Chapter 141 - The Fortunate One III

4

The good fortune did not end.

Even as the Reverse Great Wall played an endless tower-defense game against the mass assaults pouring in from the continent, lucky breaks kept coming.

["Mr. Undertaker. We've confirmed that the 'pink entity' you warned us about has moved to Kyushu, Japan."]

Go Yori, the regressor's greatest enemy and a genius at gaslighting, kindly fled Korea of her own accord.

Unprecedented good news. I felt like giving her a generous resettlement grant.

And that wasn't all.

["The status window anomaly hasn't appeared."]

"What?"

["We concentrated our observations on the date and location you gave us, but nobody saw a status window."]

"..."

["Perhaps this is another effect of the Monkey's Paw?"]

And that wasn't all².

My good fortune wasn't confined to physical reality. It showed no signs of stopping even in online communities.

In short, a Romance of the Three Kingdoms parody craze swept through SG Net's Fiction Serialization Board.

-Lu Bu Hides His Daddy (★9.9)

-The Ten Attendants' Grand General (★8.7)

-[Alternate History] I Marched Out on Orders for a Northern Expedition, but When I Opened My Eyes, I Was in Hanzhong, Not North Korea?! (★9.2)

-The Three Brothers Always Shared One Blanket [Uncut 19+ Edition] (★9.8)

-On My First Day of Possession, I Became Zhang Kai, the Man Who Killed Cao Cao's Father (★9.9)

-I Possessed a Yellow Turban Rebel, So Why Am I Holding Das Kapital? (★9.6)

Everywhere I looked on the board, the rankings were plastered with Romance of the Three Kingdoms parodies.

These days, Romance of the Three Kingdoms was positively youthful, hip, Gen Z content.

And the discussions weren't limited to the Fiction Serialization Board. Even the general board, arguably the heart of SG Net, churned out Three Kingdoms topics without a cooldown.

-Anonymous: Three Kingdoms<<< Thought it was just content for old farts, but after devouring the web novels, the Romance, and even the historical records, nothing else comes close

-Anonymous: Just how impressive was Ma Su's mountain-climbing achievement? I'm putting together a mountaineering trip to China so we can experience it firsthand. We'll coordinate our guild leave before heading out. Sorry, but overseas travel is dangerous, so we're only accepting people rated Depth 600 m or above. Contact me if you're interested!

-dolLHOuse: What's wrong with SG Net lately? Did you all get reading glasses together?

└Anonymous: Still got some full-HP bastard who hasn't read Three Kingdoms lmao

└dolLHOuse: I have, though?

└Anonymous: So which faction do you support?

└dolLHOuse: Anyone except the big-eared bastard. Aren't they all just mediocre nobodies whose story ends in the Sixteen Kingdoms anyway?

└Anonymous: Blocked.

-[Three Thousand]WitchTrialJudge: The night sky looks especially beautiful today. Is this how the chancellor felt as he gazed up at the stars on the Wuzhang Plains?

-Goryeojang: Wow I seriously want to bury all you fucking morons in coffins these days;;

-[National Roads]Historian: We hold weekly meetings in Busan to read and discuss Records of the Three Kingdoms in the original text. (4/6)

By the time I noticed, I'd spent six solid hours absorbed in the online community without once looking away from my phone.

"Hah!"

I shuddered.

After all my daily nagging at Aryeon to quit being such an internet addict, I'd finally discovered the true joy of hanging out online myself—for the first time in 590 runs.

'Is this the true power of the Monkey's Paw?'

I simply couldn't take my fingers off SG Net.

It was as though my smartphone screen had been coated with honey handcrafted especially for me, the Undertaker!

"Ugh. You frighten me, Monkey's Paw! Such enchantment would have long since bewitched an ordinary human!"

"..."

Hayul, who happened to be crossing the living room, glared at me as if I were a pathetic loser—like a responsible younger sister looking at her unemployed older brother—then disappeared.

Yes.

In my 590th run, I was getting the full, glowing experience of Life as a Cult Leader: The Hopeful Version.

The world went exactly as I wanted!

Every venture I touched proceeded wonderfully, while any trouble beyond my ability to handle simply never arose in the first place.

But I wasn't a cult leader.

I was an ordinary citizen who preferred the subway to limousines. Thus, even without checking the route map, I could guess that the next stop on my journey of destiny was called "Ruin."

It was now the seventh year.

Year ten—the due date for the debt of fortune's backlash, which I'd asked the Monkey's Paw to postpone—was fast approaching.

