The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 54

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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54
Chapter 54. The Price of Causality
***
“Can humans create Gates?”
Kim Dae-han fell silent on the other end of the line. Beyond the receiver, I heard only ragged breathing and the hollow crackle of shifting papers.
He didn’t answer clearly. Couldn’t answer, perhaps.
The common sense of the world he inhabited was crumbling wholesale at a single question from me.
[……I cannot say with certainty.]
After a long pause, Kim Dae-han’s voice returned an octave lower than usual.
[In this line of work, things often exceed what we consider reasonable, so I think we must always keep the worst possibilities open.
[However, the only certainty we can confirm is that Incubation-type Gates are artificial in nature. Beyond that lies outside our purview.]
“Doesn’t that proposition presume that humans possess the capability to realize it?”
[That’s true, Hunter. But that’s the realm of Creation. Manipulating Mana and shaping space are problems of an entirely different order.]
Creation. The word that fell from Kim Dae-han’s lips lingered at the edge of my hearing, then scattered.
Theoretically, Creation is impossible. At least within every magical framework I know.
The ability to draw something into being from nothingness, from void into substance, with no price demanded in return.
That lies not in the domain of technique or magic, but in the realm of miracles touching upon Divinity itself.
Whether Mana Engineering or Ability Engineering, their foundational premises never venture far from the laws of thermodynamics. You cannot create what does not exist.
You can only twist forms, transfer energy, and rearrange existing elements in novel patterns.
Heat inevitably increases entropy and disperses. Order collapses.
If you wish to construct a new edifice at one point, you must necessarily draw an equivalent mass and energy as payment from somewhere else.
That is the invisible chain and the law that sustains this world.
Mana is no exception. It is not a panacea of transmutation, merely high-density energy oriented in a specific direction.
So true Creation—the power to pierce the veil between dimensions and fix a space that never existed—stands in direct defiance of every cosmic law I witnessed at the height of the 9th Circle.
Even before my return, I had never encountered anyone with such an ability.
I found no further reason to respond. I pressed the call-end button. The light from the smartphone screen died, and darkness descended.
I bore no grudge against Kim Dae-han. He was simply processing information to the best of his ability within the bounds of his understanding.
Beep. Beep.
I shoved the disconnected phone deep into my coat pocket. Rough earth from the mountain path transmitted crisply through the soles of my hiking boots.
Cool night wind struck my flushed cheeks roughly as it passed. The cold air seeping deep into my lungs paradoxically set my mind churning like an active volcano.
‘If, by any chance, that Incubation-type Gate was truly created artificially by someone.’
This wasn’t merely the emergence of a new threat.
It was a horrifying premise that would overturn the very foundations and all the common sense of the entire hunter society humanity had built.
Gates are natural cosmic catastrophes born from the collision of alternate dimensions.
The waves of Mana flowing from the rifts of that catastrophe touched a fortunate few humans, granting them an ability called Awakening, and the hunters born thus maintained the world by slaying the monsters pouring forth from the other realm.
That was the sole, absolute truth known to all humanity walking this world.
Believing we could not withstand that immense natural disaster, we had accepted the end.
But what if the sequence were wrong?
My thoughts began tangling into chaos.
If someone possessed the technology to artificially generate Gates, then the grotesque logic of hiding an Incubation-type Gate in the heart of the city, mining Mana Crystals from it, and conducting human experimentation fits together with chilling perfection.
Yet piercing the dimensional barrier and fixing a Gate through human strength is nearly impossible. The clues were far too sparse.
The discovered Incubation-type Gate and the abducted Lee Do-hyeon. Reconstructing the full shape of an enormous conspiracy from these fragments alone was beyond my reach.
Nevertheless, that single fragment drove like an arrow straight into the deepest core of my heart.
The Gate Disappearance Incident.
Eight years ago, it was not only Lee Do-hyeon who vanished. As my thoughts chained together, my feet suddenly stopped dead.
Dry twigs beneath my feet cracked with an eerie sound. A sensation of chilling frost spread from my heart through my entire body.
In the early days of Gates, countless first-generation hunters were lost beyond the veil of the other world due to unexplained anomalies and abnormal Gate closures.
And within that list, the name of ‘my father’—who ventured toward a Gate and never returned—was written with terrible clarity.
‘Father… could he still be alive?’
If those we believed dead, like Lee Do-hyeon, were imprisoned somewhere.
If alive, what horrific environment were they enduring? What life as an experimental subject were they being forced to live?
“Damn it……!”
A curse spilled into the air. My fists were clenched so hard that my knuckles went white, then flushed with blood.
Fingernails bit into my palm; the metallic scent of blood reached my nose.
The defensive mechanism I had constructed to exclude all emotion and move like a machine groaned and stuttered under the weight of a single variable: father.
‘I must grow cold.’
I shut my eyes and forced myself to breathe deeply, cooling my head by sheer will. There are no confirmed facts yet.
Hasty anger and hope are only poison that corrodes sound judgment.
