Chapter 119
Chapter 119
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 119
Chapter Title: The Brainwasher I
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Shin Noah
1
I don’t particularly care for quotes or proverbs.
Admiring a famous saying is more like appreciating a photo of a beautiful landscape than actually standing before it.
To those who’ve already visited that place, it holds meaning as a memento, but to everyone else, it’s just a fake antique propped up in their living room for decoration.
That said, there’s one exception. I think even a pragmatist like me can find one proverb from Nietzsche useful.
-He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
Isn’t that the ultimate guide for hitchhikers traveling through the end times?
If you want to make it even more practical, tweak just the second half.
-If you gaze long into Go Yo-ri, Go Yo-ri also gazes into you.
Go Yo-ri.
Personal color: pink.
Pokémon type: Psychic.
Specialty: a gentle smile for everyone. And full-beam brainwashing.
If she’d appeared as a Drowzee in the first-generation Pokémon anime, she’d have gained a cult following among kids, but unfortunately, she reincarnated into reality, which made my neck hairs stand on end.
What I want to tell you all is this: to seal away this Pokémon, I—the Undertaker—worked tirelessly.
‘What if I take a photo without looking directly at her? Maybe that’ll reveal Go Yo-ri’s true form?’
Click.
I committed the reckless act of secretly photographing Go Yo-ri. It was suicidal.
The shot itself succeeded, but the result was disappointing. An ordinary camera lens and my retinas weren’t meaningfully different in performance.
In other words, the photo showed the same pink hair, the same soft smile on a beauty standing alone. Hmm. Somehow, the photo seemed inferior to the real thing.
The moment I thought, ‘Hmm. Somehow, the photo seems inferior to the real thing,’ I realized I’d already fallen under a mild hypnosis. A chill ran down my spine. I immediately burned the photo.
Failure.
‘What if someone else takes the photo for me?’
I had Yoo Ji-won—who didn’t particularly value her life from my perspective—do it. The result was the same. Yoo Ji-won returned alive and well.
Failure².
For the record, none of my tests were conducted in the same loop.
Go Yo-ri required handling with even more caution than a nuclear bomb. All tests had to be carried out in entirely separate loops.
‘If I record her voice with a recorder, maybe I’ll capture her true—’
Failure.
‘...Wait. What if I use a spirit camera?’
It was a somewhat ingenious idea.
By this point, I’d received an instant spirit camera from the Magical Girl Council as a reward for clearing the Inunaki Tunnel.
Click.
I had high hopes for this test. A spirit camera is a rarity among rarities. What could be more perfect for unveiling Go Yo-ri’s true nature?
That’s when it happened.
Drrrrrr...
A bizarre noise started emanating from the spirit camera as it normally developed the photo.
Drr! Drk! Taring! Taririring! Taririring!
It was a phone ringtone. Or maybe the blaring alarm of a red fire alarm button being pressed.
Clunk! The camera started shuddering on its own, and the next moment—psshhshhshh—like a fire had broken out inside, it spewed smoke.
Then it stopped.
“......”
It gave me goosebumps.
“What’s going on?”
Even more chilling was the fact that Go Yo-ri had approached before I even noticed.
Right up to my face.
Go Yo-ri tilted her head, bent at the waist, and looked up at me at an angle from below.
“Hmm? You look familiar... Ah, wait, wait. Hold on. Aren’t you the one from the Busan Station waiting room? Um. Your name was definitely... Undertaker. Mr. Undertaker, right?”
“......”
“Wow! No way! What a coincidence running into you here! Ah. Smoke keeps leaking from that thing in your hand. Are you okay? Or...”
Go Yo-ri smiled brightly.
“Is there anything I can help with?”
I was screwed.
Trusting a camera like this in the first place was idiotic. How powerful could a treasure from a group prancing around in magical girl cosplay really be?
But a regressor is someone who prepares countermeasures for exactly these scenarios. I immediately activated Protocol 552-71.
“Unexpectedly, a gale comes whooshing in! The wind roars fiercely, so I hurriedly climb the watchtower and look at the flags—!”
“...Huh?”
“Behold! The Azure Dragon, Vermilion Bird, and White Tiger respond to the Black Tortoise, spreading northwest in a flurry, and in an instant, a southeast gale rises, tearing the banners! Whoosh! The signal flags rattle and shake! Ah, it rises like a whirlwind, and seeing this, Zhou Yu’s liver and gallbladder drop!”
“Eh. Um...? Yes?”
“Heavens! Ahhh! Why did you birth me and give birth to Gongming! Wooo! Woo-wee!”
“......”
I danced like a madman and ran toward the horizon. All the dignity, grace, and any sense of stature I’d built over a thousand years as a regressor—I threw it all into the mud.
Protocol 552-71’s original name: Singing Pansori “The Battle of Red Cliffs.” Or, pretending to be insane.
For the record, I was good at pansori.
I was even better at pretending to be insane.
Even the Interest Demon King Go Yo-ri, who starts every encounter with “How intriguing,” didn’t pursue this human reject. Dobby was free, and I escaped.
And in that loop, I never approached within 30 kilometers of Go Yo-ri again.
Failure.
—Go Yo-ri was, without a doubt, a dangerous entity.
As the founder of the Library Society and its shadowy mastermind, I could hardly resist adding [Go Yo-ri Tier] to the end of the risk lineup: [Village-Tier - City-Tier - Continent-Tier - Ocean-Tier - Outer God-Tier].
My business partner, whom I always relied on and consulted in moments like this—National Highway Management Corps Leader No Do-ha—wore a neutral expression in the headquarters ops room.
“To me, you seem like the more dangerous one...”
