Chapter 44

When I opened my eyes again,
I found myself in a strange space.

“……?”

It was quite a peculiar place.
An infinitely dark curtain stretched out, a massive space lay before me.

What was even more unusual was that
I was definitely walking.

I looked down.
My original legs were visible. When I lifted my hand, familiar fingers came into view.

Moving my body wasn’t
that hard at all.

It felt as if I had remembered it naturally.
Having lived for thousands of years as a serpent, I still instinctively carried that sensation.

I moved my legs.
I kept walking through the endlessly vast space.

At first, I thought it was a dream.
After all, I had dreamt of becoming a human several times.

But something was different.
The sensations I should not have felt were all too vivid.

The vibrations dancing across the floor.
Each step I took resonated with my weight, and that feeling was almost tangible.

“How strange.”

A voice that belonged to a human flowed from my vocal cords.

This was too lifelike to be a dream.

Just then, a voice echoed in my mind,
[Welcome, Lord Jörmungandr.]

Like a hologram,
a woman bathed in white light appeared.

Her shimmering white hair illuminated the dark space, and her mystical golden eyes sparkled.

A sun-like glow hovered around her head like a halo, bathing her in a warm light.

The woman wrapped in a white veil
seemed oddly familiar, like I could sense her identity.

[Or should I say Lee Ji-hoon?]

“……Goddess.”

The goddess who had summoned me to this world.
As I quietly observed her, she slowly began to speak.

[I wish I could converse directly, but it seems I’m like a hologram in your original world? I can only utter predetermined words, like a video record.]

“……”

I had so much I wanted to say,
but I decided to hold back.

After all, she wouldn’t be able to hear my responses anyway.

[You must have many questions for me? And before that.]

The goddess said,
[I apologize.]

She bowed her head politely to me.

[Bringing you here, Lee Ji-hoon, was purely my selfishness.]

She continued her explanation.

[This world is, as you know, in a precarious situation. We’ve run countless simulations, but it’s a world that has already lost to the Demon God multiple times.]

This wasn’t the first time for the goddess.
As soon as she lost to the Demon God, she devoted all her powers to fix the world’s timeline.

[The moment I lost to the Demon God, I acquired the power to return to the beginning. But it wasn’t easy. Because of that, I lost all my powers to confront the Demon God directly.]

Originally, the powers of the goddess and the Demon God were on par.
That was only natural; they were both born in the same era, primordial deities.

No matter how different their powers were, their strength relative to each other was not dramatically skewed.

[I was a bit dull…]

The goddess was not prepared to sacrifice her children.

The Creator God gains power from her creations.

At first, she derived strength from the trust, awe, prayers, and respect they offered.
But in moments of true crisis, she fought back by absorbing all their potential to reclaim her full strength.

The Demon God knew how to utilize that perfectly.

[He saw his creations as mere tools.]

His creations, numbering in the tens of billions.
The Demon God crushed them into dust with his own hands and wielded the overwhelming power he gained.

The goddess had to make a choice.
To gain strength by sacrificing her children to challenge the Demon God and lose everything, or to gamble everything on a thread-thin hope.

[How could a mother sacrifice her child…?]

The goddess sighed with a bitter expression.

In the end, she
abandoned the idea of sacrificing her children.

Instead, with all her powers and abilities to oppose the Demon God,
she rewound the world’s timeline.

[It’s a shameful story… My children alone could not stand against the Demon God.]

“So that’s why you called me?”

[Yes. I needed a being with new potential to oppose the Demon God.]

“Why me?”

[Among the beings I verified, you held the brightest potential.]

She continued staring into the air, as if she anticipated my words.

[I initially failed.]

With a wave of her hand,
a hologram appeared.
There I was,
not as the serpent I am now but as Lee Ji-hoon from Earth.

I was swinging a sword, endlessly battling foes.

[You contained a stronger potential than any being I knew.]

The hologram me swung the sword against increasingly powerful foes.
With each swing, mountains fell, and the peaceful sky split apart.

