Chapter 74: Ferryman
"March, look! There's actually a pink butterfly inside the trash can."
Rekka and Stelle proudly hoisted up the giant cockr—butterfly they had just scavenged from the depths of the Belobog-style receptacle.
"For some reason, I feel like this butterfly shares a deep, spiritual connection with me," Rekka mused. He stared intently at the cardboard monstrosity that had crawled out of the garbage. Despite the fact that it possessed the exact anatomical structure, antennae, and horrifying leg-span of a mutated cockroach, his intuition stubbornly insisted that this giant cardboard pest was, in fact, a delicate butterfly.
"...Eh! Look here, March." Stelle pointed a finger at the creature's wings. "There are signatures all over it. Here's one from Caelus, one from Aether, another from Wise, and... Elysia?"
The wings of this giant, pink cardboard cockroach were absolutely covered in dense, frantic handwriting, clearly left by various individuals across a multitude of parallel universes.
"Wait, why do I feel like I recognize this?" Rekka leaned in closer, catching a glimpse of the very top line scrawled near the creature's thorax.
[This is... the treasure of... and... must... hope... kind-hearted...]
The ink was heavily smudged by mystery fluids and cosmic grime, but he could vaguely make out the surname 'You' hidden within the faded characters. Who on earth was that?
The cardboard creature scratched its spiky legs against the floorboards, producing a sound that set their teeth on edge. It suddenly hacked up a small object, dropping it right at Rekka's feet, before twisting its body and gesturing wildly with its antennae toward its own back.
Rekka blinked. A lightbulb went off in his head.
Oh!
This wasn't just a trash bug. This was a cross-dimensional fixed supply station!
"Awesome." Rekka immediately got to work. He pulled out several of his magical, multi-functional cubes, carefully labeling each one with its specific use. He folded the instruction slips, packed the cubes into a small, durable bag, and securely strapped it onto the pink giant cockroach's back.
"Safe travels~"
Rekka and Stelle waved cheerfully, sending the giant cockroach back into the dark abyss of the trash can. When they blinked and looked again, the cardboard monstrosity had vanished without a trace. While Stelle remained squatted by the receptacle, her head practically shoved inside as she tried to deduce where their new friend had gone, Rekka turned his attention to the item the creature had regurgitated.
He picked it up. It was a perfectly polished, shiny coin. The front bore the engraving of a delicate heart, while the back featured a grinning skull.
"Can't tell what it does," he muttered, tossing it into the air and catching it. Might as well keep it.
[Side Quest Completed: Encounter with the Pink Cardboard Butterfly · Xiao Die (1/1)!]
[Item Description: A cardboard butterfly seemingly crafted by Miss Pink Elf. It possesses wise-looking eyes, but for some inexplicable reason, everyone who looks at it always assumes Xiao Die is a giant cardboard cockroach.]
[Yeah, why is that? — Miss Pink Elf♪]
"Do you think it'll come back next time?" Stelle asked, her voice echoing slightly from within the metal cylinder.
"Don't know," Rekka replied, pocketing the coin. "But knowing our luck, probably."
At the exact stroke of midnight, the ambient energy in Rekka's room shifted. It was time for his daily Path switch.
Enigmata.
Stepping into the conceptual domain of the Enigmata this time, Rekka was far better prepared.
He pulled out the thick stack of outlines and blueprints he had carefully drafted during his previous stint under the Path of Erudition. Channeling the reality-warping, truth-obscuring power of the Enigmata, he began to construct something entirely out of nothing.
"How can having just me as the Captain... be enough?" he whispered, his voice layering with the conceptual weight of the Path. "If there is light, there must be darkness."
He dragged his pen across the paper, the ink glowing with a faint, surreal light. "Carrying the expectations of countless World Bubbles, traversing through the turbulent tides of the Sea of Quanta..."
The Ferryman was a lie. And so was the Captain.
"Saving people whose planets are on the brink of absolute destruction, bringing them aboard another Hyperion... but this ship is ultimately too small to hold everyone..."
Rekka's pen didn't stop. He continued to weave the fiction into reality.
"Under the heavy black robes of the [Ferryman] lies nothing but a faceless puppet, an empty vessel operated entirely by my will..."
The Ferryman had no face. That was a deliberate design choice—it eliminated any risk of being interrogated about his true identity or what lay beneath the shroud. Across the vast expanse of the universe, countless souls lost their homes every single second to apocalyptic disasters, both natural and man-made. The [Ferryman] who arrived to save these displaced wanderers... it would serve as another perfect, benevolent alias for Rekka.
