Dungeon Odyssey [EN]: Chapter 293

Dungeon Journal-293

# 293

Dungeon Journal

Episode 294

As if time itself had bypassed her, Sohye remained eternally youthful, unchanged from how he remembered her.

“I don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this day.”

She whispered softly.

“I missed you, my little Jinwoo.”

Her voice was sweet, like the lullaby she used to sing when he laid his weary body in the cramped dugout after a hard day’s work, barely able to close his eyes. Back then, it was his only comfort and respite.

But he could no longer find solace in her warmth. He now knew it was all a deception built on lies.

Perhaps that was why.

Perhaps that was why he could face their reunion with such indifference, even though he himself couldn’t fully understand it.

No, it wasn’t indifference. Memories and longing, shattered and fragmented, clawed wildly at his heart.

It felt as if dozens of awls [small pointed tools for making holes] were piercing his heart.

But despite it all, his expression remained cold. The path he had walked was too arduous to be wounded by such a small pain.

He had too many scars to cry out from this new pain. He was already a battered and tattered rag.

“Why.”

Instead of spewing out resentment, he coldly questioned.

“Was it me? Why did it have to be me?”

He sincerely wanted to know why he, a trivial life that would have miserably perished in the dugout if left alone, had been chosen and so profoundly altered.

Looking at him, she moved her lips with chilling composure.

“Where should I begin?”

Her expression was as calm as a sister choosing a bedtime story.

“Yes. It would be better to answer your question first. Why it had to be you.”

As if the words ‘I’ve been waiting’ were not a lie, she readily answered his question.

“Nothing was predetermined. I simply planted the seeds, and I couldn’t know what kind of sprouts those seeds would produce.”

It was an answer worse than silence. A joke far more cruel than any assumption he had imagined. All his hardships, even his very existence, were to be dismissed as mere coincidences.

“But it’s not as if you weren’t special at all. You were the only child who grew up in the underground and yearned for the warm sunshine of the surface. Well, it’s not that there weren’t other children like you. But unfortunately, those children withered before they could even sprout.”

She sincerely regretted that the children who had been cared for by those who remembered the surface had all died when their guardians died. But that regret was no different from the regret of losing a cherished object; it was truly ruthless.

“All the children who were lucky enough to sprout were flawed. They were already missing something essential to be called human. And what I needed was a ‘human,’ not a beast of dubious origin.”

It was already a known fact. The Beast King and the other High Lords did not distinguish between the surface and the underground.

From the beginning, they were born and raised in the underground, becoming beings more suited to its cold than to the warmth of the surface.

“Many seeds died without even sprouting. Still, quite a few children survived. And I decided to release them.”

The surviving children all returned to the surface. And before long, they returned to the underground.

The children who returned in this way bore the grand title of explorers instead of the shabby name of diggers.

“You were the last to return.”

Kim Jinwoo vividly remembered that day. The day he decided to venture into the underground, which he didn’t want to do, to earn a dowry for his younger sister, Hyunji. He returned to the underground, which he had desperately tried to escape. And he obtained the Labyrinth of Naga.

“Thanks to you, only Anulax’s subordinates had to suffer. The spiders were responsible for managing you.”

Now he understood why the hell spiders, which were only found in the deep layers, had crawled up to the upper layers and wreaked havoc.

They sent spiders to the upper layers to follow his trail, waiting for his return, which never came.

“What was originally intended for you was the Earth Dragon, the seat of the Underground Dragon who ruled the land of cold frost.”

Truths were revealed one after another, and he realized that the power of the last High Lord, whose whereabouts were unknown, had been with him from the beginning. But he couldn’t rejoice.

He knew that even the Labyrinth of Naga, which he thought was uniquely his, was someone else’s arrangement.

He was frustrated and angry. But more than that, he had questions.

If he had been meant to have the power of the Earth Dragon from the start, why hadn’t it awakened? Why had he gained the power of the Radiant Lord and the One-Eyed Lord first?

She explained the reason.

“I think I took too long. I paid as much attention as possible, but the underground was too vast to monitor everything. The hateful schemers found a clue to the scattered powers. When I discovered this and tried to intervene, they had already contacted the powers of Radiance and the One-Eyed through the nobles.”

