### Chapter 510 – Room 207, The Gate Room – The Third Trial ‘Miskatonic University’ (12)
—
The ruins underground in the city that Aydia built 700 years ago.
The overall structure resembled a tower stretching downwards, and as Aydia said, there were no significant threats.
We were simply feeling the dark and murky air as we went down the gray path endlessly.
At first, everyone walked in silence, but after about 30 minutes, Seungyub couldn’t hold back any longer.
“Aydia, we’ve been walking for 30 minutes already.”
“Indeed.”
“It’s not just ‘indeed’! We’ve been walking for 30 minutes, you know?”
“Are you tired?”
“No… It’s not that. No, never mind.”
I understood what he was trying to say at that moment.
Right now, we were somewhere between 1500 and 2000 BC.
How could they have built such an immense underground ruin that doesn’t reveal the bottom even after 30 minutes?
It’s a valid question, but we shouldn’t be questioning this since we’re from the future and that girl in front of us is an alien!
Moreover, this ruin is something that even the alien herself might not fully comprehend.
— Tap! Tap!
About five minutes later, it was Aydia who spoke up this time.
“A long time ago, exactly 724 years ago, I gathered a primitive tribe.”
Was she referring to the time when she was building the city on the Iberian Peninsula?
“I’ll be honest. At first, I thought of just gathering some power and directly attacking Egypt.”
“…”
“That was impossible, you know? Did you know that outside Egypt is just a world of savages?”
“…”
“Instead of gathering strength, I had to teach tribesmen who were closer to monkeys how to farm and make clothes. Well, eventually we managed!”
The sheer simplicity behind that statement held the weight of the centuries Aydia had endured.
“During that time, I realized something. Our world is truly strange.”
“What?”
The world is strange?
Now that I think about it, she mentioned something similar when we first met.
‘The most mysterious thing is the world itself,’ wasn’t it?
“About 500 years ago, a man-eating wild boar ate more than 30 tribesmen.”
“A boar? Not a leopard or lion, but a boar?”
“Of course! I was so curious that I took some skilled warriors and tracked the boar. When we finally found the group of boars, do you know what I saw?”
“…”
“I found a pack of boars transforming into people after eating human flesh. The ones that changed the most were entirely human from the waist down.”
Seungyub frowned at this point.
“That makes no sense!”
“Has a boar transforming into a human really become that strange when a boy maintaining his youth for a thousand years and a witch using magic are standing here?”
Seungyub was left speechless.
“And that’s not all. About 320 years ago, a bird the size of a house appeared in the city sky, and with a single deafening noise, it burst the heads of 20 people, capturing children to feed to its chicks.”
“… Why are you telling me this?”
“It’s not to scare you, so just listen more.”
Neither Seungyub nor I would be scared by such stories.
I simply understood the meaning behind Aydia’s initial words.
The world we live in is indeed strange.
“Recently, about 160 years ago, glowing mushrooms began sprouting on the eastern hills of the city. Every night, the townsfolk went to pick those mushrooms but ended up getting eaten by wolves.”
“Mushrooms?”
“At first, we thought it might be a type of mushroom that shows hallucinations. You may know, but some mushrooms have the power to deceive people.”
“I know there are mushrooms similar to drugs.”
“Drugs? That’s a fascinating word I’ve never heard before.”
I subtly signaled Seungyub not to casually drop ‘future knowledge’.
Though I wasn’t sure if my words would get through to him, who still had his childish side lingering.
“Anyway, I thought I could just burn the mushrooms, so I gathered some skilled warriors and went to where the mushrooms were with torches.”
“Did a monster appear again?”
“Honestly, it would have been better if a monster did!”
“… What was it?”
“The mushrooms turned out to be people. I named it the human mushroom.”
“W-What do you mean—”
“Listen. If you take a bite of the human mushroom, the spores burrow into the person’s body and start reproducing. During this process, that person feels immense happiness.”
“Ew!”
“As time passes, the host’s skin splits, and the mushrooms grow out. By then, people begin to realize what’s happening to them… but it’s too late.”
“Too late?”
“By that point, they’ve become slaves to the pleasure the mushroom provides. They keep eating mushrooms, going on, until they lose strength and collapse near the mushroom colony. That’s how new mushrooms are born.”
“That’s horrifying.”
“So how do you think I dealt with it?”
“You burned the mushroom colony, right?”
“That’s a given. But even if I burned the colony, the people who had eaten the mushrooms remained.”
“Uh… gather them to treat them?”
“Pfft!”
Aydia chuckled instead of answering.
I had a feeling I knew what choice she ultimately made.
Mushrooms reproduce through spores.
Also, when those small hyphae (commonly referred to as the main body of the mushroom) are visible to the naked eye, invisible spores covering hundreds of times that area have already been released.
Therefore, burning just the mushrooms won’t solve the issue.
You have to get rid of all the ‘hosts’ that keep spreading spores.
…
After a moment of silence, Seungyub sighed and muttered.
“Let me ask again. Why are you telling such depressing stories?”
This time too, instead of answering, Aydia launched into another story.
“I realized what it means to govern a city. It’s about the responsibility of a ruler, huh?”
“The responsibility of a ruler?”
“If you pity ten or so people infected with a plague and try to save them, 200 people die because of them.”
