Chapter 32: The Reason for Returning
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 32: The Reason for Returning
The next day, I was discharged from the hospital without any issues.
Thanks to whatever measures Baeksan had taken, my body felt perfectly fine aside from some muscle soreness, and there was no reason to stay any longer.
I was told that Seo-ho’s side had already paid for all the hospital bills.
He said it was a small token of gratitude for protecting Si-ho.
I hadn't really done much, but it would have been rude to refuse, so I graciously accepted his kindness.
It wasn't like the S-rank hunter, Snow Mountain Wolf Ha Seo-ho, would be short on money anyway.
Returning home, it felt like I’d been away for an incredibly long time.
I suppose it was because I’d spent a day in the hospital right after living on a deserted island.
“Ah, that familiar smell.”
“Is this really the time to be talking about smells? This place is a pigsty.”
“I had to leave in a hurry, so I didn’t have time to clean.”
Ignoring Baeksan, who was acting disgusted despite being a half-ghost who couldn’t even touch anything, I started to clean.
He was right, though. The place was an absolute pigsty.
“More importantly, when are we going to start this training you mentioned?”
I looked up at Baeksan as I cleaned.
I had decided to trust his words for now.
He was invisible to Ahyu and the others, and the story he’d told me aligned perfectly with my situation.
According to him, I was destined to become some kind of central figure for the returnees. It didn’t feel real, but if it was true…
‘I’ll probably end up dead if things go that way.’
It was only right to have some means of protecting myself.
Then, a question suddenly popped into my head.
“Baeksan, I’m curious about something.”
“What is it?”
“Can I… actually get stronger? I’m not a hunter or a returnee.”
Naturally, I was an ordinary person.
An ordinary person who could be killed with a mere flick of a returnee’s finger.
Honestly, I couldn’t picture myself training to become strong enough to survive against hunters and returnees.
Hearing my question, Baeksan seemed to see right through my thoughts and suddenly started laughing. He looked at me and asked.
“Have you forgotten that the returnees you’re talking about were once ordinary humans themselves?”
“Well, that’s true.”
“It’s the same thing. Of course, among those caught in dimensional shifts, far more of them died without being able to do anything.”
Dimensional shifts have been occurring for hundreds of years.
Even now, the government was struggling to distinguish between disappearances caused by dimensional shifts and ordinary missing person cases. That’s how common they were.
Of all the people caught in these shifts, less than 5% successfully returned.
Returnees were always a tiny minority.
That was why they had to endure a period of discrimination and neglect.
“It’s a miracle that so many returnees have come back after being dropped into worlds with nothing. But actually, the Tower of Revelation has had some influence on that.”
“It has?”
“I can’t say for sure, but it increases the number of fateful encounters. Every returnee has probably felt it at least once.”
In other words, it was something I, not being a returnee, wouldn’t understand.
“And you just had one of those fateful encounters.”
Baeksan flashed me a grin brimming with absolute confidence.
“With me, the one they called the strongest of all returnees, by your side, how could you not get stronger?”
“Ooh.”
“Put some feeling into it when you’re impressed.”
“Ooh!”
As I clapped my hands to play along, he threw his head back and laughed heartily before slowly lowering it again.
“Alright, that’s enough fun. You need to get stronger not just to survive, but also for the reason you mentioned yesterday.”
“Yeah. Because I want to find my sister.”
A prophecy twisted by the Tower of Revelation.
I didn’t know the contents of that twisted prophecy, but the look on my sister’s face as she left me made it clear that it was because of me.
If that was the case, I wanted to find her.
To tell her the prophecy was all wrong.
That it was okay to come back.
And that I was glad she was back.
I wanted to tell my sister that.
That was the reason I started studying everything I could about returnees.
“I was just curious. It’s hard to imagine myself getting stronger, even with training.”
“Hmm, it seems you’re unaware.”
As I clenched and unclenched my fists, Baeksan stroked his chin and told me something.
“For your information, your body is much stronger than you think right now.”
“Huh?”
What kind of nonsense was that?
As I stared up at Baeksan with a look of confusion, he floated down from the air to stand in front of me.
“When I entered your body, I burned away as many of the blockages as I could. Once you learn how to handle aura, you’ll be able to overwhelm most things with sheer firepower.”
“Ugh.”
I already knew from him that he had entered my body to save me.
But I never imagined he’d done something like that.
At the same time, I finally understood why my vision had suddenly improved, allowing me to stop wearing glasses.
“How could you mess with my body without the owner’s permission? That’s sexual harassment.”
“Bullshit. You would’ve died otherwise, you idiot.”
I understood that I had been on the verge of death, but I looked down at my hands with a strange expression.
All I had to do was learn to handle aura.
…So how do I do that?
I had no clue, but I decided to leave that part to Baeksan.
After all, I had no choice but to trust him completely.
