At the End of the Hidden Greenery - Chapter 303
At the question, Quilon glanced back over his shoulder. The moment their eyes met, however, he hurriedly turned forward again.
“Jiwoo. I…”
His ears drooped again, their tips flushing a deep red.
Seeing how flustered he looked, Jiwoo realized she needed to rephrase what she had just asked.
“…How did you know?”
The tension in his ears eased at once, and Jiwoo found herself thinking that one day, she might end up causing some kind of trouble by touching them.
‘I know that when his ears droop like that, it’s supposed to mean he’s upset…’
And yet, for some reason, she never got that impression from Quilon. If anything, she found him even cuter than the others. Of course, calling someone much taller and older than her, someone unfailingly formal in everything he did, cute did feel a little strange.
“Jiwoo crossed safely through a phenomenon in which two dimensions collided.”
“Yes. No, I mean, yeah. I heard it was a rare phenomenon.”
Extremely rare, in fact. An anomaly among anomalies. And not simply because dimensions colliding with one another was rare in itself.
“In truth, such phenomena occur on the scale of space, not individual objects. It is extremely difficult for a single object to happen to be contained intact within the affected area.”
Suppose the world were one vast space, and someone randomly scooped out a portion of it with an enormous spoon. What sort of piece would come away?
It could be the middle of the deepest ocean, or somewhere far beneath the earth where molten lava churned. The odds of that random fragment containing an entire object rather than a severed piece of one, and for that object to be a living, intelligent being, would be vanishingly small even without trying to calculate them.
An Akarna was an object that had been swept up in such a phenomenon.
Something that had survived with its body intact amid space itself being violently torn apart.
“So it really is incredibly difficult for a living person to be caught inside something like that…”
Quilon moved his head slightly, giving a nod so small that Jiwoo, riding on his back, could barely feel it.
“…And there is something even rarer than that.”
“Even rarer?”
“Yes.”
Quilon had been staring rigidly ahead, but for a moment his gaze lifted toward the star-cluster flowers glowing across the cavern ceiling.
“The laws of another world can cross over as well.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean rules such as daylight coming when the sun rises, bright light carrying warmth, or rain falling from above to below.”
Things everyone who lived in this world accepted without question, simply because they had always been so.
“The environment everyone experiences without needing to think about it. That, too, is part of the laws that govern the world. But somewhere in another world, what we consider common sense may be completely reversed.”
Rain might rise from the ground instead of falling from the sky, or everything might freeze the moment the sun came up.
And if, when two dimensions collided, those unknown laws themselves crossed into this world, the result could become a catastrophe.
The concept was strange, but it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to Jiwoo.
‘Is this what Turinos meant before?’
He had said that the tree prevented harmful things from leaking in from other worlds. Could these voids be something similar?
Was that why their brothers had ended up like that…?
As anxiety tightened around Jiwoo’s heart, Quilon spoke gently, as though he had sensed it and wanted to reassure her.
“Please don’t worry. Phenomena that severe only appear where the world itself has been greatly fractured.”
“Re, really?”
“Yes. If something is too immense for this world to withstand, Ellandos intervenes. It adjusts that thing so that it can exist according to the laws of this world.”
“Wait. That…”
Something extraordinarily rare even in El Ragneil, almost impossible to encounter. Something that occurred only in places near the capital.
Something serious enough that Elandos itself had to intervene.
“An incarnation?”
From a human perspective, Jiwoo had always thought of it simply as some absurdly powerful monster appearing.
But when people heard the word monster, they usually imagined some unknown living creature. They didn’t immediately think of something as vast and abstract as the laws governing wind, flowing water, or the rising and setting of the sun.
Yet when she thought about it, an incarnation wasn’t necessarily a living creature from another world.
Calling it some vastly superior intelligent being didn’t seem quite right either. Nor was it exactly the god of another world.
“I thought it would be someone like me. Um… I knew incarnations were incredibly powerful, of course, but I still thought they were basically beings with tremendous power from another world. Maybe not human, but something you could communicate with if you tried, even if you didn’t share a language…”
But perhaps it was nothing so easily understood.
An incarnation was the result of Ellandos taking something immense and indescribable and reshaping it into a form that could exist within this world.
“I guess I was thinking about it too much from a human perspective.”
“…No.”
The tips of Quilon’s ears trembled faintly.
“There was a time when I thought the same.”
Perhaps every intelligent being thought that way at least once. The arrogance of believing themselves to be the highest form of existence. They understood the laws of the world and the principles behind them, so surely, if they wished, there was nothing they could not eventually master.
Even the greatest threat in existence must still fall somewhere within the boundaries of their comprehension.
“A void in which space itself has changed like this is neither something that requires the central tree to intervene, nor is it an individual object like you.”
“So it’s just… the space itself?”
If she had to compare it to something, it was simply a fragment of scenery randomly scooped out of an entire world with an enormous spoon.