The Foreigner on the Periphery

Ha Eun-seong had no idea what was going on. Nor did he know how much time had passed since he first entered this place.

His last memory was a voice screaming in his head, telling him to run. It was a purely instinctive urge. Amid that paralyzing terror, a single question had surfaced.

Run—but where?

He had to get away from the man on the railing, the pope wielding the Sword. The man seemed perfectly capable of chasing him down no matter where he fled.

‘That was when I saw the black hole.’

The newly baptized man's spirit had separated from its flesh and headed toward it. Ha Eun-seong's gut told him the pope wouldn't be able to follow him in there.

Right after that, he must have abandoned his body and made a run for it.

Even after following Alext into this space, Ha Eun-seong's soul remained in a state of panic for quite some time. Coincidentally, the former deputy pope, Alext, who had come with him, was too enraptured by his first glimpse of Elahu-Praga to notice him either. Thus, they spent their time—one in a state of panic, the other swept up in pure ecstasy.

Once he finally managed to calm his startled heart, Alext spoke.

Alext was a living spirit, still anchored to a living body. Ha Eun-seong's soul, on the other hand, radiated a distinct sense of severance unique to the dead.

‘And that Dagger lodged in your neck!’

One look at the hilt was enough.

A Holy Sword.

‘Were you baptized? But looking at you, you appear human. So, of course, you would die. Your spiritual body must have frozen in the exact form it took at the moment of your death. Who on earth did this? And why you?’

Ha Eun-seong debated whether to tell the truth: that a man identical to the pope they worshipped had killed him on Earth roughly a year ago. That he had been brutally slaughtered, like livestock.

‘It seems you slipped in through the door that opened when I received my Baptism. If so...’

Met with silence, Alext continued guessing until he arrived at his own conclusion.

There was only one human soul residing back in his home dimension.

‘The divine beast!’

Alext had heard about it from Yuntus. He knew the body of the dragon raised by the avatar was shared by a dragon and a human ghost. Regardless of its contents, its form was a dragon, which was enough to warrant worship as a symbol of god. So he hadn't paid it much attention.

‘Did the avatar perform the Baptism himself? And then he sealed your dead soul inside the beast he raised. Dear heavens!’

Jealousy flared across Alext's expression.

‘...To be chosen and possessed by a god like that, I am truly envious!’

Even amid his fear, Ha Eun-seong felt dumbfounded. Still, he neither confirmed nor denied the man's incorrect assumption. He had a more pressing question.

=Excuse me. Is this place... Elahu-something?=

Given the divine blood overflowing in every direction, it was an answer that could naturally be deduced. Alext nodded.

‘Indeed. This is the place where the gods slumber, Elahu-Praga. It is the upper reaches of the river where their shed blood flows. No matter where the door opens, our souls are guided here. Just as the Prophet promised.’

Ha Eun-seong repeated the name to himself.

=Elahu-Praga.=

Only then was he able to escape his terror and focus with a clear mind. He used that focus to observe the divine blood.

The Talent poured in a single direction. If there was an upstream, there had to be a downstream. An enormous amount of Talent was creating a violent torrent, flowing away into the distance.

Having realized that his companion was the divine beast, Alext became friendlier. Since the ghost was an entity inside their fence rather than an intruder, he deserved to be welcomed.

‘Yes. Elahu-Praga. As we understand it, this is a dimension similar in shape to a string, which extends its coordinate system linearly. The upstream strings through every existing dimension, like a thread attached to a needle.’

Ha Eun-seong could not understand most of the other's spiritual wave, but he intuitively grasped the structural diagram Alext drew with his mind.

It was a depiction of a thread, or string, piercing one by one through a cluster of three-dimensionally arranged beads.

Those countless beads were each dimension, and the string was Elahu-Praga. Was it elongated because it was a river of flowing divine blood? When Ha Eun-seong seemed to have barely understood, Alext spoke.

