Chapter 179 - The Being I

1

Since an ark appeared in the last episode, I thought I might keep the theme going and talk about another ship.

Of course, few ships can boast the ark’s worldwide fame.

(Limited to the Korean Peninsula, the turtle ship might give it a run for its money.)

The ship we’ll be discussing this time is an anomaly that’s sort of famous, yet not famous at all.

It’s called the Ship of Theseus.

2

Before we get into the story proper.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that I haven’t introduced an episode with “This happened in run XXX” for a while.

To reveal it now, the Great Monsoon anomaly spearheaded Busan’s redevelopment construction project in run 664.

In other words, this was when the regressor known as the Undertaker had gone beyond being a stagnant pool of veteran expertise and was busily evolving into fossil fuel. An episode from the days when I was starting to enjoy a position that fully justified calling me overpowered.

Today, however, we’ll focus on a much earlier story.

["Mr. Undertaker. When I briefly stopped by Okinawa last time, I saw something through Clairvoyance. An enormous typhoon was moving toward the Philippines."]

“Enormous?”

["Yes. At least 1,000 kilometers across, and it looked tall enough to reach the edge of the troposphere."]

“What the hell is that? That’s terrifying...”

One of the taboo plots in genre fiction is “the powerful protagonist becomes weak again.”

In the past, martial arts novels and the like frequently featured frustrating developments where the protagonist fell off a cliff and lost their memory, or had their dantian shattered. But such complacent plotting cannot survive in today’s savage genre-fiction market.

In my stories, however, it’s perfectly possible.

If I’m talking about run 664 and then casually “regress” to around run 239, as I’m doing now, I can legitimately become weaker.

Back then, I couldn’t cross the Pacific with nothing but my own body (my first response would have been to ask if you were insane). I didn’t even know the Great Monsoon anomaly existed, and naturally, I couldn’t imagine the Saintess suddenly turning into a potato while out for a stroll.

Even a regressor would struggle to imagine that.

That said.

Things on a similar level of strangeness were forever lurking around my life like uninvited guests, then as now.

“Workshop Master Noh Doha! I have a patient! Please make some assistive devices, quickly!”

“Oh, fuck...”

Of course, from Noh Doha’s perspective, I was the uninvited guest in her life.

For smooth interpersonal relationships, one should always know how to adopt a relativistic perspective.

“This isn’t a patient. This is a corpse five seconds before expiration. Fuck, how am I supposed to meet that production deadline...?”

One day in run 239, I went to Noh Doha with a critically injured person on my back.

From here on, I’ll call this patient Patient A.

Despite her grumbling, Noh Doha immediately suspended her duties as commander of the National Road Management Corps and set about saving Patient A.

In the end-of-days apocalypse, the president of the Korean Peninsula also pulled round-the-clock emergency-room duty.

“..., ...”

As Noh Doha had said, the patient was in a quantum state between life and death.

Their entire body was covered in blood. Their arms and legs had flown off in search of freedom, and even their heart had a refreshing hole through it. The mere fact that the observation of death hadn’t been completed yet was practically a miracle.

Of course, it wasn’t a miracle bestowed by heaven.

The apocalyptic world was basically a yandere character whose affection for humanity had hit –100.

What good is a yandere with no affection, you ask? Exactly. That’s my point. It’s hard to find a meaningful difference between that and an ordinary murderer.

“How did they get this badly hurt...?”

“They’re from a small guild. They were exploring a void near Gimhae and ran into the Code of Hammurabi anomaly. This person killed the anomaly’s heart on the condition that they stake their own.”

“Huh. An impressive spirit of self-sacrifice. And impressive that they survived...”

“The other guild members desperately took turns performing CPR for an hour. All that intensive training paid off. I rushed over when I received their rescue request, and this place was much closer than Pyongyang, so I brought them here.”

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

It had always been important, but it became even more so once aura manipulation became compulsory general knowledge for the awakened.

Now, when saving someone’s heart, the awakened no longer relied solely on feeble pumping with their palms.

They used the mystery of the apocalypse: aura.

To take an extreme example, even if the heart wasn’t merely stopped but missing altogether, as it was now, emergency treatment was possible.

By using aura to forcibly regulate oxygen and carbon dioxide and circulate the blood, you could keep someone alive for hours.

For how long? Until my aura ran out.

Naturally, circulating blood throughout a human body wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Extremely precise aura control was essential.

In today’s job market, power hoarders who had done nothing but pile up aura weren’t favored.

The talent guilds wanted was someone with aura control delicate enough to take responsibility for both their own life and their comrades’ lives in an emergency! (In a void, these emergencies occur with a 90% probability.)

And who was the star instructor who not only developed this comprehensive system of “aura manipulation,” but introduced it to the job market and established it as a required course...?

Why hide it?

It was none other than me, the Undertaker.

There was a reason so many awakened respected me in most runs.

You know how guild leaders all over the country agree whenever I propose founding the National Road Management Corps? They’re practically all my outer disciples.

Anyway.

“Arms, legs, and a heart, Workshop Master. Please make the heart first, since that’s urgent, and leave the limbs for later. I’ll keep the patient alive in the meantime.”

