As promised, the Namgung Family sent a divine physician. The divine physician, who was checking my condition, admired it and then suddenly threw out a line.

“I’ve never seen an incarnation body this ruined in half a hundred years. Did you participate in some Holy Demon Great War or something?”

“I went through something similar.”

“Your mouth’s still alive.”

“Luckily.”

“It feels like your mouth is the most broken part.”

The divine physician snickered as he kneaded my arms and legs, then pulled out a brush and activated a skill.

Along with a bright ray of light, I felt a tickling sensation, and wherever the divine physician’s brush touched, I could see the incarnation body that had been crumbling get restored.

So this was the ‘fable repair’ I’d only heard about.

It was truly a mysterious power.

Of course, it seemed that even for a divine physician like him, repairing my incarnation body wasn’t easy. The reason was obvious.

[Fable, ‘Successor of the Eternal Name’ snarls.]

“Seriously.”

[Fable, ‘Successor of the Eternal Name’ tosses its body.]

“Stay still, you bastard.”

Yoo Joonghyuk, who had been watching the treatment process, opened his mouth.

“I didn’t know the divine physician would be an elf.”

“Is it strange for an elf to be here?”

“In today’s Murim, it’s not strange enough to be strange.”

After Murim opened up, various races flowed into the ‘Number One Murim.’ Not just different races like elves and orcs, gnomes and goblins, but even demon types and inhuman types.

The divine physician Rowellin was also a doctor who flowed into the ‘Number One Murim’ right after the ‘Outer God incident.’

“Whew, it’s roughly finished.”

“You didn’t paint here enough.”

When Yoo Joonghyuk, who was checking my condition together at my side, pointed it out, the divine physician clicked his tongue and said,

“I left that on purpose. If you want to maintain the fable’s self-regenerative power, the iron rule is to leave at least a minimum ‘hole.’”

I couldn’t understand it well, but I also felt like I vaguely understood what he meant.

Yoo Joonghyuk at my side also seemed to gain some kind of enlightenment from those words, because he suddenly crossed his legs and started cultivating.

The divine physician, who glanced at Yoo Joonghyuk, continued.

“As you know, this treatment is nothing but a temporary measure. There’s a limit to enduring the ‘Exile Penalty’ with fable repair.”

As expected, the divine physician had grasped my condition a long time ago.

“If you can’t enter a main scenario, your incarnation body will eventually collapse.”

“Yes. That’s probably right.”

Was my reaction unexpected? The divine physician scratched his cheek with a sullen expression.

“This is the first time I’ve seen an exile this calm. Aren’t you afraid of death?”

“I’m afraid, of course.”

I’m afraid the Constellations of the gigantic nebula will suddenly descend, and I’m afraid an unexpected scenario will hit the back of my head. There are many times when I suddenly get chills at the fact that I could die at any moment.

But how should I put it—over time, it felt like I was getting used to that fear.

It was like the ‘me’ that fears death and the ‘me’ that reads this story were separating.

Death is scary, but I’m still curious about the next story. I’m curious about the sentence that will be written next.

If I keep fighting with that curiosity, sometimes there were even moments when my death didn’t feel like such a big deal.

After all, wasn’t it something Kim Dokja and Yoo Joonghyuk had gone through multiple times?

“Looking at your eyes, you don’t seem to be in your right mind. You’d better suspect whether a fable is controlling you.”

“In your eyes, divine physician, what fable do you think I’m being controlled by?”

“How would I know. Honestly, this is the first time I’ve seen an incarnation body that picked and held fables as bizarre as yours.”

The divine physician lightly brushed away fable grains into the air as he continued.

“And just because someone is a fable expert doesn’t mean they know everything about fables. The ‘fables’ we mortals can understand are nothing but specks of dust in the universe.”

“There’s also a fable that says specks of dust gathered become a mountain.”

The divine physician frowned as if he didn’t like me grabbing at his words.

