CHAPTER 86: A LIFETIME OF ISOLATION AND SUFFERING

Mika hadn’t lied exactly, but he hadn’t told her the whole truth either.

That final wish she had made...it had pushed him far beyond what he was comfortable doing. He’d overextended himself, not in the ordinary "I’m a bit tired" sense, but in a way that scraped at the edges of his own limits.

To understand why, one needed to know something about the worlds, realms, rifts, drifts, that existed out there.

Every single drift a Blessed, or any other capable traveler, might enter was classified by danger level, ranked from F-class at the very bottom all the way to SS+ class, which was supposed to represent the most extreme level of difficulty.

These rankings were determined by countless factors: the number of friendly entities in the realm, the richness of resources, the total size of the realm, the number and strength of cursed beings lurking there, environmental hazards, and much more.

This system wasn’t just for bragging rights, it determined who was even allowed to enter. A low-ranked adventurer who walked into an A-class drift was, more often than not, signing their own death sentence.

But above SS+, there was something else entirely.

A category not spoken about lightly.

Abysmal Realms.

Realms so dangerous, so hostile, that they defied comprehension. Places where survival wasn’t just unlikely, it was impossible.

Entire teams, even the most elite in the known worlds, had vanished in them without leaving so much as a trace of their existence behind.

Some of these realms were swarming with cursed beings beyond counting, like breeding pits for every twisted nightmare imaginable.

Others contained things far worse: primordial entities so ancient and powerful that even looking at them could unravel a person’s soul in an instant.

These were not "bosses" to be defeated, they were forces of nature, living cataclysms, entities whose very presence distorted the laws of reality.

No one entered an Abysmal Rift voluntarily. Not if they had any sense of self-preservation.

And Mika, at first, hadn’t realized this world was one of them.

When he arrived, he’d scanned the nearby region and found it...quiet. A small cluster of life around the village, a few demonic beasts here and there in the distance, some cursed beings scattered further away.

His preliminary judgment had been that this realm was low to mid-tier at worst, maybe a D-class, C at the highest. Nothing dangerous enough to warrant suspicion.

It was only when Mina made her last wish, the wish to destroy every cursed being in the world, that Mika performed a full, deep scan.

And the truth hit him like a hammer.

This wasn’t a simple world at all. It was huge, vast beyond what his first scan had reached. And outside the quiet bubble surrounding the village was...infestation.

Tens of thousands of cursed beings. No...hundreds of thousands.

To be exact there were over 1,003,348 cursed beings in this realm.

They covered the land like a plague, swarming in every direction beyond the safe perimeter of the village, ranging from pathetic F-class creatures to vicious A-class predators that could tear through walls of steel.

And worst of all, deep beneath the surface, buried in the very bones of the world, there was something else.

A presence.

Mika could feel it even without touching it directly, a massive, sleeping entity radiating an aura so oppressive that, if it stirred, the land above would crack like thin glass. Its heartbeat alone was enough to warp the flow of mana in the entire realm.

And it was the source of all those cursed beings.

Breeding them endlessly.

Seeding them into the land like weeds that could never be pulled up by the root.

Mika’s lips had pressed into a thin line when he realized this.

Not because the discovery terrified him, he had walked through more than a few abysmal realms in his life, and their horrors no longer shocked him as they might have once, but because Mina’s wish had just made his task infinitely more tedious.

She hadn’t just asked him to wipe out the cursed beings near the village, or even across the visible continent. She’d asked for every cursed being in the entire world to be destroyed, including the sleeping progenitor that was currently hibernating far beneath their feet.

It wasn’t impossible for him...but it was exhausting.

Killing hundreds of thousands of surface creatures was already a large-scale spellcasting feat that would drain most beings dry.

But eradicating all of them, everywhere, in a single instant?

That meant extending his consciousness across the entire realm, mapping every single cursed life-sign, creating the perfect chain-reaction annihilation spell, and then detonating it all at once without damaging the rest of the world.

And that included killing the slumbering entity beneath the realm without waking it first, a delicate, surgical strike that required precision and force in perfect balance.

It would probably take him over a century, over a hundred long, suffocating years trapped in the lucid expanse of his own mind, to weave together a spell of this magnitude.

Over a century of unrelenting agony gnawing at the edges of his thoughts, a kind of over-dying pain that felt as if invisible claws were raking through his brain, urging him to tear it out just to make it stop.

Over a century of crushing loneliness, with nothing but the echo of his own breathing and the endless churn of his thoughts to keep him company.

No voices. No footsteps. No warmth.

Only the endless, solitary labor of creation, building a spell that itself carried the power to inflict such pain upon the mind and soul of its caster.

That was why, when he finally realized the depth of what he had entangled himself in, his expression twisted into one of sheer annoyance.

This...This was not some petty inconvenience. This was a monumental, self-inflicted burden. And in that moment, he truly regretted his earlier arrogance, strutting about, declaring that he could handle anything, that there was nothing beyond his grasp.

He was knee-deep in the consequences of his own pride, staring down the kind of task that made him consider, for a heartbeat, rejecting her request entirely.

He had even almost opened his mouth to tell her to choose something else, to rescind his promise before it was too late.

But then, he saw it.

The look in her eyes. That fragile, trembling hope, as though she had gathered every shard of her struggles and placed them, trembling, into his hands.

Trusting him. Believing in him.

And against that kind of trust...he was helpless.

He had never been able to resist a gentle gaze, especially one so filled with faith, so his resolve cracked, his shoulders loosened, and the corners of his mouth tugged into a reluctant, almost self-mocking smile.

Fine...He would do it.

Not because it was easy. Not because he truly wanted to.

But because he had already given his word, and when he promised something, he carried it through to the very end, no matter what it cost him.

And so, just like that, he agreed.

To the outside world, only a handful of seconds ticked by.

But within the vast, silent confines of his mind, 209 years had already passed, years spent meticulously forging a world-destroying spell, one capable of eradicating the heart of every cursed being that dared to cross his path.

When he finally unleashed it, the results were devastating and absolute.

Every cursed creature in the vicinity was reduced to nothing, the air left eerily clean in the wake of his spell, including the behemoth sleeping underneath which could only let out one final cry before being reduced into ashes.

And when it was done, he stood there, a little pale, a faint weariness pulling at the edges of his expression.

This hadn’t been the kind of effort that pushed him to the brink of his true power, that terrifying, untapped well still lay far beyond this.

But the process had been unbearably tedious, the kind of mind-grinding, soul-eroding task that would have driven any ordinary man into madness.

It was the sort of burden that would make lesser men break down sobbing, that could strip away the soul piece by piece until nothing remained.

Yet he had endured it, endured it with a smile, not for glory, not for himself, but for the sake of one girl’s happiness.

And when he saw her expression change, when he saw the pure, unguarded relief and joy on her face as she realized she was safe, something inside him eased.

That sight alone was enough to stitch together the frayed edges of his mind. His fatigue didn’t vanish, but the sharp ache dulled, his color returning little by little.

Without thinking, he reached out and placed a hand on Mina’s head, gently ruffling her hair before pulling her closer into a firm embrace.

She stiffened in surprise for a moment but then melted into the hug, returning it without hesitation as she just knew that he needed it at the moment.

And she was right, he needed it, needed the quiet reassurance that someone was still there, real and warm, after so long in that empty mental wasteland.

As he held her, a wry thought crossed his mind.

Helping others was fine, commendable, even. But next time, before throwing himself headfirst into another grand promise, before proclaiming he could handle anything, he would damn well take a moment to look around and assess the situation.

Because the next time he ended up in this kind of mess, it might just take another century of his life to dig his way out...