The Swords I Raised Are Too Strong - Chapter 44

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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 44. Awakening (1)
“Day 1,135 of survival…”
A man in the darkness looked around at his surroundings.
Coffins filled with corpses came into view.
Tens of thousands of coffins laid densely upon one another.
Stacked layer upon layer, they numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
From a distance, they resembled a colossal apartment complex constructed from death itself.
“This time…”
Along the side of each coffin ran a long ribbon, its color either crimson or blue.
The man counted the coffins whose ribbons had changed color.
“About four thousand have given up?”
The red coffins had multiplied.
The rate of increase had been accelerating lately.
‘Please…’
Jeolla Man Kim Jun—once a public relations official for Jeolla Province.
Years ago, he and 300,000 citizens of Jeonju City were sucked into The Void.
An inexplicable phenomenon, believed to have originated from a Gate, had consumed the entire city.
Countless people began to perish.
Some wandered through The Void and vanished without a trace, while others departed claiming they had encountered divinity in the darkness.
Those who remained clung together like flames, gathering in one place.
And the center of that gathering was…
“Why me?”
In a world overflowing with coffins, I exhaled a weary sigh.
I was merely a renowned public official, yet people leaned upon my reputation and depended on me.
No one could answer my question.
“This might not be the answer at all.”
My hollow murmur echoed through the vast expanse of coffins.
[The Coffin]
This nameless coffin had been the hope of Jeolla Province’s citizens.
Certainly, it was at first.
Now, after 1,135 days, I had begun to wonder if this was the final curse.
Whoooosh—.
Again.
Another red coffin had appeared.
‘What could they be experiencing inside those coffins?’
According to the patterns I had discovered in The Void, this space seduces or drives humans to madness.
To avoid that fate, I led the citizens through the darkness, and in doing so, I found [The Coffin]—a lifeline.
If one enters The Coffin…
A human can survive without losing their mind.
“Except for one administrator.”
Kim Jun had become the sole human in this space who could not sleep, yet remained unaffected by The Void’s influence.
Because he had become the [Gravedigger].
Through his choice, countless citizens had entered coffins.
‘Was it the wrong decision?’
As the one who had guided everyone, I regarded the coffins I encountered in The Void as the best means of survival.
A means to live while maintaining my sanity and reason.
The only hope that allowed us to survive in this space devoid of any sustenance.
“Please….”
And yet.
Perhaps that was not the answer at all.
Uuuuung―.
Again.
Another red coffin had appeared.
The people lying within the coffins could not emerge.
They could do nothing but choose whether to end this life or not.
‘Tombs.’
The red coffins are tombs.
1,135 days—those who had drifted in The Void had abandoned their lives of their own accord.
Meanwhile….
‘Not yet.’
The blue coffins were the death throes of those who had not yet surrendered their lives.
Humans with tubes inserted in their necks, sleeping while awaiting tomorrow.
I could not know what it was like to lie in a coffin.
Those sleeping in coffins could not know my feelings as I watched over them.
Both could only wait.
“What can I do?”
I could do nothing.
I could only survive in this Void without losing my mind, watching as the tombs multiplied.
And yet….
[Communication]
A strange power that had emerged at some point.
It was the reason I remained the sole observer—the Gravedigger—in this bizarre world where even [WorldNet] could not reach.
“Am I just talking to myself without any response?”
Sending messages to the outside alone was nothing short of torture.
All I could do was send one-sided messages into the void without receiving any replies.
And yet this was the only method.
Just as I was about to send a rescue request to the outside.
That was when it happened.
CRASH———!!!
CRASH———!!!
CLANG———!!!
A strange resonance echoed through the Void.
Kim Jun gazed upward—into darkness of unknowable depth—and tilted his head in confusion.
‘Have I finally lost my mind?’
This place was nearly a perfect soundless zone.
From the tomb of hundreds of thousands of citizens, not even a breath escaped.
Perfect silence was said to shatter the human psyche, yet….
‘I went mad long ago.’
Wasn’t I the one who had endured 1,135 days in these extreme circumstances?
I didn’t believe what I was hearing was an auditory hallucination.
I strained to listen.
CLANG———!!!
The sound of something being struck with a hammer.
It was far too vivid to be a hallucination, and the sound seemed to grow louder with each strike.
