Chapter 215 - A Person Without Ties I

1

A novel is different from a picture.

You might wonder why I’m stating the obvious all of a sudden, but from my perspective, that distinction is surprisingly important.

Take Lee Hayul, for example.

Hayul lives with me in the Inunaki Tunnel, which I converted into my hideout. Almost always, except during my vacation runs.

Compared to the other members, her attendance record was downright overwhelming.

["Ah, sorry, Boss. I’m a bit afraid of deep water, so living inside the Inunaki Tunnel is a little... If that place bursts open, we drown on the spot, right?"]

Seo Gyu preferred to find lodging near the National Road Management Corps headquarters.

["I-I’m the Mother of the Holy State of the East."]

Sim Aryeon often worked as the Saintess of the North, so she came to the hideout surprisingly infrequently.

Oh Dokseo was a new hire recruited after run 555. She lacked seniority.

Hayul, on the other hand, always occupied the choicest spot in the hideout, no matter when you looked.

Yet she hasn’t appeared in my stories as often as you might expect. Why?

There was a sad reason for that.

For example.

"... Ah. This coffee is delicious."

"Isn’t it? I picked out three kinds of the coffee sachets you like, blended them, and added exactly one spoonful of cinnamon. This is your favorite coffee, Saintess."

"... Um, Mr. Undertaker. Once you’ve gone that far, can you really still call it instant coffee? It is delicious, though."

Suppose the Saintess and I had that conversation in the hideout café at a Depth of 1,200 meters.

But this is a novel.

Strip away the novel’s filter and present it a little more visually, and the truth looked like this.

"... Ah. This coffee is delicious."

"Isn’t it?"

(Lee Hayul silently raising coffee sachets like twin swords beside me.jpg)

"I picked out three kinds of the coffee sachets you like, blended them, and added exactly one spoonful of cinnamon. This is your favorite coffee, Saintess."

(Lee Hayul wielding her twin sachets to drum rapidly on my back, identifying with the jazz-band drummer from Whiplash.jpg)

"... Um, Mr. Undertaker. Once you’ve gone that far, can you really still call it instant coffee?"

(Lee Hayul losing control of her aura, making a sachet burst with a pop and spilling coffee mix all over my barista outfit.jpg)

"It is delicious, though."

(That-little-brat-Hayul-the-pint-sized-troublemaker squirming with her head clamped in my hand.jpg)

What a different scene that paints!

That’s right.

As you all know, Lee Hayul was born with a speech impairment. She normally brought along a housekeeper doll to speak for her.

But when she was just playing with me—or playing with me as her toy—she would turn up alone and hold all the “silent protests” she pleased.

I simply haven’t described it to you, but in the hideout, there was about an 80 percent chance that Hayul was beside me, playing pranks like this.

As for why she left the housekeeper behind specifically when she was alone with me—

'Ah. Hurts. Hurts, big brother. Skull, in danger.'

She could use aura to write on my back in real time.

And my ability to read aura was excellent, so I could understand what she said immediately.

"A little pain won’t hurt you."

'Aaah. No to violence. No to violence.'

"... You and Miss Lee Hayul really are close, Mr. Undertaker. You’re like a brother and sister with a big age gap."

Anyway.

As you can see, Hayul is someone who constantly forces you, the readers of my stories, to play hidden-picture games.

She had all sorts of ways to send me messages. Writing on my back, making vibrations with aura to speak in a VOICEROID-like voice, tapping Morse code into my palm...

After receiving a thorough scalp massage from me, Hayul scurried behind the Saintess and promptly produced a sketchbook.

It read:

[EX] [PLAIN] [YOURSELF]

?

[Undertaker is an anomaly] [Regressor confirmed to be an anomaly] [YGAVGVY] [When you gaze into the void, the void also gazes into you] [This regressor has no memories from before run 4] [Then what guarantees that he isn’t an anomaly that suddenly came into existence in run 4?] [The Korean Peninsula has entrusted humanity’s defenses and fate to an anomaly] [Are we really okay with this?]

...

[DOWN] [FALL] [DOWN] [FALL] [DOWN] [FALL]

[GREAT] [A] [NOMALY] [UN] [DER] [TAKER]

[EX] [PLAIN] [YOURSELF] [EX] [PLAIN] [YOURSELF]

For the record, the sketchbook’s pages were flipping past at roughly 0.3 seconds per page.

Without my highly aura-developed eyeballs, I wouldn’t have seen a thing.

"...? Mr. Undertaker, is something wrong?"

Noticing something odd, the Saintess looked behind her. With devious precision, Hayul timed it perfectly to show her a portrait she had drawn in the sketchbook.

It was an illustration of me solemnly making coffee. Perhaps because she had learned art from Sim Aryeon, Hayul was pretty good at drawing, too.

"Ah. That’s a wonderful drawing."

"..."

"By the way, Mr. Undertaker. Could you tell me which three products you mixed into my coffee earlier, and in what proportions?"

The instant the Saintess turned back, Hayul flipped to the next page as though she had been waiting for it.

(The regressor anomaly Undertaker in a monster costume, blasting out coffee-black aura with a tremendous roar as he defeats Noh Doha, Dang Seorin, Sim Aryeon, and the other awakened of the Korean Peninsula and destroys Busan.jpg)

This little brat...

She was doing this knowing that the Saintess briefly switched off [Clairvoyance] and [Telepathy] to rest whenever she drank coffee in my café.

