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[You have cleared the 71st floor.]
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* * *
“Hey!”
“Hi!”
Kirikiri and Yong-yong, who had run towards each other shouting the same greeting, grabbed each other’s hands and began to spin around.
How long will they be like that?
The two had been sticking to such a greeting whenever we cleared a floor. It was pleasant to see at first, but now it felt a little strange.
I watched Kirikiri and Yong-yong play for a while, then glanced back. As soon as Hochi came out of the stage, he took out a novel and started reading it.
The old lady and the old man were resting in a small s.p.a.ce while Seregia was sprawled on the floor.
Her limbs flung out in different directions. Her figure resembled a discarded doll, rather than a man resting.
“Seregia, lie down straight and rest.”
As usual, Seregia ignored me. I sighed at her, who seemed to suddenly be deaf and didn’t react at all.
“Do you want a futon to lie on?”
“Yes, please.” She was good at answering questions like this. I laid down the futon, and Seregia crawled into it. Then, she stopped moving again.
I thought that she’d been living too long as an inanimate object. I was thinking about setting up a tent for her, but now that I thought about it… Nah.
It was obvious that she wouldn’t care anyway.
I walked to Kirikiri. Yong-yong rolled with Kirikiri for a while and then ran away to catch the b.u.t.terfly Kirikiri had summoned. It seemed that Yong-Yong loved everything he saw for the first time.
“You didn’t summon anything like that back then.”
“Do you like b.u.t.terflies?” Kirikiri asked.
Of course I didn’t like b.u.t.terflies.
“You don’t even like them.”
“I don’t like them, but still,” I said curtly. It felt like my heart was aching.
Actually, having that heartache wasn’t entirely false. Whenever Kirikiri showed me something I didn’t know about, I felt discomfort, even at the insignificant act of summoning b.u.t.terflies.
Maybe it was because of the strange power I felt from her. When I cleared the 61st floor and met Kirikiri again, I thought I could get a glimpse at her strength.
It was a miscalculation. Kirikiri had too complicated of a power to see at just a glance.
“If I had brought in b.u.t.terflies before, you would have killed them,” Kirikiri said in a playful tone.
There was nothing for me to refute. If there were b.u.t.terflies like that in Kirikiri’s field, I would have thought of catching and dissecting them while she was sleeping or eating cakes. In those days, it wouldn’t have been strange for me to do anything to b.u.t.terflies.
“The stage was fine, wasn’t it?”
I nodded at her question. The Tutorial stage had been fine. To keep me entertained, at least.
Kirikiri had stopped me from returning to Earth immediately after our reunion, and I was recommended to clear all the stages and return home normally.
It was a result of Kirikiri’s position as a manager who had to manage the Tutorial.
Instead, Kirikiri told me what I could obtain by clearing the stages: stage information, the Tutorial’s stage-clearing compensations, and Kirikiri’s advice.
All of these were rewards that would help me. I asked the others for their understanding and decided to clear the Tutorial before going out.
There was no hurry to go back to Earth.
The 61st floor, which I wanted to escape from, had already been cleared out. Moreover, as long as I cleared the 61st floor, there was no reason to be reluctant since no other G.o.ds could watch my surroundings.
Instead, it was good that Hochi and Yong-yong had had time to adjust to a new world before we went back to Earth.
Even if I got stuck in a unique stage like the 61st floor, I could just leave anytime. Kirikiri told me that a situation like the 61st floor would not happen anymore.
Above all, targeting the Tutorial stage itself was fine. It felt weird to have come up this far. I was clearing the stages out as if I were taking a walk in an amus.e.m.e.nt park without any hardships.
Yong-yong, who was happily chasing b.u.t.terflies over there, was the evidence. Yong-yong enjoyed visiting the Tutorial stages. Even on a stage that could give a mental shock, Yong-yong just laughed at it and finished it.
Somehow, I felt betrayed by that sight.
“They were meant to be hard for human beings.”
