Chapter 116 - The Non-Player IV

7

Shall we talk about something else for a moment?

I have described the phenomenon of humans becoming tainted by an anomaly’s existence as “developing faith,” but there is actually a much better term.

Bewitched.

Enchanted. Entranced.

Look at the Chinese character for enchantment, 魅, and you will find the character for ghost, 鬼, within it. An uncanny presence. An attraction difficult to resist. An impulse. In these things, people of old sensed ghosts. In other words, anomalies.

They also issued countless warnings.

Anomalies differ vastly from one another. Naturally, the words describing their allure must be countless as well.

Chinese Character Correction

All these characters signify enchantment.

The reason people of old did not settle on a single word, instead referring obliquely to enchantment in all manner of ways, was that anomalies dwell even in written characters—and a character inhabited by an anomaly becomes a spell.

It is exactly the same reason I constantly use “aliases” when referring to an anomaly.

If an anomaly takes possession of a single character, a single name, that is effectively no different from building it a “home.” Thus, calling an anomaly’s name amounts to inviting it in:

-"Come, child. Ghost. Anomaly."

-"This is your home. Come here."

Let me emphasize this once again: an anomaly’s name must never be fixed as just one. If you must call it, you should use a different name each time. If you lack the knowledge and experience to do so, you should never call it in the first place.

As the founder of the Library Society, I deliberately devised multiple ways to refer to anomalies.

Take Tenlegs alone.

I called it by various aliases, including “Crawling Baby Cthulhu,” “Shadow Monarch,” “Spiny Hell,” and “Lurker.” Of course, considering that Tenlegs was not a mental anomaly but merely a creature that exerted physical force, these precautions were somewhat excessive.

How much more necessary were they for Gapless, a God of Alienation?

“Cheon Yohwa,” “School Ghost Stories,” “the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons,” “the Hundred Tales,” “Four-Character Taboo,” “Hundred Tales,” “Whitening”—and beyond those, though I have rarely mentioned them in my stories, “Heraclitus's Garland,” “The Backrooms," and so on...

I gave people more than enough names to choose from.

Only then would the anomaly be unable to build its nest, driven about by the harrying characters to wander the realm of the dead.

Today’s episode is no different.

When I began this story, I named the anomaly “online game.” By now, however, I imagine you have guessed that there is a more fitting name.

“Logout Game.”

The fate awaiting those bewitched by this anomaly was departure from reality.

-Anonymous: Dead game, no fucking content either

-Anonymous: fr, I barely log in these days. Even doing dailies is a pain...

-Anonymous: When does this game end?

-Anonymous: Looking for a level 40 party!! No NPC porter, sorry :’(

-Anonymous: All the fanboys who called it a masterpiece died, so there’s hardly anyone left here lol

-Anonymous: Wow, why is this shitty dead game’s forum still up?

Players stayed logged out for longer and longer, while fewer and fewer people logged into SG Net.

The community grew steadily more desolate.

Yet one well-known member kept posting nonsense there, consistently, from beginning to end.

-Goryeojang: Café mocha the guild leader NPC made me today.png

└Anonymous: You still haven’t quit? What level are you?

└Goryeojang: Yours truly hit the level cap ages ago, so now I just decorate the guild house instead of running dungeons

└Anonymous: Level cap, holy shit

└Anonymous: But how can an NPC serve as guild leader? Is it a bug?

└Goryeojang: The game company hasn’t patched it, so I guess not?

Sim Aryeon.

Even as everyone else quit the “game” one after another, she kept playing.

Not that she did anything particularly remarkable once she logged in.

“Ugh. Dead game... Two years without an update already. No wonder the users keep bailing. Jeez...”

Lamenting what a shitty dead game it was.

“Guild Leader! Look at this! [Coffee Beans]! Hehe. Receiving this item raises your affection, right? Ehehe. It’s a really rare drop from necromancer liches, but I collected them all and brought them to you! Take that, and that! Go up! Affection, hurry up and rise...!”

Obsessing over an affection system I could make neither head nor tail of, and showering me with gifts.

“Ehehehe, ehee. Eheeheehee...”

