Chapter 143
Chapter 143
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Translator: crow
Chapter Title: Parallel Worlds
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"Lee Seung-hoon, I believe the novel you attempted this time failed due to poor theme selection."
"Yeah? In what way?"
Sarang presented me with her analysis of the web novel market.
"Joan of Arc and Yi Sun-sin's historical facts both end in tragedy. Meanwhile, web novel readers empathize with the protagonist and desire a happy ending. Readers are customers, and your novel, Mr. Lee Seung-hoon, failed to gauge their needs, making failure inevitable."
"As expected, huh?"
"Did you already know that reaction?"
"To some extent."
I opened the office window and lit a cigarette.
"While reading web novels, I thought that if I ever wrote one, I'd want to do it in the Greek style."
"Are you referring to Greek tragedy?"
"Yeah. The hero's birth, brutal downfall, and futile tragedy. By writing literature from the era when philosophy was born, I wanted to indirectly share that time with those philosophers."
"So that's why you wrote the biographies of Joan of Arc and Yi Sun-sin?"
"Exactly. Web novels in our world strongly emphasize happy endings, making it impossible. I thought maybe in another dimension it could work, but no dice."
"...You're a born troll."
"Troll? Say I'm an ill-fated novelist born in the wrong era."
"You're a troll."
Sarang was smart, but her understanding of humans was still lacking.
I had no intention of arguing, so I just let it go with "you're right."
"Shall we check out more dimensions?"
After being banned from the novel serialization community, I'd kept visiting others.
Familiar dimensions like wuxia or fantasy still popped up often, and occasionally ones with constellations, but as time passed, the weird ones became more frequent.
[How's the meal I made from Mom today?][26]
[Doesn't the stew I boiled from my little sister look tasty?][30]
[Should I eat it alive by ripping off the head? Or drain the blood and age it first for better flavor?][117]
A dimension where cannibalism was taken for granted.
[The concentration of flowing substances and rational mucus vaporizes me.][22]
[Gazing at the crystal's polyangles and components, my surface area expanded 2.272 times.][333]
[Her interior angles were truly beautiful. The moment their sum reached 1,800 degrees, I reached ecstasy and became a one-dimensional line.][9,999+]
Some dimension that was hard to even describe.
[■■■■■ and ■■■■ and ■■■■■ ■■■■.][■■]
[□□□ dies to □□□. In □□□□, stabbed in the heart by □□, from massive blood loss.][□□]
[Voting [Censored] as president will make humanity [Censored].][Censored]
Dimensions where even the data was illegible.
'There it is again.'
Above all, every time I dimension-shifted, black data kept lunging at me.
"The USB's gone too."
USB, the entity that created the dimension community function, had vanished.
I shut down the computer and restarted, but the function worked fine.
Worried it might've hacked the network, I rushed to a PC bang and booted one up, but no community appeared there. So the office computer itself must've become the entity.
"The existing entity has infected and merged with the computer, I'd guess."
"Can you block it with your abilities, Sarang?"
"I'll try."
Her abilities were near-invincible in this field, but unfortunately, it didn't work.
"My access has been blocked."
"Figures."
Noise appeared on the screen.
[Worship.]
[Worship ■■■.]
[Worship ■■■,□□□□.]
[Worship the sun and moon, the beginning of ancient things.]
[We live in the circle where the end of the universe, its borders, outsides, frames, beginnings, centers, and whispering stars reside.]
[Revere, worship, praise, sacrifice, strive, yearn, despise.]
The dimension community homepage flashed for a moment.
The black data tried to invade me again but failed, then everything returned to normal.
"Gotta send it to the Foundation right away."
I contacted Kim Dong-wook and informed him of the computer's status.
-Then I'll come pick it up tomorrow!
"Can't you do it today?"
-It was possible before your call, but a lab issue cropped up mid-conversation. All the agents rushed there, so tomorrow it is.
I knew the Foundation had severe staffing issues, but what unlucky timing.
"Guess I'll hold onto it till tomorrow."
Staying up one night? No big deal.
"By the way, I haven't checked out the parallel worlds yet, have I?"
I could kill time with that.
Clicking the parallel worlds access button brought up a loading screen.
[Randomly connecting to a nearby parallel world]
[Connection successful! Have a great time!]
"Nearby parallel world" meant it wouldn't differ much from ours.
The first community I accessed was just as expected.
[Ahet. I performed face-worship today as well.]
[Ihh! How's the work I made during qi time?]
[Planning to see that movie Angel Dream today—is it any good?]
A world similar to ours.
But the post dates were 24 years ago, in 2001.
[Thank you so much, soldier uncles, for working hard to protect our country!]
[Guys are really like this? Totally hilarious lol so fun!]
[Do girls actually do this? Wow! Amazing!]
No gender wars.
No soldier discrimination.
A community from before the intense hate and self-destructive dopamine festivals—a purer time.
"But you can't stop the flow of the era."
In the end, they'd walk the same path as us.
Hating each other to death over gender, celebrities' mistakes becoming death warrants, people's deaths as that day's dopamine hit.
"The wave of plebeian capitalism is inevitable, so I should help them adapt to that world."
"How do you plan to do that?"
"Tell them ways to make big money with little capital."
I wrote a post right away.
[Title: Everyone, prepare to make money for the future.]
[Writer: I'mTheDebater]
In the future, something called Bitcoin will become hugely popular.
Bitcoin is a kind of virtual currency mined with graphics cards.
It first appears and becomes tradable in October 2009. The initial price is 1,309 BTC per dollar, but it rises every year, surpassing 100 million won per coin around 2025.
If you can't believe this, buy NVIDIA stock.
Graphics cards' high performance is needed for virtual currency mining, causing the stock to skyrocket, and later AI demands for high-end GPUs push prices even higher.
However, sell before 2025.
A huge shock hits in 2025, crashing the stock.
That's all I can think of right now, but I'll post more later.
[Comments]
[Wait, a digitally made currency worth over 100 million? Who's buying that?]
└[Writer: People all over the world buy it.]
└[What can you use it for? Can you actually pay with it?]
└[Writer: Its value is too volatile for real payments; almost no one uses it that way.]
└[It's called currency? If you can't spend it like money, how's it currency?]
└[Writer: It's currency, but closer to high-risk investment than a functional medium.]
└[At least make your lies believable;;; This is ridiculous;;;]
I explained diligently, but no one believed me.
[How can a digital currency be worth over 100 million each? Ridiculous!]
[So if a hacker hacks it, all the money vanishes?]
[Come on! Lie within reason!]
[AI? Like Terminator? In the world, Terminator gets made in 20 years? Can't believe it ^^]
The gap between past and future can't be bridged easily.
'That's the normal reaction, though.'
If a future person appeared to us saying, "Hey! Collect dog shit! In 10 years, one piece is worth 10 billion! Gotta do it! Got it?", who'd believe them?
"More importantly, something crucial just came to mind."
"What is it?"
"I'll search first and explain."
Searching some keywords revealed that natural disasters from the past had occurred at the exact same times.
"Natural disasters are inevitable events humans can't change with their actions—I need to warn them."
I had Sarang list the years and places of upcoming natural disasters, compiled them, and posted to the community.
[Hey, you're joking, right? Prophecies? Like that last post, can't believe it.]
[A bit creepy.]
[The World Trade Center collapses? September 11th? This year? But what's the World Trade Center?]
People still didn't believe.
I felt like Cassandra, but this was decent.
'If it were a modern community, it'd be flooded with psychos, insta-bans, fake-news bird, ad spam, and curses.'
Fortunately, this era's netizens tried dialogue even with weirdos as basic etiquette.
[Are you really from the future? What's food like price-wise? Might tell if it's real or not.]
└[Writer: Franchise tteokbokki's 14,000 won, jjajangmyeon 8,000 won, jokbal or bossam around 40,000 won.]
└[No way, lies.]
└[Anyone paying that for tteokbokki?]
└[Don't engage. Scammer.]
└[Even accounting for inflation, this is absurd.]
As proof, I snapped photos: app food prices with recent dates, elected president, past news events, etc. Right after posting, the community shut down.
"Why? Banned? No ban message, though?"
Checking the parallel worlds guide closely revealed a hidden warning.
[Nearby parallel worlds risk colliding with the current world after prolonged contact.]
[Thus, max access per parallel world is limited to 1 hour.]
[Do not forcibly extend or remove this limit. Risks of full/partial merger increase greatly; we take no responsibility.]
Seeing the warning sparked one possibility.
"What if the reason my world became like this is...?"
Someone connected parallel worlds and kept it going too long?
Not necessarily via community—maybe forcibly linking two caused partial merger, sending me here or entities to my world?
"Interesting."
I kept hopping through parallel world communities.
They only showed one specific community per world, so the odds of my original world's were slim.
Still, I persisted.
As the loading message said, a nearby parallel might be my old world.
'There it is.'
Hours later.
A community name I recognized appeared.
[Surviving Entities Gallery]
The latest post's date: June 10, 2024.
Days before entities appeared in the world.
[Title: What if the entities actually exist?]
[Writer: NoNamed]
A latest post with an intriguingly anonymous nickname.