Chapter 8 - The Determinist I

1

What do you think is the greatest nemesis of the web-novel protagonist trio: regressors, possessors, and reincarnators?

Powerful monsters? The protagonist beats them all anyway.

Stress? Trauma? Obsession?

Those answers aren't wrong, either. But it's hard to call them enemies unique to regressors. After all, stress is a weakness shared by Homo sapiens across the board, from an unemployed thirty-five-year-old bum to a sixty-year-old president of the United States.

Baldness? How could you say something so cruel?

The answer, surprising yet not so surprising, is... the “butterfly effect.”

-Could a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing, China, cause a tornado on the other side of the planet?

The butterfly effect.

The theory that a difference in initial conditions causes the scale of change to grow ever greater over time, eventually reaching virtually unmanageable proportions.

I'll say this with confidence. This familiar butterfly effect is the villain of villains for regressors, the archenemy we must face on a narrow bridge with no way around it, our utterly irreconcilable foe.

Alas, what a tragedy!

How many regressors have fallen to this butterfly effect (in works of fiction)?

-I am a reader well versed in every sort of web novel, and when it comes to the fictional world I've entered, I am an unrivaled authority in the field. According to my analysis, I must first save the maid who suffers a senseless death early on, thereby preventing the first step toward tragedy... Huh? Why is the Demon King invading just because I saved the maid?

-I felt sorry for a starving little boy beneath the palace walls and treated him kindly, and now, ten years later, the crown prince is proposing to me? I only wanted a peaceful life. What am I supposed to do now?

-Wait, why is the protagonist so weak (after I completed every quest the original protagonist was supposed to solve, recruited the companions who should have joined his party, and monopolized all the items and fortuitous encounters meant for him)? Good grief. I suppose I'll have to step in.

Of course, that last example is more a matter of conscience and intelligence than the butterfly effect.

Whether in fantasy, contemporary fantasy, romantic fantasy, or alternate history, nothing could be more horrifying to the RPR trio than the butterfly effect.

So today, let's tell the story of how I, Undertaker, a highly experienced regressor, murdered the butterfly effect.

2

The first time I felt something was wrong—in other words, when I first experienced the power of the butterfly effect—was around my thirtieth run.

“Hmm?”

At first, it was only a vague sense that something was off.

'Was this café... open before?'

About six months after the tutorial ended, I went to the former Baekje Hospital building. Yes, the building with Old Man Scho's corpse decorating the rooftop.

Sometimes I thought of the place and went there to spend some time.

But where there should have been a sign announcing that the café was closed, a man was actually running the place.

This was a first across all my runs, and I couldn't hide my bewilderment.

“Excuse me...”

“Yes, welcome.”

The man smiled. He was the sort who invested eighty percent of his fashion and styling efforts in his beard.

“Excuse me, but are you sure it's safe to stay open like this? The world's in chaos right now.”

“Ah... Right. I was going to evacuate to Japan myself, but apparently a massive typhoon and tornado swept through the South Sea a couple of days ago and sank every last evacuation ship.”

The man sighed.

Having just come down to Busan from Seoul, this was news to me.

“There was a typhoon?”

“Yep. I couldn't say for sure, but I bet thousands died. Busan Port's in a huge uproar right now. I'd paid a fortune for a scalped ticket, so I figured I'd get on a ship rather than waste it... But the shipowner threatened me, saying he wasn't sailing for another week and I could take it or leave it. Well, it pisses me off, but what can I do? I've got nothing else to do, so I thought I'd stay open for that week, at least. Money doesn't mean much anymore, though. Haha.”

The manager laughed. I couldn't.

'There was never a typhoon at this time.'

I had [Perfect Recall]. A supernatural ability that literally preserved every memory of my past exactly as it was.

In fact, this skill, acquired during my fifth run, was what allowed me to tell you these stories. I could recall every single thing that happened in my thirtieth run, and everything I thought at the time.

Thus, I could declare with one hundred percent certainty:

'... This is an abnormal development.'

Again, in my thirtieth run, I arrived at the café six months after the tutorial ended.

That was still the earliest part of the early stages.

My actions during those earliest stages were always similar. It would be no exaggeration to say that almost nothing had changed compared with runs twenty-nine and twenty-eight.

Nothing about my actions had changed. And yet, in this run's world, a “typhoon” had struck the South Sea.

'What is this? What on earth caused it?'

Everything has a cause and an effect.