"Hmm."

Still, her point was valid, quite apart from her ill-mannered personality.

The so-called [Regressor Anomaly Theory].

As I told you once, I had no memories of my family whatsoever. My memories from before run 4 had grown hazy, too far removed in time.

That wasn’t the only reason.

'Even in runs where I became quite famous, where everyone who mattered knew me, not a single person I knew ever came looking for me.'

Not even a distant relative.

Or a friend who grew up in the same neighborhood.

I had absolutely no one like that.

Very occasionally, a “class reunion anomaly” would call to tell me there was a gathering and I should come, but I couldn’t count that as an acquaintance.

Ah. Incidentally, defeating the class reunion anomaly is both exceedingly difficult and very simple.

Just turn up in a limousine like a Maybach S-Class Pullman, or a supercar like a LaFerrari. That’s it. It gets subjugated automatically and never calls again.

Back to the point.

'In the end, that must mean all my family and acquaintances were caught up in the advent of the void and died or went missing.'

The odds weren’t particularly low.

Hadn’t nineteen out of every twenty people on the Korean Peninsula died? Anyone whose gacha luck was usually a little poor had lost all their ties, just like me.

"Then... should I try looking properly for once?"

"Pardon?"

"Ah. Hayul keeps teasing me, saying I’m actually a regressor anomaly. So I thought I might check whether I really am an anomaly that popped out of nowhere in run 4."

(Lee Hayul startled out of her wits, then staring at me contemptuously for tattling about every little thing.jpg)

"Ah. Um..."

The Saintess put down her coffee cup.

"Wouldn’t that be difficult?"

"Pardon? Why do you think so?"

"... Because of your nature, Mr. Undertaker. Of course, I don’t know anything about you before run 4. I’m only guessing based on everything you’ve told me so far..."

With a little hesitation, she continued.

"Wouldn’t you have applied [Time Seal] to the people closest to you first, one by one?"

"..."

"You said you first cleared the tutorial dungeon in run 3. Knowing you, I think you would have gone looking for your family and acquaintances as soon as you left Busan Station. And persuaded them—"

"To be laid to rest in crystal gravestones. But now I can’t remember where those graveyards were, or who was subjected to [Time Seal]."

"Yes. Though it’s only speculation."

... That made quite a bit of sense.

Ultimately, to find clues about my family, I would have to inspect every crystal gravestone on the Korean Peninsula.

But had I ever dug a lot of graves.

There were at least 500,000. Add the crystal gravestones I hadn’t located, and it was hard to imagine how many there might be.

"That certainly would be difficult."

"Yes. Unfortunately."

[EX] [PLAIN] [YOURSELF]

That discussion ended with nothing left but Hayul’s nonsense placards.

I hadn’t been particularly interested in making a regressor’s version of In Search of Lost Time in the first place, so the subject was naturally left alone.

Until run 267 came along.

2

As I told you, I mobilized every fairy to find traces of the Saintess of run 267.

I sent out all the dream demons to scour the dreams of every surviving person on the Korean Peninsula.

In the end, we could find no sign of the run 267 Saintess anywhere.

"Hweeeh."

Instead, I stumbled upon a completely unexpected puzzle piece.

"Isn’t this you, Comrade General Secretary? Is it?"

"Hmm?"

"Here, here, in this person’s dream! Look at that uphill road over there. The human passing in front of the supermarket!"

Fairy No. 264 invited me into a dream. It belonged to a woman in her fifties whom I didn’t know at all.

"... I can see them, but what about it? Isn’t that just a mother and child walking side by side?"

"I feel like the child bears a strange resemblance to you, Comrade General Secretary!"

"What?"

In this person’s dream, we had discovered a faint “silhouette of someone presumed to be Undertaker.”

"No, it’s far too blurry. I can’t even make out the face. How can you tell whether that looks like me or not?"

"Hweeeh. But my dream demon’s hunch-feel is quietly telling me! That gloomy aura! That shadow painted pitch-black with ink! Those eyes deader than a fish’s! Those footsteps stamping the ground with hatred for the world! That! Is unmistakably the iron General Secretary who leads us fairies... Gyaaaah! My skull! My skull is being squeezed!"

"First of all, you mean a hunch, not a hunch-feel."

"N-no to violence! No to purges!"

I frowned deeply as I provided the fairy with a complimentary scalp massage.

Far away, a mother and son were walking along as “extras” the dream’s owner barely registered. They stood at the edge of her awareness, so I couldn’t even approach them.

'That little kid is me?'

Was he about elementary-school age?

I felt absolutely nothing.

I completely disregarded the fairy’s hunch-feel, but similar reports continued to come in regularly.

"Comrade General Secretary! Look at this middle-school graduation auditorium!"

"Where?"

"There’s a crowd of students twenty meters from the dream’s owner, and just over their shoulder, a silhouette flits past for an instant! That must be you in the past, Comrade General Secretary!"

Only when I pushed my eyesight to its absolute limit—and I was the awakened who had honed aura more than any other living human—could I finally make out a wavering silhouette.

In disbelief, I muttered:

"... No, this really is a hidden-picture game. Where’s Waldo? would be five thousand times easier than this."

Still, if the fairy was telling the truth, one thing was certain.

The past before run 4, which I thought I had lost forever. Especially the original Undertaker of “run 1.”

Evidence that could prove I wasn’t an anomaly that had suddenly appeared in run 4.

I had been given clues to piece together that hidden puzzle.