Chapter 94
Chapter 94
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 94
Chapter Title: Responder VIII: Shin Noah
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Thud.
The next footprint belonged to No Do-ha.
She had set up her workshop on an island connected by a single bridge, forcing people to travel a solitary path. I worked there as her assistant.
No Do-ha didn’t ask for much from life.
Sunlight. Water. A patch of land. Beach sand. Tree leaves, a fair bit. Flowers, a little less.
A hammer. A number of others she could handle. Wounds she could endure. Warm coffee. The type of beans didn’t matter.
She longed for summer, autumn, winter, spring. She wanted the patter of rain on the garden stones—not human footsteps—to wake her from sleep.
If she ever died, she hoped the aged winds of late summer would grant her a wind burial, neither cremation nor burial.
The complete opposite of Dang Seo-rin, who yearned to leave for anywhere, No Do-ha wished for nothing to come visit her from anywhere.
Thus, she was the one who asked the most from life.
“Assistant….”
“Yes?”
“Pack your bags. I’ve got a short trip to make. Ugh. There are just so many geezers who can’t even make it to the island….”
“Ah, yes. Got it.”
As the last snow melted at winter’s end, No Do-ha left the island. The bridge hadn’t been repaired in ages, its railings crumbling in spots.
Creak. The sea blew playful breaths.
“Be careful, Workshop Master. This winter’s heavy snow damaged the bridge a lot. We’ll need to fix it up after you return.”
“…….”
“Workshop Master?”
As I walked ahead and turned to look back, smack—No Do-ha’s palm pressed against my back.
It was a pressure I could have ignored.
I didn’t ignore it.
I froze in place, mid-turn.
“Workshop Master?”
“I don’t cling….”
“Pardon?”
“Assistant. I don’t need any ideals. An ideal paradise. An ideal life. An ideal ending. Ugh. Living with even a sliver of my days mortgaged to such things isn’t how I accept the world….”
“…….”
“I’m not the type who finds pride in denying reality. I graduated from that hobby at twelve. You know that, Assistant. I absolutely hate owing anyone anything….”
Tap.
No Do-ha gave my back a light push.
Another gesture I could have ignored.
I didn’t ignore it.
The loose railing couldn’t bear my weight and groaned—before collapsing.
Just before falling from the bridge, I looked up at No Do-ha. The sun’s shadow veiled her face.
Only a smile like a shadow etched across it.
“Get lost….”
No Do-ha’s face rapidly receded.
Splash—I hit the seawater, and couldn’t help but think.
Dropping someone midway from island to mainland. From other shore to this shore.
It was murder so very like No Do-ha.
Blink. Jolt.
The wheels of time turned.
Two steps forward.
15
Thud.
The next footprint belonged to the Saintess.
“…….”
“…….”
Surprisingly, the two of us sat on a silver moon. Facing each other on stone-carved chairs, a table between us.
The world held its breath.
Earth on the far side of the cosmos had stopped, and the sun illuminating it from behind stood still as well.
The White World.
The endpoint of time. No, a temporary pause.
The inevitable destination when an Awakener called the Saintess fully blossomed her power—.
“Undertaker.”
A battleship-class, no.
Perhaps even an Outsider God-class monster.
Bearing the Awakener name of Saintess, yet the monster title of ‘Executor,’ it parted its lips.
“You already know, but you could face this ending anytime, Undertaker.”
“…Eternal rest?”
“Yes. Not the little vacations you joke about sending… but truly letting go of breath. Thus, rest. The world stops. People no longer move. No sins occur. No misfortunes, no unhappiness.”
Like chanting a small song, the Saintess laced her voice with telepathy. That is, the Constellation’s oracle.
[Of course, no regressions either.]
“…….”
“All existences become like inanimate objects. Mere specks of dust drifting through eternity and instants alike. If this world ever stops, there’s no reason it can’t be today, right?”
“Saintess. You already know you can’t convince me.”
“…….”
The Saintess sipped her coffee.
Loaded with heaps of sugar and cream, no different from convenience store swill.
As a barista, there was nothing for me to do but dump in a sachet of Maxim and stir. Cheap stuff. Yet the Saintess rated the coffee I stirred as ‘tastier.’
I wonder if she knew I secretly added half a spoonful of cinnamon powder.
“Why not? Do you believe you’ll escape eternity someday?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know? In the 23rd round, Emmett Schopenhauer gave up everything and fled to a world with just him and his lover. That was the sane choice.”
“…….”
“Even the 23rd round was plenty long, plenty painful. You’re too hopeful, Undertaker.”
The Saintess spat her words.
“This world is hell.”
With no room in the cosmos for human breath, her voice and exhalation were purely the groans of her transparent, colorless aura.
The universe’s sole noise.
Thus, its only scream.
“The world is hell, yet no one takes responsibility. Efforts to change it are absent or too slow.”
[If you can’t turn back time, you must stop it.]
“Why does a torture chamber lurk in some underground corner of the world? Have you seen a child not yet ten die?”
[A child sold to the ‘factory’ from infancy, doomed to torture and death on their tenth birthday.]
“Why are the mine slaves born in rock and swamp mines fated to die in those cramped crevices, never knowing a wider world?”
