The Second Coming

Sorrow had taken its seat at Anfield, the home stadium of Liverpool. The retirement ceremony about to unfold belonged to Joo Jae-rim, the greatest footballer in the club's history.

Liverpool's fans, the manager, the chairman — even the British Prime Minister came forward and begged him to reverse his retirement, but Joo Jae-rim would not bend.

As though the pleading of the fans clinging to him meant nothing to him at all, Jae-rim delivered his farewell with an expression carved from stone.

"Thank you for everything."

With those words, his intention to retire was made unmistakably clear.

And in that very moment—

A holographic window that only Joo Jae-rim could see bloomed into existence.

The world stopped.

"Thank you for everything."

The instant the words of gratitude left his mouth, the world froze mid-breath.

During his very first regression, he'd panicked and screamed out loud without meaning to. Now it had gone past familiar and settled somewhere deep in the bone as pure, grinding weariness.

'Hard work, my ass.'

The repulsive system message floated up before his eyes, and he stared blankly at the mission window.

If the condition had been something absurd and concrete — like winning the World Cup with South Korea — he could have shrugged and thought, 'Well, my life's officially screwed,' then spent the rest of it doing whatever he pleased, living like an absolute trainwreck.

Instead, the mission he'd been given was vague enough to feel *possible*. That was precisely what drove a man insane.

He waited obediently — for all the good it did.

Once again, the message of failure appeared right on schedule.

Not that he'd expected anything else. He'd sensed it coming from the online polls conducted in the days before his retirement.

'Regression. Again.'

He lifted his head and stared vacantly at the sky.

A humanity worn down, eroded thread by thread, by a life of endless repetition. These days he wasn't even sure he counted as a real, existing person anymore.

'What if Big Brother is running AI training on my brain right now?'

Maybe, like a brain suspended in fluid in some sci-fi film, his body didn't actually exist at all.

'Nah. You could put an AI to use in a thousand better places. Nobody with a working brain would waste time on this.'

Which meant, in all likelihood, he was definitively losing his mind.

'Haah. Regression or whatever else, please, just let it end already.'

Not that he'd always felt this way.

Truthfully, when he'd experienced his first regression, he'd been in a good mood.

It had felt like becoming the protagonist of a novel or a webtoon. And he'd assumed the mission would be cleared in no time, too.

Objectively speaking, his talent for football had been exceptional. But the evaluations of a retired footballer only kept climbing as the years passed — which was exactly the problem.

If only he could have played in the same era as Messi and Ronaldo… no, at the very least, if he'd started his career the moment those two retired, he would have had a chance to overturn their verdicts.

But regrettably, by the time the two legends hung up their boots, far too much time had already flowed by. In the years that followed, the Me-Ho Debate passed into legend, and it became flatly unacceptable for anyone's name to be mentioned alongside theirs.

Messi and Ronaldo were the saints of the football world; to be compared to them at all was an act of blasphemy.

Only after repeating three regressions did Jae-rim finally grasp the truth: regression was not a blessing, but a curse.

Still, for the first hundred years or so, he managed to hold on.

He was a little unhinged by then, granted — but in a world stuffed to bursting with lunatics, that qualified as objectively decent. Someone in his condition back then would surely have been classified as sane.

The real trouble began the moment the two-century mark slipped past.

From then on, every single day was a crisis. He could feel it himself: he was no longer a normal person.

Repeating life after life scrambled his memories together —

He once wore a Real Madrid kit and declared, 'Barcelona is the greatest team in the world.'

At his Liverpool signing ceremony, he said, 'Is Liverpool even a big club?'

In hindsight, past the three-hundred-year mark, these were trivial matters. In the cultivation novels, masters go mad enough to poison their beloved disciples. These days he understood the minds of those villainous ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠masters all too well. If the goal demanded it, he too could probably grind his cherished protégé down into powder.

In any case, somewhere in ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the endless cycle, intermittent explosive disorder and manic episodes had taken root. To preserve what sanity he had left, he had desperately suppressed his emotions — a constant, exhausting act of damming a river with his own two hands.

But now even that effort had worn him out.

He simply wanted this recurring life to end.

Yet to end it, he had to keep playing this piss-soaked excuse for a sport.

Once again, every bond and connection he'd forged reverted to nothing.

The thirty-six years he'd lived this time around became a history that only he, alone in all the world, would remember.

An unknowable emptiness flooded his chest.

And with his consciousness slowly fading to black—

the regression began once more.

Empty-handed we come, and empty-handed we go.

As old proverbs went, no saying fit a regressor better. After all, Jae-rim had been born with nothing and died with nothing, dozens of times over, on infinite loop.

'When, oh when, do I get to escape this regression hell?'

It was pitch black — nothing to see in any direction — and yet, strangely, it felt warm and cozy in here.

'A regression that starts from being a baby. Utterly soul-crushing.'

This was exactly why he hated regressions. A full year of doing absolutely nothing but lie there in boredom, plus the whole agonizing ordeal of being born — all of it endured stone-cold sober.