“Haa...”

Noh Doha adjusted the angle of her monocle with a slight tilt and took up her tools.

“Hold out like that for another sixty minutes...”

Noh Doha’s awakened ability.

[Assistive Device Crafting].

An ability that made a device fitted in place of a missing body part work “as though it had been part of the person’s body from the beginning.”

At first, she mainly used it to make prosthetic arms and legs, but as the runs progressed, she began applying it to increasingly intricate body parts.

Now, taking “body photographs” was practically mandatory when an awakened joined a guild.

These photographs captured not only the awakened’s outward appearance but their insides—their brain, heart, lungs, and internal organs.

The guilds then sent these body photographs to the National Road Management Corps for registration.

The reason was simple.

So that when their lives were in danger, as this patient’s was now, Noh Doha could make body parts as close to the originals as possible.

A sort of insurance, you might say.

Of course, Noh Doha was very busy.

Finding a healer-type awakened was far simpler than commissioning an assistive device from Noh Doha, whose workload rivaled Zhuge Liang’s.

But what if your heart got blown away?

Healers who could fix that were genuinely rare. Pretty much the only one was the Elder-Abandoning Villain who had debuted as a saintess up north.

The truly grievously injured, those no different from corpses whose companions were somehow keeping them breathing with aura—literal living corpses.

Such patients only had a chance of survival if they went to Sim Aryeon or Noh Doha.

Like this very case.

“It’s ready. Open the chest...”

“Yep.”

Truly, she was the Giving Doha Tree.

She acted as the head of a quasi-government on the Korean Peninsula after civilization collapsed, took care of welfare for the elderly, and even treated emergency patients brought in without hearts every few days. What on earth couldn’t she do, and what wouldn’t she do?

You say someone will die of overwork at this rate? It’s fine. The world will end first.

“Oh. Fortunately, the blood vessels are relatively intact. No, these are too intact...?”

“That’s because they exchanged only their heart with the Code of Hammurabi. It wasn’t a traumatic injury.”

“Aha. True. I’ll install it, then...”

Noh Doha transplanted the artificial heart.

Sweat dripped from her chin, a clear indication of how intensely she was concentrating on Patient A.

“The heart is positioned correctly.”

“Attach it with aura...”

“Yes. Even after attaching it, I’ll keep circulating the blood with aura until the heartbeat returns. One, two, three.”

THUMP.

“...!”

Patient A’s body jolted upward.

Neither Noh Doha nor I was bothered; we’d done this many times. We smoothly continued the operation.

“Start reducing the aura contribution...”

“Reduced to 70%. Breathing normal. I can feel a steady heartbeat. No problems.”

“Reduce it further...”

“Reduced to 50%. No problems. I’m faintly sensing the patient’s aura in the heart again. It’s resisting my aura.”

“Cut it right down. Slowly...”

“Yes. 30%, 20%, 10%, 1%. No problems. The resistance has disappeared. I’ll stop the aura infusion.”

I gently severed the aura connection I had maintained for nearly two hours.

“...”

“...”

Noh Doha and I quietly looked down at Patient A on the hospital bed.

We didn’t use a vital signs monitor, the patient-monitoring equipment commonly seen in hospitals that goes “beep, beep, beep.” Absolutely not. Never.

As I’ve mentioned before, electronic devices were dangerous these days. The arrival of the void had contaminated every last one.

If we set up a vital signs monitor, no matter how well the patient was doing, before long it would go:

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. BEEEEEEEP.

And their heart would stop.

It was fair to say these had effectively degenerated from medical tools into killing machines.

It was absurd, but what could we do? That was the sorry state of our world.

Even in such a world, we had to save those we could.

“One minute elapsed. No problems.”

“...”

“Three minutes elapsed. No problems. Pulse and pupillary constriction are both normal. I’ll check consciousness now.”

My ink-black aura forcibly roused Patient A’s consciousness.

The patient opened their mouth wide with a gasp.

“Hah, hhh... Hah. Wh-where am I...?”

“Can you hear me? Can you hear my voice?”

“Huh? Uh, I can... I can hear you...”

“What’s your name?”

“Uh. A-A Reum...”

I nodded.

“Consciousness is good. No contamination from void poison detected so far. Workshop Master Noh Doha, I think you can relax now.”

“Whew...”

Noh Doha sank into a chair and slumped, seemingly too exhausted even to speak.

Taking the hint, I went outside, made an iced coffee, and brought it back for her.

For a moment, her eyes suggested she was debating whether to throw it over me, but she simply accepted it and drank.

“At this rate, I won’t live out my natural lifespan...”

“It’s all right. Nobody in humanity will.”

“Fuck, I’m talking about overwork. I’m serious. I need to cut down my workload, whether that means handing more authority to Director Yu Jiwon or something else...”

“Commander Noh Doha. Do you know what we call Jiwon with more authority than she has now?”

“Let me guess. A monster? A dictator? Is it time for more of that damned regressorsplaining, where you go on about ‘I gave her more authority in a previous run,’ and I have no way of knowing whether it really happened or you’re making it up on the spot, so I just have to sit here and take it?”