'Should I kill myself?'

A drastic decision was needed.

The "extreme choice" was a route anyone who'd spent seven years in debt could sympathize with. Unlike for other people, it wasn't even particularly extreme for a regressor.

Couldn't I safely escape that future mountain of debt by leaving a KakaoTalk message saying, "Wow, thanks to the Total Fortune System, I've had a sweet, easy ride this run^^ Well, I'm off to the next one now, toodle-oo..." and quitting the chat?

I bitterly resented having to leave this Three Kingdoms paradise, but a regressor had to know when to set aside selfish desires for a while.

"Ah... I wouldn't really recommend that, Teacher."

Another expert disagreed.

"Why?"

"Hmm. I think it would only make things worse."

Having heard my concerns, Cheon Yohwa smiled wryly.

Why had I confided such a private concern to Cheon Yohwa in particular? Because, apart from me, she was the member of our group who qualified as an "anomaly expert."

As you all know, she'd sealed Gapless inside an hourglass.

Including the anomalies from School Ghost Stories, she carried a whopping hundred Pokémon around with her.

Any other trainer would have sued her for exceeding the Pokémon carry limit all by herself.

Fortunately, this world's genre wasn't a training story about imprisoning beasts with masochistic instincts and making them fight in a colosseum. But precisely for that reason, the anomalies naturally hated the chief warden who had locked them up.

In short, the anomalies of Hundred Tales, led by Gapless, were constantly sizing up their chances of rebellion.

There was a reason Yohwa suffered from stress every day and binged on tteokbokki at the snack shop in front of the school.

For her as for the Saintess, it was an inescapable fate: the more powerful an awakened became, the closer they came to the danger of falling.

"It would make things worse?"

"Yes. That's only my prediction, though."

"I don't know. Last time I checked, the Monkey's Paw couldn't detect regression at all. It didn't have the power to give its original owner, Kuro, the ability to regress, either. If I just close my eyes and regress, wouldn't the debt disappear?"

"Ahaha. But thanks to that Kuro person or whatever her name was, the Monkey's Paw stopped applying to just one individual and started applying to everyone in the world, didn't it?"

"..."

"At first glance, people making wishes seem to be parasites living off the anomaly called the Monkey's Paw. But I see it the other way around. The Monkey's Paw is the parasite."

"An anomaly that parasitizes humans?"

"Yes!"

Yohwa clapped her hands.

Despite the seriousness of our conversation, she looked delighted simply to be sharing this discussion with me.

Well, for Yohwa, who competed for control with a God of Alienation-class anomaly 365 days a year, I must have been a valuable conversation partner, too.

There weren't many people who could understand the terror of anomalies as well as the two of us.

"Think about it, Teacher. The Monkey's Paw probably can't grow stronger on its own, entirely through its own power. Someone has to make a wish to it. Then it uses that wish as an opportunity—a kind of excuse—to increase its power."

"Oh?"

"Wouldn't the Monkey's Paw have been extremely grateful to Kuro? If she'd prayed for some ordinary desire to be fulfilled, it would have remained a run-of-the-mill anomaly. But because Kuro made an excessively 'high-level wish,' the Monkey's Paw rose to the same level as that wish!"

"Then if I, a regressor, ran away on the assumption that I could simply regress..."

"The Monkey's Paw might acquire the power to govern fortune and misfortune even across regressions. That's strictly speculation, of course."

"Hmm."

"That's why I don't recommend suicide. More importantly, I don't want to see you dead, either, Teacher. Hehe..."

She had a point.

By that logic, even I, the Undertaker, who'd spent all this time pointing out Kuro's stupidity, had ultimately done something stupid myself.

An "ordinary person's good fortune" and a "590th-run regressor's good fortune" inevitably belonged on different levels.

Just consider the scale of what the Monkey's Paw had done this run.

The senile old Sword Marquis had returned from old age to youth.

It had brought Meteor Strike, which shouldn't have appeared until much later, into the waters of the East Sea, and even drawn in a UFO at the perfect moment to make them collide.

As a result, a Black Great Wall that should never have existed had arisen north of the Korean Peninsula.

In other words, the Monkey's Paw had grown powerful enough to produce as many lucky breaks of this magnitude as it pleased.

By the Library Society's classification system, shouldn't its threat level already be considered Ocean-class?

'Am I seriously fucking screwed here?'

Alarm began creeping over me.

Somehow, I had to resolve this situation before the misfortune came pouring in for real.

"Actually, I think you need to be incredibly, increeedibly stubborn about staying alive this run, Teacher."

