I’m an Infinite Regressor, But I’ve Got Stories to Tell - Chapter 348

Chapter 348

The Inviter V

On the night when a meteor shower rained uncountable falling stars, each piece of starlight was the corpse of an Anomaly. Seven hundred Awakeners in a suicide squad clung to those handfuls of starlight, one by one plummeting to their deaths.

“Aaaaah!”

“Eleven o’clock! Another squad is covering Anomalies at eleven o’clock! This bastard, it’s getting wider and wider! We have to destroy it before it spreads!”

“Squad 12, annihilated.”

“Die! Die, die! Just die already!”

“Great Witch, thank you! We love you! Long live Samcheon World!”

“Squad 10, cleared two o’clock.”

If “humanity” is not something you are born with but something you prove by living, then without a doubt that final band of seven hundred was the last of true humanity left in this ruined world.

That day, humanity was clearly going extinct.

“Three o’clock cleared. Squad 10, decimated. Six people remain. Moving on to four o’clock. Good luck.”

“Squad 7, annihilated. But at least eleven o’clock is clear. Heading for ten o’clock… Oh. Found one remaining corpse. Can’t join you.”

The stars fell like blossoms.

I suddenly hated the night sky.

If the world’s logic decreed that the most beautiful flowers must be trampled the most cruelly, I couldn’t fathom what that logic served.

“I’ll go on ahead, Undertaker hyung. I haven’t forgotten what happened in Sejong. Thank you, always.”

“Squad 4, annihilated.”

I hated every single weed growing on the fields. I loathed their red and purple, the raindrops that fell on their petals, the voices that called it beautiful—and the muffled breaths of those too dulled by dawn’s tremors to feel anything.

Falling blossoms.

The night sky was filled with starlight.

Descent.

My heart blazed like a flame.

If this season existed solely to kill humans, especially those who were most human, then how could I not hate every season first?

Undertaker!

―――.

I love humankind!

―, ――?

And I’d like if you could refrain from hating people too much.

――――.

Do you hate me too, Undertaker?

―――, ――.

…I know. So, however much you like me… just that much, please love humanity more.

‘Ahhh.’

I looked up at the night sky.

‘Truly, truly. Such a beautiful sky.’

A contract.

Even if the day comes when one hates everything, someone will still find this world beautiful.

An imprint.

The night sky is not beautiful on its own. Samcheon World. All things in creation. None of these are inherently beautiful.

It is beautiful because it’s reflected in someone’s eyes.

Th𝚒𝑠 ₡hа̄p†℮r 𝚒𝘴 p◎𝕤𝘵𝕖𝕕 b𝐲 𝒌𝚒†ℯ𝕟ⲟ𝙫ҽḷ

Magic.

No matter how many times, how many tens or hundreds of summers pass, the night sky of that day will remain scorched into my heart like soot.

I was always under your spell.

Hic!

“Ugh…”

It took exactly twelve minutes and thirty-one seconds, plus four handkerchiefs, for Seo-rin to calm her tears.

She sniffled on a bench. “Ugh.”

“You can blow your nose, you know. Don’t worry about me.”

“No, come on, that’s a bit much… We’re basically flirting, aren’t we? Who on earth blows their nose on the second date? Are you crazy?”

She said that, but she couldn’t mask her ragged breathing.

Seo-rin definitely seemed more at ease when she was with me. Before entering the Garden of Fallen Flowers, she’d been carefully controlling her image.

“Haah. This feels weird.”

Now it was different. Her eyes were all red from crying, and she sat on the bench swinging her legs.

“Even at my family’s funeral, I didn’t cry. Then here I am bawling in front of someone I basically just met… it’s weird.”

“That’s because I’m weird.”

“Who, you?”

“Both of us are. After all, anyone who shows up in a barista outfit or a witch’s robe can’t be normal.”

Seo-rin laughed softly. Then, she said, “Undertaker. Let’s be honest.”

“About what?”

“You’ve got some mind-reading power or something, don’t you? Some kind of ability connected to people’s psyches? This makes no sense otherwise. I never told you how my family died, never mentioned working at a flower shop, yet you somehow picked the perfect date route for me?” ℟𝒶ƝO͍βЕŜ

“Hm.”

“If that’s not due to an Awakened ability, then you’re just an insane Casanova. Which is it? Why go so far to seduce me?”

Well…

Normally, I’d deflect the conversation easily, but I couldn’t let that stand.

“Dang Seo-rin, that’s all well and good, but let’s straighten out the order of events.”

“Huh?”

“I’m not the one who seduced you.”

