The Fake Hero Is Too Strong

Chapter 230

Everyone tilted their heads.

Mide explained calmly.

“Our enemy is that strange existence whose limits we can’t even grasp.”

“That’s true, but.”

“With the amount of power it has, why did it act so passively? Instead of bothering with petty things like memory manipulation and mental contamination, it could have just stepped forward and handled everything itself.”

“…….”

“To put it extremely, it could have just taken control of the 80 billion units of negative energy from 230,000 years ago and wiped out humanity all at once.”

Now that he mentioned it, it made sense.

Curiosity flickered in everyone’s eyes.

Mide continued, almost like a declaration. “It isn’t omnipotent. It must have its own regulations and restrictions.”

“I will agree with that much, but even so, it’s useless if we don’t know what those restrictions actually are.”

“Right. But there’s exactly one… just one restriction that I think I have figured out.”

Their eyes widened.

“When did we come up with the idea of the hero system and start building it? How long after the regression?”

“Mm. Roughly ten thousand years after, wasn’t it?”

“Exactly. Why do you think it took ten thousand years?”

“……?”

“Listen. That thing could have introduced itself right after we regressed 230,000 years ago. It could have told us why we were regressed, and even asked us to create something like the hero system.”

“……!”

“Back then our memories had already been tampered with, so we would have believed it without suspicion. Then why didn’t it do that?”

Mide explained the answer.

It wasn’t that it wanted to hold back.

It had no choice.

Meaning…

“When time is rewound, it temporarily loses the authority to interfere. That’s one of the restrictions I mentioned.”

“Ah.”

“Otherwise it would have had no reason to wait ten thousand years. If it wanted, it could have contaminated our minds immediately.”

“…….”

“In short.”

Mide continued calmly.

“Let’s rewind time ourselves. Let’s stop it from interfering.”

“No, wait. Is that even possible?”

“I’m not saying to rewind 230,000 years like it did. We obviously don’t have enough negative energy left in the lab for that.”

“Even so….”

“Two hundred years. No, one hundred years is fine. If we rewind even a little, it will miss its chance to interfere.”

“…….”

“And when it loses its interfering authority, send Bion’s soul to me. If it doesn’t interfere, the connection with Bion should be restorable.”

Mide didn’t think the interference would be blocked nearly as long as it was when 230,000 years were rewound.

The shorter the rewind, the shorter their window without interference would be.

So the longer they could rewind, the better.

“Let’s research as fast as we can. Before Neril reaches the end of her life in the world.”

“Uh, okay, we will try. I don’t know how much progress we can make but.”

“Don’t work with the lab’s sense of time. Remember how fast our days felt when we were normal humans.”

“…….”

“Live each day as fiercely as we used to. Then we will find a way.”

Everyone nodded with grim resolve.

After that, they gave up eating and devoted themselves entirely to research.

And roughly two hundred years later…

What Mide expected happened.

Kaeld was born.

“Unbelievable. It actually happened. That damn thing is persistent.”

“What a crafty trick. I didn’t think it would contact Adin.”

Around this time, Adin had been growing anxious.

Receiving the gift called the Eye of Omniscience had been nice, but he hadn’t been able to use it at all.

And contrary to his expectations, the people of the world knew nothing about the fight between Idria and Bion (Trail)… which meant he gained no faith from them.

He finally realized he had been ‘tricked,’ so he desperately wanted to get rid of Bion and reclaim the Eye of Omniscience.

And sensing that desperation, that existence began interfering with Adin.

Just like it had once contaminated the researchers’ minds into believing the hero system was absolute truth.

At some point, Adin began to believe he was the one who created Kaeld as an assassin to kill Bion.

“We did use Adin once as a channel to pass the Eye of Omniscience to Bion before. It must have taken inspiration from that.”

“It actually improved on it. Since Bion entered Kaeld’s body. At this rate, Kaeld will push out Bion’s soul in a few years.”

“And Adin thinks he is the one who did it. What a disaster.”

Everyone let out deep sighs.

Aside from using Adin, everything had gone as expected, so this wasn’t the real problem.

The bad news came elsewhere.

Two pieces of bad news, in fact.

“The period we can rewind is shorter than we expected.”

After endless research, they finally did figure out how to rewind time.

They had succeeded by developing the technology used for stopping time when using the Eye of Omniscience.

But with the meager energy remaining in the lab, the maximum they could rewind was only a few days.

“Rewinding just a few days won’t help us.”

“No. That calculation is based on the negative energy we have left. If all of you revert your bodies into energy, we can extend the rewind period.”

“How long?”

“About seven years.”

Everyone swallowed hard.

Mide murmured softly.

“Seven years…”

“Too short, isn’t it?”

“What else can we do. That’s the limit.”

“Whew.”

Mide hid his regret and continued.

“And another thing. We won’t be able to send both the Eye of Omniscience and the blood script down.”

The Eye of Omniscience and the blood script can both be bestowed once a certain level of fame is met.

But that is only the eligibility.

Actually bestowing either requires using up negative energy.

And they had far too little left.

Bion let out another long sigh.

“Yes. But if we rewind only three years instead of seven, we can bestow both.”

“…No. Let’s rewind the full seven years. Just give me the blood script.”

“Are you sure?”

“As I said earlier, just attach Bion to me at the moment we rewind. The friend who went down first, not you.”

“I know.”

“I plan to borrow the Eye of Omniscience through that friend. We never gave him the blood script, right?”

