Chapter 188 - The Patriot I

1

Have you ever heard this saying?

- Crisis is opportunity.

That widely known, proverbial phrase strikes me as a little too kind.

Reality is cold.

To accurately reflect this merciless world, the saying, too, must submit to a proper remake.

- Find opportunity in crisis. If you can't, you're dead anyway.

An apocalypse is one crisis after another. Much like the survey calls that come at all hours during election season.

But election season lasts a month at most, whereas an apocalypse is an amusement park ride that runs forever, every day bringing fresh fun and excitement.

The weak humans who failed to adapt to Earth's newly updated environment all died.

And it wasn't just individuals who died. Professions, too, were being deleted to great acclaim.

Among the most notable occupations struck from elementary school career-aspiration forms with the arrival of the apocalypse were:

National Assembly member, election commission member, labor union president, stock trader, physicist, graduate student, shut-in, and so on...

We mustn't leave “journalist” off that list.

The apocalypse was far too cruel to modern journalism, which had become incapable of surviving without advertisers.

Of course, major guilds occasionally published quarterly newsletters and the like. Three Thousand Worlds' “Hogsmith News” even enjoyed a modest following. But there were quite a few obstacles to calling that journalism.

A front-page feature on Dang Seorin's recommended witch-fashion essentials for the fall hardly embodied the dignity of the press.

Nevertheless, it took quite some time for “journalist” to disappear from the list of professions.

There was just one reason.

Jo Yeongsu.

Because the last journalist remaining on the Korean Peninsula—no, in “South Korea”—stayed active for quite a long time.

2

Still, if I stopped a random Busan resident and declared, “Jo Yeongsu is actually a journalist,” I would very likely receive a strange look.

"Him? A journalist? Why?"

The place to find Jo Yeongsu in Busan was none other than the plaza in front of the National Road Management Corps.

Go there, and every day you could see a middle-aged man shouting with a protest placard in hand.

“Dictator Noh Doha, step down! Step down! Step down!”

“Ugh. That guy's at it again. Doesn't he ever get sick of it?”

“Dictator Noh Doha, step doooown!”

That's right.

This man was Jo Yeongsu.

Naturally, people in Busan generally didn't think of him as a journalist or anything of the sort. He was simply “the crazy guy in the plaza.”

The crazy guy was extraordinary right down to his clothes. Not only did he carry a protest placard, but the front and back of his shirt bore enormous lettering:

[REPUBLIC OF KOREA]

[DEMOCRACY]

That shirt deserved to be called armor rather than mere clothing—or better yet, a holy relic rather than armor. Besides the enormous lettering, it was densely covered in smaller text.

[The Republic of Korea shall be a democratic republic] [The sovereignty of the Republic of Korea shall reside in the people, and all state authority shall emanate from the people] [All citizens shall enjoy freedom of speech and the press, and freedom of assembly and association] [Licensing or censorship of speech and the press, and licensing of assembly and association shall not be recognized]...

The very incarnation of democracy!

Back when civilization was intact, Myeongdong in Seoul, South Korea, had its “Believe in Jesus and Go to Heaven, Disbelieve and Go to Hell” evangelists. Now Busan had acquired a local attraction named Jo Yeongsu.

However tolerant Busan, that city of fashion, might be of people's clothing choices, Jo Yeongsu stood out more than Three Thousand Worlds' witch cosplayers in all sorts of ways.

“Can't we do something about that guy?”

“He's a total nuisance.”

“When the hell is he going to lose his voice?”

Naturally, the National Road Management Corps' members intensely disliked Jo Yeongsu.

They might not worship or serve Noh Doha as the savior of the Korean Peninsula, but why would they enjoy a human siren screeching at them on their way to and from work?

Had Noh Doha merely said, “That man is annoying. Get rid of him somewhere,” the Corps' members were perfectly willing to make him disappear without a trace.

“Just leave him alone...”

In other words, Jo Yeongsu owed his continued survival entirely to Noh Doha's indifference.

“Why all this fuss about killing someone over something that doesn't mean shit? Go do your overtime...”

“But, Your Excellency Commander. Is there any reason to keep such an immature fool alive? He could undermine the Corps members' morale at work.”

“Morale, my ass. Tell them to quit if they don't want to work. Who's stopping them? Fuck, I can't quit even though I want to. Shall I show you what really undermining morale looks like...?”

