Chapter 26 - The Prophet III

4

From the day I came out as a regressor, my relationship with Oh Dokseo developed rapidly.

I felt more at ease now that I had stopped my hopeless act as an edgelord—entertaining though it had been—and Dokseo could relax now that she no longer had to spend every waking hour watching out for a ticking-time-bomb psychopath who might snap at any moment.

"Come on, rookie. Let's go."

"Huh? Where, all of a sudden?"

"Gangnam."

A little later, Dokseo and I went on a little outing to Seoul, just the two of us.

With so few parks, the area south of the Han River had never offered much in the way of pleasant walks. But ever since its residents moved from this world to the next, it had become wonderfully comfortable.

GRRGL?

Tenlegs stood blankly among the empty, abandoned buildings. A shining example of a true property manager, protecting the apartments even after all the residents had vanished.

GRRRRR!

Apparently, the property manager thought we looked suspicious. It immediately charged at us, flailing its tentacles. These were suspicious times, after all; a little overreaction was understandable.

In truth, Tenlegs wasn't wrong. If someone who had regressed hundreds of times and someone who had read this world in advance like a novel weren't suspicious characters, who was?

Dokseo squealed, "Eek!" and hid behind my back.

"O-old man, are you crazy? That's Tenlegs! We need to round up every awakened in Korea to fight it, and you're going in alone...!"

"Secret technique: Octopus Slicing."

I swung my sword.

What made Tenlegs so difficult to defeat was its disgustingly powerful regeneration. No matter how many tentacles you sliced off, they grew right back. The requirement to destroy both hearts simultaneously was no small hurdle, either.

In other words, once I learned to slice sashimi faster than it could regenerate, Tenlegs became nothing more than a live octopus on a cutting board.

Five or six strokes of my blade brought Tenlegs and the abandoned buildings surrounding it crashing down. Its screams were barely audible beneath the thunder of collapsing buildings.

Once the buildings had all fallen, silence settled over the area.

"Uh..." Dokseo muttered uneasily.

"What? Is it over? Really over?"

"Yes. The creature you called the final boss is dead, so the world is at peace now. Go raise a toast."

"Holy shit... Old man, you really have gotten stronger."

She turned to me with a look of mingled respect.

"But even with all that power, you can't stop the world from ending?"

"I can't. All Tenlegs has is good regeneration. It doesn't have any bullshit traits like immunity to physical force or magic. I'm telling you, it's the weakest of the lot."

"That's ridiculous..."

Dokseo's expression stiffened.

She had already believed what I told her, but that day's events made her trust me completely.

She disbanded the party she had worked so hard to build. I wondered whether she really needed to go that far, but she was surprisingly firm.

"No matter how much I built up my forces, I wouldn't even have been able to fight Tenlegs. But you killed it all by yourself. That makes my party pointless, doesn't it? The right strategy is to change course and support you as much as possible."

Whether her judgment was right or wrong, it gave me an excuse to part ways with Go Yori.

When Yori heard the order to disband, she looked terribly disappointed—or at least, that was the expression my eyes perceived.

"I wanted to stay with you and Mr. Undertaker, party leader... Must we really say goodbye like this?"

"Oh. Yori, you can come with us if... Aagh!"

I gave Dokseo's arm a hard pinch as she began mumbling nonsense. I had explained over and over, when we were alone, just how terrifying Go Yori was. Yet the moment she actually had to announce their parting, she had been brainwashed again.

Only then did Dokseo come to her senses with a gasp.

"S-sorry, Yori! I've agreed to become the old man's apprentice for a while! And he's insisting he'll only take one apprentice, so I don't think we can travel with you!"

"Hmm."

Dokseo even bowed her head, looking genuinely apologetic.

Yori watched her silently, then turned her gaze to my face. Was I being oversensitive if I thought I glimpsed the shadow of red flesh in those scarlet eyes?

"It can't be helped. The bond between master and apprentice is as important as that between parent and child. An outsider has no right to interfere."

Even as Yori said these words that sounded so very agreeable to my ears, she kept staring at my face. Her gaze didn't waver in the slightest.

"Then I'll take my leave as well."

"R-really...?"

"Yes. Somehow, I have a feeling our bond won't be broken even if we part today. I'm sure we'll meet again someday. Though the world has become what it has, I wish you both happiness."

