The carriage dashed fast and arrived at the Duke Blueport mansion.
As soon as Dalia got off the carriage, she noticed something was wrong. It was the mansion she had seen a few days ago, but something seemed to have changed in the meantime.
Somehow the interior seems more empty?
Some of the ornaments that stood out when she visited before were gone, and the windows in some places were temporarily blocked with wooden boards.
In addition, Lewayne’s face, who had come to greet Dalia despite the sudden visit, was not normal. He had a bandage wrapped around his forehead.Dalia asked in bewilderment.
“What’s going on here?”
Lewayne answered with a calm expression.
“I’m sorry, Miss Dalia. I tried, but I don’t think I got along well with His Highness the Second Prince.”
“…….”
“I tried really hard but…….”
Dalia looked at him in bewilderment. She remembered the strange look in Cedric’s eyes before he left.Even so, isn’t this a little too much……?
“Did Sir Cedric do this?”
Lewayne nodded heavily.
“I’m alright. I endured it thinking of Miss Dalia.”
However, Dalia, who knows his personality in the original work, knew that he was not the kind of person who would be silently beaten by others.
‘No matter how much time passes, such fundamentals cannot have changed.’
Dalia looked at him suspiciously. Lewayne did not make eye contact with Dalia, but instead only looked at the ground.
“Anyway, please come in!”
He rushed Dalia inside.
Indeed, Lewayne had already made all the preparations, like he already knew that Dalia would come.
No, he had prepared too much.
As soon as Dalia went to the drawing room, she was surprised to see piles of bread and snacks stacked on the table tray, next to all kinds of exotic fruits.
“Wh, what is all this?”
“Because you like sweet things. It’s not a big deal.”
As if yesterday’s tears were a lie, he had a calm expression and a very imposing tone that matched him. Even with a bandage on his forehead, she naturally thought that his handsome face and moist blue eyes were still pretty…….
It was absurd.
Of course, it looked delicious enough to turn her eyes away at other times. However, in this situation, she did not have a leisure personality enough to want to eat sweets.
“That’s, that’s all right. That’s not the point right now.”
“Are you sure? Not even one?”
Dalia nodded. Then Lewayne’s broad shoulders drooped like a dog in the rain.
“……Then I’ll have to tell them to clean it up.”
Dalia felt guilty for nothing. Even though there’s no reason for that!
“Th, then I’ll eat a little.”
“Please do.”
In an instant, the air around Lewayne brightened. It seemed like something similar to musical notes was floating around.
……She thought that he was someone easy to understand.
While Dalia glanced at the missing statue and ate the tropical fruit with a high sugar content resembling green grapes with a fork, Lewayne began to talk.
“Miss Dalia came today, as expected, it’s because you wanted to hear more about both of us.”
Dalia nodded.
“I am, as you might have guessed, a regressor, Miss Dalia Pesteros.”
“…….”
The atmosphere subsided in an instant.
Lewayne continued to speak softly.
“I received the ability to turn back time from a distant predecessor. However, it wasn’t always available.”
He emphasized.
“Only after death did I have the choice. Will I go back or be satisfied with this life?”
Dalia focused on his story.
“In my first life, I had Adrisha Beniter, no, Yustia, but I couldn’t save her soul. Only then did I realize. That this wasn’t the end that I wanted. No one should be unhappy for Yustia to find true happiness.
So at the end of the original <The Labyrinth of Ouroboros> that you saw, I died promising my next life. For an ending where she can be completely happy.”
“…….”
“But in the next life, and the next, the fourth, fifth, tenth, and 20th lives……. I failed. Sometimes I was defeated by Meldon, sometimes by Hikan, sometimes by Aceras, and sometimes I couldn’t defeat myself.”
It was an unimaginably long and tiring life that Dalia could not even imagine. However, Lewayne’s expression when he talked about it was just calm. As if telling an old story.
‘Ouroboros’ is a circular shape created by a snake biting its own tail and swallowing it.
It means the beginning is the end.
A life that never ends, or love, that keeps going back to the beginning and repeating itself.
