CHAPTER 75: WILL OF THE WORLD

What Yelena and Charlotte had said earlier about Mika’s abilities was, in fact, entirely true.

Because even though he possessed divine abilities, the kind of power that would make kingdoms kneel, that people would be willing to betray everything for, they came with a price.

An unbearable price.

His gift gave him god-like potential, the power to bend the impossible into reality, to create miracles out of thin air.

But as the old saying went, great power didn’t come free.

And in Mika’s case, the consequences that came along with that power were so horrifying that most people, even if granted the same ability, would refuse to use it.

They’d rather remain ordinary for the rest of their lives than suffer through what he endured every time.

It wasn’t as if the side effects were life-threatening. They didn’t shorten his lifespan, nor did they leave permanent scars on his body or health. But they were...cruel in their own way.

Short-term, yes, but intense enough to make anyone dread them.

One example stood out.

Whenever Mika used his ability to reconstruct a spell inside his mind, to build an entire "blessing" or magical ability from scratch, he was essentially running the most tedious, most complicated process imaginable.

Just like Yelena had explained, it wasn’t just "casting" magic; it was designing it from the ground up.

And doing that made his mind go into overdrive.

Like a supercomputer pushed past its limits, overheating and burning out, his brain would suffer the same, except instead of processors frying, every nerve in his skull felt as though molten iron was being poured into it.

It wasn’t the kind of pain you could grit your teeth through.

It wasn’t even comparable to broken bones or burns.

This was worse, the kind of pain that would make most people collapse, screaming, praying for it to stop. And he had to go through it every single time he created something.

And that was only the first part.

Because every time Mika needed to use his abilities, he had to step into something called the Lucid Realm. Yelena had touched on it before, a hyper-accelerated mental space where time moved on an entirely different scale.

One second in the real world could stretch into weeks or even months inside his mind.

It was the only way he could fully construct his creations, because magic like his wasn’t something that could be built in a few seconds of thought. It took time. Sometimes an enormous amount of time.

And the Lucid Realm allowed him to do it.

But that time dilation came with a cost.

Even a small spell, something as simple as the little boat they were sitting on right now, could take him multiple days to complete inside that realm. When he returned to reality, only a second might have passed, but in his head, he had lived those days.

And for creations on a much larger scale, like the massive ship he had built before, it took months of work inside his mind.

Months of painstaking effort.

Months of enduring that mind-searing pain.

Months of mental exhaustion so deep that when he finally returned to reality, even though no physical time had passed, his body felt like he had been through war.

So, every time Mika used his power, he wasn’t just "casting magic."

He was stepping into an isolated prison of his own making, building reality from scratch in a place where time crawled, where pain lingered far longer than it should.

And then, when the work was done, he would step back into the real world, smiling as if nothing had happened.

With such conditions tied to the use of one’s ability, not to mention the incomprehensible mental strain of constructing an entire spell or blessing from the ground up, it was only natural that no one else could wield such a power.

And yet, shockingly...

This was not the reason Mika avoided using his abilities.

But in the past it had been.

In the past, he had struggled. Badly.

The pain alone had been unbearable, that agony in his skull with every creation, every careful weaving of magic, and the loneliness was something worse.

Every time he emerged from the Lucid Realm, to him it felt as though months or years had passed, yet everyone around him behaved as though only a minute had gone by.

That feeling...that dissonance...it was like waking from a dream to find that the world had been frozen in place, while you had aged a lifetime inside.

It haunted him.

It became a nightmare, one he relived every time he dared to use his abilities.

But Mika was not the kind of person to break easily.

Through relentless training, through sheer force of will, he taught himself to endure the time dilation.

To accept the pain. Years of effort turned what once shattered his mind into something he could now dismiss as...an annoyance.

The agony in his head was now nothing more than a thorn in his side, irritating, yes, but nothing that could stop him.

And the time dilation?...He treated it as a long work shift on a complicated project. Mentally draining, certainly, but he had adapted.

No normal person would ever "get used to" such conditions...But Mika had.

Because in this world, even though his family was already considered the strongest, he knew strength was no guarantee of safety.

There were threats, hidden and visible, and he could not rely solely on his bloodline’s reputation to keep his loved ones safe.

So he endured.

He persevered, pushing himself past limits again and again, not for glory, not for recognition...but to build enough power to protect his family. That thought alone gave him the drive to go all the way to the end, no matter the cost.

But even so, these were not the reasons he now avoided using his powers.

No. The true reason was...much simpler.

Almost laughably so.

It had nothing to do with strategy or physical strain. It was something far more personal. Something almost childish.

It involved...sleeping.

To put it bluntly, it was as simple as a child being afraid of nightmares.

But before explaining that, before speaking of this main consequence, there was another matter.

