The 500-Million-Year Button

For a while, one debate topic had set the internet ablaze.

The 500-Million-Year Button.

Press the button, receive ten million won — but in exchange, you'd have to spend five hundred million years in an empty void where nothing existed at all.

Afterward, you'd return to reality with those memories wiped clean. Whether or not to press the button had split opinion down the sharpest of lines, as far as I remembered.

Back then, I'd been on the side that said press it.

The self who endured those five hundred million years and the me of right now were, in my view, two entirely separate people.

If I could go back to that moment, I would smash my own fist into my past head with all my strength.

“Hello?! Is anyone there?!”

I had fallen asleep and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠woken up in an unknown space.

I scanned my surroundings slowly, carefully.

But all that greeted me were rows of exercise equipment and a vast white expanse that looked uncannily like a baseball stadium.

No matter how many times I rubbed my eyes and searched, there was no exit to be seen anywhere.

“Not one bit of this is funny. Cut the hidden camera crap already.”

I shouted until my voice cracked, kicked the walls, tried every avenue of escape I could think of — and in the end, arrived at a single conclusion.

The truth that I was trapped in an unknown space.

“…….”

Crushed by despair, I crouched down in a corner.

Being locked in was a terror beyond description.

It wasn't for nothing that the cardinals sealed inside the Vatican during a conclave eventually pawn the papacy off on the youngest among them and wear smiles of pure relief.

As I sat staring blankly around the space, a line of writing on one wall of the dugout caught my eye.

'Swing?'

It was a demand with no preamble and no explanation whatsoever — but it was the only hope I had left, so I clung to it.

Spotting a baseball bat propped against the wall, I picked it up.

Slowly I made my way to home plate, settled into position, and took a swing like I would during an ordinary tee-ball drill.

Whooong—!

The number didn't so much as twitch.

The moment that final hope crumbled too, something surged up in my throat and I screamed.

“What do you want from me!”

And at that exact instant.

Like something out of a movie, a monochrome animation bloomed across one of the walls.

The wall projected the image of a baseball player rendered in pure black outlines, mid-swing.

As if to say: copy this hitting form.

“…….”

I had no other options, so I studied the batter in the animation with meticulous care.

My old hitting form had been an uppercut swing launched from a closed stance.

Because I still lacked strength and refined technique, it had been a stopgap measure — a way to wring every last ounce of force into contact.

But the batter in the animation was running a hitting mechanism of a completely different design.

The most striking feature was a level swing set up from an open stance.

'Where have I seen this form before?'

After racking my brain for a long moment, I finally remembered where.

“Isn't this the hitting mechanism that's been trending in the majors?”

A toe-tap in place of a leg kick that demanded faster reaction timing.

Coiling the body backward from the power position through a deep hip hinge, carving out space behind the torso.

Even the final detail — the launch angle created by tilting the upper and lower halves of the body in opposition through the level swing.

It was a swing that called to mind Aaron Judge, the living legend himself, or Ohtani.

I mimicked the stance from the animation.

“Like this? No — my upper and lower halves didn't separate on that one.”

Overhauling a hitting mechanism I had maintained for years was no small task.

There was no coach watching over me, no one offering advice — so correcting it alone was the only way.

I fumbled through it, tinkering with my form piece by piece — and then.

Whooong—!

“Finally!”

At the sight of the number climbing for the very first time, I let out a whoop of joy.

It finally felt like I'd found a thread leading out of this place.

The euphoria of having accomplished something lasted exactly as long as it took me to face the enormous reality in front of me.

“…When am I supposed to hit ten million?”

Was there any number more hopelessly distant?

Theoretically, even swinging ten thousand times a day would take me a thousand days — and after swinging that much, there'd be nothing left of my body anyway.

“Sixty seconds in a minute, so an hour is 3,600 seconds. Multiply that by 24 and….”

Math was poison to a sports recruit like me.

I abandoned the calculation on the spot.

“Time isn't what matters. Somehow, some way, I fill the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠swing count and get out of here.”

The number refused to climb easily.

If my form deviated even slightly, the swing didn't count — so I couldn't afford to let my focus slip for even a second.

After grinding away at the training for a while, I made an important discovery.

“Why am I not hungry?”

By rights, after this much time had passed, my stomach should have been screaming for food.

Not a flicker of appetite had appeared.

'Come to think of it… my wrist doesn't hurt either.'

I'd picked up a minor wrist injury at my last tournament, yet right now I felt nothing of the kind.

Once one question took root, the thoughts came linking themselves together, tail to tail.

Trapped in a sealed room like this, oxygen deprivation would be the natural result.

And yet my breathing carried on without the slightest trouble.

“I mean… waking up from sleep inside a place like this never made sense to begin with.”

Could it be that this space was a training ground built just for me — a place conjured into being to grant my one burning wish: to train properly?

It wasn't as if animation was short on examples. Characters who deployed their own personal domain. The Room of Spirit and Time.

“…Enough daydreaming. Focus on the swing.”

Around the time I'd finally scraped together a thousand swings, I flopped onto the floor and sank into a deep sleep.

The hypothesis that this space was a training ground made for me alone seemed to hold up, more or less.

Under normal circumstances, the day after training of this intensity, my entire body would be covered in welts from bruising — that was simply how it worked.

Yet when I woke up, my muscles were completely unharmed.

From there, it was a repeating pattern, over and over.

Day after day of swinging, then surrendering to sleep.

Once I realized that however violently I moved my body, it would be fully restored by the next day, I threw myself into the training — for several days.

