Chapter 82 - The Questioner IV

5

For an infinite regressor, the world is like a bag of potato chips. You have to dig through vast quantities of nitrogen to uncover that rare resource: an actual chip.

Likewise, even a regressor occasionally encounters an exception amid endlessly repeating time. As I did in run eighty-nine.

“Wait, Cheon Yohwa...?”

I swallowed the potato chip’s name. The Student Council President of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School. A necromancer who inevitably came up whenever anyone discussed the strongest guilds on the Korean Peninsula, alongside Dang Seorin’s Three Thousand Worlds. I had never expected to hear that girl’s name here.

-It is not limited to humans.

Yet by some miracle, this particular bag contained a few more chips than usual.

-As I explained, an anomaly’s influence does not discriminate between objects, plants, and animals.

-Think of an anomaly as a form of radiation.

-The “butterfly effect,” which the questioner is presumed to have slain, is likewise an apostle of this entity. An entity irradiated by us.

“Hold on. Even the butterfly effect?”

-Yes. That is the truth.

“...”

My brain entered a state of confusion.

As far as I knew in run eighty-nine, Cheon Yohwa was a necromancer. An evil Student Council President who occasionally treated the Korean Peninsula to [Bad Ending: Academy City ENDING] whenever she got bored.

And the butterfly effect was a mentally unstable morpho butterfly that scattered tornadoes everywhere even when it wasn’t bored.

“... They’re far too different. What do Cheon Yohwa and the butterfly effect have in common that makes them your infected entities... your so-called apostles?”

-It would be faster to show you directly.

“Directly? Show me what?”

The Fairy Monarch extended a hand.

-This entity.

“...”

-The questioner’s hesitation has been detected. Are you afraid? Will you not take my hand?

I sheathed my sword.

Being a regressor was wonderfully convenient at times like these. Even if this was an anomaly’s trap and I died, I could at least salvage the information that “the Fairy Monarch cannot be trusted under any circumstances” and carry it into the next run.

“Fine. If that’s a challenge, I accept. I don’t know where you intend to take me, but lead the way.”

When I took the Fairy Monarch’s hand, the unpleasant squishiness of its liquid body spread across my palm.

And the next instant, I was standing in the middle of a prison that was clean and intact again.

“—What?”

But this wasn’t Cheongsong Prison. I couldn’t tell exactly where it was. Only bars and corridors stretched endlessly beyond the limits of my vision. There was no one in sight.

“What the hell is this...?”

With a soft, yielding squeeze, the Fairy Monarch gripped my hand as it instinctively moved toward my sword hilt.

-Do not let go of my hand under any circumstances.

-You will lose it.

Lose it? Lose what?

Before I could voice the question, I blinked. My eyelids closed and opened once, and the prison had become a hospital.

“...”

Though there wasn’t a single patient or doctor, eerily clean hospital beds lined the corridor. Transparent IV tubes hung over each bed like suspension bridges. The corridor was infinite.

Exactly identical beds, exactly identical IV drips, fluid lines hanging at exactly the same angle, stretching endlessly along a corridor of exactly the same pure white shade—

A blink. The school was an abandoned wooden building. Its name, Hundred Tales, rippled. The sky was blood-red. Broken windows. Birch trees thrust their heads into the school corridors through the windows, scraping their white flesh against shards of glass. Impaled on white skewers, the school’s entire body was torn to shreds.

The angles and positions of the broken glass repeated at six-meter intervals. Old desks and wooden chairs lay scattered throughout each repeating section. The skin of that aged wood, the patches streaked with moss, even the angles at which they tilted were all identical.

A blink. A swimming pool. A choking smell of bleach. Swimming lanes stretching to the horizon, corridors of water.

A blink. A movie theater. It was dark. But something was wrong. Ordinary theaters didn’t have wooden chairs this worn, like chairs from an abandoned school. Nor did transparent IV lines hang over every seat. The theater was showing a prison. Bars. Corridors. Bars. Corridors. A prison with no inmates. On the screen appeared a prison, a hospital, a school, and a swimming pool in succession, then the theater again, and the screen within the screen, the eye within the eye—

A bl-ink.

The universe moved.

There were no laws governing the movement of the stars. Colors had no complementary colors. The stars danced, stood upside down, laughed without any sign of tiring, and fell silent.

