Who Is Entity (2)
Up until now, I'd always assumed my life was a boring slice-of-daily-life story at best — a background extra in some third-rate medical drama, if that.
At least, until the final message of an Entity Management Bureau I never knew existed rang every cell phone on the planet.
Lee Jeong-uk, Associate Professor of Cardiology. The luckiest man at Castrato Hospital.
His grades in medical school had been moderately good, his passion as a resident moderately good too. Since he belonged to one of Korea's most prestigious university hospitals, an "elite" tag had naturally attached itself to his name.
But if you asked anyone at the hospital whether he truly had the ability to hold a professorship at such a young age, every last one of them would shake their head.
Jeong-uk himself had never denied it.
The only reason he'd become a professor at all was sheer, dumb luck.
Back in his first year as a fellow — a clinical assistant professor — an unprecedented crisis struck the cardiology department: three professors resigned in the same year. One of them had simply hit retirement age, but the other two had been tangled up in a few scandalous incidents and accidents best left unspoken.
The hospital was thrown into chaos. Specialists were rushed in to fill the vacancies, and amid the pandemonium, Jeong-uk — who happened to be a fellow at exactly the wrong-or-right moment — fished the professorship out of the stream like a fisherman riding someone else's storm.
And so was born the luckiest professor in the hospital's entire history.
That lucky protagonist was me.
"Professor, what time should we do rounds today?"
Two years had passed since I first draped on a gown embroidered with the word professor. Even that title, heard every morning as I clocked in, had grown fairly comfortable.
By any reasonable standard, I could go anywhere and claim my life had "made it."
I wasn't at the summit of success, sure — but as long as nothing catastrophic happened, a smooth road was guaranteed.
"I'm heading out."
And so, I left for work in good spirits that day too.
All for the sake of my ordinary, safe daily life.
*
A professor never gets to put down the phone, even after clocking out. Departments like Emergency Medicine, with no inpatients of their own, have a proper work-life balance — the moment you step past the hospital doors, you're free. Cardiology is not one of those departments. Since relying on the residents on duty alone felt too risky, a professor could never fully escape the hospital.
"Ah, Song-woo. The patient who got a pacemaker put in yesterday — we need an ECG on him at six tomorrow, no exceptions. I'll come in early and check it myself."
Only after issuing that final order to my resident from outside the hospital could I truly call it a day. I hung up as I stepped off the elevator, and there, in front of my front door, sat a delivery box. The sender, unsurprisingly, was the Director.
I gave the box a shake — a faintly heavy sound, though not especially weighty. Tucking it under my arm, I punched in the door code.
"I'm home."
My voice echoed hollowly through a space where no one had been waiting. Living alone, that silence had once felt alien to me, but by now I'd grown used to it, and it no longer stirred anything.
I set the box down in the living room and headed for the shower.
I answered my mother's voice chattering out of the phone speaker while toweling the water from my hair. It was only after blow-drying it completely that the moment finally arrived to inspect the delivery.
What did the Director send this time?
Sitting alone in the middle of the living room, I opened the box with a flutter of anticipation.
A doll... and a QR code?
The first thing that caught my eye was a haetae — the mythical guardian beast — staring straight ahead with fierce, glaring eyes. It was, you could say, the mascot of our game.
For the record: despite its harmless appearance, it was one of the most catastrophically difficult Entities to manage.
Beside the haetae doll lay a sheet of paper printed with a QR code, and beneath it, helpfully, a handwritten note in what looked like the Director's own script:
I hope this package reached you safely before tomorrow's official launch.
The QR code is the link to the mobile app we'll be unveiling at the release. I've tucked a small gift into your account, Professor — do enjoy it.
And a Happy New Year to you.
Come to think of it, the game blew up so badly they announced a mobile release.
The game had originally been planned as a PC-only title. But even before its official launch, it had exploded in popularity from the early-access stage onward, and buoyed by the fans' enthusiasm, a mobile port was now in the works.