“Hmm.”
I didn’t exactly agree with No Do-ha’s point, but I revised my strategy anyway.
“As I mentioned, ‘the one whose name must not be spoken’ is dangerous not just to me, but to all humanity. Everyone projects their ideal type onto her, so even someone as emotionally barren as me—a cold bachelor—can’t help but fall victim.”
“Fuck. I have no idea where to even begin tackling this... Anyway, you. Was your ideal type someone with pink hair...?”
“That’s not the important detail. Corps Leader. But by pinpointing that issue, we can form the following hypothesis. What if it’s someone who transcends emotional barrenness and has no emotions at all? Wouldn’t they be safe even upon contact with ‘the one whose name must not be spoken’?”
“Hmm? Someone with no emotions at all? Does that even exist...?”
“More precisely, someone incapable of feeling fondness for the other party—in other words, someone who doesn’t like the other person. That’s where Go Yo-ri’s perception manipulation begins.”
“......”
“......”
We turned our heads almost simultaneously.
“Hm?”
Scrape, scrape.
There, National Highway Management Corps Ops Control Room Director Yoo Ji-won was whittling wood with a carving knife. She was crafting chess pieces for use in [Minimap].
“Why are you suddenly looking at me?”
The high-intelligence psychopath tilted her head.
2
Yoo Ji-won.
Personal color: silver.
Pokémon type... who the hell cares. Anyway, psychopath. Trying to explain this one in detail would be a waste of life.
Compared to Go Yo-ri, she didn’t win in anything except looks.
It was an excessively hateful fact for reality, but Yoo Ji-won was as brutally beautiful as her face suggested. It was such an objective truth that even I couldn’t twist it.
Just knowing that the two rivals vying for the top spots in appearance among Korea’s Awakeners were Go Yo-ri and Yoo Ji-won made it all too clear—this land had no hope.
That’s right. I always assigned Yoo Ji-won to Go Yo-ri surveillance duty.
On the national map spread out in the ops team, a black bishop (♝) engraved with the letters “Go Yo-ri” always slinked around furtively.
“Ji-won. I need you to make contact with ‘the one whose name must not be spoken.’ Of course, you must never reveal I sent you. And above all, if you sense even the slightest sign of brainwashing, I’ll isolate you immediately.”
“Hmm...”
Yoo Ji-won rested her chin on her hand. Resting her chin and humming right in front of someone—it was such a blatant psychopath tell that it gave me chills.
“Your Excellency. I have a condition.”
“What condition?”
“When you go to the next loop, bring me something.”
This was the voice of a born madwoman.
If Yoo Ji-won were an ordinary psychopath,
“Hah? The me from the next loop? That’s a completely different person from me now, isn’t it? I’m going to pursue my happiness right here, right now.”
“From now on, I’ll live for myself.”
she might think that way, but no chance. Our psychopath’s brain folds were extraordinary from the start.
‘Hmm. If the world regresses because of that guy (the Undertaker), no matter how much wealth and power I accumulate through my efforts, it’ll all vanish with a single ‘click’ of regression, right?’
‘Why should my power and safety disappear because of some clicker?’
‘But you can’t kill a regressor.’
‘Therefore, I must latch onto the regressor.’
‘In other words... negotiate with the regressor however I can to pass more power and information to the me in the next loop. Then even more in the following one. If I keep inheriting that legacy...’
‘Won’t ultimate victory belong to me in the end?’
‘From now on, I’m going all-in on Regressor Coin.’
—that’s the outrageous conclusion she reached.
How do I know this? I heard it straight from her.
I’m confident no further explanation is needed as to why I treat this hairless beauty like a lunatic. At least, I’ve never seen a character in any creative work—let alone one featuring infinite regression—with this kind of thought process.
Another example of reality effortlessly triumphing over fiction.
“Ji-won.”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“Do you have any guess how many times I’ve heard those words from you?”
“No. But your statement just now confirms that I’ve maintained my sanity in any loop. Reassuring.”
“‘Sanity’ isn’t quite the right word there...”
“Hm. Intellect? Reason? Judgment?”
“The exact opposite of all those words would be spot on.”
“...?”
In the end, I had no choice but to make another promise to Yoo Ji-won. For the record, this bitch had dug 1,000 meters deep into my secret base café.
It started at 100 meters.
No need to explain how she crawled from 100 to 1,000. I’ll just add that I’m someone who keeps promises very well.
I deployed Yoo Ji-won and trailed behind her. Maintaining a strict distance of several hundred meters, of course.
Go Yo-ri was running a cafeteria in Daejeon. She distributed food twice a day, morning and evening, in exchange for a bit of labor from civilians.
I observed the scene through binoculars. Seeing Go Yo-ri tie on an apron and smile brightly as she served food made my teeth chatter.
The apron even had kanji on it.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
‘How terrifying! Go Yo-ri!’
I shuddered.
‘Even in a moment like this, you try to toy with my mind and bewitch me! Do you think I’d actually feel fondness for you because of that!’
Not to mention, it was green—an apron that might as well be a symbol of the state of Chu, neither rootless blue nor red.
Truly horrifying brainwashing!
My hands trembled. Forcing the binoculars away, I spotted our National Highway Management Corps’ ultimate weapon—the silver-haired psychopath—walking over step by step.
And—.
“......”
“......”
The two existences met.
The one who makes you feel fondness no matter what, and the one who feels no fondness ever.
In other words... a contradiction!
The spear and shield that should never meet in proper history—destined to shatter the laws of the universe and mock society’s ethics just by making contact—now stood face-to-face due to some bizarre twist of fate (me).
My chest swelled with grandeur on its own.