“There is a fable like that too. It’s the fate of foolish mortals to cling to specks of dust and struggle to measure the universe somehow.”

“Listening to you, it sounds like you’re being controlled by that kind of ‘fable’ too, divine physician.”

“You really don’t lose a single word.”

“Looks like you didn’t fix my mouth enough.”

“So what is it you really want to ask?”

I recalled the description of the divine physician Rowellin written in Ways of Survival.

「Divine Physician Rowellin. A fable expert counted among the top ten in the <Star Stream>.」

It wasn’t easy to coincidentally meet a ‘fable expert’ of this level. Even Yoo Joonghyuk, who had repeated countless regressions, could count on one hand the times he had met the divine physician in person.

A rare chance to talk with a person who wasn’t sufficiently described in either Ways of Survival or Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint. I decided to grab that opportunity once.

“There’s a fable I want to tame.”

“What kind of bastard is it?”

“A bastard that wants to dye the entire world the same color.”

At my answer, the divine physician snickered.

“I think I know what bastard it is.”

[Fable, ‘Successor of the Eternal Name’ wiggles its lips.]

Successor of the Eternal Name.

That damn bastard who, since back when my Kim Dokja content was low, would try to dominate my flesh whenever it found an opening.

It had been quite a long time since I started sharing joys and sorrows with this guy.

[Fable, ‘Successor of the Eternal Name’ is approaching evolution.]

But a little while ago, after it absorbed the power of the ‘Demon King of Salvation,’ its condition had become unusual.

[Your current existence restoration rate is 18.8%.]

[The status of the corresponding fable has satisfied the evolution threshold.]

A fable that was born as ‘semi-myth grade’ from the start. When the evolution process ended, there was a high chance this bastard would become a ‘myth-grade fable.’

It was exciting, but it was also scary.

Even now, as semi-myth grade, it didn’t listen to me. If it became myth grade, I couldn’t even guess how much trouble it would cause.

As if he understood my fear, the divine physician laughed heartily.

“Everyone has a fable like that. To control a fable, you have to know the fable well. How much do you know about that fable?”

For a moment, the divine physician’s question sounded like this to me.

「How much do I know about Kim Dokja?」

After thinking carefully, I answered honestly.

“I thought I knew it well, but these days, it feels like I don’t know it at all.”

“Look into the fable often.”

“I’ve already looked a lot—will it help if I keep looking?”

“Even a fable you’ve already seen looks new if you look again.”

Rereading.

It was something Kim Dokja also said sometimes.

“Stories are mysteriously unmatched like that. Even when you believe you made the correct interpretation, if you look again, new interpretations pour out.”

It wasn’t exactly some new insight.

Just as I was thinking that even a fable expert was nothing special, the divine physician asked again.

“Why do you want to control the fable well?”

“I want to get stronger.”

“You seem strong enough already.”

Depending on how you looked at it, maybe. Even now, I was stronger than most Murim people. If my fables recovered, I could fight hero-grade Constellations well enough, and if I could draw out the power of the Kim Dokja fragment, I could even produce power comparable to the ‘Demon King of Salvation.’

But that still wasn’t enough.

While being chased by gigantic nebulas, while facing Outer Gods and divine beings of other worlds—while watching myth-grade Constellations and Teacher Jaehwan, I realized it clearly.

Right now, I was ridiculously weak.

An incarnation body that would burst if a myth-grade Constellation seriously snapped a finger.

In my current state, even if I died and came back to life, I wouldn’t be able to see the ending.

“I ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) need to become much stronger.”

“You want to get stronger.”

Muttering like that, the divine physician thought about something for a moment, then suddenly used his brush to write “hoo hoo” in the air.

“What does this look like to you?”

“‘Hoo hoo.’”

“So what does that mean?”

“Meaning? Isn’t it just a creepy laugh?”

