The Missing XIX
Death makes everything disappear.
Take him, for instance. He was born not of the lawful wife but of a concubine.
"We're all family."
So said his father, the clan head who once wore a national assemblyman's gold badge.
"We are one house. One. All of you must grow up to be pillars of this country, so no fighting. Understood?"
While his father lived, he had power enough to define what "family" meant. He never cast out his illegitimate son, nor did he let the boy's mother drift between rented rooms.
That power endured only so long as his father's heart kept beating.
"Son, we're moving again."
Not long after his father's death, he helped his mother pack, yet something was strange about it. Yes, how strange indeed for a family "moving house," that none of his other siblings were to be seen.
'How odd,' he thought. Why did only Mother and I have to tip-toe around gathering boxes?
Perhaps the luggage was simply too heavy. Maybe the two of them were the advance unit, carrying the burden ahead of the others.
It took him three full years to realise that he himself was that heavy "luggage."
"My son, clever like your father."
He understood many things. Why the new home was smaller than the old, why the neighborhood felt darker, why he would never ask Mother to confirm what he already knew, why silence tasted of guilt, and how guilt was laced with love.
"Clever like your father, but promise me one thing... Never join the army... Never."
He wanted to know the world.
Sometimes, while rifling through the newspaper, he spotted his "brothers'" names in print. On pages that claimed to weave a net wide enough to catch the world in letters, it seemed the world itself was nowhere to be found.
'How very strange.'
Death makes everything disappear.
Take her, for instance. She was born the daughter of a prosperous orchard owner.
"Oh, that man! Honestly, oh dear..."
Her father was a womanizer. One day, he brought home a younger half-brother from the orchard, and for some reason, her mother bullied the child mercilessly.
"I can't live like this! Oh, honestly..."
She hated the sound of her mother's sighs, so she ran from them. She felt she could only breathe in a place where sighs couldn't reach. She told her parents she was off to play with friends, but the truth was so very slightly different. Every day was a small escape from home.
In exchange for abandoning the house, she received the world outside: the scent of acacia blooming along the orchard lane, the rattle of a red bicycle her father had bought in secret, the smell of water and wet soil in the ditch between spring and summer.
'Beautiful,' she thought each time she returned, carrying all those outside things in her young breath.
The world was lovable.
"Really! Your father will be the death of me!"
In all the world, only human beings seemed to live half a handspan away from that love.
Her eldest and second-eldest sisters both went to study in Seoul. She, on the other hand, chose another city. Mother lamented that her grades were too good to waste, but Father backed her.
"Someone has to stay close to home. You can't turn them all into Seoul snobs."
She entered Busan National University. During a campus exhibition, she saw the shadow of a male student dragging fallen leaves along the edge of the quad, and the thought came to her quite unconsciously.
'How beautiful.'
She loved him, and he loved her.
Love is fearless.
"What shall we name the baby?"
"I've been thinking. Help me decide."
They spoke to each other in polite form. To them, it was a token of respect and affection, but in truth, it was a scar each had inherited from their respective parents. They did not yet know that marriage meant exchanging even the wounds you never knew existed.
"How about this?"
"If it's a boy, it's my choice."
"If it's a girl, it's yours."
There was so much they did not know, and so much yet to learn.
Their hearts pounded. The young couple visited fortune-tellers, leafed through name dictionaries, feeling out their own ignorance one careful fingertip at a time.
"If it's a boy, San. A single-syllable name."
"If it's a girl, Seo-rin."
A child was born. Her name was Dang Seo-rin.
How strange, how beautiful.
"..."
Death makes everything disappear.
Around the time their second child came into the world, his mother died. Not long after, her father and mother also passed. There were suddenly far fewer people left who could testify about their parents.
No one remembered how his father became an assemblyman, what hardships he had endured, or why he insisted on being "one family" while keeping both a wife and a concubine. No one remembered why, after bearing three daughters in a row, his mother could not accept the son her husband suddenly brought home, or why she pushed her daughters so hard toward good universities.
Death makes everything disappear.
"..."
Dang Seo-rin first learned that death existed when she was seven.
"Seo-rin seems to like flowers."
"Let's hope she grows out of eating them."
"..."
Little Seo-rin could often be found squatting in the flower shop her parents ran. Surrounded by plants taller than she was, she would gaze up at the suncast shadows falling through the greenhouse film.
'How strange.'
Sunlight glinted off the glossy green peony leaves in ephemeral sheens.
'Beautiful...'
Everything was like sunlight. It shone for only a moment, yet it was beautiful. If beauty was that great, why not stay a bit longer? It was strange that it existed only briefly.
The world was strange and beautiful.
So beautiful, yet strange.
"Sis-ter!"
"Da-a-ad."
Little brothers and sisters. Dad. Mom.
Her family.
From the day the suncast shadow rusted on a peony leaf, Dang Seo-rin decided to accept this "strange yet beautiful something." She thought that must be the original form of life. In truth, it was the shape that her parents, and their parents before them, had gnawed into the apple-core of life over their own lifetimes—a shape still too large to swallow, now handed down to her.
For millions of years, through hundreds of billions of branches.
'Live,' she told herself.
Dang Seo-rin, too, was prepared.
'Live on.'
Being hurt by people. Hurting people. Fighting. Fearing. Protecting. Abandoning. Forgetting. Remembering.
Just like Mother. Just like Father.
'Live on.'
Who would she meet?
Would that luck come?
Would she bear a child? What was love? Was love for a partner different from love for a child? Where would she live? How? Would she be wounded? Would she wound? Where would they meet? What songs would she like?
'I will leave proof that I was here.'
'The world is so wide.'
As billions of humans before her have done, from ages and millennia past.
Her heart, shaped like an apple, beat fast.
'Just watch me.'
'See what I despised, see what I loved.'
'I am Father and Mother's beloved daughter, my siblings' proud elder sister.'
'My name is Dang Seo—'
And then the Void arrived.
Creeeeeeak!
When we pushed open the greenhouse's semi-opaque door, a garden drenched in blood opened up to us.
There she was, right there at the entrance. As though she had tried to flee and failed, a child net yet old enough to have passed into high school was skewered on a plant stem.
"This is..."
"Seo-rin's little sister," Go Yuri said, half a step ahead of my own thoughts. "You've seen her, haven't you, Guild Leader?"
I had. While purging Infinite Void, I'd wandered through the barrier it cast and glimpsed a vision of Seo-rin with her siblings. This, too, was a vision—yet the mangled corpse before me was brutally real.
"So it really happened."
"I believe so... Honestly, I'm amazed the door opened at all. Thank goodness LiteraryGirl didn't betray us."
Bang!
Something slammed behind us. Turning, I saw a black handprint splattered on the vinyl wall.
Slap! Slap, splat!
Handprints multiplied, clutching the handle, shaking the door, clawing ragged furrows through the film.
"Ah. Mhm." Go Yuri wore a troubled smile. "They don't know the meaning of giving up... though with a vow binding them, they probably can't even if they want to."
"A vow?"
"Pardon me, Guild Leader, but I'll stay back to be on guard." She planted herself politely in front of the entrance, her body blocking the door. "Hogging all your time to the very end wouldn't be so bad, but you're going to forget everything that happens in this realm and in this cycle, anyway."
"...I still have many questions for you."
"I know. But as I said, you won't remember this moment."
Thud! Bang, splat!
Black handprints papered the greenhouse behind her, staining it pitch-dark.
"Repeating the same conversation over and over... I dislike that, Guild Leader. It wears the heart thin. Unless... Would you rather become one with me?"
Splat.
A palm of darkness grabbed Yuri's ankle, yet she remained unruffled.
"That, too, would be a kind of ending. I wouldn't mind."