“I'll make absolutely certain the members understand they must not touch him.”

Noh Doha was completely immune to criticism and slander. Whatever anyone said—even insults about his parents—he ignored it without so much as a snort.

It would be a mistake to interpret this as a ruler's generosity.

Even if a caterpillar wriggled furiously, begging for attention, how many humans would spare it a glance? That was precisely how Noh Doha thought.

Once Yu Jiwon decided that doing anything wouldn't earn her points with her superior, she too left Jo Yeongsu alone. She was no slouch herself when it came to treating other people like insects.

“Dictator Noh Doha, step down!”

And thus a miracle came to pass.

Jo Yeongsu had successfully obtained unrestricted “freedom of expression” of a kind difficult to enjoy even in an actual democracy.

Even more astonishingly, Jo Yeongsu was an awakened.

His ability: “Lighting a lighter flame with his index finger.”

His awakened ability itself was utterly insignificant, but to a true democrat, such “inborn traits” were of little consequence.

What mattered was that any awakened could access SG Net. That, and nothing else.

- Anonymous: South Korea now stands on the brink of disaster! The electoral system has collapsed, and democratic principles have vanished!

At night, after the Corps' members went home, Jo Yeongsu's fingers spat fire on SG Net instead of in the plaza.

- Anonymous: Through what legitimate procedure and consensus did Noh Doha ascend to the position of commander of the National Road Management Corps? What is the legal basis?

Why, he had been installed by a regressor named Undertaker—me—and selected through a beta-testing period spanning hundreds of years.

Strangely enough, everyone except him went completely mad once they seized power over the Korean Peninsula.

What could I do? I had no choice but to select Noh Doha, who had gone mad long ago and had no sanity left to lose.

- Anonymous: The situation is even worse with the major guilds that effectively rule the cities. These guilds arbitrarily collect protection taxes from the people!

- Anonymous: If this is not taxation, what is? By what right do guilds, mere gangs of thugs, collect taxes from the people?

Well, obviously, because all the “anomaly experts” of this era were concentrated in the guilds.

Anyone who's listened to my stories so far will know that an ordinary person confronting an anomaly was virtually impossible. It wasn't easy even for awakened.

In this end-of-the-world apocalypse, where a turn of bad luck could leave you dead on the roadside at any moment, guilds were responsible for public order and security.

So we had to hear their side of things, too.

"Hey. We'll pay you a head tax and a protection tax amounting to about ten percent of our income, so go engage with anomalies before anyone else, and more actively than anyone else. Got it?"

That was the proposal presented to the guilds.

People might feel differently about it, but it was difficult to call this an arrangement unfairly slanted in the guilds' favor.

Honestly, wasn't it a pretty damn demanding job to do without even that much incentive?

- BookishGirl: What's that guy going on about this time?

- Anonymous: All right everyone, the late-night shift starts now. Let's switch to Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

- Anonymous: Our man Jo Yeongsu << Is it true this guy clocks in at the soup kitchen every day??

- Goryeojang: Welcome, Republic Geezer lol

Jo Yeongsu wasn't treated well on SG Net, either.

For starters, despite posting anonymously, everyone knew who he was. That alone was a problem. It meant he had built up such an unlikable image that anyone could recognize him.

Who in this day and age lived their lives worrying about “procedure” and “voting” anyway? Anomalies beat the shit out of humans without bothering with any of that.

- Anonymous: I do not condemn the guild leaders simply because they are incompetent, or the Corps commander simply because I dislike him.

Naturally, every post he wrote drew mocking, malicious replies. Jo Yeongsu would bristle and invariably fire back at length.

- Anonymous: The issue is legitimate procedure! You may force things through in the present, but humans live through time, and time brings oblivion.

- Anonymous: Force can sustain you for ten years. For twenty years. For fifty years. But not for a hundred years. Because time is powerful!

- Anonymous: Consensus, promises, and law are the means of overcoming the oblivion wrought by time. They are the one and only solution humanity has discovered thus far through countless ages!

- Anonymous: Succession based on blood cannot be a legitimate procedure! Countless empty formalities and coronations were devised to dress it up as legitimate.

- Anonymous: Ultimately, consensus! Only consensus! Only laws that inscribe consensus in writing!

