The Golden Apple (11)
Frondier left Poseidon and flew back to the capital.
As he flew, Frondier muttered to himself, “Does the Golden Apple really exist…?”
“What the hell is the Golden Apple? And where did you hear about it?” The crow asked from beside him.
Unable to explain, Frondier gave a wry smile. “I heard it in a dream.” He offered a ridiculous excuse.
“Really? That’s common.” Gregory believed him far too easily.
“It’s common?”
“Yeah, prophetic dreams. I heard that God sometimes gives them to humans.”
In a world with Gods, prophetic dreams weren’t that strange.
Frondier scratched his cheek. There was a common thought from his previous world that had transformed into a kind of creed in this one.
‘I don’t believe in God.’
‘Because I don’t believe in fate.’
In his previous world, most people didn’t believe in God or fate.
In contrast, events in this world fundamentally shook Frondier’s beliefs.
“...Fate.” Frondier murmured quietly.
The crow flying next to him spoke. “I heard from that fussy warden. Marco said the God of Fate is on his side.”
“That’s what this is all about.” The story of the Golden Apple, which had been paused midway, was about to begin again.
Did that mean that something like the Trojan War would also erupt in a similar fashion?
“So, Frondier, you can’t help but believe in fate now, can you? It’s real.”
“This isn’t fate; it’s the Gods forcing things to happen.” To Frondier, the Gods were nothing more than cowards. No matter what fate held, the Gods would do their best to follow it.
“But believing in something makes it real, doesn’t it?”
“What kind of delusional talk is that?”
“It’s like stocks. If everyone believes a stock will go up, it will.”
“That’s because people buy it, so it goes up. It’s not that they predict it will go up and then buy it. It’s the other way around.”
“Whatever the reason, it goes up.”
“...That’s true.”
Likewise, regardless of whether fate actually existed or not, if everyone believed in it and acted accordingly, events would eventually unfold according to fate.
‘Come to think of it, this damn machine is completely dead now.’ Frondier looked down at his smartwatch, which he had almost forgotten about.
He still wore it, but it had been quite a while since it had last responded. It had started to become extremely infrequent after he met Satan, and after the Manggot War, it stopped working altogether. On the first day he boarded the ship to Agoris, it only displayed a message saying that the World Quest had begun, and then fell silent again.
He didn’t know if the event that had just unfolded in the capital of Palma was related to the game.
But regardless, the smartwatch was eerily quiet now.
‘Well, it was always a mysterious object. It was strange that it was giving me quest notifications in the first place.’ Thanks to the smartwatch, Frondier had been able to gauge the direction this world was heading. Of course, he knew a lot because he had already played the game, but he had used the smartwatch to find out when things would start, if they had already started, and the details of the events.
Frondier suddenly stopped.
The crow, which had been flying next to him, flew ahead for a while before returning.
“What is it, Frondier?”
Frondier didn’t answer.
He was now caught up in a question he had never considered before, a question that was too new. He stared silently at the still-motionless smartwatch.
“...What is the main quest in the first place?”
Though Frondier often called it a trash game, from his perspective, this was no longer a game. There were remarkably few elements that would lead him to think of it as such.
The only reasons he considered it a game were that he had played a game with the exact same settings and worldview in his previous world, and the occasional quest notifications from this smartwatch. Even those notifications had stopped now.
‘This is a game, so it’s only natural that quest notifications would pop up.’
But think about it the other way around.
What if this wasn’t a game?
What if it was reality itself, just like the life he had lived in his previous world?
‘If the main quest popped up in my previous world, what would I think?’
Going to school, getting a job, getting married having children.
If the main quest suddenly popped up in that kind of life…
And if the events it spoke of were guaranteed to happen…
Frondier stopped in his tracks.
“...That would be fate.”
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