Chapter 114: Two-Hour Budget Savior

Chapter 114: Two-Hour Cheap Savior

"Then what should I do?" Not knowing how to refute Carlson's words, I could only shout anxiously, "And what about this world? Should we let that hysterical, insane old maid spread the toxin across the entire Falvey continent? Let all living souls in this world lose their spirits and turn into eternally rotting zombies? Turn the entire world into a decayed wasteland where evil spirits wander?"

"What do you want me to do!" Originally, I just wanted to emphasize the severity of the matter, but as I went on, I was terrified by the desperate future scene I had just described. I screamed at the old troll at the top of my lungs, "Sit here with you in this broken hut—where I don't know how to get in or out—and make witty remarks and banter?"

"I cannot watch this world be destroyed and do nothing! I can't do it!!!" Standing before him, I waved my arms in agitation. My cheeks grew hot and swollen from the surging blood, and dark cyan veins bulged on my forehead.

"Destruction?" Carlson the troll remained unperturbed. He lowered his head and chanted this word that made me feel somewhat panicked, chewing on it playfully in his mouth a few times before lifting his turbid gaze to give me a mocking glance:

"You do not know what true destruction is. Trust me, you are still far from understanding these things..." He sighed softly, looking listless as he said to me, "...You think that the death of all souls is destruction? No, not even close. When souls slumber, there is still flesh and bone; when flesh and bone decay, there is still soil; when soil collapses, there is still running water; when water dries up, stones are exposed; when stones shatter, they turn to dust; when dust drifts, the gale remains; when the gale rolls by, it cannot scatter the radiance; and when radiance dims, floating clouds drift in..."

"Death is not destruction, my friend, not by a long shot. To this world, all life forms are merely indifferent passersby, including myself, including you, and including those decayed beings who seem to have attained eternal life. The universe exists naturally; our life or death, victory or defeat, are merely vague and fleeting little 'phenomena'."

"Toxin cannot destroy this world, Jeff my friend, nor can you save it. What you spoke of is far from true 'destruction'. True destruction is not violence; it requires no fear, causes no worry, and is beyond all remedy. It is a form of absolute obliteration, erasing all traces of existence—no past, no future, neither matter nor spirit. I have already let you witness the origin of this world, and true destruction is to completely erase every single symbol within that origin. Not a single 1, not a single 0, sheer darkness, and utter chaos. That is the true end, an ending without any existence, just like the beginning without any existence in legend. Whether this world is destroyed or not rests entirely within a single thought of the deities, my friend. It lies neither with me, nor even less with you..."

"Enough!" I jumped up impatiently, interrupting his lengthy discourse. I guessed that this green-skinned, tusked old fellow had been lonely for far too long, and having finally caught someone like me who could chat with him, he was rambling on endlessly. "I am not here to listen to these impractical religious lectures. I am here... I am... I didn't even want to come to this ghost place myself! I don't care what 'true' destruction is; I only know that if I don't take action, the hundreds of millions of lives on the Falvey continent will become rotting flesh. If you won't help me, let me out. Even if I exhaust my very last breath, I will never abandon the ultimate hope. Besides, I would rather spend ten thousand years with the Grim Reaper than chat with a philosopher for one more minute!"

"Oh?" Carlson displayed a trace of disappointed helplessness. "I had thought you possessed enough wisdom to ponder slightly upon what I said, which perhaps might have made you a fellow traveler on the path of wisdom. But disappointingly, you are nothing more than a radical, left-wing, violent, anti-war activist..."

The unfamiliar evaluation he gave me left me somewhat dazed. I looked at him suspiciously, unsure what kind of person he had just described me as, yet feeling a bit too embarrassed to ask.

My awkward expression was caught by the old troll. He rolled his eyes at me, revealing severe late-stage cataract symptoms in those already sparsely-pupiled eyes:

"...Simple-minded, physically well-developed, overabundant sense of justice, overestimating one's own capabilities..." He briefly explained the specific meanings represented by these descriptive words used to evaluate me.

Damn it, these words didn't sound like positive evaluations at all.

And what was even more damned was: I actually felt like these descriptions suited me quite well.

"...Since you consider these true wisdoms to be 'impractical'..." Carlson did not stop speaking because of my dejection, "...then I will show you something practical..."

With that, the old troll waved his arm, and a large magical scroll once again emerged in mid-air, capable of reflecting the realistic scenery of the Crag Fortress. Unlike the previous time, this scroll displayed not merely a simple image of a certain corner of the fortress, but was divided into hundreds of small grids, each displaying an independent picture. Within those pictures, there were not only walking corpses and broken walls, but also imperial invading troops hacking brutally with weapons, the clashing and combat of iron and blood, and desperate struggles and slaughter...

What surprised me the most was: there were also the figures of adventurers who were obviously from the Continental Alliance.