I made a solemn declaration:

“You seduced me.”

Confusion.

“I was just minding my own business. I didn’t even know you existed. It’s you who approached me first, saying my alias was cool or whatever, openly flirting.”

Bewilderment.

“Not to mention you wore clothes and did your hair all tailored to your personal… Dear heavens, O ye Seven Outer Gods. Driving a psychologically cornered person to rely on you? A monstrous level of manipulative gaslighting.”

“…Uh, what the hell are you going on about?”

“Karma. You reap what you sow. Everything returning to you is just the consequence you must accept.”

“Ah, right. A cult. Makes sense… A good-looking sweet-talker who’s too kind must be some kind of cult fanatic.”

She tilted her head to the sky, half playfully, half in earnest. By now it was dusk. The purple sky bled like a droplet of spilled paint in a dim palette.

“This world won’t last long… Probably 20 years. 25 at most. No matter how we struggle, preventing destruction is tough. But I intend to gather people who still won’t give up and fight to live with everything we have.”

“…Huh.”

“I’ve already assembled many to my side. I’ve prepared an organization called the National Road Management Corps to function in place of a government. Dang Seo-rin, I need your help too.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“When you’re facing death, you become that way.”

I gazed back at the Garden of Fallen Flowers.

The life I’d restored with Aura was fleeting. Before the sun could creep below the horizon line, those bright petals had already begun to fade again.

Yet at the very least, those petals were no longer drab browns. They fell in reds, oranges, yellows, and greens. Then they could bloom again, albeit for just one more season’s respite.

Seo-rin stood silently beside me, looking out at the Garden. A few inches sunken below the horizon later, her gaze turned to me.

“Sorry for calling you weird. I guess if I had to actually put it to words… I’m fascinated. I’ve never met anyone like you.”

“Thanks for saying so, but no need to apologize to me.”

“Mm… Yeah, that is the feeling, huh? This is weird too. I feel like with you, I don’t have to explain everything or think about how I word things. It’s like… like you’re family—”

Her head jerked.

“Mmph.”

Then she rose from the bench.

A short walk away lay a crosswalk. Not as huge as the one where we first met, but the white paint was still intact, and the black asphalt wasn’t broken.

No cars roamed here.

Only a few days had passed, yet this city had already grown accustomed to silence.

“Seo-rin?”

She didn’t respond, only stepped into the middle of the crosswalk and closed her eyes, raising her hand toward the sky.

A wind blew.

A strange sensation came over me.

The breeze drifting between her fingers, through her hair. It felt as though Dang Seo-rin might scatter into the wind at any moment.

I stood up.

One step, two steps, I trod the black asphalt. Each step snagged me on images of the many times I had witnessed her die.

Three, four, I crossed the white stripes. Each step pulled me into the June summer in which we’d crossed paths.

Past countless black and white surfaces, I came close to one person. Then, Dang Seo-rin opened her eyes.

A breath lingered on her lips.

“I have a confession.”

When I only gave her a puzzled look, she continued, “When we first met, I was interested in you right away. Do you know why?”

“Well…”

Because I dressed meticulously to suit her tastes. I hadn’t stopped at just my appearance either. My mannerisms, my attitude—I’d shaped it all to fit her sensibilities.

But seeing my expression, she shook her head.

“Actually, I heard a song.”

“A song?”

“Yeah. A song, or maybe a sound. Usually it’s just noise. But whenever I approach certain people or places… I hear a particular ‘sound’ they have.”

I blinked.

Not an act. I was genuinely startled.

In these hundreds of timelines, never once had Dang Seo-rin said such a thing to me before.

“Wait,” I said, “I’m not sure I follow.”

“Ah, well. As an example… look at the sunset overhead. You see red, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t just see red. I hear the sunset’s distinct sound in my ears. It’s kinda like the sound of waves. But the sensation is shallower than real waves—broader than a stream, but thinner than an ocean tide.”

I’d never heard of this before.

‘Why…?’

It baffled me.

‘We’ve gone to that crosswalk. We’ve walked the Garden of Fallen Flowers. Sometimes we visited Udumbara instead. But never… not once did she mention this.’

Something had changed.

Now it was the 999th cycle.

To the casual eye, that number might seem special, but I hadn’t noticed any extraordinary differences from previous rounds. Yet the fact that “she hid it for 998 rounds, then confessed on the 999th” was bizarre in itself.

‘But why would she hide something like this? Was there a reason to hide it from me at all?’

Seo-rin giggled at my confusion.

