Finally, Lee Jun-Kyeong had been able to complete all of the things he had to do at the Round Table.
This was why he had visited the Round Table before the cataclysm had come.
One of those things had been to bring them Excalibur, but the other had been to tell the Round Table to begin preparing for the cataclysm itself.
The Round Table was a neutral organization.
As long as he warned them, they would warn the other secret organization of the impending cataclysm.
‘It’s enough that all of the many secret organizations have become even more wary of it.’
He wasn’t doing this for the various secret organizations.
Instead, it was for the many people that could only survive if they came forward.
However, he had finished what he had to do in the Round Table, but that didn’t mean he had finished all the work in England that he had wished to accomplish.
There was one other thing Lee Jun-Kyeong had to do before he left.
While he had tried to handle it during his stay at the Round Table, he hadn’t been able to accomplish it because Gawain and the other Knights of the Round Table kept bothering him.
Knock, knock.
He had to visit Park Yu-Jin.
[Yu-Jin’s Telephone Booth.]
As usual, the sign was almost vomiting with a bright array of lights.
Lee Jun-Kyeong waited silently, but there was no answer.
Squeak.
In the end, he opened the door and entered.
He was on a street in England, Alchemy Street. Moreover, he was at a specific shop located on this street of secretive Hunters who made and sold black-market items.
"Ms. Park,” Lee Jun-Kyeong called out as he nonchalantly went inside the store. However, he didn’t hear any answer in response.
‘There are still some signs.’
There was some sort of high-grade mana processing device inside that interfered with the mana stream. Because it interfered with his sensing, it wasn’t possible for him to grasp their exact appearance, but he was sure that there was still someone there.
They were behind the counter.
It was an unnatural sign of space.
“Ms. Park?”
Lee Jun-Kyeong proceeded to slowly head toward the counter after not hearing a response after quite some time.
.
"Who are you?"
Then, there was a voice in response.
However, Lee Jun-Kyeong was left frowning with bewilderment.
“You don’t seem to be Ms. Park, are you?”
Park Yu-Jin wasn’t the one behind the counter. It was a fair-haired beauty who he was seeing for the first time.
“Can’t you tell just by seeing me?” she replied curtly.
Lee Jun-Kyeong took a deep breath and continued.
“Is Ms. Park not here? Isn’t this a store run by Ms. Park?”
“Hmm.”
The woman looked Lee Jun-Kyeong up and down.
“You don’t seem to be a debtor coming to collect her debts…”
Somewhere along the line, the woman came out from behind the counter with her arms folded and circled around Lee Jun-Kyeong.
“He doesn’t seem to be a Hunter who’s come to find me after I sold him the wrong potion either…”
She spoke at Lee Jun-Kyeong as if she was making comments about some sort of item.
“She doesn’t seem to be the type to have some sort of man hidden around either…”
“What are you doing right now?” Lee Jun-Kyeong asked.
The blonde woman finally made her conclusion as Lee Jun-Kyeong spoke.
“You’ve come to buy things then!”
Lee Jun-Kyeong couldn’t figure out how the woman had come to make that sort of conclusion. Shouldn’t that have been the first thing she had thought? Didn’t most people come to a store for that reason in the first place?
“That’s not it either,” Lee Jun-Kyeong said.
However, Lee Jun-Kyeong hadn’t come to this place to purchase something.
“Is Ms. Park really not here? Also, who are you?” Lee Jun-Kyeong continued as he frowned at her rude attitude.
“But I’m the one taking care of the store because Yu-Jin asked me to?”
She slowly approached Lee Jun-Kyeong. “By the way, you’re pretty handsome, aren’t you?”
Lee Jun-Kyeong took a step back in response to her infuriating attitude and spoke again.
“I’m here to find Ms. Park. If she’s not here, then I'll come back next time."
The voice of the blond woman floated to Lee Jun-Kyeong’s ears, who had tried to turn around to leave after speaking.
“She’s not coming back for a while.”
"What?" he asked.
“First, your identity.”
“...”
As the blond beauty spoke, a harsh chill appeared, and it felt as if it would cut through his body even at this very moment.
–I will take care of it, Master.
Hyeon-Mu dispersed the chill in the air.
