167. A Past I Remembered
167. A Past I Remembered
***
August 22.
Past 2 a.m., when an impossibly deep darkness cradled the earth.
"...!"
Serin sat up in bed, her face drained of color.
She had risen less than three hours after falling asleep, and her appearance was deeply strange.
Her white hair clung to her face in disarray, and even the light black pajamas she wore were soaked with cold sweat.
Through the thin fabric, her pale body seemed to show.
Yet she paid it no mind, looking around as though she could not believe some reality, and her lips moved.
"That... was just a dream?"
Her head spun, as if someone had deliberately rummaged through her mind amid memories too vivid to dismiss.
'...This is insane.'
Strange scenes, as if I were watching myself from someone else's point of view. There were far too many oddities to brush it off as a simple dream.
The way I had looked back when I lived inside Black Ark.
Because never before had those memories surfaced in this world with such clarity.
Unlike the memories she'd had until now, which left only a vague sense of what she had done, never had such detailed scenes kept rising one after another like this.
"..."
She blankly clenched her hand.
While dreaming, she must have broken out in a cold sweat, because she could even feel a faint stickiness,
and the sensation of the moment she had finished off Lilith seemed to linger in her hand even now. Along with that, the last words Lilith had spoken at the end surfaced as clearly as if branded into her mind.
"Han Serin."
When she slowly spoke the words aloud, the name slipped out, now utterly natural and familiar.
One of the high-ranking demons of the Western Demon Realm, Lilith, had definitely said that while looking at me.
'How could she have spoken that name?'
Serin, feeling the boundary between dream and reality blur, kept sorting through her memories.
The contents of the dream.
The moment she had walked the Demon Realm, advancing the main story with Princess Cecilia at the center.
And up to the moment she had faced a predetermined crisis in the Demon Realm.
Now the past memories that surfaced clearly matched without the slightest discrepancy.
But the last words Lilith had spoken while looking at her.
—Han Serin.
She had thought it was a dream, but the more she thought about it, the more it seemed those were not simply words heard in a dream.
"It wasn't... a dream."
No matter how many times she reconsidered, it was not a mistake.
Because I had definitely heard those words back then too.
And she could not understand why they were only now surfacing.
The death of Lilith, known as a high-ranking demon, had been so anticlimactic that it was profoundly unnatural in itself, and the words Lilith had spoken at the end with a suddenly transformed expression were definitely another reality that had existed in the past.
'Why didn't I feel any doubt back then?'
I couldn't understand why I hadn't felt any doubt about Lilith back then.
Back then, I had simply let the incident pass as though that were the natural thing to do.
The me from back then, who had let such an unnatural moment pass so naturally.
As she could not comprehend that at all, several questions arose.
Why had Lilith spoken the name Han Serin at the end?
My current name—one that wasn't even my original name.
Amid the endless thoughts that kept leading one into another, I blankly moved my hand.
Click.
She picked up her smartphone and checked the date and time.
"Sunday, August 22, 2 a.m..."
She read aloud what she saw, grounding herself in reality.
Just yesterday, she had finished a collaboration stream with Eunha, had dinner together, and then they had parted, promising to meet tomorrow—which was now today.
After that, she had checked various communities to see the reaction to the collab, exchanged messages with her editors about RinTube, and then fallen asleep.
An utterly ordinary day, if ordinary was the word—or a special one, if special, because she had collabed with Eunha.
Even when she went over what had happened today again, nothing particularly special came to mind.
She had met Eunha, collabed, and spent time together.
Put simply, that was all.
'It feels like there's something...'
As she wondered why she had suddenly had such a vivid dream, the date abruptly came back to her.
August 22.
It had been exactly one month since I woke up in this world.
"Could the timing mean something?"
She muttered, but no certainty came.
Whether there was some connection, whether something existed according to the flow of time—every possibility was an unknown.
Then several phrases abruptly surfaced.
—You can go back now.
—A million demonic beasts.
—You won't have to suffer anymore.
Words I had heard from someone unknown just before falling into this world. Those words, impossible to forget, I remembered clearly, at least in their rough meaning.
"...Can go back. A million demonic beasts. Won't have to suffer."
Even as she spoke them one by one aloud, the feeling was strange.
They were clearly meaningful words that seemed to hint at something, but trying to infer a proper meaning from them only left her at a loss.
The dream that surfaced so clearly seemed as if it were deliberately trying to tell me something. In a way, it felt like it was giving me a hint.
A dream cut off the moment she heard the name Han Serin.
'Han Serin.'
Me as I was now—and the person who had borne the name Rin in the world called Black Ark.
The being I'd thought was a game character I'd created now existed here in reality—and as 'me.'
On top of that, Han Serin was also using the name "Rin" for her character in the game Another World.
"I do... think Han Serin is 'me,' but I don't know if that's the right answer."
Even as she muttered, the thoughts that kept coming only made things complicated.
The conclusion that felt closest to an answer about who I was right now was that I had merged with a parallel-world version of 'me.'
And there was good reason, because there were too many commonalities that fit too perfectly to dismiss as coincidence.
My love of games; the fact that the game character I'd created had become my real-world appearance; the fact that I used a weapon called the Crescent-Moon Weight and that the game character I'd enjoyed playing was named 'Rin'; and the existence of a younger sister with a similar personality, among other things.
The more I thought through each point, the more convinced I became that Han Serin was a parallel-world version of 'me.' And that was the best answer I could come up with.
Because beyond that, no matter how she tried to understand it, she could not comprehend this situation in the slightest.
Whooosh~
As wind blew in through the slightly open window and wrapped around Serin, she instinctively curled up.
Her whole body was soaked with cold sweat, so even a light breeze made her feel a chill.
Then, as if her own state were absurd, Serin let out a hollow laugh.
Rustle.
Amid her drifting silver hair, Serin blankly stared at her own locks. The pure white silver hair seemed to hold such a clean whiteness that it looked alien.
The image of herself on a battlefield drenched in blood, where blood ran wild, still surfaced clearly.
The sight of herself stained red with fresh blood felt like a momentary illusion, while the reality before her eyes now felt so clean.
Because she was someone who curled up even at a night breeze barely more than a light wind.
***
Whirrr...
Serin slowly dried her damp hair, listening to the soft mechanical hum.
In the end, she could not go back to sleep.
A complicated heart and confusion.
Partly to wash off her body soaked in cold sweat. Only after finishing a light shower did that complicated feeling fade.
Back to her usual self, Serin slowly dried her hair and blankly moved her lips.
"Maybe I've gotten used to this reality."
Perhaps I was unknowingly accepting the reality that I now lived in this world.
Why she was living in this world instead of her original one, why she was living as Han Serin without even being able to recall her original name, and so on.
The more she thought, the more everything was simply incomprehensible.
Even if she let the endless thoughts continue, they were ultimately questions with no fundamental answer.
No matter how much I thought, agonized, or tried to remember, there was no way for me to know the answer.
Thinking about it anew, she felt that the present—where she could express emotions like this and live comfortably—was not so bad.
When I first fell into this world, there had been moments when I longed for the power I'd possessed in Black Ark and endlessly resented some unknown being. But once I calmed down and thought it through, I'd gained a lot in this world too.
Safety from an abundant era with no real threat to survival.
Wealth with no lack to speak of.
Many people she had grown close to.
Even the existence of a younger sister she could call family.
And there was the way I now reacted so easily, as if the emotions that had once been indifferent to everything had come back to life.
BaTalk!
At the sound ringing even in the early morning, Serin checked the message.
As she checked it, she was smiling faintly without realizing it.