Chapter 211
Chapter 211
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 211
Chapter Title: Infinite Regressor Spills His Tale
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13
No matter how much rooftops were geopolitical hotspots in subculture—places swarming with love confessions and punches straight from the heart—it was still awkward trying to catch up with the Saintess in comfort here.
For starters, the backdrop was all wrong. Even with time frozen, the world below remained a sprawling hellscape.
“Let’s find somewhere else to talk.”
“Sure. Sounds good.”
“But can’t you undo [Time Stop] for everyone else?”
“That’d be tough.”
The Saintess shook her head.
“For one thing, I have to be holding hands directly for someone to move around with me in a stopped world.”
Now that she mentioned it, she was still gripping my hand tight.
But if we linked hands on both sides, couldn’t we bring along at least one more person that way? She added to my half-formed thought,
“Unless they’ve tempered their aura to an extreme degree like you, Undertaker, they just couldn’t endure it. They’d need strength enough to personally overcome the very notion of ‘time.’”
“Hmm. Fair enough.”
If I had to compare it, a stopped world was like the vacuum of outer space. A regular person—no, even a decently trained Awakener—would struggle just to make a sound.
“Which is why I can pull off little surprises like this.”
*Snap.* The Saintess let go of my hand.
In my vision, it played out in slow motion: her palm peeling away from the back of my hand, inching to 0.1 cm apart.
The next instant, I wasn’t on the National Highway Management Corps headquarters rooftop anymore. I was in the first-floor lobby.
“......?”
“I just stopped time.”
The Saintess’s face was utterly impassive.
But my Guinness world-record eye for [Interpreting the Saintess’s Blank Expressions] picked up even on the faint aura lurking in those facial muscles.
This person... she’s excited right now, isn’t she?
Her mood was definitely lifted a notch.
“No, hold on, Saintess.”
“The World.”
Her hand slipped away again.
In the next moment, my body was smack in the middle of Babel Tower Square.
“....”
“Ta-da.”
The Saintess said it deadpan. Which meant she’d probably huffed and puffed, lugging my body around while time was stopped, to get me here.
“...Saintess.”
“Yes?”
“You’re in a really good mood, aren’t you?”
“Yes. It’s been all of two thousand years since I last talked to someone.”
“I spent about 212 years alone once, back when the Wandering Amusements operator screwed me over, so I get the feeling...”
It was the loop where Sim A-ryeon came to me and said, “I love the café mochas the Guild Leader makes.”
That time, I’d grabbed A-ryeon in a bear hug and bawled my eyes out like a little kid.
In other words, two hundred years of isolation was more than enough to reduce me—the Undertaker—into a pathetic little regressor, ripe for conquest by that Goryeo Jang villain.
And the person in front of me had just endured ten times that, all by herself...!
Which meant the Saintess right now was pathetic-squared.
The moment that assessment clicked, I took her hand and scooped her up effortlessly into a princess carry.
“Ah.”
“You’ve been through a lot, Saintess.”
“....”
“And thank you. If you hadn’t stopped time, I’d have honestly abandoned this subjugation altogether. I might’ve ended up trapped in an eternal hell of looping time forever.”
During those two hundred years with zero human contact, the thing I craved most was simple human warmth.
So when I reunited with Sim A-ryeon, wasn’t hugging her just pure instinct?
People can only understand others by reflecting on their own experiences, so I had a pretty good guess what the Saintess wanted most right now.
“....”
Looks like I wasn’t off the mark.
The Saintess silently surrendered her weight to my arms.
Tilting her water-blue hair—longer now than it had been two thousand years ago—toward me.
“I know a nice café nearby. How about we head there?”
“...No. Just walking around like this is fine.”
“Oh. Cool. Let’s do that, then.”
*Thud, thud.*
It’d look pretty damn embarrassing to anyone watching. But luckily—or not—the rest of the world was frozen solid, holding its collective breath. Aside from us two, anyway.
Nobody could spare us a glance.
The mortals caught in the torments of the Mountain of Knives Hell and the Boiling Cauldron Hell were petrified mid-escape or mid-scream.
We wove past the statue-still bystanders.
“Truth be told, I was a little worried.”
The Saintess in my arms parted her lips.
“Worried?”
“I’m an anomaly now.”
Even the voice slipping from the Saintess’s lips carried a parched dryness, like something long petrified.
“And not just any anomaly—even Outsider God class wouldn’t be a stretch. You’re hostile to anomalies almost without exception, Undertaker. So...”
“I see. You thought there was a chance I’d spot you and go, ‘Insolent anomaly scum—’ and subjugate you on sight?”
“Yes. Just as one possibility.”
I chuckled.
“If you ever see an Undertaker acting like that, it’s a doppelganger. Subjugate it quick.”
Sure, purging the Void from the world was vital. But how could it mean more than the people around me?
The moment I prioritized that over them and turned into a pure ‘Anomaly Subjugation Machine,’ then the lone human called the Undertaker would devolve into just another anomaly himself. One that absolutely had to be purged.
Of course, the Saintess nestled in my arms no longer ran human-hot.
She felt cool, like shade.
Probably under 15°C.
But for a body that had weathered two thousand winters, that was still plenty warm.
“....”
That was when something a little wondrous happened.
*Ssssh—*
The Saintess’s aura groped its way up my arm.
