Chapter 17 - The Internationalist III

5

People often liken the mind to the heart, and the heart to fire. A heart ablaze. The embers within growing stronger.

But in my case, water was more often the better metaphor.

After the red flesh Go Yori summoned cut my eighty-ninth run short, the well within me ran dry for a time.

The condition commonly called burnout. A slump you were bound to encounter sooner or later when you lived as a regressor.

"All of them dead..."

"With Three Thousand gone, doesn't that leave Hundred Flowers as Korea's only top-tier guild?"

"Oh, come on, those corpse-fuckers...? I'm not even sure they count as a guild."

"They failed to subjugate the void anyway. I looked up at the sky last night, and it gave me the chills."

After recovering Dang Seorin's remains, cremating them, and scattering her ashes on the shore, I returned to find awakened whispering beneath the parasols outside the convenience store.

For some reason, their whispers sounded to me like the tickling murmur of water.

That sound converged on a single object.

[This place makes great coffee. Three Thousand Worlds, Dang Seorin]

A wine-colored thousand-won note.

I placed the banknote bearing the Three Thousand guild leader's signature in an acrylic case. Then I set it on display behind the checkout counter, where the cigarettes were usually stocked.

Supplies in the underground warehouse had begun running low lately anyway. Alcohol and cigarettes had been the first to grow scarce, so there was plenty of room for the banknote.

Naturally, customers could admire the display whenever they came to the counter.

One day, the old Sword Marquis raised a hand and pointed.

"Shopkeeper, what precious artifact is that? I sense extraordinary internal power from it."

"Oh, that? It's the autograph Three Thousand's guild leader left before she went off to beat down the meteor shower."

"Hmm..."

The old man left the convenience store with a thoughtful murmur.

The next day, while buying his usual green bottle of makgeolli, the old Sword Marquis abruptly laid a ten-thousand-won note on the counter.

"Shopkeeper. This is an orchid I painted myself."

"An orchid? What orchid?"

"Look closely at the painting."

I looked.

Sure enough, an orchid had been painted beyond King Sejong's broad shoulders.

"...?"

Honestly, his painting skills were dreadful. Had Heungseon Daewongun seen it, he would have flown into a rage, declaring those pineapple leaves, not an orchid.

Still, the old man must have put some effort into it. In a corner of the cabbage leaf of a banknote, a tiny signature read [Sword Marquis of Yuldoguk].

Apparently quite proud of his work, the Sword Marquis huffed through his nose. His mustache—the only tolerable feature of his appearance—fluttered.

"Please hang it in your shop as you would a folding screen."

"..."

Well, it couldn't hurt.

Without giving it much thought, I displayed the Sword Marquis's banknote too.

That seemed to have set something in motion. Customers began presenting me with signed banknotes, one after another, without exception.

"Um, sir. I'm heading out with a raid team, so if it's not too much trouble, could you take this...?"

"I'll be back! Give me a buy-two-get-one-free deal next time!"

"You really, really can't sell me a carton of cigarettes? Huh? Please?"

Perhaps they'd been wary when only the Three Thousand guild leader's keepsake was on display, but adding the old Sword Marquis's banknote had suddenly made it seem more approachable.

The awakened left all sorts of currencies behind.

Old five-thousand-won notes, two-dollar bills, East German marks (the most fascinating of the lot), yen, euros, pounds, Mongolian tugriks, Hong Kong dollars, Vietnamese dong, Philippine pesos, North Korean won, Indian rupees, Nepalese rupees...

Before I knew it, the space behind my counter was filled with money.

Whenever I had a moment to spare, I would gaze quietly at the display.

With each banknote laid like a brick into the hollow center of the cigarette rack, I felt, somehow, as though the well within my heart was filling a little too.

If life was ultimately a journey toward leaving behind a single photograph, this would probably be my ninetieth portrait.

"Comrade Manager..."

"Hmm?"