He was strong.
Certainly strong enough to beat any creature from the Demon Realm.

However,
the first attempt had failed.

[The Demon King wasn’t an easy opponent.]

I had only trained for a mere few years.
In contrast, the Demon King had reigned for thousands of years as the overlord of the Demon Realm.

For my current self, it might not seem like much.
But as a human, on top of only a few years of training, I couldn’t defeat the Demon King.

[So I gave you more time.]

In the next world,
I swung a blade for thousands of years and trained.

I cut down countless foes,
and at last, I was able to decapitate the Demon King.

However,
[But… the Demon God was impossible.]

Just when everyone was celebrating,
the world split in two, and an endlessly massive being emerged from the cracks.

He was overwhelming.
Even having dealt with the Demon King, I was no more than a toy for the Demon God.

Dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of holograms emerged.

In every single timeline,
I ultimately faced defeat against the Demon God.

“So that’s how it was.”

[That’s right.]

“So you made me Jörmungandr.”

[Jörmungandr also possesses brilliant fate and strength.]

The goddess pondered.
In the endless cycle of repetition, she contemplated how to defeat the Demon God.

And at the end of her thoughts,
she found another god and monster from Norse mythology.

One that wrapped around the world,
even slaying the great god himself.

[But, bringing Jörmungandr here was an incredibly challenging task.]

If he were a human, it would be different.
He’s indeed another world’s human, but that race doesn’t deviate much from the goddess’s world.

But Jörmungandr was different.
As a god from another world, additionally, he was an evil god who had slain other gods and encircled the world.

To bring him to this world,
the goddess had to take a tremendous risk.

[I’d probably be sleeping by now.]
The price of that risk
was a seal on all the goddess’s destiny.

She could no longer
twist her fate through her strength.

The goddess, who once held immortal power,
was now trapped in mortal limits.

[I can’t turn back time anymore. This is probably the last time.]

The risk she took was
bringing another foreign god.

But she placed all her hopes on that.
It wasn’t just for her future or preservation.

If she had desired that,
she could have long since shattered all powers binding her to this world, killed her creations, and fought the Demon God.

Honestly, from the perspective of the Creator God, simply creating new beings again wouldn’t have been that hard.

Yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
This time, she gambled all her fate for her creations, for her children.

[Isn’t that right? The children I create next… how could they be like the ones I have now?]

So, the goddess
inserted the mind of a strange foreigner into a divine being from mythology.

A combination of the brightest potential and the most splendid flesh.

[Sorry… for having thought of such a thing.]

She said that while bowing her head.
Guilt seeped through her face, something she couldn’t hide.

It was only natural.
To drag along someone entirely unrelated for the sake of this world and scream at them to defend her world.

[If you manage to protect this world, or even if you fail and die alongside me, you can do whatever you want with me.]

The goddess only wished for this.

[So…….]

To protect this world.
To safeguard the future of her children.

[……Can you help me?]

The goddess was looking at me.
Before I knew it, my gaze had lifted high again.

It felt familiar.
I quietly looked down at the goddess.

[So that’s it.]

So that was the reason.
While contemplating all of this, Jörmungandr suddenly let out a laugh.

It was funny.
What a joke, the Demon God, who had failed against me countless times.

[That Demon God? I’ll take care of him.]

It was pride and ambition.
Although I was no longer that person, I still was that same human from my past.

I didn’t like the thought of that being who had killed my former self countless times.

A surge of revenge welled up inside me.
And at the same time,
curiosity sparked.

Just how strong could I be, having traversed countless timelines as a human?

As if knowing my curiosity,
a figure appeared before me.
A human figure clad in black armor.

He wore a cold-blooded gaze earned through numerous years of battles on the battlefield.

He silently looked up at me and
raised his sword.

“Do you think you can kill the Demon God?”

[Yeah.]

“Then surpass me.”

As he swung his sword,
the space split in two.