The Male Lead Is Obsessed With My Health – Chapter 265

Author: Asternkm

The ruins, their entrance collapsed, were glowing as they were densely covered in mysterious characters.

Standing before the ruins, where an ominous energy surged as if it might explode at any moment, I sank into unwelcome thoughts.

Just where had Dad been, and what had he been doing, to end up connected to something like this?

‘Where else—he must have gone searching the Otherworld for clues to save me.’

Even though I already knew the answer, it didn’t make me feel any better.

“Is Dad an idiot or something.”

Why is everyone around me an idiot?

“Now that we’ve seen it, let’s go back.”

“We came all this way—why would we go back now? Ah, Luka, you should go back.”

“What?! What are you planning to do?!”

Luka grabbed me, trying to stop me, but after coming all this way, I’d be too frustrated to even sleep if I left without learning anything.

‘In the end, the secret has to be in these ruins.’

The characters covering the ruins were in a script I’d never seen before.

But somehow, I knew what it was.

‘Ancient Divine Script… maybe?’

Perhaps because of that, what radiated from the letters was a type of power I’d never encountered before. It wasn’t magic—so the only thing I could call it was an ability.

The ruins were definitely active.

And—

‘I can feel Dad’s presence.’

Had Dad been swallowed by the ruins? Or had Dad activated them himself, leading to this situation?

The moment I realized that a chain of events I’d thought had nothing to do with me was actually connected to Dad, my heart grew heavy.

It felt like a strong resolve was welling up inside me—like this was something I absolutely had to resolve.

“I think I need to take a closer look.”

“What are you trying to do?!”

“I’m going to get closer.”

“You don’t know what might happen! You could die!”

Luka desperately tried to stop me. From his perspective, I was just someone he’d met a few hours ago, yet he was worrying this much about my life. It was… how should I put it.

“Luka, you’re really meddlesome.”

“If you’re human, you try to stop someone who’s walking straight toward their death!”

“Not everyone. Only people overflowing with humanitarian concern.”

“Seriously, what kind of life have you lived—wait, what are you really doing?! It’s dangerous!”

“It’s fine. I don’t plan on dying that easily.”

Besides—

“Sometimes, even when you know it’s dangerous, there are things you still have to do.”

Perhaps because the entrance had collapsed, the ruins—now inaccessible to anyone—were emitting an unstable aura. It was rough and menacing, as if they wanted to destroy the world itself.

‘Ruins…’

To adventurers, ruins were dreamlike places where one could obtain ownerless relics. But to mages, they meant something a little different.

“They’re the last remnants of an ancient civilization left on this land—and proof that a god once manifested here.”

After all, even magitech, the most advanced field of study in this world, was said to have begun with mages researching ruins.

Thump.

As I stepped close enough that I could almost reach out and touch them, a loud pounding echoed—whether it was my heartbeat or the sound coming from the ruins themselves, I couldn’t tell.

Thump, thump.

My master had said there was no way any ‘properly functioning’ ruins were still left on this land, but—

‘Looks like you were wrong, Master. There they are.’

“When I get back, I’m definitely teasing him with this.”

Grinning mischievously as I imagined my master’s face when he’d be mocked, I very carefully reached out and placed my hand on the runes carved into the ruins.

‘Cold.’

An unfamiliar force pouring out of the letters surged violently into me.

I’d thought it was some kind of ability, but once I actually accepted it, I realized it was neither mana nor an ability. It was a kind of energy I’d never felt before.

Arrogant. Savage. Something entirely new.

‘It’s devouring my mana.’

Like something starving, it began greedily sucking in my mana. At this rate, mana exhaustion felt inevitable.

And yet, I didn’t pull my hand away—because by resonating with this power, I could at least glimpse the condition of the ruins in fragments.

‘I felt this same energy from Dad.’

The rough, feral power rising from the ruins was identical to what had reduced Dad’s body to such a ruined state.

“…Was Dad swallowed by the ruins?”

