We opened the iron gate and went inside.
Since this was the deepest part, there were quite a few differences compared to the chambers we had passed through until now.
Firstly, there was only one entrance leading forward.
And in the center pedestal, there were two identical-shaped gems: a red one and a blue one that appeared to be the keys to the door.
Even at a glance, they were clearly a ruby and a sapphire.
Wouldn’t it be enough to take these back to live a life of leisure?
“Ark. This is the final question…but it seems a bit different.”
Artemis pointed at the puzzle next to the door.
But she trailed off, saying that she didn’t quite understand the puzzle.
“What’s the problem? It seems impressive for a last question…”
Approaching her side, I started reading the final question.
———————————–
There once was a murderer who killed 28 people but later saved the lives of over 50,000 and became a hero.
Is he a murderer?
Or a hero?
If you think he’s a murderer, take the red key,
And if you think he’s a hero, take the blue key.
Whichever key you choose will lead to a different truth.
———————————–
“Hmm…?”
What does that even mean?
I must have misunderstood, so I read it again carefully.
A person who killed people in the past later became a hero?
In other words…
The act of m*rder and the accomplishments that earned the praise of others happened at different times, right?
To put it simply, this wasn’t a war hero.
Even if you defend your country against enemy invaders, while that might involve taking lives,
As long as there’s a righteous justification of protecting the nation and its people, you can’t be condemned as a murderer.
You could even gain the honor of being called a hero who saved the country.
Then is this a dilemma?
No, it isn’t.
That would be a moral and psychological question about whether it’s acceptable to sacrifice the few to save the many.
But the point of this question…
Is to judge a person’s morality based on two separate, unrelated events.
Artemis was right—this question is strange.
I have to answer with my thoughts on this multifaceted human being.
“Artemis, what do you think?”
“Ark, Rios seems to want to know the thoughts of whoever reaches this point. So my opinion doesn’t matter.”
Artemis, holding both keys, looked at me with complete trust in my decision as she extended her arms, asking me to choose one.
“…”
I picked up the ruby key.
In other words, I judged that person to be a murderer.
Even if they saved more people later, that doesn’t erase their past murders.
You can’t weigh lives in terms of numbers.
That’s just evading responsibility.
The weight of m*rder is something that must be carried for a lifetime.
It’s not something that can be shrugged off halfway through.
Without hesitation, I inserted and turned the ruby key into its slot.
Clunk!
As the door opened, a foul smell that made us pinch our noses emanated from the gap.
“Ugh! What is that smell?”
“Yuck! The smell!! Oh, come on!”
Inside the room, there was a single treasure chest wrapped in laurel branches, and beside it, a partially buried human skeleton in the dirt floor.
That skeleton is probably Rios, the doctor.
“Ark! Look, it’s a treasure chest!”
Artemis, who had been staying far away to avoid getting the smell on her clothes, rushed into the room more quickly than anyone upon seeing the treasure chest.
“Hmph. It’s a treasure chest from 500 years ago anyway. The contents would never be intact.”
“Huh? What do you mean? Look at this.”
Artemis pointed at the laurel branches wrapping around the treasure chest.
“So what?”
“These are branches from the laurel tree in the heavenly Olympus. As long as they’re wrapped around or kept nearby, they prevent any changes in form over long periods.”
“Hmm? So are you saying Rios was a god?”
“Hmm? Even I, a high-ranking goddess, can’t possibly know every minor deity individually. Or maybe he was a human who served some god.”
She answered my question offhandedly, cut the branches off with her dagger, and forcefully opened the chest.
Inside were eight vials filled with red liquid and three sheets of paper.
“What kind of letter?”
I picked up one of the papers.
[To the wise one who has reached this place, I dedicate my truth and serum.]
The first sheet seemed to be a kind of will left for us.
“Artemis, it says this is serum.”
“So what? Isn’t there any precious treasure?”
“Urgh, your obsession with treasure. Come here. Let’s read the letter together.”
Artemis, who had put the vials back into the box, returned to me with a disappointed look and started reading the letter with me.
Let’s see…
What was written on the second letter…
———————————–
It happened when I was 8 years old.
While climbing the mountain with my closest friend from the village, I was bitten by a sudden appearance of a venomous snake.
The bitten area turned black in the blink of an eye.
In a panic, I screamed at my friend to s*ck the poison out with his mouth.
When my hesitating friend refused, I shamelessly blackmailed him, threatening to end our friendship.
I don’t recall my expression then, but I admit it must have been fiercer and crueler than even a street thug in an alley.
Though my friend eventually complied and began sucking out the venom from my leg, a mistake caused his upper tooth to tear his lower lip.
However, my condition didn’t improve.
Eventually, both of us were poisoned and had to rely on each other as we descended the mountain.
I survived once we got to the hospital.
However, my friend, who had less resistance to the poison, succumbed to his illness and passed away.
That’s when I learned.
I learned the dangers of trying to s*ck venom out with a mouth.
I learned that we could have both survived if we had gone straight to the hospital instead of trying such dangerous first aid.
I confessed my sin of forcing my friend to do such a potentially fatal act to the villagers and informed them of this fact.
The villagers all pounded the ground in outrage.
But not at me.
Their anger was directed at the snake.
The next morning…
The villagers waged a month-long war against the venomous snakes on the back mountain.
After wiping out the snakes, they celebrated with snake wine for over a week.
Everyone was relieved and rejoiced that no one would d*e from snakes anymore.
Although I tried to emphasize the dangers of snakes and bleeding, all the villagers did was thank me for informing them about the snakes in the mountain.
I smiled in response, but deep down, I felt utter disdain for their ignorance.
