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Join the ServerIgnas glared at us with a fiercely luminous intensity. Yet, very slowly, her long eyelashes fluttered downward, bringing her eyelids with them. Her gaze gradually sank toward the stone floor, and the oppressive aura radiating from her—one that wouldn’t have been out of place if interpreted as pure, lethal intent—steadily lost its strength. After staring at the ground for what felt like an eternity, Ignas seemed to reach a silent resolution and locked her eyes back onto mine.
“……So, we meet again.”
Ignas’s voice was barely a whisper. The ragged, uneven cadence of her breathing made it painfully obvious that her condition was far from normal. Having suffered extensively under the grueling parameters of Ignas’s Curse until just a moment ago, I honestly couldn’t bring myself to view her under a particularly glamorous light. Even so, seeing her reduced to such a wretched state the exact moment the final debuff snapped away stirred a bittersweet pang of pity within me, regardless of the underlying lore.
According to the established world-building, Ignas was a tragic princess who had been abducted by Dolwing, who subsequently plundered her family’s ancestral relic, the Pearl. Extrapolating from that narrative timeline, her current, dilapidated appearance likely mirrored her state during her prolonged captivity as Dolwing’s subjugated s*ave.
“Yes.”
“You are the child who turned back the wheel of time.”
Ignas spoke while looking directly into my eyes. At this point, completely exhausted by the recurring dialogue script, I merely offered a lazy, noncommittal nod. Despite the objective reality that I was not a Regressor, I had been incessantly bombarded with the title by various system entities for nearly three weeks now. Whatever semantic arguments I raised, the internal NPC logic had irrevocably classified me as a timeline traveler.
Ignas’s crimson lips parted slightly, hovering in mid-air as if wrestling with an internal hesitation, before she let out a long, heavy sigh.
“I utterly detested you.”
Right out of the gate, she threw down the gauntlet without a single shred of hesitation.
Excuse me, why?!
“From the exact moment I realized you had reversed the flow of time and returned to the past, I awaited your arrival more desperately than anyone else.”
No, why on earth were you waiting for me? I didn’t even know your character existed until I unlocked this specific hidden scenario!
“That’s exactly why she slapped you with those curses, obviously.”
Sensing my mounting sense of injustice, Sephiroth muttered right beside me. His voice didn’t seem to register within Ignas’s proximity parameters. He spoke with an incredibly bold, booming clarity, completely unbothered by whether the entity heard him or not.
“Good grief. Tormenting you is supposed to be my exclusive role.”
“Huh?”
“But because some random mermaid butt out of nowhere and interfered, our Blee had to suffer through all that extra grunt work.”
Tsk. A sharp click of his tongue rippled through the quiet air. I swallowed hard. The familiar resonance of Sephiroth casually throwing around that “our Blee” nickname seemed to loop through my mind, echoing right past my ears.
I sneaked a glance up at him. Sensing my movement, Sephiroth tilted his heavy helmet down to lock eyes with me. While his facial features were completely masked by the deep shadows beneath his black iron visor, looking at him from this close allowed me to see his pitch-black irises shining with a deep, nocturnal clarity—like fragments of a midnight sky.
It felt oddly, suddenly surreal.
I frantically yanked my focus away from Sephiroth. Fortunately, Ignas’s next line of dialogue acted as a perfect anchor, pulling me back before whatever strange emotion was budding toward him could expand any further.
“Yet, despite rewinding the very fabric of time, you did not save me. You did not lift a single hand to rescue my people. You possessed absolute comprehension of our excruciating agony, yet you willfully chose to abandon us to our fate.”
A palpable wave of martial animosity surged from Ignas as she whispered the words. The deep, suppressed rage I thought had been fully purified began leaking out continuously from between her tightly clenched teeth. I was fully aware that she had suffered a horrific tragedy at Dolwing’s hands. It was genuinely tragic. But directing her bitter projection at me was the literal definition of getting slapped in one neighborhood and taking her anger out on an innocent bystander in another.
I lightly nudged Sephiroth’s side with my elbow.
“I feel incredibly wronged right now. Am I allowed to contest her dialogue script and argue back?”
“Go for it, there’s no harm trying. This is Zelpia, after all.”