Dalia realized that the title <The Labyrinth of Ouroboros> itself symbolized Lewayne.
“What do you think was the reason why I kept failing?”
“……Is it because of the potion that Aceras discovered that makes the transcendents run wild?”
Dalia carefully suggested a hypothesis. But Lewayne was unfazed.
“It is true that he is responsible for all of this. As you would expect, it was all because of his scheme that the other transcendents went crazy on every route.”
“…….”
“His power, which had killed my mother dozens of times, is one of the reasons. However, it’s not the fundamental cause.”
Dalia bit her lips.
Lewayne waited a moment before continuing.
“The essential cause of this situation lies in me.”
“……Mr. Lewayne has it?”
It was something incomprehensible beyond common sense. But he nodded.
“My abilities are limited. The more I repeat my life, the more inertial it becomes.”
“……What does that mean?”
“Let me give you an example. On my first regression, on my seventh birthday, I received a calligraphy book as a birthday present. On the next regression, I received a history book. What I got for my birthday that day depends on how my mother feels at the time. However, since the fifth regression, my seventh birthday present has been fixed as the calligraphy textbook.”
“…….”
“In the past, events that were changed for no reason, simply because of coincidence, will not change unless there is an opportunity. The same goes for people.
An opportunity cannot be a mere opportunity. It’s a huge event that could alter the nature of the inner essence. Otherwise, everyone acts the way they act, and thinks the way they think. They are not even aware that they are repeating their previous actions. Even if you feel it, you will soon forget about it.”
Dalia recalled several moments that made her feel that this world was in a game.
People who behave in the same way unconditionally.
Meldon and Adrisha must reunite.
Aceras always says the same things around the same time and always goes to the Holy Empire and becomes the Pope.
Lewayne always appears in the capital four years later.
Cedric always dies.
“Why does Aceras keep plotting? Why would he want to destroy the Frederic Empire even now, when there is no reason left? Have you ever thought about why?”
“…….”
“It’s because of the repetition. The driving force behind him is inertia, not hatred. An inertia he is not even aware of.”
Lewayne closed his eyes.
Then a sacred atmosphere was created as if he was praying. Now he looked like a pilgrim walking on an endless path.
“This is my sin. It is my ability itself that has repeatedly led everyone to catastrophe.”
Dalia bit her lips.
She knew the reason why she kept bothered about Aceras.
It was because there was a part of his behavior that could not be found. To the point of being excessively unnatural.
“At some point, even when I knew the future, I couldn’t control them. Even if Aceras prevents the other transcendents from rampaging, they obsess over Adrisha in a fixed order and start a war.
Eventually, I realized. We need someone from ‘another world’, someone who can bring about a change in this fixed world. That is you.”
“…….”
“I studied magic. The magic of moving souls between worlds. If I fail in this life, then in the next life. If I fail in the next life, then in the next life. The countless repetitions of life have worn out my soul. My love for Yustia has also burned, and even when I see her now, all I have left is pity.
But in the end, I succeeded. I approached your world, understood your world, and presented it to your world in the form of <The Labyrinth of Ouroboros>. The routes that you saw in <Labyrinth> were carefully selected from the countless rounds that I have experienced. I don’t know if it was fun.”
Lewayne gave an empty smile.
Dalia couldn’t help but smile.
“Your soul was the most similar from your world to this world. That’s why you deeply sympathize with <The Labyrinth of Ouroboros> and loved this world the most. That’s why I chose you. When your soul was released from the bondage of the world upon death, I forcibly dragged your soul into this world. Thanks to this, you have become a variable in this world that did not exist before.”
“…….”
“Though of course, I didn’t know that you would be the younger sister of the final villain out of all people.”
Lewayne smiled faintly.
Translator Note: Wow he keeps on regressing for more than 20 times…That must be so devastating, bcs you know what will happen but you can’t do anything to change it…
++I don’t know why, but I keep on imagining Lewayne as a cute big bear, like Pell from ‘Another Typical Fantasy Romance’ hahaha…when he cried, when his shoulders drooped when Dalia refused to eat the snacks, and when he was sooo happy once Dalia said that she will eat some hahaha