One that came not from using his abilities, but from simply having them.

For some reason, possessing such power gave Mika a...connection. To what, exactly, he could not say for certain.

It was like a thread binding him to something far greater than himself, something vast, ancient, and all-encompassing.

The Will of the World.

Or...perhaps "the conscience of the world" would be a better term. A guiding force that touched all things, seen and unseen.

Mika didn’t know what to call it.

He had spent years trying to research it, experimenting, observing the way it would whisper to him in moments of quiet or pull his thoughts toward certain paths. Yet no matter what he tried, he couldn’t pin down what it really was.

The closest he could describe it was exactly that, the Will of the World.

A presence that seemed to steer the course of events, subtly shaping the fates of people and places.

Sometimes he felt it like a gentle hand on his shoulder, urging him toward something. Other times, it was like a faint whisper in the back of his mind, saying...not yet.

Mika didn’t know why he was connected to the Will of the World in such a way.

Through all his research, and he had done a lot of it, he had never once found mention of anyone else experiencing anything even remotely similar. It was as though he was the only one in the entire history of recorded knowledge to have this strange tether...this awareness...this link.

And that alone made it unsettling.

Maybe, he sometimes thought, it was because of his ability.

A divine ability. One that, by all logic, should not exist in this world. Maybe the Will of the World recognized that it was an outsider’s power, and because of that, it treated him as an outsider too, something to be examined, connected with, perhaps even...controlled.

Or maybe it was something else entirely. Something he couldn’t even begin to imagine.

What he did know, however, was that this Will of the World seemed to focus on him more than it should.

It paid attention.

It watched.

And, over time, Mika had come to believe that it had...two sides.

He called them "Benevolence" and "Malevolence."

The Benevolent side, if you could call it that, treated Mika like a cherished child. A kind, gentle mother figure who constantly showered him with gifts, opportunities, and impossibly fortunate coincidences.

It wasn’t subtle either.

There were times when he would stumble through a portal into what should have been a barren cave, only to find an entire hoard of treasure piled neatly in the center, as though someone had been saving it just for him.

Or he’d be digging through the ground for mundane resources, and his hand would close around an ancient artifact of immeasurable value, something historians would have sold their souls to find.

Too many times, things like that had happened.

Too many "coincidences" that were far too precise to be chance.

It was almost as if this unseen entity was actively trying to win him over. Like it wanted him to think of it fondly. Like it was courting his trust.

But then...there was the other side.

The Malevolent side.

And it was nothing like the first.

Where Benevolence wanted to protect him, Malevolence wanted to break him. Hurt him. Kill him. It was as if this other half couldn’t bear his existence and wanted to erase it entirely.

It could be just as sudden, just as unpredictable.

The same way one portal had led him to treasure, another had opened to a nightmarish abomination, a creature so powerful it could slaughter S-Class Blessing wielders in an instant.

Or the way he would sometimes be walking down an empty road, minding his own business, when the sky would split and an asteroid would come hurtling toward him, not toward the city, not toward the ground at random, but specifically toward him.

It was...deliberate.

And yet, no matter how hard he tried to understand it, there was no pattern. No set rules. He could go weeks without a single incident, and then have both sides, blessing and curse, act on him within the same hour.

He had poured years into researching it. Studying, testing, cataloging every "incident" to try to find meaning.

And eventually...he gave up.

It was too foreign. Too alien. And ultimately...unchangeable.

He accepted it. This was his life now, one foot in fortune, the other in disaster. Sometimes the Will favored him. Sometimes it tried to kill him. There was no stopping it.

And right now...

The reason Mika was standing in front of the rift instead of sleeping in his bed was also because of the Will of the World.

Sometimes, instead of simply tossing fortune or misfortune his way, it would call to him. Not with words, but with that faint, undeniable tug in the back of his mind, like an invisible thread pulling him somewhere.

And this time, that pull had brought him here.

This portal...this strange tear in reality...he could feel it. The same presence that had thrown treasures and horrors in his path before was inside it.

The problem was...Mika didn’t care.

Not about treasure. Not about artifacts. Not about secret opportunities. He didn’t like dealing with things he couldn’t fully understand, and the Will of the World was exactly that.

He wanted nothing to do with it.

But the Will didn’t play fair.

He knew, just knew, that this rift wouldn’t close until he went inside...And if he refused?

It would make something happen. Some new chain of consequences that would force him to enter eventually.

It wasn’t about keeping the portal from affecting others. No, the Will didn’t care about "others." It wanted him.

So here he was.

Looking as irritated as a child being dragged somewhere they didn’t want to go.

And the worst part?

He had no idea whether the other side of this rift held some golden fortune waiting to make him rich...

...or some hideous, world-ending beast that would swallow him whole.