For a cultured person like myself, who sternly rejected heresies such as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and followed causal determinism alone, this was a profoundly bewildering development.

“Excuse me, sir.”

“Yes?”

“I'm terribly sorry, but if you aren't going to order...”

“Oh. My apologies. I got lost in thought for a moment. Um, could I have a café au lait?”

“Of course! That'll be 59,500 won.”

“...”

The café au lait, hit squarely by apocalypse-driven inflation, tasted like shit.

But something that drove me even crazier happened in the next run—run thirty-one.

[Closed for personal reasons.]

When I visited the café at roughly the same time again, the closure sign was hanging there all alone, just as it always had.

“Huh.”

What the hell?

It was still too early to be bewildered. Whether the café opened wasn't the only variable; countless others arose independently in different runs.

“Huh? Saintess, did you move?”

“Pardon?”

“In all the previous runs, you always lived in your home in Yongsan.”

“Ah... Gathering food for the fish was a little difficult. Someone in a nearby guild keeps aquariums as a hobby, like me. So I moved closer to them.”

“...”

On the minor end of things, the Saintess's address changed in run forty-seven.

“Everyone! I hereby declare! That the new capital of the Republic of Korea shall henceforth be Busan Special City!”

“Woooo!”

“Jeong Sang-guk! Jeong Sang-guk!”

In run seventy-one, the mayor of Busan seized control of the Korean Peninsula's political landscape. I could only gape in shock.

That mayor was supposed to flee to Fukuoka, Japan, and establish a second provisional government. (For the record, he was a model family man who conscientiously brought his second family along when he fled.)

And that wasn't all. A midboss-level monster that should have crossed into North Korea apparently developed a sudden fondness for democracy and defected back south, while a meteor shower meant to hit South Gyeongsang Province fell on South Jeolla Province instead. It was a parade of every conceivable kind of bullshit.

'Wait.'

I felt rather at a loss.

'Doesn't this throw a wrench into predicting the future?'

Of course, in most runs, cause and effect proceeded “normally,” without anything particularly strange happening. But every so often, out of absolutely nowhere, all hell broke loose.

Well, it wouldn't matter much if I treated it like occasionally trying pineapple pizza for a change of pace.

But as a devotee of classical determinism, I couldn't rest easy until I'd uncovered the cause of these abnormal phenomena.

[“Mr. Undertaker.”]

And so, in run eighty-two,

I finally received a clue.

[“A typhoon is being observed off the coast of Incheon. It's an enormously large tornado.”]

“What? A tornado in the Yellow Sea? That would be difficult with such shallow water.”

[“Nevertheless, it's actually happening. I'm currently sharing the vision of an awakened at Incheon Port. We don't know where the tornado will head, so please be careful.”]

“Good heavens. Incheon already has so many refugees, so...”

[“Don't worry. I've already sent the other awakened messages in the constellations' names. Evacuation is underway.”]

I hurriedly logged on to SG Net. Sure enough, the message board was already in an uproar.

-Anonymous: Breaking news) Tornado appears in the West Sea holy shit

-[Three Thousand]WitchTrialJudge: I'd like to help, but it's too far away.

-Goryeojang: All right~ Into your coffins, old folks~ All right~ Into your coffins, old folks~

-dolLHoUse: Danger.

-Anonymous: No joke, looking at the photos, this seems pretty serious. If it looks that big on the horizon, its diameter's at least 3 km. I don't know how powerful it is, but stay the hell away. If you're unlucky, lightning will strike you fucking dead.

Amid the uproar, someone had uploaded photographs and videos of an enormous tornado.

Nothing like this had ever happened before.

“...!”

Then a realization struck like lightning.

“That's it! It was the typhoon!”

[“Pardon?”]

“The typhoon! No, I mean the tornado!”

Thinking back, hadn't the café owner in run thirty said it too?

[“Apparently a massive typhoon and tornado swept through the South Sea a couple of days ago and sank every last evacuation ship.”]

I spoke with conviction.

“Whenever a tornado blew through a run, events went strangely awry. The typhoon is definitely the culprit... No, whoever caused the typhoon is the culprit.”

[“I'm sorry, Mr. Undertaker. I'm not quite sure what you mean...”]

“I'll explain later. Saintess, could you track the path of the typhoon off Incheon and trace its origin as far back as possible?”

[“... I think it'll be a little difficult, but I'll try. I can look at which areas suffered typhoon damage.”]

“Give me a moment,” the Saintess whispered.

