For now, he was still Mujun. But for how much longer?
He might still be able to endure that pain now. But one day, that feeling would erode him piece by piece. Not by destroying his memories. Not by erasing his face. But by making him consciously choose to let go. Not because he forgot. But because he wanted to stop feeling different.
And if he reached that point, then he truly would be gone. Not because the system deleted him. But because he himself chose to release his existence.
Mujun knew it would happen. He was experienced enough to recognize the patterns of destruction. So, what was the solution? If he couldn't find another Awakened Soul—why not create a new one?
The thought emerged out of nowhere. Simple. Direct. Unadorned. Mujun fell silent. A possibility he had never considered before opened up in front of him. He stared at the white space of Hasyara, then at the panel before him.
"I am truly a genius."
Merit was the currency in Hasyara. With merit, almost anything could be done. Creating a new world was possible. Resurrecting the dead was possible. Altering the birth conditions of a soul was also possible. As long as the amount of merit was sufficient, the system would execute it without emotional constraints or moral considerations. Including one vital thing: awakening a Sleeping Soul into an Awakened Soul.
The thought revitalized Mujun. He rediscovered the direction he had briefly lost. If he could awaken a Sleeping Soul, then he would no longer have to be alone.
However, after further thought, that wasn't enough. A newly awakened Awakened Soul would still have a high probability of choosing to return to sleep. Just like the others. Mujun couldn't possibly watch over or accompany them at all times. Ultimately, the same problem would recur.
He hit a dead end again. Then came the next question: If the problem was separation after reincarnation, why not ensure that he and that soul were always in the same world?
The problem lay in the fundamental nature of the soul. Every soul is unique. In Hasyara, their forms looked identical—faceless white figures. But their essences were different. The system recognized those differences. Because of that, the probability of two souls being born in the same world consecutively was minuscule, nearly impossible.
The number of worlds in the universe was infinite and constantly growing. The number of souls in Hasyara was also increasing. Combinations between the two were almost impossible to repeat with the same pattern.
Yet, that didn't mean worlds and souls were eternal. A soul with a negative merit value would undergo a purification process. This process eroded the soul, like rust being cleaned from iron. The goal was to return the total merit to zero. After that, the soul would reincarnate again.
If the merit remained negative after the next life, the purification process would occur again. This cycle repeated. If the erosion happened too many times, the soul would eventually vanish completely.
Worlds also underwent a similar process, but the mechanism was different. If souls collected merit, worlds collected something called Fate.
Mujun did not have a complete understanding of Fate. However, he and the other Awakened Souls had a hypothesis. Fate was something the world absorbed from the merit of the souls born within it.
A simple analogy: If the soul is the tenant, then the world is the innkeeper. The soul "pays" with merit to obtain certain birth conditions—talent, ability, social status, life opportunities. The world provides facilities according to that "payment."
During their lives in that world, souls can perform good deeds to increase their merit. The world indirectly facilitates this. If a world only absorbed without giving the opportunity to gain merit, no soul would be able to maintain its balance. The system would collapse.
Therefore, the world created structures: conflicts, social positions, vital roles, great threats. All of these served as opportunities for souls to generate merit.
Take Crocus, for example. Nestal, Pritty, Reina, Leo, Rugentta, and Brienna were born with abilities and positions far above average. That was no coincidence. They had "paid" with a vast amount of merit to obtain those conditions. Crocus provided the roles and situations that allowed them to re-collect merit on a grand scale. However, as a consequence, many of them spent almost all their merit just to be born with that privilege.
This did not apply to Awakened Souls. Awakened Souls could determine for themselves how much merit they wanted to use for their birth conditions. They could suppress their usage to a minimum. Consequently, they were often born in the lowest conditions—without talent, without status, full of misfortune.
Mujun and the others concluded that worlds tended to "dislike" Awakened Souls, as they disrupted the balanced distribution of Fate.
Given this, Mujun's primary problem became clear. As long as the system recognized two souls as distinct entities, the chance of them being born together repeatedly was nearly zero.
So, the question changed. How do you make the world perceive two different souls as a single unit? If the system recognized them as one, then they would always be bound to the same world.
Mujun reached another impasse. The information he possessed was very limited. All his knowledge of the world came from the reincarnation experiences of the Awakened Souls. Every life they gathered served as data. They shared observations, organized them, and then formed hypotheses. These hypotheses were then tested in the next life.
It was not uncommon for those hypotheses to be wrong. Such errors often resulted in losses, even negative merit. But through that process, they slowly began to understand the patterns of the world.
Now, Mujun no longer had anyone to discuss things with. No matter how fast he analyzed, without another perspective, the results remained limited. Many ideas were not born from data alone, but from intuition and imagination that appeared suddenly. Without a thinking partner, the process became far more difficult.
Even so, that didn't mean he had no way to get answers. In Hasyara, as long as one had merit, almost nothing was impossible. If he wanted to, he could directly use merit to ask for the answer to his question. The system would provide it.
However, his habit as an Awakened Soul made him reluctant to do so. Using merit to answer confusion felt like a waste. Furthermore, there was an event in the past that had traumatized them all.
At one time, the Awakened Souls concluded that the fastest way to collect merit in the world was by teaching "good knowledge." The problem was, they couldn't agree on the definition of "good knowledge."
Teaching someone not to kill was clearly considered good. But what about killing in war? What about killing a criminal to prevent a greater evil? Was that still a crime or actually a virtue?
If even a fundamental question like that had no clear answer, how could they possibly teach anything to others with certainty? A mistake could result not only in failing to gain merit but in actually worsening the state of the world and generating negative merit.
Finally, they made a joint decision. They pooled their merit and asked the system to provide three sentences about "good knowledge." They thought the required cost would not be large. It was only the first attempt.
What happened was quite the opposite.