What the woman had emitted was the energy of water, and Hyeon-Mu had grown to the point where it was able to suppress this measly level of control over the energy of water.
“...!”
Lee Jun-Kyeong spoke to the blonde woman, who was clearly flustered.
“I’ve come to find Ms. Park at the request of her older brother. Around when do you think I should return if I want to meet with Ms. Park?”
There was an edge to Lee Jun-Kyeong’s speech, most likely from the irritating meeting and the absence of Park Yu-Jin.
“I told you, she’s not coming.”
However, the blonde woman soon regained her spirits and responded to him.
“Yu-Jin asked me to deliver this message in case the person her Oppa had sent came,” she said, wringing her hands as if she was exhausted.
“That she joined Olympus.”
“...”
Lee Jun-Kyeong's face suddenly hardened and became cold.
***
Leee Jun-Kyeong had no choice but to be flustered. While Park Yu-Jin’s trip to Olympus was expected, the timing was different.
From what he knew, Park Yu-Jin should have only headed to Olympus after more time had passed, after the cataclysm. It was only then that Park Yu-Jin’s whereabouts had been clear in his information, which was why Lee Jun-Kyeong had been surprised when he met Park Yu-Jin on Alchemy Street.
'History has changed again.’
Park Yu-Jin’s trip to Olympus shouldn’t have occurred already.
If that were really what came to be, then it would mean that it would be quite a long time before she would return to Korea.
‘What could have caused it?’
Lee Jun-Kyeong pondered deeply about why she would bring her trip to Olympus up this early.
‘Was it because of me?’
Their previous meeting could have been the reason. It could have changed her mind, or, someone else could have noticed her presence. That was also possible as she was a capable and promising blacksmith and an alchemist.
Clench.
Lee Jun-Kyeong gritted his teeth. His plans had been twisted ever since China.
Although it wasn’t that he was expecting everything to go the way he had wanted it to, there were far too many variables right now, even though he knew information about the future.
Lee Jun-Kyeong had originally planned on taking her to Korea, but his plans had gone awry.
He would have to change the plans that he had predicted later.
For now, Lee Jun-Kyeong picked up the phone and spoke.
“Hello?”
–Isn’t this an international phone call?
The person on the other end of the phone was Jeong In-Chang. His voice was hoarse as if he had just woken up.
‘Right now, the time over there is…’
The time difference between Korea and where he stood was roughly seven hours, so it was about time for people to go to sleep over there.
However, there was no time for him to squabble about that with Jeong In-Chang right now.
"Get ready,” Lee Jun-Kyeong said out of the blue.
On the other end, there wasn’t any response, just silence.
–D…do you mean right now?
A long time had passed before he was able to hear Jeong In-Chang’s answer.
Lee Jun-Kyeong smiled unconsciously, seemingly imagining the expression Jeong In-Chang was making. His impatience seemed to be relieved a little at the thought.
‘Is this what it means to have companions?’
He felt proud for some reason, but he still had to distinguish between public and private occurrences.
“Yes, right now.”
–Wait, why…
Jeong In-Chang's voice was shaking.
It was because he had a gut feeling that there was no hole he could hide in.
“I need you to come here,” Lee Jun-Kyeong replied.
–So…
Jeong In-Chang’s trembling voice seemed to express that his soul had escaped his body by now.
–This is an international call, right…?”
"Yes."
–…
After a long time.
–Understood. Who should I bring along?
No matter how much he hated it or how tired he was, he followed Lee Jun-Kyeong’s instructions well.
Lee Jun-Kyeong spoke with a big smile.
"It's Egypt."
–E…Egypt?
“I’ll contact Seong-Gu Hyung and give him the details, so it’ll be fine for you to talk to him about them. As for who to bring, please bring everyone but the White Tiger Clan to Egypt.”
–Ha…
Jeong In-Chang let out a long sigh.
–I understand.
But, in the end, he agreed. Once Lee Jun-Kyeong had heard the answer, he pressed the end of the call button. As he had told Jeong In-Chang, he was in Egypt.
“...”
He had headed straight to Egypt with the help of the Bifrost, and Lee Jun-Kyeong looked out toward Cairo, the capital of Egypt.
Spectacle.
