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Chapter 294

So-Hee remained the exact same girl Kim Jin-Woo remembered her to be, as if she had evaded even the flow of time itself.

“You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this day,” she whispered softly. “I’ve missed you, my little Jin-Woo.”

It was the exact same sweet voice that had sung to Kim Jin-Woo like a lullaby, back when he would lie down with his eyes closed in the narrow tunnels after a hard day’s work. At that time, it was the only source of comfort that had been granted to him.

But he could no longer find comfort in her warmth, because he now knew that it had all been built on lies. Perhaps that was the reason why he had been able to reunite with her with such a nonchalant expression.

No, the truth was that he didn’t feel fine. His shattered memories and longing pierced sharply into his chest. It was as if dozens of awls were piercing into his heart.

But nevertheless, the look on his face remained cold and expressionless. The path he had walked thus far was far too rough for him to be pained by just that. He had suffered too much to cry out just because of that. He was already wretched and in tatters.

“Why…” Instead of voicing his resentment, he questioned her coldly. “…Me? Why did it have to be me?” He truly wanted to know why she’d had to shake up his life and turn it upside down, when he could have been left to die a miserable death alone in the tunnels.

Watching Kim Jin-Woo, So-Hee licked her lips. She appeared calm as she replied, “Where should I begin?”

Her expression resembled that of a sister who was picking out a fairy tale to tell him in bed as she continued, “Alright. First of all, it’d be good to answer your question first. Why did it have to be you?”

She carefully answered his question with a kind tone, as if she had really meant it when she said she had been waiting for him all this time. “Nothing was decided from the beginning. I simply sowed the seeds. I didn’t know what kind of seeds they would germinate.”

It was an answer Kim Jin-Woo would rather not have heard. It was a tasteless joke, many times worse than all the assumptions he had ever imagined. All of his own suffering, which had denied even his own existence, had simply occurred by mere coincidence.

“But it doesn’t mean you weren’t special at all. You were born and raised in the Underworld, but you were the only child who missed the warmth of the surface… No, it’s not as if there weren’t other kids like you at all. Sadly, they were all lost before they could fully blossom.”

She added with heartfelt regret that the other children, who had been cared for by those who remembered the surface, had died without being able to bear the pain and suffering after their guardians died. However, her regret was no different from the pity one might feel when losing a precious item.

“All the children who were lucky enough to sprout turned out not to be in good shape. They already lacked something that was important to being human. And what I needed was a ‘human’, not an insignificant beast.”

It was a fact Kim Jin-Woo knew as well. The Beastfolk King and the other Highlords had made no distinction between the surface and the Underworld. Since they had been born and raised in the Underworld from the beginning, they had become existences more suited to the cold of the Underworld than the warmth of the surface.

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

All the surviving children had returned to the surface. And yet, it wasn’t long before they had found themselves seeking the Underworld once more. Those children had returned not with the shabby title of ‘tunnel digger’, but with the rather grandiose title of ‘explorer’.

“And you were the last to return.”

Kim Jin-Woo vividly remembered that day. The day he had decided to head to the Underworld to retrieve his sister Hyun-Ji’s wedding dowry, he had returned to the Underworld he had desperately tried to run away from. And that was how he had obtained the Naga’s Labyrinth.

“Thanks to that, Anulax’s subordinates had to suffer. Because it was the spiders’ responsibility to look over you.”

Now Kim Jin-Woo could understand why the Hell Spiders, which could only be found in the Deep Floors, had climbed all the way to the Lesser Floors and made a huge scene. Anulax had sent his Hell Spiders to the Lesser Floors after following Kim Jin-Woo’s tracks, as he hadn’t returned no matter how much the Duke waited.

“What should originally have been given to you was the position of the Earth Dragon, the ruler of the Land of Frost.”

With several truths revealed one after another, Kim Jin-Woo realized that the power of the last Highlord, whose whereabouts had been unknown, had been with him from the beginning all along.

However, he couldn’t be happy about it at all. After all, even the Naga’s Labyrinth that he’d thought of as his own had in fact been an arrangement made by someone else.

He was frustrated and angry. But above that, he became even more uncertain. If he had been given the power of the Earth Dragon from the beginning, why had the Earth Dragon’s power not awakened first; why had he gained the powers of the Lord of Brilliance and the One-Eyed Lord instead?

The Usurper explained why.

“It seems I was too late. I paid my utmost attention, but the Underworld is way too huge for me to observe everything. Hateful conspirators were looking for clues leading to the scattered powers. By the time I found out about that and tried to prevent it, you had already come into contact with the powers of the Lord of Brilliance and the One-Eyed Lord through the Nobles.”

The Nobles had wanted to obtain powers that hadn’t been granted to them via the Subterraneans. The result had been Kim Jin-Woo’s awakening. However, it seemed his awakening hadn’t been normal.

“It was only then that I realized the existence of something else within you. That you were also the fragment of the Wandering Lord.”

