Chapter 186 - The Addict III

4

A birth rate of 0%.

Faced with an unprecedented situation that even survivors from South Korea had never witnessed, the policy I proposed was simple.

-Use a dream demon to enter a fetus’s dream.

-Subjugate the mysterious anomaly lurking there.

I could confidently call it the most practical measure against low birth rates ever proposed on the Korean Peninsula, but even this plan ran into trouble at the very first step.

For starters, Fairy No. 264, hastily recruited as an adviser on low birth rates, expressed reservations.

“Eeeek! Comrade General Secretary. Having a fully grown adult—and a complete stranger at that—enter a fetus’s dream is an incredibly reckless stunt!”

“... Is it that difficult?”

“Hweh! Of course it is!”

As befitted an expert appointed to an advisory committee, Fairy No. 264 wore an expression that said, How can a person not know something so basic?

“A fetus’s world consists mostly of nothing but sound! The two-part melody of the mother’s high voice and the father’s low voice, the rhythm of heartbeats, the dissonance of digestive organs... And mysterious light and shade! It’s really just the parents switching the room lights off and on, but to a fetus, it’s twilight and darkness, with the sun and moon taking turns in a round dance. The feel of water. Smells. A fetus’s world, a fetus’s dreams, consist of these things alone!”

“Almost no visual information, then.”

“Yes! That’s a big problem!”

The revolutionary cadre nodded while speaking the language of the American imperialists. Pragmatic.

“Eighty percent—no, over ninety percent—of a fetus’s world is made up of sound! But for a human who finished growing long ago, like you, Comrade General Secretary, vision accounts for over eighty percent of sensory importance! At that point, you might as well call them different species!”

“Still, this is something we must accomplish. Isn’t there any way?”

“If you want your body to disintegrate the moment you enter the dream and turn into a sound in three-quarter time, I won’t stop you?”

“Hmm...”

As I hummed in thought, Fairy No. 264 added with a “Hweh.”

“Still, if the baby is familiar with your voice, the odds of success go up dramatically. From three percent to around nine percent?”

“Someone whose voice it knows?”

“It’s much easier for the mother or father to connect to the baby’s dream! In other words, if it’s your biological child, Comrade General Secretary, you get a double-success-rate event!”

Ears perked up.

At that moment, the atmosphere in the meeting room transformed.

I could sense the change in the air. Everyone attending the meeting pricked up their ears and focused on our conversation.

... I had once promised Oh Dokseo that I would never use [Mind Reading] again, but this time, resisting was truly difficult.

I immediately closed one eye and did my “Gung Ye mind-reading act.” Oh, I hadn’t mentioned it, but Mind Reading worked better when I closed my left eye.

[Cheon Yohwa: 'Whoa. That dream demon just asked the forbidden question everyone was curious about but nobody dared ask...']

[Seo Gyu: 'I am curious. Boss is a regressor who’s lived hundreds of runs. Has he really never had a child? Never been married, either?']

[Dang Seorin: 'I need to look like I’m concentrating as hard as I can on the flavor of this coffee. Yes, delicious.']

[Sword Marquis: 'Mount Hua is number one.']

[Sim Aryeon: 'Guild Leader’s baby would be sooo cute.']

[Noh Doha: 'Oh? Closing his eye? I think that bastard’s using Mind Reading...?']

I immediately switched off Mind Reading and rubbed my left eye firmly, pretending that a speck of dust had forced me to close it briefly.

Noh Doha continued staring at me suspiciously, but I changed the subject as though nothing had happened.

“Having a child solely to subjugate an anomaly would be unfair to the child. How about this instead?”

“Hweh. What do you mean?”

“Rather than me entering the fetus’s dream, we do the opposite and invite the fetus into mine. I think that should work.”

“...!”

Fairy No. 264’s backside bounced up from its seat.

“Hwek! Just what I’d expect from you, Comrade General Secretary! What a brilliantly decisive move! That would definitely send the success rate soaring above fifty percent!”

Quiet sounds of disappointment and irritation—“Aw,” “Tch,” “Tsk,” and sighs—echoed from around the meeting room.

I was rather disgusted. Was taking an interest in other people’s love lives truly a human instinct?

“Good. Instead of simply inviting it into my dream unprepared, let’s decorate the dream to match the fetus’s environment as closely as possible. Like you said, we’ll darken the surroundings, fill the place with the smell of water, and add some natural background white noise.”

“The success rate breaks ninety percent! Comrade General Secretary, you’re a genius...!”

The project had taken shape.

Now we only needed a collaborator—a pregnant mother. That part was quickly resolved.

“So some shitty anomaly bastard is trying to kidnap my baby? Of course I’ll help. Chew that fucker’s arms and legs to pieces for me.”

“Exactly, Undertaker! Cut the thing into five pieces!”

“...”

Apocalypse survivors were tough as a rule. And among them, the citizens of Busan, who watched Dang Seorin’s anomaly-dissection show live every week, possessed a truly indomitable spirit.

There were forty-nine volunteers in total.

Ultimately, the woman furthest along in her pregnancy was selected, at the fairy’s request.

“Hweh. The fetus’s brain needs to have developed enough for it to dream!”

An entirely sound point.

These days, fetuses stopped growing from the eighth week of pregnancy and completely “disappeared” as early as the tenth week or as late as the thirtieth.

The selected candidate was twenty-five weeks pregnant.

Yet far from having a bulging belly, she looked no different from before her pregnancy.

Her child could be abducted at any moment, and her anger at the anomaly and her anxiety were all the more urgent for it.

There was another reason for her selection.

“When the baby is born, I’m going to name her Seoa.”

Jeong Seoa.

