Chapter 57 - The Ruler IV

5

After the trial, we went out together for a blood-sausage set meal.

For some reason, I didn’t feel like returning to the guild building. Besides, Dang Seorin and I were no longer “guild leader and deputy guild leader,” but “foodie friends.”

And before the assorted blood sausages even arrived, I couldn’t hold back my questions any longer.

“Dang Seorin. What was that earlier?”

“Hm? What?”

She tilted her head, looking vaguely dim-witted. Frowning, I spooned some makjang dipping sauce into a small dish and passed it to her.

“Here. The trial, I mean. The trial. Since when have you been using Equivalent Exchange to pass judgment on people? You weren’t doing that the last time I came.”

“Well, you’d have known if you ever bothered showing your face in Busan. We’ve been doing this for almost six months now. Here.”

She mixed salt, chili powder, and pepper in a small dish in the perfect proportions, then handed it to me.

“The citizens love it. These days, it’s ranked among Busan’s three great attractions, along with our anomaly-dismantling shows.”

“Wait, what the... Explain that in a little more detail. Excuse me, could we get the dongdongju first?”

“Coming right up!”

I took the pitcher of rice wine and immediately mixed in half a cup of cold water with ice floating in it. That was Dang Seorin’s favorite ratio. Such was the prowess of a friend who had spent hundreds of years looking after her.

“What’s there to explain at length? An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. I’m simply applying the Code of Hammurabi as written.”

“Hmm.”

“When the country was still functioning, you could give people prison time for eyes and prison time for teeth. But we don’t have prisons anymore, do we? And chopping off fingers or strangling people indiscriminately is a waste of labor... So all I’m doing is carrying out ‘revenge everyone can accept’ on their behalf.”

“... Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”

“Huh?”

“It’s a verse from Romans 12. Honestly. I take my eyes off you for one moment, and you go and do something outrageous.”

“What? Are you picking a fight?”

“No, I’m picking up the pieces of my sanity. This is unbelievable.”

The assorted blood sausages, blood-sausage soup, rice wine, and well-ripened kimchi vanished under the onslaught of our chopsticks and mouths. My appetite came roaring back. In this day and age, only Busan could offer a proper meal like this.

“Personally, I think the old society was the strange one, trying to settle everything by throwing people in prison.”

Dang Seorin raised her chopsticks.

“Think about it. How can theft and murder receive the same punishment? Having your possessions stolen feels very different from being gifted a knife in the guts. There’s a difference in kind—in quality, basically.”

“Hmm.”

“Even theft varies once you get into the details. How it feels to have your daily bread stolen, to lose the radio you kept secret from all the other survivors right to the end, to have your kidney stolen...”

“Does that last one count as theft?”

“Of course. Anyway, every punishment needs to be judged individually, according to the severity and circumstances, and the character of the perpetrator and the victim. Jesus might turn the other cheek if someone slapped him, but you, Undertaker, would only consider it a ‘fair deal’ if you got not just a slap in on the other person, but at least one of their molars too. Am I wrong?”

“I see what you mean.”

“And astonishingly... the greatest Great Witch in all of history, the utterly unprecedented and never-to-be-surpassed Lady Dang Seorin, can arrange a fair deal for anyone.”

Just then, a little kid in the restaurant shyly approached with a pointed hat held out. “Great Witch!” Dang Seorin gave the child a radiant smile and signed the brim.

The moment her fan service was over, her expression went slack again, like a scouring pad soaked in hot water. This happened wherever our very own Busan idol went.

“Aww, so cute.”

“But that fairness is still only ‘what you think is fair.’ People always run the risk of making the wrong judgment.”

“That’s why Equivalent Exchange won’t activate without the other people’s consent. If they think the deal I offer isn’t fair, they can simply refuse to agree in the first place.”

“Who would dare reject a verdict handed down by the ruler of Busan?”