So-Hee lamented the fact that despite Kim Jin-Woo’s having devoured the Wandering Lord, the One-Eyed Lord, and the Lord of Brilliance, insteading of inheriting their powers, he had obtained a completely different power. She further explained that because of that, the lineage of power that should have been passed down had resulted in only a name being passed down instead.

“Something I didn’t even know existed woke up inside of you, long before I was even made aware of it. Seeing as the power of the Earth Dragon given to you had a mere shell of its former strength, it’s certain that its powers were drained long ago to be nourishment for that.”

At that moment, Kim Jin-Woo knew who the Usurper was referring to. Why did he only just realize that the power of the Nagaraja was way too greedy and insidious to have been the power of a single labyrinth master? Additionally, he began to understand why he had been so hesitant to absorb the power of the Heavenly Giant Lord.

“It was an irreparable loss. But it was also unavoidable for me. I could never have imagined that such a terrible monster would have been hiding inside a human body.”

So-Hee’s innocent facade faded and she looked at him with eyes full of hatred and hostility. It was a hatred so deep that it was hard to believe it was coming from a young girl, which made her gaze even more eerie.

“Thanks to that, I completely missed the fact that you were the fragment of the Wandering Lord. If I had known that from the beginning, I probably wouldn’t have chosen you.”

However, her spiteful glance was brief, and she continued her speech as if nothing had happened.

“But now, it doesn’t matter. Surprisingly, you seem to be firmly in control of the monster.”

Kim Jin-Woo couldn’t deny her words. He had already been tainted and encroached on by the malicious evil of unknown origin several times, but he had eventually been able to overcome it. Moreover, in recent times, even the greedy monster’s appetite had successfully been suppressed by his own sheer will.

He fell into deep thought, before suddenly feeling a sense of incongruity. Without even thinking too deeply, he could instinctively identify the source of that sudden sense.

“Why are you telling me all these things?” he asked.

For what could be called the deepest secrets of the Underworld, So-Hee had revealed them to him way too easily. Unless she wanted something specific, there was no way she would confide everything in him.

“There’s not much time left,” So-Hee said, but her response made no sense to Kim Jin-Woo.

“Time? What ‘time’ are you talking about?” Kim Jin-Woo asked warily.

So-Hee answered, “Soon, the Underworld will perish.”

It was the ancient secret Kim Jin-Woo had already seen through the Throne of Truth, but hearing it in person hit him differently.

“A war where defeat is already determined. The Underworld will never be able to win the war that’s to come,” So-Hee continued.

“If it’s war we’re talking about, can’t it be stopped with the power of the Highlords?” Kim Jin-Woo asked.

Given that the power of the Highlords could easily look down on even the Dukes, they should have been able to stop any war that was to occur in the Underworld. Although there weren’t as many Highlords in the present as in the past, if the Beastfolk King, the Wailing Lord, and Kim Jin-Woo himself stepped in, stopping a war would be an easy task.

However, contrary to his thoughts, it seemed that the destruction of the Underworld wouldn’t come from within. So-Hee replied, “It would be nice if that were the case. Unfortunately, the beings who will bring destruction to the Underworld are completely unaffected by the majesty of the Lords.”

“Mm.” Kim Jin-Woo’s expression turned serious. If even the Highlords couldn’t affect it, that left only ‘Night’ as the prime suspect. And that ‘Night’ was inside him right now. The thought that ‘Night’ might be waking up made him feel a chill up his spine.

“Maybe…” he began.

Once again, Kim Jin-Woo’s expectations were wrong. Was it a good or bad thing?

So-Hee cut him off and said, “It’s the Terrans who will bring destruction to the Underworld.”

It was as if Kim Jin-Woo had been struck in the back of the head.

The surface was preparing for war against the Underworld, but that had all been self-inflicted by the Underworld itself. However, hearing that it would lead to a defeat of the Underworld and result in its annihilation was completely absurd to Kim Jin-Woo.

“The only reason why the Underworld has been able to last until now was because the Terrans believed that the Underworld existed on the same realm as the surface. They didn’t want the land they were on to collapse with the destruction of the Underworld,” So-Hee explained, adding that although the surface and the Underworld were connected, they existed on completely separate realms.

“I made them believe we were in one connected realm. I blurred the boundaries between the two realms, and made them believe that the Gates were just ordinary passageways. But that lie had a limit,” she continued.”

Surprisingly, there had already been a great number of Underworld beings actively living on the surface, and those beings had exploited the greed of the Terrans and turned them on each other, thus diverting attention away from the Underworld.

Kim Jin-Woo could do nothing but simply listen to So-Hee’s explanation. It sounded plausible at first, but there were some glaring holes in her story.

The fact that the Underworld itself had given the surface reason for the war aside, it felt rather off that the powerful Ancient Lords would be forced to enter another war against the surface.

Of course, he didn’t think everything the Usurper had said was a lie. He simply felt that there was a greater truth behind whatever truths the Usurper had said so far. That little sense of incongruity continued to chip away at him, and after pondering it over and over again, he finally realized what detail he was missing.