Chapter 54 - The Ruler I

1

Today, I think I’ll talk about Dang Seorin, the guild leader of Three Thousand Worlds.

But first, let me go off on a brief tangent... Living as a regressor, I notice certain things more clearly, you might say—changes I perceive in greater detail than other people do.

Like the ever-deepening creases between Noh Doha’s eyebrows as the years go by—just kidding.

Changes in language, for instance.

If you’ve been reading my stories so far, I imagine you’re already familiar with those.

The most obvious example is “monster.” Those strange life-forms were initially called by that English word—except some weren’t even life-forms, which was precisely why people began calling them “anomalies.”

And you all know that “gate” became “void,” right?

I’ve kept this under wraps until now to avoid confusing you, but the term “awakened” actually went through quite a variety of changes too.

Plenty of people called them “hunters,” followed by “transcendents.” Later on, “ascendants” saw a fair amount of use as well.

The further down that list you went, the more strongly the terms were colored by that bizarre ideology known as “awakened supremacy.” People who wanted to distance themselves from such pseudoscientific eugenics preferred “awakened” as the most neutral term available.

You know how Noh Doha calls me:

“Awakened Undertaker...”

That wasn’t really an honorific like “sir.” It was closer to saying, “I don’t consider you some transcendent or ascendant.”

I didn’t make that up. It was a secret I learned by asking directly in one of my runs. Isn’t that just the sort of obnoxiousness you’d expect from Noh Doha?

Anyway.

Amid all these turbulent changes in language, there was one word that remained aloof and unchanged, holding its ground no matter how much time passed.

“Guild.”

2

I don’t know who first started calling a group of awakened a “guild.”

The name slipped naturally onto everyone’s tongues, as though the Korean collective unconscious had announced, “We have agreed to call those guilds from now on.”

Most awakened joined guilds as a matter of course. Hadn’t even that lunatic SwordEmpress founded a one-person guild called Yuldoguk? (In run 108 alone, its membership briefly rose to two.)

At this point, some of you might have a question.

What exactly does a guild do?

Can you visit an adventurers’ guild and pick up quests, like you often see in RPGs? Depending on how brilliantly you complete them, can you progress through the tiers, from B-rank to A-rank to S-rank, or from bronze to mithril to platinum?

Unfortunately, nothing of the sort happened. That’s merely the insane habit of East Asians, conditioned by bureaucracy since ancient times to impose ranks based on duties even in the private sector.

I can give a very simple answer to the question of what a guild is.

It’s just a gang of thugs.

“Guild Leader.”

“Yes?”

For example, this happened in my sixth run, when I had joined Three Thousand Worlds and was serving as Dang Seorin’s right-hand man.

“Apparently, awakened from the Blue Sea Guild went around hitting every bar operating in Nam District last night.”

“What?”

Dang Seorin sat up from her listless sprawl.

“Those bastards should stay on their island and live off seaweed. How dare they come onto the mainland? Evidence?”

“I’ve just finished getting it all ready. I also had Chief Yu activate the minimap. Give the order to execute the operation whenever you’re ready.”

“This is why I like my Deputy Guild Leader.”

“Will you be going yourself?”

“Yes. Of course. Let’s fuck them up.”

Do you remember me mentioning once that I thought I’d told you too many flattering stories about Dang Seorin?

If anyone in her fan club is reading this, I’m sorry. Conversations like the one above were actually an everyday occurrence in the Three Thousand Worlds office—a train car.

The “Great Witch idol Dang Seorin, the greatest star awakened the Korean Peninsula ever produced” that you know was merely a fictional creation, the product of sweeping historical revisionism a few years later.

I know all too well. I spent decades slaving away at something resembling a job as this idol’s manager.

DING! DING! DING! DING!

At the sound of the bell, guild members poured out of the train.

Amazingly, every single one of the more than two hundred members wore a pointed hat. And that wasn’t all. Each had a broom in one hand as well.

It was an excellent illustration of how, in a world where everyone had gone mad, our guild was particularly mad.

Dang Seorin climbed onto the roof of the station building, like a principal taking the podium. She surveyed the sea of pointed hats with immense satisfaction.