The nobles sought to obtain powers not meant for them through the underground people. The result was his awakening. But his awakening was not ordinary.

“And around that time, I learned about something else within you. And I also learned that you were a fragment of wandering.”

She lamented that even though he had absorbed wandering, the One-Eyed, and radiance, he had gained strange powers instead of inheriting their true essence.

She regretted that the lineage of power, which should have been naturally connected, remained a succession in name only.

“Something inside you must have awakened long before I even realized its existence. Looking at the power of the Earth Dragon that was given to you, only the shell remains, so its power must have been nourishment a long time ago.”

He realized it then. He belatedly understood why the power of Nagaraja [a powerful serpent deity], given to the owner of an ordinary labyrinth, was so powerful, greedy, and sinister.

Also, now he knew why he had hesitated to absorb the power of the Celestial Giant Lord.

“It was an irreparable loss. But it was something I couldn’t prevent. I never imagined that such a terrible monster would be hiding in the body of an ordinary human.”

At that moment, she discarded her innocent mask and looked at him with eyes full of hatred and hostility. Hatred too deep for a young girl to harbor, making her gaze even more unsettling.

“Because of that, I overlooked the fact that you were a fragment of wandering. If I had known from the beginning, I probably wouldn’t have chosen you.”

But such a gaze was fleeting, and she continued to speak as if nothing had happened.

“But it doesn’t matter now. You seem to be controlling that monster surprisingly well.”

He couldn’t deny her words. He had been contaminated and eroded by malice from an unknown source several times, but he had overcome it.

Moreover, in recent years, he had even stopped the greedy monster from consuming with his own will.

He was lost in thought and belatedly felt a sense of incongruity. And without thinking deeply, he could easily identify the source of that feeling.

“Why are you telling me these things?”

She was so readily sharing the secrets of the underground. Unless she wanted something, she wouldn’t be so forthcoming.

“There’s not much time left.”

She was talking nonsense.

“Time? What time are you talking about?”

He asked with an ominous feeling, and she answered.

“The underground will soon be destroyed.”

The ancient secret he had glimpsed through the throne of truth; he knew it too. But hearing it directly like this was different.

“A war that is predicted to be lost. The underground can never win the war that is about to come.”

“If it’s just a war, can’t the High Lords suppress it?”

The High Lords, who looked down on ordinary dukes, could prevent all disputes in the underground if they wished.

Although their numbers were fewer than in the past, if the Beast King, the Lord of Lament, and he himself stepped forward, it would be easy to stop the war.

But unlike what he thought, the destruction of the underground was not caused by internal conflicts.

“I wish it were. Unfortunately, the being that brings destruction to the underground is beyond the High Lords’ control.”

“Hmm.”

His expression became serious. If it was a being that even the High Lords couldn’t touch, then ‘Night’ was the only possibility. And ‘Night’ was with him now. The thought that Night might awaken was enough to make him feel a sense of crisis.

“Could it be…….”

Was it fortunate or unfortunate? This time, his prediction was wrong.

“What destroys the underground is the surface people.”

He felt like he had been struck in the back of the head. The surface was preparing for war with the underground, but wasn’t that all caused by the underground itself? To now hear that defeat in the war with the surface was predetermined was absurd.

“The reason the underground has endured until now is because the surface people believed that the underground was one world with the surface. They didn’t want the land they were standing on to collapse.”

She said that the surface and the underground were connected worlds, but in fact, they were separate.

“I’ve been making them believe that. I’ve been hiding the boundaries and making them think of the gates as ordinary passages. But that’s the limit.”

Surprisingly, countless underground beings were already active on the surface, and those who had infiltrated had been stimulating the greed of the surface people, causing them to kill each other, thereby preventing too much attention from being focused on the underground.

Kim Jinwoo was simply listening to her words. It was a plausible story at first glance, but something about it was subtly disturbing.

Aside from the fact that the underground itself gave the surface the excuse for war, it was somehow disappointing that the powerful old lords had to find another way to fight against the surface, without even thinking about fighting.

Of course, he couldn’t believe all her words were lies. However, he sensed that there was something more he didn’t know beyond the truths she had revealed so far.

He didn’t miss that small sense of incongruity, and after much deliberation, he was able to realize what he had been missing.