It really was the right word to describe this city.
Cairo was…
“Whew…”
Lee Jun-Kyeong sighed.
The reason he had come here was because of the variables.
'A lot of things are changing because of me.’
It was the butterfly effect.
The variables were caused by Lee Jun-Kyeong’s return to the past and subsequently influenced by him taking similar but different steps from the Demon King. These variables were still weak, but he wasn’t sure how they would change in the future.
The small changes that had been bothering him from when he had been in China had now become a variable that had manifested in the situation with Park Yu-Jin.
'I can’t tell what else will change.’
He would have to adapt to the changes, but before that, he had to make the effort to reduce any part of the variables if they could be reduced.
Lee Jun-Kyeong intended to correct anything that would affect his fate.
If, by chance, he wasn’t able to make things go the way he wanted, then he would have to find some other way to handle it.
‘It would end up becoming an outright massive shift.’
He would have to leave himself in the midst of the flowing torrent.
Although there was an advantage to knowing the future before it had happened, it was also a great advantage that he would be able to focus specifically on his growth with that knowledge.
‘Just the big events. Let’s just focus on those.’
If he wasn’t able to take a handle on the variables and return to the original flow of history, then he would end up losing himself in the flowing torrent.
However, a flowing torrent had to stop at some point, and eventually, somewhere along the line, they would focus on an event that couldn’t be changed by any variable, no matter how long it took to get there.
That was the answer Lee Jun-Kyeong had come up with.
Although he would have to take an incredible loss, he would cause more damage by not taking this loss. That was why Lee Jun-Kyeong was currently in Egypt.
‘Inebu.’
He had also been one of the changes that Lee Jun-Kyeong had caused.
Originally, Gunther should have been the one to have been dispatched to the Battle of Champions that had taken place in England and returned with the predetermined victory, but Lee Jun-Kyeong had provoked Heracles, battled with him, and had given him a way to control the Madness.
In that process, Inebu had seen something in himself, something that had caused the Hunter to try to call him to the Nile even as he had to put both his life and career on the line for it.
It wasn’t clear what variables this event would make in the future, but it was certain that he had been the one to influence the Hunter. Thus, Lee Jun-Kyeong intended to correct it.
‘There’s still some time.’
He could tell by feeling the flow of the mana.
There was still a little leeway until the Cataclysm.
Instead of Park Yu-Jin, who he couldn’t reach at this point, Lee Jun-Kyeong shifted his thoughts to obtaining something else.
Beep, beep, beep.
Lee Jun-Kyeong picked up his phone and dialed a number.
"Hello?" Lee Jun-Kyeong said as soon as the other person answered the phone.
–What is it?
The person on the other side of the line was Yeo Seong-Gu.
Although he hadn’t told this to Jeong In-Chang, in truth, not a single person knew that Lee Jun-Kyeong had come to Egypt, even the owner of the Bifrost himself, Yeo Seong-Gu.
“I’ve arrived in Egypt,” he said politely.
–...
Yeo Seong-Gu was silent at Lee Jun-Kyeong's sudden admission. After a long time, the Hunter responded.
–I thought you would have come back to Korea because I noticed the Bifrost had been used, but why are you in Egypt?
It was evident that he was flustered.
"I have something I have to do."
–Is that something related to the cataclysm?
Lee Jun-Kyeong responded promptly to Yeo Seong-Gu’s question.
“It may have something to do with more than just that.”
–Hmm…
Yeo Seong-Gu was troubled.
–Even so, there could be a lot of problems if you go there out of the blue…even without your intrusion, Egypt is in a state of disarray…
The worried voice of Yeo Seong-Gu came over the phone.
–There are diplomatic issues, and your sudden visit will fluster many people. For now, stay quiet until we figure out something from our side…
“Hyung.”
However, Yeo Seong-Gu wasn’t able to finish what he had wanted to say.
"I think there's already a problem."
–What?
Lee Jun-Kyeong put down the phone he had been holding.
Dozens of people were approaching him in the middle of Cairo.
Clearly, people—no, Hunters, they slowly reached for their weapons as they approached him.
"I believe in Asgard."
After pressing the end call button, Lee Jun-Kyeong lifted both hands.
