“Even though you saw something like that…”
“I had a good reason for it.”
Reysir Daudabina quickly cut me off, requesting a chance to defend himself before I could even start pressing him for details. It seemed he was at least aware that his actions had been quite careless.
“Fine, let’s hear it.”
“I figured that if there was something dangerous in the Academy Library, where I’ll be spending the next few years, I needed to pin down its exact location for my own safety. That way, I wouldn’t accidentally touch something I shouldn’t.”
He wasn’t wrong. His primary objective was to investigate materials regarding the Demonic Realm that had appeared in Daudabiner County, and visiting the Library was essential for assignments and exam preparation. If there was a hazard in a place he had to frequent, it made sense to identify it so he could avoid it.
But still…
“Is that something a person who touched it while knowing it was dangerous should say?”
“No, listen. I couldn’t exactly report to the Academy and say, ‘I have a bad feeling about this, so please clear out all these books,’ right? So, I had to confirm why the books here were dangerous.”
Hearing his reasoning, it was somewhat understandable. Since he couldn’t mention the **[Truth-Reading Eye]**, he would have had to act that way to provide any sort of report.
“If the information window had said something like **[DANGER! DO NOT TOUCH.]**, I would never have opened those books. But it said I didn’t have permission to read them. I couldn’t help but wonder what that meant. After all, they’re books openly displayed in the Library for any Academy student to read.”
It was a plausible train of thought. It wasn’t as if the shelf containing the Special Character novels was hidden by some secret mechanism. At the time, Reysir likely didn’t realize how strange this space truly was.
“I put my blindfold back on and took a random book from the shelf to check. Other than the title being weird and the author’s name being special characters, it looked normal. I thought maybe there was some special measure preventing me from seeing the content, but the book opened just fine, and I had no trouble reading it.”
His tone suggested that he felt a bit deflated because nothing had happened, despite his initial tension.
“So, I was about to close the book and put it back when some terms I’d never seen before caught my eye. I wondered if it was a code, so I pulled out a few more volumes to skim through. But those unfamiliar terms were used commonly as nouns, and they even shared a peculiar worldview. Not all of the Special Character novels are like that, but most of them… You’ve read them too, so you understand what I’m saying, right?”
I understood all too well. Nowadays, even in novels set in fantasy worlds, the protagonists were often modern people who had traveled to that world through possession or reincarnation. There were also plenty of “Hunter” novels that added fantasy elements to a modern setting.
Terms referring to modern items or concepts that shouldn’t exist in this world appeared commonly across various novels. Since both the authors and readers were modern people, it was natural that there were no explanations for such terms. And since all those Special Character novels were webnovels produced in Korea, the country known as “Republic of Korea” would naturally be mentioned repeatedly.
‘There’s no hidden meaning; they’re just perfectly ordinary nouns. And he thought they were a code?’
I imagined Reysir agonizing over how to decipher the “code” while staring at a list of completely mundane words. It was actually quite funny. However, even without considering Karbaldr’s character, laughing at this moment would seem incredibly strange. Thus, I consciously pulled my lips down, trying my best to maintain a serious expression.
“I never thought of it as a code… but I see why you might think that. So, did you succeed in deciphering it?”
“Well, about that… It seems I was mistaken. After reading about ten works, I got the feeling that they weren’t codes, but rather established, unique terminology.”
Embarrassment was written all over his face. He seemed mortified, knowing full well that he had been wasting his time on nonsense. As I stared blankly at him, his embarrassment seemed to double. Reysir cleared his throat unnecessarily and continued with a serious face.
“Ahem! But it’s certain that the books here are by no means ordinary. I might have missed it, but there’s definitely a secret hidden here.”
“And why do you think that?”
“Don’t you know, having read them yourself? A lot of these Special Character novels feature something called a ‘Status Window.’ There’s also the concept of ‘Dungeons,’ which is similar to the Demonic Realm… Even terms like ‘Awakened,’ ‘Skill Window,’ and ‘Inventory’ are identical to the ones we use, aren’t they?”
“Ah…”
I realized too late that I had asked something too obvious, but fortunately, Reysir didn’t seem to care. He was likely too busy laying out his own hypotheses to think deeply about my question.
“It could be that the experts who established those terms were avid readers of Special Character novels and just copied them. But the fact that the Awakened, Status Windows, Skill Windows, and Inventories in those novels are so similar to the real ones… that’s what bothers me.”
