SDM 13

Chapter 13. The 5,000th Year

“Wilson, Wilson! How dare you touch Wilson. You son of a bitch!!”

The last thread of reason snapped.

I recklessly swung my fists at the boulder in front of me.

Crack. Crack.

Every time my fists struck its hard surface, strange noises rang out.

The sound of bones being crushed and blood vessels bursting.

Even so, I didn’t stop punching.

The thing didn’t remain still either. It counterattacked.

The enormous boulder slammed into my head.

Bang! Bang!

It kicked me, grabbed me, and smashed me into the ground.

“U—aaaaaaaah!!”

Still, I didn’t stop.

My hands had become useless, so I rammed into it with my shoulder.

I simply couldn’t forgive it.

I couldn’t, but there was a limit to what sheer determination could accomplish.

“Haa… haa.”

Once I had been reduced to little more than a lump of mangled flesh that could barely breathe, I couldn’t move anymore.

The golem lifted me up.

At its feet, I could see Wilson’s remains.

I couldn’t even bring myself to reach out a hand.

Whoosh.

It threw me away.

I flew through the air for a long time before crashing into the starting altar.

Everything went black.

I don’t know how long it took before I opened my eyes.

My entire body was burning with pain, and I couldn’t move right away.

I had to spend a week simply rolling around on the ground before I could move properly.

Eventually, I managed to get up and looked around.

The exercise equipment was covered in dust, and the basket had completely dried out.

It seemed like several months had passed.

I climbed up to the altar.

There was a boulder sitting there.

A smooth stone with not a single scratch on its surface, perfectly shaped for rolling.

“…That’s not Wilson.”

I broke down sobbing.

It took another month before I could finally pull myself together enough to start rolling the boulder again.

By then, I had stopped keeping track of the days, so I didn’t know exactly how much time had passed.

Wilson’s remains were still on the seventh floor.

I hadn’t even been able to make him a grave.

When I tried pushing the boulder again after such a long time, it was harder than before.

Perhaps it was because the injuries on my body simply wouldn’t heal.

Or perhaps it was because I now had to do it alone, without a word from anyone.

It took another year to reach the seventh floor.

“Wilson!”

Wilson’s remains were still there.

Rumble!

As I approached, the boulder rose once again, and that thing appeared.

Bang! Bang!

Nothing had changed.

Just like a year ago, I was beaten to a pulp and driven away.

I don’t know how long it took before I regained consciousness again.

I cursed and condemned the absurdity of it all countless times.

Thinking about it calmly, the structure of this place couldn’t possibly have been designed for me to defeat the golem and break through.

It made no sense for nothing but low-level monsters to appear, only for a disaster-class creature to suddenly show up.

Until it was disturbed, the golem hid itself like an ordinary pile of rocks and didn’t react.

It was probably telling me to simply avoid it cleverly.

And if I actually ran away, it probably wouldn’t even chase me.

But I couldn’t do that.

I wouldn’t allow it.

“Wilson.”

That thing was still crushing Wilson beneath it.

With the single-minded determination that I would absolutely bring Wilson back, even though he still couldn’t close his eyes, I challenged the Lava Golem again and again.

“…Guh.”

And I was brutally crushed.

Over and over.

I didn’t keep an exact count.

No, I couldn’t.

There had even been times when my head was crushed and my memories were wiped out.

Whenever I came to my senses and looked back toward the altar—

“…Ugh.”

There it was, waiting for me as if nothing had ever happened: another smooth boulder.

“…Aaaaaaaah!!”

When twenty years had passed,

something important inside me finally broke.

I spent another year lying down and doing nothing.

I simply wasted time.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

I didn’t even think I could do anything.

My sense of time had long since broken down, but I could tell for certain that more than ten, even twenty years had passed.

I hadn’t aged, but there was one thing on my body that continued to grow with time: my beard.

I could estimate the passage of time by its length.

“Twenty years…”

What had happened outside during all that time?

Who had become the lord of my hometown, Corinth?

Could it have been my brother Salmoneus, or Alcyone?

Or had Corinth itself been destroyed, like the countless poleis that rose and vanished?

Had Hercules, the most famous hero of Greece, been born yet?

Had Pente participated in the Trojan War and met his end, just as he did in the original myth?

What kind of lives had everyone lived?

The only thing I was permitted to do was imagine.

“I’m home, Alcyone. Is Father doing well? The cows weren’t listening very well today.”

When fifty years had passed, I discovered a way to pass the time by talking to myself.

Humans perceive information through the brain.

If I imagined this place was Corinth, then wouldn’t it become reality?

“Please come with me, Lord Tana. The festival is still in full swing. Allow me to escort you—”

As I gestured toward empty air, I lost my balance and fell.

I had tripped over a stone.

“Ah, I’m fine. It’s nothing…”

Why?

That day, of all days, I saw someone I normally tried not to think about.

It wasn’t even the last image I remembered of her.

She appeared as the girl who used to run across the hills with me when we were young.

Her long platinum-blond hair hung limply, and her transparent blue eyes stared at me reproachfully.

‘You’re a liar who never keeps his promises.’

My hands trembled.

I forced myself to ignore her and stood up.

A hundred years passed.

With nothing else to do, I immersed myself in mathematics.

I squeezed juice from grass and used it to write numbers on the dirt floor. Before long, the formulas and proofs became so long that they covered both the starting altar and the meadow.

