Chapter 48 - Survivors I

1

Excuse me, but how do you feel when the words “student council” or “student council president” turn up in fiction?

Why the sudden, out-of-the-blue question?

Because it has something to do with this episode.

As I said at the end of the last episode, the martial world is full of extraordinary eccentrics.

The person I’m introducing today is every bit as eccentric as the Sword Marquis. In other words, another nutcase fully qualified to put her three-syllable name on the list of “Great Figures Who Made the Korean Peninsula Shine.”

In the distant past, South Korea got its nationalistic fix by bragging about having this soccer player or that idol.

But history marches on even when civilization collapses. Now people from different countries competed over the caliber of their nationalistic pride by boasting about their impressive awakened, and by this new standard, the Korean Peninsula was by no means lagging behind.

“The Great Witch who holes up on a train 365 days a year and forces her subordinates to wear pointed hats.” “His Excellency the Marquis who turns Mount Hua into a Mountain of Flowers.” And so on.

A lineup that positively swelled your heart with pride. Was the Korean Peninsula for real?

The blessings never ceased upon this land, a veritable hotspot for nutcases—sorry, great figures. There were still more people I hadn’t had a chance to introduce.

Name: Cheon Yohwa.

Occupation: a multiple-ability awakened working several jobs, perhaps in keeping with the modern trend that you can’t make a living by sticking to just one profession.

First occupation: high school student.

When the country collapsed, public education went down with it. Overnight, children became unemployed people who couldn’t select any of the options “elementary school student / middle school student / high school student” in the occupation field when signing up for an online community.

In that sense, Cheon Yohwa was one of the last high school students left on the Korean Peninsula. As for her year, I suppose she was roughly a sixth-year high school student.

That alone was an SSR-rarity occupation in gaming terms, but her other occupation was a little more unique.

Second occupation: necromancer.

Cheon Yohwa was the one and only necromancer on the Korean Peninsula.

2

Speaking of high school, “school ties” no longer existed on the Korean Peninsula.

It couldn’t be helped. What good was graduating from a prestigious university? Did monsters check people’s academic credentials before eating them?

Human systems, however, weren’t so easily changed. Just as people ate cake when there was no bread and got their nationalistic fix from awakened when soccer players disappeared, a new form of favoritism was promptly installed where school ties had been deleted.

“Hmm?”

One day, while walking around the guild, I witnessed an astonishing sight.

“Whoa, seriously?”

“I-I’m telling you, it’s true. Ahaha.”

Seo Gyu and Sim Aryeon—the Goryeojang troll—were laughing together over lunch in the dining hall.

As everyone knows, Seo Gyu had anger management issues. Sim Aryeon was a serious online-community addict.

Both had a few defects in their DNA when it came to forming close relationships with other Homo sapiens.

It was like watching a hippo and a crocodile peacefully sip water side by side at an oasis. Like any sensible person witnessing a miracle, I couldn’t help feeling intensely curious.

“Since when were you two friends?”

They blinked.

At the question from their exalted guild leader, the two looked at each other.

“Uh. Us?”

“W-we’ve just been friends...”

Were these two dating?

Two souls clashed within me: the old-fogey impulse that disapproved of workplace romances, and the old-fogey impulse that wanted to squeal with delight as I watched the youngsters’ romantic antics.

“No, Boss. Whatever you’re thinking right now, it’s absolutely not that...”

“Then how did you become friends?”

“What do you mean, how?”

Seo Gyu spoke as though it were obvious.

“We’re all ‘from Busan Station,’ aren’t we?”

“What.”

That’s right.

Instead of sorting people by school ties, awakened these days cared about which void they’d been in when they awakened.

If I had to give it a name, I might call it “void ties.” Since it concerned a place, it was a form of regional ties, too.

Seo Gyu, Sim Aryeon, and I had all awakened at Busan Station. The one whose name must not be spoken, the master of hypnosis and brainwashing, Mr. “G,” was also from Busan Station. Later, by run 555, Oh Dokseo had joined the Busan Station awakened family as well.

