TDGHR 81

Chapter 81

Oppa, You Have No Idea How Worried I Was…

“Looking at the time… it hasn’t even been quite an hour since you entered the gate, Hunter.”

“An hour?”

“Yes. To be exact, it’s been about fifty-five minutes.”

Several days had passed in there, yet only an hour had gone by on Earth?

A quiet sigh of relief escaped me at the thought. If a month or more had passed like I had feared, not only my family but Sia as well—and even Rokan, who would have had to watch Sia fall apart—might have ended up completely devastated.

At least this was one small blessing in the middle of everything that had gone wrong.

“Mr. Minjun, did time inside the gate… flow very differently from time on Earth?”

Perhaps because the woman was affiliated with the Hunter Association, she seemed to have picked up on the intent behind my question.

“Yes. It’s difficult to explain everything in detail here…”

I turned my head and swept my gaze across all the people staring in my direction. A drink of water had helped me recover a little, but answering every question from that enormous crowd on the spot would have been both impractical and incredibly troublesome.

I could understand answering the Hunter Association officials, but there was no particular reason I had to answer everyone else.

‘What excuse can I use to get out of here?’

Just as I was about to spend a moment thinking it over, a voice suddenly echoed inside my head through telepathy.

[Minjun, are you all right?]

The voice belonged to Rokan, but even though I could hear his message, I had no idea how to respond. I simply looked around in every direction, trying to find him.

Another telepathic message came from Rokan almost immediately afterward.

[I have concealed myself, so you probably won’t be able to find me. If you can hear me but don’t know how to answer, blink twice.]

I blinked twice, exactly as Rokan instructed.

[Understood. Give them some plausible excuse, then go somewhere without people and wait. I will come to you.]

That was more or less what I had been thinking too, so I decided to follow Rokan’s advice and leave with a suitable excuse.

“I’m sorry, but something urgent has come up and I need to go. I’ll leave my contact information with the Hunter Association representative, so we can speak separately later.”

I tried to excuse myself and leave, but even then, several people refused to give up and continued throwing questions at me.

“Hunter! Please, just tell us one thing!”

“What in the world was inside that gate?”

I had already said I would explain everything later, so I had no obligation to answer them now. Still, walking away without saying anything at all felt discourteous, so I decided to give them one thing.

“Then I’ll tell you this much. Whatever you’re imagining, it was probably beyond that.”

I still could not tell what I was allowed to reveal and what I needed to keep quiet, so I gave them a deliberately vague answer that would at least give them something to speculate about among themselves.

Even after that, people kept raising their hands and trying to ask more questions, but I repeated that I would answer later and finally left Yongduam behind.

✦ ✦ ✦

Once I had escaped the enormous crowd, I looked around for somewhere empty where I could meet Rokan. Unfortunately, perhaps because of the commotion caused by the Yongduam Gate, the entire area was swarming with people.

I wondered whether I would have to walk quite a bit farther before finding somewhere deserted, when I suddenly remembered the Stealth skill that had been unlocked just before I returned to Earth.

Maybe using it would make reaching an isolated place much easier. I also wanted to test my newly acquired skill, so I activated Stealth immediately.

At first, I did not feel any particular sensation that told me the skill had activated, but when I looked down at my hands, they had turned transparent. I took a few steps in case only my body had disappeared, and even my footsteps made no sound.

The Stealth skill had worked perfectly, and when I glanced around after activating it, a man and a woman across the street were staring around in shock. A person had vanished without warning right in front of them, so their reaction was understandable.

In any case, I used Stealth to slip into a secluded alley with no one around, then released the skill. Only a few seconds after I became visible again, Rokan appeared before me.

“Sir Rokan!”

From my perspective, it had been several days since I had last seen him, so my voice rose without me even realizing it.

“There is much to discuss, but let us go first.”

Before we could even exchange a proper greeting, Rokan teleported me straight to his lair. I brought over a chair and sat down, and the moment I did, Rokan asked me a blunt question without giving me so much as a second to settle in.

“How did you do it?”

“Pardon?”

I had no idea what he meant, but Rokan’s expression was extraordinarily serious.

“I am asking how you concealed your presence so completely.”

I had expected his first question to be about what had happened while I was gone, yet Rokan asked something I had never anticipated. I had used Stealth, but I still assumed a dragon like Rokan would be able to track me even while the skill was active.

Apparently, that assumption had been wrong.

“I was following your presence, and then at some point it vanished completely.”

“You… couldn’t find me?”

“That is correct. Realistically, at your current level, hiding from me or escaping me in that manner should be impossible. So how did you…”

Rokan stopped mid-sentence as though something had just occurred to him. Then he stared directly into my eyes and asked the question that had clearly been weighing on him.

“What exactly happened inside that place?”

“It’s a long story, and it might be hard to believe. But before that, Sir Rokan…”

Everything had been moving so chaotically that I had nearly forgotten something important.

“Could we call Sia too and tell her together?”

“Of course. I was about to contact Shasha anyway.”

Rokan immediately called Sia, and the instant the connection went through, her face appeared looking as though she might burst into tears at any second.

[Oppaaaa!]

Looking closely, I could see clear tear tracks across Sia’s face. She must have started sobbing the moment she heard that I had been sucked into a gate.

[What happened to you?! You said you were just going out to get some air! So why did you suddenly end up inside a gate…?!]