Naturally, since those Special Character novels were Korean webnovels, and the setting of this novel, *Nas-e*, was also based on a Korean webnovel, sharing similar concepts and identical terms was only logical. I couldn’t explain that, however, so I had to remain silent. Then, these words flowed from Reysir’s mouth:
“Maybe… the authors who wrote these Special Character novels were beings who witnessed the essence of this world, its future, or its hidden side?”
He wasn’t just believing in a conspiracy theory; he was crafting one from scratch. For a moment, a hollow laugh almost escaped me because of how absurd it was. But I quickly turned serious. While the authors hadn’t “witnessed” something in this world…
‘Special Character novels… In other words, the fact that Korean webnovels are the essence of this world… that’s actually true, isn’t it?’
I hoped everyone would forget my narration from Chapter Ten where I said it was debatable whether webnovels could be considered knowledge. I was wrong back then. I would like to make a correction.
In the world where I lived, webnovels were nothing more than creative works, but in this world created based on a webnovel, they were more than qualified to be treated as important documents containing knowledge—knowledge that dealt with the very foundation of this world.
From that perspective, webnovel authors were not ordinary beings either. In a sense, they had created a world like this one. The conspiracy theory Reysir presented wasn’t an absurd jump in logic; rather, it was closer to seeing only a part of the truth and thinking of it on a smaller scale.
“Have you ever told anyone else about this?”
“No, never. I’d sound like a hard-core otaku who can’t distinguish between novels and reality while spouting conspiracy theories, wouldn’t I?”
“……”
If he thought that, why was he telling me? He didn’t think I was a fellow otaku, did he? I felt extremely uncomfortable, and a strong urge to not be lumped together with someone like him surged within me. I pulled Yor close and took a step back.
“Why so suddenly…”
“Didn’t you say you once recommended the novels here to Hailga?”
Lest I explain why I stepped back and hear Reysir confirm that he considered me one of his own, I cut him off and hurried to a question related to the main point.
“Yeah. It’s because it seemed like the **[You do not have permission to read this.]** message wasn’t about the content of the novels, but about the information regarding the books themselves. There was no problem reading the content, and I thought maybe someone else might notice something I missed… that was one reason.”
“And the other?”
“They’re just purely fun to read as ‘novels.’ I thought it would be nice to have someone I could read them with and exchange opinions.”
I had read webnovels for a long time, but I had never once had a thought like that. Even so, I suddenly felt like I understood what that feeling was.
‘In short, he wants to read the comments left by other people.’
Once I reached this conclusion, I finally understood Reysir’s heart. I liked reading comments too—whether they were on my own novels or others’. Seeing interpretations from other people was fun, discovering missed foreshadowing was a joy, and finding someone who felt the same way as I did was oddly welcoming.
Since I had always been reading the same works as countless others and exchanging opinions, the thought that I needed someone to read and talk with never crossed my mind. Reysir, on the other hand, couldn’t read “comments,” which were one of the fun elements of webnovels, so he had come to desperately want someone to read with him.
However…
“I also tried to find out something through these Special Character novels like you did, but in the end, I just fell for the charm of the novels themselves.”
When Reysir said this, trying to find common ground with me, the thought that I didn’t want to be lumped together with him returned. After all that grand talk about the essence of the world, his conclusion was just ‘I read them hard because they were fun!’
He’s supposed to be the Original Protagonist, yet here he is saying such scatterbrained things.
‘Anyway, the reason Reysir started reading Special Character novels was because of the **[Truth-Reading Eye]**.’
The setting of “reading the truth” had essentially caused Reysir to face the “Fourth Wall.” Although the person himself, Reysir, didn’t seem to realize it was the “Fourth Wall” at all. To realize that, he would have to become aware of the truth that he himself was a webnovel protagonist, so it was only natural that he didn’t know yet.
“You didn’t… develop a distaste for Special Character novels after hearing my story, did you?”
“Not really. As you said, reading the books here doesn’t make me particularly endangered. If they were problematic books, they wouldn’t have been left in a place like this. So there shouldn’t be a problem if I keep reading them.”
It was just that I was starting to get a headache.
‘The reason I brought Reysir here was to make him check my Status Window with his **[Truth-Reading Eye]**…’
I was worried that if he used that skill on me, a bright red window might appear saying **[You do not have permission to read this.]**, just like when he checked the information on the Special Character novels.
For a moment, I felt an impulse to cancel the plan out of anxiety. But it would be better to have that window pop up now rather than when the Original Author was watching. With that thought, I managed to steady my wavering resolve.
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