"Whatever ending you mean, if it's not a happy one, my own death is already booked," I flatly refused.
"Aha? Ahaha." Her lips curved to reveal a crescent moon of white. "Noh Do-hwa. Yes, indeed... How fascinating. The being farthest from Anomalies lays a spell on the being closest to them."
Slap. Slosh, splatter.
Countless hands engulfed her shoes and ankles but advanced no higher, as though an invisible barrier blocked their climb.
"I understand, Guild Leader." She pinched the hem of her skirt between finger and thumb and dipped in an elegant curtsey. "Farewell. Let's meet again somewhere you will not remember."
"...Thank you for guiding me this far."
"Not at all."
Yuri did not lift her head.
"On the contrary, I thank you. Always."
I turned and took a step deeper into the greenhouse, toward Hecate's innermost sanctum. After several more paces, I glanced back.
Only darkness remained.
Somehow, I could sense it. With that single step, a whole timeline had split clean away. In an Undertaker-style choice box, I must have seen two options until a moment ago:
[1. Walk to Dang Seo-rin]
[2. Stay with Go Yuri]
Had I not escaped brainwashing and temptation, the game would surely have forced Option 2 on me.
Gripping Cheon Yo-hwa's black hair tie, her final relic, a precious object or a ghostly relic, I hurried on. Beyond lies the secret Seo-rin wanted most to hide, the truth veiled by Hecate's night sky.
'Go.'
Every few steps, another body littered the garden. A boy about high-school age... Seo-rin's second sibling. The child at the entrance had been the youngest brother; she'd tried to save him. Each corpse had been sliced by mutated leaves or impaled on stems—
It was the scene that had branded Seo-rin's life, her lifelong trauma now laid bare.
'Layered bodies.'
Her siblings... and there, on the mother's side. They hadn't run far.
The vision overlayed the corpses. Plants once lovingly tended had been infected with Void-poison en masse. Perhaps they'd been contaminated long ago and the incubation simply ended in this moment.
"Run!"
Who had shouted?
The family lived at the shop. Schools were closed due to the emergency situation, so the youngest and the second youngest were home.
"Dad!"
"Sani, go! Go call for help!"
"O-o-okay!"
"Big sister is inside!"
Their struggle meant nothing. In those early days, there was too little information about Anomalies. Who would have guessed that plants might turn into monsters?
The father, the mother, the second, the third, the youngest. All slain in moments, within meters of each other. An ordeal beyond what ordinary people could bear—
No, I correct myself. The Anomaly Garden was simply too powerful. Most Awakeners of the time could not even hope to handle it.
My heart pounded as I stepped onto the garden where present illusion and past remnant intermingled, passing by Seo-rin's father's corpse with memories linked to every sight.
"My little siblings..."
It wasn't a distant memory.
"My siblings kept begging me to just abandon the shop and run away with Mom and Dad, but I told them... I told them to trust their big sister, but then I... I had this thing about guilds..."
In the 999th cycle, Seo-rin herself had made a confession in the Garden of Fallen Flowers.
"I kept chasing after this dream of forming one... By the time I came back, no one was home. I went to the shop, and... If I just hadn't, then..."
When the tragedy struck, Seo-rin had not been at the scene, according to her own testimony. That means that after her family died, she returned to this place. Thus, the plant Anomaly that had drunk her family's blood was still alive at the time, and for Seo-rin to survive, she'd had to slay it. Obviously, without killing it, she too would have died before she could avenge anyone. So now—
'Could she have done it?'
Could she, an Awakener who was still low-level, with no experience, who'd been ambushed without time even to chant her Cursed Song...
My heart hammered. Thoughts may stop, but heartbeats never do. It pumped blood into my legs, urging the next step and the next.
'If Seo-rin had somehow taken revenge, burning the whole garden, then why did the sight of flowers still drive her into panic? Something's missing.'
Revenge never restores what is lost, but it does make you stronger than your loss. Flowers alone shouldn't break her. She ought to be furious, burning every bloom on sight.
'Yet after successfully taking her revenge, at least supposedly, she still collapsed at the sight of flowers. Why?'
No.
My heart skipped.
No, my premise was wrong. It was the reverse. It wasn't strange that she broke down despite getting her revenge. She broke down because her revenge had failed.
Seo-rin did not avenge them. She must have fled. She'd opened the greenhouse and immediately realized how dire the situation was. Her youngest brother was already dead at the entrance, after all. She raged and she despaired, and yet she was clever. Even in chaos, she accurately judged that she couldn't beat this Anomaly now.
So she ran, vowing to come back. A reasonable conclusion to make.
'But then why didn't she tell me the truth?'
If that hypothesis was right, someone else must have destroyed the garden later. When I visited with Seo-rin, it was ash.
'Another Awakener, perhaps, while Seo-rin was in shock?'
Yet the Saintess was observing all major Awakeners with her Clairvoyance by then. Had another been present, she would have noticed.
'And the Saintess never mentioned it.'
She wouldn't hide a secret of this magnitude.
'Therefore... she didn't see the tragedy at all?'
I had never asked the Saintess about Seo-rin's past. In fact, I'd asked her not to watch during my private meetings with Seo-rin, and she respected that.
Thump, step.
Heartbeat and footsteps resonated until, at some point, I reached the garden's abyss.
There lay Dang Seo-rin, dead.
My breath seized in my throat. It was a scene of slaughter. Leaves sharp as knives, stems thick as skewers, had shredded her.
Death makes everything disappear.
No one remembered that he, who fought a monster for the first time to protect his family, was an assemblyman's illegitimate son who, without a speck of help from the main house, had succeeded in running a flower shop in Busan.
No one remembered that she, who shielded her children, once loved the breath that rose off country roads and smiled when she bit into a peach her father had picked at dawn.
Between that man and that woman stood Dang Seo-rin.
She was quick-witted from childhood and keener still as she grew. When half of Seoul's citizens vanished in an instant and the masses fled Busan for Japan, Seo-rin argued that Busan would prove safer. History had shown that Busan would be Korea's last bastion. Secure a foothold now, fortify it with land and connections, and it would be a far safer stronghold than a Japanese city where they had no ties.
It was the right call, yet no one would remain to remember that rightness.
Death makes everything disappear—lives, loves, futures.
As half of Seoul ended in one blink, the massacre in this Busan garden was merely another day in the Void's routine.
The father. The mother. The second. The third. The youngest.
And the eldest—born for brilliance.
'Ah.'
Dang Seo-rin was dead.
"Ru...n..."
When the garden turned butcher, Seo-rin was struck first. The father could not abandon the child he loved beyond all else. Neither could the mother. They merely tried to save the remaining children, but the stems were too swift. She'd turned her back, shielding the child, and the spike pierced them both.
"Ah... ah... Mom..."
Yet even then, Seo-rin had not died but instead lay dying.
The father fell. The mother fell. The siblings toppled one by one.
Red flooded her sight.
"Dad..."
Death drew near.
Was she afraid? She seemed afraid.
Everything disappears.
Had even one family member survived, she would not fear so much.
Someone would remember.
Someone would remember our family.
"Ah..."
But all of them were dead.
Mother's lovely smile, Father's face when he puzzled over pots, their voices, the clothes that suited the youngest, how much she loved her family.
All of it, for a ridiculous reason like this, sank into the Void forever.
...
Seo-rin's lips moved soundlessly.
No voice emerged. A scream that could not become sound trembled in silence.
No.
'How unfair.'
O God.
Facing absurdity, she did what humans often do at the last: She called upon the most absurd being humanity ever conceived.
Please, O God. Just once more.
Her empty eyes, already stained with death, looked up through the torn greenhouse roof to see moonlight spilling down.
Give me a next time...
The vinyl quivered, but there was no wind. Perhaps it shook with her own ragged breath.
