Chapter 211 - The Antipode VIII

13

However much the geopolitical location known as a “rooftop” might be a place where love letters and punches packed with heartfelt emotion flew freely in subculture fiction, it was hard to have a relaxing heart-to-heart with the Saintess here.

For one thing, the backdrop was a bit of a problem. Time might have stopped, but a hellscape still sprawled across the ground below.

“Let’s go somewhere to talk.”

“Yes. That sounds good.”

“But can’t you release the others from [Time Stop]?”

“That would be difficult.”

The Saintess shook her head.

“For starters, I have to hold someone’s hand myself for them to move around with me in the stopped world.”

Come to think of it, she was still holding my hand tightly.

But couldn’t we recruit at least one more companion by employing the hold-hands-and-walk strategy with both her hands? As that thought occurred to me, she added,

“And unless their aura is as extraordinarily well trained as yours, Mr. Undertaker, they would find it difficult to endure. They have to be strong enough to overcome the concept of ‘time’ on their own.”

“Hmm. I suppose that makes sense.”

By analogy, the stopped world was no different from the vacuum of outer space. An ordinary person—no, even a reasonably well-trained awakened—would find it difficult just to speak.

“Which means I can also perform surprising little tricks like this.”

She abruptly let go of my hand.

In my vision, her palm slowly moved 0.1 centimeters away from the back of my hand, as though in slow motion.

The very next instant, I was standing not on the rooftop of National Road Management Corps headquarters, but in its first-floor lobby.

“...?”

“I just stopped time.”

The Saintess’s face was impassive.

But as the Guinness World Record holder in the [Interpreting the Saintess’s Expressionless Face Championship], my discerning eye could read even the faint aura lurking in those facial muscles.

This woman... was she excited?

Her spirits were a little higher than usual.

“No, wait a moment, Saintess.”

“The World.”

Her hand pulled away again.

The next instant, my body was in the middle of the Tower of Babel square.

“...”

“Ta-da.”

The Saintess said “ta-da” with a straight face. This from the very person who had presumably been lugging my body around with much grunting and straining while time was stopped.

“... Saintess.”

“Yes.”

“You seem to be in a very good mood.”

“Yes. It’s been a full two thousand years since I last had a conversation with someone.”

“I spent about 212 years alone myself when the Operator of All Things at Play fucked me over, so I know very well how that feels, but...”

That was the run when Sim Aryeon came to me and said, [“I really love the café mochas you make for me, Guild Leader.”]

I had grabbed her in a hug and sobbed like a child.

In other words, two hundred years of solitude had been enough to turn me, the Undertaker, into a pathetic regressor whom even that Goryeojang Villain could win over.

And the person before me had just endured ten times those two hundred years alone...!

In short, the Saintess was currently a pathetically pathetic Saintess.

The moment I finished that assessment and interpretation, I kept hold of her hand and effortlessly scooped her up in a princess carry.

“Ah.”

“You’ve been through so much, Saintess.”

“...”

“And thank you. If you hadn’t stopped time, I honestly would have given up on this subjugation. I might have fallen, as a regressor, into a hell of time that repeated for all eternity.”

When I had gone two hundred years without contact with anyone, what I had needed most desperately was human warmth.

Wasn’t that why I had instinctively hugged Sim Aryeon upon being reunited with her?

In the end, people could only understand others through the reflection of their own experiences. So I, too, hazarded a guess at what the Saintess wanted most right now.

“...”

Fortunately, my guess seemed to have been right.

Without a word, the Saintess settled into my arms, tilting her aqua-colored hair toward me. It was a little longer than it had been ‘two thousand years ago.’

“I know a good café nearby. Let’s go there.”

“... No. I don’t mind if we just walk around like this.”

“Oh. Sounds good. Shall we, then?”

I walked on, step by step.

It was a rather embarrassing pose to be seen in. Fortunately—or unfortunately—the entire world apart from the two of us was frozen, holding its breath.

No one could pay us any attention.

The suffering souls caught in the Hell of Blade Mountains and the Hell of Boiling Cauldrons were petrified in poses of fleeing or screaming.

We passed between the petrified pedestrians.

“To be honest, I was a little worried.”

The Saintess’s lips moved as she lay in my arms.

“Worried?”

“I’m an anomaly now, after all.”

The voice flowing from her lips, too, retained a certain dryness, as though it had been petrified for a long time.

“I’ve even become an anomaly that could reasonably be classified as God of Alienation-class. And you’re almost unconditionally hostile toward anomalies, Mr. Undertaker. So...”

“I see. You thought I might take one look at you, say ‘You insolent anomaly!’ and subjugate you?”

“Yes. Merely as one possibility.”

I laughed.

“If you ever see an Undertaker who reacts that way, he’s a doppelganger. Subjugate him immediately.”

However important it was to drive the void from the world, how could it matter more than the people around me?

The moment I became an ‘anomaly-subjugating machine’ that prioritized the former over the latter, the human being known as the Undertaker would have degenerated into another anomaly himself. One that must be subjugated.

Of course, the body temperature of the Saintess in my arms was already far removed from that of a human.

She was cool as shade.

Perhaps about 15°C.

But for a body that had weathered two thousand winters, she was still warm.

“...”

Then something rather curious happened.

The Saintess’s aura crept tentatively up my forearm.

As you know, her aura was colorless and transparent, so nothing appeared to change from the outside. She simply lay quietly in my arms.

‘Her control over aura really has become impossibly skilled.’

Even as I marveled inwardly, I drew up my ink-black aura and wrapped it around the transparent aura cautiously touching my forearm.

