The Nerd Next Door Turned Out To Be The Magic Tower Master - Chapter 71

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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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Chapter 71
She had opened Pandora’s Box. What remained inside was not hope, but only bewilderment and chaos.
Yes, that was all there was.
Strangely, she did not feel the same sense of betrayal she had known when she first learned he was Dilanshei. No anger rose in her. No revulsion.
Perhaps it was because his warning—that he was a darker man than she had imagined—had been perfectly apt.
Not that she was unaffected. She was more than a little unsettled.
Perhaps more than a little.
Cecilia gazed at him across the sofa with a troubled expression.
His secret—the one he had hidden so carefully—was that he was an obsessive stalker.
It was too much to dismiss as mere collecting. More than half the pictures and photographs hanging in that room were from before she had ever met Lien. There were even objects she had used in places where he had not accompanied her.
Aside from his feelings for Lien, this had crossed dangerously into the realm of crime.
Cecilia, unable to hide her distress, finally spoke after a long silence.
“…I need time to think about this.”
For the moment, she could neither accept him as he was nor bring herself to condemn him—so she offered this instead.
He, who had been hanging his head like a penitent, suddenly jerked it up.
“N-no. Please.”
His vigorous shaking of his head was pitiable enough. But as someone who had lived in the modern world, she found it difficult to extend her compassion further.
“Your preferences don’t matter. A relationship requires the consent of two people, but distance requires only one.”
Cecilia conveyed the harsh reality as gently as she could.
“You know this isn’t normal, don’t you?”
“…Am I so horrifying? So repulsive? Will you hate me now because of it?”
He asked the question as though merely speaking it aloud might make it true, his voice wrung dry with desperation. He looked as though tears might spill at any moment.
“I can’t promise that won’t happen, but…”
Perhaps it wouldn’t. Perhaps she only needed a little time to understand him.
She tried to add more, but Lien seemed already to have suffered a terrible shock.
He had gone pale as though sentenced to death itself, struggling even to draw breath properly.
‘He’s insufferable.’
Cecilia let out a sigh.
What was wrong with this man? His trauma over her death didn’t explain so much of this. There were too many things she couldn’t understand.
The room suffused with excessive obsession, the abnormal depth of his affection, and this exaggerated distress—none of it made sense.
“I… I was wrong.”
He descended from the sofa, gasping, and knelt at her feet.
“I understand that you may despise me, hate me. Even so, please don’t abandon me. If you do—if I’m cast aside—I think I may truly die this time.”
“…Are you threatening me right now?”
“No! That’s not it. It’s that I genuinely cannot live without you. I truly cannot. You—without you, I…”
His words scattered incoherently.
She had not asked him to leave, nor told him she hated him, nor hurled curses or reproaches.
Yet watching his eyes—still bright with recent tears—twist with anguish, she felt something crumble inside her.
‘I should have left it buried.’
Tired of measuring and doubting his words and actions, she had decided to pry out his secret by any means—even getting him drunk. And she had suspected the truth lay in that room. But she had never imagined it would take this form.
Ordinarily, she would have turned her back on such a dangerous man without hesitation.
But…
When Cecilia, lost in confusion, remained silent, he murmured something sorrowful.
“…You said you wouldn’t abandon me.”
Only hours ago, she had said exactly that. And it remained true now.
She could not abandon him.
The moment she saw that room with her own eyes, she had been genuinely afraid, and had thought it beyond her strength to bear.
But what could she do? The person she loved was in this state.
Besides, she had dimly suspected from the beginning that he was not quite right.
So however dark and dangerous he might be, she could not help but hold him close.
“I won’t abandon you.”
He kept secrets. He deceived her, misled her. She could not fully trust him. His reactions and behavior were far from normal, and even his blind devotion was incomprehensible to her.
She had come to care for him more than expected, but she had thought, deep down, that she might never care for him as deeply as this required.
Yet now, faced with all of this, she understood something.
Her heart for him had grown so deep that she could not abandon him, no matter what she had to endure.
And so Cecilia spoke without hesitation or doubt: she would not abandon him.
At her clear answer, he dragged his hand roughly across his face. As though he had been holding himself rigid until that moment, he let his weight settle against her knees, his forehead coming to rest there.
Cecilia watched the broad expanse of his back rise and fall with released tension, then turned her gaze toward the window, where darkness still pressed against the glass.
She had not checked the time, but it had been a very long night. Soon the sun would rise.

It was time to go back.
But before that, there was so much to say.
Even if she listened, she might never understand him—but he had to try, didn’t he?
Yet before she could demand an explanation, a voice cracked with exhaustion spilled out first.
“Will you hear my story?”
He clenched his trembling hands into fists and began a long confession.
* * *
When he recalled his memories of her, it was always the winter and spring between his twenty-second year.
He had lived through the spring of his twenty-second year exactly forty-three times.
He had met Cecilia forty-three times, loved her forty-three times, and lost her forty-two times.
Forty-two times he had failed utterly. Each time, he rewound time. And with each repetition, the accumulated memories slowly drove him mad. Perhaps he had been mad all along.
He could have confessed everything.
But there was a reason he could not reveal all the truth.
How could he tell her?
In those forty-two lives, save for the very first moment, she had despised him, scorned him.
Sometimes to the point of wanting to destroy herself.
When she died for the first time, he had searched frantically for a way to bring her back to life. It took decades before he found even a thread of hope.
The “Breath of God”—a myth he had once dismissed as baseless—and his own mana. Those two things were the answer.
It would cost him his life, but he did not hesitate. He drove a blade as thick as his forearm through his heart, filled the room with blood drawn into a magic circle, and poured out his mana.
And so he lived through the spring of his twenty-second year again, and met her alive.
But she, a Weberdin and a Saint, despised him, Dilanshei. She found him abhorrent, could barely stand to look at him.
“Those red eyes disgust me. Just looking at me makes my skin crawl.”
“You, Dilanshei, say you love me? Please, spare me such nauseating words. So long as you are Dilanshei, no matter what you do, I will never love you.”
“You still wish to be by my side? Then die. Perhaps I could bear you if you were a corpse.”
Because she found those red eyes unique to Dilanshei so abhorrent, he changed their color. When that still displeased her, he even gouged out his own eyes.
Because she hated his domineering, arrogant manner, he played at being harmless, at being naive.
Because she despised anyone she could not control, he cast aside all pride and spoke and acted like a fool.
He even begged her—please, don’t hate me, please, just once, let me stay by your side.
Yet every time, she rejected him, despised him, denied him her presence, and died.
To save her, he had imprisoned her by force, killed her worthless lover, destroyed the Imperial Court and Dilanshei with his own hands when they threatened her.
But when he locked her away, she bit through her own tongue. When he killed the Holy Knight who was her lover, she threw herself from the window. And even when there was no threat from the Imperial Court or Dilanshei, she was murdered anyway.
Sometimes by the Imperial Court or Dilanshei’s hand, sometimes by her own, most often by the Fanatic Cult.
She died again and again.
Each time, he rewound time.
Believing that if he did not give up, one day a miracle like the first life would come again.
Hoping, always hoping, that in some life he would meet a her who did not hate him, who did not despise him.
But a human body and mind were gradually reaching their limits.
As memories accumulated, as he endured her blame and death again and again, he felt his worn and frayed mind slowly unraveling into madness.
Just as he was beginning to forget what his original self had even been like.
In his forty-third life, after all that endless waiting, the miracle finally came to him.

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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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