“What if... it is?”

SPLASH!

Even as a regressor with a wealth of experience, there were a few things I hadn’t anticipated.

The first was that coffee could still be thrown over someone even after half of it had been drunk.

The second was Patient A, whom we had saved.

“Thank you, Commander! Thank you, Mr. Undertaker!”

Incidentally, this person’s real name was A Reum.

Their given name was Reum, and their surname was A. Not a common surname on the Korean Peninsula.

“I’ll work even harder to make the most of the life you saved! Thank you so much!”

That was how Patient A thanked us, but neither of us really took those words at face value.

Awakened who experienced losing their hearts usually withdrew to the rear. The void would be too fucking awful for them.

Nobody blamed them, either.

There were plenty of tough souls who thought nothing of losing an arm or a leg, but when it came to hearts or brains, even they responded, “Yeah, fair enough if you retire after that.”

But Patient A was a little too dedicated.

One month later.

“Workshop Master Noh Doha! I have a patient! Please make some assistive devices, quickly!”

“Oh, fuck...”

As usual, I kicked open the conference-room door at the National Road Management Corps commander’s headquarters and burst in.

Noh Doha, who had been in the middle of a meeting with the other directors, swore viciously.

After examining the patient’s condition, her swearing grew a little more vicious.

“No, wait. Fuck. I’ve seen that face before. Isn’t this the person who lost all their limbs and donated their heart last month...?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“They crawled back into the void after injuries like that? And unless my fucking eyes are deceiving me, half their head is gone now...?”

“It’s a miracle even this much is left. Apparently they ran into a basilisk. You should have photographs of this person’s brain. Please make it as similar as possible.”

“For fuck’s sake...”

Amazingly, Noh Doha could even make an artificial brain.

But only one hemisphere, either the left or the right.

One side had to remain intact for the artificial hemisphere on the other side to work properly. If the entire brain was gone, even the Workshop Master’s S-rank assistive devices were completely useless.

We didn’t know why, either. I didn’t want to know.

In this age, ignorance was power. Francis Bacon wasn’t a person’s name; it was just “France is bacon” with the spaces in the wrong places.

“Thank you, Commander! Thank you, Mr. Undertaker! I’ll work even harder to make the most of the life you saved! Thank you so much!”

“Ah, yes. Well. Don’t work harder. Just live safely, please...”

In any case, Noh Doha once again saved Patient A, who had come in missing their left hemisphere this time.

Patient A’s left hemisphere, heart, left arm, right arm, left leg, and right leg had now all been replaced with assistive devices.

At this point, calling them Homo sapiens was becoming rather difficult.

But, well. Even now, you occasionally saw people with sunflowers for heads when walking along the national roads. A synthetic human was relatively well off, I supposed.

The problem was what came next.

“Workshop Master Noh Doha! I have a patient! Please make some assistive devices, quickly!”

“...”

Another two months later.

Noh Doha, who had been enjoying some privacy (wine tasting in the basement), made a sour face at the patient I’d brought in.

“Fuck, are you kidding me? That’s the same person...?”

Amazingly, our Patient A had been brought in missing their right hemisphere this time.

What kind of coincidence was this?

Even in my long life, this was the first time I’d seen such a case.

What insane lunatic would keep forcing their way into the void after losing their limbs and heart, lose their left hemisphere, then go back in and come out missing the right hemisphere of all things?

But a regressor’s life was statistics, not arithmetic.

The lunatic existed, and this insane combination of events did occur.

“So you’re not going to save them?”

“No, fuck. I will. I’m going to... But this amounts to replacing the left and right hemispheres with assistive devices one after the other. Who knows what’ll happen? I’ve never done this before...”

“Relax. It’s my first time, too.”

“Wow. That’s so fucking reassuring, you regressor bastard...”

In any case, Noh Doha made a right hemisphere.

And successfully fitted it into Patient A.

Honestly, we could have done it with our eyes closed. By now, both Noh Doha and I were starting to wonder whether our actual job was being Patient A’s personal physicians.

In the end, we became the first medical team in history to successfully convert an entire human brain from wild-caught to farm-raised.

“Can you hear me? Can you hear my voice?”

“...”

“What’s your name?”

“...”

Blink. Blink.

Patient A opened their eyes. Their heartbeat was normal, and their eyes showed clear signs of intelligence.

“A Reum. My name is A Reum.”

I patted Noh Doha on the shoulder, congratulating us on the success of this absurd operation.

However.

“But what, exactly, is the being called ‘A Reum’?”

Looking back now, perhaps it would have been better if the operation had failed.

“Pardon?”

“I have the name A Reum. But is the A Reum of ten years ago the same person as the A Reum of now?”

Patient A spoke each word distinctly.

In a voice that sounded somehow alien.

“What about the A Reum of ten seconds ago? Of one second ago? Is the A Reum of one second from now the same person as the A Reum of now? Who am I? What kind of being am I?”

“...”

Yes.

At that moment, a new anomaly was born into the world.