Everything I have, I will give it all away.
It was a sincere vow yet a contradictory wish. If she gave truly "everything," then even if time was granted, it would no longer be hers.
My name, my life, all my future, every memory... take them all.
Let me live... as a human being.
She meant it. To live as human, she would gladly surrender humanity.
She prayed for the paradox.
Present yet impossible.
I refuse.
I refuse this ending.
The garden fell silent. There was no breathing, no groans. Only plants squirmed, feasting on what remained of humans.
Dang Seo-rin was dead.
"..."
Moonlight tilted.
Moonlight is only sunlight reflected, yet people insist on calling it moonlight, as though a separate world lies beyond the mirror.
A shadow, not the real.
A being known only by an alias, not its true name.
Moonlight poured onto Seo-rin's corpse.
To the moon, it was natural: All things on earth are mere shadows momentarily reflected somewhere else.
Human yet not human.
Alive yet not alive.
Possessed yet bereft.
The light of the night sky at last found an anchor to exist upon the earth.
And in that instant—
"..."
—Dang Seo-rin opened her eyes.
-x-X-x-
The Missing XX
The flower garden went up in flames, incinerating with it the Anomaly that had drunk deep the family's blood as it turned into a billow of white-black ash that scattered on the wind.
In the very heart of the infernal blaze stood Dang Seo-rin, stunned. With hollow eyes, she looked around. Her gaze snagged briefly on the bodies of her family, then reached my face and waned into a half-lidded stare.
She smiled. "You saw it, didn't you?"
The flames raged, framing the greenhouse in scorching flames that embroidered shifting shadows across Dang Seo-rin's face. Even that smile, worn only because she had no other expression at hand, was stained in shadow.
"Yeah, that's right. I already died once... Granted, I only recalled that fact a little while ago. Up until then, I thought I'd simply lost my mind when the Anomaly killed my family at our shop, and that I'd beaten the thing to death in that frenzy."
It was memory distortion. Hecate had answered Dang Seo-rin's wish—"I want to keep living as a human"—by gifting her a new life, one created by rewritting the memories so that Seo-rin had survived the conflagration in the garden.
No, calling it "memory distortion" might itself be imprecise.
"I... was born in that moment."
Just as Go Yuri had hinted with that strange testimony of hers: that unlike her younger siblings, Seo-rin alone had been born at home.
"A child who lived until then and died then. I took the memories of the human called 'Dang Seo-rin' and was born here, in the midst of these flames."
"Hecate..."
"Mhm." Dang Seo-rin removed her witch's hat. "Moonlight is nothing but sunlight reflected once. I'm the same, an Anomaly merely reflecting the light of the girl named Dang Seo-rin."
She was an Outer God. This forsaken god, devoid of intellect or reason, had granted someone's wish of "I want to live on as a human." The price for fulfilling that wish was the entirety of said person's being.
Seo-rin's life. Seo-rin's memories. Her recollections and love for her family. Her optimism toward the future. Her faint misanthropy. Her hate. Her fear. Her smile. Her voice.
Even the sixty years of life that should have remained.
The god of the night sky took every last bit.
"You know it's true, don't you, Undertaker? The Dang Seo-rin you loved... she never actually existed."
I had no answer to that.
"I realized it just before you told me you'd stay with me even after I'd Fallen. I was truly happy."
A spark leapt and lodged in Seo-rin's cloak, then began to fizzle. The cloak, dark as the night sky, was being eaten away little by little as though by insects.
"Of course I'd be happy, I'm well aware of how much you hate Anomalies. To think that your care for me weighed more than all that hatred. Yes, that made me glad... But if I weren't a human who later became an Anomaly, if I had been an Anomaly from the very, very beginning right to the end?"
The half-burned cloak lost its hold and slid off her with a whisper, like the torn wings of a swallowtail.
"Then it can't be helped, can it? Even if that means I can't stay with you, there's nothing anyone can do." Seo-rin let out a small laugh. "In the end, you will wipe out every Anomaly alive. That's what you're living for, after all."
In the silence hanging over us, all I could manage was a quiet beginning: "Seo-rin."
"This is the end now." Seo-rin looked down at her own palm. The witch's broom had already been let go and was rolling across the floor. "That child's wish was simply to go on living as a human. To keep that wish alive, I even altered memories and lived while believing myself to be Dang Seo-rin, yes. But now... the contract is broken."
Clink.
Moonlight that had reflected the flames cracked across the mirror of the night sky that held it.
Crack, crack!
The fissures spread like a spiderweb.
"They've found out I'm not human. That everything was a lie from the start. So Dang Seo-rin no longer exists. Not even the first contract can be kept, this is where the tale of an incompetent, contract-breaking Outer God ends."
Seo-rin smiled.
"Listen."
The corners of her lips trembled.
"Why... did we meet only now?"
"..."
"I fell in love. I came to adore all of it—the human life, living among humans. There were lots and lots of things I hated, sure, but still, because you were here, I grew to love this place."
The moonlight shattered, again and again, and even the flames that had licked up to devour everything broke apart like moonlight and were trapped between the shards of mirror.
Thud.
Seo-rin pressed a hand to her chest.
"It hurts. Right here."
"..."
"It hurts. It hurts so much I could die. It's strange, I shouldn't even be able to die. I'm not truly alive at all, Undertaker. It hurts too much."
"..."
"I'm sorry."
At last even the sound of moonlight breaking broke apart on itself, spawning more sound that rippled outward like waves.
――Sorry for taking Dang Seo-rin away.
The shattering moonlight faintly mimicked someone's voice.
Like that first mirror in this world that stole the sun and produced a counterfeit.
"I'm sorry for sullying your precious memories. Sorry that the one you loved turned out not to be human at all."
――I couldn't keep my promise. I'm sorry I couldn't stay Dang Seo-rin until the end. Sorry that I'm not human.
"For being born this way."
――Because there was no other way for me to come into this world.
"I'm sorry."
Dang Seo-rin fades away.
There was never a happy ending for her.
The regressor's world began on June 17. Seo-rin's world was born on June 15.
The two timelines would never intersect.
Like the white crosswalk lines and the black asphalt passing by each other forever.
Going back and using a "blank canvas" to change Seo-rin's past was impossible too.
The Seo-rin the regressor had built memories with up to now was none other than the Seo-rin born on June 15.
Even if the massacre of the Seo-rin family were somehow prevented, the witch the regressor had wanted to stay with would not return.
'No, in fact, coloring that blank canvas was an impossibility from the start.'
It was different from the elder twin sister or Yu Ji-won. At least their stories were painted atop "facts that might actually have happened in the past."
'But Seo-rin?'
The moment you try to stop the family's tragedy, countless contradictions arise. All the causality accumulated over a thousand runs collapses.
In the end, it's a simple story.
There are beings in this world who are denied a happy ending from the very start.
――Huh?
And so Seo-rin's eyes went wide.
The eyes that had calmly accepted extinction both as Seo-rin and as Hecate now opened in disbelief.
The regressor was holding her in an embrace.
"Undertaker? Why...?"
"I've finally figured it out."
He held Seo-rin's shoulders a little tighter.
"Why the road had to be so hard, why the door leading here was so narrow and the stairs so steep, I've understood it all now."
"What are you talking about...?"
"It was so I could be with you."
The world was scorching. He shielded her from the flames that were consuming the garden.
The world was deafening. He took on the moonlight that warped sound in her stead.
"The contract isn't broken, Seo-rin. You haven't forgotten already, have you? Tonight, beneath this night sky, everything between us will be forgotten."
"..."
"I will forget your past."
It didn't matter if he cast out all the world's heat and silenced all its noise.
The petals and songs he needed no longer existed there anyway.