If only his regression point were middle school or high school, he might have had fewer complaints about the whole arrangement.

In any case, in the repetitive, mind-numbing routine of the womb, Jae-rim turned over the causes of his last life's failure — a kind of coping routine to keep the post-regression void from swallowing him whole.

And absurdly enough, the answer came to him almost immediately.

'Ugly Koreans.'

It was entirely those bastards' fault. If it hadn't been for them, there would have been far more people in the world willing to call him the greatest.

Irritation surged up from somewhere deep in his chest. He wasn't performing an emotion here — he was genuinely pissed.

'Those lucky Chinese bastards.'

Ever since he'd naturalized as a citizen of England, the creatures known as Ugly Koreans had tormented him with a vindictiveness that bordered on artistry.

After he won back-to-back World Cups, the epithet GOAT had slowly begun attaching itself to his name. Honestly, it baffled him that the title hadn't come sooner, but football was a minority sport for the Yellow race, so he'd had no choice but to nod, accept it, and move on.

Regardless, the Koreans, with terrifying persistence, hacked away at his reputation around the clock. If they'd stayed in their own corner of the internet, chattering in Korean amongst themselves, he wouldn't have blown up like this.

Frankly, out of six billion people on Earth, fifty million is a handful, no? A handful of fifty million could never have moved the needle on the world stage.

But these people multiplied across the internet as though they'd mastered some forbidden shadow-clone technique. Online, where numbers amplify, these lucky Chinese bastards — despite their measly fifty-million population — seemed to outnumber the actual billion-and-a-half-strong Chinese. Honestly, the Chinese, penned behind their Golden Shield and unable to crawl out, had been far better for his peace of mind.

'Are these bastards regressors too? Where do they find the time?'

The Ugly Koreans, who cheerfully introduced themselves as Time Bill Gates, spammed Reddit — a community site mostly used by Westerners — with thread after thread explaining why Joo Jae-rim was not, in fact, the GOAT.

Racists lurking in every corner of the globe piled on in agreement, and his evaluation bled out in real time.

'What kind of braindead circus is this.'

Watching his reputation get curb-stomped live, Jae-rim had burst out laughing — a hollow, ugly laugh. It genuinely felt like the entire world had conspired to dunk on him.

Frankly, he couldn't wrap his head around the Koreans' behavior.

'Is naturalization really such a cardinal sin?'

He hadn't just up and switched passports on a whim, either. Knowing that a sudden naturalization would draw fire, he'd deliberately waited for the football association to set itself on fire first, used the institution as his shield, and then naturalized. If anything, he'd restored the association's sanity — shouldn't they have been thanking him?

And here was the punchline: it was the Koreans who had originally shoved him toward naturalization in the first place.

But even the very people who'd told him to go — the moment he actually chose naturalization — buried him in a landslide of abuse.

Jae-rim pictured the Korean comment-section warriors of that era and made a vow deep inside.

'Fine, you fucking bastards. This time around, I'm keeping my Korean citizenship and keeping my mouth shut about it.'

The resentment hadn't fully drained out of him, though, and he kicked out petulantly — a small, furious jab of a leg.

"Oh my, our little champ's got some kick in him today."

Han Hyomin, an expectant mother devoted to her prenatal care, was startled by the sudden kick from inside her belly. She and her husband had tried for so long to have this child that a smile bloomed on her lips without any effort at all.

But the brightness lasted only a moment. Worry began to settle over Han Hyomin's face like a shadow.

'Father-in-law… is he seriously still set on naming the baby that?'

It was all because her father-in-law had dug his heels in over the child's name. Han Hyomin would normally have deferred to him without much fuss.

'But naming my own child Joo Jesus? That's a different problem entirely.'

She began a grim, serious conversation with her husband, Joo Sang-hyun, the moment he came home.

"Honey… is Father really ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠going through with that name?"

"…Yeah. I've been trying to talk him around with your mom's help, but it's not going easy."

"Then find the time, just once, and talk him out of it yourself. Jesus? The baby's name is going to be Jesus? And look — if I were the one with the different surname, fine, I'd get it. But you're a Joo. Which makes him Joo Jesus. Do you have any idea how much that kid's going to get teased? Honey, even for the child's sake — no."

"Hmm… Alright. I'll sit down and have a real talk with him. Don't worry too much, honey."

Time flowed onward from within his mother's womb — slow, but steady.

'So it begins….'

The moment Joo Jae-rim felt the first faint tremor of a sign, he steeled himself. It seemed the day of his birth was drawing near.

And a short while later—

'Ugh….'

A pain beyond the reach of language came crashing down on his head. He had regressed dozens of times now, and still he had never once grown used to this.

Just as the sheer, monstrous agony threatened to thin his consciousness into nothing, Jae-rim raised his right hand above his head and roared inside.

'Open!'

And the heavens split apart, and light poured down.

It was the descent of the returning Jesus — the one who would come to save Korean football from its rotting corpse.