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ArabicArknights: How Did I Actually Become the Doctor? — Chapter 52
Chapter 52: The Mastermind Spins Another Web
In the chaotic haze of the dream, it felt as though someone was gently cupping your hands. Traces of crimson blood still stained the corners of her mouth, yet she looked at you with a quiet, devastating stillness. Her expression was a tender, agonizing blend of sorrow and a faint smile.
Her hair fluttered against a background of absolute, blinding white.
You slowly looked up. Long, straight black hair. A highly distinctive headband.
No. No, no, no.
Why is it Priestess?!
[Initiating shutdown of the Warp Engine System?]
Gwah! You snapped your eyes open, your body bolting upright from the sterile hospital bed like a dying carp desperately leaping from a dry pond.
What kind of ridiculous, cursed nightmare was that!
The current dynamic between you and Priestess was supposed to be one of bizarre, mutual terror. In your mind, she was a terrifying cyber-ghost haunting the system architecture. In her mind, you were a temporarily dormant Gravity-type War Criminal resting up for your next atrocity. Both sides firmly believed they were the weak, helpless victim, while utterly convinced the other party was a deranged lunatic.
“Doctor.”
The sudden voice sliced through your lingering panic. You looked down to see the person who had apparently been keeping watch by your bedside. Kal’tsit stood there, her face a mask of absolute severity, dressed impeccably in a crisp medical uniform.
“I believe we need to have a proper talk.”
The moment those words left her mouth, a cold sweat began to bead at the back of your neck.
A massive miscalculation. You had gotten a bit too absorbed in your recent technical research and completely forgot what kind of unhinged nonsense you might have blurted out in your sleep.
Seeing the newly awakened Doctor fall into a heavy silence, Kal’tsit struck while the iron was hot, attempting to force a breakthrough. “The fact that I could wake you again means I already understand everything you were hiding from me. I will not hold your past mistakes against the brand-new you. You can trust me.”
No, no, no! Saying something like that just proves you don’t know a single thing, Kitty! This isn’t the kind of secret that can just be brushed under the rug!
Your internal facial expression management was crumbling by the second. Did Kal’tsit’s understanding of your ‘dark past’ seriously still stop at the level of Sarkaz internal politics? Did she just think this was about you backstabbing Theresa?
Watching the Doctor’s expression grow even more unreadable, Kal’tsit felt a surge of vindication. It was as if she had finally chiseled a microscopic crack into that flawless, smiling mask he had kept welded to his face ever since his awakening in Chernobog.
After all this time, have I finally seen through his true thoughts? Kal’tsit’s tone grew more confident, pressing the advantage. “After the last incident, I tracked multiple personnel, reviewed your movements extensively, filled in the missing operational gaps, and combined it all with that encrypted document you didn’t have time to destroy…”
You closed your eyes in sheer, unadulterated despair.
“…Those strings of data you wrote are the encrypted cipher you used for secret contact with Theresis, aren’t they?” Kal’tsit concluded, her voice carrying the weight of a judge delivering a verdict. It must have been engineered to be overly complex for the sake of absolute secrecy, which was why neither she nor PRTS had been able to decipher the underlying language.
You felt your soul attempting to leave your body.
God, my living ancestor, please stop guessing. You were genuinely about to burst out laughing from the sheer absurdity of it all.
Wait, why was the original Doctor such a wicked bastard! You really hadn’t left the poor feline a single scrap of useful information!
How in the world was a normal person supposed to respond to this!
Kal’tsit suddenly leaned in closer. Her forehead almost touched yours. Her piercing green pupils stared down into your grey ones with an oppressive, suffocating intensity, the stray strands of her hair lightly brushing against the shell of your ear. “Doctor. Even now, are you still not prepared to admit it?”
No. The little cat had worked so hard to put these puzzle pieces together. You simply couldn’t bear to keep her in the dark anymore. Your moral conscience had finally triumphed over your gamer reason!
Kal’tsit’s slightly cool fingers reached out, gently but firmly pinching your chin, forcing you to maintain eye contact. “Doc-tor?”
You swallowed hard, summoning every ounce of your courage, and spoke in a small, defeated voice.
“…Everything you guessed is absolutely right.”
Hilarious! If your conscience could actually beat your reason, you wouldn’t have built the Aether-Phase Engine in the first place!
Only those who lose the game are called war criminals. Only those who get caught are called traitors!
Once the first lie slips out, the subsequent ones flow like water. You let a trace of melancholy bleed into your eyes. “I only just remembered… Did I once know a person with pink hair?”
Kal’tsit’s fingers stiffened. She slowly released your chin and sat back heavily in her chair. Looking at the Doctor’s perfectly crafted expression of confusion mixed with deep guilt, she remained silent for a long time.
“As I thought,” she finally whispered. “You’ve remembered.”
As I thought, you betrayed Theresa.
Kal’tsit stood up, walked over to the ward door, and locked it with a heavy click. For the next five minutes, she delivered a brief, clinical overview of Babel’s true history. She focused entirely on the essential timeline, deliberately skipping over the more sensitive, agonizing details of the civil war.