- Anonymous: In practice, everyone cannot gather every ten years to renew their consensus, so we first establish “a promise to which any human can agree, transcending time and space.” That is a constitution!

- Anonymous: In practice, everyone cannot participate in reaching consensus, so we append “promises periodically renewed by people elected by all holders of sovereignty.” Those are laws!

A lengthy rebuttal indeed.

I hadn't edited these together at my own discretion. He really wrote replies like that to each and every member.

The words and sentences differed subtly from comment to comment, so he wasn't deploying the secret art of copy-and-paste, either.

- Anonymous: Do the National Road Management Corps and the guilds have power? Yes. Do they have consensus? No. Do they have a constitution and laws? No. Do they have procedures based on consensus? No!

- Anonymous: It is therefore plain as day that these organizations will destroy themselves before even a hundred years have passed. They have no right to represent South Korea today!

- Anonymous: Former Busan mayor Jeong Sang-guk of the provisional government that fled to Japan has a better claim to legitimacy!

└dolLHOuse: ?

No matter how much effort Jo Yeongsu put into his lengthy harangues, nobody agreed with him.

That was entirely natural.

- Anonymous: A hundred years, fuck lol. We're freaking out because we don't think we'll even live ten, and he's spouting this “oblivion wrought by time” bullshit lmaooo

Nobody expected a nation that could survive more than a hundred years.

South Korea itself had fallen around the hundredth anniversary of its founding. The “constitution and laws” Jo Yeongsu so revered hadn't been able to hold back the time when the void arrived, either.

A single phrase of Dang Seorin's Spell-Song Chanting could protect far more people and preserve far more public order than those few agreed-upon lines of text.

That was the kind of world we now lived in.

Humans were no longer great. We were merely a part of nature. Far from gaining the upper hand over nature, humanity was at an overwhelming disadvantage, and law books were nothing but luxuries.

In other words, we were animals.

Beasts.

Awakened abilities were not something grand, not proof of being chosen by heaven. They were merely claws sprouting from a beast, wings with which to flee.

Only by first humbly acknowledging that fact could we face our present reality.

- Anonymous: Difficult times are no excuse for neglecting procedure! Did South Korea not establish a constitution alongside its declaration of independence even when it had lost its nation to foreign usurpation?

In short, Jo Yeongsu was an idealist.

To the SG Net members whose families, friends, and colleagues had died and were still dying, he was an almost unbearably idealistic one.

- Goryeojang: Well now, our pal Republic Geezer's keeping the late-night shift nice and warm again hehe

Hence the nickname Republic Geezer.

It was a derogatory combination of “Republic of Korea” and “geezer.”

Alongside the Goryeojang Villain, Republic Geezer was known as one of SG Net's three great villains.

Who was the third? Opinions varied, but WitchTrialJudge sometimes made the shortlist.

Certain factions even dared nominate me, Undertaker, as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms Villain, but that was all slander.

- Anonymous: Commander Noh Doha, wake up!

└Goryeojang: Wake up! Wake up!

Anyway.

It was another late-night shift on SG Net, with Goryeojang stirring up trouble and Jo Yeongsu spitting fire as usual.

At an hour when all normal people were sleeping to prepare for tomorrow's work.

Only the two villains were exchanging posts and comments, passionately worrying about “the nation's future.”

- Anonymous: Even now, the National Road Management Corps and the guilds must gather public opinion and seriously discuss the direction of South Korea!

└Goryeojang: “Gather public opinion,” my fucking ass lol. How do you even do that?

└Anonymous: Through the press, of course!

└Goryeojang: Oh, I see hehe. But our proud South Korea doesn't have a press or news, does it? hehe...

That was when it happened.

Jo Yeongsu's keyboard, which had always proclaimed his righteous arguments without a moment's hesitation, suddenly fell silent.

One minute. Three minutes. Five minutes.

No matter how long we waited, no rebuttal to Goryeojang's counterargument appeared.

- Goryeojang: Last hit secured.

Eventually, pleased to have secured the kill, Goryeojang changed the subject.

- Goryeojang: Guys, this is the song I'm listening to right now. How would you rate it??

└ZERO_SUGAR: Let's talk Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

└Goryeojang: Go to bed.

Of course, Goryeojang had no idea.

No idea that this exchange had inadvertently brought the Korean Peninsula's last “journalist” into being.