Resurrection Count: 9
“...”
I stared blankly at the hospital ceiling.
My mind had checked out, and it was in no hurry to come back.
“This is reality, right?”
It still didn’t feel real.
I’d pressed the button, and now I was in a hospital.
The morning after the subway disaster. The morning I’d first come to my senses.
As if my body still remembered the carnage from back then, everything ached, and a deep muscle soreness ran through me.
“Huh? Was all of that a dream?”
No way.
I called up my status in my mind.
Resurrection Count — 9
The letters flickered before my eyes.
As if to prove that the resurrection count was everything I had, no other information appeared at all.
“Fuck.”
Something was off. Right after I’d escaped the subway anomaly, my resurrection count had definitely been ten or higher.
Why had it dropped to nine?
I clutched my head and tried to force an answer out of myself.
In the end, every line of reasoning led to the same place.
“That wasn’t a dream, was it?”
The Management Bureau had been overrun. The world had been racing toward annihilation.
Everything I’d lived through had not been a dream.
“I’m checking out.”
This was no time to lie around.
I needed to head to the Management Bureau and confirm whether anything had changed.
I decided to discharge myself far earlier than scheduled.
“About filing a claim against the state—”
“I’m fine. I don’t need it.”
I’d landed a dream job that paid four million won a day.
I didn’t have the luxury of suing the government.
Dragging my battered body along, I ran straight for the Management Bureau.
I didn’t even have time to report to the gallery.
I took a taxi and arrived at the Management Bureau Building.
The exterior looked exactly as I remembered.
Is it intact? It has to be intact, right?
My mouth went bone-dry.
Had pressing the B10 button really erased the anomaly that had tried to end the world?
And if it had, how was that even possible?
What the hell was the Causality Regenerator in the first place?
Patak’s explanation alone left too many gaps I couldn’t fill.
I pushed open the doors and stepped inside.
Management Bureau employees went about their ordinary routines as if nothing had happened.
In the middle of that everyday disorder, I found something unfamiliar.
These people were not the anomalies I knew.
Wincing at the muscle pain, I made my way to the reception desk.
“Hello. What brings you here today?”
“I was referred by this person.”
“Manager Lee Gukdo? We don’t have anyone by that name at this company. I think you may have come to the wrong place…”
The reaction was different.
The reception woman’s response made the tension drain out of me.
The machine called the Causality Regenerator had successfully restored a broken world to its original state.
What the hell even is the Causality Regenerator?
What was it?
The question didn’t resolve itself. It only sank deeper.
“How did you know to come looking for this place?”
The reception woman’s eyes narrowed.
My throat prickled.
The real reception woman was seriously high-strung.
“I’m a survivor of the Jamsil Station subway accident.”
I rubbed the back of my neck and told her the truth.
Even if she didn’t know Patak’s name, “Jamsil Station survivor” should ring a bell.
“A survivor of the Jamsil Station ghost story? An agent hasn’t been dispatched yet, though.”
The chill at the nape of my neck faded.
So even without knowing Patak’s name, the part about an agent coming had been real.
I’d assumed they simply didn’t bother sending anyone because people dying to anomalies was routine.
“I’ve confirmed the information. It’s genuine. Congratulations on surviving. Mr. Seol In-yul, we’ll process your survival compensation, so please step into the reception room for a moment.”
Whoa. Money. How much was I about to get?
I followed the reception woman into the elevator.
“...”
Why was she glaring at me like that?
Under that razor-edged stare, I swallowed hard and rolled my eyes.
Still fucking hot, though.
She looked soft and gentle, but she was sharp as a blade.
Even so, her edged attitude did nothing to kill the thing between my legs.
“We’ve arrived. Please wait here a moment.”
We got off on the fifth floor.
The same floor I’d always come to for part-time work.
But the room where the part-time applicants used to gather was empty.
We passed it and arrived at the room where I’d once found the rulebook.
A simple space with a single desk and two chairs in the center.
I sat down and waited for someone to appear.
The door opened.
Click.
I heard the lock turn.
“Hi. I’m so glad to see you alive.”
She came over, pulled me into her arms, and buried my head between her breasts.
Tits. Soft.
The plush give against my face melted the tension right out of me.
But there was no one at the Management Bureau who should know me well enough to act like this.
I went rigid again and turned my head.
Senior Seo In-seo?
Seo In-seo had opened the door and come back inside.
Why is she here?
Hadn’t everything reset after the regression?
This could be an anomaly’s trick.
I narrowed my eyes and stared her down.
“I’m so, so glad I get to see you alive again.”
But the moment she pulled my head back in, my brain short-circuited straight into her chest.
Tits. Enormous tits covering my face.
Holy shit. Huge fucking tits.
Senior Seo In-seo’s body was insanely voluptuous.
I crushed the urge to take a nipple into my mouth and go to town.
“What happened? I opened my eyes and time had gone back several days.”
“What?”
“Don’t you remember? After we went down to B10 and pressed the button?”
“...”
I shrank into myself. Senior Seo In-seo remembered everything from before the regression.
Unlike my regression, which triggered off my death, the Causality Regenerator seemed to preserve some people’s memories.
Fuck. No way.
With a sinking feeling, I opened the gallery.