You listened with rapt attention. Once she finished, you lowered your gaze, pretending to process the weight of the past. Then, you looked up and asked a quiet question. “Kal’tsit. Why do you subconsciously assume in your narrative that the previous me definitely should have helped Theresa?”
“This…” Kal’tsit faltered, the clinical detachment breaking for a fraction of a second.
Whenever she encountered an impossible obstacle, her subconscious reaction had always been to seek out the former you. Much like a daughter’s blind admiration for a father figure, she instinctively felt that you could solve anything. But the eventual betrayal had been too abrupt, too brutal. Her heart had been left with nothing but shock and bleeding wounds. She couldn’t understand—or perhaps, was no longer willing to try to understand—the psychological motives of a traitor.
“You should still remember the grand project you were originally supposed to supervise, Kal’tsit.”
You smiled gently, your voice dropping to a soft, dangerous register as you broached the ultimate taboo. “I also just remembered it. That project… the one that would be considered utter insanity by the modern people of Terra.”
Kal’tsit’s pupils instinctively contracted. He remembered?
You did your best to maintain a relaxed, non-threatening posture, waving a hand to signal for her to calm down. “I’ve lost my previous memories. I can only logically understand that past ‘me’, but I cannot empathize with him. Nor do I currently possess the motive to act the way he did.”
You paused, letting the silence stretch. “But I think… for someone willing to endure tens of thousands of years of absolute isolation, all to strive for a single possibility in the distant future, that ‘me’ must have loved his civilization very, very much.”
“He surely wouldn’t mind lending a hand to help another fledgling civilization grow. But the absolute premise of that charity is that it doesn’t involve the Originium that stores his homeland.”
In the original timeline, the Doctor had indeed done exactly this.
“I found some highly classified data fragments recently. What caught my eye was a specific description from a bystander regarding her Arts. It said, ‘The Princess will make flowers bloom from suffering.'”
A very poetic expression, assuming it wasn’t meant to be taken literally.
“Before her, whether it was burning, cutting, or industrial polishing, Originium only ever changed its physical form. It never truly disappeared. But that description gave me the distinct impression that she might have truly mastered a more fundamental, destructive use of Originium.”
Kal’tsit tried her absolute best to maintain her icy composure, but her heart was racing against her ribs.
This was the truly terrifying part of the Doctor. As long as he noticed a single, microscopic flaw in the narrative, he only needed a few days to follow the trail, unearthing secrets that had been buried for centuries and dragging them out into the blinding sunlight.
Even if the clue was just a seemingly insignificant line of poetry.
“His civilization has been sealed away,” you continued, your tone turning distant. “He probably doesn’t mind the little animals of this era enjoying the technological legacy of his homeland.”
“But this time, the fundamental nature of the threat was different. The true essence of Originium is the storage and transcription of information.”
“She certainly didn’t have full administrative permissions. Nor could she distinguish whether the Originium crystal in her hand stored mere environmental records, or the complete, transcribed data of a living, breathing person.”
You suddenly leaned closer to Kal’tsit, closing the distance until you could whisper directly into her ear. “Perhaps to him, this was making flowers bloom using the flesh and blood of his compatriots.”
“Is it still romantic now?”
This time, it was Kal’tsit’s turn to violently flinch backward.
She suddenly felt a bitter wave of regret. She shouldn’t have locked the door. The hospital room was too quiet. It was so quiet that she could easily catch the shallow, rhythmic breathing of the monster sitting in front of her, the warm airflow brushing past her earlobe feeling like the touch of a ghost.
You looked at her, your grey eyes filled with a sorrowful, gentle light. “I won’t betray Rhodes Island. Because I have people I care about by my side now. Those elite operators who trust me. Amiya. All those familiar faces who look to me for guidance… and you.”
“But when he woke up back then, his Rhodes Island was left trapped inside the Originium. The only one he trusted in this entirely alien world was you.”
“He naturally supported your ideals unconditionally at first, doing his absolute utmost to find a way for the two civilizations to coexist. However, if our positions were reversed, I would make the exact same judgment he did. I cannot stand by and watch my Rhodes Island be turned into flowers by someone else.”
The sophistry had reached its climax. You cautiously observed Kal’tsit’s expression.
As expected, she had been completely and utterly stunned by your words.
This round of psychological manipulation was more successful than you could have ever hoped. Kal’tsit’s brilliant, analytical brain was practically short-circuiting now, with only two echoing sentences remaining in her mind: He only has you, and I cannot use the flesh and blood of Rhodes Island to make flowers bloom.
She no longer cared at all about those supposed Theresis spy codes written on your drafts.
I really deserve to die for this!
Watching Kal’tsit’s back as she hurriedly unlocked the door and fled the room, completely unable to formulate a response, your conscience finally began to ache just a little bit.
Sigh. The Kitty just doesn’t read enough sci-fi. After tens of thousands of years, her mental defenses are still so shockingly fragile!