The scenery in every picture was different, but the scene in every picture was so familiar that I could not deny this was indeed some corner of the fortress. These brave warriors who had traveled from afar with the mission of liberation and salvation met with varying fates: at the city gate, a human beast master of only level forty-five had just been pounced upon by seven or eight vampires and knocked to the ground; while in the central plaza, an orc berserker of level fifty-two was shouting as he smashed the sixth toxic zombie until it could no longer move. Beside the collapsed city wall, five all-elf adventurers were desperately resisting a formidable enemy, and the monster approaching them step by step was actually... Meryl, the triple-headed tainted monstrosity?! What was going on? Wasn't this man-made mutated beast already destroyed by us?

These resolute and tenacious adventurers were scattered in every corner of the fortress. In some places, they were separated by only a few steps, yet each was striving to complete their own exclusive adventure journey, completely unaware of each other's existence—in fact, in none of the pictures did I find a second team of adventurers.

In one of the pictures near the center of the large scroll, I saw the most incredible scene of all: an adventure party with an average level of around 55—two humans, a tauren, two elves—stood proudly atop the Crag Fortress, upon that damaged high tower. Lying prostrate beneath their feet was actually the corpse of the haughty Lady Dark Baroness Arthur Dengot, and the vial containing the potent toxin was shattered on the ground, seeping into the crevices of the bricks and stones, never to flow into the veins of any innocent life and spread to every corner of the Falvey continent again...

They had actually succeeded!

The Dark Baroness was dead, the toxin was destroyed, the Doomsday Monarch's conspiracy was shattered, and the world was saved.

Yet...

Was all of this real?

This good news came so suddenly and hastily that even seeing it with my own eyes produced a sense of unreality deep within my heart. Perhaps... and merely perhaps... this false feeling stemmed from an unspeakable sense of loss—after all, that source of evil had not died by my hands, and the immense danger had not been lifted by me. My existence was apparently not as important to the survival of this world as I had imagined.

I used to have this feeling: everything happening here met me neither too early nor too late; this was not coincidence, but destiny. My companions and I were the destined heroes, fated to come and resolve the crises of this world. In one perilous battle after another, we would use our weapons and blood to write our own epic of heroes, and our achievements would be widely praised like the heroic ballads of two hundred years ago.

Yet now it seemed that all of this was merely my impractical, proud illusion.

Then why did I and my companions risk our lives to make this journey, and even leave our corpses behind? Why did those warriors who rushed here with the same passion and responsibility do so? None of this started in our hands, nor did it end in our hands; we were merely a group of fragile beings saved by others. Facing such a reality, how could you expect me not to feel a lingering sense of bewilderment amidst the relief?

Just as I was feeling lost in thought, an inadvertent glance made my whole body turn cold. In the lower right corner of the entire scroll, the figure of the Dark Baroness appeared once again in a small frame. This time, she was valiantly swinging a large hammer, engaged in a desperate fight to the death with several opponents before her.

She... was not dead?

And this was just the beginning. Having discovered this incredible sight, I searched the entire scroll more carefully and then found that there were over a dozen Dark Baronesses appearing in it. Their appearances and attire were completely identical, yet their plights were entirely different. Some had beaten their team of opponents to the point of being unable to raise their heads, some faced a perilous and evenly matched battle where it was hard to tell who would achieve final victory, and others were already critically ill and tottering, looking as though they could not hold on much longer.

"It seems you have already discovered..." My startled expression was fully taken in by Carlson the old troll. "...Not only do you have the time to spare to save this fragile world; there are quite a few superheros like you, and furthermore..." He glanced at me mockingly and said derisively, "...It seems their luck is better than yours."

"What... what... what is going on here?" Although I had encountered countless incredible things with Carlson in this short span of time, such a scene still shocked me. "How can there be so many..."

"In fact, there are even more than you see," Carlson said slowly. "Remember when I told you how I gained consciousness? Everything has been repeating and repeating continuously ever since that time. In fact, I am not sure how many times this has happened before I woke up. Everyone wants to come here and slaughter that bad-tempered woman; some succeed, and some fail just like you guys. But look, the ones who succeeded did not stop all of this from continuing to happen, and it seems the unlucky ones who failed didn't let the outside world be destroyed either—if it were going to be destroyed, it would have been destroyed months ago, and you wouldn't have had the chance to stand here."

"Although I don't know what the outside world will actually look like, I think that everything you and your companions, and those people who came here wave after wave, have done here is in vain. You cannot change anything except yourselves. No matter how much hardship and effort you put in here, or how many brave lives you buried, as long as someone still comes here and walks through the gates of the fortress, a brand-new space will open up for them, allowing all of this to repeat. That is a world belonging exclusively to them, having nothing to do with anyone else. Here, everyone can be the unique savior hero in their own inner world... well... a cheap hero for two hours."

"You mean, all of this is an illusion, and everyone here has fallen under an illusion spell?" His words made me even more baffled. "Is this a trap of the Doomsday Empire? Why did they build such a magical space?" Unconsciously, I had started using "they" to refer to those alien invaders. Although the old troll before me belonged to a faction hostile to mine, in my heart, I had completely separated him from "them."