“Day 1,135 of survival. 171,302 survivors remaining.”
I.
Spoke into the empty air.
“An anomalous phenomenon has occurred for the first time. A sound like a hammer striking comes from outside.”
Some force transformed my voice into text.
It was a strange ability that emerged after becoming trapped in this place—a rescue request I could use once per day.
I held absolute certainty that someone was listening, even if they never replied.
‘Please!!!’
If not, I would have no hope left to sustain myself.
I spoke with the heart of a prayer.
“If rescue has come from outside, I beg you to find the massive rectangular structure.”
And so, I revealed what I had never disclosed—the truth about the tomb.
A colossal structure built from stacked coffins.
Because we were not alone in this Void, I had desperately concealed this fact.
Because of the people who had vanished at the beginning.
Especially those who disappeared claiming they had met a ‘god’.
‘If those monsters arrive first….’
Having witnessed this space from the very beginning, I knew they had transformed into something like ‘monsters’.
Creatures of truly horrifying form.
At a glance, one could recognize them as grotesque beings desperate to devour the living.
Driven by this sense of urgency, I revealed information about the coffin structure.
‘Please….’
Black spots rising from my fingertips grew larger and larger.
I knew.
Now, I could endure no longer.
And so.
CRASH——!!!
I desperately hoped that the source of this noise
was something that had come to save us.
—Ep. 16 Awakening.
The Void is an enigmatic anomaly that cannot be observed from the outside looking in.
Yet, thanks to the one-sided messages transmitted from within, people had speculated that there must be survivors.
And now that had become an undeniable fact.
‘In total, 170,000 survivors exist in Jeonju City, Jeolla Province.’
From the moment I drew The Saint’s card, the survival of that population became an irrefutable certainty.
Each step I took felt impossibly heavy.
Perhaps it was due to the overwhelming weight this space exuded.
Shhhhhhh———.
Within a terrible darkness where no human could possibly survive.
A black and fathomless gloom.
An abyss of unknowable depth.
A black hole that had consumed a portion of the world, its width beyond measure.
I stood alone within that darkness.
‘Is this cognitive dissonance?’
My sense of direction, the passage of time, even my physical sensations—all blurred.
I was merely standing still, doing nothing, yet this was happening.
If I was affected this severely….
‘How on earth did they survive?’
The fact that 170,000 ordinary people had survived within this place was utterly unbelievable.
Were they still fully ‘human’?
Or had they become something that had crossed the line of humanity for the sake of survival?
Perhaps they were monsters who had abandoned their humanity, intoxicated by power.
Amid such tension, I stepped forward into the Void’s darkness.
Shhhhhhh———.
The sound ceased.
I walked blindly toward what felt like a deeper place.
As I walked, I felt this space.
The experience of the Swords dwelt within my body, and their experience was that of an absolute being who had witnessed the end of an entire world.
Therefore—.
‘This is….’
Completely different from the premonitions of the Black Gate.
‘A Barrier.’
I grasped the true nature of this space.
This place was a massive Barrier itself, an artificial space created to conceal something.
What was hidden within this Void?
What was being born from the Void that had consumed hundreds of thousands of people?
I decided to break free from the barrier that had been containing me.
‘Aga Sword.’
Summoning a blade that merely transcended a barrier would be wasteful.
Chaos—a neutral disposition.
Aga Sword, wielding dominion over time and space, would be perfectly suited for the current situation.
I drew Aga Sword from the scabbard it rested in.
A small, delicate blade that was nonetheless gradually growing stronger and more resilient—it sang its blade-song to me.
Uuuoong—.
A resonant cry declaring it would tear through the barrier imprisoning me and open a path into true Void.
‘Let’s go.’
A blade that had not yet transcended.
Yet a blade brimming with possibility stronger than any other.
I swung the blade into the darkness.
Shhhhk.
Pure white and pitch-black auras spiraled forward in a torrent.
The two colors moved as though intermingling into one, yet never truly merged—each advancing along its own path.
That line quietly cleaved through the Void.
Zzzzzzzzrrrk——.
Darkness yawned open, welcoming me.
Beyond the barrier that dulled all sensation, what I felt was….
‘Demonic power.’
Cruel and terrible death.
A land of death where nearly half of the three hundred thousand citizens had perished.
