I Became a Slave to a Mythical Shepherd

Episode 24. stopped time

“…Hephaestus-sama?”

I spoke to Hephaestus even though I knew it was a futile attempt. It may have been a reckless attempt to God, but I saw it even when I clapped my hands or snapped my fingers in front of his eyes.

There was no response.

The door prepared by Hephaestus also did not open.

‘Did Zeus know I was about to run away?’

it could be. Didn’t Hephaestus also say that this space was prepared by the power of Zeus?

I took a deep breath. If that’s the only doorway…

I spurred open the door that Hephaestus said would lead to the throne room of Olympus…

There was no reaction.

It is still the throne room of Olympus where I was. The gods looked at me and laughed.

However, Ares stood still in the state of tearing off the leg of an animal he did not know whether it was a cow or a chicken, and Zeus froze as he was talking kindly with Ganymede.

Even the flame that Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, kindles in the corner.

stopped

Like the room I just left.

“···what?”

Within the court of Olympus, which had become empty and silent, I walked aimlessly.

The sight of strange animals with the head of a wild boar on the body of a cow staring at the floor while being tied to a leash.

A strange garden where countless flowers bloom without any order, covering the walls and even the ceiling.

Tanks with weird fish swimming through the air, and more.

There were many things to see.

they were all dead

As soon as the curiosity that had protected even the outer shell of the opposite s*x was gone, I began to be afraid.

I am in the Palace of the Gods.

And even the gods hold their breath in the stopped time and just keep their place. The only one alive is me.

In a situation where I didn’t know what this phenomenon was or what caused it, I could only think of two things.

The first is the mysterious voices heard before the world froze.

Those who were slowly stretching said this. I made up my mind to run away, and my will asked if I could stop time and stop fate.

I didn’t even know that maybe this happened because of my choices.

The next thing that came to my mind was the advice of Hephaestus.

-“Conserve yourself with this and leave this civilized world.”

– “To a place where the power of our gods cannot reach.”

Those words came to mind seriously. In fact, it didn’t matter if it came up late. It wouldn’t have been any different if, after a hundred years or so, he had decided to obey.

Since everything but me was still, the time was theoretically infinite.

Once I caught my breath, I returned to the place I had been when I first landed on Olympus.

There were still twelve thrones spread out in the great throne room, and in front of them, on sofas or tables, or just in the air, the gods lay or sat and exchanged glances.

Only Hephaestus, who had hardened while helping me, stood a little further away with his mouth open.

he said with his mouth

– “Remember… If you can run away, run away…”

I had to run away like that.

As I exist in this world, Troia is destroyed and after a long war, my biological brothers are either killed or enslaved. The biological parents, Priam and Hecuba, also die a miserable death.

…But to be honest, they don’t have anything to do with it. I’ve never seen their faces, and they don’t know me. The first thing I thought of was…

“Mother, Father…”

slaves, shepherds.

My neighbors, a kangchon village nestled in the corner of a mountain.

Will they be safe in the war that lasts for 10 years? Who cares about the lives of slaves in a war where the king and queen die, the walls of Troy that are said to have been built by the gods collapse, and countless heroes end their lives?

‘… I have to run away.’

I had to save them.

Everything I gained in my second life must escape before it burns.

even for me to live

Even after 3,000 years, in order not to die miserably in the stigma that will continue.

Looking back, there was a bronze door that glowed with a dark blue light. A massive gate embossed with the history of the world, from the birth of Gaia to the downfall of Uranus, the defeat of Cronus and the victory of the gods.

The door seemed to be three times my height, so I wondered if it would open…

– Kikii profit.

Surprisingly, it was easy to see beyond. It was all bright light, so I couldn’t see anything right, but I didn’t care and continued walking.

The feeling under my feet was quite strange. It felt like I was stepping on hardened milk, but in the white light, I felt like I was a cereal floating in milk. I even had a delusion that I would become mushy and dissolve into that light.