But that didn’t quite fit. The very thing driving Dad to move right now was also this power.

Without it, he wouldn’t even be able to move in that condition. As things stood, Dad was practically a corpse.

‘What are these ruins, really?’

Duke Gremwart had said these ruins could revive the dead.

But did they truly have that kind of power?

‘Resurrection belongs solely to the domain of gods.’

That was why star-ranked mages dreamed of completing resurrection magic circles—because such a thing fundamentally shouldn’t exist.

‘If the goal is to save someone, turning back time is supposedly less taxing.’

But this world doesn’t have gods.

So does that mean these ruins hold power comparable to a god?

I narrowed my eyes at a contradiction I should have realized long ago. In my fixation on finding Dad, I’d let too many clues slip by—and now they were finally falling into place.

‘And it’s not like they just revive someone for free.’

Ruins that resurrect people through human sacrifice. At the very least, it seemed like over a hundred thousand lives had already been offered—and yet the young lord of Gremwart still hadn’t been revived. They’d even opened gates to parallel worlds just to secure more sacrifices.

Which meant reviving a single person would require even more lives than that.

Even if we lowballed it at one life per million, that exchange rate was absurdly inefficient.

Once raised, my doubts only grew.

There was no way ruins that demanded such devilish acts would grant only resurrection.

‘There’s something more.’

And I had a strong premonition that Dad was tangled up in it.

“Tell me.”

I want to know more.

Kuuung.

As if responding to my words, the ruins shook violently.

When I infused mana into the ruins with clear intent, the structure—which had been greedily devouring my mana—suddenly reacted with rejection.

Crack.

My arm throbbed from the rampaging energy, as if it meant to crush me—but I barely managed to hold on to the power as it tried to pull away.

“No. I’m not letting go. You swallowed my mana—now you pay the price.”

Even if the ruins wanted to push me away, it wouldn’t be easy. All the mana it had absorbed from me was now fused with its own power.

If I were just an ordinary star-ranked mage, I’d have lost this contest long ago, but—

‘So this is what “rank” means.’

It wasn’t difficult at all. If anything, it felt effortless.

I realized then that it was because my rank was comparable to—or perhaps even higher than—that of the ruins.

‘I’ve always wondered what rank was actually for.’

It took facing ruins that had devoured over a hundred thousand lives for me to finally feel it.

Rrrrnnnng.

The sky darkened. The earth roared, and the ground around us began to leap upward on its own. The ruins were desperately trying to shake me off, and I clung on even more stubbornly.

I could feel the mages of this world gathering around me, drawn by the sudden abnormal phenomena.

“-!”

“–!”

They were shouting something, but the density of the energy enveloping this place was so different from the outside that not a single word reached me.

Rrrrkk.

The ruins were trying to collapse the world. Unable to shake me off directly, they were attempting to sever their own terminal connection to this world.

And then, they sent their will to me.

Are you willing to let this world be destroyed because of you? Or will you let me go?

“Don’t make me laugh.”

Since when did you care about someone else’s world?

“You’re the one who clung to this world and sucked it dry like a parasite, you bastard.”

I could see the mages struggling in desperation, trying to separate me from the ruins—but no matter what they did, they couldn’t even get close, repelled by the shockwaves of our struggle.

“And this world will be destroyed because of me?”

That was the real joke.

“This world is already destroyed.”

It was a realization that came to me suddenly.

This world doesn’t exist. I had merely arrived at a single moment from a time when it still had existed.

Whether it was because I was a mage, because my rank had risen, or for some other unknown reason—I didn’t know. But I already understood it.

Which meant I also knew that no matter what I did here, nothing would change—not the future, not anything.

“And you think you can threaten me with that?”

That really rubbed me the wrong way.

As the struggle intensified, the backlash grew more violent. The ruins howled in agony.

Crack. Boom.

The moment my mana, which had infiltrated the deepest layers of the ruins, surged violently—