I was dreaming.
—Atone.
It was a terribly distasteful dream.
—Atone.
Everything kept rolling further and further toward the worst possible outcome.
—Atone.
I wanted to do something, tried to do something, but my actions only steered things in an even worse direction.
It was exactly like being dragged into a bottomless swamp.
The more I struggled, the deeper my body sank.
And then, once my entire body was swallowed by the mire, finally— I jolted awake.
It seemed I'd been dreaming.
An utterly wretched, irredeemable dream.
The first thing I saw upon opening my eyes was an unfamiliar ceiling.
As I stared blankly at it, I sensed someone moving right beside me.
"Shun! You're awake?!"
I turned toward that panicked voice, and there sat Kathia.
Her face was a jumbled mess of anxiety, exhaustion, and relief — the same cocktail as her voice.
"Are you okay?"
"Y-Yeah. I'm fine."
Caught off guard by the urgency radiating off Kathia, I blurted out an answer without thinking.
"Thank goodness. I kept casting healing magic on you, but you wouldn't wake up, and I thought… I thought you might never wake up again."
So Kathia had apparently been continuously casting healing magic on me the entire time.
No wonder she looked so exhausted.
—And that's when it hit me: Kathia burst into tears.
"Huh? Wh—!?"
"I'm so glad. I'm really, really glad…"
At a loss for what to do about a sobbing Kathia, I floundered helplessly.
"I'm fine. See? Not a scratch on me. Right?"
It was a clumsy attempt at comfort, I knew, but I figured it beat doing nothing. I gave her my best show of being in good spirits.
In truth, my body felt perfectly normal.
No injuries. No pain.
If anything, I felt slightly sluggish — probably just from waking up — but otherwise I was the picture of health.
…Physically, at least.
"Are you really okay? Your complexion looks awful."
Kathia was more worried than I'd ever seen her.
She'd been crying, too, so apparently I was in worse shape than I thought.
While I'd been unconscious, I'd been having nightmares — I knew that much. Even after she'd been healing me, I still wouldn't wake up and was thrashing around the whole time. Of course she'd be worried.
"Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just… a little thirsty, maybe?"
I'd been drenched in sweat, and my clothes had soaked it all up like a sponge, sticking to my skin. I'd clearly lost a significant amount of fluid. My throat was bone dry.
"Oh. Let me go get some water and a cup."
Kathia immediately rose to her feet and jogged out of the room.
Watching her go, I sank back heavily into the bed they'd been keeping me on.
In the corner of my vision — or rather, in the back of my mind — floating text hovered.
It felt exactly the same as when I'd used Appraisal.
That text had been radiating an unpleasant presence ever since I opened my eyes.
Just being aware of it made me feel sick.
And yet, unlike with Appraisal, I couldn't make it disappear.
There, displayed in stark characters, was the word: Taboo.
Suppressing the nausea, I forced myself to focus on those ominous characters.
And then the Taboo entry expanded into a menu.
『Taboo Menu System Overview Detailed Explanation of System Components Update History Point Ledger Reincarnation History Special Item n%I＝W』
"Ugh!"
Just opening the menu hit me with a fresh wave of crushing nausea.
It was like being shown something concentrated and putrid — a foulness that oozed from every character.
A chill crawled up my spine, driven by something that bypassed my thoughts and emotions entirely.
Instinct screamed at me to close the menu immediately, but I barely managed to hold back.
Gritting my teeth against the nausea, I opened System Overview.
『System Overview Pre-System Status MA Energy Post-System Status』
The moment I did, another surge of nausea struck.
It was almost as if the words themselves were whispering to me.
—Atone.
Thoughts — no, curses — hammered into me like blows.
It made me queasy, filled me with revulsion, and I deliberately tried to ignore it.
The paradox of trying not to notice something while being acutely aware of it.
Still, if I didn't do that, I felt like I'd lose my mind.
Honestly, I didn't want to look at any more of this.
But I had to.
I needed to verify whether what I'd seen in that dream was real.
The dream I'd had was the story of a single, irredeemable world.