Yori took a couple of steps back, then bowed gracefully, like a nobleman's daughter. Without adding a single word, she walked down the hill alone.

Soon, her receding figure sank out of sight below the slope.

"Hwaaaah..."

As though all her tension had suddenly snapped loose, Dokseo slumped into a boneless heap. Even the baseball cap that constituted her true self slipped halfway off.

"... You were telling the truth, old man. What the hell was that? I wasn't thinking anything before I brought it up, but once I started talking to her, I suddenly thought, 'Why am I being so cold to Yori?'"

"That's how she always is. Still, it's a relief she said she understood because the master-apprentice bond is important."

"Huh? What are you talking about? She told me that even if we're master and apprentice, it could be dangerous for a man and a woman to travel alone together, so I should be careful."

"...?"

"...?"

We stared at each other, then whipped our heads toward the hill Yori had descended. We had just seen her going down, so we should now have been able to see her climbing the opposite hill.

Cicadas cried.

No matter how long we waited, Yori's receding figure never emerged.

5

We wandered through a world falling apart.

I had no desire to describe that disintegration in detail. Some perceptive readers may already have noticed that I deliberately avoid such descriptions.

Of course, thanks to the Saintess's efforts, public order in Korea remained relatively decent. But her reach extended only to the awakened. Even she couldn't control the ordinary people who made up the vast majority of the world.

Looting, arson, violence; the perpetrator of that violence being someone who had lost their partner, filling that empty space by raising a dog that had lost its owner; political factions turning into warlord armies and military units turning political; the fingertips of the poor and vulnerable, or the first patient of an unprecedented epidemic—the list of misfortunes went on without end.

I deal only with the misfortunes I can bear.

The weight of those I cannot bear inevitably passes into someone else's heart, and I didn't become a regressor because I wanted to serve as the host of a contagion.

"Hmm. The novel I read... I mean, [Omniscient Regressor's Viewpoint], the one with you as the protagonist, had only just reached thirty chapters."

Dokseo said this one day, roughly wiping something like splattered blood from her face. It wasn't actually blood, but red petals called udumbara, parasites responsible for a vicious epidemic. I'll have an opportunity to discuss those in the next episode.

"Thirty chapters?"

"Yeah. No matter how interesting a novel looks, I never read it if it has fewer than thirty chapters. You never know when the author might stop updating. Two or three days before the gates broke out in Seoul? I think that's about when I started reading it."

Dokseo's disposition was similar to mine. Rather than discuss misfortune, we often chatted about our hobbies.

"Where did you find that novel?"

"Nowhere special? On the web-novel platform I use a lot, it was in my favorites... Um, favorites are basically bookmarks. Anyway, when I opened the novel app, it was already bookmarked."

"... Does that mean there's an author writing [Omniscient Regressor's Viewpoint]?"

"Beats me. I don't know either."

Dokseo chewed her gum.

"I don't actually remember bookmarking ORV. But I've easily got over two hundred titles in my favorites, so I figured I'd just forgotten. Looking back now, though, maybe it got bookmarked without me knowing... Oh."

As we walked through downtown Onyang, a large dog that appeared to have lost its owner approached us. Dokseo hugged it.

Our party of two gained another member.

"The way I see it, that's your ability."

"My ability?"

I said this on the day we snuck into a department store occupied by a guild and scooped up dog food. Fortunately, security in the pet-supplies section was lax.

"There's a man named Seo Gyu. His ability is creating and running an online community. Awakened abilities come in every imaginable variety, so there's nothing strange about yours manifesting in the form of reading a novel."

"But hasn't my ability already been identified as [Shield Generation]?"

"You have multiple abilities."

"Huh? Really? Isn't that supposed to be incredibly rare in this setting?"

"It is rare. But after living this long, I've found that a one-percent chance is more common than you'd think."

"Oh, I see... Hmm. So I actually have another ability, and it manifested as reading a novel..."

"For convenience, I've been calling your ability [Pestering for Updates]."

"Pestering for Updates..."

Darkness—that was the dog's name—barked. The sound carried low through the darkened department store.

Dokseo shushed him, but a patrolman had already spotted us.

"Oh, trouble..."

"Let's run."

Wiping out the guild occupying the department store would have been easy, but these were potential allies who would later play an important role on the front lines fighting for humanity. We hurried away. Darkness barked twice, delighted in Dokseo's arms.