Fragments of what I had learned in my previous life also resurfaced faintly, and after another hundred years of research, I was able to come up with several strange proofs.

Naturally, they were completely useless.

I erased them all.

I tried every activity I could possibly do alone.

I made a strategy board game and endlessly analyzed its rules by myself.

I drew pictures until the rocks were completely covered.

I made musical instruments and plucked their strings until my fingers were raw.

I chopped down trees and built a boat.

None of it had any meaning, so after finishing each thing, I destroyed and erased it all.

And so, a thousand years passed.

“It’s strange.”

I had already spent far more time in this place than I had in the life I had once lived.

Including my previous life.

It was obvious that the human being known as me had actually been created to exist in this place.

If someone asked me which of the two was my real life, I could honestly say that the life I spent in Corinth might have simply been a butterfly dream that the me here had dreamed for a brief moment.

And yet…

“Why do I want to go back so badly?”

Even if I escaped this place now, none of the people I knew would still be alive.

It was when I muttered those words that—

—Swoosh.

I saw something.

Through a gap between the trees.

“Clea…?”

She looked as though she wanted to condemn me, yet was frustrated because she couldn’t bring herself to say what she wanted to tell me.

The moment I felt her gaze, my heart ached.

But only for a moment.

Clea’s figure turned away and disappeared.

“Wait!”

What had she wanted to say to me?

What did the expression on her face mean?

I couldn’t stand not knowing, so I immediately ran after her.

—Rustle!

But as always, the moment I ran into the forest, I emerged on the opposite side.

Unable to control my momentum, I fell in an undignified heap and rolled for quite a while.

When I raised my head, a slope greeted me.

It was the path where the first floor began, one I had climbed dozens, hundreds of times.

“…What the hell am I supposed to do?”

—Boom!

Unable to contain my anger, I slammed my fist into the ground.

“I’ve honestly done everything I can! What more do you want me to do?!”

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Blood flowed from my fist.

I slammed it down with all my strength, and the stone floor began to crack and cave in.

“Even if I climb up there, there won’t be anything! Do you think I’ve been holding back because I wanted to?! If only I’d been born a hero! If only I’d been born a god!”

—Rumble!

The ground finally gave way beneath my punches.

“Huh?”

At that moment, I felt my body falling.

—Crash…

I fell somewhere together with the pile of rocks.

[You have entered the hidden altar on Underground Floor 1.]

“…What is this place?”

I stood up and looked around.

Looking closely, I realized that the slope from the first floor continued downward in a long passage.

There had been an underground floor?

It was a small, dark stone chamber.

In the center stood an altar for offering sacrifices, and a single book rested upon it.

The architectural style was one I had seen many times before.

It was the kind of building used by priests or ritualists when making offerings.

“It’s pretty old-fashioned.”

It had to be several hundred years old.

No, perhaps more than a thousand years old.

I opened the dusty book.

The smell of mold filled my nose.

[Chronos’s Tartarus]

[Tartarus was created by tearing apart the authority of Chronos, the second ruler of the Golden Age.]

“Chronos.”

Fragments of my memories began to return.

A thousand years had passed, but there was no way I could have forgotten those names.

‘You will be imprisoned in Chronos’s prison of time.’

Those were Zeus’s words to me.

“Chronos was the second ruler of the Golden Age.”

I also remembered that he had been the mightiest of the Titans.

“He killed Uranus, the god of the sky and the first wielder of power, and inherited his authority. But what does that have to do with this place?”

[Chronos possessed four authorities.]

[Sky, agriculture, god-slaying, and time.]

“Zeus tore apart Chronos’s authority and created this place?”

The authority of the sky had been inherited from Uranus and must now belong to Zeus. After all, he ruled the heavens and commanded lightning.

The authority of agriculture had been inherited by the goddess Demeter.

Had he used the remaining authority of time to create this prison?

“Here, the laws of time are… different.”

My body didn’t age and healed on its own.

The grass and deer reappeared whenever I looked away.

It was an incredibly bizarre space.

A thousand years had passed for me.

“But outside… might still be exactly the same.”

After all, Zeus had imprisoned me here because he enjoyed watching me suffer.

If he had simply wanted to torture me, there would have been no reason to imprison me in a place imbued with Chronos’s authority.

If an infinite amount of time passed from my perspective while no time passed outside, Zeus would be able to watch me suffer forever.

“Which means…”

It also meant that I had been given an infinite amount of time here.

Suddenly, my mind became clear.

I climbed back outside.

“So I have an infinite amount of time.”

I dug out the remains of the training equipment that had long since rotted away.

“If I become infinitely strong…”

I could avenge Wilson.

—Rustle.

The sound of grass brushing against itself.

Once again, Clea’s silhouette watched me silently from afar.

It was probably an illusion created by the shame buried deep in my subconscious.

Some part of me had never been able to forgive myself for avoiding my goal.

The phantoms in my memories would occasionally appear like this.

When I was climbing the mountain, it was usually Pente who would pass by and remind me of the things I had learned.

But now, Clea appeared without me even deliberately recalling her, simply staring at me.

“Fine. I understand.”

Now I knew what she wanted to tell me.

I stood up.

Though…

Had Clea’s hair really been red?

My old memories had become jumbled together, leaving me confused.

I knew perfectly well that I had gone completely insane.

“Good enough.”

—Thud!

I took the boulder from the altar and tied it up with vines.

Naturally, my body remembered how.

“Let’s just do this the usual way.”

I started again.

“Hup.”

Squats first.