I'm Stuck on a Remote Island With the Male Leads - Chapter 199

***

The sea was still choppy.

Diego stood on the bow of the warship with Marcel holding a telescope.

The remains of the destroyed Alea Island were visible through the fog. The island itself was too large.

Diego looked at the shattered island of Alea with some trepidation. From a distance, it looked really, really unremarkable.

“You were trapped there?” Marcel asked in an angry voice.

Diego, who was standing there with his arms crossed and a serious look on his face, glanced at my brother.

“They distorted space and time to make it undetectable to passing ships.”

As Diego said, the unusually scattered fog around the island proved that the island retained remnants of its magic.

“Have you gotten an answer from His Highness? I think we might be able to get in if we take a detour at a slightly faster speed.”

Diego shook his head at Marcel’s question. He took the telescope from Marcel and scanned the island again.

They’d spent too much time looking for the island, and too much time looking for a way in. Now that they had found a way in, all they had to do was get on the island and secure the evidence.

But Enoch hasn’t given the green light yet. He hasn’t been reachable since last night.

‘The order is that we must find the island and take it before the Peony Blossoms do anything.’

Diego hesitated for a moment, then made up his mind.

“Let’s go in.”

At Diego’s command, Marcel gave the order to enter.

-pow! boom! boom!

A long plume of red smoke shot up into the sky. It was clearly coming from the land. Soon, it turned into a huge flame and took over the sky.

“What, what……!”

Marcel was about to give the order to enter the island when he looked up in panic.

Diego had seen that flame before.

Right there on Alea Island.

Diego quickly turned to Marcel and rescinded the order to enter Alea Island.

“Wait, we’ll wait here. We’ll wait for the Crown Prince to arrive.”

If Margaret was here, surely Enoch would be with her.

“What? What do you mean, what do you know about that flame?”

“It’s a signal from Lady Floné.”

“Wait, Lady Floné……? What, a noble lady sends a signal like that? No, more importantly, how did she get here, and how did you know it?”

Marcel’s questions poured in, but Diego didn’t answer any of them clearly, instead giving short instructions.

“I’ll explain when His Highness arrives. Turn the ship around.”

***

Sitting on the sandy beach, we listened as Yuanna told us the story of the dimensional rift.

How, a thousand years ago, a rift appeared in the dimension and the chasm slowly began to widen.

“A rift caused by the overuse of magical and divine powers, that’s interesting.”

[T/N: magical power and mana are the same.]

Enoch said as he listened to Yuanna’s story, and it was indeed interesting.

This is a world of magical and divine powers, and the people’s dependence on them is great.

People don’t go to doctors when they’re sick, they go to priests. Most of the advancements in society and technology have also relied on magical and divine powers.

This naturally led to the growth and corruption of the Wizards’ Association and the Holy See, which wielded this power.

Jenas has used this social structure and the desires of the people to control the Peony Blossom for over a thousand years.

According to Yuanna’s findings in the Holy See, the dimensional rift was also caused by the overuse of that power.

“If that’s true, then maybe this world would be better off without magical and divine powers,” Arthdal muttered as he listened to Yuanna’s story.

Indeed, one of the purposes of Jenas’ plan to cause a dimensional rift was to use the aftermath to destroy all magical power in this world.

Of course, his idea of draining the mana of everyone in the world so that he could control it himself and then rule over everyone was insane.

“Is there any way to close the dimensional rift?” Enoch asked.

Yuanna nodded. “I can close it.”

“How?” I asked her, a little surprised by her answer.

She smiled bitterly. “If the rift in the dimension is a side effect of the overuse of power, it would be best if we could get rid of it.”

“Is that possible?”

“Yes. I can. My divine power is special. You’ve heard of me, the saint who appeared after a hundred years. I was born for this day, I think.”

Yuanna glanced at us one by one as if making an important announcement.

She added, “My divine power is not only healing, but also purifying, and the purification power is greater than you might think.”

Purification power. Was that why Yuanna was on the list of test subjects? Come to think of it, Jenas seemed to think of her as a bit more special. The first saint to appear in a hundred years.

“Oh, and Margaret, I read your letter from the other day,” she continued, “about the magic stone that Jenas created for use in a world without magic. Destroy it yourself. I don’t think I can control it.”

Just thinking about Jenas makes my head hurt. I rubbed my throbbing forehead and asked, “But no matter how great the divine power is, if that power is used by a single person, isn’t there a price to pay? I don’t think it’s an ordinary power.”

Yuanna smiled brightly at my question.

“Oh, I love it when you worry about me, Margaret.”

“Don’t joke around.”

“Don’t ask me that. It wouldn’t make any difference to know, not when we don’t have a single alternative.”

My heart sank at her words. Her refusal to tell me made me even more worried. They say that with great power comes great responsibility.

Seeing my worried expression, Yuanna took my hand in hers.

“It’s nothing to worry about, I promise.”

Whether these words were just empty words for me or not, I would only know when the situation actually came to pass.

Just then, Enoch pointed to Eunji on my shoulder.

“So what happens to Eunji? If the magical power disappears, will the monsters in this world…….”

“All the monsters will disappear.”

“What?!”

