Threads of Parallel Worlds
I kept firing off questions like we were playing twenty questions. I even asked about the trivial things I already knew—her tastes, hobbies, that sort of stuff.
Zeta answered every single one of my questions diligently, without a hint of annoyance. Before long, once I was convinced she really was the Zeta I knew, I closed my mouth.
“Aren’t you going to ask anything else?”
“I still have plenty of questions, but I’m done asking first.”
Now that I would believe anything she said, I decided to listen carefully to whatever she wanted to tell me. She paused for a moment, as if organizing her thoughts.
Then she spoke.
“This world is a single string.”
“......?”
My earlier resolve went out the window as my belief hit a wall right from the start. The sudden topic made it impossible to keep a straight face, but I waited in silence without pressing her.
“More precisely, the threads that make up that string? Or maybe a tree with countless spreading branches? I only read about it once in a book when I was little, so I don’t know the exact details.”
Zeta explained it had been written in an ancient text passed down through her family. According to her, if the string was a collection containing every possible branch point, then each individual thread making up that string represented the outcome of connected branch points.
Every thread followed its own path, and even the parts that snapped off like loose fibers in the middle were each a complete world. Those, too, counted as a kind of branch point.
“So what you’re saying, Zeta, is that what we can see beyond the broken sky is some kind of parallel world?”
“That’s probably it. Threads that were never meant to overlap have overlapped, and that’s what caused all this. It’s only my speculation, though.”
“And you came from over there?”
“Mm… No, that’s not quite right. It wasn’t me who crossed over. More accurately, it was my ancestors. The concept of vampires has existed for a very long time, hasn’t it? Besides, I was born here.”
Zeta went on to explain that most of the occult elements in this world—various legends, myths, and folklore—were connected to beings that had crossed over through the gates.
At the same time, something suddenly flashed through my mind. At first I’d dismissed it as a wild leap, but after listening to her, one thing crystallized into certainty.
It was the exact time the disaster alerts had arrived.
It was only one or two minutes.
Hadn’t the emergency warning sounded before the sky even broke?
It wasn’t simply that they’d detected one nation launching a preemptive strike. They had observed something that went far beyond that—an unreal phenomenon.
If we’d ever encountered those kinds of events in our daily lives, maybe it would be different.
It was strange that the government had noticed a phenomenon with no connection whatsoever to our everyday routines. Didn’t that mean quite a few people had already crossed over from other worlds long before?
My head spun with speculation. The settings we’d only ever seen in movies and games weren’t fiction after all. The sky had shattered, another world lay exposed beyond it, and beings that had only existed in our imaginations were appearing in reality. Who could have predicted any of that?
Certainly not me. This was Zeta’s first time experiencing it too, but since she herself was a vampire and already knew some of the related stories, she had to be considered an exception.
I stared down at my smartphone, its corner cracked.
Something I only vaguely remembered—no, the proof was still sitting right there on the top of the screen even now.
Run away immediately. If you want to live. A door that must not be opened is opening.
It had arrived as a web transmission amid the flood of disaster alerts. Clearly sent by someone who already knew about beings from another world.
“Zeta, are there a lot of cases like yours? Ancestors crossing over and settling down here, or people still coming through even relatively recently. If the government sent out an alert like that first, it seems like there must be quite a few.”
“I don’t know that either. It’s not like I crossed over myself, and there aren’t that many stories passed down in our family… It’s not as if the people who crossed over are walking around advertising that they just arrived today…”
Unlike her earlier confidence, once Zeta realized she didn’t have much to tell me, her eyes drooped sadly. She quickly added, “B-but there probably aren’t as many as you think! The texts said crossing the gate is extremely difficult! Once you pass through, the gate closes immediately, so you can’t use the same one twice.”
“Then with the sky shattered like this, it must be easy now. It’s not just a door opening—it’s like the whole wall has been smashed down.”
Zeta nodded in agreement. We had no choice but to think that way, especially since some of the zombies currently wandering outside were wearing completely unfamiliar clothing we’d never seen before.
Most of it leaned toward Western styles rather than Korean, though some looked like defeated soldiers.
Even at this very moment, fragments from another world were falling somewhere and crashing into ours, contaminating everything around them.
It was obvious that things would only grow more chaotic with time. Irreversibly so.
That was as far as Zeta’s knowledge went. She didn’t know exactly why this catastrophe had occurred or why that other world had been destroyed.
