Chapter 2451

2451 - Evidence

"...Do you mean the incident of your wife's murder?"

Robin's hesitant expression faded, replaced by something far stranger...

His eyes opened to their fullest, a small smile occupied his lips, and for a moment he seemed disconnected from reality. "...What did you say?"

"...?" Helmor felt the danger he sensed multiply rapidly, his expression shifting from laughter to seriousness at once. "Anything about you has become public knowledge by now. Anyone who pays a little money will know your origins and history from the very beginning, and the incident of your wife's murder is not something hidden."

"Do you think I care how you know?" Robin raised his voice sharply. "Why did you mention this now, Helmor?"

The only thing preventing Robin from standing up now and grabbing Helmor by the neck was that he had brought up the subject while they were talking about The All-seeing God, and the only way to learn more was to keep listening.

"I don't mean to be cold toward your misfortune, but frankly, when I heard about your wife's murder and your son's torture, I laughed." Helmor spoke seriously and cautiously. "Without intending offense, this is an incident that has repeated with every candidate of The All-seeing God."

"...?!" Robin frowned deeply. "Continue."

"I'll give you a simple introduction, and you can verify it historically as you like. Just as Qarun published the apparent history of the candidates, you can also trace their hidden history if you're prepared to pay enough." Helmor raised his head slightly, "Every one of them suffered the extermination of everyone they cared about at the beginning of their candidacy period."

"…?!"

Helmor continued, "The closest example is Sevar. His mission included rapidly upgrading his planet, and he was too weak to protect it, so the planet was wiped out. Even the people he had arranged to be able to escape were killed in a strange way, through an error in the Gate's coordinates, as I recall. This caused Sevar to become the one you know today."

"……?!"

"Qarun is also a candidate, in case you didn't know. Just a hundred years after his candidacy and being sent to another planet, he learned that the small group of humans he cared about most had been killed in a very horrible way… I don't know if this affected his twisted personality, but it happened."

"………?!"

"Every one of the candidates who came before you suffered the same fate, and hear this… some of them had no loved ones before candidacy, so they met loved ones after candidacy and married, then their loved ones were killed. One of them had nothing but a pet… and it was killed too. You could say it's a kind of coming-of-age ritual."

Then he raised his head slightly with a strange smile, "When I heard what happened to you, I said to myself: This is it!"

Then he continued after a brief pause, "But I felt you came out of your ritual with the least possible losses. Normally, all of a candidate's relatives and loved ones are wiped out, but you only lost a wife."

"……" Robin looked down, maintaining the same expression, his eyes wide open.

Losing his entire family?

That was undoubtedly on its way to happening.

His wife's father and all her close relatives were killed, his son Caesar was a prisoner, and his remaining children were hunted across the continent. Half of the Burton family was killed in the long war, and he killed the other half, until only a few hundred remained of what was once estimated at tens of thousands.

The survival of that small remnant was thanks to the integrated laws, thanks to training, thanks to their history full of fighting… otherwise they would have been wiped from existence without a doubt.

The Flame Empire's savage war at that exact time on the city of Jura… Was that also part of his planning?!

But again…

Is this too much for a Transcendent who built his foundations on the Master Law of Causality?

"……." Helmor kept his silence for a few minutes, then began to find the lack of reaction strange, so he furrowed his brow and continued speaking, "In truth, after reading about that incident, I wanted to send you a message to tell you what was happening, but of course you wouldn't have listened to me.

To you, I'm an enemy, and I would have embarrassed myself and diminished my prestige. You would have thought I was trying to sow discord and ignored my words, so I stayed silent."

Then he continued, "But now, since you've mentioned that you're close to reaching the truth, I wanted to tell you something from the past that might hasten your steps. After all, what does a man want other than to possess his own decision? Do you find that I was wrong when I mentioned the atrocities of the All-seeing God at this timing? If you see it that way, then forgive me, and consider that I said nothing."

"……."

Again, the silence stretched for nearly half an hour.

Helmor furrowed his brow more than once, and was about to open his mouth, but he closed it again and waited… and instead, he began to observe the stability of the Spacetime Gate and marvel at it.

A candidate like Robin, a mere human possessing a small amount of momentum given to him by The All-seeing God, is not supposed to be capable of creating stable gates in this manner, crossing sectors, and remaining without a single fluctuation throughout a conversation that approached an hour!

"In your opinion, Helmor..." Robin finally spoke in an extremely calm voice, still looking downward, "why would The All-seeing God... do something like this? Self-destructive events... some candidates will certainly feel something and abandon him... why?"

"Of course I don't have a complete answer, but based on what I understand of The All-seeing God's past and his plan for this Cycle, he seeks to destroy his opponents, and does not seek to build a candidate who rules the Cycle. Therefore, he wants a vengeful person who has no love for life, to carry out his impossible tasks silently before being killed, then he begins arranging the next board with another candidate."

Then Helmor continued, "This is why The All-seeing God constantly tries to erase all traces of his candidates, so that future candidates do not know what happened to them or their history, and thus know their final fate, and their minds become occupied thinking about what will happen to them... But we have Sevar and Qarun with high levels of Causality, and they can track things like this and record them, and even sell them at the appropriate price, and of course, all of it supported by evidence."

Then he quickly continued, "If you contact either of them and ask for those specific clues, they will give them to you immediately and for free."

"….." Robin continued looking at the ground, "Do you think… they also have clues about what happened to me?"