"Then wouldn't my ability be [Prophecy], rather than Pestering for Updates?"

Dokseo said this a few months later, on our way back from a meeting with the guild alliance.

"Prophecy?"

"Yeah. Knowing your life story is basically the same as predicting the future. In novels, prophets watch the future in movie-like images and stuff. In my case, the prophecy manifested as a web novel, the form I'm most familiar with. What do you think? Sounds plausible, right?"

"Hmm."

It certainly did.

But if her ability was [Prophecy], one question remained unresolved.

"Then why was there no sign of anything unusual until run 555?"

"Huh?"

"You wouldn't know, Dokseo, but from my perspective, this run is extremely unusual. To borrow your terminology, someone I thought was just an extra suddenly awakened [Prophecy]."

"You could put it a little nicer... But yeah, that is strange."

She rested a hand on her chin.

"Maybe I awakened precisely because it was run 555? It's a special-looking number. Five-five-five. And my name's Oh Dokseo, too."

"Regression isn't a numbers game. Surely that can't be it."

"Hmm. What is it, then? Why didn't I approach you until run 555...?"

Dokseo tilted her head.

The day our question was answered was both distant and near.

It came when run 555 ended in failure, as usual, and run 556 began.

[Oh Dokseo: Wow. The Busan Station waiting hall. I saw this in the novel! In a minute, the tutorial fairy will appear and blow the head off the guy who shouts, "Hey, you fucking bastard"... Huh? Huhhh? What? Why is the protagonist suddenly coming toward me?]

This time, I approached Dokseo first. Naturally, it was to prevent Go Yori from barging in at all.

The unexpected event left Dokseo thoroughly flustered. But once I showed her that I could finish Tenlegs with a single stroke, just as I had in the previous run, she quickly came to trust what I said.

And then I discovered something astonishing.

"But, old man, is it okay for you to travel around with me like this?"

"Hmm? What do you mean?"

"What was his name again... Schopenhauer? Anyway, aren't you supposed to meet up with that old guy who's a Sword Star or whatever?"

My eyes widened.

"You know Old Man Scho? You?"

"Huh? Of course. He's in the novel."

In the previous run, Dokseo had never mentioned Old Man Scho. I had told her there was actually another regressor, but to someone whose novel had only reached my fourth run, he was merely a person she had heard about.

After all, I first met Old Man Scho in run six.

Yet now Dokseo had brought him up herself.

The implications were clear.

'The novel Dokseo read... has more chapters now?'

I looked at her intently.

"Dokseo. How many chapters of ORV were out when you read it?"

"Huh? Uh, probably... Thirty-two? Thirty-three? Somewhere around there."

"...!"

Now it was certain.

As the runs progressed, Dokseo's 'novel' gained more chapters. What had been a mere thirty chapters in the previous run had gained at least two more this time.

The rules governing these additions were utterly arbitrary.

Sometimes I lived through sixty runs and Dokseo gained only a single chapter; other times, just one run added two. There was no rhyme or reason to it.

I would need to investigate further to discover exactly what determined the increase.

But one thing had become clear already.

'This child is following the tracks of my life.'

A shiver ran through me.

6

With a slightly slower step.

At a pace a little behind my own life.

Yet with a definite current carrying her forward, Oh Dokseo was following me.

She probably hadn't read the 'novel' before it reached thirty chapters. She herself had said she wouldn't even open a story with fewer than that.

Only once thirty chapters had accumulated did she read the novel for the 'first' time. That was what had happened in run 555.

Dokseo's guess was correct. Her ability was [Prophecy].

She had simply let it go to waste for 555 runs, unaware that she had awakened it.

'But it isn't perfect prophecy.'

According to Greek mythology, the god and prophet named Prometheus had a younger brother.

Epimetheus.

Unlike his older brother, whose name meant 'one who thinks first,' Epimetheus was 'one who thinks afterward.' The brothers respectively became the origins of the words prologue and epilogue.

Oh Dokseo was an Epimetheus who had discovered the power of prophecy.

Her prophecies were never quick. She was slower than any other prophet, following tracks I had trodden long ago, belatedly, with a gap of roughly five thousand years.

Yet even so, step by step, she was steadily following me.

