Chapter 118 - The Tormented

1

It has been a while. Let me tell you a brief anecdote about Old Man Scho.

“Embalmar.”

“...”

As I mentioned once before, Old Man Scho often called me “Embalmar.” My alias was Undertaker, after all—a profession that involved preparing other people’s bodies for burial.

This was precisely why people said a single vowel could make all the difference.

He had merely changed one vowel, turning “embalmer” into “embalmar,” but his highly advanced Korean pronunciation managed to work the ring of “damned bastard” into it.

This proved that Old Man Scho’s mental development had yet to progress beyond infancy. By giving people the nastiest nicknames he could and announcing them in public, he sought to establish his dominance over them.

In the eternal electoral contest between innate human goodness and innate human evil, the latter had just secured another precious vote.

“Embalmar. Why aren’t you answering? Did you cut out your tongue and give it to a beggar as charity? Shame on you, boy. You shouldn’t torment someone like that, even a beggar.”

“Goddamn...”

“Now, now, Embalmar. I am quite pleased to see you grasping that maxim from the Parthenon, ‘Know thyself,’ but why disparage yourself in that fashion? And you still dare call yourself a regressor? All people are equal in worth. You may be a damned bastard, but you’re an embalmer, not a damnation.”

Who the hell had taught this German old geezer to speak native-level Korean?

They were clearly a language teacher of astonishing ability. Once I discovered their identity, I very much wanted to pay them a visit and respectfully present them with a stab wound.

“Fine. What is it? What new breed of bullshit are you planning to unveil this time?”

“Your memory is better than mine, so you’ll know more precisely. That little kid.”

Old Man Scho pointed at someone.

A child of about five. A little girl was playing between a young couple who ran a bakery in Haeundae, Busan.

Old Man Scho said,

“That was definitely a boy in the last run.”

“...”

“The run changed, and so did their child. The baby that should have been born to that couple has disappeared. Hasn’t it?”

That was not all. I had never told Old Man Scho, but I remembered it precisely: the couple’s child changed with every run.

In run eighteen, it had been a boy. It had also been a boy in run seventeen, but with a different appearance. In run eleven, they had even had twins. The timing of both pregnancy and birth differed subtly each time. Across all those runs, not once had they had an identical child.

“And? Why are you suddenly asking about that?”

“Think about it, Taker.”

Whenever Old Man Scho had something serious to say, he always called me Taker instead of Embalmar.

“Doesn’t that mean that whenever we regress, the children who existed in the previous world—all the people newly born there—disappear?”

“... Not all of them.”

“Yes. Lives unaffected by our butterfly effects remain the same. But I really started noticing it after we defeated Tenlegs. There were more and more lives I’d never seen before.”

“With Tenlegs defeated, more people felt it was safe to settle permanently on the Korean Peninsula. That’s only natural.”

“Why pretend you don’t understand? That isn’t my point. There are children erased from the world forever because the two of us regress! Their memory, their existence. Everything! Except in that extraordinary memory of yours!”

“...”

“I worry that I—or, more precisely, the ripples of the butterfly effects I unintentionally create through my struggles—might be doing something terrible to those tiny, young things.”

A guilt difficult to describe settled between Old Man Scho’s aged brows.

I learned it much later, but the Schopenhauers had once lost a child to a miscarriage. Old Man Scho was projecting his own wound onto the ‘lives that disappeared’ whenever we moved to another run.

Perhaps that had also played a part in his decision to take a ‘vacation.’

Erasing every trace of himself. Refusing to interfere in any way with lives yet to be born, so that their existence would not be so fleetingly erased.

“Hmm.”

“... What’s with that obnoxious look?”

“Nothing. Just thinking.”

But I saw things somewhat differently. And not only my thoughts—my feelings differed too.

Perhaps our paths were already destined to diverge from this moment onward.

Because I felt no guilt whatsoever toward those ‘vanished lives.’

Of course, I felt regret and sadness.

For instance, the child Old Man Scho had pointed out had made glutinous rice doughnuts alongside her mother and father. They had made far too many, so she had even given some to me.

“Big brotherrr! Say ahhh!”

Her childish laughter. The little hand that put a doughnut into my mouth. The stiffness I felt when I had to stoop to meet that hand. The stickiness of the sugar, a little too thickly coating the surface even for a glutinous rice doughnut. My reaction—“Wow! This is so delicious!”—and her parents’ bashful thanks in response.

All those memories remained with me.

Yes. I admitted it.

I would never again receive a sugar-coated doughnut from Haeundae Bakery’s child, five-year-old Jeong Seoa—our little baker, who thought her mom and dad were so wonderful that she wanted to make bread too.

And was little Jeong Seoa the only presence embedded in my heart like a grain of sand? Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of losses clung to a regressor’s years.

Shadows existed not only in space, but in time as well, and we had named that shade memory. As the human who had lived the longest, I was draped in the darkest memories.

But the emotions flowing from my heart were only sadness, sorrow, and longing.

I could state with certainty that they were different in nature from guilt.

The objects of my guilt had been limited from the beginning.

Mostly to the gravestones for which I had held funerals through [Time Seal]. In other words, guilt pooled within me only for those I had buried forever with my own hands.

“Old man. Didn’t you mention something the other day?”

“Hmm? What?”

“You know. Since the children born change subtly when we regress, aren’t we actually erasing people from existence with every regression?”

“Eh? When did I ever say... Oh, ah! That?”

Old Man Scho rounded on me with a glare.

“What kind of crazy bastard are you?”