Catching slimes in the Han River and beating them in every conceivable way.

Her play pattern was so monotonous that even I would find myself watching her and wondering, Doesn’t she get bored?

Perhaps Aryeon did grow bored after all. At her most active, she logged in every day, but as time passed, the intervals stretched to one day, three days, seven days.

Even that was steady attendance compared to other players.

In fact, it wasn’t just players. There were hardly any NPCs left either.

Noh Doha and the Saintess, at most?

Go Yori was probably still around if I looked for her, but there was no reason to deliberately court danger.

Ultimately, the three of us—Noh Doha, the Saintess, and I, members of the Regression Alliance—decided to gather on the banks of the Han River and live together.

There was no longer any point in maintaining the National Road Management Corps headquarters, and staying inside the aquarium mansion in Yongsan alone was no way to keep surviving.

Above all, the warmth of life had grown far too scarce in this world. It was inevitable that the last NPCs—no, the last survivors—would band together.

“Hmm. It’s quiet...”

Noh Doha breathed out over a cup of coffee.

“The anomalies aren’t causing much trouble either. They’re all shut away in their dungeons. The awakened stand motionless, like stones waiting eternally for someone’s return. Honestly, when I heard you had lived through countless runs, Undertaker, I wondered what witnessing the end of the world firsthand would feel like... So this is what it looks like...”

“It’s rarely this quiet.”

For a while, we watched the river drink in the sunlight.

“I’ll conduct an experiment,” the Saintess said.

“Pardon?”

“Where the people who logged out have vanished to. Whether they really entered a deathlike state, or were drawn into a God of Alienation’s ‘divine domain,’ as you suspect, Undertaker. I’ll log into the game myself and find out.”

“... It will be dangerous. The other awakened suffered no particular effects only because they felt they were simply returning to reality. If you enter while consciously aware that it is a God of Alienation, there’s no telling how it might react.”

“But we need information. You’re already thinking about the next run, anyway. In that case, the right thing to do is take the risk and obtain even a little more information.”

“...”

“As you pointed out, recklessly throwing yourself into a God of Alienation’s divine domain isn’t wise. Your ability might be discovered, too. So I’ll handle the reconnaissance.”

Her argument was not wrong.

Normally, I would never have expended a piece as valuable as the Saintess merely to carry out a scout’s duties.

On the chessboard, she was the king: an operative who must never be captured or discovered by the enemy.

But there were no longer any awakened for her to monitor, nor any need for her to impersonate constellations.

We took a gamble.

In the guild basement, the Saintess murmured softly.

“Status window.”

“...”

“...”

Noh Doha and I watched her.

“How is it?”

“... I can see my abilities. My level, too. But the terminology for awakened abilities is quite different.”

She was looking not at us, but at the empty air before her, as if words were written there.

“Can you see a logout button?”

“A logout button... Ah. Yes, here. When I open the menu, it says ‘Log Out’ at the very bottom.”

“Hmm.”

“I’ll press it now.”

At that instant.

The Saintess stopped. Her movements literally froze. The vibration of the heart beating in her chest a moment earlier, the gaze of her sky-blue eyes, her pale aqua hair fluttering in the river breeze.

Everything. Every last thing stopped.

“...”

“Hmm.”

Noh Doha reached out. But that hand simply swept through empty air.

“I’ve experienced this several times already, but it’s unpleasant. Hah. Visible, yet impossible to touch. No different from a mirage, an illusion...”

“...”

“You decided to call it Logout Game, didn’t you? This anomaly. It seems terribly determined to turn our world into fiction...”

I started the timer on my watch.

Ten seconds.

That was the interval I had agreed upon with the Saintess. She would remain logged out for exactly ten seconds the first time, then escape immediately.

Ten seconds passed.

The Saintess did not move.

“...”

“...”

We had anticipated that this might happen, so we had set the second interval at three minutes.

Two minutes and fifty seconds passed.

Still, the Saintess did not move.

We had also anticipated, beforehand, that this might happen, so the third interval was—

“Undertaker.”

“Yes.”

“She’s dead.”

“...”

