And so They Continue Without Existing
Chapter 23: And so They Continue Without Existing
(The Saintess's POV—III Present)
Centuries passed.
Or days.
Time stopped being a straight line.
She did not see that sky ocean‑soul again.
For a long time, whenever she saw a man with tired eyes and a sword, some stupid part of her checked for blue underneath.
It was never him.
The ache dulled.
The hatred did not.
Without hope, you need a project.
In all the endless cycles, there is one thing she have noticed.
Not all souls are equal.
Some are thicker. Heavier. More... present. They press against the world in ways that make reality twitch. If you pushed them hard enough, you could probably crack the cage.
She saw one once.
A woman whose presence bent curse and blessing both. She could have unmade her entire timeline by breathing wrong.
She tried to take her.
She did not go quietly.
They both lost that time. She woke up in another body anyway. She tore half that universe open on her way out.
If one soul could accidentally do that by struggling, what could one do if someone sharpened it? Picked it early. Cultivated it. Turned it into a blade with only one purpose.
Cut the leash.
Cut the Connection.
Cut the word.
Cut me.
After that, she started looking.
Not for fully grown monsters. Those are slippery. They already know how to run. She looked for seeds. Ones that could become something like that man’s ocean‑soul if you watered them in all the wrong ways.
She watched births.
She watched accidents that were not accidents.
She watched potential bloom, then wither, then bloom again somewhere else.
At first, she made the obvious mistake.
She thought lineage mattered.
Powerful parents, powerful children. It made sense. Even ‘It’ seemed to like recycling certain bloodlines. Old saints. Old gods. Old monsters.
She spent a few cycles trying to pick promising couples.
Push this reincarnated sword‑king and that witch into bed. Arrange accidents so that those two geniuses would end up in the same village at the right drunk festival.
Sometimes it even worked.
The children were strong.
They weren’t right.
They glowed. They burned. They turned the world under their toddler feet into interesting patterns.
They did not have that weight.
Whatever selected for that didn’t care about breeding.
It was random.
Or, worse, it was the System’s sick joke.
She gave up on eugenics after one of her “perfect” candidates turned genocidal before hitting puberty and tried to eat the sun.
She had to kill that one personally.
Twice.
Useful data, at least.
Do not assume control where you do not have it.
She needed a different approach.
Stop trying to manufacture anomalies.
Start hunting them.
And then.
Han Si‑woo.
His soul wasn’t impressive at first glance.
A little too still. A little too dull around the edges. The kind of thing that would have drifted through life as unremarkable, dying quietly in somewhere no one would write songs about.
But the core was there.
With Refinement. It could reach, she has seen it over and over again.
A hardness.
A line running down the middle that wouldn’t break if you leaned on it. Just enough stubbornness that, given the right pressure, it could grow into something sharp.
Shepressed.
Remove parents. Easy. A dungeon break at the right time, in the right street, with the right cleanup team looking the other way.
Drop him into the slums. Not so deep that he dies. Deep enough that he learns hunger.
Make sure he awakens.
Nudge the Association so they put him in the support track, not the front lines. Let him think it’s because of “aptitude tests” and “guild recommendations”.
It wasn’t.
A sword that thinks it’s a shield does interesting things to its edge.
Then, Sheneeded a grinder.
Cha Eun‑ha.
What a delightful little monster she was.
Ambition like a dragon. Insecurity like a black hole. The possessiveness of a starving dog that finally got a bone and decided it was “forever”.
She dangled him in front of her.
How easy is it to shape someone like her?
All she had to do was keep bumping their paths together. A raid here. A shared debrief there. A “coincidental” drink at a bar she liked.
The rest she did herself.
Chains instead of promotions. Isolation instead of Home. Overwork instead of appreciation.
Every time she tightened her hold, his soul made a little noise.
Not enough. Not yet.
Pressure alone doesn’t refine. You also need heat.
So she raised the temperature.
Even with all that, he was slow.
He could have grown into something monstrous himself. He had the pattern for it. Instead, he kept trying to be... decent.
She hated that about him.
About people like him.
It makes them harder to break, because they keep trying to stop themselves from becoming what they need to be to survive.
She got impatient.
She tried to shortcut.
Call it... an experiment.
There was a ritual he should not have survived. If it had worked the way she wanted, his soul would have torn a little. Enough to see what lay underneath.
It didn’t go as planned.
He didn’t die.
He just... forgot.
His past. His connections. His idea of who he had been. All of it wiped clean.
The Eun‑ha project should have collapsed right then.
It didn’t.
And so, she used that as a new ingredient.
She brought in Yeonhwa properly. Not just as a shadow in his past, but as a present blade.
Two Sharpeners. One Knife.
