Restart
Though Restart had allowed him to live again and again, Seonwoo had never once given up on life easily.
Every moment had been precious, and he had always done his utmost. It wasn't only because he was the kind of person who felt he had to.
Unlike Seonwoo, who, upon dying, became the dead one whose story ended in that instant—
—the ones left behind had to endure the tragedy that began from there, precisely because they were still alive. That was what made him keep going.
Failure.
Would you like to start again?
[Y/N]
The instant he failed and lost his life, he was given that brief window of choice.
Until he pressed Y, Seonwoo was granted a short reprieve.
And in that moment, he had to face the immeasurable grief and despair of the precious people beside him.
Not even a full minute.
Yet inside that tiny sliver of time were screams that seemed to gather a lifetime's worth of sorrow and despair.
No matter how many times it repeated, he never grew used to those faces, those voices, those scenes—and he never would.
He carved them into his eyes—no, into his soul—every single time, and took the next step.
Because he had engraved that moment into himself after every death, he understood at once.
Crackle—!
...No.
The horrific pain scorching through his nerves told him this was completely different from all the times before.
At the moment of death, the senses of the living never remained. His mind existed, but his senses did not. It was alien. Terrifying.
But now, unlike then, Seonwoo stood before the system's question asking whether he would live the next life—and he could feel everything with perfect clarity.
And so—
Slowly, he raised his head and looked ahead.
A road overflowing with light stretched out before him, so bright he shouldn't have been able to see even an inch ahead.
Step.
And yet the road did not dazzle him.
Following instinct, Seonwoo stepped forward.
He had to move on.
He had to reach whatever lay beyond that road of light.
Driven by that instinct, he never stopped. He simply kept walking.
Saaaaaa—
And at last, at the very end of it—
There sat a cat, its swaying, pure-white fluffy tail the first thing that caught the eye.
Like its tail, the rest of its fur was soft and plush, and its eyes were blue.
A pure-white cat.
With everything around them steeped in dreary gray, it stood out all the more.
Judging by size, it looked like a medium-sized cat, but rather than dignified, it gave off a cute impression.
Thump!
But Seonwoo's heart pounded.
His senses, sharpened to a bizarre degree, felt the absurd presence emanating from the cat before him.
Its presence was so vast he couldn't even begin to grasp its full extent.
He had met more than a few beings powerful enough to be called the strongest on his way here, but none of them even came close.
If they were beasts like tigers or lions, then this cat was a great mountain that held all beasts within it.
Even when the Elementalist Who Brings Ruin had arrived leading an army that could literally destroy the world, it hadn't felt like this.
And above all—
Who is this?
It was someone Seonwoo was seeing for the first time.
There had been no such character anywhere in Goddess Saga.
No—more than that, there had never even been a place you entered like this to begin with.
That was what the cat asked him when he only gazed back in silence.
Only then did Seonwoo smile faintly and nod.
"Yeah. First time."
"The concept of a talking cat is pretty common, isn't it?"
Yes. Seonwoo's life was far too far from ordinary for something like a talking cat to truly shock him.
If anything, the more surprising part was that it was pure white and cute.
It looked a little dissatisfied, yet even that was somehow expressed through the gentle swish of its tail, making it seem only cuter.
As he faced the cat, Seonwoo thought to himself.
He was talking to it casually, but this was a situation he needed to take very seriously.
He could say it with certainty: there was no character like this in Goddess Saga.
And more than that, this was his first time ever coming to a place like this in the course of Restart, something not even included in this world's System.
He had senses, yes—but he had unquestionably died.
The system that asked whether he wanted to restart did not activate unless he died.
So this was, without question, a variable from an entirely different dimension.
At that moment, a new voice reached him, and Seonwoo turned toward it.
Ah...
The tangled noise in his mind vanished cleanly.
She was beautiful.
Not beautiful in the simple sense of seeing a pretty person and calling her beautiful—
Thump!
It was the sort of wonder one felt if a silver river made of countless stars adorning the night sky suddenly unfurled right before one's face.
The Milky Way.
That was exactly what she was like—a person so distant, wondrous, and beautiful that a mere human being could never fully contain her.
She approached him.
Her black hair drifted in the air, along with the hems of clothing not from Earth, but from Murim.
Because he had lived his current life over and over rather than his past one, it wasn't unfamiliar to him.
And yet the one wearing those clothes was far too extraordinary.
The cute white cat had already possessed an absurd presence, but standing beside her, it only brought a phrase naturally to mind.
A mountain beneath the heavens.
Where in the world is this?
After emerging from the road filled with light, he had found himself in a space where withered gray earth stretched on without end.
And now, right at its entrance, he was facing beings this absurd.
He didn't even know where to begin sorting things out.
As if seeing straight through his thoughts, she spoke.
"Yes."
Seonwoo answered her offer without hesitation.
At his immediate reply, she let out a small laugh and took the lead.
The barren gray land stretched on for quite some time, and before long he saw a tea table sitting all alone in the middle of it.
And on top of the table were two steaming teacups.
"Doesn't the cat drink any?"
"Haha! This child doesn't care much for tea."