“Hey, in a world like this, they should be grateful they get a trial at all. If I don’t pass judgment, they’ll all die in a witch hunt anyway. Whatever crime they committed, the story ends in death. This is better than dying, isn’t it?”

“Hmm.”

“If you’re that concerned, why don’t you come watch next month’s trials too?”

She grumbled.

“Anyway, what have you been doing lately that makes it so hard to see you?”

“...”

... The truth was, I was a little lost around this time.

Readers with exceptional memories may have noticed already, but the twenty-sixth run was the very run in which Old Man Scho officially declared he was taking a “vacation.”

When the teammate I’d naturally assumed would spend his entire life with me, fighting our way through this shitty game called the end of the world, officially retired, my mental state became Barcelona immediately after Lionel Messi’s transfer.

It had been a long time since I’d made such a pathetic spectacle of myself as a regressor, and I did it several times... But let’s skip that embarrassing chapter of my life.

“All right. I’ll come back in a month.”

“Good. Bring Melona when you come.”

Exactly one month later, I visited Busan’s “execution square” carrying homemade ice cream I’d made by blending melons.

“Here. Take it.”

“Oh, thanks... Whoa. What? It looks exactly like Melona!”

Dang Seorin marveled at my versatility.

For the record, I could reproduce almost every cup noodle, packet noodle, and snack from the days when civilization still functioned, with at least a ninety-two-percent flavor match. You can trust that claim: I’d personally raided the snack companies’ headquarters to obtain the recipes.

What? Why? What else do you think an infinite regressor does with all that time? This is one of my more productive hobbies.

“I saved you a seat over there.”

Unlike last time, I could watch the trials from start to finish from a prime spot in the audience.

As I watched, sucking on my Melona—Dang Seorin, seated at the judge’s bench across the square, was likewise chewing hers with an air of cool indifference—I discovered, astonishingly... that Busan’s witch trials were quite reasonable.

“You cut off another person’s legs, so you will attend to the victim for the rest of your life. [The victim may order you to perform any task their two legs would originally have performed]. You may never leave their side of your own accord without their permission. Do you consent?”

“You misused your pen at Busan’s only remaining newspaper to accuse an ordinary citizen of a crime they never committed, and that citizen took their own life. Though they had no surviving family and no one has declared vengeance against you, the newspaper’s reputation, damaged by one person’s wrongdoing, must be restored. From now on, everything you have done must be recorded and published in a column of the newspaper. [Every wrong you committed in the past, and every mistake you commit in the future, must be reported without the slightest deviation from the truth]. Thus, every citizen of Busan will learn what wrongs make up the person you are. Do you consent?”

“Someone worked for you, yet you failed to pay the wages you had promised. Labor is an investment of time. [For precisely as long as the victim spent working, you will obey the victim’s orders]. Of course, orders to kill yourself, or other profoundly unreasonable demands, are not permitted. You will eat the same meals you once provided the victim, sleep in the same accommodations, rise at the same hour, and rest at the same hour. Do you consent?”

These were verdicts unimaginable in a modern world with civilization intact.

No, they were deals that could never have been implemented at all without Dang Seorin’s magic.

Her judgments were cruel and harsh—and yet, strangely, they carried a persuasiveness that allowed the hundreds gathered in that vast square to accept them.

With every verdict, the blue scales suspended in the air glittered.

The trial that left the deepest impression on me concerned a defendant who had killed another person. In other words, a verdict for murder.

“...”

Dang Seorin chewed on the stick of her already-finished ice cream.

The accused murderer stood on one side, and the bereaved family on the other. Her dark-blue eyes swept over them once.

“Do you repent of the murder you committed?”

“... Yes.”

“Are you truly sorry to the bereaved family?”

“Yes... I’m sorry...”

“Then, [whatever the bereaved family does to you, you may never resist them]. Nor may you appeal to anyone or complain that you have been wronged. You must simply accept it.”

“...”

“Well? Do you consent?”

“...”

The silence lasted quite a while. Compared with that long stretch of time, the defendant’s nod was very brief—almost excessively so.

