Chapter 191: Intervention
Ren stayed on his knees for long as he kept transferring into them with everything that he had, wanting to make sure that he gave it his all. He gritted his teeth and kept going.
'Come on, work, I need the two of you, for the sake of everyone, for the sake of everybody. Everyone needs you, everyone needs both of you.
So this is me begging, don't go, stay, stay with me.'
He poured everything into them and finally, he lost consciousness. Falling forward, he hit the ground between them, passed out.
Ren was pulled into a dream. He was floating, suspended somewhere he did not know. The sky was bright and the wind felt good on his skin.
"Where am I?" He wondered. He forced himself to stand. It seemed like he was standing on water somehow. He looked down and saw a reflection of himself there.
"Where am I?" He muttered.
"Seems you have done a lot of adventuring. For you to come here, you must have pushed yourself close to death." Ren heard the voice of the goddess that had first allowed him to come to this world. He looked up to see her, and all he could see was a being of light standing on the water and looking right at him.
"It's you." He muttered.
"Yes, and it's been a while. You've been up to a lot, it seems."
"Yeah, it's been a lot of stuff," Ren said. He let out a laugh. "It's been fun," he added. He had come a long way since the very day that he arrived here. A lot of things had changed, and even though it was not as easy as he thought it would be, it still turned out to be the best time for him.
"But the fact that you are here now tells me you faced your fair share of hardships as well. You are not dead, but you are close to death." She said.
"Will I survive?" Ren asked.
"Certainly, this is barely anything to you. You simply used yourself as a catalyst. Risky, but something you could handle," she said and started coming close.
"But it allowed me to get in contact with you."
"Hmm? You were trying to get in contact with me?"
"Yes, I was. There was a bit more I wanted to discuss with you now that you were more established in this world.
I wanted to have a bit of talk about the scenarios around this world, demons and ancients." She said calmly.
"What do you want me to do about them?" Ren asked.
"Nothing much, simply look out for anything that has to do with them. You'd surely come in contact with them and their plans to destroy or cause chaos.
There is no right path in life, but there is the one that leads to less destruction and chaos, and I'm hoping that you'll be taking that path."
"I'll be taking the path to ensure that my people are safe, that's what I can promise. I know it might sound selfish and self-serving, but I really do not want to risk the lives of those around me for the sake of the entire world." Ren explained to her calmly.
"I see," she replied. "Then if you choose to do that, use your own people to help others as well, spread your banner wider and hale more under your net.
I'd appreciate if you could at least do that much to ensure that a life or more could be saved from the doom that looms ahead of everyone. That being said, that's enough for now." She finished speaking and then changed topics.
"So you met with Crimson, that's pretty nice. I did not think you would meet a god already." She said.
"It's more like he met me," Ren replied. "He was not what I'd expect from a god. Even in all his eccentricness, he is pretty nice."
"You would think that now. But that was not always how that chaos god was. He was something else in the past and definitely not someone you'd want to meet.
Even now, I'm not sure how someone can change that much."
"That's because I no longer like the stress."
Crimson suddenly appeared there behind Ren. He had cup noodles in his hand and was eating out of it vigorously.
"How did you access here?" She asked him.
"Come on, you might outrank me, but I'm still powerful. I can at least enter somewhere like this for a bit." He said casually.
"So why are you here?" She asked.
"Well, because you took my person and are talking to him without me, I wanted to be sure that you had nothing planned." Crimson said.
"You do know that I was the one that brought him, right? His life here is simply because of my action, something a god of your status will not understand," she stated clearly.
"Yeah, yeah, I have no power over death and reincarnation, that's fine and dandy, but now, hah, he is here, he is kind of mine," Ren said and then slurped on his noodles.
"Uhm, I'm not anyone's property." Ren tried to argue.
"Shuu, gods are talking." Crimson said and then walked past him.
"I know you are planning something. There has never been a time that you have not been planning something. The issue is I can't figure out what exactly you are planning and what it has to do with Ren.
But hear this, in all your grace and goodness, please do not cause him harm that can't be changed or stopped. Do not ruin the life of someone because of your desire to make shit happen," Crimson said to her clearly.
"This discussion is over. Your task remains to watch over this world and not ask me questions on my task. You can speak and guide Ren, but the true control remains with me." After she said that, she snapped her finger, and the surroundings vanished, and what remained was the room that Crimson normally stayed in.
Crimson walked to his couch and sat down, still with his noodles. He ate it in quiet.
Ren looked at Crimson on the couch, slurping his noodles with the same energy he brought to everything.
"What was all that about?" Ren asked.
Crimson chewed for a moment. Swallowed. Looked at the cup.
"She is a being that works very closely to rules," he said. "Laws. Karma. Logic. The fundamental structure of how things are supposed to work." He picked up another mouthful. "The reason you ended up here, in this world, has to do with those kinds of things. Debts and balances and reasons that exist on a level most things never get close enough to see."
"You knew I was reincarnated," Ren said.
"That is a given. I am a god," Crimson said it without looking up. "I know you are not from this world. I don't know who you were before you came here or what arrangement was made to get you here, but that much is obvious." He slurped again. "Do not look at me like that, I genuinely do not know the details. That is her jurisdiction, not mine."
Ren folded his arms.
"Should I be worried about it?" he asked.
Crimson was quiet for a moment that had actual thought behind it rather than just time passing.
"No," he said finally. "Not right now. What you are dealing with is something well above where you currently sit. If you were close to divinity, if you had real proximity to that level, you might be able to start understanding what is happening. But you are not there yet, and trying to pry into it from where you are standing would only cause damage. To you and to the people around you."
He set the cup down on his knee.
"Playing with things that concern gods and deities is dangerous even for gods," he said. "I did not intervene because I have answers for you. I intervened because I did not want her talking to you without me knowing what was being said."
Ren noticed something then.
In everything Crimson had said since they arrived in this space, he had not used her name once. Not a single time. He had referred to her as she and her and nothing else, and the consistency of it was not accidental.
There were rules even Crimson could not step around.
And whatever those rules protected, her name was part of it.
Ren filed that away and said nothing about it.