“Watching the dead for too long is disrespectful to the departed. I’ll keep watch here, in case she does return. So go upstairs, Undertaker...”

I accepted Noh Doha’s words.

Light spilled down along the riverbank.

I calmed myself, made two cups of coffee, and went back downstairs to find Workshop Master Noh Doha’s body frozen.

“...”

I returned aboveground with only one cup of coffee. And I never visited the basement again.

The next day, a message appeared before my eyes.

[Emergency Patch Notice.]

[An announcement from ‘Operator of All Things at Play.’ A serious bug was discovered in the game yesterday at approximately 3 p.m., and a patch has been applied.]

[We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused to our users. Thank you.]

8

As a regressor, I sometimes have this thought.

Perhaps other people take life more lightly than I do, though I turn the wheel endlessly.

My mind, which remembered everything, held intact the hundreds of endings the Saintess had met, the hundreds of scenes in which Noh Doha had died.

My companions sometimes overlooked how their deaths would remain in my memory.

'Not yet. I cannot die yet.'

In a world where I had been left alone, in this space that had become virtual to everyone else yet remained reality to me alone, I waited.

For the moment the God of Alienation revealed itself.

'Now almost the entire world has fallen into your hands. You must be desperate to declare your final victory. But within your void, there is still someone who proves [This is not a game].'

That someone was me.

'I must irritate you, you damned anomaly.'

An impurity it had to eliminate to perfect its void.

If the God of Alienation could bear it no longer and cast aside its game mask to reveal its true form—if [Operator of All Things at Play] showed its true colors—I intended to see it, then gladly die.

Until then, I absolutely would not oblige it by dying. It would be a mistake to underestimate a regressor. Unlike Old Man Scho, who always killed himself with all the resilience of a sunfish, I had grit.

“Guild Leader, have you been well? Whew. Real life is so busy these days, it’s getting harder and harder to log in... But whenever I think of you, I’ll make absolutely sure to stop by! Hehe.”

The intervals between Aryeon’s logins grew rapidly longer.

Now, logging in once a year or once every three years was nothing unusual.

From our conversations, she did not seem to realize that it had been three years since her last visit. She appeared to think she had been away for three weeks at most.

'Time flows differently there.'

Well, strange behavior from time was only natural in a void. Hadn’t Cheon Yohwa herself believed she had spent four years at Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School?

I did not merely sit around as the years passed.

I entered the dungeon reputed to be the most valuable among users on the Korean Peninsula and hunted every monster inside.

After a short wait, the monsters respawned, but I killed every one of those as well.

For eleven years.

Though I was merely an NPC, I ruined the bundles of experience points that should have fallen to the players.

[Emergency Patch Notice.]

[An announcement from ‘Operator of All Things at Play.’ A serious bug was discovered, and an emergency patch has been applied.]

[We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused to our users. Thank you.]

Before long, the dungeon disappeared.

“Ha.”

Did it no longer need even to pretend to maintain the game’s structure?

I smashed the dungeons throughout the Korean Peninsula one after another. An “emergency patch” was applied each time, and the once intricately constructed “game” rapidly fell apart.

The cities and villages where players had once mingled met the same fate. Beautiful natural scenery and streets, revolting monsters—every object was destroyed.

Only the stone-still figures of players who remained logged out lay scattered here and there.

My rampage of destruction continued for thirty-seven years.

[Emergency Patch Notice.]

[Emergency Patch Notice.]

[Emergency Patch Notice.]

At some point, the “game” even stopped alternating between day and night.

It was proof that the sun and Earth themselves had already been “bewitched” by the God of Alienation-class anomaly.

The Han River’s waters stopped flowing. The summer cicadas fell silent. Even when monsters respawned, they merely circled in place.

A grotesque world.

A broken game.

A virtual El Dorado where nothing was born and nothing died.

Yet my endlessly enduring memories, my flesh through which blood still flowed and aura still circulated, impressed upon me that I was still alive.

Now, reality’s time was only as vast as the memories dwelling in my brain, and reality’s space only as large as the volume of my body.

[Emergency Patch Notice.]

Two hundred and twelve years passed.