"Why's that?"

"Suppose you die before experiencing as much misfortune as the good fortune you've enjoyed this run. Then the 'misfortune you haven't finished repaying' might carry over into the next run, couldn't it?"

"Hmm..."

I held my chin.

Something about my conversation with Yohwa had set my brain tingling.

'Wait. A good idea is right on the tip of my mind...?'

At this point, I hadn't yet figured out exactly what that "good idea" was. That would be covered in the next episode.

But I had settled on the right direction.

"Then, according to you, Yohwa, I should start making myself as miserable as possible, even now."

"Ahaha. ... Yees. But deliberately picking out nothing but misfortunes to experience isn't something we can do at will. It's a problem."

"No, there's a way. A very clever solution, in fact."

"Huh? Really?"

I nodded.

Then, with the utmost seriousness, I said,

"Yohwa."

"Yes, Teacher."

"Have you ever heard of a 'hate potion'?"

"...?"

5

The "hate potion."

There's a sort of meme—perhaps you could call it a genre—by that name.

Yohwa tilted her head as though she'd never heard of it in her life. Naturally. It originated in our neighbor across the sea from the Korean Peninsula.

Some people believe Japan lacks creativity and originality.

-"Tonkatsu? Isn't that just a variation on a cutlet?"

-"Japanese curry? All they did was adapt Indian curry to Japanese tastes."

But that's nothing more than prejudice.

Remove the [All Ages] filter from the corneas through which you view the world, and you'll suddenly witness creativity erupting from the Japanese archipelago like Mount Fuji.

Wasn't it the Japanese archipelago that gender-swapped the characters of Romance of the Three Kingdoms to produce the mutant strain known as "gender-swapped Three Kingdoms fiction," or Koihime stories?

It also boasted a whole host of inventions that, for various reasons, were difficult to mention.

The only place ever to display greater creativity was ancient Greece. (The Greeks even impregnated the thigh of their chief god and dressed the human hero supposedly closest to invincible in all history as a woman.)

Anyway.

The "hate potion" was another example of the archipelago's gloriously offbeat creativity.

-"Take this potion, and your affection ratings will reverse!"

-"Affection ratings will reverse?"

-"Yes. Even people who've loved you dearly, even your family—everyone will hate you just as much as they loved you. It's literally a 'hate potion.'"

-"...?"

-"Everyone who's been quietly showing you affection will change completely and start spewing curses, telling you to hurry up and die! Oh, don't worry. People who disliked you from the start will retain their existing affection ratings!"

-"Why on earth would you introduce a potion like that into a story?"

-"Because its effects have a time limit."

-"...??"

-"Once it wears off, the people around the protagonist start regretting what they did. They see how utterly broken their curses have left the protagonist. Oh, what have I done to the protagonist I loved? How could I have said such awful things...?"

-"What is even the point of that?"

-"Huh? Isn't misery fiction where people wrong the protagonist and then regret it delicious?"

-"...???"

From a pragmatic standpoint, building up a narrative over dozens of chapters to make the protagonist miserable was terribly inefficient.

Modern people, always obsessed with efficiency, wanted to slap on the #regret #obsession #misery tags immediately through sheer narrative convenience.

The tool for that was the "hate potion."

It was the instant three-minute misery jajang sauce the Japanese had developed.

Put simply, you could call it an "affection-reversal potion." All you had to do was drink it to become miserable.

So how had I, the Undertaker, come to know about such a niche foreign genre? Well, uh...

Let me remind you that this story took place during my 590th run.

And it was around run 560 that I'd devoured every web novel in the world and then reenacted Misery on their authors.

That concludes the explanation.

"So you're going to take a 'hate potion' to deliberately cause 'misfortune' and escape the clutches of the Total Fortune System?"

"You've understood perfectly."

"Mister, you've really gone elegantly insane."

Oh Dokseo—the very person who'd introduced me to web novels, and the only one of my companions with enough nerd credentials to know about "hate potions"—nodded.

"That's a really good idea. Just what I'd expect from you, my protagonist, Mister. Let's try it right away!"

For the record, Oh Dokseo liked misery fiction.

"But where do we farm a hate potion? There wasn't anything like that in <The Omniscient Regressor's Viewpoint>."

"Now, now, Dokseo. You get ginseng from Joseon and queue hairstyles from Qing China. Surely that makes it perfectly clear which hunting ground we should visit to farm a hate potion?"

"Oh."

Exactly.

We immediately set sail for its "place of origin."