Chapter 89: The Myths.
There’s a very particular kind of feeling you get when you’re floating in black sludge that clings to you more desperately than a stray puppy you fed once out of pity.
That sludge, unfortunately, was the once glorious Pond of Life.
Yes.
The Pond of Life.
The legendary spring which is said to be born from the Goddess of Life’s tears, overflowing with mana so pure that an entire civilization would have worshiped it.
The pond that could heal, restore, nurture and maybe even fix the unfixable.
And me? I had just turned it into this... sticky, stinking and corpse-colored mess.
Congratulations, me. I didn’t just corrupt a divine miracle, I reduced it to a puddle of cosmic tar.
Now, I just hope the Goddess of Life herself doesn’t descend from the heavens to fry me with divine lightning for crimes against creation.
Because, honestly, with luck being the bitch she is, it could very well happen.
With such stupid thoughts and cursing my dear, ever-faithful Luck, I dragged myself out of the pond.
Or... well, whatever abomination it was now pretending to be.
The Trickster’s last words still echoed in my head, shaking me more than I wanted to admit.
He knew about the novel.
Which could only mean one thing, there might be others like him.
And, honestly, that was a real kick in the face.
Ever since I transmigrated, I thought I had a head start.
My secret cheat-code knowledge of how the world worked.
My little edge over fate.
But now? Yeah. Turns out I might not even be special. Just another poor bastard following a script that others might have already skimmed through.
And that... that was the shittiest revelation of all.
Still, maybe I was just overthinking. Wouldn’t be the first time.
After all, just because the Trickster knew about the novel didn’t automatically mean others did.
Maybe, just maybe, he only found out because he was inside my soul like an uninvited roommate.
Maybe he read it off me somehow, picked the knowledge straight from my memories while I was too busy not dying every five minutes.
Yeah. That could happen.
I mean, the bastard had been camping there since the first time I met him, lurking in the corners of my existence.
Reading memories from someone’s soul wasn’t easy, sure, but it wasn’t impossible either.
A handful of freaks with unique Nexuses... and, of course, a few gods... could do it given some strict conditions.
Because the soul wasn’t just off-limits. It was forbidden. A domain locked to almost everyone.
And unlike those fancy transmigration protagonists, I didn’t have some overpowered skill or some cheat-level protection from the system to keep cosmic stalkers out of my head.
That’s literally why I sent Bearlo to that cave because tucked away there were artifacts. Good ones.
And among them was something that could help me patch up this exact problem.
So yeah. Maybe it really was just the Trickster.
I don’t know if that domain fried my brain cells or what, but this theory actually made more sense than the brilliant nonsense I came up with while I was being teleported back.
Like, the Trickster being me or Noah?
Yeah, no. Definitely not.
Noah, for all his dumbness and for all his "hi I’m an idiot" energy, would never laugh like that.
And me? Please. For all my undeniable glory, I would never waste this handsome face by hiding it behind someone else’s mask.
But still... something was definitely off about him.
Hell, for all I knew, I didn’t even know if he had vanished properly this time.
All that melodrama, that cryptic prophecy, could’ve been nothing but smoke and mirrors. Because let’s not forget how he pulled the exact same thing last time as well.
For all I knew, the Trickster could probably be just spewing some bullshit prophecy to make me overthink, then laughing his ass off from some corner of existence I couldn’t see.
And honestly, all these little "incidents" had made one thing painfully clear: I was too fucking vulnerable.
I mean, look at the scorecard,
First, I literally died to a dragon. Not because I was weak, oh no, but because some cosmic bitch whose motives I still don’t even know decided to screw me over because I was walking the same path as that Trickster.
Then, the plot twist was that the Trickster had been hiding inside my soul the entire time, casually playing 4D chess with that same bitch while I was busy thinking I was clever.
In both cases, I was a fool. A complete, blind, dancing puppet of fate.
Why couldn’t my life be like those other transmigrators?
You know, the ones who get cheat skills, soul-barriers, plot armor and protection from high-level interference by default before they grow stronger.