"If there's a past you don't wish to revisit, I won't look back either."
"Ah."
"I won't dig into the reason for your silence. Whether you were an Outer God or whatever, it doesn't matter. You are Dang Seo-rin."
"But, I... if I don't disappear—no matter how hard you try, in the end, like this..."
"Then we'll disappear together."
I said.
"We couldn't be born together, couldn't share a childhood. You're right. Maybe we met far too late."
"..."
"But we can still stay together until we die."
Moonlight slid down.
"From now on I'll begin a journey of discarding my own pieces one by one, settling all the over-flowing Voids of the world—completely, in a human way."
"..."
"For a while—just until that day comes—I want you to stay by my side."
Seo-rin's shoulders trembled.
"Stay beside me and give it everything you have to remain human. If you try your hardest, I can keep from giving up, forever."
"Nngh..."
"Not only the sixty years that were originally Seo-rin's, Hecate, everything that still remains to you, discard them one by one while you walk with me."
"If... if I do that."
"We can die together."
I took Seo-rin's shoulders.
Then, gently, I pressed my forehead against hers.
"Seo-rin."
"..."
"Will you die with me?"
There was no applause, no hymn. Only the deferred flames of hell and the clamor of moonlight adorning the Void filled the air.
'...Yes.'
That was enough.
"Yes..., gladly."
We had long known we were born into such a world.
"Gladly."
The night sky collapsed.
The glittering jewels beyond—Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury—celestial bodies of the universe.
The planets that symbolized the Outer God's power were shattering one after another.
Neither the moonlight nor the earth beneath were exceptions.
The last frame still burning finally collapsed.
With that collapse, even the ground beneath our feet began to crack apart, slowly.
A place of birth and of death, the holy ground of magic.
This place, at once a flower garden and a fire garden, was meeting its final season.
Now that I think of it.
Add up Earth, the Moon, and Saturn and all the rest, and the count still barely reached eight.
Two of the ten notes that should have rung through Pythagoras's cosmos had gone missing somewhere.
"On the scale's right pan, I place my everything."
The secret behind that disappearance was revealing itself before our eyes.
Firmly, Seo-rin laid her right palm over her own heart.
"On the left... your heart."
Then her left hand covered my chest.
A golden light blossomed.
The light formed a circle, sketching an unbroken golden ring that revolved around my heart.
Each time a planet shattered in the night sky, the golden ring embracing my heart widened.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
A golden revolution. The vow of a ring.
Circle Magic.
"..."
"Actually, I'd already cast one on you in secret."
And I realized.
"Thanks to this spell... I alone was able to hear your voice."
"Yes. And I could hear yours."
A faint golden loop revealed itself between my heart and Seo-rin's.
Yes.
The remaining two notes missing from the night sky were flowing, none other than, within our hearts.
Together we made ten.
Constellations were inscribed upon our hearts.
As many celestial bodies as that night sky were singing a silent song inside our chests.
'...Please.'
Caressing the ten strands of heartbeat with both hands.
Seo-rin whispered quietly.
A song for one person alone in this universe.
Melody One.
"May you not grieve too deeply."
Melody Two.
"When you do grieve, may I sense your loneliness."
Melody Three.
"When you feel like dying, may I be at your side at that very moment."
Melody Four.
"May you not... despise people too much."
Melody Five.
"After you dream, may everything feel okay again."
Melody Six.
"Yet someday, may you still find the world beautiful."
Melody Seven.
"Sometimes, let everything go. When you're exhausted, may you truly rest."
Melody Eight.
"If the day comes when I hurt you, may the wound heal, and may I always be able to say I'm sorry."
Melody Nine.
"I love you."
Melody Ten.
"Together with you, until the day we die."
"..."
As a regressor, I possessed several abilities.
One of them was called [Resume].
It was the vaguest of the powers I held.
All it really did was let the strength and effort I'd accumulated in a previous run persist into the next.
I unlocked that ability in my tenth cycle.
How I awoke [Resume], though such a trivial power, I had kept to myself until now.
The reason was simple.
In the tenth cycle, after defeating the Ten Legs, the day Seo-rin reached the end of her lifespan and I served as chief mourner at her funeral.
It was before her portrait that I Awakened [Resume].
However.
Looking back now, [Resume] may have been more than that.
Perhaps faint melodies that not even a regressor could hear had been singing inside my heart.
Like the song of Mars.
Like when we soared into Hecate's night sky and none of us could catch the voices of the planets.
The reason I could keep from abandoning the world may have been the few threads of song you planted in my heart.
"My name is Dang Seo-rin."
Not Resume, but—
"[A Spell Laid Upon You]."
A covenant of ten rings.
A grand spell of the tenth circle.
Beneath the crumbling garden, the moonlight, and the night sky—everything breaking save for that golden ring—at the end of the world, at the curtain call of the stage.
The witch who had once been the goddess of magic drew my heart toward her.
"Thank you, Undertaker."
"..."
"That I was able to meet you――"
Sound collapsed, and memory with it.
But it didn't matter.
– Your name?
– Undertaker. It's an alias.
– Someone who goes around burying people, huh? Not bad. The depth of a person depends on how many corpses they've buried inside their own heart.
From tens of thousands of years before I met you.
– I'll be in your care from now on.
– Companion of my time.
Your voice had always been ringing inside my heart.
-x-X-x-
The Missing XXI
There is an epilogue.
As I have already stressed, this is nothing more than a side story, merely a manuscript that the regressor has never edited.
To confess, had I, like any ordinary scribe, been able to move my brush strictly in chronological order, in fact this would not have been the proper place to speak of an after-story.
The Saintess of the Frozen World.
Was she not still waiting in the regressor's sickroom?
The stretch that was the 999th cycle and the 1,000th stage had yet to draw to a close.
Yet a side story is a privilege granted to only a single chapter. To speak of the Saintess I would need one more side story.
Therefore.
"…"
For the moment let us turn to someone else.
Across the time that has flowed since millions of years ago, across the lives that diverged into hundreds of billions of branches, let us speak of someone who, by chance, brushed against hers for the briefest instant.
"…Huh?"
He was a man without a birth.
He had no father. He had no mother.
Surely parents must have existed, but he could not recall them. He could not even verify their existence.
Because, as a regressor, the price he paid for an infinite future was a finite past.
It is not only death that makes everything go missing. There are things one lets go of simply in order to go on living.
'Busan Station concourse? Out of nowhere?'
Thus it was only natural that he had forgotten something.
'What the— I was just drinking with Dang Seo-rin and the world ended?'
He could not remember.
What moonlight had poured over the night sky of a city that existed nowhere. How earnestly his comrades had fought, ready to die, on a satellite as beautiful as a mirror. What kind of life had been there.
Who had worn what sort of smile.
'…I can't make heads or tails of this.'
That was the contract required for him to live on.
"You piece of shit! What kind of bullshit is that?!"
'Well then. First things first, let's save Seo-gyu.'
Life continued.
Perhaps the regressor had settled all the deferred payments in one lump sum.
There are things every human being is forced to pay as they live.
This universe collects memories at the price of life from every human equally.
Even a regressor endowed with [Complete Memory] could not be an exception, so long as he remained human.
— Still haven't given up, my friend?
That day too he dropped by a café, took a sip of the café au lait that had been placed beforehand on the table, and found a note hidden beneath the cup.
Reading it, the regressor let out a small snort.
"The one who doesn't know how to give up is you, you geezer."
Once, he had had a friend.
A fellow regressor.
Curiously, the two were very different.
Where he had resolved to keep on living in order to remain human, his friend had chosen endless deaths for the same purpose.
Thanks to that, the friend never forgot whom he loved most—and in return forever abandoned the chance to save that love.
He, on the other hand, saved his own love without realizing it—and the price was to forget whom he loved.
