Chapter 208 - The Antipode V

9

Abduction.

Naturally, abduction by a human and abduction by an anomaly were rather different things.

If a human abducts you, your reputation, property, and life are generally at considerable risk.

But if an anomaly abducts you?

Surprisingly, all of those things are likely to remain perfectly intact.

Anomalies do not do unnecessary things. If one wanted your life, it would have greeted you with a killing move the moment you met, rather than bothering to arrange an abduction.

When anomalies abduct you, they are after just one thing.

Your “humanity.”

Here, humanity encompasses not only ethics and morals, but even the logical structures built into the Homo sapiens brain.

Q. What is one plus one?

A. Two, of course.

Even someone who once exchanged perfectly normal questions and answers like these will, after being abducted by an anomaly, respond like this:

Q. What is one plus one?

A. Having butchered the “six”—the flesh—from six hundred and sixty, only the limbs of one hundred and ten remain. Ten takes the form of one crossing another one, and these have gathered into a hundred. Thus, I humbly submit that one should line up a hundred pairs of crossed human arms.

Then they murder a hundred people, themselves included, and display a hundred pairs of arms.

Expressing your outrage by shouting, “How could you do something so monstrous?!” will have no effect on them.

A. Why are you suddenly angry?

Because, from the respondent’s perspective, answering 1+1=2 and murdering a hundred people carry precisely the same weight.

They slaughtered a hundred people with exactly the same feeling as doing a very simple sum.

They will look at you with eyes that cannot comprehend why you are angry, or why you look so sad, when all they did was say that 1+1=2.

It is difficult to call them human.

It is impossible to converse with them as a human being.

Hence, the abduction of humanity: being spirited away.

This was precisely the situation I commonly described as being “bewitched” by an anomaly.

The tutorial fairy must have meant it in exactly that sense as well.

“If everyone infected in reality has been abducted... how many humans are there in this Reverse World?”

“Hweee. At least two million! And the number is still growing tremendously in real time!”

I furrowed my brows.

“Wait. Then it’ll overtake the population of the real Korean Peninsula.”

“Exactly! Not only the people infected with the virus in reality, but the people in their dreams have been dragged here too, so it’s going to pass ten million easily! It’s a population-reversal world!”

“Huh.”

A staggering ten million.

I surveyed the vast void stretching out around Seoul Station.

If a void was defined as a place where anomalies bewitched people, this place already deserved to be called a great void.

Great voids of this scale were truly rare.

For example, “an apartment building imprisoning four hundred souls” required only a single apartment anomaly. But for “an apartment building imprisoning forty thousand souls” to work, several additional concepts were necessary.

Perhaps “the Korean yearning for apartments had taken physical form.” Or “it was set in an apartment building that had actually received that many housing applications.” Or it was really an anomaly of an entire apartment complex rather than a single building.

Only with connecting seams like these could a great void grow in scale.

The largest voids on Earth were concentrated in the western part of the Eurasian continent. They, too, imprisoned hundreds of millions of humans through the connecting seams called “World War I” and “World War II.”

“How did it draw in millions, tens of millions of humans? Did it define this place as hell?”

“Hwee, not at all. You should actually think of it as the exact opposite...”

It happened then.

“Everyone!”

Someone in Seoul Station plaza shrieked into a megaphone.

He was a middle-aged man dressed like someone who would have preached on the streets even before civilization fell. Only the writing on the front and back of his outerwear was a little different.

[Believe in the Goddess, Enter Heaven]

[Disbelieve, Enter Hell]

His vest, patchworked with lettering made from stickers, exuded an almost indescribable realism.

“Everyone! Forgive me for interrupting your busy daily lives! I had no choice but to take up this microphone, for the sake of your righteous lives and your true faith!”

The middle-aged man bellowed into a red megaphone.

“As you all know, even now, in the hell beyond, countless people! Pitiful souls who, unlike us, have yet to be saved, are groaning through lives repeated every day, regressions repeated every day, suffering repeated every day! Everyone!”

At this point, the realism that had enveloped the very volume of the air abruptly reversed.

“...”

“...”

Every passerby walking through Seoul Station plaza stopped at once and looked at the middle-aged man.

Those on calls hung up. Those looking at their smartphones turned them off. Those chatting with companions stopped talking.

The plaza fell silent in an instant.

Not a single person glared in annoyance at the megaphone’s noise.

Most watched the middle-aged man expressionlessly, with profoundly dark eyes.