Even in the midst of all this, Seonwoo had spared a thought for the cat, and she answered with a smile.
The cat perched on her shoulder answered in place of words by swishing its tail.
"Go on. The taste shouldn't disappoint."
"Thank you."
Slurp.
Just as she said, the tea was good.
And as warmth spread through him, his body and mind settled a little.
Is she from Murim?
Her clothes, her speech, her whole bearing—everything about her made her seem unmistakably like a person from Murim.
Humans from another dimension who wielded superhuman abilities through the power called martial arts.
But that alone was nowhere near enough information.
To begin with, this was a place he had reached after dying and walking down a strange road of light.
Instead of sinking into deeper speculation, Seonwoo chose the simple, direct path.
"Who... are you two?"
He included the cat in the question.
"You could say we are beings whose resentment remained, and so could not pass on to the afterlife, becoming bound here instead."
The answer came immediately, and it carried considerable weight.
"Resentment?"
"Yes. One becomes seized by a grievance too deep to fade, because one's life could not be brought to a clean end."
"This place is a crack between dimensions, formed where the resentment of such beings pooled too deeply. Hanwa."
Hanwa.
A crevice born when resentment gathered and gathered until even dimensions were twisted by it.
She explained that among those who died with resentment too vast and deep, some were drawn here by chance—unable to go to the afterlife, trapped and bound instead.
The cat spoke, and the woman nodded.
"Not just anyone can come to Hanwa simply because their resentment runs deep."
"Only those who have accumulated enough karma to escape the force that draws the dead, as part of the universe's order, into the afterlife."
"And even among them, only those who happen to reach this place may enter."
"So I am sincerely curious. How exactly did you come here?"
It wasn't contempt. It was pure bewilderment.
Though said casually, someone whose resentment ran deep enough to come to Hanwa could never be ordinary.
Such a person would have to be someone burdened by tragedies too horrible to voice aloud, one after another, until resentment accumulated within them.
To come here, that person would need enough karma to push an entire world toward ruin, and yet still not have their resentment resolved.
The karma visible through Seonwoo's soul did, in fact, make it understandable that he had ended up here.
But the human being called Seonwoo, who had amassed karma of that degree, made no sense at all.
He looked ordinary in every respect.
His personality, his presence, even the power he possessed.
Judging by the karma he had accumulated, he should have lived at least two hundred years.
For a human to live that long, a martial artist would need to have reached at least the realm beyond mastery, and a mage the rank of archmage.
But in the eyes of the woman and the cat, Seonwoo was at a level where even using the word realm felt embarrassing.
And since their eyes could not be wrong, they had no choice but to wonder.
Understanding what they meant, Seonwoo smiled faintly.
"I think it's probably because I failed too many times."
"Too many times?"
"Yes. I... well, I came from another world."
"I see. Dimensional travel, then?"
"No. I think possession is the more accurate term."
"I see."
Another world. Dimensional travel. Possession.
Words no ordinary person could mention lightly, yet no one here paid them any special mind.
These were beings to whom even such things were truly ordinary.
And Seonwoo, already standing before Restart, had no reason to hold back.
"I wanted to become the protagonist of some game, and that wish came true."
"I wanted to become the protagonist and see the happy ending... but I couldn't do it, because I wasn't enough."
That much, too, they could accept calmly.
But what came after that was another matter.
"So I failed. Far too many times."
"I was given the chance to do it again and again, and I failed again and again and again. So many times I can't even count."
"I think that's why. Those failures stayed behind as resentment. Maybe that's why I came here for a little while."
"Are you saying you were able to repeat your life over and over?"
"Yes. But even after repeating it that many times, I still haven't seen the ending I want."
"...How many times did you repeat it?"
At the grave question, Seonwoo gave a bitter smile and shook his head.
"I don't know. At some point, I stopped counting."
"......"
"......"
The calm air around the woman and the cat wavered for the first time.
Only now could they truly see it.
The resentment layered within him was not the product of a mere two hundred years.
It had not been accumulated all at once by some transcendent human who had reached a higher realm.
It was tragedy piled upon tragedy, built by an ordinary human who had failed dozens—perhaps hundreds—of times.
That was how the cat asked, almost as if reciting the words to itself.
It wasn't an insult.
It was closer to stunned disbelief.
He wasn't some human who had reached enlightenment and forged an unshakable self.
He really was—truly—an ordinary human being, one who had lived through horrifying tragedies across an inconceivable span of time and still gone on living until now.
And yet that ordinary human—
"Yeah. I'm sane."
—answered with the calmest smile, as an ordinary human.
Even for her, a being exceptional even within Hanwa, it was something so astonishing it shook her.
"......"
"......"
For a moment, both the woman and the cat were speechless.
Only after some time passed did she finally speak, her voice heavy.
"What... made you keep moving forward, even while repeating failure to such an extent?"
What in the world—what truly—had allowed this ordinary boy before her to walk so far down such an endless road?
That was what she asked.
And the boy, thinking of the reason, answered with a dazzling smile.
"My family."
"Your family?"
"Yes. Because in this world... I have family I want to be happy with."