I’m an Infinite Regressor, But I’ve Got Stories to Tell - Chapter 350

The Missing II

“Hey, mister.”

“Sometimes, when I write down your story as a serial novel, can’t I insert ‘side stories’ as well?”

This conversation took place around the 692nd cycle, right when Oh Dok-seo began to fully Awaken to her Side Story Creation ability.

“Though I call it a side story, it’s basically just writing from the perspective of ‘someone else.’”

“But it’d be a problem if it eclipses the main storyline. So let’s say… yeah. Once I’ve stacked up about ‘100 chapters’ of the mister’s point of view,”

“I’ll write one ‘side story’ each time.”

Back then, no one thought anything of it. It was hardly unusual for a novelist—especially a certain LiteraryGirl who complained about serial stress more than anyone—to write side stories as a kind of vacation from the main story.

But wasn’t it strange? Despite having declared she’d present one side story every 100 chapters, Oh Dok-seo had never once actually written an episode that truly counted as a “side story.” Even when she fell into a crippling slump, whether caused by her own nature or the Infinite Metagame’s curse, an Infinite Hiatus Syndrome, she never used her free pass to create a side story.

“By the way.”

“It’s a side story, so do I still need you to proofread, or can I just write it and post it as I please?”

Thinking back on it now…

“Yeah. Go ahead and write whatever you like.”

“Great! Thanks, mister! You’ll be blessed!”

What Oh Dok-seo really wanted back then might have been the condition that “she could skip the Regressor’s review.”

As of the current serial timeline, we’re at Chapter 350.

Number of side-story opportunities: 3.5 times.

The shackles of the Infinite Metagame are unlocked. There’s no better chance for an Outer God to distort history.

Saying she “had been waiting for this precise moment” might be an exaggeration, but it couldn’t be denied that she had been preparing for a time just like this.

Title of the first side story: The Missing.

Selected time: 173rd cycle.

Selected viewpoint: first-person POV, Undertaker.

* And no proofreading by the Regressor required.

For the first time, Miko Oh Dok-seo manifested her power in full.

The fourth shard of starlight.

At last, the constellation was drawn.

We return to that day, the moment Dok-seo roped the other members of the Regressor Alliance into sneaking a peek at the Regressor’s romance with her. If I were to describe succinctly what happened to me, the Undertaker, I would say it went like this:

“Undertaker? What’s with you all of a sudden?”

At the time, I had been drinking with Seo-rin.

As someone who loves working out, I’m supposed to stay away from alcohol, but an alchemist from Japan, across the Korea Strait, invented a pill advertised with the tagline “Drink this, and your hangover’s gone in 50 seconds—no side effects!” If you can afford the price of such a hangover cure, alcohol can indeed become humanity’s savior in no time.

Needless to say, Seo-rin and I had no reason to worry about the next day and we were both fairly inebriated.

“Hey, doesn’t the weather seem… kind of odd?”

“The weather?” Seo-rin echoed, looking up at the sky.

It was around 10 PM. Except for the nightlife district near the casino, the city of Busan was otherwise asleep.

“I dunno?” she continued. “I don’t hear anything out of the ordinary.”

“Hmm. Maybe it was my imagination.”

Just a moment ago, the clouds in the night sky almost looked like they twitched and rapidly shifted to one side.

Like some gigantic dragon.

I shrugged it off and raised my glass.

‘Well. If something that big had actually happened, the Saintess would have tipped me off by now—’

A sudden clang! made my hand pause. Seo-rin looked in the same direction as I did. Some distance away from the bar, one of the streetlamps that lit up the Dream Casino district had burst.

“…What’s that?” Seo-rin furrowed her brow and muttered, “Is some Awakener messing around?”

Thɩʂ 𝖼h𝗮p𝙩𝗲r 𝚤𝐬 p𝖔𝗌𝙩𝓮𝕕 b𝐲 Ⱪḭτ𝓮η𝕠𝓋𝑒𝗹

“Not sure. I missed it too.”

“You? Wow, you really are drunk, huh?”

I didn’t respond, still wary. Something felt ominous. Seo-rin went right back to focusing on her drink, but though I felt a bit buzzed, I sharpened my senses and focused on my surroundings.

It wasn’t long before I realized the source of my unease.

‘…No one’s coming out of the casino.’

At this hour, the main flow of foot traffic in Busan should have been right at the casino entrance—yet it was weirdly silent. And it wasn’t just the casino either.

