I’m an Infinite Regressor, But I’ve Got Stories to Tell - Chapter 359

WeTried Translations

The Missing XI

“Hmm? Why the long face, sunbae? Did something good happen while I wasn’t looking—?”

I still hadn’t answered Seo-rin since our midnight stroll to the moon and back. I doubted she ever expected an instant reply.

I needed time to think.

I began spending more and more time alone, even going so far as to ask the Saintess not to keep watch on me with her Clairvoyance for a while. That was how four days passed with my door firmly shut… until my unruly pupil—dressed in a black sailor uniform and carrying her school bag—popped in without warning.

I stared at her for a beat, then greeted, “Cheon Yo-hwa.”

“Geez, using my full name is embarrassing.” The elder twin beamed. “Call me like you always do. ‘My adorable protégé.’ ‘The very meaning of that brief season when you tutored for pocket money.’”

“That’s even longer than your full name…”

“There’s an old saying: Like father and child, lie teacher and student. In other words, we’re basically already family, you know. I’ve wanted to call you this for ages—Daddy!”

I let a wry smile slip out. If Ha-yul were here, she’d probably explode, complaining that Yo-hwa was stealing her form of address. “How did you know I was here? Did the Saintess tell you?”

“Nah. She respects your wishes too much. She kept quiet, so I just followed my intuition.”

We were in a café inside the abandoned Baekje Hospital. The very place where Emit Schopenhauer chose to die.

Whenever I need to lose myself in thought, I end up here because—

“This is the graveyard that keeps a Regressor’s End. The other regressor who left this world before you, your sunbae. He kept nagging you for clinging so stubbornly to something you’ll abandon, anyway. So you use him as a mirror to look back at yourself, right?”

“Yeah,” I said after a pause. “It really is hard to fool you.”

“Ehehe, I am your star pupil.”

I looked down at the floor at the exact spot where Old Man Scho’s body had lain, minus the head. The corpse had already been burned away by my Aura, but the keepsake he clutched to the end still rested there all alone: a smartphone, carrying the voice of the woman he loved.

“I’ve been wondering what makes me any different from that old geezer.”

Yo-hwa gazed at my face, silent as I spoke.

“His death was clean. He wasn’t tainted by Void poison, and he didn’t resurrect his wife with some inhuman art. While she was still alive, he simply talked with the love of his life, over and over—a remarkably gentle way to live and die… And then, there’s me. The path I might tumble down is nowhere near that quiet. I’ve already come too far, already paid too much.”

“Udumbara is always there, sunbae,” Yo-hwa whispered. “If that tender world-tree infects you, your Regression, Complete Memory, even the Time Seal—all of it will vanish.”

“…Udumbara is Sim Ah-ryeon.”

Blink.

“Huh?”

“More precisely, it’s Ah-ryeon’s Grudge Orb. The Bird That Drinks Poison and Udumbara are the same at their core. You know every Awakener’s power blooms from their own scars and resentment.”

“R-right, I’d kinda guessed…”

“Instead of drinking someone’s grudges, she gives that person life-force. Sound familiar?”

Yo-hwa’s ruby red eyes widened in shock. “Why didn’t I see it? That’s right, when Ah-ryeon fell, all of Utopia turned into a garden…”

“Udumbara isn’t a cursed tree that steals an Awakener’s power; it simply gathers up their scars.”

A life without wounds and scars. The manifestation of that ideal would be a Huayen world where people transform into their own flowers—into plants.

[Maybe I always wanted to become a plant.]

Long ago, someone who’d been hurt more than anyone confessed that wish.

[I wanted to have no choice but to accept everything, to run away from everything that angered me or hurt me. It was my deepest, darkest desire.]

[So, I guess I just became a plant.]

That was the Saintess’s self-revelation after she turned into a potato.

Ah-ryeon cherished the Saintess fiercely, even dragging the Eastern Holy State’s elite troops under her banner. Perhaps she felt an instinctive— No, an essential kinship.

“So infection by Udumbara isn’t an exit. Not in any sense of the word,” I told Yo-hwa. “And who knows what it would do to Ah-ryeon, who shares the same root. The more I treat Regression like a curse—like shackles I want to break—the harder Udumbara will cling to me.”

“Oh no…”

“If it ever blooms inside me, I might lose all the memories I’ve kept from hundreds of cycles in a single instant.”

Silence settled over the café. After staring at the blossoming four-season garden outside, Yo-hwa finally spoke.

“When I heard you came from the 1,000th—no—the 999th cycle, I honestly felt nothing. It was just some far-off future. But just now, I realized for the first time that you really are a man of the future. The info gap is insane.”

“Is it? You’ve been looking like you’re lost in your own thoughts the whole time, Yo-hwa.”

She lowered her eyes. “Anyway… Our allies are scary strong when you think about it. They’re all Mikos or soon-to-be Corrupted. Feels like someone planned the whole scenario. Sunbae… Why did you deliberately Corrupt the children you cherish so much? What made you agree to Project Collapse?”

I couldn’t say it aloud.

‘The moment Dang Seo-rin completed Utopia, everyone here became her limbs.’

