A visitor had come to My Castle. At present, however, he is not here.
The visitor who was here until a moment ago was a time traveler.
With the Goddess's Gift, [The Power to Have Any One Wish Granted], he had obtained [the power to move freely between past and future].
He wore a drab polo shirt and chinos and had the look of an unremarkable university student, and there is very little daylight between that impression and the reality of the man.
He possesses, fundamentally, no more than ordinary human strength. He has studied no swordsmanship and has no capacity for magic. His one and only ability is the special power of time travel.
Even so, there are few who could beat him.
His basic tactic is to go back into the past and kill his target while the target is still an infant.
Where there is no opening to kill the infant, he kills the parents in their youth, or erases the meeting between them entirely. Then the target is never born at all.
And so the destination this time traveler set out for was the point at which I had been reincarnated as a Mofu and was not yet [The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One]—which is to say, before I had spent the Goddess's Gift on my wish.
The time traveler put a single knife thrust into me, a newborn Mofu, and returned to the date and time he had come from.
"What?! Why are you alive?! I killed you with these hands, I know I did!"
There in front of me, as I sat on the throne with my chin in my hand, the time traveler had collapsed onto his backside.
"Haaah... Fine, fine. I'll explain it to you."
In truth I could have made him understand in an instant without bothering to explain anything, but being omniscient, I am aware that there are certain parties observing this exchange between the time traveler and myself.
So I explain, partly as sarcasm and general harassment aimed at them.
"You think you're traveling into the past, but there's no such thing as a past world to begin with. Look—here in the present, the world of one second ago doesn't exist, does it? Some idiot scientist may claim to have observed the past, but that isn't the past. It's just a present that hadn't been observed yet. Following?"
The time traveler was still failing to keep up, and he furrowed his brow.
"What are you talking about? I have actually gone into the past. That is proof beyond anything else."
A thing you cannot present to the other party is not called proof.
That aside: if no past world exists, then what does happen when this man time travels? Without that explained, it is no wonder he cannot understand. Kind creature that I am, I shall explain it for him.
"Your case is a little unusual, you see. What happens when you go to a past that plainly doesn't exist is that a parallel world is born at the time coordinate we call 'the present,' and the past state of the original world gets copied into that new world's present. Meaning: this place is not the world you were in before you went back. It's a parallel world."
The time traveler could follow the logic, but being told a thing like that out of nowhere, he seemed far from convinced.
Understandable enough. For him, what he observes with his own eyes is the whole of reality, and since he cannot tell the original world from a parallel one, he cannot simply swallow it.
I answered the question he was about to ask before he could ask it.
"A parallel world is only born when you go into the past. Time runs one way, present to future, so as long as you don't run it backward there's no contradiction that needs resolving. Which means this world hasn't changed one bit since the world where you killed the Mofu I used to be."
"Th-then why are you alive?"
"Because the me in the original world brought me back. I'm omniscient, so I know the laws of the world and every action you're going to take. However many times you time travel, all you do is spawn new parallel worlds—and as long as the me in the original world exists, nothing you do can erase me."
And even supposing he really could reach the past of the original world, so long as I exist in the present, nothing he did back there could ever erase me.
I am omnipotent. If a past world did exist, then of course I would be able to reach into it.
"That can't be... Then there's nothing I can do at all."
"That's right."
Now then—let us leave cleaning this up to the me in the original world.
And with that, I sent this time traveler back to the original world.
And so, with the time traveler shipped in from a parallel world standing before me, I cleared my throat once to get his attention.
"You may not have noticed, but you have this very moment transferred out of a parallel world and back into the original one. Now, you're going to settle accounts for trying to kill me by underhanded means—but I'm a kind soul, so I'll let you off with a hundred years."
I threw the time traveler into the world of the void.
There, the flow of time does not exist. Subjective time, however, does. He is to pass one hundred years as measured by that subjective time.
In the world of the void the five senses are lost, no matter exists apart from oneself, and life is sustained without food or drink.
Once a hundred subjective years have gone by, he will be graciously permitted to die.
"Right, then..."
All that was left was to dispose of the time traveler's homeland.
I dropped a monolith—a black mass twenty kilometers tall, cut to the shape of the country—onto Nation P.
Hm? Counting the parallel world, doesn't that make two of me? Two [Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior Ones], and thus a contradiction?
Very well. I shall explain.
To begin with, the one who revived the me of the parallel world was the original me. As if that me would leave a contradiction lying about.
For the me of the parallel world, an exception has been written into [Absolutely Superior].
Namely: [excluding the original me].
In this way, no matter how many of me come into being, the exception is applied in order of creation, and every me is assigned a rank.
As if I—omniscient—would ever find myself going, "Oh no, I have carelessly become two! Resolving the contradiction will annihilate me!"
Well. It is a nuisance, so I shall simply erase the parallel world the time traveler caused.
Not by dropping a monolith, obviously. By erasing its existence outright.
When I set my hand to it, wiping out an entire world is a trivial matter.