Which is the greater pain?
Pain belongs solely to the one who feels it, so its depth is hard to compare.
A person can only choose the kind of sorrow they will shoulder.
Even forgetting is a choice.
From the fact that no one remembers the pain of being born, it follows that every human sets foot in this world having chosen a single, common wound.
He was a man without a birth.
He was human.
"The Constellations don't exist. The Saintess of National Salvation, the Conqueror of the Alps… they're all characters I created."
He lived the life he had chosen. He carried out the flow of time he had decided.
"I awakened about twenty days ago. From that day my hair changed color, and I began having nightmares full of monsters."
"So you created the Constellations."
"That's right."
He recruited a Observer. He persuaded a Sovereign.
One by one he drew in the humans who would walk beside him.
And so, before he knew it, it was June 24.
"…"
It was time to go meet someone. That whole day had been set aside for a single person.
'Strange. My heart's pounding more than usual.'
He tilted his head.
In truth, to a regressor like him, feelings such as 'freshness,' 'novelty,' or 'excitement' were terribly faint.
Of course, they had trodden the same timeline hundreds upon hundreds of times.
No matter how dear the person he was about to meet, there was a limit, no moment could feel like a first meeting.
And yet.
'…It feels exactly like I'm setting out on a journey.'
For some reason today was different.
Was it because the weather was mild? No, the weather on June 24 was always the same.
Had he processed a different schedule than in previous cycles? Again, no, the regressor's timetable had long been perfected for maximum efficiency.
True, starting with the 1,000th cycle he had awakened a new ability.
I had planned to discuss that difference later, but it had not altered his itinerary.
Everything was the same.
Even so, for some reason, it felt different.
"Hm."
At the mirror he finished straightening his clothes, sprayed on cologne, and allowed himself a faint, elusive smile.
'Such a curious thing.'
Now then.
Let us speak about her.
"…"
She was a woman without a birth.
She had no father. She had no mother.
"Ah…."
Yet she believed she did have a father and a mother.
The moment she opened her eyes—no, the moment she was born—she took the corpses strewn before her eyes to be her family.
"Ah… ahhh… Mom… Dad… it's… a mountain…."
To be born, and from the moment of birth to carry an eternal wound—
that was the price she had to pay in order to live as a human being.
The flower garden was burned to the ground.
She believed it was because she had lost her reason in anger and incinerated the anomaly.
Swept up in her own flames, even the traces of her family had been reduced to carbonized fragments by her magic.
"Nh."
Staggering, she rose to her feet.
The first temperature she felt upon opening her eyes was the heat of her tears, the second was the chill of corpses.
The very first thing she experienced after birth was, of all things, the funeral of her family.
"Uh—nnh. Ugh… uuh…."
Unable to cast magic, unable even to muster the will to cast it, she dug the soft earth with a shovel.
She was used to digging soil.
But digging not to plant flowers but to bury family was something one could never grow accustomed to.
She was doing the same thing for the one-thousandth time.
Even so, it could never become familiar.
"…"
After four days spent barely managing to lay her family to rest, she collapsed beside the graves, almost fainting outright.
After a full day unconscious, she opened her eyes in a haze.
A night sky stretched overhead.
'What… am I doing?'
Pale moonlight settled over her.
Her hair, her mouth, her whole body felt brittle. Ants crawled across her palms, but she could not care.
There are tears that evaporate in moonlight, not sunlight.
'Why should I keep on living?'
She was the human who considered suicide the earliest in her life.
'It hurts….'
It was agony.
Though they called her an anomaly, the void, the night sky, or an outcast deity, the very first thing she felt as a human was pain.
Should she just close her eyes like this.
"…"
At that moment.
Flames flowed across her skin—formless, soundless fire.
"I can't die."
She muttered.
"If I die… everything disappears."
Father was dead. Mother was dead. Even her siblings had been brutally murdered.
Accepting their deaths was impossible. How could one possibly accept such absurd, senseless deaths?
Much less—
She could not allow even the traces of their deaths to vanish as well.
'I will remember.'
She stood up.
Her arms trembled. Her legs shook.
Sleeping a single day had not restored the strength she had lost.
Nor had it erased four days of digging earth with the feeling she might die at any moment.
'Only I can remember.'
Even so, she rose.
'Let's live.'
Because she had wished not to end with such a conclusion.
'Let's keep living.'
She washed her hair. She washed her body. She washed away her tears. She laundered her soiled clothes. She folded them. She retched up her tears. She put away baggage. She cleaned the room. She wiped away more tears.
'Live, Dang Seo-rin. Survive.'
How wonderful it would be if she could not only survive but bring them back to life.
'You must live.'
Why is it that, for human beings, not only death but even bare life requires resolve.
Armed with resolve and another layer of resolve, she chewed through each second that followed the next.
Perhaps because her mind was consumed by that.
"…?"
One day she came to herself to find she was standing alone in the middle of a desolate crosswalk.
"…Huh?"
Strange.
Only a moment ago she had been buried in guild paperwork.
She had just formed a small group called the Samcheon World, and its leader had been absent for more than five days owing to a family death.
Naturally, the guild members understood her absence. It was an age in which family or friends were lost with terrifying ease.
That, however, did not make the backlog disappear.
"Hmm? Uh, so… where is this?"
In the middle of working she had thought,
Ah, when I finish all this, I really will have no home left to return to, forever.
"…"
She looked up at the sky.
'Where should I live?'
Released suddenly from work, the vaguely postponed worry stepped close.
She wore a vacant expression.
Since the funeral she seemed to have forgotten how to craft precise expressions.
What grand meaning could there be in moving the muscles of one's face.
'I need another place to stay… no, I hate that.'
She would never be able to call a new house home again.
Because when she returned, she would never forget the sight of her family, who had smiled at her only the day before, and her siblings, who had answered her as though annoyed, lying dead.
'…Ah. How about a train?'
An idea flickered.
'Mm, good. A train doesn't look like a house at all, and I can outfit it like a VIP suite if I want.'
Though impulsive, the more she chewed it over, the sweeter it became.
'I'll secure an entire train and turn it into a guild dorm. In this era commuting separately is a luxury.'
'In an emergency we need to muster our fighting power at once, and still keep at least a minimum of privacy…'
'Then maybe I should just occupy an entire station? Divide the guild among multiple trains. If the guild grows later, that certainly…'
It was then.
"Excuse me, are you all right—?"
A voice came from somewhere.
"Hello— over there—"
"…?"
"Are you all right—?"
Goodness.
She had reacted to the voice a touch too late.
She must have been lost too deep in thought without noticing.
She turned her head.
"If you stay there it's dangerous! No, don't move either! Please wait right there!"
Far away,
beyond the vast crosswalk, at the far end of the crossing, a man was waving his arm.
"Just a moment, please don't move carelessly!"
He was yelling something.
But to be honest, she paid no attention to his words.
'…A song.'
She was listening to a certain sound.
It seemed to be coming from that man.
The closer he came across the crosswalk, the clearer the sound grew, allowing her to locate the source of the song.
'A heart.'
The song was beating quietly in his heart.
Ever since she awakened—no, since the moment she was born—she had heard sounds from every object in the world.
For some reason nothing could be heard from the night sky,
yet the ground was always full of all kinds of noise and clamor.
"Please wait."
"…"
The man was different.
A slightly different song was spreading from his heart.
It sounded like a human voice. Like a machine. Like a piano, like a violin, like a cello, as though every melody were layered together.
She found herself thinking,
'…Beautiful.'
For the first time in her life.
'So very beautiful.'
She—
found something in this world beautiful.
He came closer and said something, she too said something to him.
There at the intersection.
He had no past to tell her, no way to say where he had been born or what childhood he had lived.