“But I don’t know about Eunji, she swallowed magic stones. I heard that magic stones are powers that remain intact even after the dimensional rift closes.”

“You do realize that mana exists within our bodies like air, right? When a dimensional door opens, it collapses. Normal people can’t even use their mana because the flow is disrupted, and I think they wanted to have the power to control it intact.”

“This magic stone is the one that controls the flow of that disrupted mana, and they planned to use it to rule the continent when the rest of the populace couldn’t touch it, until they realized the experiment had failed.”

I nodded, remembering what Kayden had told me before.

“Right.”

Hearing that, I was once again troubled by the fact that Eunji had only swallowed seven magic stones. It would be nice if he ate the rest of the magic stones that Archbishop Rinnehaon had presumably stolen.

“The problem isn’t Eunji, it’s actually Margaret.”

“What? Me?”

“Margaret’s mana doesn’t flow the same way as ours. She’s a soul who crossed dimensions once.”

After saying that, Yuanna looked at me with a pained face.

“She was the only one on Alea Island who could use mana. The system Anata devised for the island didn’t work for Margaret. It’s possible that my purification power doesn’t work on Margaret.”

As I listened to Yuanna’s words, I suddenly remembered how my body had reacted when the Peony Blossoms had used the magic stones. When a rift appeared in the sky, my body hurt terribly, as if it was reacting to the rift.

“Isn’t it a good thing that it doesn’t work? That means Lady Floné has the mana all to herself.”

At Arthdal’s question, Yuanna gave me a troubled look for a moment.

“That’s……. No. That would mean you can’t close the dimensional rift, which is what Jenas wanted.”

All this time, I’ve been thinking in my head. I have to cross the dimension. But now it was time to draw concrete conclusions.

Why me? If I hadn’t crossed the dimension during the experiment and lived in Korea, I wouldn’t have had to make this sacrifice.

No. In that case, we would all have died on the island. Besides, didn’t Yuanna sacrifice herself on the island to save us all?

I turned to Yuanna with a determined look on my face.

“I understand what you’re saying. You’ll do your part to the end. I’ll do my part, and we’ll all give Jenas a real ass-kicking.”

Then Arthdal asked me what an ass-kicking was. I was averting my gaze, not wanting to explain, when Enoch suddenly grabbed my arm.

His grip on my arm was too strong. It hurt a little, but I couldn’t say anything. The look on his face was devastating.

“No way.”

“No way?”

I asked back, a little puzzled, but Enoch’s face was very determined.

“You’re trying to sacrifice, you always do.”

“We’re all making sacrifices.”

Didn’t Yuanna say just a moment ago that she was sacrificing herself? She hadn’t said it directly, but she was sacrificing something, too, and Kayden was sacrificing himself. By binding Jenas within himself.

“Enoch, nothing is more important than survival, and if you have to choose between the sacrifice of many and the sacrifice of one, you know what the answer is.”

First, everyone must live, and only then will anything else follow.

Hearing my answer, Enoch stared at me, his mouth tightly shut, as if he were angry about something.

At that moment, a huge magic circle formed in front of us, and one by one, the wizards of the Magic Tower arrived.

Yuanna and Arthdal, who had been watching me and Enoch, quickly moved out of the way.

I sat face to face with Enoch and we were silent for a moment.

“If nothing is more important than survival, why are you willing to sacrifice yourself?”

Enoch asked after a long moment of silence. He slowly reached his hand up to my cheek. His firm fingers touched my cheek.

“Whatever you are planning, I would rather do it.”

“You can’t do that.”

I grabbed his arm urgently. I could never see Enoch sacrifice himself for me. Never.

“Why? Margaret, why can you sacrifice, but not me?”

Enoch looked at me in incomprehension.

“I would give my life for you, because you are more important to me than my own survival.”

It suddenly dawned on me that I’d been thinking about Enoch too much.

Since when, I wondered, had I fallen in love with him?

I realized now that this wasn’t a passing feeling, or a suspension bridge effect.

Slowly, like paint on water, like clothes soaked in a drizzle, very slowly, I had grown to like Enoch. So much so that I couldn’t resist watching him sacrifice himself for me.

Was it from the first time I woke up on the island, or the first time he protected me from a monster, or the night he wandered through the monster-infested forest looking for me when I disappeared, or the time I used Tentathionem as an excuse to kiss him?

When I realized that he liked me, even though he knew I was Lee Jinju, even though he knew I was Margaret who had been mean to him in the past?

Or maybe it was when he confessed to me under the beautiful moonlit sky before we entered Jenas’s cabin?

“As you said, it could be a momentary emotion created by the circumstances. You can deny it if you want, but it doesn’t take away from the time we’ve had together.”

The man who said he would hold off on telling me his true feelings for fear of burdening me, Enoch. To this day, he has waited patiently, not forcing his feelings on me for fear of burdening me.

And even now, without a moment’s hesitation, he tells me that my life is more important than his own survival.

But this time, there’s no point in anyone else’s sacrifice but mine. I don’t want Enoch to make a senseless sacrifice solely for my sake.

That’s why I can’t accept his heart regardless of how much I like him.

“Enoch, you have no reason to give your life for me. You heard the Saintess, this is something I must do.”