‘That customer who went to the bar’s restroom still hasn’t come out. The waiter who went to the kitchen isn’t coming back either.’

Not only were there no people in sight, but their very presence had disappeared. A textbook sign of an abnormal phenomenon.

I immediately lowered one hand beneath the table and wrote a note on my thigh.

‘Saintess?’

No response.

‘Saintess?’

No response.

“Hey, Undertaker. Let’s just finish this and move on to the next spot,” Seo-rin suggested.

My mouth went dry. Even as Seo-rin offered me another drink, I quickly took out my smartphone to try connecting to SG Net.

[Cannot connect to the site.]

Dead.

“…Undertaker? Seriously, what’s wrong?”

“Listen carefully, Seo-rin.”

“Huh?”

“Something’s happening and we don’t know the cause. Communication with the Constellations is down. Access to SG Net is also blocked.”

A blink.

Seo-rin tilted her head. “Out of nowhere?”

“…I’m just as shocked as you are. Anyway, we should stay close and not separate.”

“Ah, okay. Got it.”

Though I didn’t know the cause, it meant the Saintess, Seo Gyu, and maybe even more people had been taken out all at once.

To be honest, only one suspect came to mind.

‘Is this Go Yuri’s doing?’

And yet… that, too, seemed strange. No warnings whatsoever, just me having a few drinks at night—and then suddenly the world goes off the rails? In an early cycle, maybe. But in this 999th cycle, with all our contingencies prepared to face Anomalies, a sneak attack of this magnitude was highly irregular.

“Let’s take a look around.”

“Ah—”

I got up, taking Seo-rin’s hand. At first, she didn’t realize how serious things were, but as the minutes passed—5, 10, 15—her expression steadily darkened.

“There’s no one around…”

I nodded. “Right. They’re all gone.”

Literally.

All of humanity had disappeared, leaving only Seo-rin and me behind.

“Still not hearing anything from the sky?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s silent.”

“Think about it. You said you usually hear all sorts of sounds and songs mixed together. Is it normal for the entire sky to make no sound at all?”

“Ah.” Some inscrutable emotion flashed over Seo-rin’s face. Then she let out a small sigh and took a pill from her pocket, biting down on it: one of Uehara Shino’s special anti-hangover drugs. “And I wanted to stay drunk today… Looks like I need to sober up, though. Sorry, Undertaker.”

“No need to apologize.”

“Let’s fly.”

Seo-rin hopped on her broom and rose into the sky. I climbed on behind her, and we took off together.

Didn’t change a thing.

“I sent a signal to the train, but no response. And the ones supposed to be on patrol at this hour aren’t around either… Looks like you were right. Seems like there’s absolutely no one left in Busan.”

The city looked bleak. Power was still running, so lights flickered around the casino, but I couldn’t sense a single human breath anywhere.

Not in the residential areas, not at the National Road Management Corps headquarters, not in the refugee camp, not at the cafe hideout, not at the authors’ dormitory.

Nowhere.

“Should we check another city?”

“Nah, I bet Seoul, Sejong, Pyongyang are the same. Everyone’s gone but the two of us.”

“…I see.” While steering her broom, Seo-rin snuck a glance back at me. “So where do we go now?”

We returned to the bar. In a place with no customers, no staff, no owner—just us two—we set down our now-cold side dishes and drinks to brainstorm.

“For now… in cases like this, where something inexplicable has happened, sometimes it’s surprisingly best to just stay put in the starting location.”

“Like that old movie. What was it called? Cube?”[1]

“Yeah. Since the Anomaly happened where we were, the cause probably lies here as well.”

“Huh.”

Seo-rin looked around.

The bar was shabby—a hole-in-the-wall joint at best. Still, the owner’s cooking skills were top-notch, so Seo-rin and I were frequent customers.

“But there’s nothing here,” she said then.

That was the problem.

We’d visited this exact same bar countless times, but never encountered anything like this before. Not until the 999th cycle.

I remained calm, working through the logic.

“If that’s the case…”

“Huh?”

“We might need the opposite perspective. Instead of ‘the world suddenly ended,’ or ‘everyone vanished except for us two,’ think the other way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly the reverse, Seo-rin. We’re the ones who disappeared.”

Her eyes went wide.

“Huh? You and me?”