“Surely... awakened don’t treat Busan Station like some kind of elite university, do they?”

“Why wouldn’t they? Of course they do, Boss. We’re number one when it comes to void ties.”

“...”

I was shocked.

No, you little shits! Without me, you’d all die stranded in Busan Station or inside a monster’s stomach within three weeks!

In fact, through run three, everyone from Busan Station had died. Seo Gyu, the fastest man of them all, even racked up fifty deaths by run fifty, setting records for the earliest exit every time.

These little squirts... an elite university?

“Listen, you brats, you’re barely out of diapers. Void ties, my ass! If you have time to worry about that nonsense, train your aura instead. What a bunch of posers.”

“Boss, you’re so young. Why does every word out of your mouth sound like it comes with decades of experience...?”

“Exactly. I-it’s strange, isn’t it? If it weren’t for that, you’d probably be really popular...”

Their exalted guild leader was lecturing them, yet they looked thoroughly unimpressed.

Their faces said, “Oh, there goes the old geezer again.”

My head spun, and I could hardly breathe. I’m an infinite regressor. I’m destined to save the world (not really). Is this any way to treat me?

“Um, Guild Leader... But I think it’s only natural to care about void ties.”

“What do you mean by that, Aryeon-Aryeon?”

“...”

Sim Aryeon’s expression changed to “Oh, there goes the old geezer awkwardly copying outdated catchphrases again,” but she quickly wilted under my laser glare.

“W-well, it’s terrifying when you first fall into a void, isn’t it...? Your phone doesn’t work, anomalies keep jumping out at you, and people are dying everywhere... Void ties mean you’re comrades who suffered together while fighting your way out of the same hell. Wouldn’t you inevitably develop d-deep feelings for each other...?”

“Hmm.”

“I think all the other guilds are like this too, not just ours...”

On hearing her out, Sim Aryeon’s reasoning didn’t seem all that bizarre.

“But I didn’t suffer.”

“...”

“What? Something to say, Aryeon?”

“No, Guild Leader...”

I’d said it like a joke, but I meant it. This was precisely the main reason I couldn’t relate to the latest trends like void ties.

Right. I didn’t feel that I’d suffered alongside these people in the same place, at the same time.

I’d suffered alongside Old Man Scho.

To me, the void wasn’t “Busan Station” so much as this “world” itself.

A dungeon I was trying to clear somehow through countless repetitions of trying, dying, regressing, and trying again.

Naturally, I couldn’t help feeling a particularly strong camaraderie with Old Man Scho, who had regression coins just like I did.

Of course, that camaraderie no longer existed. When was that no-show geezer going to cut his vacation short and come back? I ought to punch him right in the face.

“Just out of curiosity, what’s the most famous place of origin among awakened?”

“Huh? Busan Station.”

“No, besides that.”

“Besides that? Hmmm...”

After struggling to think of an answer, Sim Aryeon spoke.

“... Then I suppose... Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School...?”

“Ah.”

Hundred Flowers Girls’ High.

Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School.

There had been a private school by that name.

Some of you might even have heard of it. Whenever some pointless post like “Schools with the Prettiest Uniforms in Korea” appeared in an online community, Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School was very likely to get a mention.

I don’t know whether its uniforms were objectively pretty. I’m not interested in uniforms.

But I could concede that they were objectively distinctive.

Their uniform was a traditional sailor outfit, something you rarely saw in Korea.

[“The ribbon on our uniform is the pride of Hundred Flowers!”]

Apparently, that ridiculous line had been passed down through generations of older and younger students. A truly peculiar tradition.

The uniform style was still going strong next door in Japan, but despite supposedly being a naval outfit, the sailor uniform trend hadn’t even managed to cross the waters of the Korea Strait.

The reason Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School had adopted Japanese-style uniforms anyway—strictly speaking, they originated in Britain—was surprisingly simple.

The school itself had simply been built in the 1920s, during Japanese colonial rule.

Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School boasted quite a long history. And, like most such schools, it occupied an exceedingly ambiguous position: alumni considered it a “prestigious high school,” while students elsewhere reacted with, “Hmm, is it really that impressive?”

In short, aside from the sailor uniforms and the dormitory system, it was Ordinary Academic High School A, the sort you could find anywhere in South Korea.

At that ordinary school, a school whose older students warned you never to move into the dorms unless you absolutely had to; at its granite gate, where the number of graduates admitted to prestigious universities was somewhat small compared with its long history, and where, consequently, banners proclaiming “CONGRATULATIONS: SO-AND-SO ACCEPTED TO SEOUL NATIONAL UNIVERSITY” were hung all the more noisily and fervently every college entrance exam season; on an utterly ordinary lunch break, right in the middle of its grounds—

[“Huh? Why won’t the gate open?”]

[“The security guard... isn’t here either. Go tell a teacher.”]

The void arrived.

[“Huh?”]

[“Wait. The teachers aren’t here either.”]

[“What’s going on...?”]

The school gate closed.

It was a typical sealed void.

The length of the closure was not typical. The gates of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School didn’t open for eleven months.

That year, Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School produced not a single student who passed the college entrance exam.

3

I had no way of knowing what tragedies the students of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School experienced in that sealed environment, which lasted almost an entire year.

I was an outsider.

At most, all I could discover were the “numbers” observed from outside.

Students enrolled: approximately 750.

Survivors after eleven months: 19.

Survivors after twelve months: 17. Two suicides.

“Oh, technically, it wasn’t eleven months. It was a little longer!”

It was quite some time later that I had the chance to speak with a survivor. I’ll record her testimony here exactly as she gave it.

“Longer?”

“Yeeep. You know how the flow of time—or its speed, I guess—can change sometimes? And space changes every which way, too. Ahaha. I guess our school was one of those cases!”

The survivor’s face looked untroubled as she said this. I’d heard somewhere that when people accept misfortune, there is a way of accepting it with the face and a way of accepting it with the heart.

“Then, as you experienced it... exactly how long were you trapped in the school?”

“Oh, four years!”

Some would call this a tragedy.

After all, roughly 750 people were trapped, only nineteen returned alive, and two of those subsequently took their own lives.

But I would venture to call it a “great achievement.”

In run three, when I first cleared Busan Station, I was the only survivor. There were countless cases in which everyone trapped in a void died.

For ordinary high school students to endure eleven months that were also four years inside a venom-breeding jar, utterly cut off from the outside world, and emerge with a double-digit number of survivors—wasn’t that closer to a miracle?

“Aw, a miracle? Senior Undertaker, you’re exaggerating sooo much.”

And at the heart of every miracle was a protagonist.

In this case, that protagonist was Cheon Yohwa, the necromancer hailed as the Korean Peninsula’s only one and the world’s best, the awakened we’ll be focusing on today.

“Let’s go, let’s go! Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School! We can do it!”

“We can do it!”

The seventeen survivors rallied tightly around Cheon Yohwa.

... No. To be more objective, more precise, that description ought to be revised.

Cheon Yohwa made the seventeen survivors rally around her.

As I’ll have occasion to mention in another episode, Cheon Yohwa had a talent for that.

Interpersonal skills. Organization-building skills. The art of reading human psychology and using it. The art of tearing down the walls around people’s hearts. The art of choosing the right place and time. Mediation. The art of resolving conflicts within an organization and projecting those that couldn’t be resolved outward.

At some point, Cheon Yohwa began wielding all these abilities with effortless mastery, as though a spirit had descended upon her.

As a result:

“President.”

“Student Council President.”

“Student Council President Cheon Yohwa.”

To the survivors of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School, “Hundred Flowers” was no longer merely the name of their alma mater.

It meant school ties and regional ties. In the latest parlance, it meant void ties, and perhaps those ties ran deeper than blood.

Over those four years, Cheon Yohwa secured seventeen awakened who would throw their lives away in the street for her sake.

And together with them, she emerged into the world.