“Sorry, Hyunwoo…”
“There you go again. You didn’t do anything wrong, so why are you apologizing?”
I made up my mind to accept this new reality. Honestly, the fact that my childhood friend of many years was a vampire, or that zombies were roaming around outside the window, still felt like too many unbelievable things to process at once.
“Oh, Zeta. I have one more question. Can I ask?”
“Ask me anything. I’ll tell you everything I can.”
“You mentioned earlier that your ancestors crossed over. You also talked about your family.”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Usually vampires make people think of Europe, so I was wondering why you’re in Korea. Most of the legends that get passed down are from there, right? And when you think about it, isn’t our country basically hell for vampires?”
Looking at Korean cuisine, it’s rare to find a dish that doesn’t use garlic. It feels like garlic is a basic ingredient in almost everything. Of course, I’d never seen Zeta avoid any food.
“You like garlic bread, don’t you? Is that allowed for a vampire? Doesn’t that disqualify you right away?”
“After all that buildup, it was about garlic? I think I told you before, but I’m a little different from regular vampires.”
“How exactly?”
“My blood is different, like I said. Anyway, I’m generally not greatly affected by those things.”
When I asked about her weaknesses and family, Zeta answered that she was the seventh head of the Beatrix Family.
“...Head? Isn’t that usually what you call the representative?”
“Yeah. I’m the representative of the Beatrix Family.”
Zeta puffed out her chest proudly and leaned forward. Just as I had guessed, she said her main family was based in Europe while she operated separately. According to her, “family” here referred to something like subordinates.
“Pardon me, but your age…?”
“Since I’m the same age as you, if you suspect otherwise I’ll turn you into a dried-up husk.”
“Ah, right.”
It was common sense that someone becoming head at such a young age was extremely rare, so I’d asked out of curiosity and nearly gotten my blood drained for it.
My body still wasn’t fully recovered. If I lost more blood here, there was a high chance I wouldn’t escape a horrible fate.
“...Then what about that thing you said about your family business?”
“That? We’re just not running it here, but we do operate the actual business. Don’t be surprised when you hear this. Our family sells information to self-proclaimed important people. When requests come in, we investigate them.”
“So you ran an errand center?”
Receiving requests to gather information was exactly what an errand center did. But Zeta made a displeased face and shook her head. She even stopped herself from saying that her subordinates reported their findings to her.
“No, it’s not an errand center. It’s an information guild.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“It’s not…! Completely!! Different!!”
“Okay, okay. Don’t get mad.”
I hurried to calm Zeta down. Her earlier smugness had vanished, replaced by angry huffing.
“So why are you here, then? If your headquarters is in Europe, shouldn’t you be there too? You’re the head, aren’t you?”
“......”
“And you’ve never even been to Europe, right? At least not from what I remember.”
We’d been together almost every single day, so I could say that with absolute certainty. It wasn’t a distance she could have traveled while I was sleeping, either.
That would mean she had completely abandoned her family the entire time she was with me. What kind of family head would neglect her own household for nearly twenty years?
I might not know much about families, but I knew something was wrong here.
It was possible she had been abandoned by her family instead, but that seemed extremely unlikely. After all, I remembered hearing what sounded like pleading voices on the other end every time she answered the phone in the past.
I hadn’t understood it back then, but now I finally felt like I knew why.
“Um, that’s… Technology these days is so good that we can handle things through video calls…”
“What kind of grandmother excuse is that? Fine, I won’t dig any deeper.”
“No, it’s true…! You just didn’t see it because you were sleeping, but I worked hard too! That’s why I received my allowance on time every month, and I even sponsored you—!”
A family head who received allowance from her subordinates. Was this what twenty-first century vampires were like? Even that was astonishing, but the words that followed were impossible to ignore.
“So it really was you.”
“......”
Zeta hurriedly clapped a hand over her mouth. She invoked her right to remain silent. Silence was as good as an admission. The thing I had suspected for so long was now confirmed as fact.
The person who had sponsored not only me but several other children at the orphanage as well, knowing that receiving sponsorship alone would lead to bullying.
My light.
My salt.
I had finally found my mom.
It wasn’t exactly a shocking revelation. I had suspected it for a while now.
Still, my voice trembled as I called out to her.
“...Mom?”
“Hyunwoo, do you actually want to die?”
“No.”
Cancel that.
She wasn’t my mom.