Since the laws had ceased to function, time, too, let go of the world. Colors snatched up its slipping fingers. Interlocked fingers. Redvermilionyellowgreenblueindigovioletpurple navyazureemeraldgoldcrimsonscarlet. Fingers interlocked. Hands of color clasped hands of color and danced in a ring. Vermilion stepped on blue’s foot, and red murdered vermilion. The Milky Way turned red.

A blink.

And. And so, stars came into being and were destroyed the instant they formed; shapes were created and collapsed as soon as they emerged. Like bubbles. Everything in the world was a bubble. Soap bubbles sprayed camouflage in oily rainbow hues, as though catching sunlight. Existence was bubbles, and life was color.

A blink.

The universe closed and opened its eyelids once. A traffic light. Like that moment when a red traffic light is about to turn green, when time briefly loses its breath. A fleeting stop signal.

The colors of starlight, the bubbles of planets, the vermilion murdered by red, the arrangement of colors that had danced in a ring, the theater screen, the bleach smell of the swimming pool, the school’s wooden chairs, the white flesh of birches jutting into corridors and the shards of glass, the white hospital corridor, the prison bars, the crosswalk where white and black alternated like a carpet.

The entire universe.

Was staring steadily at me.

The universe stood across the crosswalk by the traffic light, staring at me. Their maws gaped open.

“Eyes.” “Ink.” “Bl.” “Not.” “Do.”

Like choir members who had never rehearsed together. Their voices had neither consistent pitch nor timbre. One spoke in the tolling of church bells, another in the sound of water flushing down a toilet, another in the fluttering of an insect’s wings.

The breaths from those maws were barely “reconstructed” through the mouth of the Fairy Monarch holding my hand.

-Do not blink your eyes.

“...”

-The questioner perceives this entity as the Fairy Monarch. In other words, a highest-tier anomaly that commands all terminal entities. Strictly speaking, however, that perception is incorrect.

I felt as though my ears would tear apart. No, my brain.

Every word whispered by that entire universe was pronounced through a different vocal organ. “Ter.” “Minal.” “Anom.” “Wrong.” “Tity.” “Mon.” The sound of wind chimes swaying beneath a temple’s eaves. The scream of a crow dying in a hawk’s claws. Sounds and noises that should never have formed language were forming language.

Had I not been a regressor who had honed himself over countless years—an overwhelming intuition surged up alongside nausea that merely hearing that universe’s “voice” would destroy my brain.

It was not even a sound that insulted humanity.

The world was being violated.

“If it’s... incorrect...?”

-Maintaining your sense of self under these circumstances is outside the predicted range.

-This entity, the “Fairy Monarch,” is an interpreter.

-A shamaness.

-A priest. A pope.

-A terminal entity. A commanding role. The highest-ranking priest.

-Yet infinitely beneath the god.

-A prophet who silences on behalf of the speaking god, speaks on behalf of the god that has not spoken, and sees on behalf of the blind god.

-The god possesses neither benevolence nor malice.

-Only random numbers exist. Rejoice. Your existences are equal.

-Aaaaaaah!

-There is no difference between a single drop of foam and the Himalayas amid the clouds. Laws are not superior to individual things. The ladder of forms has neither heights nor depths.

-This entity is merely a terminal born by chance. To you, I am good fortune, not misfortune. The questioner has no need to harbor hostility toward me.

-We merely experiment. Just as in the experiment that created us.

“...”

So.

I raised eyes that felt as though they were burning and stared at the universe. So that was an anomaly.

A God of Alienation. Alienation. Level 5.

The most toxic void among all voids. One of the seven Gods of Alienation, the mightiest anomalies of all.

Something I... something humanity had to kill.

An enemy of this world.

“... It wouldn’t have a name of its own, either. That thing.”

-Unnecessary.

-Whatever you designate is our god, and whatever you do not designate is also our god.

“Gapless.”

The Fairy Monarch looked up at my face.

“The Hell Without Gaps. From now on, that thing’s name is Gapless.”

I spoke as though coughing up blood. It was the greatest resistance my run-eighty-nine self could muster, poised as I was on the verge of being crushed flat beneath the void.

-As I explained, designation is unnecessary.

“No. I need it. Because I’m going to kill that blind, unseeing god that raped our world without permission.”

-...

“Each thing in the world is distinct and preserves its own boundaries, yet you mix everything together, leaving no gaps between anything. Things become impermanent and existence melts away. It fully deserves to be called hell. Thus, a hell without gaps. And since you plunder, rob, and indiscriminately rape the laws that undeniably exist in this world, it is also a wasteland of violation.”