As everyone knew, her aura was colorless—transparent—so there wasn’t any visible change. She just stayed quietly cradled in my arms.
‘Her aura control really has reached absurd heights.’
Amazed inwardly, I summoned my ink-black aura and gingerly wrapped it around the transparent tendril brushing my arm.
“....”
A hesitation.
The Saintess’s transparent aura responded to my ink-black touch, tentative and careful.
Instead of human fingers interlocking five to a hand, our auras split into thousands, then tens of thousands of tendrils, twining together finger by finger.
Transparent and ink-black bloomed across our bodies.
Flowers bloom without a word, and the Saintess simply closed her eyes in my arms.
“....”
“....”
Aura carried heat.
Warmth.
With aura mastery no ordinary Awakener could dream of imitating, the two of us were ultimately just mimicking the human ritual of sharing body heat.
So the line between anomaly and human wasn’t some 36.5°C internal temp, or five fingers per hand. It came down to what you tried to imitate with that heat and those fingertips.
We spent a quiet while like that, caressing each other’s humanity.
14
“While surviving in the stopped world, I mulled over ways to breach Nut’s domain.”
The old Baekje Hospital café.
The very spot where Old Man Show always took calls from Madam Adele. The Saintess sipped her coffee there. It’d been ages since I’d brewed a cup for someone myself.
Well, it was just instant coffee—tear open a gold foil packet, add hot water.
But it was her favorite, so what could I do? Barista pride crumbled before the miracles of modern food tech.
“Any breakthroughs?”
“Sadly, no.”
She shook her head.
“The closest I got to success was the ‘life flashing before your eyes’ approach. I leveraged the legend that those who experience it glimpse the afterlife for a split second—so I pushed myself right to the brink of death on purpose.”
“Oh. Clever angle.”
“Yeah... But I still hit that glass barrier at the boundary between this world and the next.”
Glass.
Metaphor for the phenomenon where you can peer across but never cross.
If only I could smash that pane with my fist. But the Outsider God’s shield was leagues beyond the bulletproof glass on a U.S. president’s limo.
In hindsight, the time Fairy No. 264 dragged me into the shadow world was the golden opportunity... Regretting it now wouldn’t change a thing.
“Tell me every other method you tried, too.”
“Of course.”
We pooled all the records of her failures from the last two thousand years.
Don’t get the wrong idea and think the Saintess was incompetent.
Flip the perspective: even the Outsider God, Night Goddess Nut, hadn’t managed to meddle with her [Time Stop] for over two thousand years.
Outsider Gods wielded power to warp the world into hell overnight.
Yet they couldn’t lay so much as a finger on a time the Saintess had halted.
‘Domain disputes’ between anomalies packing Outsider God-level threat ratings played out like this, more often than not.
“Truth is, your power and Nut’s are perfect counters.”
The Saintess cocked her head.
“Really?”
“Yeah. The world you freeze is basically nothingness. Time’s halted, so no life sparks, no suffering festers. Nothing perceives anything.”
And that ‘nothingness’ was paradoxically the polar opposite of ‘hell.’
“Hell, the afterlife—they’re projections of the idea that life drags on in soul form even after death. Endless existence.”
“Ah. Yeah, that tracks.”
“So Nut can’t pierce your formless void, and you can’t pierce her manifested realm. Perfect counters.”
“...Meaning Nut and I are locked in eternal stalemate purely from matchup.”
“For you solo, yeah.”
I rested my chin on my hand.
“Glass. Glass. How to shatter the glass. Anomalies tied to glass...”
“Shouldn’t we consider mirrors too, not just glass?”
The Saintess chimed in.
“You said that when you entered the shadow world, looking down into the glass showed your reflection from the real world.”
“Right. My real-world self, projected right underfoot.”
“Then it’s closer to a ‘mirror’ than plain ‘glass.’ The afterlife’s ultimately a copy of this life. I think the shadow world is our world, reflected in a mirror.”
“Spot on. Hmm...”
Every human in existence got ‘copied’ and ‘pasted’ into Nut’s domain.
Then Nut declared those copies the genuine article—and us, mere souls writhing in hell.
Like the Saintess said, the ‘mirror’ concept fit best.
“Mirror. Mirror, huh. Doppelganger...? No, doppelgangers were Infinite Hell’s minions. It’d be more about identity fracture and chaos.”
“Ship of Theseus?”
“Probably. Off the dome, anomalies linked to ego splits or confusion: Ship of Theseus, Uyuni Salt Flats, dark history mosquito, Potato Saintess...”
“Skip the last one, please.”
What’re you saying? That might be the key clue of all.
“Either way, loose associations at best—no direct tie to breaching Nut’s domain... Ah.”
Right then.
My Undertaker brain-search, combing old leads, latched onto one keyword.
“—Mirror!”
I shot to my feet. Still linked hand-in-hand with the Saintess.
“Yes?”
“Now that I think about it, there was an anomaly not just tied to mirrors, but to ‘hell’ and the ‘present world’ too!”
Why hadn’t it hit me sooner?
The anomaly that chanted hell nonstop like a sutra: ‘This world is hell’ ‘Being born into this world is evil itself.’
*-Die right now.*
The Magic Mirror. The anomaly born from Snow White.
That mirror—the one always in psychopath Yoo Ji-won’s room—was the thread leading straight to Night Goddess Nut.