The Crown Prince Who Raises Alt Characters

#Chapter 342 Crown Prince Alondre (20) - Side Story Many people say that revenge is a wrong thing to do. The chain of tragedy must be broken. Personal matters must be forgotten for the greater good. Doing something like this won't bring back what was lost. Even if you dismiss these words as nonsense, that doesn't resolve everything. Because the biggest problem still remains. Namely, the person's own thirst for revenge. Emotions are not infinite. Nor are emotions eternal. No matter how fierce the hatred, the rage, or the thirst for revenge, it gradually fades and thins with the passage of time. Long ago, there was someone who could not accept this. He did not wish for his thirst for revenge to fade. He did not want his future self to forgive those who had wronged him. He did not want the perpetrators to repent, nor did he want them to feel regret. Let trash remain trash for eternity. Let trash suffer for eternity. Let himself remain an avenger forever. And so, the god decided to go to sleep. So that he would dream, over and over for eternity, of the reason he began his revenge, of that hatred. So that there would be no forgiveness, no pity, no reconciliation whatsoever. This succeeded. "─Hmm, it took quite a while, but I somehow managed to subjugate it." That is, until this very moment today. *** Crown Prince Alondre cracked his neck, once, then again. In his hand was a staff of a size well-suited for use as a blunt weapon, and though he wore the extravagant attire characteristic of the Eizern Empire, his appearance was, unlike usual, rather tattered, with bleeding wounds visible all over his body. If the Empire's ministers had seen Alondre's current state, they would have been horrified. For the Empire's most noble Crown Prince to end up in such a wretched state would have been utterly unacceptable to them. And even the continent's strongest would have been horrified had they seen Alondre's current state. A transcendent. And not only that, they wouldn't have believed that he'd subjugated a god who had perfectly run an entire world and come away with 'only' that much injury. "What a monstrous human. He actually did it." Lucidra, who would belong to the latter group if anything, also clicked her tongue in bewilderment as she looked at the Crown Prince. "You had a hand in it too, so why are you talking like it's someone else's business?" "If it had just been me alone, I wouldn't have bothered picking a fight with something like this in the first place, but even if I had, I'd have done it after climbing to the 7th Rank. Not some reckless stunt like taking it down while staying at the 6th Rank." "You've seen my memories, so you should know, no? Level-restricted play is fairly common in the world." "If you told players who do that kind of thing to try it for real with their own lives on the line, I feel like they'd say you're out of your mind." ─Ugghhhhhhh. Was it that it disliked seeing the two of them leisurely chatting away? Another presence there let out something like a groan from its mouth. It was, so to speak, a being that looked like a plaster bust one might find in an art room, magnified several hundred times over, perhaps even more. A thing whose eyes alone, in size, dwarfed the Crown Prince's entire body. The state of this being, otherwise known as the 'Dreaming God,' was hard to call good even as a polite lie. Its arms and legs—no, everything but the torso and head—had been utterly shattered, not even a trace remaining, and about a third of its head had been blown away as well, with something like white sand overflowing from the gap. A state in which combat of any kind was already utterly impossible, with only the thread of life still barely holding on. After glancing at that sight, the Crown Prince shrugged. "Still, it's better than ending up like this from some pointlessly warped Transcendence. To begin with, this Dreaming God probably wasn't this insane a person while alive. It was simply the problem of having achieved Transcendence with a thirst for revenge as the driving force, of all things." A transcendent possesses their own law. Just as the Sky Sage, wishing for a world where effort was rewarded, created a domain where a game's Quest and reward System existed. Just as the Dreaming God, feeling intense hatred toward baseless rumors and irresponsible gossip, built upon that a world that tormented humans. The problem arises when, during the process of Transcendence, a particular emotion becomes involved to an excessive degree. Having been betrayed by those he trusted and nearly killed, the 'Dreaming God,' who had achieved Transcendence through his thirst for revenge, was exactly this kind of case. Rather than the transcendent himself governing the law, he was instead the one swept along by it. If the Dreaming God had retained even a little bit of proper reason, he never would have arrived at a lunatic conclusion like, 'Since I don't want to forgive those who wronged me, I'll torture myself by ruminating over what was done to me within an eternal dream, and thereby keep my grudge alive.' People whose heads flare up in the heat of the moment often, in a fit of temper, do things they'd regret upon looking back later, and the Dreaming God, even after ascending to godhood, went and committed an irreversible act driven by the emotions of his mortal days. "Setting aside whether the act of revenge itself is right or wrong, and considering only whether he could bear the consequences, this person's final line was