Fairy No. 264 set down a box of sugar-free drinks. Beneath the Saemaul cap, the fairy looked utterly dejected.

"This is the last box of sugar-free drinks, too. Waaah..."

"Is that so? What about alcohol?"

"Beer, soju, whiskey, wine, makgeolli, sake... Even if we scrape together every kind, there are only fifty bottles left. I'm ashamed that our source of revolutionary funds has dried up..."

It wasn't just the alcohol. Our reserves of almost every item had run out.

No oasis stayed wet forever.

But so what? Had you ever seen a tree refuse to cast shade for fear that it would someday rot?

"Here."

I took out a Cheonhajangsa sausage I'd saved.

No. 264's ears perked up at the sight. This was something I'd learned during this run: for whatever reason, fairies went wild for these sausages.

"Ah! A sausage! I thought they were all gone!"

"Eat it without letting the others see."

"You're the only one who cares about me, Comrade Manager...!"

I patted No. 264 on the head.

"Let's call everyone over and finish off all the remaining booze."

"Yes, Comrade!"

I gathered the customers.

A post on the online community would have made inviting the awakened easy, but unfortunately, that was no longer possible.

[Unable to connect to the site.]

Seo Gyu's Hunter Community had shut down some time ago.

He had died somewhere I knew nothing about.

Go Yori had probably died too. After all, she was likely a being who couldn't survive without mimicking humans and living among them.

The fairies went around gathering people in person, and we still managed a party of a little over a hundred. Fifty bottles wouldn't leave everyone entirely satisfied, but it was enough for that many people to have a decent time.

'The Saintess didn't come?'

The awakened laughed, chatted, sang, and enjoyed themselves.

They had supplies of their own saved for the very end, so there was no risk of the party being meager. Astonishingly, one awakened brought eleven bottles of 1990 Château d'Yquem, instantly establishing herself as the greatest hero in human history.

The mood reached a fever pitch.

"How about we found a guild with everyone here?"

"Yeah!"

"The last guild! To celebrate its founding, let's head out to clear the meteor-shower gate once tonight's farewell party is over!"

"Isn't this more of a pickup raid than a guild...?"

The awakened who had survived this long were either stubborn loners who'd never joined a guild or misfits who'd been kicked out after some trouble. Most didn't have an easy time getting along with others.

Yet as the final moment approached, even they came together to form a party. Granted, those eleven bottles of Château d'Yquem had probably contributed considerably to that unity.

"Manager! Aren't you coming with us?"

I shook my head.

"There's still one customer I haven't said goodbye to. I'll head out a little while after you."

"Aw, with you along, I bet we'd last thirty seconds longer. What a shame."

"Maybe even three minutes?"

"All right, all right! Let's get moving!"

Everyone chuckled.

That night, the sky's ceiling was unusually high, and filled with commotion.

6

My long experience as a regressor told me instinctively that the end of the world truly was upon us now.

The day after the last supper, I summoned all the fairy clerks.

Forty little creatures in Che Guevara T-shirts huddled together. I stood before them and declared:

"Today is a day off."

"Huh?"

The fairies blinked.

"Does a day off mean a day without labor?"

"Labor reflects a person's worth, so taking a day off means abandoning that worth. It's an extremely counterrevolutionary concept."

"Forgive my presumption, but wouldn't that depend on whether it's paid or unpaid leave?"

I chuckled and gave each fairy a fifty-thousand-won note.

"Don't worry. It's paid leave."

Every note bore my signature.

[General Secretary, Chairman, and Store Manager of the Sixth International.]

The fairies' eyes sparkled.

"Wow! Comrade Manager's handwritten autograph!"

"Deeply moving!"

"We must pass a law requiring it to be framed and hung in every public office!"

"Sure, do as you like. Anyway, I'll mind the store alone today, so go get some rest."

"Yes!"

The fairies raised their red flags and scurried off in a march to somewhere or other, leaving me alone.