Finally, Lee Jun-Kyeong had been able to complete all of the things he had to do at the Round Table.
This was why he had visited the Round Table before the cataclysm had come.
One of those things had been to bring them Excalibur, but the other had been to tell the Round Table to begin preparing for the cataclysm itself.
The Round Table was a neutral organization.
As long as he warned them, they would warn the other secret organization of the impending cataclysm.
‘It’s enough that all of the many secret organizations have become even more wary of it.’
He wasn’t doing this for the various secret organizations.
Instead, it was for the many people that could only survive if they came forward.
However, he had finished what he had to do in the Round Table, but that didn’t mean he had finished all the work in England that he had wished to accomplish.
There was one other thing Lee Jun-Kyeong had to do before he left.
While he had tried to handle it during his stay at the Round Table, he hadn’t been able to accomplish it because Gawain and the other Knights of the Round Table kept bothering him.
Knock, knock.
He had to visit Park Yu-Jin.
[Yu-Jin’s Telephone Booth.]
As usual, the sign was almost vomiting with a bright array of lights.
Lee Jun-Kyeong waited silently, but there was no answer.
Squeak.
In the end, he opened the door and entered.
He was on a street in England, Alchemy Street. Moreover, he was at a specific shop located on this street of secretive Hunters who made and sold black-market items.
"Ms. Park,” Lee Jun-Kyeong called out as he nonchalantly went inside the store. However, he didn’t hear any answer in response.
‘There are still some signs.’
There was some sort of high-grade mana processing device inside that interfered with the mana stream. Because it interfered with his sensing, it wasn’t possible for him to grasp their exact appearance, but he was sure that there was still someone there.
They were behind the counter.
It was an unnatural sign of space.
“Ms. Park?”
Lee Jun-Kyeong proceeded to slowly head toward the counter after not hearing a response after quite some time.
.
"Who are you?"
Then, there was a voice in response.
However, Lee Jun-Kyeong was left frowning with bewilderment.
“You don’t seem to be Ms. Park, are you?”
Park Yu-Jin wasn’t the one behind the counter. It was a fair-haired beauty who he was seeing for the first time.
“Can’t you tell just by seeing me?” she replied curtly.
Lee Jun-Kyeong took a deep breath and continued.
“Is Ms. Park not here? Isn’t this a store run by Ms. Park?”
“Hmm.”
The woman looked Lee Jun-Kyeong up and down.
“You don’t seem to be a debtor coming to collect her debts…”
Somewhere along the line, the woman came out from behind the counter with her arms folded and circled around Lee Jun-Kyeong.
“He doesn’t seem to be a Hunter who’s come to find me after I sold him the wrong potion either…”
She spoke at Lee Jun-Kyeong as if she was making comments about some sort of item.
“She doesn’t seem to be the type to have some sort of man hidden around either…”
“What are you doing right now?” Lee Jun-Kyeong asked.
The blonde woman finally made her conclusion as Lee Jun-Kyeong spoke.
“You’ve come to buy things then!”
Lee Jun-Kyeong couldn’t figure out how the woman had come to make that sort of conclusion. Shouldn’t that have been the first thing she had thought? Didn’t most people come to a store for that reason in the first place?
“That’s not it either,” Lee Jun-Kyeong said.
However, Lee Jun-Kyeong hadn’t come to this place to purchase something.
“Is Ms. Park really not here? Also, who are you?” Lee Jun-Kyeong continued as he frowned at her rude attitude.
“But I’m the one taking care of the store because Yu-Jin asked me to?”
She slowly approached Lee Jun-Kyeong. “By the way, you’re pretty handsome, aren’t you?”
Lee Jun-Kyeong took a step back in response to her infuriating attitude and spoke again.
“I’m here to find Ms. Park. If she’s not here, then I'll come back next time."
The voice of the blond woman floated to Lee Jun-Kyeong’s ears, who had tried to turn around to leave after speaking.
“She’s not coming back for a while.”
"What?" he asked.
“First, your identity.”
“...”
As the blond beauty spoke, a harsh chill appeared, and it felt as if it would cut through his body even at this very moment.
–I will take care of it, Master.
Hyeon-Mu dispersed the chill in the air.