“Yes. I consent. Please... please do that, Great Witch.”

The scales shone.

“You son of a bitch!”

At that very moment, one of the bereaved leaped over the fence and lunged straight at the defendant.

THUD!

I distinctly heard the sound of a fist crushing bone.

“How could you do that! To our child! You promised to marry them! How could you! You bastard! I’ll chew you to death, you fucking son of a bitch!”

Under ordinary circumstances, someone would have tried to intervene. Before civilization collapsed, at least the courthouse guards would have stopped it.

But in the execution square, nobody—not a single person—held the bereaved back. The other family members rushed in after the first, knocking the defendant down and raining kicks on him.

With almost all its high-rise buildings collapsed, Busan offered an unobstructed view. The one thing unchanged from the old days was the red sunset, reflected once on the sea before bouncing back into the city.

In the sunset-drenched execution square, drops of the defendant’s blood fell here and there. Before long, his breathing stopped.

“...”

And for a moment, I was seized by an overwhelming intuition—that all of this might be nothing more than a landscape painting of Dang Seorin’s heart, transposed into the world outside her.

While every other spectator watched the punishment meted out by the bereaved, I alone turned my head to look at her.

She was looking at me too.

Between us, the sunset glowed red.

6

The aftermath.

I don’t believe I have any right to judge everything in the world.

And so, I did not stop Dang Seorin’s “witch trials.” She had her own rationality and her own fairness.

In a fair assessment, that rationality and fairness were as good as it got in the apocalypse.

The other cities? They were dispensing private punishments according to whatever personally benefited their guild leaders. As you all know, even the introduction of AI judges came much later.

Not only in the twenty-sixth run, but in every subsequent run where I taught her the completed Equivalent Exchange spell, Dang Seorin invariably held witch trials.

“So... what did you think?”

“Of what?”

“You know. The trials.”

That day, we returned to Three Thousand Worlds’ train to drink.

Usually, making the rounds of restaurants outside was how we maintained our friendship.

But when Dang Seorin asked, [“Want to drink on the train today?”] it meant she wanted to get utterly drunk that night.

The ruler of Busan, Alliance Leader of the Korean Peninsula’s guild alliance, and Great Witch who founded Spell-Song Chanting could hardly let herself be seen staggering drunk through the streets. She couldn’t even show that side of herself to her guild members.

Only someone on my level—Undertaker, the sword that defeated Tenlegs, the awakened who reclaimed Seoul south of the Han River, the man with countless disciples through SG Net—could accompany Dang Seorin without diminishing any of her authority.

“I think it’s all right.”

“Which part is all right?”

“The fact that you’re asking someone else whether it’s all right makes me think all of it is.”

“Pfft.”

She laughed.

“What kind of answer is that? You sound like an idiot.”

But her expression grew noticeably more relaxed.

After I’d spent a while putting up with my friend’s drunken antics, she suddenly activated Equivalent Exchange.

“Undertaker. Put your feelings for me on the scales.”

“Come on, you’re not a child... What are you, a parent asking their kid whether they love Mommy or Daddy more?”

“Oh, damn it. Never mind that. Just put them on, mister. Do you consent?”

I sighed and said, “Fine.”

Then a serpent’s tail flowed out of my chest, pitch-black and radiant, shadow and light mingled in equal measure.

Dang Seorin twirled a finger. In turn, a slender, pure-white snake crawled up from around her heart and coiled on the opposite side of the scales.

CREEEAK!

As a sound that should have had no physical existence rang out, the two sides of the scales slowly found their balance. Before long, they were in perfect equilibrium.

Dang Seorin curled the corners of her mouth like a cat.

“Hmm.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Deep in the night, the scales Dang Seorin had conjured glowed faintly like starlight inside the train, while beyond the window, the Milky Way rained down.

It was a meteor shower.

Against the backdrop of that rain in the night sky, she smiled brightly.

“Secret.”

It was a very witch-like answer.

- The Ruler. End.