‘Yes, it is thought to take roughly that shape. That is why it can be accessed from any dimension. And the end of the thread—the downstream, in other words—ends as it connects to the mining site.’

The mining site.

The place where the Committee extracted Talent.

So that beautiful light scattered across the world had come from here.

Ha Eun-seong relaxed his guard and gazed into the river of divine blood. The moment the reins squeezing his heart loosened, the backlash immediately appeared.

=Ah!=

His eyes were bewitched by the beauty. His mind grew faint. Without realizing it, he lowered the altitude of his spiritual body, slowly drifting closer.

His soul was on the verge of touching the upper reaches of the rough, rapidly flowing river of divine blood.

Alext shouted in sudden fright.

‘No! Stop!’

=...Gasp!=

That sharp rebuke woke Ha Eun-seong. He shuddered and moved away from the surface again. Talent was still fatal to a mental body.

‘You would have been in grave trouble if you touched that!’

=Ah, I'm sorry. It's just hard to endure while in this bodiless spiritual body state...=

‘I understand. Even trained priests are momentarily entranced by it. Still, you must be careful. With absolutely no experience, you would not survive touching that river.’

Alext explained that his condition just a moment ago had been extremely dangerous.

‘It might not feel real when observed from the outside, but that torrent is actually flowing fast enough to be infinitely close to the speed of light.’

With an expression that seemed to ask if that wasn't a truly terrifying thing, Alext waited for Ha Eun-seong's reaction.

But the expected feedback did not come. Ha Eun-seong merely stared back at him with an expression that said, "So what?"

‘If you touch the surface defenselessly and without preparation, your soul will sink, soaked entirely in divine blood. Your soul particles would become entangled in that current, in that massive wave. Your mind would naturally collapse, and you would be swept downstream at near-light speed. As your spatial speed increases, your temporal speed will decrease, and your relative time will melt and slow down. The conclusion is that, after a long time has passed by outside standards, you will be expelled into the mining site. In a mad state.’

Alext added one more word.

‘And that is assuming you are lucky enough for it to end there.’

Ha Eun-seong asked back in fear.

=It could get even worse than that?=

‘Do not forget that both you and I are currently in a mass-less spiritual body state. While caught and swept away in the river of divine blood, you would not be able to go backward upstream, but propelling yourself forward by swimming is possible. Thrashing around in a state of madness could lead to exactly that. Then your own speed would be added to the speed of that torrent.’

Ha Eun-seong pictured someone walking forward while on a moving walkway. As a result, they would move at a faster speed than the moving walkway.

‘If you then reached the speed of light, your time would freeze. But a far more terrifying assumption is...’

Alext warned him, as if telling him to absolutely never attempt it.

‘As I already said, because we have no mass right now, it is possible for us to even break past the speed of light. If that happens, it is truly irreversible. Your relative time would slow down, and then, passing the point of finally stopping, it would reach the domain of negative numbers, or even imaginary numbers. That time period is the temporal Territory from before the beginning, before the gods dreamed.’

Ha Eun-seong only understood the last part.

=You mean... returning to the beginning?=

‘Before the beginning, to be precise. No one clearly knows whether the phenomenon of reaching that time period means going backward in time, separating from the existing time period, or perfect annihilation. What is certain is that no priest has returned after reaching that state. Nor has a soul ever been found claiming to be a time traveler who went back to before the beginning. My interpretation is that if we, who belong to the dream, were to make contact with the time period before the dreaming, we would simply be annihilated... Wait, you. When did you go all the way over there?!’

Ha Eun-seong had no idea either. Alext, who had been explaining things, was now faint and far away in the distance. It was a distance where conversing would have been impossible if not for spiritual waves.

The man who used to be the deputy pope flew over in a start and grabbed Ha Eun-seong. Only then did Ha Eun-seong, who had been flying toward the downstream while floating above the surface, stop moving.

‘Because you are not a living soul, you are swept away more easily. You didn't even touch the surface, yet you were influenced by the reverberations the river creates, the faint waves spreading around it. I do not think we should stay here. Let's go further up. The repelling force weakens the closer you get to the upstream.’