I wanted to give them information, not thanks.
And I wanted to be punished.
But in the end, no one punished me for my sin.
Not the village chief.
Not my family.
Not even the mother of my friend.
If only I had got slapped hard enough to split my mouth open.
If only I had ribs broken from a kick.
If that had happened, I wouldn’t have become such a devil.
———————————–
“Stupid. The important thing wasn’t killing all the snakes in revenge; it’s knowing the correct emergency response. Venomous snakes aren’t monsters unique to that village.”
“Yeah.”
Artemis’s short evaluation encompassed everything.
When I first came to this world, I was also shocked.
The ignorance caused by the low education level here was worse than I imagined,
And contradicting what was considered common sense to them was a brave act.
The second letter ultimately showed that Rios, with his quite extraordinary intellect, eventually became disillusioned with reality but had to suppress it inside.
“Let’s read the third letter.”
“Let’s.”
The third letter will likely reveal the truth of what kind of devil Rios became after suppressing everything inside.
———————————–
For 20 years, each time I looked in the mirror and saw the conflicting emotions of the pain of guilt and the relief of impunity on my face, I slapped my own cheeks.
After my family in the thatched village passed away, I apprenticed under a doctor and eventually became one myself.
Upon becoming a doctor, my first impression was that of injustice.
The world had more diseases than medicine, and countless people died for the lack of it.
I wanted to develop medicine.
Not being content to stay in the city, I traveled around seeking new materials.
I used everything—poisonous mushrooms, animal oils, etc.—for research.
Then one day, while experimenting with various things, I discovered sulphur springs.
While everyone avoided those sulphur springs because of their rotten smell, the local indigenous people washed their bodies with them, and I saw with my own eyes that various skin diseases healed.
I immediately informed the medical community about this information, and soon, there was no doctor who didn’t know the name Rios.
One day, I received a letter.
It was from my hometown village.
The villagers were suffering from unknown high fevers and coughs and asked for free treatment.
What money could the people cultivating these thatched fields possibly have?
I just returned to my hometown to erase the deeds of the past.
Their condition was severe.
All the villagers were suffering from high fever and coughs.
It seemed like an infectious disease, and no one from the surrounding cities even dared to approach, making the situation even harder.
I exhausted my savings to buy medicine and treated them with all my heart.
The fever temporarily broke, but the cough wouldn’t subside.
Hemoptysis started, and people began to d*e one by one.
No medicine I gave helped, so in desperation, I decided to try sulphur.
My overly confident and narrow judgement: if sulfur was good for the skin, sulfur gas might also benefit the respiratory system.
The villagers who inhaled the gas suffered and died.
One of them, writhing in pain, knocked down a torch, and the fire spread to their home, eventually burning down the entire village.
Terrified, I rushed to the nearby city and reported the situation.
An investigation team was dispatched to the thatched village, and soon an official cause of d*ath was announced.
Not suffocation, but burning.
Not gas poisoning, but they were announced as having died from the fire.
In that way, the deaths became attributed not to me, but to a mistake in torch management.
Then the townspeople raised their hands in celebration.
They were relieved that the village plagued by the infectious disease had burned down completely.
And I, the doctor who had gone alone to care for the infected village, was celebrated as courageous.
The same person who had wiped out the population was hailed as a hero named Rios.
Once again, I was disillusioned with humanity and shamelessly hid the truth.
I thought that the guilt of killing people could be compensated by saving ten or hundred times more.
It was a simple and straightforward responsibility for me.
For ten years.
That way, another ten years went by.
Time continued to flow.
As time passed, my medical skills became so adept and refined that people called me a god.
But to me, it was nothing but a defilement of my sacred medical practice with the thought of having killed people.
Indeed.
I felt disillusioned not only with people’s ignorance and indifference but also with myself.
I never escaped from feelings of guilt, and the more people I saved, the clearer the guilt became.
Ultimately, my foolish rationalization that if I saved more people than I killed it would make up for it was nothing but a despicable excuse of a murderer.
It took me until I was over 60 years old to realize this simple truth: human life cannot be calculated in numbers.
Like a ship lost in the vast sea awaiting inevitable storms, I lay awake every night in fear, awaiting d*ath.
On a certain night when I was exhausted and about to collapse,
A sun appeared before me.
That sun was none other than Lord Apollo!
Seeing me, he began with the first words.
Which were…
———————————–
“…”
“…”
Having finished reading the letter, we were unable to say a single word.
Judging by the bloodstain on the word “which were,” it seemed the writer passed away before completing the letter.
28 people killed and 50,000 saved.
That referred to Rios himself.
This was the question that the wise adventurer who had solved the labyrinth wished to know: how would he view himself?
Therefore, the ruby key was the answer Rios hoped for with the final question.
No, not just the final question.
All the questions we had solved.
Rios had repositioned all the mistakes he had made in his lifetime into puzzles.
And calling someone “wise”…
Though he himself had committed mistakes due to ignorance, he was confident that whoever reached this point would not repeat such mistakes, which is why he had used that description.
Doctor Rios…
He hadn’t faced legal punishment while alive.
So perhaps he had created this labyrinth in the distant future, hoping to be called a murderer and criticized, receiving the judgment from some wise individual.
At least, his soul would then be freed from guilt…
“…Shall we go?”
“Yeah.”
I put the broken laurel branch into my bag.
And the letter with the serum too.
“Ark, what should we do with Rios’s remains?”
“Let’s leave them here.”
“They’ll disappear soon without the laurel branches, right?”
“That’s probably what Rios wished for in the end.”
After paying my respects to the remains, I heaved open the last iron gate at the deepest end.
