Chapter 213 - The Antipode X

16

Everyone must have imagined it at least once as a child.

'Wouldn't it be fucking awesome if the whole world stopped and I was the only one free to move around?'

For Homo sapiens, getting something for nothing is practically instinct.

Anyone can fantasize about becoming a bank robber while time is stopped, then following the tech tree all the way to billionaire.

That adolescent fantasy had finally come true, roughly several thousand years later.

"Civilization really does look intact. Oh, there's a Starbucks over there... That's right. That was the green symbol they used."

"So it was."

Chatting quietly, the Saintess and I wandered together as though out for a stroll through the God of Alienation's domain, now dyed in achromatic shades of black and ink.

"After the void arrived, all the logos got contaminated into boiled Cthulhu octopus, so I'd forgotten what they originally looked like. They used to have that mermaid shape."

"... There are so many people, too. So many."

"This is before the Korean Peninsula's population density fell to one-twentieth of what it was."

"How can they all sit in cafés and restaurants in the middle of the day instead of going to work?"

"Hmm. Who knows? Perhaps they're working on their laptops?"

"Oh. Their electronic devices haven't been contaminated by anomalies."

Who wasn't cut off from civilization in the apocalypse? But the Saintess as she was now and I had been living particularly detached lives.

As a regressor, I was forever severed from my memories before my fourth run.

As someone who stopped time, the Saintess had forgotten so much over thousands of years spent alone.

If anything...

"By the way, this is a change of subject, but I'm amazed you didn't forget me. How on earth did you preserve your memories of me for two thousand years?"

"..."

An ambiguous expression formed around her mouth. She seemed to be trying to smile, or perhaps to press her lips tightly together.

"That's a secret. More importantly, Mr. Undertaker, would you like to stop inside that café?"

"I don't mind... You're welcome to look around, but don't put anything in your mouth. Do you remember the myth of Persephone? Anyone who eats food from another world can't return to reality."

"Yes. I'll keep that in mind."

We spent a while enjoying ourselves around Seoul Station.

Going into a café and setting coffee on a table (we didn't drink it). Sitting side by side and taking pictures with a smartphone (nothing appeared in the photos). Going into a bookstore and leafing through books...

'Come to think of it.'

Occasionally, our hands parted and my time froze as well, but for the most part, we wandered around with our hands firmly clasped.

'This is the first time I've spent so much time out and about with the Saintess.'

We had gone to Beijing to hunt the butterfly effect once. But even then, we had mostly walked along dark subway tracks.

'Isn't there some way to keep the Saintess as she is now, even into the next run?'

The thought suddenly occurred to me.

If I could call it a thought. That feeling came upon me unbidden.

'She endured thousands of years alone to stop the world from ending. Surely she'd understand me.'

I had never let it show, but I, too, desperately needed human warmth—someone to spend my days and nights with on time's lonely desert island.

Wasn't the Saintess of run 267, holding my hand right now... better suited to being a regressor's companion than anyone else I had ever met?

'Yes. She definitely is.'

One of us traveled through time; the other stopped it. One was imprisoned in eternity's flow, the other incarcerated in eternity's stillness.

In a world where no one could understand us—no, could even perceive us—we could understand each other better than anyone.

The fact that one of us was a God of Alienation-class anomaly posed no problem at all.

If it came to it, I wouldn't even mind humanity worshipping the Saintess as a new god.

'But a way to transcend regression... Oh. Wait. What if I became the Saintess's apostle, her shrine maiden?'

A brilliant idea.

Since we were both awakened with time-related abilities, perhaps we could somehow establish a God of Alienation–shrine maiden relationship if we found the right method.

Then we could stay together.

I could see hope. And wasn't I, the Undertaker, the world's foremost expert when it came to finding hope?

"Mr. Undertaker."

"..."

"Mr. Undertaker."

I felt the coolness of a body temperature of 15°C against my cheek.

When I noticed, the Saintess already had her palm resting on it.

"... Oh, I'm sorry. I was lost in thought for a moment. What is it?"

"I think it's about time we subjugated Nut."

