The Ten-Year Ultimatum
Bang!
With the gunshot still ringing in his ears, Lee Yun-hyeok bolted upright in bed.
"Aaaaargh!" he screamed.
His heart hammered frantically against his ribs.
Yun-hyeok grabbed the glass sitting on the nightstand. He took a desperate gulp of water, trying to soothe his racing chest.
"Haa... haa..."
The horrific sensation of a bullet shattering his frontal bone and tearing through his brain was still agonizingly vivid. His hands and feet trembled uncontrollably.
He checked the calendar first.
2023.
The television in the living room was broadcasting the news.
It was a painfully familiar sight to Lee Yun-hyeok.
"I've regressed again."
This was not his first regression.
Lee Yun-hyeok had already died three times, and regressed three times.
Now, his fourth life had begun.
In the year 2063, the Republic of Korea collapsed. It wasn't destroyed by the United States, China, Japan, or North Korea. It imploded from within, devoured by its own internal rot: the ultra-low birth rate.
Amidst a plummeting working-age population and an ultra-aged society, the youth were reduced to 'tax poors,' forced to surrender sixty percent of their income to the state. Meanwhile, the MZ generation, now elderly, had become a massive national burden.
Ultimately, the Youth Revolutionary Party launched a coup d'état and overthrew the government.
At the time, Lee Yun-hyeok was a five-term Member of the National Assembly. He was executed by firing squad under the guise of political purging—his life ended by none other than the Chief of the Youth Revolutionary Party's MZ Task Force.
That was his first life.
When his second life began, Yun-hyeok immigrated to the United States.
Utilizing his knowledge of the future, he established an investment firm and became a billionaire. Yet, fate caught up with him in a mundane supermarket robbery.
During a scuffle with the store manager, the robber's mask slipped off. It was a face Yun-hyeok knew all too well: the Chief of the MZ Task Force.
To eliminate the sole witness, Yun-hyeok was shot dead on the spot.
Then came his third life.
He had been single in his first life, but in his second, he had a family. Two children, to be exact. The agonizing grief of losing them haunted him for a very long time.
Desperate to reclaim his lost family, Yun-hyeok sought out his second-life wife once more and married her. They had three children, and to protect them, he lived as quietly as a mouse, keeping his head down.
In the quiet void of his heart, contemplation took root. Yun-hyeok worked as a university philosophy professor, lecturing on justice, freedom, and democracy.
But one night, a radical youth group raided his estate. They took Yun-hyeok hostage, leading to a tense standoff with the police.
In this lifetime, the MZ Task Force Chief had somehow become a homicide detective. He discharged his weapon by accident, and the stray bullet struck Yun-hyeok square in the forehead.
And that was how Yun-hyeok's fourth life began.
"What do you want me to do?!"
Seething with rage, Lee Yun-hyeok hurled his pillow across the room.
No matter how he lived, he always ended up shot to death. Whether it was at the hands of a radical youth group spawned by South Korea's demographic dystopia, or an immigrant robber who had fled that same ruined nation to America.
But had three regressions finally driven him mad?
A message hovered before Yun-hyeok's eyes, drifting like a floater in his vision.
It was something he had never seen in his previous three lives.
If you fail to stop South Korea's demographic collapse, you will be shot to death.
Time remaining until execution: 10 years
The message window flickered for a brief moment before vanishing entirely.
He could have dismissed it as a hallucination, but his past three lifetimes made it feel like an absolute, inescapable destiny.
Perhaps this was the ultimate calling for Lee Yun-hyeok—the five-term National Assembly member who had once fought tooth and nail to prevent the nation's ruin in his first life.
If he couldn't stop the birth rate from collapsing, he would be shot.