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

WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

Editor: LiteraryGirl

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The Missing XIX

Death makes everything disappear.

Take him, for instance. He was born not of the lawful wife but of a concubine.

So said his father, the clan head who once wore a national assemblyman's gold badge.

"We are one house. One. All of you must grow up to be pillars of this country, so no fighting. Understood?"

While his father lived, he had power enough to define what "family" meant. He never cast out his illegitimate son, nor did he let the boy's mother drift between rented rooms.

That power endured only so long as his father's heart kept beating.

"Son, we're moving again."

Not long after his father's death, he helped his mother pack, yet something was strange about it. Yes, how strange indeed for a family "moving house," that none of his other siblings were to be seen.

'How odd,' he thought. Why did only Mother and I have to tip-toe around gathering boxes?

Perhaps the luggage was simply too heavy. Maybe the two of them were the advance unit, carrying the burden ahead of the others.

It took him three full years to realise that he himself was that heavy "luggage."

"My son, clever like your father."

He understood many things. Why the new home was smaller than the old, why the neighborhood felt darker, why he would never ask Mother to confirm what he already knew, why silence tasted of guilt, and how guilt was laced with love.

"Clever like your father, but promise me one thing... Never join the army... Never."

He wanted to know the world.

Sometimes, while rifling through the newspaper, he spotted his "brothers'" names in print. On pages that claimed to weave a net wide enough to catch the world in letters, it seemed the world itself was nowhere to be found.

'How very strange.'

Death makes everything disappear.

Take her, for instance. She was born the daughter of a prosperous orchard owner.

"Oh, that man! Honestly, oh dear..."

Her father was a womanizer. One day, he brought home a younger half-brother from the orchard, and for some reason, her mother bullied the child mercilessly.

"I can't live like this! Oh, honestly..."

She hated the sound of her mother's sighs, so she ran from them. She felt she could only breathe in a place where sighs couldn't reach. She told her parents she was off to play with friends, but the truth was so very slightly different. Every day was a small escape from home.

In exchange for abandoning the house, she received the world outside: the scent of acacia blooming along the orchard lane, the rattle of a red bicycle her father had bought in secret, the smell of water and wet soil in the ditch between spring and summer.

'Beautiful,' she thought each time she returned, carrying all those outside things in her young breath.

The world was lovable.

"Really! Your father will be the death of me!"

In all the world, only human beings seemed to live half a handspan away from that love.

Her eldest and second-eldest sisters both went to study in Seoul. She, on the other hand, chose another city. Mother lamented that her grades were too good to waste, but Father backed her.

"Someone has to stay close to home. You can't turn them all into Seoul snobs."

She entered Busan National University. During a campus exhibition, she saw the shadow of a male student dragging fallen leaves along the edge of the quad, and the thought came to her quite unconsciously.

'How beautiful.'

She loved him, and he loved her.

Love is fearless.

"What shall we name the baby?"

"I've been thinking. Help me decide."

They spoke to each other in polite form. To them, it was a token of respect and affection, but in truth, it was a scar each had inherited from their respective parents. They did not yet know that marriage meant exchanging even the wounds you never knew existed.

"How about this?"

"If it's a boy, it's my choice."

"If it's a girl, it's yours."

There was so much they did not know, and so much yet to learn.

Their hearts pounded. The young couple visited fortune-tellers, leafed through name dictionaries, feeling out their own ignorance one careful fingertip at a time.

"If it's a boy, San. A single-syllable name."

"If it's a girl, Seo-rin."

A child was born. Her name was Dang Seo-rin.

How strange, how beautiful.

"..."

Death makes everything disappear.

Around the time their second child came into the world, his mother died. Not long after, her father and mother also passed. There were suddenly far fewer people left who could testify about their parents.

No one remembered how his father became an assemblyman, what hardships he had endured, or why he insisted on being "one family" while keeping both a wife and a concubine. No one remembered why, after bearing three daughters in a row, his mother could not accept the son her husband suddenly brought home, or why she pushed her daughters so hard toward good universities.

Death makes everything disappear.

"..."

Dang Seo-rin first learned that death existed when she was seven.

"Seo-rin seems to like flowers."

"Let's hope she grows out of eating them."