She'd probably fetched a map. A little later, after sweeping through the cities bordering the Yellow Sea, she reported back.

[“Hmm... The area is so large that I can't be certain. Mr. Undertaker, please keep in mind that this is only an estimate.”]

“That's fine. Where is it?”

[“China. Beijing.”]

Beijing, China. A tornado.

“Oh.”

At that moment, for some reason, I felt I knew what this tornado was.

3

-Could a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing cause a tornado on the other side of the planet?

A succinct expression of the butterfly effect.

The original actually says “Brazil,” not “Beijing.” Interestingly, even that so-called original was merely a slogan invented later.

When a meteorologist first presented the butterfly effect at an academic conference, he cited a “seagull,” not a “butterfly.” Naturally, there was no Brazil, and no typhoon either.

That alone should make it clear just how carelessly the anomalies appearing in this world disregard human history.

Every last anomaly had a humanities-minded sensibility that cared nothing for factual rigor.

Of course, a cultured person with a rigorously scientific, causally deterministic outlook like mine might ask the following questions:

-Why did the butterfly effect occur in Beijing instead of Brazil?

-The butterfly effect is a theory about initial conditions producing completely different results after a long period of time, so why are you firing blasts of wind in every direction right from the outset?

I don't know.

No, seriously. I don't.

Anomalies basically don't give the tiniest fuck about humanity's curiosity or objections.

To an anomaly's sensibilities, those questions simply aren't “sexy.”

To share an insight I've acquired through my long life as a regressor... these bastards are fundamentally no different from “AI art.”

To anomalies, humanity's long history, common sense, and scholarship are all nothing more than “prompt inputs.”

Just as AI art considers a human with either two legs or three a perfectly normal Homo sapiens, egalitarian anomalies make no racial distinction whatsoever between Chinese and Brazilian people.

The “butterfly effect,” once a concept belonging to human scholarship, was also enthusiastically reinterpreted at the end of the world.

“A being that creates storms at random, unbound by the flow of cause and effect!”

If I had to describe it, I'd call it a tornado launcher.

Thanks to that, the “butterfly effect” acquired an identity much like North Korea's missiles. That it fired missiles whenever it got bored was certain as a categorical proposition, but where those missiles went depended on its mood at the time.

In run thirty, it curved toward the South Sea and sank evacuation ships bound for Japan. In run eighty-two, it made landfall off Incheon, once again drenching refugees.

And was that all? In runs eighty-three through eighty-five, it drifted toward Mongolia, India, and Siberia, respectively.

Such a varied repertoire of breaking balls that a major-league scout would have fallen head over heels and thrust a contract at it.

Ultimately, tornadoes throwing strikes into the Korean mainland were surprisingly rare. No wonder it was hard for me to notice, with my origin label reading one hundred percent Korea.

“... It really is dangerous.”

The Saintess crunched down on a potato chip.

Amazingly, the Saintess was eating her potato chips out of a LocknLock plastic lunch container rather than a bag. That meant she even portioned out snacks and stored them in the refrigerator, proving that she wasn't in her right mind either.

What's more, she picked up the potato chips with chopsticks instead of her fingers. Did she truly have no human heart?

The germophobic shut-in Saintess spoke.

“So it's the butterfly effect in name only. In practice, it's an unpredictable variable—a random number. With an anomaly like that around, doesn't your greatest advantage as a regressor lose its value?”

“Precisely. An even bigger problem is that it's difficult to pinpoint this anomaly's location.”

“Pardon?”

“Think about it, Saintess. If the tornado heads in a different direction every run, that could mean the location it's launched from changes too. We're certain it's Beijing, at any rate, but Beijing is hardly small, is it?”

“Oh...”

The Saintess nodded, apparently understanding at last.

“That's difficult.”

“Yes. It might be different if the anomaly were as big as Cthulhu, but since my information network hasn't caught it so far, it's probably small. We have to find an anomaly somewhere in Beijing whose location changes every run. It's little different from finding a scale on a sandy beach.”

“Yes. You're right.”

“Exactly. Solving this on my own would be almost impossible. Unless, of course, there were some gifted person who could share the vision of every awakened.”

“...”

“...”

“...?”

“...”

“... I'll go with you. To Beijing.”

“Oh, goodness. You needn't go that far. Ah, but with your help, Saintess, I'd feel as though I'd gained an army.”

“...”

The shut-in Saintess's thrilling overseas business trip: confirmed!