By Zephyria 
Richard greeted me, standing atop the main entrance stairs of the villa.
The royal villa in Onelt, a small city in northwestern Galea, was a modest three-story building. Withered flower thickets clung to the shoulder-high walls, and weeds sprouted haphazardly across the wide yard.
King Floyd had already declared, ‘The First Prince of Sierren is not within Floyd.’ It meant he intended to turn a blind eye to everything that happened from this moment forward.
Even so, one might expect a knight or two brought from Sierren to be with him, but there wasn’t a single soul in the villa other than Richard.
Richard’s golden hair, which had always been polished and gleaming, was dry and brittle today. His attire was the same. Though he had tried to dress neatly, the wrinkled shirt—clashing with his flamboyant gems—made his handsome face look shabby.
He waved his hand awkwardly, a vacant smile on his face.
Like someone who had unexpectedly run into a long-forgotten friend.
“It’s been a while, Rubel.”
“Why are you so far away? You were hard to catch.”
“I know. I guess I didn’t think you’d actually come to see me.”
Originally, Richard wasn’t the type of bastard to speak so leisurely in front of me. He might have fluttered his tail like a courting bird before others, but in my presence, he used to hold his breath and watch my every move like a fox that had encountered a hound.
That was the Richard I was used to. The way he would keep his mouth shut and avoid my gaze, only to follow wherever my eyes landed like a dog needing to pee, desperately struggling to get a rise out of me.
He always envied me for things that were incomprehensible. Of course, I had no desire to understand them.
Whether his liver had swollen with audacity facing death, or what it was.
Seeing that smirking face made my stomach churn again. Without responding, I stared at him silently. Richard, meeting my gaze, turned and stepped inside the villa as if telling me to follow.
I gave a light signal to the eighty-odd knights and wizards who had followed me from Sierren. They quietly surrounded the villa.
If they had any brains, they would know exactly what might happen inside this villa. But at the same time, they had to remain ignorant of what was to occur.
I entered the villa accompanied only by the two gods.
The bastard was waiting for me in the drawing room.
Thinking the whole thing was useless, I still strode forward and sat opposite him. Then, I asked abruptly.
“How much did you know?”
Instead of answering my question, he changed the subject.
“It’s really hard to have a conversation with just the two of us, Rubel. I tried a few times, but…”
“Stop talking nonsense, Richard. Since when did Wesley Kiadris—”
“Me too.”
Richard snapped his head up. His eyes were blue as well. However, they weren’t clear and sparkling like Mikael’s, nor were they refreshing and kind. His eyeballs were greasy, and the corners of his mouth, pulled up high, were trembling. In that state, he murmured rapidly.
“I needed a mother just like you did. A father too, or just something, anything.”
“…”
Good grief. This crazy bastard.
Richard was now twenty-four years old. At a point where he had been an adult for nearly ten years, the first thing he says after using his hereditary status to push hundreds of my knights into death traps is about a mother and father?
The Imperial Knight incident was simply the most evident crime; if you added the hallucinogenic mushroom case and the Saras cruise ship incident, the damages were immense.
I knew he was a son of a bitch, but I didn’t know he was such a brat.
Thinking about how I had agonized for so long because of a piece of trash like this made my blood boil. I shut my mouth to see how far he would go.
Richard was still smirking. He let out a vacant, mindless laugh over and over, as if he were on drugs.
“I guess Brother wanted to be reborn as a human.”
…And then he began to tell the story of The Ninth God.
It was a story about the most recent, as-yet-unwritten myth.
No one still knew what the hell that damn bastard was thinking when he started this. The attention of the gods behind my back fixed on Richard. As if enjoying the gaze, he half-closed his eyes and whispered.
It was a long, long story.
Does eternal love even exist?
The pain of a one-sided love lasting over a thousand years exhausted The Ninth God. The Ninth God spent all his time, devotion, and affection on reviving the first human, neither eating nor sleeping. Yet, at the same time, he was aware to some extent that the first human could not return to him.
At some point, The Ninth God wanted to become human.
He wanted to live as a human and die as a human. He thought that if he repeated the process several times, he might be born in the same body as the first human, who had already been split into thousands of fragments. He wanted to achieve love in another way. No, he simply wanted to forget everything. He wanted to end this excruciatingly painful love.
However, a human body cannot contain the soul of a god. After several attempts, The Ninth God came up with another method.