“...?”

“You goddamned bastard! I brought that up more than three runs ago! Why are you suddenly talking as though we discussed it yesterday? You little shit. You’re doing this on purpose to make me look like some forgetful old man, aren’t you?”

Old Man Scho huffed and puffed. I had to spend three minutes calming him down.

So I never quite dared make the joke, ‘Didn’t you once tell me not to call people damned bastards? Why the change of tune?’ If you wanted to be friends with an old man far older than yourself, you had to make a lot of concessions.

“Taker. Unless you fix that shitty habit, you’ll find yourself in serious trouble one of these days.”

“Indeed. Hearing that from an old man whose bullshit cells have metastasized throughout his entire body certainly gives me cause for alarm.”

“Why does this little bastard get more insolent by the day...? Embalmar! Where has that innocent boy you used to be disappeared to?”

“Who knows? Perhaps a German dragged him off, fed him gas, and killed him.”

“You racist little shit! My family supported the Social Democrats back in the days of the Reichstag! My ancestor was arrested too!”

“Sure, but a white man can accuse an Asian of racism all day and it still won’t stick, will it? Anyway, I spent some time thinking carefully about what you said. I found that I couldn’t agree.”

We were walking through Haeundae.

A sandy beach that had once been practically synonymous with vacations on the Korean Peninsula. As though it had stolen every jewel of the civilization humanity had lost, the watery hues of the sand held blue emeralds.

“If young lives disappear every time we regress, then conversely, aren’t lives that could never have been born before coming into being because of us?”

“... Hmm?”

“Without regression, every human born into the world at this moment would have been predetermined. But the fiercer the typhoon of our butterfly effects becomes, and the farther it spreads, the more entirely different possibilities get to see the world, however briefly, before departing.”

“...”

“Of course, it isn’t a particularly good world. People in every generation complain that they were born in the worst era in history, but aside from the ice ages, this truly is the worst in both name and reality. Even so, I think spending even a moment here, passing through life, is better than remaining in nothingness—a bottomless abyss.”

The countless grains of sand, as innumerable as those of the Ganges, rustled beneath my shoes.

“And do we regress because we enjoy it? It’s those insane anomalies’ fault. Those bastards are the ones who should feel guilty. Why should we, of all people, take responsibility for the end of the world?”

“Hah.”

“Old man. In my opinion, we need neither feel guilty about the lives already gone nor claim credit for the lives newly arrived. The determination to stop the end of the world already weighs heavily on our backs. It hardly needs saying how foolish it would be to pile on a responsibility that doesn’t exist and break our own spines.”

“...”

“If you insist on feeling guilty, that too is a choice, and I won’t stop you. But then it would only be right for you to feel exactly as much joy for the children newly born.”

“...”

“I am no great-hearted man, and my heart is too small to bear both emotions. So I choose to feel neither guilt nor joy over these new lives.”

For a long time, only the sounds of waves, sand, and footsteps murmured along the beach.

In short, I had just advised Old Man Scho not to grieve too much.

“When did the boy who couldn’t understand a single line of the Analects become so clever?”

A sigh flowed from Old Man Scho’s mouth, like the aged sea spilling waves.

“Yes. Finding the courage to take hold of something is difficult, but finding the courage to let it go is harder still. Taker. Perhaps you are better suited to being a regressor than I am.”

I could not readily agree with that reflection.

One thing was certain, however: my words could not have offered much comfort. As you know, Old Man Scho eventually went on vacation with his beloved wife.

I still did not agree with Old Man Scho’s argument.

Only when I saw Sim Aryeon smiling after being reduced to one-bit graphics did I briefly find myself wondering whether I might be ‘doing something terrible’ to the other children.

“Mister!”

It happened while I was walking along the beach.

“Hmm?”

“Say ahhh!”

A very small boy came running up and thrust a glutinous rice doughnut toward me. Looking over his shoulder, I saw the familiar bakery couple smiling tentatively.

I understood the whole situation at once.

“Say ahhh!”

“...”

I compared the child before me with little Jeong Seoa, whom I had met in run nineteen, thousands of years ago.

They looked completely different.

Yet, astonishingly, when I opened my mouth and took in the glutinous rice doughnut, its taste—including the sweet scent of that far-too-thick coating of sugar—was so very similar.

My eyes widened. I could only chew the doughnut slowly, savoring its flavor.

“How is it? Is it yummy?”

“... It’s delicious. Really, so delicious. You could run a bakery yourself.”

The child burst into giggles and pattered across the sand, back into his parents’ arms. The baker couple, who knew I had played a leading role in defeating Tenlegs, bowed their heads.

The sight of grains of sand scattering beneath the child’s feet imprinted itself vividly in my eyes.

A wave swept in from the sea and brushed past my feet, then withdrew, carrying away even the last dregs lodged in my heart.

‘If Old Man Scho erases every trace of himself by taking his own life, shouldn’t I instead survive to the very end, every time, and keep time flowing so that newly born lives can walk this earth a little longer? In any case, time will reveal which of us was wiser.’

Just as I was about to leave Haeundae with a light step, a strange sense of incongruity stopped me.

‘Wait. Didn’t the little girl in run nineteen call me big brother?’

Moreover, if I disregarded the runs and compared only the points in time—in other words, going purely by my apparent age—I was a year younger now than I had been then.

‘Then why did he call me Mister...?’

Hmm.

... On second thought, perhaps little Jeong Seoa’s glutinous rice doughnuts had tasted better after all.

- The Tormented. End.