“…”
“So infected people must all be killed. Not because those ten lives are inconsequential, but because the lives of 200 are more valuable.”
I’ve heard something akin to this before.
Seungyub, who had a similar idea, also looked glum.
*
It feels weird hearing the philosophy of the Administration Bureau from someone else.
That woman, the Virgin Aydia, must be the founder of the Vatican.
Did she establish the Vatican based on the insights gained from managing a city in ancient times?
If I meet her in person, I’ll probably call her ‘great senior’ as someone walking the same path.
*
After nearly an hour of descent, I finally felt something unusual.
It was an area without lighting except for the torch we had brought from the surface, yet suddenly, without any warning, the surroundings brightened.
As Seungyub and I glanced at each other with caution, Aydia spoke again.
“We’re almost there.”
“To the place where the mirror is?”
“Yes.”
“… You mentioned that it’s filled with incomprehensible madness. Should we prepare to fight?”
“Before that, could you listen to me once more?”
“If you have something to say, say it. You said that before too.”
“Haha, true that.”
Aydia, with nearly 30% of her body having turned to crystal, wore a dreamy expression that seemed detached.
“It might sound strange, but I wanted to become a king.”
“A king?”
“I wanted to establish a kingdom more glorious than Egypt, which abandoned me, in this new land.”
“…”
Aydia had said she had set aside her desire for revenge against Egypt and ‘us’ about 800 years ago.
While she may have half-forgotten her vengeance, it seems a sort of competitive spirit remained.
“To shape a kingdom greater than the one that abandoned me.”
Somehow, I vaguely understood the emotion behind it.
“I wanted to be a good king, a king adored by all people. I wanted to be Queen Nitocris, making sure no one was hungry and everyone lived peacefully in paradise.”
“Nitocris?”
“That’s the name I’ve been using lately.”
“… It’s a nice name.”
“But when I came to my senses, the one sitting on the throne wasn’t a king, but a monster.”
“…”
“To save a hundred people, I burned five, drowned twenty, and hung thirty on a pole.”
“Aydia…”
“No matter how many I kill, it never ends, right? Just when I thought I had driven out the human-eating mushrooms, another piper showed up, and when I chased away the piper, worship of corpses spread.”
A despair that words cannot express was palpable from Aydia.
Even I, who is somewhat numb to such emotions, was startled; Seungyub’s face was already turning purple.
“I came to realize that there’s no being more deadly than me. People began calling me not the merciful king, but the goddess of death.”
What could I say to her, who suffered the pains that the ‘Administration Bureau’ of the distant future couldn’t even begin to grasp?
Seungyub and I had long since thrown away the idea of ‘You all just take care of yourselves’ regarding Egypt.
“What should I do?”
*
What should I do?
The answer to the Virgin’s dilemma was something even the Administration Bureau, 3000 years later, could not find.
What we found—something so shameful it could hardly be called an answer—was simple.
‘Don’t even think about such dilemmas.’
I too have believed in this unwaveringly for a long time.
So when I heard Aydia’s next words, I was genuinely shocked!
*
“Um, should I answer? So, um, the internal contradiction of sacrificing a few to save the many, um…”
“Stop with the umming!”
“Haha! Yumi, don’t rush Seungyub. If the question is challenging, it’s only natural you might stutter while searching for the answer!”
“From now on, I’ll be doing the umming.”
“…”
“…”
Aydia gave a look as if to say, ‘What are you talking about?’ but she soon regained her composure.
“Shall I give another analogy? We arrive at a crossroad with three directions. We’re pondering which way is the answer, only to find out all three lead to hell. They’re just different kinds of hells. Which path should we choose?”
“Choose the one that’s less painful—”
“That’s the trap I fell into.”
“Okay?”
For the first time, I couldn’t comprehend Aydia’s words.
“The answer is to escape from the crossroad itself, which leads to hell. To create an entirely new game.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, we’ve arrived.”
In the next moment, a genuine smile appeared on Aydia’s face, one I had never seen before.
Behind the girl with a bright smile—there was the mirror.
…
It’s a mirror.
A gathering of infinite possibilities bubbling like foam.
The trace left by the greatest being sitting at the highest point.
The greatest mystery in existence in this world.
Therefore, this is—
“Behold! This is—”
The root cause of all problems in the world!
“The answer to all problems in the world!”
— Crackle!
“Yumi and Seungyub, let’s start over. From the beginning, this time in the right world.”
*
— Kim Ahri
— Crackle!
“Ugh! That hurt!”
Suddenly, I was forced awake.
The memories of Yumi’s fragment ended here.
…
I clearly saw the same object, the same mirror!
Someone obtained the ultimate answer, while someone found the root of all evils.
I couldn’t tell whose answer was correct, whether it was Aydia’s or Yumi’s.
However, just before Yumi’s memory cut off, I saw a strange scene.
A severely tense Seungyub was shouting something as he blocked Yumi’s path, and the mirror emitted an incomprehensible radiant light.
What could this mean?
“I wanted to see just a little more! Mooksung, I’m going to dive once again— Oh?”
When I belatedly scanned my surroundings, I realized that aside from the writhing Yumi fragment and me, there was no one else.
“Mooksung? Sophia! Where are you both?”
Where did they both go, leaving me behind?
If there was an urgent matter, at least they could have left me a note—
— Squeak! Clank!
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