…and after a long walk.

-chin.

Finally, it feels like something hard is being stepped on.

As I got a little excited and ran faster, the feeling under my feet hardened more and more, and as the luminosity of the white light decreased, it gradually turned into a green landscape. For some reason, I had an unfounded conviction that this path was the right one.

And that conviction was right. Let’s run without breath and look around while panting…

Shallow hillsides are visible. Above it were fences for sheep and goats, and shabby huts made of earth and wood.

“It is our house.”

Oddly enough, it felt like visiting for the first time in decades. I felt a little uncomfortable, but I straightened my clothes and relaxed my neck.

Maybe this will be the last goodbye to the parents who raised me.

I opened the plank door with a gloomy feeling at that thought…

“···mother? father?”

I didn’t hear any reply.

My father was sharpening arrows. After complaining about the feathers on the back of the arrow for a while, he caught a bird from somewhere, plucked its feathers, and attached them to the arrow.

Mother was chopping firewood. As if the ax blade had become dull and didn’t go in well, I was pushing the ax with my weight into the block, stepping on the back of the ax blade with my foot.

Even when I offered to sharpen an ax for free, my mother consistently refused, perhaps because she did not like my work as a blacksmith.

“Just… say you like it then.”

However, now both of them have stopped.

This was the essence of the sense of incongruity.

Backing out the door slowly, I looked around carefully again.

The clouds seemed nailed to a corner of the sky.

The sheep and goats lost their vitality like stuffed animals.

Maybe the earth stopped spinning, and the wind stopped blowing.

“…”

For some reason, tears flow. Wiping the flowing tears, I left the house.

It was the house of Uncle Phillips. As befits a family with no children and a good family, Mr. Phillips cooked for his sick wife with all his heart and then poured porridge into his mouth.

In case my wife’s palate is burned, I blow on spoonful after spoonful.

Uncle Yorgos gathered oil with other uncles and gnomes, brought a pot, and boiled it. And I fried the squid I don’t know where I got it in oil and shared it with my friends.

The members of the meeting ranged from children of the same age as me to senior citizens of all ages. If you look closely, it seems that Yorgos’s own daughters are also there, so he seems to be bribing his wife with squid so that he doesn’t get caught.

Of course, each drop of oil was suspended in the air.

“A place out of the influence of the gods…”

Then, shouldn’t we just go to Northern Europe or the East? Since they are gods in Greek mythology anyway, they will not have any influence outside the Greek world.

“Is it a hammer?”

When you flick your fingers lightly, the handle with a familiar touch returns to your hand. Yes, you can meet Thor with this hammer and Mjolnir, share a horn full of mead, and be reborn as a Viking warrior.

It was natural, but it was hopeless optimism.

Time was infinite anyway, so I didn’t care about anything.

I don’t know if the effect of stopping time applies to me, or if it’s the effect of ambrosia and nectar, the divine food that Hephaestus fed me, but my body didn’t get tired, and I didn’t have to bother with menstruation.

After crossing present-day Macedoia, Serbia, and Hungary without difficulty, I was optimistic that by the time I arrived in Germany, the stopped time would return and the strange Norse gods would greet me.

Of course, all I saw were chiefs leading soldiers in leather pants and drinking from horns.

…Of course, it was in a state of being stopped in time.

Still, I didn’t give up.

Egypt may be different. Osiris, who came back after being broken into pieces, and Horus, the god with the head of an eagle, will greet me alive and breathing.

So this time I headed south again.

. . . It must have been several months. From Byzantium, I swam across the Bosphorus Strait myself and returned to my homeland… Troy.

And again we passed through scattered meadows. Unlike the Middle East 3,000 years after I knew it, desertification hadn’t progressed much here, so there were grasslands everywhere, and farmers and nomads scattered here and there and ate palm trees.