"Hmm."

She was right.

We might have stopped time and been merrily wandering around Nut's domain, gleefully teabagging it, but a God of Alienation was still a God of Alienation, come what may. The moment we let our guard down, it might strike back from a direction we couldn't imagine.

Putting aside a regret I couldn't quite explain, I nodded.

"You're right. Let's subjugate it quickly."

"Yes. But Nut is up there in the sky, like the sun. How do you intend to subjugate it?"

"Simple. Let's just walk up."

I smoothly manipulated my ink-black aura into a 'foothold' before us. As the footholds lined up like dominoes, a staircase leading into the sky took shape in an instant.

It was, quite literally, a path of ascent to heaven.

The Saintess murmured beside me.

"... Your way of subjugating anomalies feels rather like overpowering them through sheer weight class."

"What else am I supposed to do with my aura? Make soup? This is why I trained myself half to death. Now, follow me."

"Yes."

STEP.

We stepped onto the translucent staircase together.

Ten meters, twenty meters. As we ascended, the footholds below disappeared and new ones formed above.

Sometimes the steps were ink-colored, made from my aura; sometimes the Saintess beat me to it and they shimmered transparently.

How long had we been climbing?

In this world where time had stopped and 'how long' no longer meant much, I happened to look down and saw the ground spread out impossibly far below.

"Aha."

When I laughed, the Saintess tilted her head.

"What is it?"

"Nothing. I was just thinking I've become a little more like you."

"...?"

"Didn't you say you now look down on everything from an omniscient perspective? Look. Seoul, the Korean Peninsula—it's all spread out below us. At last, my field of vision overlaps with yours."

"..."

Still unaccustomed to seeing things in the first person, the Saintess's gaze angled obliquely toward me.

Instead, her grip on my hand tightened a little.

"Yes, Mr. Undertaker."

We continued up the stairs.

Fortunately or unfortunately, we didn't actually have to climb roughly 150 million kilometers to reach the sun's location in space.

The atmosphere.

To my surprise, Nut's 'eyeball,' which had taken the sun's place, was located near the stratosphere.

"... I see."

I reached out smoothly and 'touched' the 'sky.'

The atmosphere was covered in a translucent glass membrane. Nut's eyeball was embedded in this glasslike layer.

"Space has disappeared. There's only sky."

"There are constellations engraved into the glass instead. Shall we break it?"

"No. Even if we break through and go outside, we'll probably find another glass membrane. There must be multiple layers surrounding the Earth."

Geocentrism.

The view of the heavens humanity had believed in since ancient times. The hypothesis that Earth was the center of the world, and all other stars merely revolved around it.

Nut, goddess of the night sky, had brought that hypothesis into being here.

The same phenomenon was probably occurring in reality, now beginning to be contaminated by Nut.

Reducing all the uninhabited reaches of space to nothingness, it made the earth below into hell and established this place as the one and only world of the living.

Violence befitting a God of Alienation.

"Good grief. If it weren't for you, the whole world would have ended up in Nut's embrace."

"..."

"Well then, I'll stab Nut's eye."

I drew my sword cane, Doha, and without the slightest hesitation thrust it into Nut's 'eye'—the 'sun' of this great void.

The sun split.

The God of Alienation could offer no resistance.

With time stopped, Nut couldn't even let out a dying scream. Once time resumed, the subjugation would probably be complete.

"It's done. Saintess, please release time now. And once we're back in reality, I'd like to consult you for a moment. There's a loophole for escaping the cycle of runs I'd like to discuss—"

No answer came.

"Saintess?"

I turned to look beside me.

The Saintess stood quietly with her eyes closed.

Still expressionless, still carrying her water-colored scent, still holding my hand.

Only...

"..."

A vivid red bloodstain.

In the achromatic world, a scarlet lotus was somehow blooming in the very center of the Saintess's chest.

My entire body went rigid.

Even as I turned deathly pale, my mind spun faster than ever. A whirring filled my ears; the sound of my brain turning was almost deafening.

Impossible.