“Beyond that divide, countless people still groan, unable to escape the hellscape of eternal reincarnation! They are your acquaintances, your families, and, beyond that, portraits of yourselves! Let us pray for them! O Goddess!”

“O Goddess!”

The passersby who had remained silent all this time shouted in unison.

The man holding the megaphone waved his arms even more violently.

“O Goddeeeess!”

“O Goddess!”

“Let us repent! My error in believing that if the world repeated and I lived my life again, hundreds, thousands of times, one day I would become someone else and the world would be saved! The errors of my acquaintances! The errors of my friends and family! I repent!”

“We repent!”

“Let us give praise! All that accumulated throughout our repeated lives were our wicked sins, and even when we forgot, the Goddess continued to watch over us! Though our filthy souls were stained with so much sin, even so! The Goddess did not abandon us! She broke our souls out of that hell and delivered us into the world of the living! I give praaaise!”

“We give praise!”

“O Goddeeeess!”

“O Goddess!”

The plaza was steeped in madness in an instant.

Fairy No. 264 let out a “Hweee!” and ducked behind me.

Even I hesitated for a moment at the madness wavering in their eyes.

“Prostrate yourselves, everyone! Worship!”

Without the slightest hesitation, the passersby threw themselves onto the ground of the plaza, utterly unconcerned about dirtying their suits.

Kim Jucheol was among them. He bowed his head to the ground alongside his wife.

“Face it! The sight of yourselves living in that eternally repeating hellscape, no different from yesterday, from the day before, from a hundred years ago, from a thousand!”

Then a strange phenomenon occurred.

The plaza’s surface, which had been covered in asphalt moments earlier, turned transparent like “glass.”

Images appeared beyond the glass. Where Kim Jucheol bowed his head, there was an image of Kim Jucheol himself.

“Save meeee! Please get me out of here! I don’t want to repeat this day anymore!”

He was not the only one.

Wherever the passersby lowered their heads, images of themselves played.

Looking closely, I spotted a familiar head of green hair among them. Sim Aryeon.

One particular “scene beyond the glass” caught my eye.

“The National Road Management Corps are minions of hell who support eternal regression! They’re trying to imprison and isolate us for wanting to escape regression! They’re the real demons!”

“Demons! Demons! Demons!”

In the images, a group had gathered in front of National Road Management Corps headquarters to protest.

Yu Jiwon and other Corps members came out and ruthlessly subdued the protesters. Screams filled the Tower of Babel plaza.

A scene that could very well have happened in reality.

I murmured.

“What... are those images?”

“Hwee. The real reality outside.”

The fairy peeked out over my shoulder.

“Comrade General Secretary, please look down.”

“Hmm?”

I looked.

Astonishingly, an “image” was playing beneath my feet, beyond the transparent glass, just like everyone else’s.

The Undertaker on the other side of the glass was asleep with his eyes closed. Noh Doha and the Saintess sat nearby.

The two conversed quietly beside me as I lay in bed.

“Good grief. It’s noisy outside...”

“The protests are getting worse.”

“Well, not just ordinary people, but the awakened are all getting infected with that damned regression virus or whatever it is. Three Thousand and Hundred Flowers did tell us they’d try to keep it under control, but who knows. They won’t last a few days...”

“Still, I think things will get better once Mr. Undertaker wakes up.”

I was speechless.

That was not a scene that might exist in reality. It was reality itself.

“But for the humans bewitched by the Reverse World, it’s the exact opposite.”

“... The exact opposite?”

“Hwee! Yes. This is reality, and the other side of the glass is the afterlife, and hell!”

My eyes widened.

“What? How could a trick like that...”

“It absolutely works! More precisely, the anomaly is working away, hup-hup, to make it work!”

Fairy No. 264 explained why they considered their “Reverse World” superior to my “real world.”

“First, there’s no war here, and civilization is intact! As I said, the population is also just about to catch up!”

Civilization and environment.

“Life over there is harsh, and it’s a hellscape where regression repeats forever! But this Reverse World the anomaly created keeps going, continuously, regardless of regression! Just like reality!”

The passage of time.

“So, Comrade General Secretary, this anomaly is defining your world as ‘hell.’ It’s challenging you to a duel to settle which side is reality and which side is hell!”

“...”

I see. I understood now, too.

In the end, it was fundamentally no different from other anomalies.

While ordinary anomalies set up a hell within reality, this anomaly had merely labeled all of reality hell instead.

And like this, it had secured its own domain by separately constructing what the fairy called a “Reverse World.”

This place is the world of the living. That place is the world of the dead.

That was how the anomaly was bewitching people.

Reversal. Inversion. A shift in perspective.

