This was a sealed library.
Within it lived an exceptionally petite girl dressed like a scholar—Cardinal.
More than two hundred years had passed since she fled into this library and began her hidden struggle against Quinella. Throughout that time, Cardinal had searched endlessly for an opportunity to defeat her—and at last, that opportunity seemed to have arrived.
Quinella was the Highest Minister of the Axiom Church, better known by the name Administrator.
The relationship between the two was extremely unusual.
Quinella had originally been born from a political marriage between two ruling families.
Possessing exceptionally keen powers of observation, she continued investigating the world around her until she uncovered the secret of the Sacred Tongue: it was actually a system-command language. By repeatedly killing animals and other natural creatures, she accumulated experience and raised her System Control Authority, allowing her to execute increasingly advanced commands.
Eventually, after attaining extraordinarily high authority and merging herself with the Cardinal System, Quinella was worshiped by the people of Centoria as a Child of God. At the age of thirteen, she founded the Axiom Church, appointed herself its Highest Minister, and assumed the name Administrator.
Fearing that someone else might someday acquire authority equal to her own, she established countless laws and restrictions. The people of this world became trapped in a stagnant society, with nearly everyone assigned a predetermined role from birth.
That way, the humans of this world would never struggle against one another, never advance, and never accumulate the experience necessary to threaten her rule.
She also constantly monitored those who were unable to obey the laws, especially anyone who attempted to resist them.
Those people were captured and transformed into Integrity Knights, becoming her loyal enforcers.
Half the members of the Integrity Knight Order had once possessed exceptionally high Transgression Quotients. Quinella did not execute them because people with such rebellious qualities became extraordinarily powerful after being transformed.
The other half came from the noble families of the Four Empires. Unlike ordinary citizens, nobles were permitted to receive an education and learn how to fight.
Those who emerged victorious from their tournaments were then deceived and transformed into Integrity Knights.
After ruling the world for more than seventy years, Quinella discovered that she faced a serious problem. She began searching for suitable candidates and eventually selected ten girls, all of whom bore the name Lyceris.
The original Lyceris was the daughter of a furniture craftsman. Quinella intended to turn the girl into a backup for her own Fluctlight.
A Fluctlight could normally store only around one hundred and fifty years' worth of memories, and Quinella's was nearly full. That was why she set her sights on Lyceris.
Quinella planned to overwrite Lyceris's Fluctlight and transfer her own consciousness data into the girl.
However, the procedure was extremely dangerous. Quinella had already attempted the experiment once and lost consciousness, so she did not dare overwrite her original self immediately.
It was like transferring a completed document to another device. To prevent its loss if something went wrong, anyone sensible would first create a backup.
Quinella therefore intended to confirm that she had been successfully copied into Lyceris before abandoning her original body.
Unfortunately, the procedure had one fatal flaw.
The instant the transfer succeeded, there would be two Quinellas.
Would the Quinella whose Life was nearly exhausted willingly allow herself to be destroyed?
Of course not!
Yet the existence of two completely identical people created something resembling a logical contradiction. As the two Quinellas stared at each other, both suffered an overwhelming mental shock. Had the situation continued, both of their Fluctlights would eventually have collapsed.
At that moment, the secondary personality long hidden within Quinella's consciousness finally emerged.
That personality was Cardinal, the Cardinal System's sub-process.
When Quinella forcibly merged herself with the Cardinal System, its sub-process had unexpectedly gained awareness and developed into a second personality within her mind.
The two personalities had fought for control before, but Cardinal had ultimately lost and been sealed away.
Quinella's attempt to copy herself created an unexpected error that gave Cardinal the opening she needed. She seized control of Lyceris's body in an instant.
That action, however, made both sides realize that they were no longer the same person. There were no longer two Quinellas in the world, and the threat of mental collapse disappeared.
That was why Cardinal now regretted intervening. She should have remained hidden and allowed both Quinellas to collapse.
At the time, however, she had not known that Quinella would destroy herself if the contradiction continued.
The instant Quinella recovered from the shock, she and Cardinal began fighting.
They possessed identical memories and the same level of authority, so logically, the battle should have ended in a stalemate.
Instead, Cardinal lost.
The cause was the difference between her body and Quinella's. Their system commands neutralized each other, leaving them with no choice but to engage in purely physical combat. Cardinal's smaller, weaker body put her at an insurmountable disadvantage.
Defeated, she ultimately fled into this library.
The moment she stepped outside, Quinella would detect her and immediately launch an attack.
More than two hundred years had passed since then, and Cardinal's chances of defeating Quinella had only grown slimmer. During that time, Quinella had established absolute control over the Human Empire. She gathered experience that should have belonged to countless ordinary people and concentrated it within the Integrity Knights, creating thirty high-level warriors.
With that army at Quinella's command, Cardinal had even less hope of defeating her.
Over the past two centuries, Cardinal had continued observing changes throughout the world through several familiars—units whose existence Quinella already knew about—while searching for an opportunity.
Now, the familiar stationed at the far end of the Northern Mountain Range—the one Cardinal treasured most, and the companion who had remained with her the longest—had witnessed a shocking upheaval.
Ten Integrity Knights were surrounding and attacking a young man!
Even more astonishingly, that young man could use magic—or rather, abilities executed through system commands.
Under normal circumstances, those commands had to be activated verbally.
Yet he was casting them without chanting anything at all.
That blatantly violated the rules of this world.
Even though Quinella had merged herself with the system, she still could not alter its fundamental rules. She was merely an Administrator, not a developer.
An administrator simply possessed far more advanced permissions and functions than an ordinary user.
Since Quinella was not a developer, she could not alter the underlying code or freely reshape the world.
Otherwise, she would have become invincible long ago. If she could modify the world however she pleased, why would she ever need to create the Integrity Knights?
She could have marched into the Dark Territory alone and annihilated it.
But because she was only an administrator, even Quinella remained bound by the restrictions of the underlying code. At the system's maximum permitted output, the strongest art she could execute was merely capable of wiping out several hundred inhabitants of the Dark Territory in a single attack.
Furthermore, to cast such an art—a system command—she had to remain within its effective area. That meant she would also be caught within the enemy's attack range, where any counterattack would reduce her Life.
Of course, Quinella had long realized that merely possessing administrator privileges was not enough. For more than two hundred years, she had continuously experimented with methods of modifying the code.
The Integrity Knights were one of the results of that experimentation.
However, she still had a long way to go before she could alter the world itself.
Which brought Cardinal back to the original question.
How was that young man casting arts without chanting?
Even more shocking was his apparent immortality.
Had his Life somehow been locked so that it could never fall any further?
Wasn't that simply cheating?
Wait...
Cheating?
Cardinal's pupils widened as a possibility occurred to her.
That young man was not a native of this world.
He might be one of her creators—or at least someone from the same world as them.
A person from the real world had entered this world once again!
(End of Chapter)
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