He saw the First Goddess peering into the world. He obstructed her movements and, taking advantage of a moment when her power weakened, he subdued and hid her.
He tore the already opened world even deeper. Souls that should never have entered tumbled into this world.
Chaos ensued.
The other gods had watched The Ninth God’s madness until then, but they could not tolerate an act that threatened to collapse the world. The first to arrive was Gano Paquin. The Ninth God was torn into thirty-six fragments by Gano Paquin’s hand.
The gods did not know why The Ninth God had done such a thing. Because the First Goddess had been busy peering into various worlds recently, they failed to notice her disappearance as well.
Through that process, The Ninth God became small enough to be contained within a human body.
It was an unfortunate inevitability that Wesley Kiadris came into contact with a fragment of the torn god.
If a god desires something fervently, the dream eventually comes true in some form. The wish of The Ninth God, who wanted to live as a human, and Wesley Kiadris, who no longer wanted to live, met at a certain intersection.
The Ninth God took possession of Wesley Kiadris’s body and became human.
The human body was incredibly fragile.
He reconstructed his body several times. Wesley Kiadris’s physical form transcended human limits.
To live as a human, The Ninth God returned to the place Wesley Kiadris had left. When he entered the capital, the first person to notice his presence was Maelo Sanson. He tactlessly welcomed his disciple, who had returned possessing surprisingly immense power, and formally requested a sparring match.
The Ninth God did not know the way of human thinking or the level of human martial power. He sparred with Maelo Sanson and fought to a draw. In the 12th cycle of the Beneto calendar, the Imperial Family announced that Wesley Kiadris had become the Empire’s second Grand Sword Master.
That was also the year Richard lost the pendant of the Floyd princess.
An eleven-year-old Richard had been hiding in the annex garden of the Amethyst Palace on the day Wesley Kiadris was granted the title of Marquess as a Grand Sword Master.
Since The Ninth God was also a god of despair, he was drawn to that dark despair and anger and discovered Richard, who was hiding in the flower thickets, sobbing.
Richard was a prince. Having grown up amidst countless power struggles since childhood, he was cunning and already knew the appearances and personal details of the major nobles. And instinctively, he recognized The Ninth God’s lacking humanity and wounded inner self.
Sobbing, he clung to Wesley Kiadris’s embrace. He acted spoiled and clung to him as if dealing with someone very close. Thus, The Ninth God mistakenly believed that Wesley and Richard had been very intimate for a long time.
Most humans of this land contained small fragments of the first human’s soul. Instead of pushing him away with the appropriate distance the original Wesley would have maintained, The Ninth God awkwardly hugged and comforted Richard.
Richard didn’t want someone to raise him; he wanted someone to protect him.
That’s why, from the day he first saw Wesley Kiadris, he treated him like an older lover. The Ninth God was vulnerable to the human way of counting age and didn’t feel anything strange, and in the courting, clinging Richard, he saw himself, unable to forget the first human.
Young Richard took care of and was taken care of by The Ninth God until the latter became accustomed to the human body.
Time passed in that manner.
When Richard, having just reached adulthood, pulled Wesley Kiadris into bed, The Ninth God, whose heart had softened, confessed the truth to Richard. That he was not Wesley, but The Ninth God. Therefore, he could no longer advance their relationship.
“That’s when I realized.”
“…Realized what?”
“That I liked you, Brother. The more I looked at you, the more I wanted to see you; when you were smiling, I wanted to make you cry, and when you were crying, I wanted to make you cry more. I thought, ‘Ah, this must be love’…”
“You crazy bastard.”
“What could I do? In my world, you were the only one who wasn’t afraid of my father. You were arrogant and composed, as if a human Emperor were nothing, yet you’d get all flustered every time you barely managed to say you loved me—it was so cute I could die. I loved how confident you were. When someone like that became anxious and restless in front of me, I felt like I owned the world.”
“…”
“Honestly, I was confident. Wounds caused by love can be forgotten with a new love, right? And they say I have some of that first human’s fragment or whatever. We were already living like lovers, too.”
“…”
In the Sierran Empire, the lighter the hair and eye color, the more beautiful a person was considered. Among them, Richard Flo Searon was famous for his flamboyant appearance, resembling his mother.
Perhaps that was why. Richard would occasionally smile with his eyes to an almost off-putting degree and draw out the ends of his sentences.
