Editor 136

Amphitheater (1)

“You’re acting like you’re totally in love. Huh? Even a single word feels too precious to say, right?”

“I let it slide last time because I was distracted, but where did you learn such baseless, wild accusations? You’re quite the expert.”

“Baseless? This is the result of careful observation, you know? I’ve suspected for a while, but I think you’re into older women. You might have a shot with Lady Dione since you’re five years apart, but with Archbishop Historia the age gap is way too much, isn’t it?”

“Stop the nonsense and go jog in place or something to sober up. Or fetch some water.”

“Heehee, now you’re sounding like the real Ray. Fine, I’ll go get water!”

“Wait. Where’s the canteen?”

“Uh, I thought I brought it.”

Arthur rummaged through his backpack but couldn’t find the canteen. Cleio, wondering if he was really drunk from just that, stepped closer.

“Want more light if it’s too dark?”

“No, it’s not that—something feels like it’s pulling from behind, my arm won’t move—”

Wooooooong.

The Gate of Mnemosyne resonated.

Ancient numerals floated above the crumbling wall, and a storm of light, overwhelming the dim glow of the barrier stone, engulfed the two of them.

‘What is this…!’

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The endless sensation of falling stopped in cold water.

“Ptui, cough, ack.”

Cleio sputtered for a while, water having gotten into his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. As he flailed his limbs, his knees and hands hit a hard floor.

Determined not to make a fool of himself like last time, Cleio jumped up.

Pulling his feet out of the water, he saw that the place he’d fallen into was a knee-deep stone-cut channel.

‘Ugh, I got water up my nose at this depth? What the hell.’

Soaking wet and sitting on the edge of the canal, Cleio quickly figured out where he was.

He knew this place. He had even been here before.

‘It’s the amphitheater.’

It was the very dungeon where he’d given Arthur the “foregrounding skill” in the previous manuscript.

The mess in his head since meeting the archbishop instantly cleared up.

Right then, “the Word” appeared before Cleio’s eyes. As before, it was in the same format as the message of promise.

[Remembered World: Amphitheater]

[- A fragment of time and space condensed by the broken jewel of the goddess Mnemosyne.

• Please stop the ‘Master Clock’ and halt the repetition of history. If temporal simultaneity is lost, space will be dismantled.

Caution: When the time limit runs out, all elements will reset to their initial state.]

[- Remaining Time / Time Limit

119:59:51 / 120:00:00

*The play will be performed randomly every 6 hours.]

Wooooong—!

Guuuuuuuuuuung!

At that moment, a low but threatening sound vibrated through Cleio’s body. It was a sound layered with dozens of voices, murmuring, accusing.

Turning around, Cleio’s face went pale.

Thousands of transparent spirits were wailing and humming.

Ta-at!

Arthur, who had fallen on the opposite side of the round stage, dashed across half the semicircular stage in a few strides.

With a resolute air, he put himself between the spirits and Cleio.

His level 6 knight’s body, enhanced to the max with ether, shone like a golden statue of an ancestor. The boy was about to unleash his sword aura, as if thousands of spirits were nothing to fear.

Cleio took a moment longer to grasp the situation.

They had rolled out from the canal between the stage and the first row of seats, blocking the spirit audience’s view.

Faintly, Cleio could pick up the meaning of the spirits’ protest: that was exactly it.

‘Wow, major nuisance…’

Why did this always happen every time he came to a theater?

“Arthur, stop and let’s get to the back seats. Quickly.”

“What?”

“Just follow me.”

Cleio dragged Arthur along. The spirits were just noisy but didn’t harm them.

With a face full of question marks, Arthur climbed up the stone steps between the seats with Cleio.

The higher they went, the farther they were from the semicircular stage surrounded by the canal, and the spirits’ protests died down.

By then, Arthur also grasped the situation. He withdrew his ether and took his hand off his sword. He lowered his voice and asked,

“Was that really a protest about blocking the front row’s view? From those ghosts?”

“Yeah, the play’s about to start. Intruders like us should go to the back so there are no complaints.”

‘Jeongjin’ recalled the manuscript he’d pored over for the Academic Excellence Book Support Project application.

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‘…Even if it wasn’t selected for the book award, I remember enough to get a rough idea of the structure.’

Judging by the well-built stone background on stage, it was close to Roman style.

Also, the front row, with its beautifully carved backs and armrests, was reserved for priests and officials.

Since Cleio and Arthur had been loitering there, it was no wonder the other spirits got angry.

Snapping out of his shock at being dragged into a dungeon, Cleio quickly regained his usual composure.

Given that the first monster incident had occurred, it was the right timing for this dungeon to appear in the plot.

‘It’s a little early, but… anyway, the previous manuscript is scrapped now. No point relying on that anymore.’

The two only found empty seats under the columns at the very edge of the theater’s highest tier.

The dungeon’s boundary was the theater’s outer wall, and beyond the back row, the sky split in two. Above the theater, the sky was at sunset, and outside the circular boundary was a void of nothingness.

Within, who knows how long time had repeated? Yet the stone architecture below looked as smooth and polished as if it had been carved yesterday. Not a single weed grew between the paving stones.

This was how the space preserved by the “foregrounding” skill looked before it became a ruin.

“What’s this, Ray? You seem really familiar with this place. Did you ‘predict’ this too?”

“What about you? This is the place of your stigmata, so why are you acting like it’s your first time here?”

“What?”

“You didn’t notice?”

“That was a ruin, and this is all shiny and grand.”

“This is what it originally looked like.”

Far from the stage, but from this height, they could see the whole theater.