“Because it wasn’t a level of difficulty designed for humans in the first place.”
However, it was a difficulty level that humans could choose. It was the level of difficulty that didn’t consider the human being who came in. It was a level of difficulty where even a more powerful being than a human would suffer.
“Well, most G.o.ds don’t care about humans.”
Yet, the G.o.ds were worshipped by humans.
It would be the same even if there were a G.o.d of Philanthropy or Love.
“Correction. There’s no such G.o.d that cares about humans.”
There’s no such G.o.d, huh? At least there was no such G.o.d in the Pantheon.
Kirikiri looked at me all of a sudden. “Oh, that reminds me. You cried a long time ago because it’d been a long time since you saw one.”
Talk about changing the subject. Why was Kirikiri suddenly talking about me crying when we were talking about G.o.ds?
At that moment, someone cut in.
“Crying? Who?” asked Hochi, who had just arrived.
Kirikiri pointed at me with her finger.
“Him?”
“Yes.”
Hochi looked at me and muttered, “This guy cried? Why don’t I remember anything like that?” A shocked expression was plastered on his face. Hochi looked as though he had peeped into the secret of his birth.
Why? I didn’t put it in his memories, so he couldn’t have known about it.
“Kirikiri, would you like some cake?”
“I want to eat cake!”
I bought a cake.
Kirikiri ignored Hochi and rushed toward the cake. Hochi soon went to Kirikiri, who was eating a cake, having lost interest in the question of his memories.
“Can I have some too?”
“No!” Kirikiri exclaimed indignantly.
Hochi made a deal to share his fork in exchange for lending it, and Kirikiri accepted the agreement on the condition that he would not touch the only cherry on the cake.
Soon, Yong-yong joined forces and ate the cake, while the cherry which Kirikiri had treasured, crept into Seregia’s mouth, who had crawled there with blankets around her body.
Kirikiri was in tears and asked me to buy her another cake, but I didn’t buy her one.
* * *
“The G.o.ds are going crazy. Who would have expected a new personality to pop out of the Tutorial. There’s a movement to make Tutorials in other Hundred G.o.ds Temple’ dimensions, and there’s a rumor that they’re going to make each Tutorial have only one difficulty: h.e.l.l.”
It was a mess. The Tutorial, to which the Earth belonged, was limited to the dimensions managed by the Hundred G.o.ds Temple. Therefore, the Hundred G.o.ds Temple partic.i.p.ated in the design of the Tutorial and shared the right to partic.i.p.ate.
That was until the other G.o.ds of the Pantheon intervened.
“What happened to the Hundred G.o.ds Temple?”
“Nothing bad happened. The Pantheon G.o.ds compensated the Hundred G.o.ds Temple,” she said lightly.
It probably costs a considerable amount of money to act beyond the interference of the system and constraints. All the Pantheon G.o.ds who crawled onto the 61st floor must have paid the Hundred G.o.ds Temple, the original owners of the Tutorial.
I didn’t know the price, but it wouldn’t have been less than the apostles I had captured on the 61st floor.
d.a.m.n, this makes me mad. Are there any possible incentives?
I had quenched my curiosity, but there were still two questions left. I decided to ask the first question.
“Tell me the exact difference between the Hundred G.o.ds Temple and the Pantheon G.o.ds. They seem the same, and sometimes, different.”
The concept of the Pantheon G.o.ds itself appeared after I was trapped on the 60th floor.
It was the Pantheon G.o.ds who had contacted Lee Yeon-hee after I was isolated on the 60th floor. Of course, I didn’t know much about them. I just thought they were G.o.ds from a different dimension.
“You can say that the Pantheon is a complete gathering of all the G.o.ds under the system. There are hundreds of groups under the Pantheon.”
“Do all these G.o.ds belong to Hundred G.o.ds Temple as well?”
“No, there are more G.o.ds who belong only to the Pantheon.” Kirikiri added that there were only a few G.o.ds in the Hundred G.o.ds Temple.