Yo-hwa, too, was no exception. No matter how independently she moved, how self-aware she seemed, she was still ensnared in the Great Witch’s Divine Realm.

Enchanted.

‘But once someone Awakens as a Miko, the story changes.’

Yu Ji-won proved that when she summoned Leviathan. She broke free of Utopia and reclaimed her individuality—barely escaping the Witch’s half-hypnotic cradle. Sim Ah-ryeon as well.

‘In short…’

I’d hidden it from my comrades.

‘This is rebellion against Utopia—an uprising from within.’

In the one-in-a-million chance that Seo-rin would lose control and truly become an Outer God… In the truly, wholly unlikely event that that happened, at the very least, my friends and I had to keep our sanity and fight.

‘We have to save the Saintess. This is our only window. But then, what about Seo-rin…?’

On and on, the thoughts spiralled in an endless swamp, the punishment for humanity that bit the fruit of good and evil.

The café floor, once soaked in a regressor’s blood, now seemed to beg for my gaze as well.

“Sunbae.”

How long had I been lost in that void? Her voice reached my ears like a muffled cry from above the water.

“Hold on, don’t turn this way yet.”

Before I could answer or look away, Yo-hwa turned her back, and the soft rustle of clothes fell quiet.

Startled, I jerked my head aside, my heart lurching. “Yo-hwa! I’ve told you a thousand times, stop using my heartbreak as an opening and quit that sisterly seduction tactic!”

“Ahaha. So this happened in other cycles too? I’d love the juicy details.”

“You two are going to be the death of me! I must’ve been an idiot, moving to Sejong for a job that paid this much, yelling about the jackpot I’d landed all the way!”

“But the money was sweet, right?”

“It was extorting cultists! I still want to refund it!”

“Ahaha!” Yo-hwa giggled. “All right, you can look now, sunbae.”

I frowned and lifted my head— And my eyes went wide.

“No, I guess I should call you ‘Teacher.’”

Gone was the black uniform sliding to the floor. Standing there in a snow-white school uniform was Cheon Yo-hwa, the little sister of that twin pair, grinning ear to ear.

“How’s my impression of my sister? Pretty good, right?”

I couldn’t respond, my eyes still wide with surprise.

“I don’t know what exactly you’re struggling with, Teacher. I mean, I know it’s about the line between Anomaly and human, but I can’t tell how deeply that line cuts for you. Unlike me, whose life ends with this one, you have so many factors to weigh.” Hands clasped behind her back, Yo-hwa continued, “But just as the border between my sister and me depends on what you believe, I trust you more than anyone to see the other person as they truly are.”

“…Yo-hwa.”

“Who I am doesn’t matter. I decided to entrust my self to whoever watches over me.” A shy smile danced across her lips as she said, “Whether someone counts as Anomaly or human is up to you, just like it was for me and just like it was for my sister… Well, okay, I don’t really like her, but for Ji-won too. And Dok-seo, I haven’t known her long—no clue about her at all. Let’s call her an Anomaly, okay?”

That made me laugh out loud. “Offend Dok-seo and you’re dead. She’s ghost-writing my story and if she’s in a mood, she’ll cut anyone’s screen time. Her grudges last.”

“No worries. I live in the here-and-now, faithful only to the person in front of me.”

“Thank you.” I patted Yo-hwa’s shoulder, just like that winter day inside the student-council room when we shared the white season alone. She chuckled, puffs of breath misting. “Right. Nothing to hesitate over. The scale’s bigger, but I’ll keep doing what I’ve always done.”

“Yes, Teacher.”

“Speaking of Dok-seo… Yo-hwa, I hear you tried to kill her?”

“Ah—”

“Let’s dig just a bit deeper into that bottomless hole, shall we?”

“L-language is amazing, huh? How can you do a little deep dive into a chat hole without an end, and do it all at once too?”

“Yo-hwa.”

“S-sorry, sunbae! Actually, I am Cheon Yo-hwa pretending to be the other Cheon Yo-hwa pretending to be me! How was my little-sister act? Great, huh?!”

I gave her a good scolding.

Before that summer was over…

[Dad.]

Even Ha-yul managed to Fall, freeing herself from Utopia’s brainwashing. Her condition for Corruption was simple: I, the Undertaker, had to be assassinated or die an unjust death at the hands of ordinary people—no one special.

So, just like with Ah-ryeon, all I had to do was screen an “illusion” for Ha-yul.

Since the pattern was the same, there was no need to re-enact the exact scene with someone else’s pain.

Yes, I skipped the timeline. The process of Falling was erased, and only the result remained. All that was left was the fact that Lee Ha-yul Fell.

Everything in between is gone.

Th𝒾𝓈 𝖼hа̄p𝘵ꬲr 𝙞ʂ pℴ𝖘𝐭є𝒹 b𝘺 𝘒𝗶𝕥𝓮п𝙤ⱴ𝙚𝘭

[I feel so light.]

Ha-yul straightened her back, emotionless, and raised her fingers in a peace sign.

[I’ve never been this happy.]

[I’m not alone anymore, Dad.]

[Now, nothing scares me.]

“…You don’t have to pile up the defeat flags that neatly, kiddo.”

Awakener: Lee Ha-yul

Corrupted Alias: The Tuner

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