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“Something like this has happened a way too long time ago, in another world, or a better name to call it is: the pre-rewound world. Why does it have such a name? My audience, it would be very convoluted to explain that, therefore please just consider it as a name for a world with events that have already happened. And our current world, is the rewound world, which is a repeat of the other pre-rewound world.

So confusing! Why is there such a distinction? To begin the story of our current world, we have to begin with the pre-rewound.

Once upon a time, there was a Princess who fell in love with a knight. Initially it began as a mission her own parents assigned her, eventually she realized her own feelings for him, but kept denying it due to her own responsibilities for her own kingdom.

She became the Queen after her parents passed away, but let’s just keep calling her the Princess. She inherited the throne, and the knight kept serving her out of the unyielding love he had for her.

He kept fighting and fighting, in hope of being recognized by her, who used to share most of their childhood together. But the Princess kept acting cold to him, and treated him as harshly as possible, since she wanted to appear to herself and the people in the kingdom how impartial she is.

At some point the knight got jailed, and was given by the Princess the choice between revoking his status as a knight, or remaining imprisoned indefinitely. He chose the choice of leaving the jail, not because he no longer wanted to serve the Princess, but because he knew that his efforts didn’t mean anything to her at all.

During the final battle, the final boss appeared and almost destroyed the kingdom. Everybody was hopeless, including the Princess, but the knight returned, and came in to save the day. The boss was defeated, and the knight was heavily wounded. The people cheered for the man who has valiantly saved the kingdom. Those who knew the Princess approved of him for her, which led the Princess to believe that perhaps they could finally be with each other.

What they didn’t realize was how dispirited the knight had become, toward every single thing in life. His love for the Princess didn’t extinguish during his painstaking and laborious service, and yet it extinguished after the final battle. The entire kingdom treated him nicely, the royal court treated him nicely, the Princess treated him nicely. But all he felt was hollowness. Eventually, he disappeared into a distant land.

The knight kept moving, until one day he found a certain Queen of a certain kingdom in the East. They fell in love with each other, and the Queen bore him a child. The knight thought he couldn’t be any more happy than he was, until one day, the troops of his own kingdom, led by the Princess, invaded the kingdom in the East.

The knight brought his wife and baby with him, running, but reached the edge of the cliff. His wife used her own body to protect her husband against the invader’s stab. His child also got killed by the troops. With nothing left to lose, the knight charged forward toward the invaders, specifically the Princess. He could have killed her, but felt no meaning of doing that, and ended up taking his own life.

The Princess was devastated as the person who she had always loved the most had ended his own life. She couldn’t accept that, and lost it. She concentrated every single effort of the kingdom into figuring out the way to resurrect the knight.”

“Isn’t that irresponsible? She’s the ruler of the kingdom, how can she do that to the kingdom she has inherited from her parents?”

“She had gotten fed up with it. She no longer cared about the kingdom anymore. She thought, why should she care about a kingdom that didn’t care so much for her and her beloved? The kingdom she had devoted her own life to had never treated her and the one she loved well. And the one who used to love her and sacrificed everything for her now died because of the very thing she tried to protect. She no longer felt any responsibility or obligation at all.”

“How is this related to the story of our rewound world?”

“Because the soul of the knight had reincarnated into another foreign world, whereas other souls remained in that world. Time-rewinding isn’t impossible, but to retrieve a soul which has reincarnated into another world is another matter.”

“Are you saying that’s why the magical ritual has obtained a different soul for the body of the knight?”

“You are almost there! It’s true, that the soul the magical ritual retrieves could have belonged to anybody at all. But it also depends on how strongly a soul can resonate with the magical ritual that travels across every single possible worlds, or universes. That is to say, the identity of the soul that reincarnated back to the rewound world may not be the knight, but the very essence of that soul happens to be the knight.”