It’s a personal preference, but I don’t like characters who laugh “hoo hoo.” Every single bastard who laughs like that has something dirty behind them.

“To you right now, it might look like that. But what about other people? For example, how do you think someone with hot food in front of them would interpret this word?”

After a short deliberation, I answered.

“They’d think it’s breath to cool the food.”

“And if it were someone thrown onto a cold snowy mountain, with both hands frozen stiff?”

“That would be to warm their hands, like…”

Only then did I feel like I understood what the divine physician was trying to say to me.

“If you look into a fable with one single desire, the fable might not tell you much of a new story.”

In that moment, I felt like I could forgive the divine physician even if he laughed “hoo hoo.”

“Then what should I do?”

“I don’t know either.”

“Huh?”

“First, look into the fable a lot. Look while you’re eating, look while you’re sleeping. Even while you’re doing something else, if you think of it, look. If time passes like that, then a fable of yours that looks at that fable will pile up again. That fable will help you.”

I nodded in admiration at his words. I thought it was good I asked him, and I also thought the <Star Stream> was truly vast and faraway.

Even people who aren’t well described in either Ways of Survival or Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint interpret the world with their own insights like this. Maybe the first thought I had to throw away was the prejudice that “I already know this world.”

“If I gain a new interpretation of the fable, will I be able to become as strong as I want?”

“I don’t know how strong ‘as much as you want’ is, but there’s a saying. ‘One very small interpretation of a fable can sometimes change the entire universe.’”

“Nice. Was that something a Constellation said?”

“It was something the Recorder of Terror said.”

Recorder of Terror.

I didn’t expect to hear that name here.

“Do you know about the ‘Recorder of Terror’?”

“Those who repair the final records at the front lines of fables. Every ‘fable expert’ hears their story at least once. Why—are you interested in them too?”

In Ways of Survival, there are short mentions about the ‘Recorders of Terror.’

But some content was too abstract, and some was too difficult, so it was hard to figure out what was ‘useful information.’

To the point that even that ‘Kim Dokja’ would have barely known anything about the Recorders of Terror.

But for the divine physician to know information even Kim Dokja didn’t—who would have thought.

“In fact, I met one of them.”

“You met a Recorder of Terror?”

This time, it was the divine physician’s turn to be surprised.

“Yes. It was a short meeting, though.”

Lycaon, the ‘Recorder of Terror’ I met at the ‘Recycling Center,’ said. That he was a low-ranking member among the ‘Recorders of Terror.’ And he told me to find the other recorders, and to find the world’s disappearance.

So I thought this.

「Maybe the secret of this ‘41st regression’ might also be related to the ‘Recorders of Terror.’」

Maybe it was shocking that I had faced a ‘Recorder of Terror,’ because the divine physician checked the fables on my face here and there again as he spoke.

“You faced them and your mind is still intact? What kind of conversation did you have? Did this mouth perhaps get broken back then?”

“We couldn’t really talk much. But is it that surprising that I met them?”

“It seems you really don’t know anything about the ‘Recorders of Terror.’”

The divine physician shook his head and added.

“I also don’t know a lot of information about the ‘Recorders of Terror.’ But there are a few generally known facts.”

“What are they?”

“One is that they are trying to record the ‘primordial terror.’”

Primordial terror.

I thought for a moment about what that could mean.

“And?”

“Two is that among those who faced them, there is no being who returned to their right mind.”

“Why is that?”

“Well… no, you said you met them?”

“I did, but…”

“Did you not witness ‘terror’?”

From the start, I didn’t know what the ‘terror’ he was talking about was, so it was awkward to answer.

“Well, fine. I’ve never seen a case like yours either.”

“Is there a third one?”

“Actually, the third one is the most interesting.”

I had no idea what the first two were even talking about, so I wondered what would change if I heard the third characteristic.

But the moment I heard their ‘third characteristic.’

“They mainly appear in this world in the form of ‘possession.’”

A shiver ran down my spine.