“I called it training, but I don’t intend to disrupt your daily life. There are still four years until you turn thirty, and that’s more than enough time to build the strength to escape life-threatening situations. In fact, I’d rather you maintain your daily routine.”
“So you’re saying I can still play games and go to work?”
“Yes. I don’t want the future to change too much either. It’s better to keep things as they are whenever possible.”
That made sense. If he wanted to leverage his advantage as a regressor, that was the right way to go.
“However, you’ll be sleeping a bit less.”
“That kind of disrupts my daily routine.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll forge your body into one that can go a week without sleep.”
He’s trying to turn me into some kind of weapon.
“In any case, your daily life won’t change much. All I want from you is to become strong enough not to die. I’m not going to ask you to stop the apocalypse, so don’t worry. The me of this world will take care of that.”
He had a bored expression, as if he never expected that of me in the first place.
I agreed with him on that point.
Even with a regressor around, what could I possibly do to stop an apocalypse that even the most powerful returnees couldn’t prevent?
In that case, it was better to focus solely on survival, just as Baeksan said.
That must be why he didn’t want my interference to change the future too much.
“That’s a relief. Then let’s do this one thing, and then we can start that training or whatever.”
Relieved that Baeksan was being considerate, I sat down in front of my VR game console for the first time in a while.
I had the day off from work because of the accident, so I planned to take care of a few things in the game.
Just then, I wondered what would happen to Baeksan when I entered the game.
Would he follow me in?
Or would he just watch my body while I was playing?
To solve the mystery of my unexpected cohabitation with a regressor, I decided to log into Lord of Academy.
“Wait a moment.”
Suddenly, Baeksan spoke to me.
Was he going to change his mind and tell me to train instead of playing games?
Just as I was about to grumble about a regressor being so fickle, I stopped when I saw his expression.
He wasn’t looking at me. For some reason, he was staring intently at my game console.
“…Hmm.”
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“No, maybe I’m mistaken.”
He had a slightly uneasy look on his face, but he soon seemed to dismiss it and looked away.
“Go on.”
With a look of lost interest, he sat on my bed and waved his hands as if to say, ‘go on in.’
What was he planning to do while I was gone?
I wasn’t sure, but I decided to log into the game first.
I had to clear my weekly and daily quests.
3
While Ha-chan was logged into the game, Baeksan stared at the VR game console, lost in thought.
The moment Ha-chan had touched the console to log in, he had seen something flash by.
It was still nagging at him.
‘Come to think of it, why did so many returnees flock to this guy in particular?’
Baeksan knew his personality well.
Before regressing, he too had gotten involved with Ha-chan and had seen the countless returnees who had been helped by him.
He could recall more than just one or two returnees from his memories.
Later on, it became a situation where returnees attracted other returnees, so he’d let it go, but there was something strange about how it all began.
‘Right, this guy’s involvement with returnees definitely started with the game.’
Baeksan frowned, recalling the Heavenly Demon complaining by Ha-chan’s side, saying how much she missed playing the game with him back then.
The point at which he had met Ha-chan was two years from now, when he turned twenty-eight.
At that time, Ha-chan was no longer playing games and was working as a member of the Returnee Association.
And one year after that.
Kang Ha-chan died saving him.
「Baeksan, why are you crying, you idiot? I’m fine.」
Grind—
The sound of teeth grinding filled the silence.
An old memory surfaced, and Baeksan slowly wiped a hand down his face.
That was all in the past now.
Don’t think about it.
After all, he had come here to repay that debt.
This man’s unconditional acts of salvation were nothing short of madness.
‘And it’s gotten even worse than I remember.’
And Baeksan knew he himself was the cause.
The trauma he had instilled in him as a child had been replaced by the trauma of his sister.
‘If things had gone as they were supposed to.’
The one who provided the trauma that made salvation his life’s goal should have been that other guy.
But this time, it was different.
From that point on, countless things must have changed.
‘Dammit, what am I supposed to do if it gets even worse?’
To repeat, his salvation was madness.
An obsessive madness born from trauma.
In other words, he was a salvation freak who would throw away his own life and body for others.
Baeksan turned his gaze back to the game console, thinking about how much of a headache this was going to be.
For now, the questions he had about the returnees he met through the game came first.
‘There’s definitely some kind of interference here, too.’
Something that even he, a regressor, could not understand.
Recalling the memory of vaguely watching the world crumble, he shifted his gaze to the window.
The numerous bonds with returnees and hunters that had strangely gathered around Kang Ha-chan.
Was it really a coincidence?
If not, then where, who, and for what purpose had done this to him?
He didn’t know.
The damned world had been destroyed before he could find out, and Kang Ha-chan had met his end in his place.
The world ended just like that, without any answers.
But, infuriatingly, just as on the day of the apocalypse, the Tower of Revelation stood in its place today, unchanged.