*CREAK*The door let out a very loud creak as Cole opened it. As soon as he let one foot inside, he was sucked into the door and it closed letting out a loud creak once more.
"Well, I guess there"s no turning back."
The door he had chosen was the one that had the word "Future". Well, the t.i.tle of this chapter said it all so there really isn"t any need for this to be clarified. He could"ve gone with the standard route of Past, Present, Future but he thought that messing up the formula wouldn"t hurt much.
The room the Future lead to was different from what Cole had expected.
The otherwise blank and black room was filled to the brim with mirrors. Some were broken, others shining, and a few larger than the rest.
There wasn"t any kind of order to their placement. Circles, columns, lines, not all of them were even standing up. Cole walked towards the mirror near him. It was laying on the ground and the broken shards were scattered all over the place.
Find authorized novels in Webnovel，faster updates, better experience，Please click for visiting.
When Cole looked at his reflection in the broken mirror shards. It wasn"t his face that he saw, it was a future that could no longer come true.
"I guess that"s why it"s broken."
It was the same for all the other broken mirrors. Him leaving the military and pursuing another profession in the〈Avant Zone〉, him getting married to his former girlfriend and making a family, him meeting all of his deceased buddies. All the things he could"ve done if he hadn"t died and if the〈Collapse〉hadn"t happened.
They were all things that he couldn"t do anymore. Cole didn"t feel saddened by this. There was no point in crying over stuff like this.
He was already grateful for being given another chance at life and felt satisfied with his situation. Although there was one future that he wished could"ve come true but could no longer be done. And it wasn"t just because he had died, it was because of something else.
"...Dad would have probably wanted a future like that."
It was a future where his family was normal. Cole wasn"t some genius in making weapons, his father didn"t need to go places all the time and his mom...
Well, it was just another impossible future he shouldn"t be crying over. He walked over to the intact mirrors this time, the normal-sized ones.
Instead of being distant life plans, they were more short term. Things like Eva showing him a book, the dish that Felicia would be cooking tomorrow, Libra and Zhujiao doing their regular thing.
Simple everyday things like that.
Cole skipped right over them. He didn"t need some magic mirror to tell him things that he could easily predict or guess. Although he could have as easily seen them if he used his〔Reader〕skill more often.
"It"s a lot more tiring to use especially with the mana cost. It"s more efficient if I just predict the outcome myself."
And then he reached the mirrors that just begged to be noticed with their shiny particle effects and big stature. Maybe they had mommy or daddy issues which would be weird for a mirror. There were only four in total.
From how the other mirrors were working, Cole surmised that these mirrors were probably futures that had the most probability of happening. If not, then what was the point of making them so eye-catching.
The first mirror showed a very heartwarming future. Cole had a ring on his finger along with Felicia. Eva was riding on his shoulders as he held hands with Felicia.
Most people would see it as the ideal future while a few might see such a future as boring and lacking in excitement. Such people would hate to waste away in such boredom. Cole was starting to question it he really wanted something like that.
"Well, at least I"m on the right track."
If he somehow came to hate such a future then...
"I guess even such a strong future can come to break as well."
He moved on over to the next big mirror. In this one, he looked like some mafia boss. Dressed up in his standard black tux, smoking a few cigarettes.
Cole chuckled to himself, he resembled Mikhail a lot more like that. Surrounding him were monitors all showing different clients with different requests and each with a varying amount they offered to pay.
"Nice to know that Black Hollow will be doing well."
That"s all Cole had to say. There wasn"t really anything else he thought he needed to say about his possible future so he moved onto the third one.
This time, there was a very interesting background going on. An ashen-grey battlefield filled with black crosses, each piercing piles of bodies that towered over the horizon. Among all of this, there was a single man that stood on the tallest pile of them all.
A black coat that flapped as the cold wind of early morning rushed past it. Black metal armour designed like riot armour. Silver hair stained by the ash falling from the sky.
"What the? Is that Kcalb?"
Cole jokingly asked himself. But then he noticed the existence of one of his favourite colour, Orange, so I guess that automatically ruled out the possibility. He also realized that the man wasn"t just wearing a suit.
The theme he had going on was more Cyberpunk-ish. The man was also facing his back to the audience so Cole couldn"t tell if it was him or someone else but then just accepted the fact that there was no way it was someone else.
"Well, if I was watching someone else"s future, that wouldn"t make much sense. But I"m on my way to becoming a some Demon Lord? Seriously?"
Cole felt that it was really funny. He didn"t remember writing "Demon Lord" as one of his dream professions when he was a child. Well, he didn"t write mafia boss either.
He finally let his eyes feast on the last mirror.
"What the?"
This time, the mirror had nothing to show him. Cole felt that the big mirror looked a bit pointless since it had nothing to show him. Cole looked so small in comparison to the mirror. Maybe that"s what it wanted to show him.
That in the grand scheme of things, he was small like an ant.
Or maybe it wanted to tell him that the future was his for the taking. That he was free to form his own future. He could break it or reflect anything he wanted. Anything that could fit in this one big mirror of his.
It depended on how you interpreted it.
On the dark side, it made you get an existential crisis or a mid-life crisis if you were already at that point in your life. It could just prove how worthless your existence was and how the pessimistic vision you had of yourself was right.
Pretty depressing.
While on the bright side, it made you feel a sense of hope. Although some people said that hope was another evil. Anyway, the thought that you could shape your own future was an uplifting feeling.
"So... That"s it?"
Cole checked around if there was anything else that piqued his interest. Behind all of the mirrors, if there was anything written on the broken shards. Maybe there was something about all of the position of the mirrors.
Nope.
Now that he thought about it, they felt procedurally generated or that could just be his imagination working.
Since he had nothing left to do in this room, Cole went to look for an exit.
He swung back over to the four mirrors and went past through the gaps they had in between them. Cole had noticed them earlier when he peeked behind. Instead of two normal doors, they were hatches.
And it seemed that whoever was making Cole"s dream got tired of cool letter placement and just slapped the words "Past" and "Present" on the two hatches.
"Hmm..."
Cole thought long and hard-- Not really, it took him about two seconds to pick. He opened his chosen hatch and jumped down the rabbit hole.