What the woman had emitted was the energy of water, and Hyeon-Mu had grown to the point where it was able to suppress this measly level of control over the energy of water.
“...!”
Lee Jun-Kyeong spoke to the blonde woman, who was clearly flustered.
“I’ve come to find Ms. Park at the request of her older brother. Around when do you think I should return if I want to meet with Ms. Park?”
There was an edge to Lee Jun-Kyeong’s speech, most likely from the irritating meeting and the absence of Park Yu-Jin.
“I told you, she’s not coming.”
However, the blonde woman soon regained her spirits and responded to him.
“Yu-Jin asked me to deliver this message in case the person her Oppa had sent came,” she said, wringing her hands as if she was exhausted.
“That she joined Olympus.”
“...”
Lee Jun-Kyeong's face suddenly hardened and became cold.
***
Leee Jun-Kyeong had no choice but to be flustered. While Park Yu-Jin’s trip to Olympus was expected, the timing was different.
From what he knew, Park Yu-Jin should have only headed to Olympus after more time had passed, after the cataclysm. It was only then that Park Yu-Jin’s whereabouts had been clear in his information, which was why Lee Jun-Kyeong had been surprised when he met Park Yu-Jin on Alchemy Street.
'History has changed again.’
Park Yu-Jin’s trip to Olympus shouldn’t have occurred already.
If that were really what came to be, then it would mean that it would be quite a long time before she would return to Korea.
‘What could have caused it?’
Lee Jun-Kyeong pondered deeply about why she would bring her trip to Olympus up this early.
‘Was it because of me?’
Their previous meeting could have been the reason. It could have changed her mind, or, someone else could have noticed her presence. That was also possible as she was a capable and promising blacksmith and an alchemist.
Clench.
Lee Jun-Kyeong gritted his teeth. His plans had been twisted ever since China.
Although it wasn’t that he was expecting everything to go the way he had wanted it to, there were far too many variables right now, even though he knew information about the future.
Lee Jun-Kyeong had originally planned on taking her to Korea, but his plans had gone awry.
He would have to change the plans that he had predicted later.
For now, Lee Jun-Kyeong picked up the phone and spoke.
“Hello?”
–Isn’t this an international phone call?
The person on the other end of the phone was Jeong In-Chang. His voice was hoarse as if he had just woken up.
‘Right now, the time over there is…’
The time difference between Korea and where he stood was roughly seven hours, so it was about time for people to go to sleep over there.
However, there was no time for him to squabble about that with Jeong In-Chang right now.
"Get ready,” Lee Jun-Kyeong said out of the blue.
On the other end, there wasn’t any response, just silence.
–D…do you mean right now?
A long time had passed before he was able to hear Jeong In-Chang’s answer.
Lee Jun-Kyeong smiled unconsciously, seemingly imagining the expression Jeong In-Chang was making. His impatience seemed to be relieved a little at the thought.
‘Is this what it means to have companions?’
He felt proud for some reason, but he still had to distinguish between public and private occurrences.
“Yes, right now.”
–Wait, why…
Jeong In-Chang's voice was shaking.
It was because he had a gut feeling that there was no hole he could hide in.
“I need you to come here,” Lee Jun-Kyeong replied.
–So…
Jeong In-Chang’s trembling voice seemed to express that his soul had escaped his body by now.
–This is an international call, right…?”
"Yes."
–…
After a long time.
–Understood. Who should I bring along?
No matter how much he hated it or how tired he was, he followed Lee Jun-Kyeong’s instructions well.
Lee Jun-Kyeong spoke with a big smile.
"It's Egypt."
–E…Egypt?
“I’ll contact Seong-Gu Hyung and give him the details, so it’ll be fine for you to talk to him about them. As for who to bring, please bring everyone but the White Tiger Clan to Egypt.”
–Ha…
Jeong In-Chang let out a long sigh.
–I understand.
But, in the end, he agreed. Once Lee Jun-Kyeong had heard the answer, he pressed the end of the call button. As he had told Jeong In-Chang, he was in Egypt.
“...”
He had headed straight to Egypt with the help of the Bifrost, and Lee Jun-Kyeong looked out toward Cairo, the capital of Egypt.
Spectacle.
