Greed spat out a mouthful of water, then coughed violently for a long while, nearly choking himself to death.
"This is what you call 'nothing worth hiding'?!"
"There really was nothing worth hiding. Stop pretending. What, are you some poor little thing who gets traumatized by the end of the world?"
"But this is too... Tell me how it was destroyed first."
"Two countries went to war." Anatoly shrugged. "There was a tiny little clash at sea. One of them opened fire without authorization from his superiors, and his subordinates faithfully carried out his orders. Then things spiraled out of control, and in the end, it became irreparable."
Greed suddenly remembered that the plane crash which had sent him through time and space seemed to have happened amid a barrage of shells. Now he knew where those shells had come from.
Anatoly seemed to see through his thoughts. "You died relatively early. More accurately, the day I sent you back was relatively early, so you didn't know what happened afterward. The fighting was unbelievably brutal."
"Nuclear war?"
"Of course. That was the only possible outcome in the end." Anatoly lowered his eyes. "Nurse Chen's younger son went to war. I pulled him back when he still had one last breath left, but his body had already died. He couldn't remain in his original world, so I could only send him over to you."
"No wonder." Greed shook his head. "Then didn't you do anything to stop the war?"
"That was exactly the problem. I tried practically every method, but it seemed unavoidable. After investigating, I found that this might have been our problem."
"What do you mean?"
"Our repeated trips through time and space caused that universe's stability to plummet. Once stability declined, chaos followed one after another, and certain