to crush only those who had wronged him. Had the Dreaming God not been in a state of Transcendence, that's probably as far as he would have gone." The royal family that stole his achievements. The comrades who colluded with the royal family to fabricate evidence. And the townspeople who directly betrayed him. Had he still been the Dreaming God of his mortal days, he would have taken his revenge only that far and gone no further. But he was already a being who had transcended, one swept along by his own law rather than one who governed it. And so he simply ran amok. Those who had not helped him and merely stood by watching became targets of revenge too. Those who lived on obliviously, unaware of the situation, became targets of revenge too. Everyone in this world became a target of revenge. Humanity itself, as a species, became a target of revenge. Into a being that, knowing no satisfaction, endlessly scattered malice all around without end. "Well, you could call him a pitiable being, if you wanted to call him pitiable." "So is that why you deliberately didn't kill him and left him alive?" "Hmm? No, not particularly. It's just that if I killed the god himself here, this world he's currently sustaining would be destroyed, so I only kept the thread of his life going. Putting him into something like a brain-dead state, having him just breathe and keep the world running, that would be just about perfect." At a punishment crueler than simply killing him cleanly, Lucidra let out a hollow laugh. It was, if anything, exactly the answer she'd expected. It's something the people around the Crown Prince often mistake, but the Crown Prince is not a good-hearted person. Being good-hearted is simply his preference, that's all. If goodness were his criterion for judgment, he'd be bound by it, but if it's merely a preference, that's something he can set aside as a later problem whenever he likes. For a ruler who had to do dirty work whenever necessary, this could truly be called the finest quality to have. 'No matter how I look at it, he seems like a person born just to be a ruler.' The fact that the Crown Prince's Clones felt far more human than his own True Body might, in a way, be part of the same context. Because, more than a True Body that was endlessly close to human 'perfection,' the Clones—based on the Crown Prince but with his strengths or weaknesses greatly emphasized, and with limits on their abilities—would feel far more human. Or conversely, perhaps that very obsession with making alternate personas was, in reverse, the Crown Prince's one and only hobby and touch of humanity. "Hmm, this should do." As if the processing work were all finished, the Crown Prince nodded to himself. Before him now, in place of the crumbling giant plaster statue, only a small stone tablet remained, and on that tablet were densely inscribed the operating guidelines for sustaining the world. From now on, this world would become one that ran not by a god's will, but by the guidelines written on this tablet. "As for the souls that leaked out from our world, I've arranged for those already dead to come back over here right away, and for those still alive to come back once their lifespans run out." "And the anomalies, and the problem of the world splitting apart?" "Since the anomalies are the very foundation of the world itself, I couldn't get rid of them entirely. Instead, I removed their unconditional hatred and hostility toward humans, so they'll gradually come into harmony. There'll be exceptions, sure, but that's much the same as with wild animals. As for the world having split apart, it'll just go on existing as a parallel world." "Now that I think of it, the future— no, should I call it World B now? Anyway, you had a Clone over there, didn't you? Is it fine to just leave it without retrieving it?" "I'd like to, if I'm being honest, but there's not much time left. I need to get back soon and clear out the backlog of work waiting for me." "……." Lucidra found it absurd that a man who had, in effect, committed deicide—leaving only the thread of life behind—was now worrying about his backlog of work, and yet, having herself once done that work as a stand-in for the Crown Prince, she couldn't quite bring herself to say anything about it. After the two of them left like that, how much time had passed, one wonders. Clatter! Amid a tremendous noise, an elevator that had suddenly appeared out of thin air came crashing down into the ground. And not just one, but two of them at that. The elevator doors opened, and from within each one, two women revealed themselves. "Haah. I really hope it's a jackpot this time." Grumbling with a sigh, a woman with a black hime cut looked around this way and that. At her waist was a large diary fastened with a chain, and in her hand she held a glossy metal baseball bat that looked exceedingly heavy. "Damn this elevator. If this turns out to be a bust again too, I'll just eat him and absorb his abilities myself." Likewise grumbling as she revealed herself was a woman with silver hair and silver eyes, dressed in a gorgeous gown, her hair tied into twintails. Unlike her exceedingly beautiful and elegant appearance, her words and conduct were quite blunt and rough, making for a considerable gap. "Hm?" "Huh?" And then, the two women's eyes met. ...It was a first encounter that, in time, would become the subject of many a tale. (E/N: Gotta be honest. The anomaly world might be my favorite arc so far. Kinda came as a surprise since at first I thought I would dislike it.)