When I crossed run 555, she set foot in run five.

When I crossed run 560, she would set foot in run eleven.

'Then someday—far, far in the future—might the day come when Dokseo herself reaches run 555?'

That this story was no fictional novel.

That what she had assumed was the story of another world was actually the story of the very world she lived in.

That she would meet me, the protagonist, wander the world with me, deal with warlords, and adopt a dog.

One day, all these facts would appear in Dokseo's novel, and she would read them.

As I realized that future, I trembled faintly. It almost felt as though a ray of light had fallen across a world whose destruction I could never prevent.

"... Old man, what's gotten into you?"

Dokseo tilted her head at my reaction.

Suddenly, my right forearm itched.

Over her uncomprehending expression, Dang Seorin's final words flowed through my mind.

["Your dream is similar to mine, too."]

["You're moving forward, repairing this world's broken rails one by one. The rails Tenlegs ruined. The abandoned lines other monsters destroyed. If you keep repairing them a handspan at a time, someday the tracks will connect one station to another."]

["And other people will be able to walk that path, too."]

Yes. In the end, Dang Seorin had been right.

What she murmured back then had probably been nothing more than hope, and I had accepted her last wishes merely because I shared that hope.

But now, after more than five thousand years, reality had finally caught up with our wishes.

'Then... '

I gathered that trembling into my heart.

'What I need to do is wait until this child catches up with me.'

Until when? Until Dokseo arrived at the train station called run 555.

That run was like Pandora's box. Once Dokseo realized that the 'novel' she read was actually a set of tracks laid through reality, this world would surely change in a decisive way.

My life as an infinite regressor gained one more thing to look forward to.

And so, I waited.

Run 556 ended.

Run 557 ended.

"Hey! Old man! You can't abandon Old Man Scho like that!"

Dokseo shouted this when I reached run 581.

She had probably read the scene in the latest chapters where Old Man Scho went on an indefinite 'vacation.'

I chuckled.

"Who are you saying I abandoned?"

Nothing could have been more unfair. I had abandoned Old Man Scho? He had abandoned me. And I had never once given up on him.

It wouldn't do to confuse the order of events, or the suspect with the victim.

Still, reading a novel, interpreting it, and leaving comments was always the reader's prerogative.

Whenever the latest chapters updated, whenever the runs progressed, Dokseo left me 'comments.'

"Wow. How do you beat this udumbara boss monster?"

"No way! The constellations were all a lie?"

"An ability to create a community? What kind of bullshit ability is that...?"

"Sim Aryeon is just a crazy troll... I really don't get along with people like her."

"An online-game anomaly? Wow, holy crap. A gimmick like this existed? It was never mentioned in the original."

"...? What is Go Yori? Is she even human? Isn't she a monster?"

Dokseo screamed and poured out her complaints as though she were a reader leaving comments for an author.

Even though I wasn't the author.

Still, I accepted her comments graciously. Despite being over five thousand years old, I remained childish, but at least I knew how to let someone else step across the boundaries of my life.

'Follow me, Dokseo.'

Come soon.

Though slower than me, you walk faster than anyone else.

Walk here, stepping through the failures I've endured, the strategy guide I've made, the story of my life.

My life was always meant for others, but from now on, it is meant for you as well.

Of course, this waiting wasn't all pleasure.

Eventually, Dokseo read as far as run 52, the part where I established the International convenience store with the fairies.

From then on, something fundamental changed in the way she looked at me.

"Old man."

"What?"

"You know what? You're a fucking lunatic."

"..."

"And cut back on SG Net. Ease up on the Three Kingdoms talk, too."

"Dokseo, I have my reasons for bringing up the Three Kingdoms. If I don't talk about it, a certain anomaly..."

"Oh, whatever. You give off so much fucking old-man energy, it's ridiculous for your age. Wait, no. Maybe it actually is age-appropriate? How old are you now?"

"..."

I exercised my right to remain silent and quietly drank my coffee.

After all, I knew better than anyone that struggling to salvage an image with nowhere left to go but rock bottom would be utterly pointless.

Yes.

This may sound a little embarrassing, but sometimes—very occasionally—I missed the Dokseo who trembled before me, mistaking me for the coldest edgelord regressor in the world.

Wicked brat.

Just try getting as old as me, you little pest.

- The Prophet. End.