“...”

After a moment’s hesitation, her transparent aura cautiously responded to the beckoning of my ink-black one.

Instead of the human method of holding hands with five fingers, aura fingertips branching into thousands upon tens of thousands of strands interlaced with mine.

Transparency and ink-black bloomed across our bodies.

Just as flowers bloom without words, the Saintess quietly closed her eyes in my arms.

“...”

“...”

Aura held heat.

It was warm.

Using feats of aura that an ordinary awakened could never even imitate, what we were ultimately imitating was the way human beings shared body heat.

Then perhaps the dividing line between anomaly and human lay neither in a body temperature of 36.5°C nor in having five fingers, but simply in what one sought to imitate with that warmth and those fingertips.

For a while, we silently caressed each other’s humanity.

14

“While I lived in the stopped world, I thought about ways to infiltrate Nut’s domain.”

The café in the former Baekje Hospital.

There, where Old Man Scho always talked on the phone with Mrs. Adele, the Saintess sipped coffee. It was the first coffee I had made her myself in a very long time.

Well, it was only instant coffee. I had torn open a golden packet and added hot water.

But that was her favorite, so there was nothing to be done. A barista’s pride crumbled before the technological prowess of the modern food industry.

“Did you have any success?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

The Saintess shook her head.

“The approach that came closest to succeeding was the ‘life flashing before your eyes’ phenomenon. Drawing on the lore that people experiencing it sometimes glimpse the afterlife for an instant, I deliberately pushed myself to the extreme brink of death.”

“Oh. That’s a good idea.”

“Yes. ... But I was still stopped by that same glass lying across the boundary between the afterlife and the living world.”

Glass.

A metaphor for the phenomenon of ‘being able to see the other side, but unable to cross over.’

If only we could smash that pane with a punch. But the barrier the God of Alienation had constructed was vastly stronger than the bulletproof glass in the US president’s limousine.

Thinking back, the moment Fairy No. 264 brought me into the Reverse World had truly been a golden opportunity... But regretting what had already passed would do no good.

“Please tell me every other method you tried as well.”

“Yes.”

We shared the records of the Saintess’s failures over the past two thousand years.

It would be a mistake to take this as a sign of her incompetence.

Viewed from the opposite side, Nut, the goddess of night and a God of Alienation, had likewise been unable to interfere with the Saintess’s [Time Stop] for more than two thousand years.

The God of Alienation was powerful enough to turn the world into hell in a single day.

Yet it could not so much as lay a finger on the time the Saintess had stopped.

This was generally how ‘territorial disputes’ between anomalies with God of Alienation-class threat levels played out.

“In fact, your power and Nut’s are absolute opposites.”

The Saintess tilted her head.

“Are they?”

“Yes. The world you’ve stopped is actually close to nothingness. Because all time has stopped, no life is born and no suffering is cultivated. There is no subject to perceive anything, either.”

And paradoxically, such ‘nothingness’ was the concept most opposed to ‘hell.’

“Hell and the afterlife are ultimately projections of the idea that a person’s life continues in the form of a soul even after death. They are boundless existence.”

“Ah. Certainly.”

“So Nut cannot invade your formlessness, and you cannot invade Nut’s realm of forms. That makes them absolute opposites.”

“... You mean Nut and I are matched in such a way that we can only continue in a stalemate forever.”

“If you’re acting alone.”

I rested a hand on my chin.

“Glass. Glass. A way to break glass. Anomalies related to glass...”

“Shouldn’t we consider mirrors as well as glass?” the Saintess said.

“When you entered the Reverse World, you said you looked down at the glass and saw yourself reflected in it.”

“Yes. My appearance in the real world was projected beneath my feet.”

“Then I think it’s closer to a ‘mirror’ than to ‘glass.’ The afterlife is ultimately a copy of the living world, after all. I think the ‘Reverse World’ is, in the end, our world reflected in a mirror.”

“You’re right. Hmm...”

The humans who existed in the world had been ‘copied’ and ‘pasted’ into Nut’s domain.

Then Nut had claimed that these copies were the genuine articles, while we were merely souls suffering in hell.

As the Saintess said, it was probably more accurate to see the concept of a ‘mirror’ at work here.

“Mirrors. A mirror, hmm. Then doppelgangers... No, doppelgangers were Gapless’s minions. This is closer to the fragmentation and confusion of identity than to doppelgangers.”

“The Ship of Theseus?”

“Perhaps. To roughly list anomalies associated with the fragmentation and confusion of the self, there’s the Ship of Theseus, the Uyuni desert, the Embarrassing Past Mosquito, the potato-Saintesses...”

“Please leave out the last one.”

What was she talking about? That might be the most important clue of all.

“In any case, these are only things that seem potentially relevant. They aren’t directly connected to a way into Nut’s domain... Ah.”

At that moment, the Undertaker’s mental search engine, scouring the past for clues, found a single keyword.

“Mirrors!”

I sprang to my feet, my fingers still interlaced with the Saintess’s.

“Yes?”

“Come to think of it, there was an anomaly connected not only to mirrors, but to ‘hell’ and ‘the living world’ as well!”

Why hadn’t I thought of it sooner?

The anomaly that endlessly chanted about hell like a Buddhist invocation: ‘This world is hell.’ ‘Being born into a world like this is itself evil.’

—Die right now.

The magic mirror. The anomaly born of Snow White.

That mirror, always sitting in the room of the psychopath Yu Jiwon, was the very clue that led to Nut, the goddess of night.