"An illusion?" Carlson smiled slightly. "And what isn't an illusion? Before that infinitely real, infinitely complex, and infinitely tedious origin of the world, what isn't an illusion? Am I not an illusion? How do you know that you yourself are not an illusion? Even as for the original scene of the world, how can you be certain that it is not an even more real illusion? Perhaps only when all those original symbols recede can we see a truly real world..."

To be honest, what he said sounded quite reasonable at first, but upon closer pondering, I found that I hadn't understood a thing at all. Out of respect for a scholar possessing noble wisdom, I felt that benevolently pretending to have a sudden flash of insight and gazing at him with a gaze containing a shred of admiration would be a behavior more in line with normal social etiquette. I tried this against my better judgment, and old Carlson's expression of smiling smugly and nodding repeatedly proved that the effect was quite good.

"Then... what should I do now?" I looked expectantly to this wise old troll for enlightenment.

"As for this... actually I don't know either!" Very well, let me strangle this long-winded old fellow.

Seeing the unfriendly expression on my face, old Carlson hurriedly added, "However, there is one thing I should perhaps remind you of: your companions have run back into the fortress."

The images floating in mid-air immediately transformed from hundreds of small grids into four large grids, showing four dim flames drifting along the roads of the Crag Fortress, with the name of a friend floating above each flame—this must have been the first time I saw with my naked eyes what souls looked like when they existed independently.

"Can you naturally send me to their side?" I asked.

"Of course I can..." Carlson readily agreed, then hesitated for a moment and said, "...However, the terrible thing is that they seem to want to have another go at that Dark Baroness. If you are still going to be with them, I can hardly guarantee that I can save you in time before you die this time. I don't want to watch a friend go off to his death less than ten minutes after meeting him."

"How do you know what they plan to do?"

"Inside this fortress, I can intercept anyone's dialogue, including dead people's—this is not a very complicated skill."

"Could it be that we don't have the slightest possibility of defeating the Dark Baroness?" The old troll's pessimistic tone made my heart sink.

"Should... probably not..." The old troll frowned and pondered for a moment, then shook his head somewhat hesitatingly.

"Really?" I brought my face right up to the tip of his nose, widened my eyes, and stared intently at him. "Doesn't look like it, though."

The old troll was somewhat flustered by my stare. He hurriedly retreated two steps and explained, "Nothing is so absolute. According to statistics from past battles, generally speaking, the average minimum level to defeat the Dark Baroness is fifty-three, and the highest level among the five of you has just reached fifty-three. Assuming your combat time and that woman's remaining vitality as baseline coordinates, and then substituting your levels and combat effectiveness evaluation values... referencing the probability of critical damage effects and attack miss rates... as well as the five hundred and seventy-two variables known to me that might affect your battle results... after a simple random variable distribution model calculation... and then employing a reverse probability deduction method..."

As the old troll muttered under his breath, all sorts of eerie numerical symbols rapidly shifted on the scroll in the air. Following a series of extremely complex changes, it was finally simplified into a simple pattern composed of three strokes: two straight lines intersecting perpendicularly, with a curve separated far away from those two straight lines.

"The final result is like this." Carlson pointed to this picture and told me, "According to your usual combat style, only when this curve intersects with this horizontal line will you have the chance to defeat the Dark Baroness."

"Then when will they intersect?" Viewed from afar, the closest distance between that curve and the horizontal line was a full person's height, making my heart break out in a cold sweat.

"The ideal state is... they can approach infinitely, but they will never intersect." Carlson said jubilantly, "What a philosophical revelation, telling us that although we will never succeed no matter what, we must never give up hope..."

I slumped down onto the ground in dejection, my heart filled with reluctance and doubt. I was unwilling to retreat quietly here and act as a desertor, leaving behind my companions full of resolute hope to face that destined defeat and doom; and more importantly, I inevitably harbored a sliver of doubt toward everything I saw in that magical scroll. If I didn't see the Dark Baroness die completely with my own eyes by her side, my heart would never feel truly settled... After all, this concerned the survival of the entire world, and I still didn't dare to abandon my mission lightly.

Yet, if I were to rush off to throw away my own life while knowing full well there was no chance whatsoever, that was something I would never do. I was willing to risk my life for a one-in-ten-thousand chance, but I would not throw it away out of sheer despair.

Amidst such contradictory hesitation, I suddenly remembered a sentence Carlson had just uttered. This inadvertent remark illuminated my thoughts like a beam of fire, helping me discover a glimmer of vitality amidst the despair.

"Wait..." I said abruptly, "...What you just said was 'according to your usual combat style,' which means, do you happen to know of some other combat styles?"

The smile on Carlson's face vanished entirely in an instant. With a bitter old face and a disgruntled, wide-open mouth, he remained dumbfounded for a long time before finally speaking: "Damn it, did I really say that?"