Alext and Ha Eun-seong flew side by side. Moving further and further upstream as the priest's soul guided him, Ha Eun-seong finally asked the question he had wanted to ask the most.

=So... when can we go back to where we originally were?=

Ha Eun-seong had also dreamed of entering Elahu-Praga before. Specifically, to use it as a shortcut to return to Earth.

However, after hearing Alext's warning-laced explanation, the desire to attempt such a thing completely vanished. He might not have perfectly realized the principles behind it, but he at least understood that carelessly messing around with his soul in here would result in a very nasty situation.

Right now, Ha Eun-seong just wanted to return to where he had originally been. The pope was frightening, but all he had to do was try to avoid running into him. Even if that man really was the murderer, Ha Eun-seong was already dead. You couldn't kill a dead person again.

‘When time passes, the black door will reopen at the location where my soul is. This rule has never been broken so far. All we have to do is wait quietly until then.’

Because of Ha Eun-seong, Alext had effectively missed the chance to calmly and quietly admire this place. But he didn't complain and moved while taking the divine beast's soul with him. Since he had come this far anyway, he intended to tour the highest point before returning. To him, this journey was akin to a holy pilgrimage.

After going upstream for a long time like that, Alext saw something.

‘Ooh! That's it!’

It was his first time facing it directly as well. A distinct line was drawn just ahead.

They gradually grew closer to the boundary. Alext continued to explain as they advanced. Ha Eun-seong also did not stop, flying side by side with him. Sure enough, he could feel the repelling waves growing weaker.

‘Beyond there is the source.’

=...The source?=

‘A river has a downstream and an upstream, and if you go further up, there is a source where the river water gushes out, is there not? The river of divine blood is the same. Past that line lies the origin of the divine blood. We call that place the source.’

From what Ha Eun-seong had heard, Talent was the blood shed by the primordial race.

=You are saying they are sleeping over there? I can't see them from here. Will I be able to see them if I get closer?=

‘We cannot get that close. That line will not let us pass. Just like a solid wall. But I am satisfied just having come this far. Now, let us wait here. If we pass the time like this until the door opens again...’

Alext's explanation cut off.

‘...?!’

A sudden silence.

It wasn't just the spiritual waves that had stopped. His movements had also ceased entirely. Ha Eun-seong realized this fact a little late.

=I really can't see anything. Maybe if I go a little higher... Huh? Where did this mister go?=

Puzzled, Ha Eun-seong spun his spiritual body around. Alext's soul was floating in the direction he had come from. Wearing a horrified expression, as if his mind were about to shatter into pieces. Because Ha Eun-seong had kept moving toward the upstream while he stopped, a fair amount of distance had grown between them.

=Why did you stop coming?=

‘Y-Y-Y-You!’

Opening and closing his mouth in his soul state, Alext extended a finger and pointed at Ha Eun-seong. Then soon, as if realizing the disrespect of the act, he lowered it again. And then, he spoke in a spiritual wave mixed with awe and fear. The reverberation was filled with confusion.

‘Just... ‘what’ are you?’

=Huh? What are you talking about now?=

‘How did you cross over there?!’

Shouting like that, Alext still remained rooted in place, not following Ha Eun-seong.

The priest did not seem to have any intention of moving any further.

No, it seemed as if he couldn't.

=Huh?=

Only then did Ha Eun-seong look at the spot he had just passed. Upon focusing, he saw what he had not noticed earlier. The point where Alext had stopped. And the faint boundary drawn in front of it.

He loaded his guess onto a spiritual wave.

=Mister, are you perhaps unable to cross that?=

Unable to even reply that it was obvious, Alext's spiritual body trembled violently.

Only then did Ha Eun-seong realize what he had done. It was an ability he had already grown accustomed to, several months having passed since he first awakened it.

He pulled his gaze away from the priest and stared once more.

At the barrier he had just crossed.

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