Had the God of Alienation struck back? Had it set up a system that cursed its killer upon its death? But if so, why was it the Saintess's body rather than mine, the Godslayer who had stabbed its eye—

"I'm sorry, Mr. Undertaker."

Through my consciousness, stained with white noise, the Saintess's calm voice rang out in a single clear strand.

"There was actually one secret I hadn't told you."

Though a red spider lily bloomed from her chest, her voice carried no pain.

Apology. Shame.

Only those emotions were mixed translucently into it—her faint expressions of feeling that no one but me could understand.

The water-colored presence spoke.

"I am the shrine maiden of Nut, the God of Alienation."

17

An instant passed.

When I briefly closed my eyes and opened them again, the aura staircase beneath my feet had been erased.

"...!"

My body lost its balance and crumpled in an instant. Just as I thought I was falling out of the atmosphere, time stopped again, then resumed.

The Saintess was firmly holding my hand from above as I dangled beneath the sky. Kneeling on both knees on the stairs. Looking down at me.

As though she had barely caught someone falling over the edge of a cliff.

"Saintess, what on earth is—!"

"Please don't move," she said.

"Please don't activate your aura, either. Don't create any new stairs. Don't do anything to me."

Blood was still flowing from her chest as she spoke.

If Nut's eye and the Saintess's heart were linked, the wounds in both corresponded exactly to where I had thrust my blade.

"If I see even the slightest sign that you're going to move, I'll immediately let go of your hand and stop time."

"..."

"You said Nut and I were opposites. That Nut, which creates an afterlife, and I, who stop time, are fundamentally different beings. But you were wrong."

DRIP.

The blood flowing from her chest ran down her clothes and dripped onto my cheek. Onto the very spot her palm had covered just a short while ago.

"That isn't what matters. Ultimately, the crucial point is whether we see the earthly world where people live as 'hell.'"

"..."

"You must know, Mr. Undertaker. I've called this world hell for a very long time."

Suddenly—

["This world is hell."]

Run 117.

The words the Saintess had spoken to me in Gapless's prison flashed through my mind.

["The world is hell, but no one takes responsibility."]

["If time cannot be turned, it must be stopped."]

["Why on earth should I allow time to flow so that such a world can continue to exist?"]

["Hell lies twenty thousand yojanas below? Impossible."]

["One layer."]

["Just one layer beneath that planet, everything has been made into hell."]

Ah.

Even then—yes. Even then, the Saintess had been in space. She had spoken to me from an 'other world' symbolized by the moon.

Did she see the world as hell?

Could she manipulate the cosmos at will?

Did she have an 'eye' that looked down on the world from above, an omniscient viewpoint?

... Was she herself an expert in time, enough to fight and ambush a regressor, a 'master of time'?

The answer to all of them was yes.

In all four respects, the Saintess and Nut shared identical characteristics.

If a God of Alienation could freely establish a foothold alone within a [Time Seal] graveyard isolated from the world's flow...

If an awakened could freely move alone in a stopped world...

Then it should have been natural to suspect some fundamental connection between the two.

"You probably thought I reached the level of a God of Alienation by training my aura for two thousand years, but that's not quite right."

"Not right...?"

"I'm sure I spent hundreds or thousands of years in other runs, too. I always stop time to observe people. But the reason I've grown particularly powerful in this run is that the authority of the God of Alienation linked to me has grown stronger."

"..."

"I am Nut's other self."

DRIP.

Blood brushed past the side of my cheek and fell into the unfathomable distance below.

"You could call me the personality of a God of Alienation that has no personality. So you can't kill Nut alone. You have to subjugate me as well."

"Wait! We should be able to seal away just the God of Alienation!"

I shouted desperately.

"It happened with Yohwa, too—the Student Council President of Hundred Flowers Girls' High School! There was a God of Alienation called Gapless, and we were able to seal it inside Yohwa's personality—"

"It's a bad match for you."

The Saintess shook her head.

"Gapless probably never noticed the runs repeating. But Nut is different. Nut is the God of Alienation of time, of the cycle of day and night, of days repeating. With each run, instead of being 'reset,' it will only grow stronger."