It really was the right word to describe this city.
Cairo was…
“Whew…”
Lee Jun-Kyeong sighed.
The reason he had come here was because of the variables.
'A lot of things are changing because of me.’
It was the butterfly effect.
The variables were caused by Lee Jun-Kyeong’s return to the past and subsequently influenced by him taking similar but different steps from the Demon King. These variables were still weak, but he wasn’t sure how they would change in the future.
The small changes that had been bothering him from when he had been in China had now become a variable that had manifested in the situation with Park Yu-Jin.
'I can’t tell what else will change.’
He would have to adapt to the changes, but before that, he had to make the effort to reduce any part of the variables if they could be reduced.
Lee Jun-Kyeong intended to correct anything that would affect his fate.
If, by chance, he wasn’t able to make things go the way he wanted, then he would have to find some other way to handle it.
‘It would end up becoming an outright massive shift.’
He would have to leave himself in the midst of the flowing torrent.
Although there was an advantage to knowing the future before it had happened, it was also a great advantage that he would be able to focus specifically on his growth with that knowledge.
‘Just the big events. Let’s just focus on those.’
If he wasn’t able to take a handle on the variables and return to the original flow of history, then he would end up losing himself in the flowing torrent.
However, a flowing torrent had to stop at some point, and eventually, somewhere along the line, they would focus on an event that couldn’t be changed by any variable, no matter how long it took to get there.
That was the answer Lee Jun-Kyeong had come up with.
Although he would have to take an incredible loss, he would cause more damage by not taking this loss. That was why Lee Jun-Kyeong was currently in Egypt.
‘Inebu.’
He had also been one of the changes that Lee Jun-Kyeong had caused.
Originally, Gunther should have been the one to have been dispatched to the Battle of Champions that had taken place in England and returned with the predetermined victory, but Lee Jun-Kyeong had provoked Heracles, battled with him, and had given him a way to control the Madness.
In that process, Inebu had seen something in himself, something that had caused the Hunter to try to call him to the Nile even as he had to put both his life and career on the line for it.
It wasn’t clear what variables this event would make in the future, but it was certain that he had been the one to influence the Hunter. Thus, Lee Jun-Kyeong intended to correct it.
‘There’s still some time.’
He could tell by feeling the flow of the mana.
There was still a little leeway until the Cataclysm.
Instead of Park Yu-Jin, who he couldn’t reach at this point, Lee Jun-Kyeong shifted his thoughts to obtaining something else.
Beep, beep, beep.
Lee Jun-Kyeong picked up his phone and dialed a number.
"Hello?" Lee Jun-Kyeong said as soon as the other person answered the phone.
–What is it?
The person on the other side of the line was Yeo Seong-Gu.
Although he hadn’t told this to Jeong In-Chang, in truth, not a single person knew that Lee Jun-Kyeong had come to Egypt, even the owner of the Bifrost himself, Yeo Seong-Gu.
“I’ve arrived in Egypt,” he said politely.
–...
Yeo Seong-Gu was silent at Lee Jun-Kyeong's sudden admission. After a long time, the Hunter responded.
–I thought you would have come back to Korea because I noticed the Bifrost had been used, but why are you in Egypt?
It was evident that he was flustered.
"I have something I have to do."
–Is that something related to the cataclysm?
Lee Jun-Kyeong responded promptly to Yeo Seong-Gu’s question.
“It may have something to do with more than just that.”
–Hmm…
Yeo Seong-Gu was troubled.
–Even so, there could be a lot of problems if you go there out of the blue…even without your intrusion, Egypt is in a state of disarray…
The worried voice of Yeo Seong-Gu came over the phone.
–There are diplomatic issues, and your sudden visit will fluster many people. For now, stay quiet until we figure out something from our side…
“Hyung.”
However, Yeo Seong-Gu wasn’t able to finish what he had wanted to say.
"I think there's already a problem."
–What?
Lee Jun-Kyeong put down the phone he had been holding.
Dozens of people were approaching him in the middle of Cairo.
Clearly, people—no, Hunters, they slowly reached for their weapons as they approached him.
"I believe in Asgard."
After pressing the end call button, Lee Jun-Kyeong lifted both hands.