The Pantheon itself was a restraint that bound the G.o.ds with system constraints. There was another restraint called Hundred G.o.ds Temple.
I wondered if the Hundred G.o.ds Temple’s concept was not a private organization of G.o.ds, but a secondary restraint by bringing together exceptionally dangerous G.o.ds. It was all the more so because the G.o.ds who made up the Hundred G.o.ds Temple had completely different personalities, let alone similar tendencies.
The presence felt by most of the Pantheon G.o.ds on the 61st floor was quite different from that of the Hundred G.o.ds Temple.
It was time for my second question. The G.o.ds of the Pantheon had confirmed that I had achieved a level of divinity almost comparable to theirs.
“There’s a movement to make a new Tutorial after they found out about my powers?”
It sounded like they wanted to find a new personality by making a Tutorial. It was hard to understand, considering that the reason the G.o.ds wanted a Tutorial challenger was usually to get the apostles.
“They can still get apostles with the lure of making them a subordinate-G.o.d [1]. If it doesn’t work, the apostles will be forced to eat dog-s.h.i.t.”
Is that so?
The words ‘eat dog-s.h.i.t’ instantly made sense. The G.o.ds must be rejoicing. If they put ordinary humans in there and even one G.o.d came out of every 10,000 people, they might think it’s worth the try.
The G.o.ds, in general, wanted power.
When the source first appeared, they heard that it helped me achieve my powers. Even those who had already achieved their own wanted to gain more power from my source.
In the stage where the source appeared, the stage ended with the involvement of the Hundred G.o.ds Temple. Perhaps the dispatched G.o.d was meant to retrieve the power of the source.
There was no way that the G.o.ds, who were so covetous of the source, would not covet other people’s divinity.
“It’s going to be a brutal struggle.”
“I suppose so.”
However, the Earth’s Tutorial aimed to help humans through Easy, Normal, and Hard Difficulty to solve the Earth’s crisis. However, if the challenger’s only purpose were to achieve his or her prestige, the story would be different.
Every challenger summoned as a Tutorial Challenger would be forced to face a h.e.l.lish situation.
“Even the species with powerful powers from the beginning, unlike humans, will face such difficulties that they cannot easily break away with their abilities. You’re the only successful one we’ve had so far.”
And I had gained divinity by breaking through a difficulty that was generally never cleared. The challenge of the new Tutorial would only have one level of difficulty, and that was h.e.l.l.
No matter how powerful it was, it was difficult to clear it. It was someone else’s business, but it wasn’t beneficial for me either.
“I don’t feel very good.”
Kirikiri nodded. “There are still G.o.ds who are looking for you. Of course, I can’t deliver their message directly to you, but they keep asking if I can arrange a conversation.”
“I don’t want to talk to them, so ignore it all.”
I didn’t want to be another G.o.d’s apostle now. There was nothing to gain, not even experience.
“Have you asked all your questions?”
I nodded at Kirikiri’s question.
Kirikiri said she would grant my wish as promised when I cleared the 61st floor, and we reunited. I told her to give me some time. The wish that Kirikiri had promised had come to mind after a long time.
I’d really thought about what to ask for. But for the last time, I wanted to think about it a little more.
I wanted to clear the stages, check some more information for Kirikiri, and tell her my wish. Then, I’d clear the 71st floor.
Ten more floors were cleared to earn information, and all necessary information had been grasped by it.
“What wish should I grant?”
Somehow Kirikiri, who was pretending to be serious, felt like a mountain G.o.d. A rabbit and a mountain G.o.d, it was a combination that didn’t make sense.
But she could grant my wishes, I who was something akin to a G.o.d.
“End this Tutorial.”
Tutorial 71st Floor (1) End
Note from Imagine:
[1] Subordinate-G.o.d most likely means something like becoming a Saint (however this is just my theory on what it means, feel free to interpret it anyway you want to for now as i doubt we’ll get an explanation on what exactly it means)