I was mopping the floor of the now-quiet store when it happened.

DING

The glass door opened.

"Welcome."

"..."

It was the Saintess. The customer I'd waited for until the very end.

She quietly looked around the store. Here and there, the shelves were empty, like gaps left by missing teeth. Signs attached to those shelves read [Temporarily Out of Stock - Please Wait for Restocking].

The Saintess murmured,

"Restocking is taking quite a while."

"Yes. I keep pressing headquarters, but they seem to be having a hard time."

"... I see."

She offered no objection to my words, merely accepting them quietly.

The end was right on our doorstep.

Even so, the Saintess hadn't died. And it wasn't just this run. She always survived to the final day—so consistently that you could almost call it a certainty.

It was a little different from a fixation on living.

She had imposed upon herself a duty to live.

"Could you make me a cup of coffee?"

"Of course."

I brought out the last of the coffee beans, milk, and sugar, and made a cup as close to instant coffee mix as I could.

Having the manager personally make their coffee was how we treated regulars at the Sixth International.

Naturally, I could offer at least that much to our very first regular.

"..."

"..."

The Saintess said nothing while she drank. Her jet-black eyes simply wandered over the space behind the counter, the shelves, and the view beyond the windows.

Her gaze lingered longest on the banknote cases.

"Thank you for the coffee. Here, my payment."

She offered me a fifty-thousand-won note.

"You don't need to give me change. I'll come again."

On the back of the note was written [From your first customer.]

After that day, no awakened ever visited the convenience store again.

In the middle of the night, I closed the store and walked out to the banks of the Han River.

The Milky Way stretched across the night sky. Red. Green. Violet. It gaped like lips torn into a long slit, and countless stars glittered within, as though they might spill out at any moment.

And spill out they did.

The gate that the guild alliance, including Three Thousand, had tried to seal even at the cost of their lives was now fully open, pouring a catastrophe made of starlight onto the earth.

An event that always occurred in South Gyeongsang Province in the seventh year of a run, and in Seoul in the twelfth. The so-called Meteor Strike.

"A meteor ending this run, then."

I sat on a rise by the river and looked up at the sky.

I could survive if I wanted to avoid it. But even if I did survive alone, there was nothing left for me to do in this run.

There were countless things to do in the next.

'Not a bad vacation.'

I opened my smartphone.

While waiting for the stars to fall, I swiped through the photos saved on it.

I didn't normally take photographs. More precisely, I'd lost the habit while living as a regressor. Photos were meant to preserve memories, but for me, they couldn't serve that purpose.

Yet even knowing they would disappear, I couldn't help taking these.

[This place makes great coffee. Three Thousand Worlds, Dang Seorin]

[Sword Marquis of Yuldoguk]

[Thanks to you, I had a great time. Lee Juho.]

[My sincerest thanks. But no matter how I look at it, the store's name and the clerks' T-shirts are strange. Are you perhaps a member of the Red Army Faction, Manager? Respectfully, Uehara Shino.]

[Here on our school trip! Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School♡May our love last forever, across a thousand miles and ten thousand - by Cheon Ryohwa]

[Getting here is such a pain. Thought I'd die hauling the wine bottles. - NDH]

[Go, go, Sixth International! You can do it! - Sim Aryeon]

[You would've been the GOAT if you'd sold cigarettes by the carton... Y]

.

.

.

[From your first customer.]

The corners of my mouth lifted without my realizing it.

Why I had accepted life as a regressor, whom I wanted to help, and why I wanted to help them—all those reasons filled my heart with a volume and clarity unlike ever before.

Twelve years, it seemed, had been enough to supply the drinking water needed for a regressor's life.

Of course, another century of this and I'd have to take another vacation.

'Wait. Doesn't a meteor ending feel a little old-fashioned?'

The whole world was suffused with starlight.

Time to regress.

That day, I retired from my twelve-year career as a convenience store manager and returned to work as a regressor.

- The Internationalist. End.