Tsk. Life really is unfair.
But fine. No point in whining over it.
Obviously, I was going to take my revenge on that cosmic bitch, without a doubt. Once I was strong enough, I would rip the answers out of her myself. One way or another.
Until then even thinking about it with my meager strength was just wasted effort.
So I shoved down the useless thoughts, gave myself the mental equivalent of a shrug and forced my focus back where it belonged—on my body and on my surroundings... if you could even call this wasteland that anymore.
Every tree stood brittle and withered, like skeletons of what they once were. The ground was cracked and lifeless without a single trace of grass.
Not a single monster lurked nearby.
Not even the faintest sound of movement.
Hell, even the dragon’s corpse, the one I had killed with my own hands not long ago, was gone.
Not decayed or rotting but just... erased as if the world itself had disintegrated it out of existence.
The Pond of Life hadn’t simply died alone. It had dragged everything else down with it in final collapse.
Was this because of Hel’s authority?
...Could be.
Or maybe it was because of the death wave I unleashed before touching the Card of Arcana.
I mean, I wasn’t dumb enough to start evolving in the middle of this cursed forest where eldritch horrors practically sat around waiting for me to blink so they could crawl out and snack on me.
So, the moment I touched the card, I let loose a full-powered death wave, channeling Hel’s authority with the noble intention of wiping out all the pests in one go.
Smart move, right?
Except... yeah. I hadn’t exactly expected this destructive outcome.
Honestly, who cares.
It’s not like some environmental activists are going to march in here with cameras, point their fingers and accuse me of mass-murdering a few poor, defenseless cursed trees and nightmare monsters—monsters that, mind you, hadn’t even tried chomping on me yet—instead of letting them peacefully flourish in their haunted little ecosystem.
My body wasn’t faring any better than the wasteland around me.
I was drenched head to toe in that sticky black sludge, every inch of me reeking like I had just crawled out of a corpse pit.
And my "clothes"? Please. If you could even call the pitiful scraps of torn fabric clinging to me clothes.
They barely covered anything, hanging on like they were ashamed to still be here and were just enough to keep my last shred of dignity from blowing away with the wind.
And don’t even get me started on that so-called "designer."
The smug bastard who swore up and down that my outfit could survive even under S-Rank attacks.
Yeah, right. Tell that to the dragon who shredded it with one casual swipe of his claw while he was busy torturing me.
Some durability. Some masterpiece.
What a joke.
But the rags weren’t what mattered.
My body... my body was different. Lighter and sharper than before. My senses burned brighter than ever before.
Everything around me was too bright and loud.
Hell, even my nose betrayed me, picking up seventeen different smells at once.
All of them were disgusting, naturally.
It was like I had been living underwater my whole life and only now had I finally broken the surface.
The air burned. The world screamed. And yet... It all felt euphoric and liberating.
I pulled a water container from my storage ring and went about scrubbing the sludge off me, bathing in the grand, luxurious bathroom called nature.
Yeah, barbaric methods.
But what choice did I have?
It wasn’t like I had a proper bathhouse lying around... or some creepy stalker hiding in the bushes, watching me scrub myself like a caveman.
For now, all I wanted was one thing, get this disgusting filth off my skin before it glued itself there forever.
Only when I finally saw my own skin again did I stop.
I pulled out a towel, dried myself off and slipped into the spare clothes I always kept stashed away as backup.
A black formal shirt and matching trousers.
Both, of course, made by the same scam-artist designer.
But I didn’t care about that now.
Clothes didn’t matter.
The wasteland didn’t matter.
Because it was finally time to see the carrot, the prize I had been chasing like a fool all this time.
My evolution.
And the chaos it might have awakened.
"Status."
The word left my mouth and at once the system window snapped open before me.
Only... instead of directly showing my status, it first threw up the notifications I had ignored during my resurrection.
And there, buried among them, one line glowed brighter than the rest.
[CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE AWAKENED YOUR MYTH.]