Every twisted puzzle piece will find its place only when Lee Do-hyeon, isolated in the Hunter Association Medical Ward, regains consciousness.
The rough mountain path had ended, and asphalt road studded with sparse streetlights came into view.
***
I had always loved to walk. Even after awakening as a mage, even after reaching the transcendent realm of an Archmage, I never abandoned this habit.
No matter how refined my Teleportation Magic was, the act of pressing my own two feet against the ground and drawing in the cold night air proved the most effective means of cooling an overheated mind.
Even the Altar of the Successor—that absolute space within my consciousness—could not perfectly recreate the texture of this rough, irregular wind that blew from the waking world.
Lost in tangled thoughts, I followed wherever my feet led, until I found myself at the edge of a familiar neighborhood.
Not the hundreds-of-billions-won Penthouse where my mother and sister now lived.
Rather, the weathered, shabby old apartment complex on the G City Outskirts where our family had once crowded together, bearing the weight of existence with stubborn resilience.
“…….”
Had the memories from before my return drawn my steps to this place? Or had some weak emotion—nostalgia, perhaps—lingered within me still?
Beneath the glow of a streetlamp, a rusted slide and an ancient playground with coarse sand came into view.
This was a place of particular significance to me. In that past world, Kang Tae-yoon and I had grown up rolling in the dirt there since childhood.
After we matured—after he became a hero known as the Sword Saint, and I became a mage wandering blood-soaked battlefields—it remained the same.
Whenever our hearts grew heavy, we would sit on that old swing and clink cheap beer cans together, pouring out secrets we told no one else.
Though in this world after my return, there existed no “elder brother” who had transferred everything to me before vanishing.
Yet the playground, where our memories lay buried, remained unchanged in its place, looking down at me.
I was drawing slowly toward the playground when—
“Hah! Hah!”
A sharp cry split the quiet dawn air. The sound of something cleaving through the atmosphere repeated at regular intervals.
In the center of the playground, someone drenched in sweat was wielding a Wooden Sword, sending up billows of sand.
The moment I saw the silhouette of that figure in the yellow light of the streetlamp, I felt my heart plummet.
‘A hallucination?’
The broad shoulders gripping the Wooden Sword. The solid lower-body stance, planted firmly without tricks. And the dark hair, wet with sweat, clinging to the forehead.
It resembled Kang Tae-yoon far too closely.
The stubborn bearing he possessed—how he gazed steadily forward, even boringly so, as he swung his blade—was etched into every movement of this figure’s body without a single discrepancy.
‘It can’t be.’
I shook my head, denying my own illusion. Kang Tae-yoon did not exist in this world.
The moment the System grafted his destiny onto me, his existence was erased completely from the map of Causality Law.
This figure was merely one of countless Hunter aspirants burning the midnight oil in training, dreaming of becoming a swordsman.
The Bracelet jingling at my wrist testified to that cold truth. Just as I was turning to leave—
“Huh? Hyung! It’s Do-jin, right?!”
“……What?”
The man practicing caught wind of my presence, dropped the Wooden Sword to the ground, and came bounding toward me like an enthusiastic puppy.
In the darkness, the figure’s features grew progressively clearer in my vision.
The moment I confirmed the face of the approaching figure, my mind bleached white.
“Do-jin hyung! After you became a Hunter, you’ve been ignoring all my messages! Is this how it is—you make it big and just cut ties? Really hurts, you know.”
The face of a man slightly below my eye level. Without question, it was Kang Tae-yoon’s face.
Though he retained a slightly younger look, his characteristically warm, easy laugh and his gentle eyes aligned with Kang Tae-yoon’s appearance without a single deviation.
A suffocating shock swept across my entire body. Yet this was no illusion. My instinct rapidly deduced the truth of this figure’s identity.
The memory returned. Kang Tae-min.
When I first visited Kang Tae-yoon’s home after my return, his mother had said she had only one son. Not Kang Tae-yoon, but Kang Tae-min.
That fact had been so bizarre and shocking that it had been branded into my mind—a name I could not forget.
“Right, Kang Tae-min…….”
In the world where Kang Tae-yoon had vanished, a replacement forcibly twisted into shape by the Law of Cause and Effect to fill the void.
A grotesque byproduct of my return, and a mutation that should never have existed in this world at all.
I forced my wavering pupils into submission and summoned forth the role of Kim Do-jin attuned to this world-line.
To this boy, I was nothing more than a close neighborhood hyung.
“……Yeah, Tae-min. Sorry. I’ve been busy with work lately.”
I crafted my voice to sound as dry and ordinary as possible.
“Seriously, hyung? You said you ran into mom before, right? Not even one call to me. What’s with that?”
“Yeah, that happened. I’ve moved now.”
“Moved? When exactly?”
Tae-min pouted slightly and gave my shoulder an affectionate pat.
A being wearing Kang Tae-yoon’s face, yet speaking in an immature voice wholly unlike Kang Tae-yoon, was sulking at me.