Yet a land where one hundred seventy thousand survivors still endured—hope remained.
And yet, what my eyes truly beheld was a single man standing alone in solitude.
“…Today’s survivor is—.”
A man clinging to an enormous tree.
A man who appeared like an elderly person drained of all vitality, his skin wrinkled and withered.
He repeated his vacant murmuring endlessly to himself.
I expanded my field of vision.
Kuuuguguguguguuung———!!!
The man is no longer visible.
His murmuring can no longer be heard.
Only an immensely vast and overwhelming tree trunk rose to an incomprehensible height.
And countless people were ‘preserved’ upon that wooden pillar, clinging to it—some appeared to have melted, becoming one with the tree itself.
The one commonality they all shared was that, save for the man from before, every last one of them was smiling.
‘An eternal dream?’
I know the identity of the massive tree the man clung to.
An entity that devoured hundreds of thousands of humans, crossed through Gates, and caused erosion on a ‘regional’ scale—and still had power to spare.
A tree so monstrously vast that it was difficult to comprehend.
Yet still, I found myself breaking into a faint smile.
That tree.
The fallen World Tree.
It was my blades’ favorite thing.
* * *
[A tree that grows by consuming death.]
Within the endless cycle of blade cultivation, the World Tree had fallen countless times.
Even before its corruption, the World Tree had been inherently violent, but after falling, it committed atrocities no different from those of a foreign god.
It would absorb entire nations as fertilizer, or transform all of nature’s vitality into the aura of death, rendering the land uninhabitable for all living things.
Or it would manipulate its own children—the elves—to ignite continental-scale wars.
Through countless failures, I came to understand that the World Tree served as a kind of branching point.
So I changed my strategy.
‘An experience event.’
To my blades, the World Tree was ‘experience’—whether fallen or not.
“Hahaha! The Demons of the Void will devour the Mother Goddess’s entire body.”
For Iris Ruzbella, the World Tree was the opportunity that perfected her as a Demon.
“This iron called the World Tree ultimately has its limits, it seems.”
For Muratan, it became an introductory textbook for handling [inhuman] iron.
“Pillar of the world, how have you forgotten your purpose and sought to harm humanity?”
For the Saint Yulia Lanestia, it became the catalyst that allowed her to ‘purify’ things once considered virtuous.
“Withered and fallen tree, abandon your grandiose past and depart. The age of noble humans has come—.”
As for Reinhardt Euclid, he used it as a debut stage to showcase the formula he had perfected after long training.
The same applied to the blades not yet awakened.
Therefore——.
“Muratan.”
Without hesitation, I spoke the blade’s name.
All my blades had volunteered to be deployed, but the blade I needed in this moment was [4th Blade, Muratan].
Within that immeasurably vast tree, 170,000 South Korean citizens were alive.
Kuuuong———.
A massive, crude greatsword materialized.
Within time that had grown sluggish, the absolute sensation of a transcendent being settled into me.
The Void, where nothing could be felt, began to burn with the scorching heat of a blacksmith’s forge.
Within that heat, my vision transformed.
‘I can see it.’
The World Tree, corrupted pitch black.
Within the colossal black wooden pillar, countless red and blue lines became visible.
From the red lines came the sensation of death, yet from the blue lines, vitality still flowed.
It meant the World Tree was drawing nutrients.
In other words, living people.
‘So many survivors….’
I reached for the sword.
No—I lifted the hammer instead.
To sift the living from the dead wrought by that abominable tree.
Unlike the other swords, this work required Muratan’s assistance without exception.
And Muratan proved remarkably cooperative in such moments.
As expected.
⦗Usable iron, yet brimming with impurities.⦘
Muratan murmured.
⦗Iron must be pure. Worthless things that are not iron must never be allowed to mix within it.⦘
The meaning was simple enough.
For the iron called the World Tree, Muratan would separate out all the impurities—the humans—without mercy.
Piercing through that transcendent instant, the World Tree threatened me.
Krrrunch——.
Colossal roots erupted from the darkness, tearing through the ground beneath.
They carved through empty space like sinister serpents, creeping to corrode everything around me.
Yet a blacksmith’s hammer must always move faster than iron itself.
My hammer struck the World Tree’s core before the tendril could even reach me.
CLANG———!!!
The world trembled.

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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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