Unfortunately, the mobile app wouldn't be ready in time for the official release date for practical reasons — though I'd heard the porting itself was finished and only optimization remained.
So I'm a beta tester now, huh.
I scanned the QR code on the spot, and the mobile version's link popped up.
Let's just download it first... Whoa. That file size is brutal.
The game was hefty by design, so I suppose the mobile version was no lightweight either.
Apparently the mobile version was getting several new features as well. Most notably, some kind of system linked to the unofficial fan wikis, and the ability to share portions of the Echo Compendium once certain conditions were met — little touches meant to deepen the immersion in the worldbuilding.
I stared blankly at the download bar as it slowly filled.
10... 11... 12...
What kind of state was this app in, for the download to crawl like this? A catastrophically slow download speed, rarely seen in this day and age.
Just as the app hit roughly twenty percent—
A notification banner swallowed the screen, and the phone screamed at a pitch ready to rupture my eardrum.
CODE BLACK : Humanity Catastrophe Warning
Entity Phenomenon Management Bureau
To everyone living in this land, and to everyone who will live on in this world:
We are sorry. We have failed.
We guarded this world against unknown threats — and we have failed.
This message is our final duty, and our apology to humanity.
There is no time, so we will say only this: do not immerse yourself in the narratives of the Echoes.
Distance yourself from them as far as you can, and never forget your own story.
We have failed — but there is no need to despair. The world does not end so easily.
However, be wary of the daily life that has changed.
[This message is automatically translated into the recipient's language. Please share it with anyone who has not yet received the warning. That, too, is part of survival.]
An emergency broadcast and a text message, fired off together. For a moment I wondered if April Fools' had come late — but the government's official announcement, issued in under an hour, made it clear this was nothing of the sort.
I checked the news: the government refused to acknowledge the Bureau's existence, announcing only that it was investigating the cause of the message.
People believed the government's announcement. The contents of the message were simply too absurd.
So everyone assumed some reckless teenager had hacked a public agency somewhere, and waited for the follow-up briefing.
Even our internal medicine group chat was trading the usual tired jokes.
But I couldn't slip into that lighthearted mood so easily.
Because fragments of the game's lore were flashing through my mind unbidden.
"Stories exist everywhere, and nowhere. Perhaps some will stir nothing at all, scattering hopelessly into the wind. But in the end, every story remains as an Echo."
"Every being carries its own narrative. And narratives that resemble one another draw each other in. Thus narratives gather and give rise to existence. We call this Resonance."
I couldn't explain why those lines had surfaced.
Unlike machines, humans possess something called intuition — the ability to leapfrog the process and arrive at the result — and so there are countless cases where we can't articulate why we reached a conclusion.
But intuition also has a notoriously high error rate, and for a doctor who lives and dies by evidence, it was a sense to be avoided wherever possible.
Have I been pulling too many night duties for the youngest professor on staff?
If I was deriving intuitions from a prank-level incident like this, my condition was clearly not in great shape.
I shook my head to clear away the stray thoughts.
The game's still downloading, anyway.
Forty percent, at long last.
I should read some of my novel while I wait.
Half to kill time, half out of habit, I opened today's installment of the serial I'd been following.
It was the work holding the platform's #1 ranking, enjoying a fanatical surge of popularity. Normally I saved it for right before bed, but today I read it a little earlier than usual.
And today's chapter was, frankly, shocking.
In the negative sense, mostly.
The protagonist killed himself.
Right before the final battle. Right in front of the heroine's eyes.
What even is this...?
I reeled at the utterly unprecedented suicide drift — and before the bewilderment could even settle, I'd started rereading the latest chapter.
"Please, I beg of you — grant me the joy of perishing for you..."
Then, somewhere in the middle of it, a thought struck me: I'd seen this line before.
Where was it...
While I was still racking my memory for where I'd read the line, my eyes had already finished the novel's second full read-through.
"Grant me the rapture of offering all of this up in your name..."
Where was it I saw... oh.