Within this bizarre cognitive dissonance, I felt a strange, tearing headache, as though my body were being ripped apart.
***
I excelled at analyzing others’ psychology and deconstructing situations.
No matter how unfamiliar or information-scarce an opponent, a light conversational current was all I needed to comb out their essence down to the bedrock.
As I sat beside Kang Tae-min on the playground swing, listening to his relentless chatter, I came to understand what kind of person this Kang Tae-min was.
In this world, I occupied a very special position as this boy’s neighborhood hyung. His nature was radically different from Kang Tae-yoon’s.
Unlike the elder brother—who was heavy and taciturn, seldom revealing his inner thoughts—Kang Tae-min resembled “a high-tension, talkative version of Kang Tae-yoon.”
Unbearably bright, his emotional expressions far too honest.
“What do you think, hyung? When I Awaken, what class do you think I’ll be? A Swordmaster, right? You saw the form I had earlier, didn’t you?”
Tae-min pushed the swing forward and back in wide arcs, his eyes gleaming.
“How would you know, you bastard—you haven’t even Awakened yet? It’s up to the System.”
I replied curtly and turned my gaze to empty space. The kid had just turned twenty.
Yet this lunatic had given up on university entrance exams while still an ordinary person without Awakening and registered at the Hunter Exam Preparation Academy to train there, he’d told me.
Most Hunter academies accept only Awakened Ones who’ve opened their Core as students.
The fact that an ordinary person had registered there bare-handed and was swinging a Wooden Sword so recklessly meant his obsession was abnormal.
He hadn’t inherited my brother’s talent, but that stubborn blood ran through him all the same.
“I’m definitely going to be an amazing A-Rank Hunter like you! Man, I saw that thing you said at the City Hall press conference last time and I was dying. ‘Because that’s what a Hunter is.’ Ohhh! The romance of it—I lost it!”
“Please stop saying that. It gives me chills.”
I wiped my face in genuine exasperation, and Tae-min giggled, clutching his stomach as he laughed.
“Oh, and that Club Arabian incident I saw on the news? The boss there was Jang Yu-cheong, right? That bastard used to torment us something fierce back then······.”
At the name that left Tae-min’s mouth, my eyebrow twitched slightly. But what followed didn’t quite match the fragments in my memory.
“If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know if I’d have even graduated properly. You were really cool back then.”
Tae-min’s usual lightness faded, and he looked at me with genuine eyes.
‘······Me?’
I swallowed a quiet laugh internally. Before regression, that pathetic version of me was merely a one-sided victim—I had no backbone to stand up for anyone.
It was always my brother, Kang Tae-yoon, who protected me.
But in this world twisted by the Law of Cause and Effect, the situation had reversed entirely. I became Tae-yoon’s guardian and protected Tae-min from Jang Yu-cheong.
It was a cruel joke of destiny born from regression.
In the process of erasing Kang Tae-yoon from existence, the System had repackaged all his kindness and achievements under my name.
“······I see. Forget about the old days. Jang Yu-cheong’s dead and gone now, anyway.”
“I was really grateful back then, hyung.”
The face of the kid beaming at me.
Staring into those eyes that held my brother’s features and gazed up at me with blind reverence, a leaden weight seemed to press down on a corner of my chest.
If I stayed any longer making meaningless conversation with him, my shallow emotional control would slip. It was time to stand up and leave.
But before that, there was one thing I had to settle.
“Hey, Kang Tae-min.”
I got up from the swing and looked down at him, calling out with gravity.
“Huh? Why the sudden call? Getting serious on me all of a sudden? Since we haven’t seen each other in a while, you gonna give me a fat allowance?”
Tae-min grinned without a hint of caution and reached out his hand.
“Yeah. I’ll give you whatever you need whenever you need it. But listen to what I’m about to say carefully.”
I pulled out my wallet and grabbed a stack of fifty-thousand-won bills, pressing them into his palm.
“Whoa! Jackpot! Why so much? Of course, just say the word! Whatever you say goes!”
Standing right in front of him as he held the cash and laughed carelessly, I stripped all warmth from my voice.
“Don’t become a Hunter.”
“······What?”
At my hollow tone, Tae-min’s laughter evaporated instantly.
The air temperature seemed to plummet, and a heavy, cloying bloodlust washed across the back of his neck. This was no simple advice.
“Never think about drawing a blade. Just go to university normally, get a job, and live quietly, just breathing.”
I held the gaze of this weak substitute wearing my brother’s face as I continued.
“If you ever try to worm your way into this world and catch my eye again——”
“Hyung······ What are you saying?”
“I’ll kill you with my own hands before any monster tears you apart in a Gate.”
The Wooden Sword in Tae-min’s hand fell uselessly to the ground. A dull sound of impact against the sand broke the silence.
The price of regression was mine alone to bear. I had no intention of pushing this child wearing my brother’s face into a bloodstained battlefield as well.
That was the last courtesy I could afford him in this twisted world.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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