“Hello, everyone.”

“Hello, Great Witch!”

“Those little shits from the Blue Sea Guild who’ve been hanging around Yeongdo had a company dinner at the bars under our protection last night. They must have plenty of money. You know how much partying they did? They made it all the way to a sixteenth round! Life on Yeongdo must be pretty good these days. But they didn’t say a word to us, their neighbors. What are we supposed to do about these hurt feelings?”

“We must kill them!”

Someone shouted. That someone was Yu Jiwon, my adjutant and the finest hype man on the Korean Peninsula.

Dang Seorin blinked as though she’d been presented with a wholly unexpected insight.

“Hmm... I hadn’t considered that angle, but listening to you all, I feel as though I’ve suddenly had an epiphany. Yes, that’s a wonderful suggestion. Let’s kill them.”

“YEAH!”

The members of Three Thousand Worlds marched across town in their matching uniforms of black pointed hats and black cloaks.

Weren’t they ashamed, being grown adults? Well, a few of them weren’t adults, but even setting those exceptions aside, of course they were ashamed. Say that in front of Dang Seorin, though, and you’d die.

The members of the opposing guild were horrified by the sudden all-out assault.

“Fuck! It’s the Witch Gang!”

“Three Thousand Worlds.”

“The Witch Gang’s attacking! The crazy witch is here!”

“I said Three Thousand Worlds. Want to die?”

Nobody listened to Dang Seorin. In fact, hardly anyone remembered the guild’s name was Three Thousand Worlds. It was simply the Busan Witch Gang.

And the Witch Gang’s specialty was witch hunts. In keeping with the times, civilization had advanced beyond the barbaric Middle Ages: the latest trend was for witches to do the hunting instead of being hunted.

“P-please spare me...”

Three hours after the fighting began, the Blue Sea Guild, based in Busan’s Yeongdo district, had been annihilated.

Looking somber, Dang Seorin tapped the other guild leader’s head with the end of her broom.

“Hey.”

The broom’s stiff bristles poked the Blue Sea guild leader in the eye.

“Agh... Aaagh...”

“Why would someone who couldn’t even last a day go around emptying the wallets of ordinary people running honest businesses? We don’t want to fight you either. But when the merchants ask us for help, hmm? We can’t just pretend not to hear our neighbors’ pleas. Why put us in such an awkward position?”

“I’m sorry... I’m sorry... Please, just spare my...”

“Let’s play a witch game. We’ll put you in the water, and if you sink, you’re innocent. If you float to the surface, you’re guilty. Got it?”

“You fucking bastard! You completely insane piece of shit! How can you even call yourself human?”

“What are you waiting for, everyone? This gentleman would like to take a dip.”

I repeated the order.

“Into the water.”

“Pffgghmmph?”

As I said, the modern era had advanced beyond the Middle Ages. Unlike the inquisitors of old, who merely tied rocks or lumps of iron to people’s ankles, we had adopted that cutting-edge innovation: “concrete hiking boots.”

As it happens, there are plenty of mountains beneath the sea too. Seamounts, they’re called. Concrete shoes were an invention that now helped humanity conquer even those.

A little later, bubbles rose in the waters off Busan.

I nodded.

“He isn’t coming up, Guild Leader.”

“So he was innocent.”

Dang Seorin removed her pointed hat and pressed it firmly to her chest. Then she lowered her eyebrows mournfully and bowed her head.

“Another tragedy of these troubled times. Let us all pay our respects.”

“A moment of silence.”

Following Dang Seorin’s lead, all two hundred or so guild members observed a moment of silence.

Our guild didn’t practice water magic alone. There was fire magic, which let you savor the aroma of firewood; time magic, which made you vividly appreciate every second of a day otherwise frittered away; healing magic, which bestowed the benefits of acupressure on your soles by making you walk over a heated stone path, and so on, and so on...

As befitted the guild of Dang Seorin, master of all magic, Three Thousand Worlds never discriminated between white magic and black magic, and loved all four elements equally.

It was excellent proof that, in a world gone mad, Three Thousand Worlds was even madder, and Dang Seorin was particularly mad.

Now then.