And his soul, stripped of the comfortable excuses, started waking up in the most inefficient ways.
He lied more cleanly.
He weighed lives. His and others.
Interesting.
She stepped back.
When you push a fragile object too hard, you break it. When you push a durable one too hard, you learn its limits.
He didn’t break.
He bent.
She has seen this play before, in other worlds. Love wrapped around obsession, tearing people apart. It ripens souls faster than any battlefield.
Give one woman the chains. Give the other the Darkness. Give them both the same man.
See which one he sacrifices himself for.
See what that decision does to him.
She lure the fake “truth” relic to Eun‑ha’s side. Let her think she’d stolen it. Truth doesn’t matter. Belief does. The belief that she could prove he still loved her, even when his actions said otherwise.
She waited.
Seoul burned a little.
Russia cracked a little.
Each time, his soul thickened. Took on more weight. More contradiction. More scar.
She didn't even need to open her third eye to feel the difference when he stood between Cha Eun‑ha’s Flames and Yeonhwa’s shadow.
She could feel it from the other side of the continent.
Finally, She thought.
Finally, something in all this waste is worth harvesting.
His head lolled to the side as the transport hit a pocket of disturbed mana.
An Inquisitor moved reflexively to steady him. She flicked her fingers.
“Leave him,” she said.
The woman drew back at once.
“Yes, Saintess.”
She wrote his tragedy.
You belong to me.
She could cut him open now.
Peel back the flesh, slip her fingers through the cracks in his soul, pry it out while it screamed.
It might work.
It might not.
If She misjudged the ripeness, the soul would tear wrong. It would explode. It would take this transport, this whole pretty little archipelago with it, and She would still wake up somewhere else, in someone else’s skin, with another century of people chanting that cursed title at her.
Unacceptable.
No. One more step.
One more refinement.
There is something people like to say.
“Slaves crave freedom.”
They’re wrong.
Slaves crave what they know.
Give someone who has only known cages and orders a field with no walls and watch what happens. They don’t run toward the horizon.
They look for the bars.
They wait for the hand.
They break themselves trying to understand why no one is holding the leash.
Han Si‑woo has never had a day in his life that wasn’t owned by someone.
She could drag him straight into a cell in the Holy City. She could chain his body to an altar and work on him while he watched the ceiling rot.
He’d survive it.
He’d endure.
He’d adapt.
He is good at that.
It would be inefficient.
So instead, She will do something crueler.
She will give him everything.
Freedom. Luxury. A quiet room with soft sheets and no chains. Food that doesn’t taste like ration packs. Clothes that don’t stink of blood. Time where no one is asking anything of him.
She will open the door and tell him he doesn’t have to walk back into the cage.
Then she will watch.
A dog that has only known kicks does not know what to do with a hand that never hits it.
He will wait.
For the blow.
For the demand.
For the betrayal.
And every day it doesn’t come, his soul will wind a little tighter. The suspicion. The restlessness. The realisation that perhaps there is no kindness behind this, only a lull before the next storm.
People like him break more cleanly under silence than under whips.
When he realises that all his sacrifices, all his deaths, all his “heroics” have only ever served to ripen him for slaughter, then he will either shatter or sharpen.
If he shatters, Shelose nothing. Shewake up somewhere else and start again.
If he sharpens...
She will finally have a blade worth putting to her own throat.
The mana hum shifted slightly. We were dropping altitude.
Seoul.
Cherry blossoms in spring. Tourist photos. A pretty mask stretched over old rot. The Church had dug its teeth in deep there. Convenient for what came next.
She rose, smoothing her robes out of habit.
“Saintess.”
The Inquisitor from before stood in the doorway, helm tucked under her arm. “We’ll be touching down soon. The subject’s holding stable. The heretic is contained in the secondary vessel.”
Cha Eun‑ha, locked in blessed iron and screaming herself hoarse where no one but officiants would hear.
Of course she was.
“Good,” she said. “Have him placed in the guest wing. Private quarters. No restraints.”
The woman blinked.
“No restraints?”
“You don’t need to repeat my words,” she said. “Just follow them.”
She swallowed.
“Yes, Saintess.”
She left.
She looked back at him.
“My executioner,” She said softly.
He couldn’t hear her.
The word was right.
Not lover. Not saviour.
Just Executioner.
Someone who would do what no one else in this endless farce had managed.
“Sleep for now,” She told him. “Tomorrow, I’ll give you the world.”
She let her fingers rest lightly over his heart, feeling the soul underneath shift, restless even in unconsciousness.
“Then,” She whispered, “we’ll see how much you hate it.”
For the first time in longer than she could remember, she smiled.
Not because she was happy.
Because, for once, the end of the story might be her.