I wonder if you remember her. In a run from the distant past, she was the little aspiring chef who had fed me a sugar doughnut with her own hands on Haeundae’s sandy beach.

Jeong Seoa’s personality and appearance varied slightly from run to run. Even the child’s sex differed. In any case, the identity of being the bakery couple’s child remained the same.

Yes. The “Jeong Seoa” I thought I knew and the “Jeong Seoa” who would be born in this run would be similar, yet different.

But what did that matter?

Every child carved out a life of their own in the gap between what adults knew and what they did not.

I did not want to watch this child be kidnapped by an anomaly.

“Now, sit side by side! We need to sing a lullaby to properly enter the dream!”

Preparations were complete.

Thirty-six fairies formed a circle, holding hands. I clasped a fairy’s hand with my right hand, and the mother did the same with her left.

Then the fairies sang in unison.

“When Mommy goes to the island’s shade—♪”

“To pick some heaaads—♪”

“The baby stays alone—and takes a shiiit♪”

“...”

You lot still insist that ridiculous song is a lullaby?

Immediately after I was left dumbfounded, my consciousness plunged into the depths.

5

The fairies and I had agreed beforehand not to descend too deeply into the unconscious.

As everyone knew, the bottommost depths had become the turf of “the One Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken.”

To describe it purely by feel, the unconscious world where the “pink entity” resided was basement level thirteen. The unconscious I descended into this time was, at most, only basement level two.

THUMP.

Even that depth was enough to decorate the interior in imitation of a fetus’s mental world.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

There was only darkness there.

But it was neither a silent darkness nor a flat black backdrop. The darkness was sound.

The world was growling softly.

For a human, the heart always existed not as a visible diagram, but as a sound—a ripple submerged in water, echoing little by little.

“I can’t see anything.”

“Of course you can’t. The baby has never seen anything! The world a human sees with their eyelids shut is the entirety of a baby’s vision.”

“So there’s a reason prophets in myths show up missing both their eyeballs. To experience the original world, you have to know how to distinguish things by sound.”

“Shh. The baby’s over there!”

Holding my left hand, Fairy No. 264 pointed to one side of the darkness.

I saw it.

-...

My five senses reinterpreted the “world as the baby experienced it” entirely as visual information.

And the sight was astonishing.

“That’s... just water, isn’t it?”

Water floated in the middle of the darkness, wriggling.

There were no visible arms or legs. No head, either. Something resembling a long tentacle squirmed within the water... Was that the umbilical cord?

No matter how I looked at it, it was less a human than an aspiring undine, nothing more and nothing less.

“Yes. It’s water. And?”

“... No, where’s the baby quietly curled up? Why is there a water-element slime sitting here instead?”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk. Comrade General Secretary. That’s a way of thinking distorted by an adult’s perspective.”

I really wanted to flick this little bastard on the forehead.

“Adult humans distinguish between the fetus and the amniotic fluid, thinking this is a human and that is a liquid, but to the fetus, the amniotic fluid is practically part of its own body! They’ve been together from the moment it came into being, so of course it is!”

“Ah.”

“Human scholars interpret the pain babies experience during birth merely as separation from the umbilical cord and the mother. But more fundamentally, being separated from ‘water’ is closer to losing their ‘body’—specifically their most fundamental ‘skin’! Mammals are terrifying creatures that have their skin completely stripped off every time they’re born...”

Fairy No. 264 shuddered.

'Actually, that’s a pretty interesting perspective.'

In other words, a considerable portion of the pain humans experienced at birth was the “loss of water,” the “loss of the body.”

Put another way, perhaps it was a process in which babies that had originally been “water spirits” were forcibly turned into “humans.”

But I had no time to immerse myself in such anthropological questions.

“Comrade General Secretary! An anomaly has appeared!”

“...!”

The culprit that had ushered in the Korean Peninsula’s era of zero births had arrived.

TAP, TAP.

The anomaly approached lightly from beyond the darkness. When I saw its appearance, my eyes could only widen.

Jeong Seoa.

An anomaly bearing an uncanny resemblance to what the fetus would look like after growing up was walking toward it.

“Haah. Yesterday was rough, too.”

PLOP.

The “grown-up Jeong Seoa” sat beside the “Jeong Seoa who had not even been born yet.”

“You know, I think Mom finally heard the news. That if things stay this way, I might never be born.”

“...”

The anomaly imitating Jeong Seoa whispered to the fetus in a strange voice, with a peculiar manner of speaking.

“Our dad went into a void last month and died, remember? So Mom thinks I’m the only trace he left behind. But now she hears that even I might disappear, and she’s in terrible pain. So she went and ate all that Dopamine again.”

“...”

“It isn’t just Mom. Right up to the day before he disappeared, Dad baked and ate Dopamine rice pizza bread every day, too. Our uncle, too. Our aunt. Our dad’s cousin’s wife, too. We need to count our great-uncle and great-aunt over there as well. Thanks to that damned Dopamine, they lived healthy, happy lives before passing on.”

“...”

“Then... it’s my turn now, isn’t it?”

SPLASH.

Jeong Seoa plunged a hand through the surface of the fetus made of water.

An ominous “black,” different in hue from the soothing darkness blanketing this dream world, contaminated the fetus’s water.

“...! ...!”

The fetus’s amniotic fluid turned a murky black.

The fetus, the being of water, did not yet know how to scream. It expressed its pain only by violently churning its surface.

'Ah.'

Only then did I realize Dopamine’s true nature.

And how, until now, it had been able to do nothing but make people happy without any side effects.

The side effects had not vanished.

Neither had the unhappiness.

The side effects and unhappiness had merely been transferred to “other people” and deferred.

None other than children who had not yet been born.

In other words, to the “next generation” who shared their blood.