Her previous tears had not even dried, yet her eyes were already filling again. Seeing that made my own eyes sting, and I could feel them beginning to redden as well.

“Sorry. I made you worry a lot, didn’t I? What happened was…”

After clearing my throat with a small cough, I carefully explained to the two of them how I had been sucked into the gate and everything I had experienced inside it—in other words, everything that had happened in Elysium.

Once my long explanation came to an end, Sia finally released the emotions she had been holding back and burst into tears again.

[Still… I’m so glad, Oppa. You came back alive. That’s enough for me. When Grandpa told me it seemed like you had suddenly disappeared, you have no idea how terrified I was…]

Rokan, on the other hand, said nothing. He had his eyes tightly closed and seemed deeply immersed in thought.

[But still, it’s amazing that the place Oppa went to was Pangaea.]

“Right? When I first heard I had landed in Pangaea, I couldn’t believe it either. What are the odds of something like that happening?”

Sia had only been crying moments earlier, but as we talked, she gradually recovered her usual energy. Rokan, however, remained silent, his face still grave as he continued thinking.

[Grandpa, is there… some kind of problem?]

Sia seemed to sense that something was wrong too, because she asked Rokan cautiously. Rokan merely waved a hand in dismissal.

“It is nothing. I simply have something I need to think about for a moment.”

Despite what he said, the serious look on his face did not change. His claim that nothing was wrong clearly did not match his continued silence, and that only made Sia and me more anxious.

While Rokan remained lost in thought, Sia and I silently exchanged glances. Neither of us said anything, but I could tell she was thinking the same thing I was.

If he said nothing was wrong, then sitting there in silence like this only made the tension worse for both of us.

❦

At last, Rokan broke the long silence and spoke with a more solemn expression than I had ever seen on him before.

“Minjun. You said you encountered a man believed to be Bellium, and afterward an EX-rank skill was released from its seal, correct?”

“Yes.”

Judging by his reaction, Rokan clearly knew something about Bellium.

“Do you remember what year it was there? Did anyone mention an Imperial Calendar year or a Continental Calendar year?”

“That… I don’t know.”

Thinking back on it, I should have investigated that too in preparation for the future. I had been so focused on returning to Earth that the thought had never crossed my mind, and I had not even made any plans for what I would do after getting home.

“All I heard was that it seemed tens of thousands of years had passed since Bellium died.”

Unfortunately, that was the full extent of what I knew. Rokan looked as though countless thoughts were running through his mind.

“…For now, I understand.”

I had seen Rokan sink into deep thought from time to time, but never this intensely. Could there have been some other secret hidden among the things I experienced in Elysium that I still knew nothing about?

It felt a little awkward to ask while he was thinking so seriously, but it was still better than letting this brittle, frozen atmosphere continue.

“Sir Rokan, do you happen to know what kind of person Bellium was?”

I asked him as cautiously as I could.

“What you heard there is everything I know. He gathered people who had been exiled from their homelands and built a city, and he did not get along well with the other dragons. That is all.”

Rokan firmly shook his head, but I could not quite accept his answer at face value.

“Even something minor would help. Any small clue about Bellium—”

“There is none.”

Rokan cut me off before I could finish.

“Being dragons does not mean we know everything that happens in this world, nor do we record everything.”

He drew a firm line and made it clear he had nothing more to say about Bellium, but I still could not fully believe him. If he truly knew nothing, then what explained that grave reaction and the long silence just now?

“Sir Rokan, then do you know anything at all about Bellium’s child?”

Even if he did not know more about Bellium himself, perhaps he knew something about Bellium’s child, whose existence had apparently never been recorded in Elysium’s history. Adil had said no one in Elysium knew anything about the child, but Rokan was a dragon too, so perhaps things would be different for him.

Unfortunately, his answer was the same once again.

“I do not. If Bellium had been a great figure who left a major mark on history, detailed records about both him and his child might have survived. But he was not such a figure. In fact, I have heard his reputation among his own kind was rather poor.”

From the perspective of Elysium’s citizens it might have mattered, but according to Rokan, the dragons themselves had no particular reason to preserve information about Bellium and pass it down to later generations.

“You humans are much the same, are you not? Unless someone is a traitor who committed a major crime, you do not normally preserve detailed records of every mediocre neighborhood thug who happened to be somewhat unpleasant. Think of it in similar terms.”

I had assumed dragons might be different in that regard because their lives were incomparably longer than those of humans, but apparently that was not the case.

Rokan’s explanation was convincing enough, yet I still could not shake the uneasy feeling in my chest.

“Perhaps there are books I have not read that contain stories about them. Shasha, have you ever heard anything about Bellium or his child?”

Rokan passed the question to Sia, but she too shook her head with a disappointed expression.

[No. Honestly… I only know that there was a city called Elysium and that someone named Bellium built it. I’ve never heard anything beyond that either. Sorry, Oppa.]

Rokan nodded as though that was exactly the answer he had expected.

“I would like to satisfy your curiosity as well, but unfortunately, I do not believe I can. I will step away for a moment, so the two of you may talk while I am gone.”

With a troubled expression, Rokan left the room.

After entering his study, Rokan sank into a rocking chair, frowned, and leaned his head back. A moment later, he released a long sigh and quietly muttered to himself.

“Bellium. Why must you continue causing trouble for your own kind even after death?”