I trust that even this brief anecdote has made it abundantly clear why I declared guilds to be “gangs of thugs.”

Granted, I deliberately picked a sliiightly provocative episode, but a guild’s main source of income was protection tax. They diligently collected taxes from people doing business in their cities, people working there, and people who had fled there for refuge.

There was no way around it. That miraculous fantasy where you kill a monster and—oh my!—it drops gold coins didn’t exist in reality.

Nor were there any “mana stones,” those dream superconducting energy sources that could replace oil.

About the only useful item monsters dropped was meat, perhaps? But that wasn’t quite enough for a guild to open a butcher’s shop. Not only did people dislike monster meat, it occasionally came seasoned with radiation and the like.

In the end, guilds had no choice but to shake people down for “protection tax.” Up to this point, every guild in the country—no, every guild in the world—was the same.

The real differences came afterward. They depended on how each guild interpreted the concept of “protection.”

“The essence of the world is a war of all against all, and humans are the most fearsome beasts. Protection of people, by people, for people is precisely what humanity needs most today.”

The humanists who adopted that answer hunkered down on their own turf. It was also the governing ideology chosen by the overwhelming majority of macho men.

“Aren’t monsters a little scarier than humans?”

A tiny minority of cowards, roughly four percent, thought somewhat differently.

“Humans are one thing, but we need to fuck up the monsters first.”

“But they don’t drop anything when you kill them.”

“Of course they do. They drop Busan.”

Dang Seorin set the first of every month as the due date for protection tax. And whenever the end of the month approached, she invariably led her guild members out to clear the voids beyond Busan before returning.

She didn’t merely hunt, either. Dang Seorin always photographed the slain monsters, and even captured at least one alive to drag back to Busan.

Then, before the citizens of Busan, she demonstrated that the Great Witch’s magic was by no means limited to humanity.

GRAAAAGH!

Having sampled fire magic, water magic, time magic, and healing magic in that order, the monster offered its thanks with its limbs tightly bound.

“Torment it some more! More! More!”

“That’s the Three Thousand Worlds guild leader for you. She knows how to have fun.”

This magic show was so popular that it became a source of civic pride and one of Busan’s famous attractions.

Amazingly, collecting protection tax the day after the execution, or the day after that, produced a significant increase in the payment rate. The citizens’ attitude was more or less, “They put on a fun variety show for us, so we ought to pay admission.” I doubt the proportion of conscientious taxpayers had ever been this high even when South Korea’s National Tax Service was functioning properly.

“Guild Leader... Are you a genius?”

“Yes. Feel free to praise me some more.”

“If it weren’t for the pointed hats, you’d have made it into biographies of great people.”

“Want to die?”

As Dang Seorin had predicted, it wasn’t long before Busan naturally fell into the embrace of Three Thousand Worlds.

As events took this curious turn, some of the humanists had no choice but to reconsider their political philosophy.

“Come to think of it, I believe monsters were a little scarier than humans.”

“Exactly. At least you can talk to people. You can’t negotiate with monsters at all.”

“To think I failed to grasp such a self-evident truth until now! I feel ashamed of myself!”

True to their nation of early adopters, the Korean Peninsula’s guild leaders didn’t hesitate to follow Dang Seorin’s example.

Whether out of love for their hometowns or lust for power, guild leaders changed their main occupation to hunter. Those who failed to make the career change were weeded out by natural selection anyway, so they weren’t even worth mentioning.

But not one of them could match Dang Seorin’s “magic show.”

Who else would dare perform magic that severed a monster’s limbs—there were actually a few more than four—levitated them into the air, then grafted them back on?

“Why are the executions in our town so boring?”

“Way down in Busan, they’ve got fire magic and water magic and everything.”

“Ah, no copy ever lives up to the original.”

In a world where both the internet and movie theaters had collapsed, monster executions were hard to resist. With every passing day, more and more ordinary people moved to Busan.

The extremely reasonable protection tax Dang Seorin had set for Busan’s citizens must have played a part in that moving craze as well.

And it was right around this time that Her Excellency Dang Seorin, our Great Witch, began entertaining strange thoughts. Of course, her thoughts were always strange—but these were “a little stranger” than usual.