The Nerd Next Door Turned Out To Be The Magic Tower Master - Chapter 79

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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 79
If you dream of something you’ve actually experienced, can you call it a nightmare?
If so, then he’d been having nightmares frequently ever since he started turning back time.
Most of them ended the same way—with her last moment.
Before his eyes, her slender body crumbles. Those golden eyes slip beneath her eyelids and vanish. Her faint breathing grows shallower and shallower, and her warmth becomes indistinguishable from that of any lifeless thing.
So is this too a nightmare?
He watched in a daze as the small hand that had covered his own fell, limp, to the ground—watched as snowflakes that landed on her cheek froze rather than melt away.
If it were a dream, he prayed he would wake. Drenched in cold sweat, he’d open his eyes to find her curled up asleep beside him.
Anxious, he’d press his hand beneath her nose to confirm she still breathed, and even after he was certain, he wouldn’t be able to let her go—he’d burrow into her embrace.
She might pout at being woken, or she might hold his head close like he was some small animal she adored.
Hearing his heartbeat grow clear and sharp—thump-thump—he would finally feel relief wash over him, and he’d fall back into a deep sleep.
But no matter how much time passed, no matter how many times he closed his eyes and opened them again, he remained trapped in the nightmare.
Perhaps he would never wake up.
Having accepted that one bitter truth, he pulled her limp form closer against his chest.
No breath. No pulse. Nothing.
So those eyes would never open again. She would never look at him. Never smile, never touch him, never speak to him again.
A tear he thought long dried fell once more.
Failure. Again and again, failure.
Where had it all gone wrong?
He retraced the events of just hours before, over and over.
She’d stood upon the platform dressed in formal vestments, looking like a god incarnate. He watched, aching, as soft snow fell and melted into her clothes and hair.
And then the moment their eyes met.
Thump-thump.
His heart began beating irregularly.
It was different from that painful pounding he always felt in her presence.
Was it because her expression had looked so cold, so rigid?
The inexplicable dread intensified the moment Cecilia gripped the dagger.
He wanted to rush up onto that platform at once, seize her wrist, tear the blade from her hand, and put as much distance as possible between her and that cold steel.
But he restrained himself. Under the guise of saving her, he’d destroyed her countless times before.
“Please just disappear from my life!”
Her voice crying out in despair from some other lifetime still echoed in his ears.
So this time—just this once—he wouldn’t lay a hand on her, the one who had promised to forgive him, to accept him, to never abandon him.
He clenched his fists and endured. Again and again, he endured.
But he should never have done that.
Looking back, everything went wrong the moment she said she was going to the Temple.
He’d been afraid.
Ever since he’d recovered his memories, she rarely made it past a single year.
He feared that charlatans would crawl out of the woodwork like insects and devour her.
Desperate and childish, he’d clung to her, but Cecilia had gently pushed him away.
“If you’re really that worried, stay close and watch over me. Understood?”
“You’re so good to me.”
He bitterly regretted not confining her to that room. He should have burned the Temple itself to the ground, should have stopped searching for who was behind it all, should have killed every human that crawled out like ants. He regretted it desperately.
Even if she came to hate him, even if she never let him kiss her again—if he’d known it would cost him her forever, he would have done it.
In some cycle long past, when he’d done something similar, Cecilia had cursed him in the charred ruins of the Grand Temple, tears streaming down her face, and tried to kill him.
Days later, she’d died in a carriage accident while fleeing.
Only now did he wonder.
Was her death perhaps an immutable law decreed by her god?
Was it all predestined causality—that he couldn’t save her, that she would die before his eyes?
Even though he’d never believed in gods or fate, he mocked himself with the thought.
But the reason didn’t matter. Not really. Even if it truly were the will of some god, it changed nothing.
“I’ll go back. That’s all that matters.”
Lien muttered the words as he carefully lifted her and descended from the platform.
But before he’d gone far, the Paladins moved to block his path.
“I don’t know how a sorcerer managed to slip into the Temple, but surrender the criminal at once.”
“…Criminal?”
He repeated the incomprehensible words of these worthless creatures.
Criminal?
When he realized they meant the woman in his arms, cold fury seized him.
The criminal wasn’t her—it was the fool who’d failed to stop her death, and that bastard Pope who was the true architect of it all.
He didn’t need to ask what had happened between the Pope and Cecilia. The fact that she’d stabbed him with her own blade meant she’d uncovered the conspiracy on her own, without any help from him—and that knowledge cut deeper than any steel.
‘Right, I nearly forgot the important part.’
Lien looked up at the podium where clergy had gathered in droves.
With several high priests clinging to him, the Pope was still gasping for breath in ragged fits.
‘That won’t do. It’s not fair.’
He couldn’t allow himself to survive alone after she’d been torn from him, couldn’t permit himself to find peace.
He gauged his own magical power. To launch an attack single-handedly in this Holy Ground brimming with Divine Power—the antithesis of magic—and surrounded by high priests no less, would be madness even for a Magic Tower Master.
But he had always been mad. A man stripped of even the reason to stay alive, long since lost to sanity.
So he slaughtered them.
He suffocated the Paladins who blocked his path, crushed the priests clinging to the Pope with Gravity Magic, burned them with Lightning Magic, and watched in silence as the Pope gasped his last in agony.
The Paladins who rushed at him shrieking were tiresome, but posed no true threat to his life. That Vice-Commander simply stood there, dazed and helpless.
That same pathetic helplessness had long ceased to amuse him. Cold and indifferent, Lien gathered her carefully into his arms.
With the Pope’s breathing stilled, there was no reason to remain.
He shook off the clergy clinging to him like leeches and moved swiftly to the very summit of the Magic Tower.
He swept aside scattered piles of books with his foot and laid her down on the cleanest bed he could find.
Then he roughly removed the fingerless glove he always wore on his left hand.
A strange geometric pattern—a Magic Circle—was scarred into the back of his hand.
It was proof that he had become a Sacrifice.
Repeated Regressions exacted a price beyond his life. First they took his ordinary emotions; then his essential memories.
He gradually forgot any clues about who had harmed her, yet the memory of the day she died only grew sharper.
As this vicious cycle continued, he descended further into madness—until he began to doubt even whether he had truly reversed time, whether this memory was real at all.
In other words, this scar was proof that he had not merely gone mad, but had actually turned back time. His only certainty.
‘So I can do it again.’
The her he rewound might despise him once more. And he might have to reverse dozens, perhaps hundreds of lives again.
Yet he could not bring himself to let her go.
Lien seized a dagger and cut the tips of his fingers. With the blood that dripped steady and slow, he drew Magic Circles throughout the room—the same pattern as the scar on his skin.
His body bore wounds from his rampage in the Holy Ground, not a single place left unmarked, but he did not care.
The sun rose and set again and again until the magical power that had been depleted was finally restored.
In the room filled with strange formulas, he at last rose to his feet.
His body, having bled far beyond its limits, was precarious. Yet he dragged himself on both knees to the side of the bed.
Cecilia lying upon it did not look dead, but merely asleep.
“Cecilia.”
No answer came.
“Cecilia.”
In the terrible silence, he caressed her cold cheek and pressed his lips willingly against her frozen mouth.
A final farewell.
Lien sat down at the center of the Magic Circle, never once taking his eyes from her.
And he raised the same dagger that had pierced her.
It was time to go back and meet her again.

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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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