But even in the desert, the sun was still hot. And in order to head to Egypt, I had to touch the desert anyway. After all, I realized it only after touring the pyramids, the palaces of the Egyptian dynasties.

Nothing happened.

It may have taken two years to this point.

Literally ‘I don’t know.’ I just rested and walked again, and the sun stood still in the air.

. . . Maybe Egypt was too close. The Orient, of course, is also attached to the Mediterranean world.

let’s go to india I don’t know the history of Indian mythology, but are there any gods like Vishnu or Shiva that we know about during this time?

···no. It wasn’t India. Didn’t Alexander the Great also conquer India? From the Indus River to the Ganges River, from Punjab to Assam, where black tea is famous, I still saw people frozen.

The citizens of the Indian city-state, praying, bathing and debating among the famous ancient brick cities, seemed joyful and exuberant, but still frozen.

Yes, Northern Europe, Egypt, the Orient, and India were too close. let’s go to china

Enough time.

The past time is 70 years only in my mind, and in reality it is 0 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes, and 0 seconds.

only 0 seconds. Not even an instant had passed. Time is just an illusion that can only be felt in my head.

only 0 seconds. yes i have a lot of time

A lot.

I can do this forever

You can drink up the Atlantic Ocean and swim across the Pacific Ocean. won’t even die It could circle the earth five more times and wait hundreds of years. Until this world wears out and falls down. maybe even hundreds of millions of years. If I were allowed to walk on air, I was confident that I would even go to the moon. Maybe even Mars or Jupiter.

So after that, I gave up counting the years.

After facing the coast of the South China Sea in a place presumably Vietnam, I walked aimlessly along the coast to a place presumed to be the Shandong Peninsula and Beijing.

Still the world stood still.

But the next destination was a place I really didn’t want to go to. I’d rather wait hundreds of millions of years. Seeing the place stop, I felt like I could ‘realize’ this stopped time.

However, I literally came to the ‘Far East’ of Eurasia. There was nowhere else to go.

I crossed Manchuria

came to the Korean peninsula.

This is probably the Han River.

I drank the water of the Han River, which was so clear that it was incomparable to the era I was in, and walked slowly along the sandbar along the river.

There was an unusual sight in the distance.

Children playing with freshly caught fish in earthenware pots, adults lighting a fire near a dugout, and a chief preparing for a human sacrifice with a bronze mirror hung around his neck in the distance, holding a bronze bell and a sword.

It is the same as the imagination of the Bronze Age that I saw in the Korean history class.

So the sight broke me.

Even if he waited for hundreds of millions of years, he would have to keep watching that scene.

It was an unfair bet. I couldn’t win It only delayed defeat until it gave up.

I’ve been scouring the world for hundreds of years at most… isn’t it? Was it thousands of years?

Does not matter.

Because it’s shorter than an instant anyway.

To be honest, if I could only swim, I would have liked to go to Japan as well. And if possible, I wanted to cross the Pacific Ocean and visit Central America.

Maybe there the mythical powers of Greece, fate can’t reach. Then I can find rest.

Then everyone can continue to live while enjoying everyone’s daily life.

Mother and father tend the sheep, Phillips quarrels with his wife, Yorgos plays nice things, the older brother Theo will someday marry a village girl, and Uncle Skleos laments over his disobedient son. .

I lived quietly as if I had gained a third life somewhere, again.

No war… no destruction.

[impossible.]

Why did I just realize it now?

[Fate is.]

Running away was impossible from the start.

[He hugs you.]

Because it’s ‘destiny’.

While the world is silent, a whisper in my ear again.

A voice that once forced me into ignorance and made me not even know my name once.

As if guiding me gently, it constricts me more powerfully than any strict command…

I closed my eyes for a moment.

And it floated again.

It was no longer the bank of the Han River on the Korean Peninsula, which stopped 3,000 years ago.

“…is it a cave?”

[As your pathetic mind understands… yes. This is a cave.]