Before long, I had fallen into a slump of boredom.

“I want to get out….”

It was true that I'd wanted systematic training — but this was not what I'd asked for.

Is this how it feels to be committed to a psychiatric ward?

Devoting yourself to nothing but baseball in a world of unbroken white, with no entertainment of any kind, was no easy feat.

Naturally, my gaze drifted toward the exercise equipment filling one side of the space.

Thinking about it rationally, the correct move was to concentrate on swinging if I wanted out of here fast.

But repeating one single motion, endlessly, was never going to be easy for a human being.

'Even at five thousand a day, that's two thousand days….'

Wouldn't mixing in some other pastime actually be the smarter way to protect my sanity and keep my routine intact?

After much deliberation, I sat down at a chest press machine.

Truthfully, I'd never been particularly fond of weight training.

But maybe because swinging had grown so tedious, the return to strength work after so long offered a refreshingly different kind of stimulus.

“Hup! Hoo! Hup! Hoo!”

The sensation of muscle fibers tearing microscopically, recovering, and rebuilding themselves stronger.

For someone living through such strange days — eating nothing, only to wake with a body as good as new — it was in these moments, while my muscles howled, that I could most keenly feel myself alive.

'Who knows. Maybe I'll end up developing a taste for this side of things….'

From that day on, five thousand swings plus weight training became my new daily routine.

Whooong—

“There it is!”

Five million — half my target, finally complete.

With no clocks or calendars in this place, I had no way of knowing how much time had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠actually passed.

But I'd grown reasonably comfortable with the new hitting form.

Where before, a momentary lapse in concentration was enough to stop the counter dead, now it felt as though my muscles moved on their own accord.

That was a genuinely remarkable thing.

Consider that even in a single season, a professional baseball player's hitting form typically changes multiple times.

Just as I was sighing over the fact that half the target number still remained, a sudden question surfaced.

“Is this training actually working?”

A hitting form was nothing more than a tool for producing good contact.

In the end, baseball is a game of hitting a ball.

Could swinging at empty air, over and over like this, really translate to real games?

As if in answer to that very doubt.

When I lifted my head from a sigh, something I'd never seen before was sitting in my field of vision.

A machine perched atop the pitcher's mound.

“Huh? Isn't that a pitching machine?”

Just as I stood in the batter's box as usual and readied to practice my swing, a baseball came hurtling at me out of nowhere.

Fwiiiish—

“Whoa!”

Having barely dodged the ball, I stared blankly toward the mound.

“What the hell?”

Balls kept flying toward home plate in quick succession.

“Don't tell me… it wants me to hit these?”

The suspicion hardened into certainty.

Crack—!

Only when I produced a hit that would qualify as a base knock did the number finally tick upward.

Head spinning, I pressed a hand to my forehead.

'This isn't what I signed up for….'

In terms of sharpening my eye for reading the ball and building live-game feel, this training would undoubtedly help.

But it was blindingly obvious that filling ten million swings with hits-worthy contact would take far, far longer.

Whether it understood my frustration or not, the pitching machine kept spitting out baseballs.

Fastballs, two-seamers, curveballs, sliders, splitters, and on and on.

Every pitch type, at every conceivable velocity, came screaming toward home plate.

The one silver lining: the balls vanished on their own, sparing me the chore of shagging them.

Crack—!

Crack—!

After sending a series of thunderous liners into the void, I found myself staring blankly up at the ceiling.

“…You know what? This is actually fun.”

The recoil transmitted from the bat into my palms felt, somehow, like proof that I was still alive.

.

.

.

How much time had slipped away?

As the target of ten million swings drew closer, new anxieties began gnawing at me.

'What if I fill the count and I'm still stuck here?'

Worries like: what if the real me is lying in a hospital bed in a vegetative state? What if this is all just a brain in a vat?

I shook my head forcibly.

Didn't the philosopher Nietzsche say as much?

I think, therefore I am.

Not that I understood the precise meaning.

I spent most of class hours asleep face-down on my desk, after all.

Actually — I'm not even sure it was Nietzsche who said it.

What mattered was this: even if I were a brain in a vat, the me of right now was thinking, and my body moved exactly as my will commanded.

My gaze dropped naturally downward.

My chest, my abs, and all the smaller muscles woven throughout the rest of my frame.

The muscles hadn't grown conspicuously larger, but it felt as though my skeleton itself had been rebuilt — as if something fundamental had changed.

The quiet pride of tangible progress lasted only a moment.

Then I sank back into thought.

'What if this was only the beginning? What if it tells me to hit ten million pitches next — to become a two-way player?'

Despite the paranoid suspicion and creeping dread, my body kept cycling through its mechanical swings.

Crack—!

Bang—!

The ball trajectories that had seemed so alien at first now moved along lines I could predict with ease.

I had spent long enough in this place to deadlift 650 kilograms without breaking a sweat, after all.

In that instant, the hope of finishing the ten million and escaping this cursed white prison — and the fear of whatever might come after — tangled together into one knot.

Crack—!

At long last, I had achieved the target number.

I flinched when nothing around me seemed to change — but only for a moment.

Then new words appeared across the wall.

“What? Tutorial? Are you kidding me, you—”

Just as rage began to sweep through my entire body.

An irresistible drowsiness flooded over me.

When I opened my eyes, an unfamiliar ceiling greeted me.

I stared blankly at the pattern of the wallpaper, and the moment I realized this was my own room, I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠shot upright in a flash.