Chapter 156
Chapter 156
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Translator: crow
Chapter Title: Time Travel
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“The Foundation Research Institute is divided into four zones.”
The research building where theoretical research takes place.
The experiment building where various experiments are conducted.
The safety isolation building for storing and isolating safety-class entities.
The danger isolation building for storing and isolating danger-class entities.
“Extinction-class entities each possess their own separate isolation dimensions. You must submit an application to the administrator thirty days in advance, and without approval, you can't meet them.”
“I see. Ah, one thing I'm curious about: even after being so thoroughly destroyed by Munchkin Mary Sue, are there still many entities left?”
Dong-wook let out a sigh at my question.
“Almost none of the previous entities remain. A few friendly ones have returned to offer their cooperation, but the rest were completely obliterated by the Munchkin Mary Sue constellation. The entities currently isolated in the institute are mostly newly captured ones.”
As expected.
The Foundation still has a long way to go before regaining its former glory.
“The danger isolation building also requires an application submitted to the administrator fifteen days in advance, so today we can only tour the safety isolation building. As long as you're with a B-Grade Agent or higher, you can visit the safety isolation building anytime.”
“Come to think of it, you're B-Grade, right?”
“I was promoted to A-Grade just recently.”
We entered the safety isolation building with Dong-wook.
The first entity I saw was shocking.
“Is that a dead cat?”
“Yes.”
Beyond the safety glass, in the center of a room filled with various cat toys, the corpse of a black cat lay.
“Flies are swarming it. Looks like it's been dead for quite a while.”
“Try closing your eyes?”
“Done.”
A moment later, the sound of a cat wheel rolling echoed.
“Meow!”
“You can open them now.”
When I opened my eyes again, the cat corpse was perched atop the cat wheel, still spinning from inertia.
“Fascinating.”
“Entity name: 'Schrödinger's Cat'. It's a cat corpse while being observed, but perfectly alive and moving when unobserved.”
“For hygiene's sake, can't you at least shoo the flies away?”
“That's part of the entity too. No matter how much you swat at them or spray insecticide, they never go away.”
The second entity was a billiard ball.
“Entity name: 'Magic 8 Ball'. There's a small glass window on the back that shows fortunes. Ask it a question and shake, and it answers with a fortune.”
“A prophecy entity? The security seems pretty lax for one.”
The Magic 8 Ball sat on a cushion atop a table in the safety isolation lounge, available for anyone to use.
“Its ego is too strong-headed to give proper answers. It only spits out the truth when it's in the mood, and experiments clocked the probability at under 1%.”
I gave it a try.
“Can I drive well?”
I asked the question and shook the ball. A fortune appeared.
『Will you?』 I tried again.
“Is there really no way for me to drive normally?”
Another fortune surfaced. 『Probably faster to be reborn.』 They said the truth rate was under 1%, so maybe there's hope? 『This isn't a lie, you know?』 “Eh? It answered without me even shaking it!?”
Startled, Dong-wook shook it several times, but the Magic 8 Ball refused to produce any more fortunes.
“What the heck? Why did it cough up the truth twice in a row?”
The Magic 8 Ball was in for some experiments in the near future. I encountered plenty more bizarre entities after that.
“This is the 'Smartphone with a Delivery App That Never Fails'. Order food using the delivery app installed on that phone, and you'll always get the absolute tastiest dish available. Delivery's free, no price markup from the restaurant, and no minimum order fee either.”
A smartphone loaded with an app that guarantees delicious delivery every time.
“These are the 'Sensory Possession Sunglasses'. Put them on, select a character from a picture or video, and you can experience their sensations exactly as they feel them.”
“There's a warning label? 'Do not use while watching slasher films, horror, scary movies, or pornography depicting extreme sexual fetishes'?”
“......All cases straight from experience.”
Sunglasses that let you share sensations with characters from movies or comics.
“This is the 'Penis Size Adjustment Pump'. Male-use only. Attach it to your penis and pump—the erect length increases by 1 cm, girth by 0.5 cm, erection rigidity and semen volume rise by 1.5 times per pump. However, each pump randomly eliminates one of the following: 10 IQ points, 10 cm of height, 10 kg of body weight, or 10,000 strands of hair. Each has an equal 25% chance.”
“What if there's nothing left to pay with?”
“The penis vanishes.”
“Terrifying.”
A pump that boosts penis size and potency but randomly erases parts of your body.
“Not many of these are useful for capturing entities, huh.”
“Anything helpful is already deployed in the field. Surprisingly, the beneficial ones tend to be among the danger-class entities—the kind that aren't dangerous as long as you follow the manual.”
“What's that one?”
As we toured, I spotted something intriguing. An utterly ordinary desk clock sat alone in its isolation cell. ‘The time reads 5:15 p.m.—exactly matches the current time.’ I asked Dong-wook about it.
“This is the 'Absolute Time Indicator'. No matter if someone tampers with time itself, this clock's reading never deviates from the original timeline.”
“If its time differed from the current time, that'd be proof someone altered the flow.”
“Theoretically, yes. But it's never been off even once, so no observation records exist.”
Something felt off. I'd personally experienced anomalies in the time axis more than once or twice.
“Wheeze... wheeze! Allow me to explain that one!”
“Whoa! What happened to you!?”
“Barely escaped! Ugh, those creepy freaks! I told them it was a misunderstanding, but they hounded me to the bitter end!”
Ella appeared, looking thoroughly disheveled. Since I hadn't sensed her approach, she must've used some entity or Foundation over-technology.
“What's your take on time travel, external special interrogator?”
“It's possible, but the concept is riddled with paradoxes. Especially if your actions in the past alter the future—your present self might cease to exist, which would prevent those past actions from happening in the first place, creating a paradox.”
“Exactly. You get it. And yet, tons of entities enable time travel, or it happens as a side effect of their anomalies.”
With a wave of her hand, a semitransparent display materialized.
This is the timeline we live on. And let's say this dot marks our current position.
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“This is the timeline we live on. And let's say this dot marks our current position.”
A straight line appeared.
A dot marked the exact center of the line.
“We tend to think changing time is easy. But every timeline shift we've experienced is just a loophole exploit.”
A new line segment inserted itself between the original segment and the dot.
“Time delay effect via insertion of a new timeline axis.”
She drew a parallel line, peeled off part of it, and attached it further left.
“Shifting to another timeline in an endlessly identical parallel world.”
She twisted the line segment until the present touched the past.
“Forcing a warped timeline to reach the past or future.”
She manipulated the dot representing our present position across the line in various other ways.
“But no matter the method...”
Finally, she tried forcibly dragging the dot off the line segment itself.
Yet the dot, carried along by time's natural flow, refused to budge.
“Manipulating time itself is impossible.”
“Why?”
“Arbitrarily controlling time's flow violates the laws of entropy.”
“Couldn't entities' powers make it possible?”
She beamed.
“That's the most fascinating part! We've tested countless entities, but not one has ever truly reversed time itself. They all just mimicked timeline changes with the loopholes I showed—fooling us convincingly, but the time axis proper never budged.”
“Sounds like even entities struggle with it.”
“Of course, I'll grant that their methods produce time travel-like effects. But it's no different from hopping in a car or plane to reach your destination.”
“Then what would true time travel be like?”
“Like yanking the ground itself to the opposite side of the Earth? All without harming anything around it?”
It was the smile of a professor gazing at a student who'd nailed a thorny problem.
“Entities that shatter countless physical laws and even defy entropy—why can't they ignore time manipulation rules and instead resort to these loopholes? We've come up with two hypotheses.”
“Intriguing. I'm all ears.”
“One: There's an enormously powerful entity overseeing the timeline, so others can't touch time's domain directly and have to use loopholes!”
That made sense.
The existence of some primordial being tied to time wouldn't be surprising.
“Two: Manipulating time's flow is such an outrageously immense feat that only the mightiest of entities could even dream of it!”
“Both sound plausible. No way to know which is right.”
“Right? Research in this field used to be booming, but after the Foundation weakened... budget cuts killed it.”
“One more question: If the timeline's never actually changed, how did you figure out that clock's purpose?”
“There used to be a humanoid entity that could pierce the abilities of any object. Sadly, it perished during the constellation raid, but we identified it with that entity's help. Its quirk was shouting 'Emotion!' every time it used its power.”
Time axis manipulation, huh.
What would the world look like if an entity capable of that existed?
‘At least it wouldn't be safe.’
“Wow! What a clear sky!”
On a highway in Sokcho.
Yoon Sung-tae (44) parked at a rest area and pulled a telescope from his trunk.
‘Today I might even capture Andromeda nice and sharp?’
Stargazing was the hobby of this amateur astronomer, and with forecasts of no fine dust for a while, he'd burned a vacation day to race down to Sokcho.
‘Sigh... tech keeps advancing, but spotting stars gets harder every year?’
Endless fine dust wafting from the neighbor's place.
Starlink satellites photobombing every good shot.
And on top of that, his wife's endless nagging!
“Tch. So what if I splurged on a lens.”
Sure, he'd dropped some cash.
But they were selling a 20-million-won lens for 10 million!
That's a 10-million-won profit, right!?
‘......Even I know that's a lame excuse.’
Stargazing was just a pretext—he'd basically been kicked out.
“Whew, time to shake off my worries under the night sky!”
He swung the telescope toward Andromeda's position.
But something strange caught his eye.
‘What the heck is that?’
Next to Andromeda gleamed a brilliantly shining star.
‘Was there a star like that?’
It was so bright it drowned out Andromeda's light.
At that luminosity, it had to be a supernova at minimum.
“No way—a supernova explosion!?”
That'd be a historic event!
‘I just witnessed a moment for the history books!’
Yoon Sung-tae excitedly glued himself to the telescope.
Just like him, countless astronomers and amateur stargazers around the world spotted the same star.
“Huh? What's that?”
And by dawn.
“That's one shiny star.”
“Pretty. Is that Venus? The morning star?”
Even ordinary folk could see it with the naked eye, no telescope needed.