“Right. Ask yourself: is it harder to make ‘all humanity vanish except for these two,’ or is it harder to make ‘just these two vanish from humanity’?”

“Ohhh. Right, that does seem more likely.”

An unknown Anomaly or Void had basically kidnapped us, yet Seo-rin calmly raised her glass. She fell silent for a moment, then spoke.

“Feels a bit weird.”

“What does?”

“Your explanation’s perfectly convincing. It explains why the world’s so quiet, why the usual clamor of songs in my head suddenly stopped. And yet… somehow, this feels more comfortable to me. This feels more ‘normal.’”

I stayed silent.

“Come to think of it, it was the same when we first met. Remember? That huge crosswalk? It was just the two of us.”

“I remember.”

Of course.

“Yeah. This time, the crosswalk’s just a bit bigger, right? Not that different, is it? Thinking of it that way, I feel much more at ease. You’ll figure something out, anyway.”

I opened my mouth, wanting to argue that it wasn’t that simple, then closed it again, opting instead to comb through my mental archives for a key to solve our predicament. Whatever else may have happened, the Saintess’s existence being erased was more concerning than anything. 

While I was distracted, Seo-rin suddenly plopped down next to me.

“…Dang Seo-rin?”

“I think I might know how to clear it.”

“Seriously?!”

“Yeah.”

Quietly…

“…But can I ask why, if you supposedly know how to solve this, your hand is now pressed against my cheek?”

“Ahaha. You’re clueless, huh?” Seo-rin said with a giggle. Thanks to that top-grade hangover cure, her intoxication should have dissipated almost instantly, but her laughter still carried a night-air drunkenness to it. “In a world where suddenly only two people remain—wouldn’t the most ‘plausible’ explanation be that it’s all a dream?”

“A dream.”

“Right. Whether it’s your dream or mine, if we just say, ‘It was all a dream,’ the mystery is neatly solved. But…”

Softly…

She placed her other hand on my cheek as well.

“And we both know the easiest way to wake up from a dream, don’t we, Mr. Self-Proclaimed World’s Greatest Expert on Anomalies?”

“…The correct answer: an alarm clock.”

“Shut up. You fool.”

Seo-rin’s breath brushed my lips.

I squeezed my eyes shut, knowing that if this didn’t dissolve the Void, we’d be in serious trouble.

The hush that had submerged the entire world flowed like transparent currents, circling quietly between the two of us.

And then

「Foolish man.」

For some reason,

「Was that your first kiss?」

Behind my tightly closed eyelids, I suddenly heard a nostalgic voice.

「Undertaker. Put all your memories of kissing onto the scales, if you have any—across all cycles, not just this one.」

Memories of when I revealed to Dang Seo-rin that I was a regressor.

Memories of the 173rd cycle, when she fell into Corruption but I swore to remain by her side until the very end.

「There. Now then.」

「Close your eyes.」

A remembrance of utopia.

Sensing that a great deal of time had passed, I opened my eyes again—

And my eyes went wide in shock.

Seo-rin was right in front of me.

That in itself was normal enough. We’d been alone in a bar just moments ago. But beyond her, the Busan night sky was bursting with fireworks in red and blue, brilliant colors lighting up the air.

Between the explosions, witches from the Samcheon World soared on brooms, laughing and whooping as they flew.

That was not normal. It made no sense.

Just moments ago, Busan had been silent as the grave. Forget fireworks—Seo-rin couldn’t hear a single noise anywhere.

Now, above Seo-rin’s head, a golden set of scales shimmered like a Constellation.

No denying it. It looked far too much like the scene imprinted in my memory long ago. No, it matched it exactly.

The Dang Seo-rin in front of me…

That Dang Seo-rin, smiling softly…

“Now this is our very first kiss.”

…Was not the Dang Seo-rin of the 999th cycle.

She was the Dang Seo-rin of the 173rd cycle, the Fallen Great Witch.

What in the world was going on?

To this neverland of a missing space—this utopia—where witches’ laughter and bursts of fireworks echoed without end…

I, the Undertaker, had been brought along.

Footnotes:

[1] The 1997 sci-fi horror film Cube features an escape-room premise wherein the characters are tasked with escaping a series of deadly trap-rooms shaped together in a giant cube to get to a room on the outer edge where they can escape. Toward the end of the film, it is revealed that all of the rooms move over time, so the safest way out would have been to stay in the room they originally found themselves in.