But she did not need it.
She could not speak her past to him; even if she did, all of it was fated to be a lie.
But that did not matter to him.
He had no birth.
She had no birth.
And yet between him and her, there was life.
A very strange, very beautiful thing.
"I'm called the Undertaker."
"I… I'm Dang Seo-rin."
This is a tale for such an intersection.
"My name's a bit odd, isn't it?"
"No."
Just as it is not strange for there to be one human who devotes himself to an outcast deity,
it is not strange for there to be one outcast deity devoted solely to a human.
"I think it's a lovely name."
-x-X-x-
The Receiver I
Blink. I opened my eyes.
There was no unfamiliar ceiling.
Instead, there was an unfamiliar Go Yuri.
"Did you sleep well, Guild Leader?"
"...…."
"Forgive me, but I happened to peek at the scene of you confessing so fervently to Dang Seo-rin. Whew—just watching had my own heart racing. Really now, do you perhaps possess a hidden skill, something like [S-rank Silver Tongue]?"
It was the worst prologue in history.
For the record, my head was resting on Go Yuri's lap. Someone out there might envy me, but I have never joined that sort of suicide-wish society.
Naturally, I straightened my back.
And was met by scenery just as unfamiliar as Go Yuri herself.
"Where… exactly are we?"
"As you can see, a deserted island."
Swaaah.
Lazy waves rolled in.
A sand islet with nothing but a single palm tree, not even an animal in sight.
A stretch of beach in the middle of the boundless sea, the kind Captain Jack Sparrow might have used for a steam bath, spread out before us.
I'd believed that escaping the lap pillow would help me get a handle on the situation—but no.
My faith and expectations are famous for betraying me.
"I'll ask again. How did I—how did the two of us—end up waking on a deserted island when moments ago I was with Dang Seo-rin?"
"Well, because Dang Seo-rin died, of course."
"…"
My heart lurched downward.
Go Yuri, meanwhile, spoke as if it were nothing remarkable.
"I had to push myself hard to save you, Guild Leader. When Hecate collapsed, the universe of the 173rd cycle collapsed with her. You and Dang Seo-rin's remains were both about to fall into a black-hole-like pit, so I—hiya, hiya!"
Go Yuri struck a pose like a mountaineer rescuing someone dangling off a cliff.
"Haaah, I barely pulled it off. I'm not trying to brag, but it was honestly exhausting."
"…I could have just died there."
"Yes. You'd like me to say it wouldn't have mattered, right?"
She smiled brightly.
"But, Guild Leader, doesn't it seem a little sad if the hero who saved the world receives no praise and is forgotten besides?"
"…"
"I think it's sad."
Pat.
She ran her fingers through my hair.
I tried to lean away, but she pulled my shoulder closer, shrinking the distance instead.
"I'm not a child—"
"No."
"The human heart isn't like the body. The heart you had at one, at five, at ten—those rings stack up as you grow."
"…"
"Even if you don't remember them, the marks remain. Being praised feels good, being patted feels pleasant. Being honest about those feelings is very important for humans. Children are all ill-tempered. If they feel they were denied care, they'll surely take revenge someday."
She giggled.
"Normally one of your other comrades would be next to you, but now there's no one. So I figured I should handle the praise in their stead."
"…"
"You really did splendidly. My goodness, sinking mighty Hecate! Amazing! I always believed you could do it."
It was odd.
I couldn't resist her grip.
Strange as it sounds, by letting her embrace me I felt not consoled but rather that I was the one consoling Go Yuri.
"…I'm not sure defeating Hecate deserves that much praise. I only laid my own heart over Dang Seo-rin's."
"Ah-haha."
The hand stroking my hair stopped.
And then—
"What on earth are you saying?"
Suddenly her eyes filled my vision. They were barely ten centimeters away.
Those pupils that always smiled were now staring at me from an unreadably close gap.
"Did Hecate look easy to you?"
"…"
"In case you didn't know, Guild Leader, Hecate is the Outer God of Paradox. She put her fingertips on every contradictory way voids and anomalies exist in this world."
Clamp.
The hands that had held my head and shoulder now pinned my skull between them.
"You purified that Outer God. No matter what strategy anyone devised, her magical shadow slipped away through absurd contradiction. You used every trick and barely, truly barely, caught her. Do you still not grasp the magnitude of that feat? Troublesome—very troublesome."
"…Right. Sorry. I spoke too quickly."
Slowly her eyes receded.
Far enough to see her full face, still smiling as always.
"No, I'm the one who's sorry. I guess starting the three-hundred-sixty-sixth day got me excited."
"Try to understand my side, I can't take your words at face value. I once let you trick me and ended up dead."
"Oh dear. Mmm, yes, I'll apologize for that too. But it's strange."
Her look asked, Strange how?
"Noh Do-hwa strangled you five times, yet you trust her fine. Isn't that discrimination?"
"No. With Director Noh Do-hwa it was karma. But you… wait."
My head whipped around.
"Five times? I'm certain Director Noh Do-hwa strangled me four times."
"Ah." She covered her mouth demurely.
"Oh dear, my mistake. You died only four times. Saying five was merely my foolish slip."
"…Are you telling the truth?"
"Absolutely! I swear on the honor of the Infinite Metagame."
Ah, so I am going to be strangled again.
Setting aside the factual violence against Infinite Metagame.
Only one task remained in this stage.
『Rescue the Saintess.』
In that respect Go Yuri's deed in saving me while the universe collapsed was enormous.
Had I died with Dang Seo-rin—
That momentary relief would have diverted me from helping the Saintess of the 267th cycle.
"I'm a bit late, but thank you."
"No problem, I wanted it too."
"Even so, several things puzzle me."
I looked around. The sea was a clear emerald.
Since civilization's fall the Yellow Sea and East Sea have remembered they're children of the Pacific, one shouldn't judge by the old standards.
"Where is this? The Unconscious Realm? Or the world of the 173rd cycle? Then where are my comrades?"
"It isn't the Unconscious Realm."
"And to match your sense of time, it isn't the 173rd cycle either."
"What? Another riddle—"
"Strictly speaking, this is the world of the 999th cycle, Guild Leader."
I froze.
"The 999th cycle? The one where I was drinking with Dang Seo-rin and suddenly everyone disappeared?"
"That's right."
She smiled sweetly.
"Strictly speaking, they didn't disappear. They all went pop—wiped out in an instant by Hecate's grand magic."
"…Wiped out."
"It was a paradox."
Shhh—clear waves lapped.
"A world that is the 173th cycle and not the 173th, the 999th cycle and not the 999th—two runs overlapping. How could it stay intact?"
"…."
"While Hecate still held her Authority, it was fine. Sustaining paradox is exactly an Outer God's magic. But now her magic—"
Tap.She poked my chest.
"—remains only here."
"…Could the whole human race vanish so easily just for being paradoxical? My comrades aren't weak."
"Oh my, are you suspecting me?"
"A little."
She chuckled softly.
"Really, did Hecate look easy? The only reason we managed was that she was confined inside the vessel called 'Dang Seo-rin.'"
"…"
"By the way, the sea around this island? That's Leviathan's corpse, the blood that spilled when it went boom."
That meant Yu Ji-won was dead as well. So it really was the 999th cycle.
"…?"
A faint sense of wrongness pricked me, though I couldn't name it. Talking so calmly with Go Yuri felt odd.
Pushing that aside, I voiced the next question.
"Then what about the Saintess of the 267th cycle? She froze time in Hecate's sanctuary—'Nowhere'—right?"
"Yes. Thanks to that shaky seal she kept Hecate from griefing you with unfair endings."
"And now that Hecate has fallen, shouldn't the Saintess be free?"
"Ummm, about that."
For the first time since our crash landing, trouble showed on her face.