"The key is..." he murmured to himself, his pen tip tapping a rhythmic beat against the desk. "...it can't be too specific."
The true power of fiction lay in the negative space—the blanks left intentionally unfilled. Often, the more details one provided, the more logical loopholes appeared. Conversely, if he provided a sufficiently vague yet deeply compelling silhouette, the human mind would automatically fill in the gaps with its own desperate imagination.
The Ferryman would materialize just moments before those worlds faced total annihilation. He would stand before the doomed populace and ask a single, eternal question:
"Are you willing to come with me?"
Those who agreed would board the ship. Those who refused would be left behind, remaining in the graves they had chosen for themselves.
"This setting..." Rekka paused, rubbing his chin as he stared at the glowing text. "Is it a bit too cruel?"
He quickly rationalized it. Agency was paramount. Those who were truly unwilling to abandon their homelands, even in the face of the apocalypse, deserved the right to make that final choice for themselves.
...
"Another destroyed planet."
The Ferryman stood in the cavernous hold of the duplicated Hyperion. Beneath the deep hood of his black robes, only the lower half of a smooth, featureless white mask was visible. The massive deck of the warship was currently packed shoulder-to-shoulder with the ragged survivors of a freshly shattered world.
The refugees who had just lost everything possessed hollow, vacant eyes. Their bodies trembled violently, wracked by a mixture of bone-deep cold and lingering terror. Some huddled together in tight clusters, sobbing quietly into each other's shoulders, while others simply stood frozen in place. They stared blankly through the reinforced observation windows, watching the burning fragments of their home planet disintegrate into the cosmic void.
"Are you willing to live within a World Bubble?"
The Ferryman's voice echoed across the silent deck, synthetic and calm. Several clusters of ethereal, liquid-like matter floated in the air before him, each one emitting a brilliant, inviting halo of light.
"It could be an uninhabited primeval forest. It could be a city of empty skyscrapers. I cannot guarantee the scenery, but I can guarantee your safety. Those willing to step into a World Bubble and start anew may enter on their own."
One by one, they stepped forward. When the very last survivor vanished into the glowing halo of the final World Bubble, a deathly, heavy silence reclaimed the massive cabin of the duplicated Hyperion.
Back in his room on the Astral Express, Rekka exhaled slowly. Being his first time actively ferrying, his experience was admittedly lacking. Operating the [Ferryman] puppet remotely to receive those refugees had taken a significant mental toll.
He wasn't entirely sure if funneling those displaced souls into the World Bubbles anchored to his fictional Hyperion was the absolute right thing to do. But standing by and watching billions of people die? He knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that that was wrong.
The expressions of the refugees were burned clearly into his mind. Fear. Despair. Numbing shock. Suspicion. But the exact moment that massive, impossible warship had materialized out of thin air above their doomed world, all those fractured emotions had coalesced into a single, unified feeling: hope in the face of absolute despair.
'Are you willing to come with me?'
When he had projected that question across the dying planet, the masses had looked up at the Ferryman as if they were gazing upon a savior. Thinking back on it now, the sensation was incredibly strange. It was a paradoxical blend of feeling like a high-and-mighty deity looking down upon mortal suffering, while simultaneously feeling like a completely powerless bystander. All he could do was offer them a Path to survival. He couldn't walk it for them.
"Yeah," he muttered, a small, satisfied smile touching his lips.
This wasn't bad at all. As a Nameless of the Astral Express, doing good deeds without seeking fame or glory was practically part of the job description. Operating under the guise of the Ferryman suited him perfectly.
The power of the Path of Enigmata was truly terrifying in its scope. It could drag fictional narratives kicking and screaming into reality, all while retaining a certain ethereal, dreamlike sense of unreality. Those refugees were genuinely saved. Their world was genuinely gone. And that duplicated Hyperion, now carrying the seeds of their future, was quietly anchored in a hidden, silent corner of the Sea of Quanta.
A sudden knock at his door pulled him from his thoughts. He opened it, expecting to see a certain pink-haired archer, but the person standing in the corridor was not March 7th. It was Long Night Moon.
"Oh, it's you," Rekka said, leaning against the doorframe. "Why come looking for me in the middle of the night? I thought March was sleepwalking again."
"You seem to have created something very interesting just now," Long Night Moon observed, looking at Rekka with a gaze full of deep interest. "A unique power emanated from the Express and returned carrying countless, faint echoes... and the source of that conceptual power is the [Enigmata], isn't it?"
Rekka smiled calmly. "Exactly."
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