"..."

Little Seo-rin could often be found squatting in the flower shop her parents ran. Surrounded by plants taller than she was, she would gaze up at the suncast shadows falling through the greenhouse film.

'How strange.'

Sunlight glinted off the glossy green peony leaves in ephemeral sheens.

'Beautiful...'

Everything was like sunlight. It shone for only a moment, yet it was beautiful. If beauty was that great, why not stay a bit longer? It was strange that it existed only briefly.

The world was strange and beautiful.

So beautiful, yet strange.

"Sis-ter!"

"Da-a-ad."

Little brothers and sisters. Dad. Mom.

Her family.

From the day the suncast shadow rusted on a peony leaf, Dang Seo-rin decided to accept this "strange yet beautiful something." She thought that must be the original form of life. In truth, it was the shape that her parents, and their parents before them, had gnawed into the apple-core of life over their own lifetimes—a shape still too large to swallow, now handed down to her.

For millions of years, through hundreds of billions of branches.

'Live,' she told herself.

Dang Seo-rin, too, was prepared.

'Live on.'

Being hurt by people. Hurting people. Fighting. Fearing. Protecting. Abandoning. Forgetting. Remembering.

Just like Mother. Just like Father.

'Live on.'

Who would she meet?

Would that luck come?

Would she bear a child? What was love? Was love for a partner different from love for a child? Where would she live? How? Would she be wounded? Would she wound? Where would they meet? What songs would she like?

'I will leave proof that I was here.'

'The world is so wide.'

As billions of humans before her have done, from ages and millennia past.

Her heart, shaped like an apple, beat fast.

'Just watch me.'

'See what I despised, see what I loved.'

'I am Father and Mother's beloved daughter, my siblings' proud elder sister.'

'My name is Dang Seo—'

And then the Void arrived.

Creeeeeeak!

When we pushed open the greenhouse's semi-opaque door, a garden drenched in blood opened up to us.

There she was, right there at the entrance. As though she had tried to flee and failed, a child net yet old enough to have passed into high school was skewered on a plant stem.

"This is..."

"Seo-rin's little sister," Go Yuri said, half a step ahead of my own thoughts. "You've seen her, haven't you, Guild Leader?"

I had. While purging Infinite Void, I'd wandered through the barrier it cast and glimpsed a vision of Seo-rin with her siblings. This, too, was a vision—yet the mangled corpse before me was brutally real.

"So it really happened."

"I believe so... Honestly, I'm amazed the door opened at all. Thank goodness LiteraryGirl didn't betray us."

Bang!

Something slammed behind us. Turning, I saw a black handprint splattered on the vinyl wall.

Slap! Slap, splat!

Handprints multiplied, clutching the handle, shaking the door, clawing ragged furrows through the film.

"Ah. Mhm." Go Yuri wore a troubled smile. "They don't know the meaning of giving up... though with a vow binding them, they probably can't even if they want to."

"A vow?"

"Pardon me, Guild Leader, but I'll stay back to be on guard." She planted herself politely in front of the entrance, her body blocking the door. "Hogging all your time to the very end wouldn't be so bad, but you're going to forget everything that happens in this realm and in this cycle, anyway."

"...I still have many questions for you."

"I know. But as I said, you won't remember this moment."

Thud! Bang, splat!

Black handprints papered the greenhouse behind her, staining it pitch-dark.

"Repeating the same conversation over and over... I dislike that, Guild Leader. It wears the heart thin. Unless... Would you rather become one with me?"

Splat.

A palm of darkness grabbed Yuri's ankle, yet she remained unruffled.

"That, too, would be a kind of ending. I wouldn't mind."

"Whatever ending you mean, if it's not a happy one, my own death is already booked," I flatly refused.

"Aha? Ahaha." Her lips curved to reveal a crescent moon of white. "Noh Do-hwa. Yes, indeed... How fascinating. The being farthest from Anomalies lays a spell on the being closest to them."

Slap. Slosh, splatter.

Countless hands engulfed her shoes and ankles but advanced no higher, as though an invisible barrier blocked their climb.

"I understand, Guild Leader." She pinched the hem of her skirt between finger and thumb and dipped in an elegant curtsey. "Farewell. Let's meet again somewhere you will not remember."