On the orchestra stage, spirits in white sang the opening song before the play began. The main stage, between the orchestra and the background structure, was hidden by a low tapestry.

Even with the chorus resonating in multiple scales, the spirits in the audience all stared at the stage, waiting for the curtain to rise.

‘Let’s see, there must be thousands of spirits here.’

For now, they weren’t paying attention to the intruders, but when they tried to destroy the clock, the spirits would resist to keep the play going.

‘If only Isiel had come too.’

But only two people could enter the “Amphitheater” dungeon.

Cleio was bothered by how suddenly the dungeon had opened, as if it had been waiting to drag Arthur and himself in.

‘And the reward for this dungeon has already been given out, so how are they going to handle this? Will it be replaced with another skill?’

No use overthinking.

Once they cleared the dungeon, he’d find out if the author had a plan or if Cleio himself would have to clean up.

“Anyway, just stay still so we don’t attract attention from the spirits. Each one isn’t aggressive, but what we’re about to do could definitely be disrupted.”

“What we’re about to do… oh, finding the clock, right? But what’s the clock in here?”

Cleio pointed to the structure standing between the stage and orchestra.

“See the round pillar with markings on top of that square platform, with angel and bird-shaped decorations?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a water clock.”

“That’s a clock?!”

“Look carefully. The lines on the pillar mark the time. The angel’s arrow tip shows the current time. When the arrow moves six marks ahead and points to midnight, the shield is disabled. Only then can it be destroyed, no matter how much ether you pour in at other times, it won’t break.”

“What if you can’t break it at the right moment?”

“Nothing happens. The time resets to 6 PM when the dungeon first opened, and a new play starts.”

“…Seriously, for the whole 120 hours?”

“Probably.”

The dungeon’s insanely long time limit wasn’t a plus. Even if you smashed the stage, background, and split the seats, everything would be restored every six hours and a new play would begin.

‘In the last manuscript, Isiel and Arthur nearly went crazy. Not because of tough monsters, but because they couldn’t figure out the strategy.’

The two, with no interest in theater, had to watch plays for five whole days without knowing how to escape. It was a maddening dungeon.

‘Let’s hope the old strategy works again.’

As the chorus exited stage right, the curtain came down, and two men in Roman attire stood on stage.

The spirits, semi-transparent so the background could be seen, began performing the play for who knows how many times now.

Even though it was a language Cleio had never heard in his life, he could understand the spirits’ words.

‘Feels like using the extra feature of “Comprehension.” Well, since it’s a technology that exists somewhere in the world, they must have applied it to me too.’

A spirit in the form of a young man delivered lines about his unrequited love for a queen and her lover.

Arthur already looked appalled.

“Ugh. This is the kind of dungeon Lady Dione would love.”

“Agreed.”

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Arthur, who at first grumbled about what kind of play this was, was now completely absorbed.

He claimed to know nothing about opera, having grown up in the countryside where traveling troupes never came, but even this unsophisticated prince was drawn in by the melodrama.

As for Cleio, watching a 17th-century tragedy in a magnificent theater that looked fit for a Sophoclean play made him feel surreal.

No matter how he looked at it, the play the spirits were passionately performing was Racine’s “Bérénice.”

Titus, who became emperor of Rome, was stymied by a law forbidding marriage with a foreigner.

That one law, which not even an emperor could break, prevented him from marrying the foreign queen who had helped build his fame.

Titus had to choose between marrying Bérénice and being exiled from Rome, or choosing Rome and banishing Bérénice.

‘They could at least write an original story… Since I crossed into another world, who cares about copyright, I guess.’

Cleio clicked his tongue at the author for the first time in a while.

‘What counts as world consistency anyway? Don’t the setting and era have to match?’

Such criticism of the author might be a bit out of line.

The manuscript that records the world and can change the recorded world probably wasn’t written in the way Jeongjin knew—in other words, not as a Hangul 97 file in the author’s Namyangju villa study.

Still, one thing was clear.

‘The goals and themes set by the author’ governed the work, and that was the author’s will. In this world, the author was, literally, God.

Wasn’t this a deformed text that didn’t consider the reader’s existence at all?

In other words, it was a world where the author pursued his own silver coin as he pleased.

‘At this point, I can kind of see why Melchior hates the author so much. If your life kept getting reset just for the author’s desired plot…’

While Cleio was lost in thought, the play continued.

Titus ultimately chose the Roman Empire over his lover, ignoring Bérénice’s pleas for his love.

Barely pulling herself away from the urge to die, Bérénice bid farewell to her lover as she left Rome. The two parted forever, never to meet again.

Arthur, who had been engrossed in the play, snorted in frustration.

“Hey, isn’t it so lame for the emperor to dump the queen like that?”

“It’s just a play. Don’t get mad.”

“That emperor’s all talk. He says he can’t live without her, but still asks her to leave? He’s way too small-minded to be an emperor.”

Cleio controlled his expression, glancing once at the distant dark sky and once at the stage.

As Charlie Chaplin said, “Life is a tragedy when seen up close, but a comedy in the long shot.”

It was true of the tragedy of the queen of Palestine and the emperor of Rome, and also true of a teenager sitting in a dungeon theater, watching a melodrama, not knowing what would happen next.

“Really? So you’d give up your throne?”

“No way. Why do you have to choose just one? He could persuade the citizens and the senate. That Titus guy just lacks willpower.”

Arthur couldn’t understand Titus, who had to choose between love and rule. Cleio, finding that arrogant innocence in his belief in the power of will rather amusing, just laughed a little.