He had never shown such disgusting behavior in front of me, but there were more than a few young ladies who blushed, captivated by his looks.
As if to show off, Richard interlaced his fingers and stretched his arms forward. Our eyes met. His pupils, glistening to a point that felt grotesque, didn’t look like the eyes of a living being.
“If only you weren’t here, it might have worked out.”
“…What nonsense is this?”
“There weren’t many methods I could use back then. I grew impatient and asked Brother to just do something about you, but that didn’t go well. I heard you looked more like the first human.”
“…”
Richard’s beast-like eyes blazed with anger.
It was an affection I never asked for, nor ever wanted. It was deeply unpleasant to know that I had been placed on a scale and weighed in a place I didn’t know. I didn’t bother hiding my discomfort.
Richard, who stared back at me without flinching, pressed the back of his hand firmly against the corner of his eye. After kneading his face a few times and taking a deep breath, he began to smirk again.
“So things turned out quite funny. Originally, I ignored that bastard no matter how much he poked at me, but then I just snapped.”
“That bastard?”
“Owner? The guy talking like a con artist, saying we should merge this world back into one and return to the very beginning. Didn’t you hear him too? In Owen.”
“…”
“He said he’d try it. That he felt he could really succeed this time. After that, he got busy doing all sorts of useless things, so the time he spent with me decreased, so we fought a bit, and then this and that…”
His voice, which had been growing louder, suddenly lost its warmth and dropped. Was I even the one that bastard was looking at in the first place? His dropped gaze wandered over the table a few times before coming to a stop.
“…I found out a bit.”
Owner suggested regression to The Ninth God.
Since time moving forward has continuity and cannot return to the beginning, he whispered that they should twist and crush the axis entirely to start from the beginning. Then, he would be able to reunite with the first human.
The Ninth God did not fully believe his words. But he wanted to believe.
For regression, a massive collision of Mana was required. However, if a god kills a living being, the Mana possessed by that being is absorbed by the god. What The Ninth God wanted was not to become stronger himself, but the reversal of the world.
Therefore, he sought to incite a war. He wanted humans to kill humans. To achieve this, he sought out Richard again. If you truly love me, start a war. And Richard answered that he would.
The Ninth God began traveling to collect his fragments. And…
Richard, who had been chatting away, stopped abruptly. His gaze was directed toward Gano Paquin. That god, who had never been in great health to begin with, was now staggering with a deathly pale complexion. Spiritus supported him by the shoulder.
Richard clapped his hands with a loud snap and spoke of something else in a lively voice.
“Oh, right. Want me to tell you how Beneto died too?”
I didn’t answer. But Richard continued. In a very excited voice.
“You know Melatia sent a letter after I turned twenty, right?”
I knew. It was impossible not to. Kate cared deeply about Richard’s biological mother, Melatia, and I had also ordered a thorough investigation into related matters to prepare for any possibilities.
Richard smiled brightly, rocking his chair back and forth. Like a child, unlike the person I knew.
“I just asked her to ghostwrite one page. That she had come to know all the facts, but since her body had become one that could not stand by your side, she would now die. That they should be together forever in the afterlife.”
“You told Melatia everything?”
“As if! I just told her to write exactly that. Melatia probably didn’t even know what I intended to do with that suicide note. She got 5 gold for writing one letter, so it was a good deal for her.”
“…She died just because of that?”
“Exactly. I laughed a bit too. Of course, I first leaked through my father’s physician that Melatia had died. Honestly, Beneto wasn’t a lord worth respecting. He entrusted his secrets to her but gave no carrots, only whips, so how could it have worked out? Once you and I grew up, everyone was desperate to replace him. It reached you too, right? Mage Chiron.”
“…”
“Seeing as he thought of embezzling the Divine object in the midst of all that, I wonder if he wanted to keep playing Emperor or what… Well… what does that matter to me now.”
“…”
We were silent for a moment. My head throbbed.
Richard shrugged, spreading his arms wide. He told me to ask anything, that he would answer it all. Why is it that people want to blabber everything right before they die?
After thinking it over, I asked the one thing I understood the least.
“…What was the media war? The bet involving the two young ladies. Why, when you couldn’t even cling to it until the end?”
He answered immediately.
“I wanted to see you get jealous, Brother.”
“Ha.”