"..."

"Even if we found some way to isolate it within my mind, Nut's authority would grow stronger with every run. The contamination of my heart would progress as well. Mr. Undertaker."

The Saintess spoke to me as I struggled speechlessly to move my lips.

"Can you truly be certain that one day, at some moment, I won't open my eyes and suddenly turn the world into hell?"

"..."

"Mr. Undertaker."

She stroked my hand, cradling it on both sides as I hung at the edge of empty space.

Her body was cool, but in this stratosphere's thinning air, hers was the only temperature.

"Please don't worry. I'll stay here and keep this place's time stopped."

For a moment, I didn't understand her words. My mind refused to understand them.

"What...?"

"I'm sorry. But stabbing time with a sword won't destroy it."

Her voice was quiet.

"This is the only way to kill an anomaly of time. I'll keep the anomaly, the void that seeks to interfere with and contaminate your regression, stopped. Here."

"Keep it stopped?"

My lips parted.

"Until when, exactly?"

"..."

"This is run 267. Already. And I still see no sign of saving the world. The runs may repeat hundreds of times, perhaps more than a thousand. Until then... Are you saying you'll keep this void stopped until then?"

"Everything is only an instant."

She bent down and caressed my cheek this time, wiping away the blood her heart had shed with the temperature of her hand.

"I'll stop everything here, including myself. Then, even if you regress to the next run, this place will remain stopped. As a result, the God of Alienation—I—will no longer be able to interfere with your regression."

"..."

There was something she hadn't said.

Stopping the world's time, including herself.

That meant even the person stopping time would be frozen.

A truly flawless seal.

A perfect subjugation.

Whether a thousand years passed, ten million years, a hundred million, or 2.56 sextillion, no one would sense anything wrong. The world of things tangible and intangible would flow on as though nothing had happened.

Except for one person.

Me, the regressor who would remember this moment forever.

"Mr. Undertaker."

"..."

"Thank you. Because you were there, I could keep from giving up. As long as you're on the other side, I won't think of that place as hell."

I could feel it.

The Saintess was about to let go.

She was about to banish me from this void, [seal] herself and this place's time, and become alienated from the world.

That the Saintess of run 267 existed here, would continue to exist here, would exist here forever, keeping a God of Alienation asleep...

No one would ever know.

That a single human being had existed here, wishing only that the world would not become hell.

"This."

My decision was utterly impulsive.

"Please keep this."

I removed the ornament from my left arm.

Then I fastened it around the wrist of the Saintess's hand holding mine.

She tilted her head.

"A bracelet...?"

"A silver bell."

JINGLE.

The silver bell rang softly.

"It's the very first thing I take whenever I open my eyes at Busan Station. It's only a souvenir with no effects whatsoever... But I'm certain it will serve as a link between you and me."

"..."

"Please wait for me. No matter how many runs it takes, no matter how long, I will come to save you. I promise."

"..."

"I'll find a way for you not to destroy the world even after this seal is released, and I'll come back."

That was when it happened.

The Saintess smiled.

Since our reunion after two thousand years of stopped time, she had not once managed to look straight at me. Now, with difficulty, holding my right hand in one hand and my cheek in the other, she slowly adjusted the angle of her head like a child learning the movement for the first time. She lowered her head toward me and aligned her gaze with mine.

The world's achromatic colors narrowed in an instant to the space between us, painting everything black and white.

"Yes."

An instant's pause.

The temperature of deep water lingered briefly on my lips.

"I'll see you in a little while."

We parted.

When I opened my eyes, a thin glass membrane—a truly, impossibly thin membrane—stood between the Saintess and me.

Beyond the glass, the Saintess was frozen with a smile on her face and her hand outstretched. Like a black photograph.

'Ah.'

Having lost hold of her hand, I fell.

No, in truth, it was the exact opposite. The Saintess's stopped world, having lost hold of my hand, was receding into that bottomless abyss.

I cried, "Saintess!" and desperately reached out, but nothing I did could carry me across into that achromatic world—

The next moment,

I returned to a reality without you.