The gallery’s state was different from before.
The gallery hadn’t been affected by the regression either.
Fuck. My image crafting.
I’d worked so hard to become a genuinely well-liked figure in the gallery—not as some ironic bit—and every last bit of that effort had gone up in smoke.
Kyaaaaaagh.
Hehe, tits.
Hehe, Vampire Queen from behind.
Tits. Tits. Tits. Sooooo many.
Staring at my old posts, I sank into despair.
Anyone could tell a lunatic had written them.
“You’re joining the Management Bureau, of course?”
“What?”
“What’s wrong? Is this about what you did with Kim Yul-ryeong and Lee Ye-yoon? That’s our secret. I won’t tell anyone else. Don’t worry.”
I barely registered what Senior Seo In-seo was saying.
By the time I came back to myself, I’d already stamped my Management Bureau employment papers.
The document vanished into her hands.
“Congratulations on joining. I’m so happy to have an SSS-rank rookie.”
Senior Seo In-seo grabbed my head and shook it.
The crushing hydraulic pressure through my cheeks made my vision swim.
“I’ll walk you through what we do at the Management Bureau. HR will send someone to your old workplace to help with the transfer.”
From resignation to onboarding, everything moved at breakneck speed.
I followed Seo In-seo into the elevator.
“Hello. I’m Seol In-yul. I’ll be joining as a new hire.”
The team Seo In-seo belonged to was called an Exploration Team.
More precisely, Exploration Team 9.
Whenever an anomaly was discovered, they were the first unit sent in to investigate it.
First in, risking their lives to analyze the anomaly and uncover its rules.
I exchanged greetings with the Exploration Team, then headed to a nearby bar for the new-hire welcome party.
The next day I was assigned an apartment. The day after that, I was thrown into actual work.
I never met the Director on the thirtieth floor.
Patak had said anyone would know him if I just dropped the name.
But when I mentioned Lee Gukdo, not a single employee had ever heard of him.
I feel like I’m missing something…
I sighed and headed down to the basement.
Counting today, this was my third trip underground.
“Code Yellow, Code Yellow. Temporary employee injured by an anomaly.”
A middle-aged man was wheeled out on a stretcher.
The same middle-aged guy who’d come for a part-time interview.
So the Bureau really did recruit part-timers—he’d come back to work again.
Even with time rewound, the outcome of getting wrecked by an anomaly hadn’t changed.
“Not bad for a rookie. I’ve never seen a new hire this calm.”
“If you just follow the rules, it’s nothing special.”
I’d survived anomalies the rules didn’t even work on.
The first-floor ones were cute little pranks by comparison.
But why did that thing show up in the first place? I still don’t get it.
I returned to the Seoul apartment I was scheduled to own in ten years.
Swinging a bottle of wine I’d bought at the convenience store, I sank into thought.
I understood that the Causality Regenerator on the tenth basement level worked a lot like my regression mechanism.
Press the button, erase the world-ending anomaly, and roll the world back to before it appeared.
Losing a resurrection count sucked, but it still beat not having the option at all.
What I still couldn’t crack, no matter how hard I thought, was the identity of the anomaly that ignored every rule and drove the Management Bureau to the brink of annihilation.
How had something like that even crawled out?
Senior Seo In-seo had been just as baffled—its very existence was unknown.
“Ah, forget it. I’ll think about it later.”
I set down the wine glass and opened the gallery.
After days of turning it over, I’d reached a conclusion.
The current world was not fake.
It wasn’t an anomaly’s trick.
Their passionate welcome made the corner of my mouth twitch.
Who was I? King of the gallery. The one who’d surpassed even the head admin.
The savior of everyone trapped in ghost stories.
Morning came.
I posted my survival report to the gallery and left the apartment.
The gallery was overflowing with nothing but praise for me.
I was their one and only savior.
No one else could redeem them but me.
My third day commuting as a Management Bureau employee.
“Good morning.”
I tossed out a bright greeting and stepped into the elevator.
“Good morning.”
“Morning.”
A man in his thirties with heavy dark circles returned the greeting.
A senior who’d joined Exploration Team 9 two years ahead of me.
“Morning. You’re as cheerfully energetic as ever. Almost pleasant to look at.”
The short-haired employee I’d met in the cafeteria came over.
The senior I’d once ranked as a meat-toilet candidate.
But she was human now, so I had no business thinking something that blasphemous.
“You two always look so close. When did you get that friendly, though?”
“That’s our little secret. Absolutely can’t say.”
Senior Seo In-seo kept our secret for the two of us.
Every member of Exploration Team 9 had gathered.
“Congratulations on the team leader promotion.”
“Congratulations.”
Senior Seo In-seo, whom I’d taken for a regular employee, had apparently been on the verge of becoming team leader.
She was scheduled for a perfectly ordinary promotion to team leader today.
Unexpected events had just tangled everything up before.
“Ah, right. You’re coming outside with me today. We’ve got to pick up your item.”
“Item?”
“If we’re going to face anomalies, we need abilities of our own. I’ll pick out something suitable for you.”
I headed to the underground parking garage with Team Leader Seo In-seo.
The entire Exploration Team 9 followed her out of Seoul.