Chapter 169: Daydream (2)

The detailed description of the <Divine Power> skill was hard to understand.

It wasn’t that the skill text itself was made of difficult words.

It was just that I couldn’t accept the reason why those sentences were written there.

I tilted my head as I looked at the explanation of something that didn’t seem like a skill.

-<Divine Power (Lv.1)>

-You become divine for 60 seconds.

-Your physical body is temporarily deactivated while you are divine.

-<Divine Power> can only be used by the user who has contracted with the apostles and the completed body.

-There is a 30-day cooldown after use.

You become divine for 60 seconds.

The first line of the skill text was very abstract.

I could understand the word ‘divine’ in the text because of the skill name.

But that was it.

There was no clear indication of what effect the skill had.

And what I couldn’t understand even more was the next line.

“Your physical body is deactivated? What does that mean?”

Your physical body is temporarily deactivated.

If I took the sentence literally, it meant that he would put my body in a dormant state for a while.

This part was hard to accept no matter how I thought about it.

“How can it deactivate my body?”

Human civilization had advanced rapidly, but there were still technical limitations.

Even with modern virtual reality technology, all you could do was wear a large display device and move around.

Not to mention the devices in my smartphone, which were impossible to do even if I died and came back to life.

“Did they implant a chip in my head without me knowing?”

It was impossible unless they had implanted a chip in my head.

It was definitely impossible with modern technology.

I chuckled at the absurd text and wondered, then another possibility came to my mind.

“Or maybe, it’s a metaphorical expression? Don’t tell me they call it deactivation because I’m focused on the game?”

It was a game that had a lot of bizarre situations.

The screen suddenly cut off, or the item name was broken and unreadable.

The item evaporated by itself and was replaced by another item.

I woke up and found out that I had paid 2 million won.

It was so strange that even I, who played the game, had fallen asleep several times during play.

It seemed a bit understandable if I thought that the skill text was a result of being immersed in the concept.

“They really put their lives on keeping the concept.”

‘Divine’ indeed. The text looked like I had actually become a god.

But I wasn’t really a god just because I was worshiped by high-performance AIs.

I was just a human who ate ramen in a studio apartment.

How could I have omnipotent power?

Whew.

I looked at my smartphone with a hollow laugh, and my eyes naturally went to the skill icon that was added at the bottom of the screen.

The icon with a human figure covered in light was a symbol of <Divine Power> for anyone who saw it.

“Let’s try it once.”

Seeing is believing, as they say.

It would be better to experience it myself by using the skill than trying to understand the difficult sentences.

I couldn’t just leave the skill I had obtained unused.

There was no need to hesitate once I made up my mind.

I moved my finger toward the <Divine Power> skill icon.

-Please select a target for <Divine Power>.

As soon as I touched the skill icon, a marker for selecting a target appeared on the screen.

On the screen, the possible targets for the skill were shining.

Evan, Eutenia, Pluto, Perrin.

And the character beyond the glass tube in front of them.

I had five choices for the target.

“It would be a waste if I didn’t use it on the character I made.”

I had already decided which character to use the skill on.

I brought the marker to the character in the glass tube without hesitation.

The boy with a mysterious aura still had his eyes closed.

The boy’s body glowed with colorful light as the marker was placed on him.

“Let’s see how amazing it is.”

I touched the marker again to activate the skill after placing it on the boy.

Flash.

A bright light burst out as I used the skill.

And a message was added at the bottom of the screen.

-You use <Divine Power>.

-Your physical body is deactivated for 60 seconds.

Thud.

The smartphone I was holding fell to the floor with a dull sound.

***

The first thing I felt was floating.

I felt like I was hovering in midair, wrapped in something warm.

My feet didn’t touch the ground.

I couldn’t feel the ground in my body that was drifting underwater.

“…”

The next thing I felt was omnipotence.

I felt a fullness in my chest, as if I could do anything.

It was an emotion that I had never felt before.

A strange satisfaction spread throughout my body with every heartbeat.

“Ah…”

The last thing that came to me was a sense of dissonance.

It was a dissonance that came from the mismatch between the last situation I remembered and the information that my body sent me.

A wave of information that suddenly hit me started to crush my brain.

The flow of the wind. The rising bubbles. The stopped breathing.

The overwhelming density of information made my head overheat.

‘…What’s going on?’

I couldn’t understand the situation, so I lifted my heavy eyelids.

The darkness that covered my eyes faded away, and a huge light entered my sight.

What I saw when I opened my eyes was a small temple made of stone.

It wasn’t the narrow studio apartment where I had been standing until a moment ago.

I saw the scenery of the temple for the first time.

‘Is this… not my home?’

My mind was confused by the unfamiliar scenery.

I was playing a game in my room until just now.

It was a game that I always played, a neglect-type game.