“If you had luckily died in the middle, I would have become Emperor just like that. Well, that was greed. I just got pissed off knowing you’d gone to Yulan to spawn a brat.”
“…Why did you do that to the… brat.”
“I told you, he’s The Ninth God. A great being with a special secret, who loved the same person for over a thousand years. I just acted out a bit to see if I could receive that immense love you give. It was fun and infuriating.”
Richard smiled radiantly, his entire face glowing. It was the first time I had seen him smile like this.
I think I understood why Beneto had kept him so close. That smiling face looked exactly like the Floyd princess in the portrait.
He lowered his voice. He murmured in a whisper.
“That’s why I wanted to try talking to you, just the two of us.”
“…”
“You also fell in love with a soul from another world. Without a promise, without hope. Groveling quite cutely.”
“…!”
“I was really curious if you knew something, but it was too nerve-wracking to ask openly. Until then, I hadn’t given up on the dream of becoming Emperor, and I didn’t want to die before you, Brother…”
“…You knew? Since then?”
“I knew, and you didn’t. Though that’s only until the day of that Young Master’s debutante.”
“How?”
But the moment I asked, I realized.
If The Ninth God had confessed everything he knew to Richard… it was possible. The gods were aware of the existence of Mikael and Namgung Jeong-yeon.
Especially since The Ninth God was the one who tore the world apart, even if he didn’t know their exact locations, the fact that souls from another world had crossed over…
And exactly as expected, Richard began to chatter lively, like someone who had been waiting for this moment.
“Well, because my brother told me everything—when the world opened again, what he did to the First God, and what the Owner told him. How the world was torn apart, how he stole a few souls and lost a few others… Listening to it, I got curious, so I scoured every record of those born in the same year. That’s how I found out. Young Master Ernhardt spilled everything himself, didn’t he? Something about coming back after defeating a demon?”
“…”
I stiffened my expression to keep from letting out a groan. It was my fault for not discovering the young Mikael—back when he was just clueless and cute—sooner. If I had known earlier, I would have shut his mouth.
“I guess we really are brothers. Right? Seeing how we both bury our heads in hopeless love and can’t get out. Maybe it would have been better if I were born from the same womb as you. Then I might have been a bit less bored… No, no. I couldn’t act like Lucilla, so we wouldn’t have gotten close. After all, look how much she suffered because of you…”
He murmured as if dreaming. I had finally discovered the cause of his endless jealousy, but I wasn’t happy in the slightest. Looking at his smirking face made me feel increasingly disgusted.
But it’s fine. I achieved my love. Unlike Richard.
Mikael loves me. He will defeat The Ninth God and return to me.
Richard kept laughing. He laughed and laughed. He giggled until he was breathless. Watching him act as if his life meant nothing, an anxiety that had been crouching in a corner of my chest suddenly began to rear its head.
Richard clamped his mouth shut so hard his lips trembled, then slapped his thigh with his hand and burst into loud laughter again. That laughing face looked almost like he was crying.
“Hwahahaha! Yes, that’s right. We’re both ruined!”
“…What?”
“Want me to tell you where my brother took Michael Ernhardt? You’ll probably be shocked. Wow, I really never thought something like that would be possible…”
Richard babbled cheerfully. A strong tinnitus overlapped his voice.
I was truly curious. It was the thing I wanted to know most.
But I heard nothing.
Nothing at all.
While remaining seated, I slowly looked back. The expressions of Spiritus and Gano Paquin, who had been composed the entire time, were distorted with horror. They asked something, and Richard answered again. The gods shrieked, and Richard laughed until he nearly choked.
Spiritus grabbed the bastard by the collar. He cheered with a laugh. Raising both arms high, he writhed, saying he was glad he wasn’t the only one who was fucked.
I felt suffocated.
My vision flickered between black and white.
Despair, crawling up from the very bottom, filled me up to my throat.
Having fully enjoyed my pain and loss, Richard’s voice grew hoarse from laughing. Exhausted, he said he would give me one last gift. He babbled that since they had traded blows, they should end this filthy ill-fate here, and that he had truly enjoyed himself in the meantime.
Richard walked out on his own. Spiritus followed him out. Gano Paquin curled up, clutching his head. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of words brushed past my ears.
Richard returned as a crushed corpse.
Knights and Wizards entered the drawing room to find me.
I was still breathless.