If the blood script were passed along with the Eye through Adin, that greedy bastard might try to keep one of them for himself, so they had avoided it.

“This works better. I get the blood script, and he gets the Eye of Omniscience. We can share what we need.”

“You are quite frugal.”

As if it had just occurred to her, Bion asked:

“Come to think of it, what should we set as the standard for the blood script?”

“What’s the standard right now?”

“After the Demon King of Corruption appeared, we set ‘corrupting a human’ as the sin. That way it would help Leon as much as possible.”

“Then widen the range. We need to channel all negative energies into Idria now For that, it’s better to be able to see every kind of sin.”

Bion silently nodded.

The short duration of the regression. The fact that he couldn’t immediately use the Eye of Omniscience.

It seemed they had somehow managed to set a rough direction to handle those two problems.

Then Adwin spoke up.

“But if the only goal is to turn back time, is there any need to approach Kaeld on the premise of failing once? You could just descend to the world and rewind time right away.”

“Hmm……”

Mide scratched his head with a somewhat awkward expression.

“If I do that, I probably won’t be able to beat Kaeld.”

“What? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“When I descend, I will lose my memories and have to start over. That means the events from 230,000 years ago will repeat.”

“……!”

“To be honest, even if I had received the Eye of Omniscience right from the start, I don’t think I would have followed it diligently. That’s why I said a failure was necessary. Let alone without the Eye of Omniscience.”

Everyone looked like they still didn’t understand.

Mide’s face reddened slightly.

“Back then, 230,000 years ago, I didn’t understand the importance of ‘fame.’ Well, the system didn’t exist then, but…… anyway, I didn’t know how important it was to be loved by people. That’s why I lost.”

Ahem.

He cleared his throat once.

“If I go down there and lose my memories, the same tendencies will kick in. I know myself well.”

“…….”

“No matter what I do, I won’t try to take credit. I will pass it on to someone else or hide it. That’s exactly how I was 230,000 years ago.”

“Hmhm. Now that you mention it, that’s true.”

“I need awareness. I need to realize what I lack compared to Kaeld.”

What he lacked.

Obviously, it was fame.

That was why he failed 230,000 years ago.

Back then he didn’t even have the thought that winning people’s hearts and being loved mattered.

If he started again with no memories, history would repeat. He could feel it.

So Mide needed to confirm it.

He needed to see with his own eyes exactly what kind of disaster would happen if he neglected being acknowledged and loved by everyone.

“Well, aside from that, I also want to understand Kaeld’s tendencies and abilities as much as possible. There’s no guarantee he is identical to the Kaeld from 230,000 years ago.”

“That’s true.”

“What I’m worried about is whether we can return while preserving the memories we have learned about him. I’m fairly confident it’s possible based on our research so far, but still.”

He looked at Bion.

“Please. This is the most important part.”

“Yes. Leave it to me. No matter what, I will preserve everyone’s memories. If it really becomes impossible, then at least yours.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

As Mide answered, he noticed Bion wearing a lonely expression.

He patted her shoulder.

“Sorry. For making you stay behind alone.”

“No. This is my karma too.”

“You are still saying that?”

“…….”

“Don’t make that about-to-cry face. Take good care of me once I become a hero.”

She nodded and spoke in a suddenly new tone.

“By the way, that means you are the one who will become the hero after all, Mide. Not the others.”

Everyone shrugged.

“It’s obviously Mide.”

“Honestly, like I said before, if the hero system had existed 230,000 years ago, Mide would have become the hero. He would have stomped Kaeld.”

“Come to think of it, what would Mide’s fame have been back then if measured by the hero system?”

“He was the hero of 80 billion humans…… so maybe in the trillions?”

“No way. Mide and our lab were acknowledged by only a very tiny fraction of people. Everyone else was too busy praising Kaeld.”

“That’s true. Then maybe around a million?”

“Hey, that’s too stingy.”

They continued a completely useless debate.

Because now they would descend to the world.

And they would have to fail once.

And then they would have to rewind time by seven years.

After regressing, they would have to use the brief moment when that existence’s interference disappeared to destroy the hero system.

They were trying to overcome that immense pressure with trivial chatter.

Bion let out a small laugh and said:

“A long time ago, I once calculated it just for fun, and it was probably around 20 million.”

“Alright. Let’s go with that.”

“Huh?”

“If I build up over 20 million fame, tell me everything about our 230,000 years of history. I won’t remember anything then.”

Bion shook her head as if it were absurd.

“That violates the cornerstone rule……”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. We are the people trying to abolish the hero system itself. We don’t need to be bound by the world’s restrictions.”

“Ah! Sorry. I’m so used to it I forgot.”

Then she suddenly had a question.

“Then why even set the standard at 20 million? According to the plan, once I guide you into using the Eye of Omniscience, I could tell you everything right away, couldn’t I?”

“…….”

“Isn’t that what we must do? After you lose your memory, who knows if you will even want to destroy the hero system?”

“If it’s me, I absolutely will. Don’t worry about that. And as for why set the standard at 20 million…….”

He scratched his head.

“It just feels wrong to learn the secrets of the world without at least that much representation.”

“You are the owner of this world, though?”

“I’m the former owner. Once we pull this off, there won’t be any ‘owner’ of the world. It will be a world without gods, demon kings, or heroes.”

In a gentle voice, he continued:

“Only people will remain.”

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