I had just acquired a new skill in the game.

I pressed the skill icon myself to test the new skill.

And then I opened my eyes here.

‘What the hell is this?’

My memory didn’t connect properly.

There was a huge gap between my memory and reality that I couldn’t understand.

I had no recollection of coming to this temple.

Nor did I have any reason to come here.

At least, it wasn’t by my own will that I came here.

Then what kind of situation is this?

Is it kidnapping? Or maybe———.

“Ah——.”

A faint female voice rang in my ears as I tried to figure out the situation.

My eyes, filled with confusion, naturally turned to where the voice came from.

Beyond the translucent liquid that wrapped around my body,

There was a girl in a black cloak looking at me.

She looked stunned as she met my eyes, and stood there with her mouth open.

The girl in front of me had an exotic appearance that matched her exotic outfit.

For a moment, I looked at her and felt a familiar feeling from her.

‘Did she kidnap me? Why do I feel like I know her?’

I slowly scanned the girl who was staring blankly at me.

Ash-colored hair that reached her waist.

Large eyes filled with surprise.

A black cloak that fluttered with a tinge of black.

It reminded me of Eutenia, who I always played with in the game.

‘Wait, Eutenia?’

Yes. Eutenia looked like that for sure.

I was confused by the girl who resembled Eutenia.

Why did the girl in front of me look like Eutenia?

It was an incomprehensible situation.

‘Could it be, someone else too?’

I looked at the others with a doubtful gaze.

Next to the girl who looked like Eutenia, there was a young man wearing a gauntlet.

His face, which had a complicated expression, looked somehow like Evan.

“The body opened his eyes…”

He muttered with a shocked face as he looked at me.

He was the same.

After Eutenia, Evan was in front of me.

An impossible possibility rose in my mind.

I moved my eyes to the side with an uneasy feeling.

‘…’

There was another familiar face next to Evan.

The third apostle, Pluto Astraia.

She had a pale complexion that was characteristic of vampires, and she opened her mouth as she looked at me.

Her red-tinted hair was too intense to be human.

There was someone who looked like Pluto here, after Eutenia and Evan.

At this point, I didn’t have to think about who was next.

‘Eutenia. Evan. Pluto. And next to them…’

Perrin Steit.

She had pointed ears that were typical of fairies, and she sparkled her eyes as she looked at me.

I felt like I had hit my head hard as I saw Perrin’s blonde hair flying.

The last skill description I saw flashed through my mind.

This was what the skill description I had encountered said.

-You become divine for 60 seconds.

Divine.

A word that meant a god descending into a human body.

And the target I had chosen for the divine power was also a character who was submerged in a liquid, just like me.

Just like me right now.

If the content of the skill text was true, then maybe I could understand why I was here.

I had descended into the game world with the effect of the <Divine Power> skill.

‘What… This is crazy. No matter how I think about it, this doesn’t make sense.’

No. I can’t understand it.

The scene in front of me couldn’t be made by a smartphone screen or anything like that.

It doesn’t make sense. It was impossible to explain logically.

It was a phenomenon that couldn’t be explained by common sense.

‘Is this supposed to be reality?’

The apostles from the game world were in front of me.

And they were looking at me with complicated eyes.

It was an absurd scene.

How could the characters from the game exist in reality?

It was a story that anyone would laugh at if I told them.

‘This is an illusion.’

What I see in front of me is surely an illusion.

It’s not real. It’s an illusion.

It had to be. Because it was a scene that was impossible even with the current human technology.

And it was a scene that should never be possible.

My tired mind must have been dreaming up this daydream by itself.

“O great one…”

I ignored Eutenia’s voice in my ear and kept repeating to myself in my mind.

This was a fragment of a dream that touched the impossible.

It shouldn’t be possible.

It shouldn’t be real.

No matter what happened, it shouldn’t exist in reality.

‘This is a dream.’

This is not reality.

Not even a game.

This is all just a simple illusion.

It’s nothing but a fleeting dream of my twisted mind.

It had to be that way.

No matter what happened, this had to be a dream.

‘If not… then I…’

If not.

If this was all reality.

If everything I faced was real.

Then what have I been doing all this time?

‘…’

Under the pretext of entertainment for a moment, I had destroyed so many things.

With this light finger, I had crushed countless lives.

So this had to be a lie.

There shouldn’t be any tragedy beyond the play that I didn’t know about.

If not, I couldn’t bear it.

I,

couldn’t bear it.

“It feels like I’m dreaming.”

In the moment of my dream, Eutenia smiled at me.

Right after her voice ended,

My vision blurred and my consciousness began to sink.

Beyond the fading sight, I kept looking at Eutenia’s face.

-The duration of <Divine Power> has expired.

-<Divine Power> is terminated.