I hadn't seen it through anyone's eyes — it had been shown to me from a detached, bird's-eye perspective. The past of this world.
It was just a hunch, but what I'd seen felt separate from this Taboo.
Someone had shown it to me, perhaps.
As for that someone's intentions — I'd set those aside for now.
What mattered was that I had to confirm the truth.
I commanded my trembling body onward and went through the entries one by one.
Pre-System status. MA Energy. Post-System status.
What was written there was nearly identical to what I'd seen in the dream.
The world had been a planet not so different from Earth before the system was activated.
The only difference noted was the existence of dragons — creatures that didn't exist on Earth.
The text was cold and clinical, listing facts without any hint of emotion.
And yet, as my eyes traced the characters, those thoughts continued to batter me.
—Atone.
I pushed them aside and kept reading.
Humans had discovered an unknown energy called MA Energy and begun using it — all without realizing it was the very life force of the planet itself, and that using it would drastically shorten its lifespan.
And when that usage touched the dragon's scales, humanity was nearly annihilated.
The one who protected humanity from the dragon was the goddess
But the dragon, having written off humanity and the planet alike, departed.
Then, as MA Energy began to run out, the planet's collapse countdown began.
Humanity forgot the debt of gratitude they owed for being saved and tried to use the goddess Sariel as a sacrifice to regenerate the planet.
The one who flew into a rage over this was Administrator Grielis Todies.
He activated the system to save the goddess Sariel.
To simultaneously fulfill two goals: the goddess's wish and the prolonging of her life.
That was as far as I'd read when Kathia returned with a cup and a pitcher of water.
"Shun!? Your face is completely white!"
Was my complexion really that bad?
Kathia rushed over, set the cup and pitcher aside, placed a hand on my forehead, and began casting healing magic.
This wasn't something physical — healing magic wouldn't help.
But her concern soothed the ragged edges of my heart.
"Thank you. I feel a bit better."
I meant it sincerely, but Kathia wasn't convinced. She kept staring at me with worry in her eyes.
Between the night sweats and the cold sweat from the menu, my throat was even drier than before.
I reached for the cup Kathia had set down.
But before I could pick it up, she grabbed it herself, poured water into it, and brought it to my lips.
Was I about to be fed water like an invalid?
I wasn't even a patient. This was a little embarrassing, to say the least.
"I-I can drink on my own."
"No, you can't!"
Overpowered by Kathia's uncharacteristic pushiness, I let her do it.
Cold water flowed into my parched throat.
I drained the first cup in no time, and whether she could tell it wasn't enough or not, Kathia had a second cup ready right away.
After finishing the second cup, I could finally breathe.
Even as I'd been drinking, I'd been scanning through the Taboo menu.
It matched the dream for the most part.
There were gaps —
I closed System Overview.
I wanted to check the other menus too, but I didn't have the mental energy for it.
I briefly opened a few of them. Detailed Explanation of System Components was packed wall-to-wall with text so dense it made my stomach turn just looking at it.
Reading every word of that cover to cover would be grueling under normal circumstances, but with every sentence draining my mental stamina like this, there was no way I could get through it anytime soon.
I gave up and moved on to Update History, which turned out to be just as densely packed.
That was where my willpower finally broke.
I closed the Taboo menu.
But even after closing it, the word "Taboo" hovering in the back of my mind didn't vanish.
And neither did the thoughts seeping out from it.
It wasn't as bad as when the menu was open, but the thought of this going on indefinitely made my skin crawl.
I let out a long sigh and pushed myself off the bed.
"Shun, you should really keep resting."
"No. I need to go."
For a while now, there had been a commotion coming from downstairs.
This must be the second floor of some building.
As if drawn by something, I left the room and descended the staircase.
Kathia followed close behind me.
And at the bottom of the stairs stood the person I had seen just before I lost consciousness.
"Could you tell me more about that? In detail?"
The white girl turned at the sound of my voice.
Multiple eyes locked onto me with unwavering focus.
The same eyes that had killed Brother