“... Clever bastard. Then where is this place? Inside a dream? The unconscious world?”

“Hwek, it’s a little different. Although you reached this place through a dream, Comrade General Secretary, that was only an analogous experience!”

“An analogous experience? ... Aha.”

I quickly deduced the answer.

“I see. There were ghost stories about people sometimes experiencing the afterlife when they dreamed. It’s not that the afterlife exists inside dreams. With luck, you can briefly connect to the afterlife through a dream. After all, this place must still possess the attributes of an afterlife.”

“As expected of you, Comrade General Secretary! Exactly right! Hwee, of course, the anomaly defines this side as the world of the living and that side as the world of the dead...”

Quite a complex, intricately constructed trap.

But at last, I could glimpse a clue to overcoming it.

All that was required was to prove which place was reality and which was illusion. I simply had to show that the world I lived in was the real one.

“Everyone! Rejoice! Your heartfelt repentance has reached the Goddess!”

The middle-aged man shouted.

“You no longer need to look down into hell today! Raise your heads! Lift them high! Look up into the heavens and behold!”

The passersby prostrate in the plaza raised their upper bodies. Instinctively, my gaze followed their movements.

Toward the sky.

“The Goddess’s sacred form!”

And I saw it.

There was no sun there.

Why hadn’t I noticed?

If I had to give a reason, it was because modern people were not in the habit of looking up at the sun.

Also, judging by the angle of the sunlight, the sun appeared to be directly overhead, making it difficult to look up without forcing my head back almost ninety degrees.

In short, even I, a regressor, had the habit of assuming that if sunlight was falling from the sky, “of course there must be a sun.”

“...”

The thing occupying the sun’s place in the sky was a gigantic 『eyeball』.

A slow blink.

As the eyeball blinked slowly, ever so slowly, the world briefly fell into shadow.

Before looking up, I had assumed a passing cloud was casting that shadow. I had been mistaken.

A slow blink.

Sunlight—no. Eye-light poured from the gigantic eyeball.

The pitch-black pupil in the center of that immense eye kept moving this way and that.

It saw me.

“Hwek! Danger...!”

The instant the eye of the sun, the sun of the eye, looked straight at me, everyone prostrate in the plaza turned toward me at once.

“...”

“...”

The inhabitants of “this” world, who had not noticed me until now, stared straight through me.

The gaze of the sunlight that had illuminated every inch of this world abruptly converged on me as well.

The surrounding temperature soared in an instant, and my skin began melting like candle wax.

“E-emergency escape!”

The fairy hurriedly waved its magic wand.

Before my eyes, half of Fairy No. 264’s body burst apart. Yet the fairy protected its wand to the very end.

The next instant, I was flung out of the dream.

10

“... Hey.”

Welcoming me back to reality was the person who would take undisputed first place in a [Face You Least Want to See When You Wake Up in the Morning] contest.

“Hey, awakened Undertaker. Are you all right? You haven’t croaked, have you...?”

Also known as Noh Doha.

When I laboriously pushed my eyelids open, the first thing I saw was the dark circles under his eyes.

He had never been someone you could accuse of caring about fashion, but today he looked even stranger.

He was covered from head to toe in something resembling scraps of flesh. He had taken a direct hit from chunks whose texture was closer to jelly than human flesh.

On closer inspection, the Saintess standing beyond his shoulder was similarly drenched in something between a solid and a liquid.

Before I could sarcastically ask what on earth this latest fashion was supposed to be, Noh Doha forestalled me.

“The fairy that sang a lullaby and went off on a dream trip with you. It just burst. Half its body suddenly exploded all on its own...”

“Ah.”

It was true.

Still lying in bed, I turned to look beside me. Fairy No. 264 was still holding my hand tightly, but the other half of its body was gone.

“... Please call Aryeon. These creatures are tougher than they look. If we heal it quickly, it’ll survive.”

Behind Noh Doha, the Saintess nodded. She had probably sent a message immediately through [Telepathy].

Straightening my clothes, I asked,

“Commander Noh Doha. Are people protesting outside right now, by any chance?”

“Hmm? Yes, they are. Team Leader Yu put them down immediately, though... How curious. You could hear the noise here even while dreaming.”

I rested a hand on my chin and sank into thought.

This time, Noh Doha addressed me with a sardonic question.

“Thanks to that fairy, we’ll have to replace all the wallpaper in here. What exactly was in that dream to cause this mess...?”

“The goddess of night, Nut.”

After a brief pause, I said,

“She’s a God of Alienation.”