“…….”
I hesitated. Generally speaking, when it came to mechanical optimization and combat strategies in Zelpia, Sephiroth’s advice was absolute gospel. However, when it came to navigating critical quest branches and narrative choices, his track record was slightly more suspect. My mind flashed back to the infamous Three-Race Extinction Stratagem he had pioneered, which had essentially become the community’s default blueprint for completion through total annihilation.
As I wavered in indecision, a heavy iron gauntlet lightly tapped my shoulder.
“Why are you giving me that look of profound distrust?”
“Because your tactical methodology tends to skew a bit toward extreme violence.”
“Extreme violence? Please. The very hidden progression route you’re currently riding on was discovered by me before anyone else.”
When he put it that way, he actually had a point. Left completely devoid of a counterargument, I mumbled something incoherent under my breath before offering a firm nod. Ultimately, following Sephiroth’s instincts in Zelpia had never resulted in a negative outcome.
“I actually find that accusation rather unfair.”
Ignas’s pitch-black eyes snapped toward me. Her gaze held a profound, turbulent mixture of resentment and sorrow, pooling within her eyes like unshed tears. I quietly watched the shimmering visual effects push those heavy emotions to the forefront. Her lips trembled as she drew in a ragged breath. Before she could initiate her next scripted line, I took a decisive step forward.
“I’ve caught fragments of the horrific ordeal you endured, Ignas-nim. But I have absolutely zero knowledge regarding the specific events that transpired. Given the circumstances, forcing me to bear the weight of this resentment feels entirely unjustified.”
“You claim…… you possess no knowledge of what transpired?”
“Yes.”
As I nodded firmly, Ignas’s brow furrowed into a faint, processing frown.
“I see. So you truly do not comprehend the exact nature of the horrors inflicted upon me. Very well. Then I shall illuminate the truth for you now.”
The narrative Ignas subsequently unveiled was exponentially more grim and depressing than I had anticipated.
As the Mermaid Princess, the Pearl she protected was the sacred relic of the entire mermaid race—an artifact capable of manifesting a person’s dreams into physical illusions indistinguishable from reality. Utilizing this divine treasure, the mermaids had constructed a magnificent, sprawling kingdom beneath the waves, living in absolute serenity. However, coveting the artifact’s reality-warping properties, Dolwing orchestrated a brutal invasion, forcefully seizing their aquatic citadel. Her beautiful kin were systematically rounded up, shackled, and subjected to a horrific human trafficking enterprise.
Amidst the chaos, Ignas’s plight was rendered significantly more agonizing due to her exclusive knowledge of the Pearl’s activation parameters. Dolwing harbored a malicious conspiracy to utilize the artifact to manipulate the populace at his whims, and consequently, subjected Ignas to a relentless interrogation to extract the activation keys. Though she steadfastly refused to break, Dolwing unleashed an unholy arsenal of psychological coercion, physical torture, and systemic depravity, thoroughly driving the princess into an inescapable psychological corner.
As she unraveled her lore, her facial animations shifted with staggering dynamism—at times brightening with a tragic, nostalgic warmth as she recalled her lost home, at times crumbling into a profound, bone-deep sorrow that made her physical frame tremble violently, and at times contorting into a mask of pure, unbridled fury that stripped away her rationality. Even though I constantly reminded myself that this was merely a narrative sequence within a virtual reality game, witnessing an entity express such hyper-realistic, visceral emotions made it completely impossible to avoid becoming emotionally immersed.
“Mm.”
The heavy emotional resonance of her story caused my spirits to sink slightly. A quiet, empathetic hum escaped my throat.
Right at that moment, Sephiroth casually rested his large palm right on top of my head. The immense weight of his armored hand pressed down, neither too heavily nor too lightly. It was a completely trivial gesture, yet the physical grounding instantly caused my turbulent thoughts to settle into a calm stillness. I couldn’t comprehend the underlying psychology of it—whether I had unconsciously grown to completely rely on his presence or something else entirely.
Fortunately, Ignas’s lore dump was drawing to its natural conclusion. After uttering a few more fragmented details regarding her tragic downfall, her head dropped limply toward her chest.