"...Thank you for guiding me this far."

"Not at all."

Yuri did not lift her head.

"On the contrary, I thank you. Always."

I turned and took a step deeper into the greenhouse, toward Hecate's innermost sanctum. After several more paces, I glanced back.

Only darkness remained.

Somehow, I could sense it. With that single step, a whole timeline had split clean away. In an Undertaker-style choice box, I must have seen two options until a moment ago:

[1. Walk to Dang Seo-rin]

[2. Stay with Go Yuri]

Had I not escaped brainwashing and temptation, the game would surely have forced Option 2 on me.

Gripping Cheon Yo-hwa's black hair tie, her final relic, a precious object or a ghostly relic, I hurried on. Beyond lies the secret Seo-rin wanted most to hide, the truth veiled by Hecate's night sky.

'Go.'

Every few steps, another body littered the garden. A boy about high-school age... Seo-rin's second sibling. The child at the entrance had been the youngest brother; she'd tried to save him. Each corpse had been sliced by mutated leaves or impaled on stems—

It was the scene that had branded Seo-rin's life, her lifelong trauma now laid bare.

'Layered bodies.'

Her siblings... and there, on the mother's side. They hadn't run far.

The vision overlayed the corpses. Plants once lovingly tended had been infected with Void-poison en masse. Perhaps they'd been contaminated long ago and the incubation simply ended in this moment.

"Run!"

Who had shouted?

The family lived at the shop. Schools were closed due to the emergency situation, so the youngest and the second youngest were home.

"Dad!"

"Sani, go! Go call for help!"

"O-o-okay!"

"Big sister is inside!"

Their struggle meant nothing. In those early days, there was too little information about Anomalies. Who would have guessed that plants might turn into monsters?

The father, the mother, the second, the third, the youngest. All slain in moments, within meters of each other. An ordeal beyond what ordinary people could bear—

No, I correct myself. The Anomaly Garden was simply too powerful. Most Awakeners of the time could not even hope to handle it.

My heart pounded as I stepped onto the garden where present illusion and past remnant intermingled, passing by Seo-rin's father's corpse with memories linked to every sight.

"My little siblings..."

It wasn't a distant memory.

"My siblings kept begging me to just abandon the shop and run away with Mom and Dad, but I told them... I told them to trust their big sister, but then I... I had this thing about guilds..."

In the 999th cycle, Seo-rin herself had made a confession in the Garden of Fallen Flowers.

"I kept chasing after this dream of forming one... By the time I came back, no one was home. I went to the shop, and... If I just hadn't, then..."

When the tragedy struck, Seo-rin had not been at the scene, according to her own testimony. That means that after her family died, she returned to this place. Thus, the plant Anomaly that had drunk her family's blood was still alive at the time, and for Seo-rin to survive, she'd had to slay it. Obviously, without killing it, she too would have died before she could avenge anyone. So now—

'Could she have done it?'

Could she, an Awakener who was still low-level, with no experience, who'd been ambushed without time even to chant her Cursed Song...

My heart hammered. Thoughts may stop, but heartbeats never do. It pumped blood into my legs, urging the next step and the next.

'If Seo-rin had somehow taken revenge, burning the whole garden, then why did the sight of flowers still drive her into panic? Something's missing.'

Revenge never restores what is lost, but it does make you stronger than your loss. Flowers alone shouldn't break her. She ought to be furious, burning every bloom on sight.

'Yet after successfully taking her revenge, at least supposedly, she still collapsed at the sight of flowers. Why?'

No.

My heart skipped.

No, my premise was wrong. It was the reverse. It wasn't strange that she broke down despite getting her revenge. She broke down because her revenge had failed.

Seo-rin did not avenge them. She must have fled. She'd opened the greenhouse and immediately realized how dire the situation was. Her youngest brother was already dead at the entrance, after all. She raged and she despaired, and yet she was clever. Even in chaos, she accurately judged that she couldn't beat this Anomaly now.

So she ran, vowing to come back. A reasonable conclusion to make.

'But then why didn't she tell me the truth?'

If that hypothesis was right, someone else must have destroyed the garden later. When I visited with Seo-rin, it was ash.

