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Chapter 318 - Merba (5)

It was overly clean and calm.

“It feels like this place has escaped destruction.”

“It’s probably because of the remnants of Anvil’s spiritual power. So even those artifacts...”

Kang Shin-hyuk nodded quietly, feeling a strange mood at Tsukuyo’s words. Spiritual power was flowing gently throughout the forge. It not only protected the building and interior objects from the passage of time, but it also attracted artifacts seeking their master’s spirit. The reason why the smithy was so fine was probably that items with powerful spiritual energy were staying there.

“After all this, I’m here.”

“Well, Tsundere?”

“I don’t think that’s it.”

Kang Shin-hyuk calmly accepted Claire’s joke as she tried to release the stiff atmosphere. She giggled at his grumbling, then glanced inside again. In truth, it didn’t feel all that familiar. The memories from his previous life reached nearly 80 years, but most of them were from after he joined the Hero Universe, yet...

‘...No, I don’t want it to feel familiar.’

It wasn’t that he couldn’t recall them; it was just that it was difficult as Anvil tried hard to forget his painful past. However, as the synchronization progressed, Kang Shin-hyuk recalled those memories he didn’t want to know.

‘And all those memories... It remains so dark here.’

He could feel a strong spiritual power in all things inside the forge. At the time, he probably didn’t even feel the fragments of his spiritual power, but this underground bunker had clear traces of him. As if they thought he would come back here, those sources of spiritual power opened and delivered the memories of those years to him.

Information overflowed his mind, passing through memory and consciousness to quickly subside somewhere deeper. The memories of the times shared by these tools and fixtures remained vivid there. He gently closed his eyes and accepted everything he tried to turn away from. He was a young man who started as an apprentice to a family blacksmith, sweaty and desperate to remember the basics. When he met his young wife, made love, and she became pregnant with his child. When he took on the weight of fatherhood. The smithy was born as he grew out of being an apprentice.

He remembered the impressiveness of the world changing as his child was born... Yes, he remembered it. The first time his child opened her eyes and looked at him. When she first started walking, when she first called his name. The appearance of her welcoming him with a bright smile with his wife, and jumping with joy after receiving a present.

All the while, the threat of the monsters grew worse and worse, and a war broke out between humans. At that time, as a somewhat influential man in the country, he couldn’t return home and was constantly working metal for days at a time. When he barely met the order and was about to go home, that was the moment he heard about the death of his wife and daughter, having been attacked by monsters that suddenly appeared in the civilian residential area. He remembered.

His family, as the family of a blacksmith, was well-treated by the country. They lived in a safe place compared to ordinary citizens. However, due to the war, the troops that protected the streets were gone, and the monsters that appeared couldn’t be quickly defeated. The state made that excuse and ordered him to work harder to produce weapons in order to defeat such monsters. From that point, terrible confusion and despair overwhelmed him, making it difficult to recall even now, when the memories of his previous life had been almost completely restored. No, he didn’t want to reflect on it. But now, in order to take a step back and recover his past life, He had to. And for that, it was necessary to read the memories of the hairpin, which contained the truth of that time.

“Anvil, are you okay? If you use your spiritual power excessively... Still, it’s too dark in this space. It will be a burden.”

“It’s okay. Perhaps... if I put it off, I won’t even want to think about it.”

“Anvil...”

Kang Shin-hyuk sat into the nearby chair. The slightly lower chair was made for when his daughter came to the smithy to play. She would sit in this chair and watch him work. She would laugh and shyly smile at the customers who would come by; she was the very image of his wife.

“...Claire, can I hold your hand?”

“Yes.”

Tsukuyo looked envious of Claire, who sat next to him. Kang Shin-hyuk held the hairpin in his other hand. All the sand covering this planet had condensed into it, and it possessed more energy than the Great Heavenly Spirit with Halo’s branch inserted. Once again, he extended his spiritual power to the source of the object until he explored where it was first made.

The first thing that came to mind was his daughter’s smile. The next was the distorted face of his wife.

“...”

“Anvil, Anvil! Are you okay?!”

Everyone there could recognize Kang Shin-hyuk’s spiritual power. Lee Na-hee or Eleanor, who had just opened their eyes to spiritual power, were likely to lose their minds if they came into contact with the enormous power of the hairpin, but he succeeded in finding the source within it and read the memories there. It was so simple to find that he wanted to know what he turned away from.

...Ah, obviously, they wanted to hide it from him.

-Synchronization has accelerated. 100% synchronization rate has been achieved, and all VIP privileges will be regained.

-Various items have been added to the Hero Universe store. Please confirm!

-VIP member login bonus has been enhanced, and roulette has been improved.

-You can now access VIP only secret bulletin boards! Discuss the operation of the universe with them!

-You can now perform the dimensional movement without performing dimensional quests. Contact the administrator for details.

-You became a being outside one world. Remember that your power is attached to many people and how you use it.

-Recovered 120 billion HP.

It was the moment he got back the last piece he didn’t want but needed. Kang Shin-hyuk recovered all of his memories and became a full VIP member. While regaining the privileges of a VIP, the information he learned was both something expected and unexpected. Actually, he wasn’t surprised at all. No... The facts he had to bear were so overwhelming he couldn’t pay attention to anything else.

“Anvil...”

“My wife and daughter...”

His voice became a whisper.

“They were killed by human hands.”

“...Sorry, grandfather. I was expecting it.”

“Me too, Anvil... I’m sorry.”

“Honey...”

Yes, everyone must have guessed it. Maybe all the members who knew Anvil before knew it. Claire must’ve realized it after coming here and thinking of his past actions.

“I was more important than I thought then. The state wanted to conceal my existence, but when the war situation changed due to my weaponry, the enemy nation recognized and investigated me.”

Anvil was a simple human. He loved what he made but never imagined they would be treated as such. He underestimated his own existence, and that accelerated the tragedy. Starting with the conclusion, the enemy country pursued information about him and found his family’s whereabouts. They didn’t try to kill them; rather, they wanted to bring the blacksmith to their side. So, they tried to kidnap them. There weren’t many guarding his family, and they weren’t that strong. They decided that they couldn’t stop the enemy soldiers and realized that if it were left as is, his family would be kidnapped, and the blacksmith would follow them.

-So they killed his family.

Before they could be kidnapped, Anvil’s family was killed by soldiers. Did Anvil really not know this? No. He thought he was going crazy at first, but he soon realized that he had his suspicions. He thought hard and reached the truth he didn’t want to admit. The moment he reached it, he stopped making weapons for humans. They said they would use weapons to bring peace to this world, but it was their greed that killed his family. They were lunatics who would stab other humans to expand their position in this world of monsters. As a result, even if their position narrowed as the monsters’ territory expanded, they didn’t stop their foolishness.

The blacksmith began to doubt whether humans really should survive. Even monsters were able to join forces against humanity, yet humanity couldn’t stop fighting each other even until the moment they were destroyed. If so, won’t humanity perish someday anyway? What’s more, the weapons he made were the best tools to accelerate it. Then, he’d rather, instead of going around and around like this, wouldn’t it be simpler to create a tool with the sole purpose of killing humans?

What was established was a group called Jormungand.

It was after the blacksmith Anvil disappeared from the human world.