“So earlier, I got a bit startled. When you took my hand and led me to the flower garden, all I could hear was screaming. Over and over… But when you cradled that peony and let it bloom, suddenly the flower’s screams stopped. And instead, a really pretty… it’s like piano keys being played, that kind of sound.”

She clasped her hands behind her back.

“I can hear a song from you, too… It’s very sad, but also very clear. It’s been continuous from the start, connecting seamlessly. Sometimes the key changes, but the melody never does. Like footprints. Really faint… but really strong.”

Gently, Seo-rin took my hand. Behind her, broken traffic lights flashed slowly, blinking as if half-asleep.

“None of the sounds I hear have ever lied to me. So I want to trust you too. Thank you… for giving me a reason to still like this world.”

She smiled, likely listening to a tune I could not hear—part sunset to the west, part night sky to the east, half upon this place, half upon her heart.

“If you ever need my help… whenever it is, just say so, Undertaker. Even if we have to set the whole world on fire, I’ll do it. I’ll help you no matter what.”

There is an epilogue.

Let me briefly mention another story.

When Ji-won and I decided to seal Leviathan, I’d already grown exceedingly cautious about using Aura. We needed to limit Aura usage drastically, like living with blackouts or water rationing.

‘If I use Aura right away, I can easily defeat Ten Legs or a Meteor Shower.’

But that was a poor solution. We had to learn to fight without relying on Aura at all.

‘That’s the only way to completely put Leviathan to rest.’

It was a harsh path.

After the 777th cycle when I first pioneered this route, I spent hundreds more refining the approach step by step.

‘We can’t jump straight from 100% usage to 0%. That’s too ambitious.’

‘We’ll do it gradually. If we used 100% before, we’ll try 95%, 90%, 85%… steadily reducing bit by bit.’

It wasn’t just Aura either. Ultimately, we had to rely less on other Awakened abilities as well.

‘And somehow… until the 20th year, when the Monster Wave fully hits… we must endure.’

Easier said than done.

The less we relied on Aura, the more we depended on other Awakened powers. And naturally so, since humanity needed weapons to fight Anomalies that could destroy the world at any moment.

“Guild Leader.”

In one cycle, Ah-ryeon fell to Corruption and blanketed the world in flowers.

Because we’d reduced our Aura mastery, to minimize casualties we leaned on Ah-ryeon’s abilities… and she was Corrupted.

– Dad.

In another cycle, Ha-yul fell to Corruption, turning all living things into puppet dolls.

We’d woven puppet strings across continents to strengthen communication lines among Awakeners… which led to her Corruption.

In yet another, Yo-hwa created an entire NPC army, or Dok-seo enlarged the protective barrier too far, or Ji-won once again relied on Aura in the end.

‘This…’

I bit my lip.

‘This is basically just shuffling cards around.’

A deadlock.

To stop these Anomalies, we must rely on Awakened powers. But that only leads the Awakeners to become stronger, to be Corrupted, to approach the Outer Gods.

‘Is there a way…?’

An ability that doesn’t grow stronger the more you use it.

An ability that, the more you use it, the weaker it gets.

A power that—no matter how much you wield it—will never risk Corruption, instead returning you closer to an ordinary human.

Such a miraculous ability, if it existed…

‘Is there a way to…?’

There wasn’t.

“Undertaker.”

But there was magic.

“Do you need my help?”

Dang Seo-rin.

Her ability, Cursed Song Incantation, was simple.

She uses up her own lifespan to cast spells.

Exactly.

Only Seo-rin did not grow stronger with the use of her power. In fact, the opposite was true. The more lifespan she saved up by not using it, the stronger she became. The more she used it, the weaker she got—completely inverse to every other Awakener’s ruleset.

Burn your lifespan, and your death draws near.

She would die.

As a human.

That, indeed, was Seo-rin’s magic.

She was just like me.

Like my role as a regressor, who must erase the very Aura-levels I’d built up to save the world… so too did Dang Seo-rin abandon herself.

My companion.

There existed a song to strengthen humans without Aura, a song to heal without crushing Ah-ryeon, a song to reach Ha-yul without cornering her.

Everything fit together like a miracle.

This path was destined for someone to walk with me.

“All right. Sorry. It appears I do need your magic.”

“Mm. There’s no need to apologize.”

Thus, after that day in the 777th cycle, it became the story of how I and another gradually died.

Our string of failures.

A singular route.

Escaping the cursed formula of Awakener Corruption and the Anomalies’ mockery.

A grand magic of Equivalent Exchange, balancing humanity’s decline with our own demise.

From here on, the tale will fast forward.