'Another Awakener, perhaps, while Seo-rin was in shock?'

Yet the Saintess was observing all major Awakeners with her Clairvoyance by then. Had another been present, she would have noticed.

'And the Saintess never mentioned it.'

She wouldn't hide a secret of this magnitude.

'Therefore... she didn't see the tragedy at all?'

I had never asked the Saintess about Seo-rin's past. In fact, I'd asked her not to watch during my private meetings with Seo-rin, and she respected that.

Thump, step.

Heartbeat and footsteps resonated until, at some point, I reached the garden's abyss.

There lay Dang Seo-rin, dead.

My breath seized in my throat. It was a scene of slaughter. Leaves sharp as knives, stems thick as skewers, had shredded her.

Death makes everything disappear.

No one remembered thathe, who fought a monster for the first time to protect his family, was an assemblyman's illegitimate son who, without a speck of help from the main house, had succeeded in running a flower shop in Busan.

No one remembered thatshe, who shielded her children, once loved the breath that rose off country roads and smiled when she bit into a peach her father had picked at dawn.

Between that man and that woman stood Dang Seo-rin.

She was quick-witted from childhood and keener still as she grew. When half of Seoul's citizens vanished in an instant and the masses fled Busan for Japan, Seo-rin argued that Busan would prove safer. History had shown that Busan would be Korea's last bastion. Secure a foothold now, fortify it with land and connections, and it would be a far safer stronghold than a Japanese city where they had no ties.

It was the right call, yet no one would remain to remember that rightness.

Death makes everything disappear—lives, loves, futures.

As half of Seoul ended in one blink, the massacre in this Busan garden was merely another day in the Void's routine.

The father. The mother. The second. The third. The youngest.

And the eldest—born for brilliance.

'Ah.'

Dang Seo-rin was dead.

"Ru...n..."

When the garden turned butcher, Seo-rin was struck first. The father could not abandon the child he loved beyond all else. Neither could the mother. They merely tried to save the remaining children, but the stems were too swift. She'd turned her back, shielding the child, and the spike pierced them both.

"Ah... ah... Mom..."

Yet even then, Seo-rin had not died but instead lay dying.

The father fell. The mother fell. The siblings toppled one by one.

Red flooded her sight.

"Dad..."

Death drew near.

Was she afraid? She seemed afraid.

Everything disappears.

Had even one family member survived, she would not fear so much.

Someone would remember.

Someone would remember our family.

"Ah..."

But all of them were dead.

Mother's lovely smile, Father's face when he puzzled over pots, their voices, the clothes that suited the youngest, how much she loved her family.

All of it, for a ridiculous reason like this, sank into the Void forever.

...

Seo-rin's lips moved soundlessly.

No voice emerged. A scream that could not become sound trembled in silence.

No.

'How unfair.'

O God.

Facing absurdity, she did what humans often do at the last: She called upon the most absurd being humanity ever conceived.

Please, O God. Just once more.

Her empty eyes, already stained with death, looked up through the torn greenhouse roof to see moonlight spilling down.

Give me a next time...

The vinyl quivered, but there was no wind. Perhaps it shook with her own ragged breath.

Everything I have, I will give it all away.

It was a sincere vow yet a contradictory wish. If she gave truly "everything," then even if time was granted, it would no longer be hers.

My name, my life, all my future, every memory... take them all.

Let me live... as a human being.

She meant it. To live as human, she would gladly surrender humanity.

She prayed for the paradox.

Present yet impossible.

I refuse.

I refuse this ending.

The garden fell silent. There was no breathing, no groans. Only plants squirmed, feasting on what remained of humans.

Dang Seo-rin was dead.

"..."

Moonlight tilted.

Moonlight is only sunlight reflected, yet people insist on calling it moonlight, as though a separate world lies beyond the mirror.

A shadow, not the real.

A being known only by an alias, not its true name.

Moonlight poured onto Seo-rin's corpse.

To the moon, it was natural: All things on earth are mere shadows momentarily reflected somewhere else.

Human yet not human.

Alive yet not alive.

Possessed yet bereft.

The light of the night sky at last found an anchor to exist upon the earth.

And in that instant—

"..."

—Dang Seo-rinopened her eyes.

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