Two-and-a-Half-Star Special Salvage: Demon King's Earthly Paradise! Yae Gaki Learns It! Entering the Mokumokuren Labyrinth

On the barren land of Everworld, where nothing remained, someone walked aimlessly forward, measuring the earth's distance, time, history, and future with his legs.

The blazing sun was gone, and the silver moon had vanished.

All life and organic matter had already turned to nothingness long ago.

Someone had once asked him what meaning there was in remaining self-aware every moment and continuing onward after everything had disappeared.

But existence itself was meaning.

If someone remembered the past, then that past existence was meaningful.

Suddenly, the person stopped the footsteps that had risen and fallen for who knew how many years, and raised his eyes toward the lightless sky.

Those pupils seemed to contain the ultimate truth of everything, as though all the answers had been written within them.

The man sensed the ripples coming from beyond the endless river of time, branching into countless paths and extending without end.

Thus, he wondered.

"Possibility...?"

He murmured softly, lowering his eyes.

He glimpsed another self.

He glimpsed a beautiful past in which so many things had yet to happen, and there was still time to make amends.

After a long silence and a fleeting pang of envy, the man's five fingers tightened, gathering everything into "one."

The infinite possibilities and branches ended there, while the countless lives and sufferings became nourishment for his state of mind.

He sighed calmly,

"Don't become... like me."

"Don't become... like me."

That lonely sigh, like a phantom dream, sank into the depths of memory.

Uesugi Tetsu opened his dazed eyes. The warm afternoon sunlight fell into his pupils, revealing an unfamiliar ceiling.

"Uesugi-kun, you're awake?"

Yagyū Shion's voice came from beside him.

Uesugi Tetsu looked over and saw Yagyū Shion, dressed in martial-arts robes and smiling, along with a plate of peeled, neatly cut