[Because people don’t understand infinity.]

[That’s why I imagine walls and ceilings that don’t exist.]

– Snip.

-Clap clap clap clap.

It was dark.

It was dark, but there was a very small lantern.

Faint flames from point-like lanterns illuminate the entire cave.

The person sitting closest to the lantern was slowly drawing something from the darkness beyond the flame. It’s like a strand of tousled hair…

[Stop.]

I tried to lightly touch the threads, but he stopped me.

[Your head will burn. You won’t understand.]

Looking around closely, there were hundreds, thousands… no, tens of thousands of such stems. The goddess was quietly pulling out thread by strand from each stem.

Carefully, but through a natural process close to unconsciousness.

As she plucked a thread out of the darkness, its slender figure was reflected in the lantern fire and reflected on the cave wall beyond.

I saw the shadow of the thread.

“What, what?”

It wasn’t just a simple black line drawn on the cave wall. As if… the shadow of something… of a familiar shape…

“···Young kid?”

[This cute appearance makes me happy.]

As I turned my head in the direction of the voice I heard again, the spun threads were being sucked into someone’s spinning wheel.

The goddess who turned the wheel looked down at me, who was small and insignificant, and sneered at me.

[The appearance of those who dare to see with their own eyes what they cannot see, and try to understand with their heads what they cannot understand.]

As the spinning wheel turns, the child’s shadow begins to change rapidly. Just like a flip book animation in which the picture appears to move when the pages are turned over, the appearance of a child, girl, and maiden changes with each rotation of the wheel.

The girl draws water, weaves, hangs out with the villagers, and has a tryst with the man she loves under a tree. And when the woman’s stomach swells, the goddess we saw earlier starts preparing another thread.

[stop.]

– Snip.

And with the sound of metal rubbing together, a woman’s life ends.

During difficult labor, the woman collapses and her husband, exhausted from crying, lies next to her.

I went to the place where I heard the sound of metal…

[Did you say you made this? Leftovers are good.]

under.

it’s scissors

The goddess with scissors cuts off the spun threads and ends man’s destiny.

The process repeats endlessly, countless times.

I have seen countless boys and girls become young men and die again. Get stabbed, get run over by boars, catch malaria, and if you’re lucky, die peacefully…

The numerous shadows came and went like an illusion, and countless threads were prepared.

I know what those threads become when they are entangled.

[You know us.]

It is ‘destiny’.

[We watch over you from the moment you were born.]

[We keep track of every breath you exhale and inhale for all the time you grow up.]

[When we reach the moment when you take your last breath…]

Snip again.

[…cuts the thread.]

I was overwhelmed.

The lives of tens of thousands of people are newly determined even in a very short moment. I watched the process of someone’s life and death over and over again thousands of times.

To them, each person’s life is not insignificant… but it is very small.

Because once every few seconds, humans are born and die again.

“Three Sisters of Destiny…”

[Yes, we are ‘destiny’.]

[The thread we spin is also ‘destiny’.]

[The intertwining of those threads is again ‘destiny’.]

[‘Fate’ is you.]

[‘Destiny’ is your life.]

[‘Fate’ is the world itself.]

The goddesses throw out one word at a time as if explaining indifferently and emotionlessly.

[Of course boy, you can’t run away from yourself, your life and the world.]

The sound of the wheel spinning again, the sound of scissors blades brushing against each other.

[you]

[Troia]

[It must be destroyed.]

And in an instant, all the hands of the goddesses stop.

All at once, they take their eyes off their work and look at me.

All sound ceases, all movement ceases.

A stillness as if the entire universe had stopped engulfs the entire cave.

[…By the way, your thread was there before we spun it.]

The goddess winding the thread slowly pulls out one of the millions of threads.

That one thread was entangled with another thread of a different color.

[Your will has stopped our time.]

[On the topic of mortals who cannot escape.]

I barely made eye contact with them.

[What are you?]