The Fairy Monarch, the fairies—the blinking red traffic light and the stars and the colors and the ring dance and the theater screen and the school and the hospital and the prison—stared intently into me.

There was a phrase in Laozi’s Tao Te Ching: “Silent and solitary.”

Silent, meaning still. Solitary, meaning desolate.

Before humans distinguished between all things, the world existed undivided. Every sound and noise was meaningless, and that utterly silent world was described as “still and solitary.”

“I do not know its name.” Such a world was inherently empty, and so it could not be given a name.

I gave that void a name.

Pointed at it with a human finger.

-Gapless.

-The Hell Without Gaps.

-A correct name.

-An incorrect name.

-This, too, is a random number.

-I can conjecture why the pink entity exhibited unusual behavior.

Ten million layers of laughter split apart.

For an instant, the smell of swimming-pool bleach drifted past. It was the breath exhaled by this universe’s Backrooms.

-I will experiment on you. Undertaker.

Just like that, the Fairy Monarch... No. “Gapless” let go of my hand.

At the same time, the traffic light turned vivid blue. Neither green nor yellow, but sapphire blue, like a morpho butterfly’s wings. A color whose meaning I could not understand.

The existence of Gapless surged toward me. Over the crossing painted pure white, across the swimming pool, pounding down the corridor, trampling time and tearing space to shreds.

In that instant, I lost consciousness.

6

“Guild Leader?”

A voice reached me.

“Are you all right, Guild Leader? Are you coming around?”

“Mm... Mmm, where...?”

“Cheongsong Prison. More precisely, what used to be Cheongsong Prison. You said you were going to talk to the fairies, remember?”

“Ah.”

As I came to my senses and looked around, I found Go Yori cradling my head in her lap amid the rubble of the collapsed building.

She looked down at me with a bright smile.

“Did your conversation end well?”

“The conversation... I don’t know. I’m sure I saw something, but I can’t really remember...”

“Ahh. I see. Hmm, this is a bit of a dilemma. What should I do...?”

Go Yori murmured with her index finger against her chin. For a moment, she seemed troubled.

My mind was still hazy, and all I could do was look up at her.

“... All right. Do you still remember promising to take me with you the next time you have reason to go down to Busan?”

“Huh? Uh, well. I remember.”

“True. I quietly stepped aside, so it’s only fair that I receive this much of a concession.”

“...?”

“Relax your body for a moment, Guild Leader. Take a deep breath—yes. Now breathe out. Like that. Yes. Well done! You were caught in several explosions, after all. Your body and mind must have become terribly tense without you realizing it.”

A gentle stroke.

Go Yori’s hand caressed the back of my head. It should have been nothing more than her stroking my hair, yet strangely, my mind gradually cleared.

Most crucially, the memory of the “Gapless” I had just observed came flooding back.

“Ah...”

“Mm. It looks like you’re feeling better. What a relief.”

“I’m not sure ‘feeling better’ is the right way to put it. My memories... No, never mind. Anyway, it looks like you took care of me while I was unconscious. Thanks, Yori.”

I had given a name to one of the strongest anomalies in this world, yet I still did not know the true name of the being before me. She took my hand and pulled me to my feet with a “Heave-ho!”

Then she smiled brightly.

“Guild Leader. Are you happy right now?”

“Huh? Yeah, well. At least I’m not unhappy.”

“Then I’m happy too, Guild Leader.”

As always, her smile was exceedingly beautiful.

7

There is a very brief epilogue.

“Seo Gyu. I’m actually a regressor, and the tutorial fairy has blown your head off more than fifty times, at the very least. But two runs ago, I discovered the anomaly that serves as the fairies’ boss. It’s called Gapless, and it’s a terrifying bastard that kills most people just by letting them look at it. Anyway, it’s the enemy you’ve hated for three lifetimes... No, more like fifty lifetimes. What do you want to do?”

“You’re telling me there’s a motherfucking bastard like that, Boss? Of course I’ve got to go take revenge with my own hands!”

I took him there.

“Hey, you fucking bastard! You blew my heaaaAAAAAAAH?”

BOOM!

The moment he stepped into Gapless’s void, our SG Guy’s head exploded. You know, like the aliens’ heads in Tim Burton’s [Mars Attacks!].

“Hmm.”

... It seemed we still had a long way to go before avenging humanity.

- The Questioner. End.