"As you know, the Saintess forcibly linked herself to Hecate, the Outer God of Paradox."
"So?"
"In other words, she inevitably became something close to a paradox herself. Oh, freezing time minimized the damage, but still."
"…"
Watching her skirt the point filled my neck with coiling dread.
"Sigh. With Hecate gone, there's no one left to govern paradox except the Saintess."
She pressed a hand to her cheek and sighed again.
"Call her Hecate's remnants, like how Yellow Turban rebels lingered after the uprising."
"Don't throw my own analogies at me. What exactly do you mean the Saintess became paradoxical? Explain so I—"
"U-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
A hearty laugh burst out behind me.
On what I thought was a two-person island, another presence—of course I spun round.
"At last! Finally! Liberation is here!"
And I saw it.
A slightly shorter figure, if the Saintess were younger, maybe a second-year middle-schooler, she would look like this, identical features, but a 'kid' standing proud, hands on hips, roaring with laughter.
"Behold!"
Tchakk! The kid struck a flamboyant pose.
"Absolute Spirit Leviathan is dead! Gone! The Form-Terminating Infinite Void shows not a hint of presence! Ahh! And that detestable foe—the Nightmare Abyss Nut—has vanished!"
"…"
"Now only I—only the rightful Leader of every void, I, the [Monarch of the Crimson Horse], shall rule this world! Ah-hahaha! Wahahahaha!"
"…"
Crrreak. My neck turned like a steampunk gear.
Pointing at the aqua-haired kid, I looked at Go Yuri.
"Don't tell me… that's…"
She gave a dazzling smile.
"Yes!"
"No, right?"
"It is!"
"Tell me it's not."
"Shall I swear on the Infinite Metagame?"
"See! I really am going to be strangled a fifth time! No, focus. Seriously?"
"Seriously-seriously."
She beamed.
"When the paradox struck, the void toxin of 'Saintess and yet not Saintess' occured—what do you think happened first?"
"Oh, please—"
"It's something you're already familiar with."
Potato. Potato sprout. Potato statue. That potato.
"Exactly! The Saintess split into separate personalities, each a [Constellation]."
"...…"
"Wahaha-haha! Hrk—cough, cough! Bwah-ha-ha!"
Now beside me, the kid was slapping my backside.
She even wore an eye-patch, the classic chuunibyou accessory.
Anyone could guess whose influence made the Saintess manifest the [Monarch of the Crimson Horse] like this.
"And of course it's not just Mr. [Monarch of the Crimson Horse]. Ms. [Collector of All Anomalies], Ms. [Librarian of the Great Library], Ms.[Succubus of the Grand Arcade], Mr. [Morning Star of the Second Coming], Ms. [Understanding of Anguish]—they're all here, every one of them at least ocean-class! Congratulations!"
"…"
"Not that it's surprising, the Saintess was absurdly strong to begin with, and she spent practically an eternity linked to Hecate. Truly the strongest Awakener."
"…"
"So, Guild Leader?"
Her eyes sparkled.
"Isn't it fascinating?"
Shit.
-x-X-x-
The Receiver II
Constellation.
The word that originally meant "zodiac sign" has, in modern fiction, evolved into labels such as "voyeur," "hard-core KakaoTalk addict," "age-gap fetishist," or "shut-in NEET."
The Saintess eagerly adopted this Constellation concept. The instant the Apocalypse broke out, a deluge of messages was pushed to every Awakener on the Korean Peninsula.
Naturally, among them were Awakeners whose hobbies were web novels and webtoons.
They shouted at once, "Wow! You know about Constellations? For anyone who doesn't, let me explain— in the series
In short, they shared their knowledge with everyone else without the slightest filter.
Please, try not to blame them too much. When would life ever again grant a chance to prove that web-novel reading is a loftier pastime than studying Spanish?
Thanks to their devoted efforts, the word Constellation became common sense in the post-Apocalypse world.
Even so, one question kept nagging at me.
"Bwahahahahahaha!"
The author of the Constellations, a lead actress juggling multiple roles, and the Saintess who had probably read no more than a couple of web novels in her life—
How well-versed could the woman herself really be in Constellation stories?
"Hah, kek, keugh. Gup! Puhahahah, ha. Hoo-ah-ah… ah, whatever. I'm exhausted."
Flop—
The eyepatch-wearing chuunibyou kid collapsed onto the sand. Even her bob cut, brushing her jawline, differed from the original.
I inched toward [The Monarch of the Crimson Horse].
"Excuse me, but are you perhaps the General of the Left?"
"Ung? General of the Left? What's that?"
"…Then have you heard of a pig named Dong Zhuo[1]?"
"Ah?! Dong Zhuo?! I personally slit that mangy cur's throat! What, are you another nobody who worships this hero that is I? Aiyaah, how troublesome. Shall I graciously make you my servant?"
"..."
A sigh welled up from the bottom of my heart.
'This is no Lü Bu!'
The character sheet—
The character sheet was an utter mess!
Strictly speaking, [The Monarch of the Crimson Horse] refers to Lü Bu Fengxian[2], history's greatest unfilial son.
And Lü Bu's rank was precisely General of the Left.
Yet the Saintess, for all she built a Lü Bu-based Constellation, had never been a Three Kingdoms buff!
'My lady Saintess, you who know so much… how could you neglect the Romance of the Three Kingdoms!'
It was like a VTuber whose lore says she's a high elf yet whose hobby is pruning bonsai World Trees.
At that level of lore-collapse you're practically begging the viewers not to get immersed.
Thus, even though Lü Bu had materialized in real life, the Three-Kingdoms flame in my heart could only grow colder and colder…
"Hey, you self-styled general."
My eyes were as dead as an otaku staring at a defective figure with the paint job half-finished.
"Aaang? Self-styled?"
"Right. What do you think of the 'Saintess'? For reference, I am her one and only close friend."
"Ah! The Saintess! Ooooh! She is the parent who gave birth to me—my Mother!"
…Was that a vow to decorate my severed neck in the name of filial piety?
"It so happened all us sisters got split apart. Hmph. We must re-fuse to restore Mother Saintess."
The delusional chuunibyou kid who thought she was Lü Bu rattled on cheerfully.
"So this hero was busy fighting other fools, when suddenly a tremendous aura was felt here. I dropped everything and came running."
"I-I see."
"Aah! Huhuhut! I wondered what kind of weasel Mother's lover would be, but seeing you in person—those muscles are nicely firm, not bad at all!"
Pow, pow.
The Monarch of the Crimson Horse—calling this brat Lü Bu was an insult to the Han-era rank—leapt up and smacked my butt.
"Her lover, is it? More importantly, why do you keep slapping people's behinds? That's harassment."
"Ah? Sorry, sorry. Your glutes are outstanding! I acted on impulse. It's my first time seeing such a specimen up close, and I just had to give it a whack. Wahaha. Next time I'll restrain myself and settle for your vastus lateralis!"
Is "don't hit me" not on the menu?
'Wait a second.'
Watching Go Yuri quietly unfold a bright smile across from me, a sinister thought dawned.
'In short… this kid's a personality spun off from the Constellations the Saintess role-plays.'
Meaning she's the Saintess at her core.
If this Sword Marquess + Oh Dok-seo chimera had certain impulses, there was a very high chance the 'original' shared them as well—
"Gyaaaah! Begone, fiend!"
"W-What! Fiend?!"
[The Monarch of the Crimson Horse] jumped in fright.
"Have our sisters already found this place? Where are they! Show yourselves!"
"N-No, that's not it. A theory I desperately need to launder from my brain just popped up…"
That was when it happened.
A voice made me freeze.
[The Collector of All Anomalies marvels at your insight.]
Huh?