[Why do humans rejoice not at happier people, but at the existence of the more miserable?]
“If you’d excuse such crude traits as forced by environment, by the world, not their choice.”
[Fine.]
“Then what reason do I have to permit time’s flow for such a world to keep existing?”
“…….”
“Hell lies two myriad fathoms below? No such thing.”
Inhalation flowed into the cosmos.
[One layer.]
The Constellation’s starlight flickered.
Pythagoras’s shadow Earth strayed from harmony, screeching with noise.
“That planet, just one layer beneath, is entirely hell.”
“…….”
We fell silent.
Not from lack of words, but because our words to each other were set.
I knew the one phrase that could kill the executor of time, the executioner, the Saintess. And like a murderer with a final scrap of conscience, I slowly brought down the blade.
“Help me, Saintess.”
“…….”
“I want to help the others.”
“…….”
Blood flowed in the cosmos.
Per Pythagorean lore, the universe comprises ten celestial bodies, one invisible to human eyes.
Shadow-Earth.
Always orbiting in sync with Earth, back to the light, Shadow-Earth dwells in eternal eclipse-like darkness year-round.
That shadow planet, revolving with the other nine, emitted sounds. Like heartbeats. Like harmonies. Thus, Pythagoreans believed the cosmos forever filled with celestial song.
To them, the world was beautiful.
But humans hear that cosmic song from birth onward. It becomes such natural ‘background’ that we never truly hear the universe’s music.
One layer.
That the horrors—and the beauties—of this world lie beneath eyebrows of but one layer was the Saintess’s fatal curse.
“Avici….”
Ever shrouded in shadow, turning its gaze wherever people avert theirs, the shadow Constellation parted its lips.
“…has descended upon Baekhwa Girls’ High School as the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. It exists as leader commanding ninety-nine ghosts. In other words, Avici has fragmented its being into ninety-nine pieces.”
“…….”
“My power was merely stopping the world. But as it grew stronger, I could move freely within the halted world. Much like… Cheon Yo-hwa’s power will surely grow even stronger.”
“What do you mean?”
“Imprinting behavioral principles on humans to command them like NPCs. That’s Cheon Yo-hwa’s Awakener ability. But perhaps—with development—she could use it on monsters too.”
“Ah.”
My eyes flashed open.
“You could command monsters at will! Amazing! An incredibly powerful ability!”
“…Yes. At least limited to the monsters in school ghost stories, or Baekhwa Girls’ High School.”
The Saintess nodded.
“Cheon Yo-hwa is Avici’s apostle. She can interfere to some degree with the monsters Avici commands. You’d know better than me why she was chosen as its apostle, Undertaker.”
“Indeed….”
I saw the strategy.
The Saintess warned me.
“But devouring Avici’s Night Parade of One Hundred Demons would make Cheon Yo-hwa incomparably stronger than now. She’d become no different from a monster herself. …Like the vision you’re seeing of me now.”
“…….”
“Even just Avici alone does this. The more monsters you subjugate, the more gather around you, Undertaker. Dang Seo-rin, Sim A-ryeon—eventually, surely. …If only ‘poison begets poison’ summed it up, but in truth, it just transplants the world’s poison into you. If you ever gave up… the backlash would dwarf Schopenhauer’s. So please….”
I took the Saintess’s hand.
“I know.”
The Saintess looked at me.
“Fall into hell with me.”
“…….”
Screech—
The cosmos’s halted sphere groaned. Sun, Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn jolted into motion. The ten wheels aligned in a straight line.
Grand Alignment. The cosmos’s most majestic constellation, pronounceable by stars.
At its final line stood the shadow.
“Yes.”
The shadow smiled before my eyes.
[To the very end.]
Blink, One Layer closed its eyes.
Jolt, the ten Constellations played a silent symphony.
Before long, hands clasped, we tumbled upside down—from the moon’s glassy surface toward the ground—toward hell.
Endless fall.
We clung tightly to each other.
The universe’s song was time.
Blink. Jolt—
The wheels of time turned.
From other shore to this shore. From nearest otherworld to farthest reality.
One step forward.
16
“—Uncle! Uncleee!”
I pondered why humans are born with two eyes.
Because the world is always double-layered. Hell beneath the sunlight, beauty shrouded in shadow.
Blindness and gaze. Poles. The gap.
Existence as the space between voids.
I slowly opened my two eyes.
“Yo-hwa?”
“Yes, Uncle! Ughhh. So… you’re really Uncle? I mean, do you remember… us wandering the school ghost stories and all?”
I looked around.
Ding-dong-dang-dong.
Bells rang. This was the school ghost stories… no, Baekhwa Girls’ High School. The tolls spread not under red skies, but blue.
An endlessly normal school.
No eerie birch forest, no flowerbeds of otherworld blooms. Lunchtime now, students milling across the field in groups.
“…Yeah, I remember. We were walking four steps to exorcise Avici. Just the last step left.”
“Aaah! Yes! Um, but why this time are Uncle and I in the same illusion…?”
“Looks like this is your fourth step.”
Thud.
Cheon Yo-hwa’s and my footprints overlapped.
A world so peaceful, leaving no gap for monsters, voids, or apocalypses.
That was our final station.
Infinite Regressor Spills the Tea