“……That is how it happened. Yes. Speaking the words aloud brings absolute clarity to my mind. My true adversary was never you. It was Dolwing.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“But the version of me trapped within that dark past did not possess that clarity.”
The Mermaid Princess offered a deeply melancholy smile—a fading, unstable expression that looked as though it might dissolve into sea foam at any given millisecond.
“And so, stripped of options, I chose to place my reliance upon another entity. An entity that was not you.”
Ignas sharply struck her tail against the stone floor, signaling us to pay absolute attention. Suddenly, a volatile, pitch-black miasma began to ooze from her body like writhing tentacles. The sclera of her eyes stained into a void-like black, while her pitch-black irises ignited into a burning crimson. Her porcelain skin began to shift, mottled by an eerie, unnatural gradient of decayed ash-gray and deep violet.
Maintaining that corrupted state, Ignas tightly clasped her hands together. Her entire physical frame vibrated with a fragile, precarious instability, looking as though she might collapse into pixels at any second.
“Yes. I chose to forge a covenant with the Evil God.”
The Evil God. It was a foundational nomenclature woven deep into Zelpia’s overarching baseline lore. The historical texts states that the entity had been completely sealed away after suffering a crushing defeat at the hands of the ancient Heroes who wielded divine blessings. In the current timeline, the recent movements of the Evil God’s lingering remnants served as the primary narrative catalyst, creating the world state that allowed the Heroes—the players—to mobilize.
“Did you establish direct contact with the Evil God?”
“Indeed. The ancient seals have steadily begun to fracture. The harbingers of the Evil God sought me out. To be precise, their focus was undoubtedly fixed upon plundering the reality-warping architecture of my Pearl…… Regardless, I no longer harbored a single shred of lingering attachment to this wretched world.”
The Mermaid’s Pearl possessed the capabilities to forge illusions indistinguishable from reality, or rather, a reality indistinguishable from an illusion. Should an artifact of that magnitude fall into the clutches of an apocalyptic deity seeking the absolute annihilation of the world, its weaponized application would be catastrophic. For instance, it could easily be utilized to manifest a perpetual, localized living hell on a global scale.
I stole a quick glance to my side. Sephiroth stood with his arms firmly crossed, his long index finger tapping a slow, rhythmic cadence against his forearm. The heavy, dark iron plate armor—which should have looked entirely clunky and utilitarian—possessed an strangely refined silhouette, likely due to the exceptionally aesthetic proportions of his underlying hand structure. I let my mind drift into that completely useless observation for a brief second.
“So this is how the overarching narrative is going to branch out.”
“Are you starting to grasp the bigger picture?”
“This possesses all the hallmarks of a massive new season launch. Based on her dialogue script, the sealed Evil Gods have already begun collapsing the containment parameters across the global map, right?”
“An entire new season?”
Between the hidden event triggers, the recurring Regressor nomenclature, and a narrative chain that felt explicitly tailor-made to accommodate our progression, I knew we had veered into an exceptionally unique route. But realizing that our actions were about to trigger a systemic cataclysm that would fundamentally overhaul the global architecture and lore background of the entire game sent a dizzying shock straight through my brain. To think that Chae Un-ha—a literal greenhorn newbie who hadn’t even scratched the surface of Season 1 content—was currently sitting right at the epicenter of a tectonic shift that would completely rewrite the meta.
Ignas let out a long, hollow exhalation.
“Therefore, every single preparation has been executed to perfection. I have secured the absolute methodology required to exact vengeance upon every single corner of this accursed world.”
“What specific preparations have you set in motion?”
For reasons outside my comprehension, the NPC logic seemed programmed to unveil the absolute entirety of her script to us without a single omission. In response to my query, Ignas blinked her corrupted eyelids slowly, before offering a quiet, chilling nod.
“Utilizing the reality-warping architecture of the Pearl, I have constructed a colossal Tower.”
The overarching plot has just escalated to an apocalyptic scale! With Ignas revealing the birth of a world-threatening Tower tied to the Evil God, do you immediately consult Sephiroth to map out the competitive world-first raid strategy, or do you dive deeper into her dialogue tree to uncover the precise coordinates and mechanics of this new dungeon?
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