[The Collector of All Anomalies pays you respect and reveals herself.]
A wave rolled up the empty beach and ebbed away, leaving a human shadow where nothing had been.
She, too, was the Saintess's spitting image.
But unlike the usually blank original, she somehow looked gloomy, somehow seemed as though she'd keep smiling forever.
"My, my. Hoho. Caught me, did you?"
For some reason she rubbed me the wrong way.
The self-proclaimed Lü Bu pointed at her at once.
"Aaaaagh?! You there! Collector!"
"Hoho, yes. How do you do, my beloved sis. It delights me to see you so full of energy."
"How dare you call me sis without permission! I've never had a sour-tempered little sister like you!"
"My, how sad. Fengxian sis, weren't we all loving siblings?"
[The Collector of All Anomalies] shrugged theatrically.
Using such words about someone who looked like the Saintess felt rude, but just watching her made my stomach acid bubble up.
"If Mother, now asleep, were to see us she would be heartbroken. Sigh. Are we truly incapable of being filial even once? You and I?"
"..."
Frankly, if Lady Saintess saw this live she might acquire an urgent desire to die.
"To insult this hero! Hey, Mother's lover! Don't be fooled! That snake gobbled up both the 'Saintess of National Salvation' and 'The Chancellor of the Red Cape' alone! She's the most vicious of all us sisters!"
"Ufufu. Yet Fengxian sis, did you not cleave 'The Conqueror of the Alps' in a single stroke?"
"Ha! That was an honorable duel! Unlike you, pretending to ally with someone only to stab them!"
"Please say I merely used humanity's weapons—intellect and strategy. Now, let the idiot sister be. What do you say, Mr. Undertaker?"
[The Collector of All Anomalies] offered me her hand.
"Me? Why me?"
"A foolish question, hoho. Obviously, whichever Constellation you side with is highly likely to become 'Mother.'"
The Collector fluttered her lashes in a deadly wink. Her mystic eyes practically compelled one to answer with a critical hit.
"That idiot sister is a brainless spearman… utterly unfit to be your partner."
"What?!"
"I, on the other hand… hoho. As you know, Mr. Undertaker, I'm a veteran who has collected countless anomalies. I'm sure I can help you along your way."
Arms spread, the Collector declared,
"I am your destined guide! Take my hand, Undertaker! Together we shall conquer every anomaly in this world!"
I nodded.
"Go Yuri."
"Yes."
"Sic 'em."
"Yessir ♪~"
Chomp!
A mouth of living shadow gaped open on the sea's surface and swallowed [The Collector of All Anomalies] whole.
"Mwooooo?!"
The Collector thrashed, to no avail.
Crunch!
Crackle!
A few ominous noises later, the shadow devoured its prey without leaving a trace.
Another wave foamed over and the shadow vanished. The beach returned to normal.
"Uh. Uhh? Uh…?"
The self-styled Lü Bu's gaze wavered.
Go Yuri produced a napkin, dabbed her lips, and bowed gracefully with a bright smile.
"Yes, that hit the spot."
"..."
"A delicacy, really. Ah, the Collector's soul can be retrieved any time, so don't worry. Still, it would be better if you, Guild Leader, disposed of her yourself. Miss Saintess's mental health might suffer otherwise."
"I'll keep that in mind."
When I turned, my eyes met those of the self-styled Lü Bu. The brat was still gaping at the slasher flick that had just played out before her.
Then something astonishing happened.
"B-Brother…!"
Thud.
Without hesitation the pseudo-Lü Bu dropped to her knees in the sand.
With a grave face the kid wailed,
"No! Father!"
"..."
"If you're Mother's lover, then of course you're this Fengxian's father! U-Until now this fool failed to recognize the heavens and dared to act up!"
Thwack—sand sprayed onto my cheek. Thunk! Thwack! Her forehead strikes threatened to rename the place Samjeondo.
"Please spare this unworthy child's life! Though I am but a slow-witted bear of a girl, this Lü Fengxian will become your unbeatable warhorse in your grand design!"
"Here you go, Guild Leader."
"Thanks."
I wiped my cheek with the napkin Go Yuri handed me.
Then I squatted, bringing myself eye-to-eye with the kid who now had at least three fathers.
"Hey, General."
"Y-Yes-heh? I'm not really—"
"No. You are the General of the Left. I'll ask some very important questions—answer them. Understood?"
"Y-Yes, sir!"
"What do you think of Cao Cao[3]?"
"Eh-heh? Mengde? That fellow—born a eunuch's whelp without even a— and forever wallowing in inferiority toward noble Yuan Shao, then butchering innocent civilians so history would call him the paragon of filial piety because Yuan Shao beat him to it… He's history's biggest piece of trash! If people want a model of filial devotion they should look at me first. Huhut! Never have I seen such a twisted lump of inferiority."
"Hm."
I nodded.
First test passed.
"Then what about Liu Bei[4]?"
"Ha? Xuande? That guy came from dirt and got a little success; people like that insist only their own words are right, then lose their base. Wahaha! With ears as long as a donkey's, pampering only his own circle—"
"Go Yuri. Sic 'em."
"—is what some blind fools claim, but they're idiots! The moment I met Xuande I knew no wiser, more virtuous lord exists! Ooh! This unworthy servant merely got lucky and took Dong Zhuo's head, while Xuande is the true hero of this chaotic age! Ah! I betrayed him for a moment's greed—this, this! You worthless Fengxian! Hup! I must smash my forehead and apologize to Xuande's very soul!"
"Mm."
I nodded.
Second test passed.
I clasped the shoulders of this genuine [Monarch of the Crimson Horse]—the one and only Lü Bu Fengxian across all parallel worlds—and hauled her up.
"From this moment on, you are Lü Bu!"
"Eh? Uh, but I was already Lü Bu…"
"I have zero desire to be your father, but you're still a shard of the Saintess, so how could I treat you coldly? From now on you may call me hyung."
"Ah. Uh, yes, respected Brother…?"
Though this remote desert island lacked a peach tree, a lone palm would suffice for a brotherhood.
My ambition was grand indeed.
'If I forge Lü Bu into the mightiest Constellation and return her to the Saintess, the Saintess will surely grow to love the Three Kingdoms!'
I shivered at my own stratagem.
Come to think of it, the 1,000th run had been slated as a vacation.
Somehow Hecate got involved and now I was fighting Constellations, but the more perilous the situation, the more one should enjoy it.
Look, Go Yuri over there has been grinning from ear to ear for ages.
"Brother Fengxian! No matter what happens I'll see you restored as the Saintess's main body—just trust this hyung!"
"Aah. Um, yes! Wahaha! Of course I'll only trust brother!"
"Good."
I slapped the shoulder of the sworn brother I welcomed after Seo Gyu with hearty gusto.
"Now then, little brother, to clear the third test let's start by memorizing the Official Histories of the Three Kingdoms, shall we?"
"…Yep?"
Shards of Constellation left to rescue the Saintess:
Four more to go.
Footnotes:
[1] Dong Zhuo (died 192 ce, China) was a general whose seizure of power and tyrannical rule ended the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) and divided the Chinese empire. In 190 ce Dong Zhuo burned Luoyang, the capital, and removed himself and the emperor to the ancient capital of Chang'an (now Xi'an).
[2] Lü Bu, courtesy name Fengxian, was a Chinese military general and warlord who lived during the late Eastern Han dynasty of Imperial China.
[3] Cao Cao, courtesy name Mengde, was a Chinese statesman, warlord, and poet who rose to power during the end of the Han dynasty, ultimately taking effective control of the Han central government.
[4] Liu Bei, courtesy name Xuande, was a Chinese warlord in the late Eastern Han dynasty who later became the founding emperor of Shu Han, one of the Three Kingdoms of China.