It was a line I knew. A line from a game that had absolutely nothing to do with this novel.
"...I beg of you, grant it to me."
That's an Entity from Paranoid Institute...
An Entity that erodes the minds of its readers through the work itself.
There had definitely been an Echo and an Entity like that.
Even as the thought formed, my eyes were already scrolling down through the identical text a third time.
Dread crept over me. The creeping sense that perhaps the game was no longer just a game.
C'mon, no way. That can't be it.
But my fingers had slipped out of my control and kept dragging the screen downward, and my eyes kept verifying the novel's contents.
Only then did I realize something had gone badly wrong.
Stop.
My body wouldn't listen. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't tear my eyes from the novel, and my finger refused to press the back button.
By the time the third read-through ended, the fact I'd been desperately denying in some corner of my mind could no longer be denied at all.
The fact that the Echoes had become reality.
Meanwhile my eyes had begun their fourth pass through the text, and my vision was starting to blur with tears.
It wasn't because I was afraid of the situation itself.
It was because this Entity was demanding my empathy, by force.
No, no, no...
I know this story.
I know the Entity this Echo creates when it latches onto a popular work.
The Most Romantic Choice.
An Echo that resonates with romance-flavored hit fiction, transforming the works themselves into Entities. Once a work completes its Resonance and becomes an Entity, the protagonist abruptly takes his own life, leaving behind a signature final utterance:
"Do not take from me the single happiness I have ever been allowed."
Any reader who lays eyes on that line begins to immerse themselves in the suicide of the protagonist, rereading the passage over and over while their darkest thoughts fatten and grow.
And with each reading, the reader loses a little more control over their own body.
Exactly how much control is stolen per reading varies from person to person, depending on willpower.
But one fact never changes.
Read it ten times, and you kill yourself...!
On average, at the end of the tenth read-through, the reader makes that irreversible choice.
The fifth read-through was already done.
My thoughts were no longer entirely my own.
Bell atones like this, and I... no, what am I even thinking? What would I have to atone for?
Sixth read-through.
So many people I couldn't save. How can I shamelessly stay alive... Get a grip. Dying alone isn't atonement — it's not anything.
Seventh read-through.
Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off. Turn what off... No. Don't think.
Eighth read-through.
Somewhere along the way, my legs had started moving.
If I'd been in America, my body would have marched itself to the shelf where we kept the revolver — but this was Korea.
And so my feet carried me toward the veranda.
The veranda that looked down over the city's night lights.
STOP!
My legs froze.
The will that refused to move and the other will that forced movement collided head-on.
But for all my struggle, my eyes finished their ninth read-through.
The balance of power had tipped — away from the will I'd lived with all my life, and toward the new one.
The small, desperate remnant of I want to live was being painted over, coat by coat, with pity for the protagonist and guilt for every day I'd spent alive.
I... I...
It's too cruel.
Karma, is it?
What did I ever do wrong?
Think about it — everything was wrong, wasn't it.
Becoming a professor young, on dumb luck? That seat was always more than my skill deserved.
Spotting a game before it blew up, back when it was still a seedling? It would have been a hit without me.
"Damn it."
What did I ever—
"WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?!"
My scream ripped out of me — "AAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!" — and at that exact moment—
Ding-dong.
Download complete.
The game I'd been downloading launched itself automatically. The screen that had held the novel went dark—
A cold, synthesized voice intoned the title of the game—
—and with the game's opening voice line, the negative thoughts that had ruled my mind melted away like snow.
And in the space those thoughts had vacated, one thing poured in and filled it to the brim: the will to live.
When I came back to my senses, I was half over the railing.
"...Ngh. Ugh."
Choking down the scream rising in my throat, I hurled my body backward — toward the veranda floor.
I wasn't thinking about falling technique or anything of the sort. There was only one thought in my head: live.
CRASH!
"Hah... hahk... hah..."
I flung that cursed phone across the floor, collapsed onto the veranda, and gasped for air.
It was a full hour before I recovered the strength to move again.