Editor: echo
Discord: sdsc.gg/reapercomics
◈ I’m an Infinite Regressor, But I’ve Got Stories to Tell
Chapter 320
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The Skeptic XIII
This might not sound too convincing, but I actually care more about my companions’ personal privacy than you might expect.
I’m not like so typical subculture protagonist who goes, “Oh, you’ve had such-and-such trauma in your past? Then let heal you!” and then starts prying into every painful detail, and there are many reasons as to why.
“Mister. Actually, I’ve been bullied since fourth grade... Ahhh, thinking back on it, my life started falling apart back then. That’s when I learned how to loathe people, hate society, and give up on hope.”
“Didn’t you say it was third grade last ti?”
“Huh? Did I say that? Well, anyway—”
First off, human mory isn’t accurate. As soone who has Complete mory, this still amazes . Even when it cos to their most painful, life-defining traumas, most people still sohow hide them away in a haze that never quite clears.
For my part, each of my runs spans about twenty years. By the ti I entered my 776th cycle facing off against Leviathan again, my total lifespan had already sailed past ten thousand years.
Just imagine. How many contradictory “testimonies” do you think I’ve collected from my companions in that ti?
At so point, I picked up a certain habit—or you might call it an attitude—in how I deal with people:
“Don’t be too quick to judge.”
As Scott Fitzgerald once said, reserving judgnts is a matter of infinite hope. A person’s character isn’t determined by their words or actions in a single mont—it’s proven over ti.
This is the monologue of a regressor who’s outlived ten thousand years.
Does Oh Dok-seo sound like an idiot sotis? Yes, that’s undeniably true.
Idiotic speech aside, though, she never betrayed us, or for that matter, even when she was ntally corrupted by an Anomaly. (She just ended up punching her fans at a et-and-greet.) Therefore, I don’t assign too much weight or importance to remarks about a companion’s “past” or “trauma.”
A slight mistake in their mories? Who cares? They’ve already proved themselves with countless years of loyalty and action.
The sa goes for Yu Ji-won.
It didn’t matter whether she was so psycho who seized control of a convenience store the mont the apocalypse hit, or whether there was so past event that twisted her sense of humanity. Unless she took the initiative to tell herself, “Your Excellency, to be honest, I carry a very tragic trauma from my past,” I saw no need to dig into her history.
Among all my companions, Yu Ji-won ranked first place by a landslide in the “Never Talking About My Past” competition.
Even when we all drank together...
Even when just the two of us were chatting over drinks...
Even when she was on the brink of death, leaving her last words for the next run...
She never really divulged the details of her past.
Was it because she genuinely placed no value on her pre-apocalypse life? Or was she silently taking into account my own situation of having lost all mory of my pre-apocalypse past?
Whatever the reason, her past remained as silent and nebulous as a Void.
Hence...
“A little more natural, please... Okay, good.”
The photographer kept pressing the shutter, and the cara click-click-clicked away. Ji-won struck poses without so much as batting an eye at the nonstop cara flash. She turned her head this way and that, her face blank.
“All right. Now give a little smile.”
She offered a faint smile.
It might have been an earthshaking, mind-blowing event to , but the photographer hardly found it special. He just kept singing her praises—it was perfect, perfect!—and snapping pictures.
“Great, wow! You’re just perfect again today, Ji-won.”
“Thank you.”
“All right, next up we’ll have you sit in that chair over there, reading a book.”
So, yeah.
It turned out that in her first year of middle school, the 14-year-old Yu Ji-won—black-haired, because it’d be a while before her powers Awakened and turned it silver—was indeed a born psychopath in many ways. However, in this era, she was also a professional model.
“You’ve got to be kidding .”
I was hiding behind the scenes at the photo shoot, suppressing my presence with Aura and stealth, my mouth hanging open in disbelief.
“That’s just cheating.”
To the cara’s lens, Yu Ji-won was playing the quintessential star student, all dressed up in a crisp school uniform and wearing a flawless smile that was practically perfect in every way.
Translator: ZERO_SUGAR
Editor: echo
sdsc.gg/reapercomics
Over two weeks of practicing my stealth ga and sneaking around, I pieced together the story of this so-called “14-year-old con artist.”
Yu Ji-won was born into poverty.
As a girl, she lived on the third floor of a leaning villa on a steep hillside slum. Hers was a household of four: a grandmother with dentia, a father with anger managent and alcoholism issues, and a mother who had gotten sucked into so shady religious group.
“It’s like the trifecta of misery or sothing...”
A ssed-up ho, no doubt.
At this point, we’d usually delve into a squalid sob story of how deeply unfortunate Yu Ji-won’s ho life was, how her personality flaws were both innate and shaped by her environnt, and how that forces us to feel sympathy, yet also reprimand her for stooping to killing people, but...
“She doesn’t look miserable at all.”
Sure enough, Yu Ji-won was not your average kid. All of that “tragic family backstory” was just a minor inconvenience to her. Even if you just listened to the snippets of conversation with the photographer, you could guess how well she was managing.
“Oh, right, Ji-won. You have any interest in modeling for eyeglasses? A friend of mine is looking for a few student models these days.”
“If you can put in touch, Director, I’d be glad to work hard.”
“Oh man, our Ji-won is so polite! Not like most kids these days! Everybody I introduce you to says nothing but good things.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Case in point, even in an environnt where you’d expect a deluge of misery, she managed to live perfectly well. Despite being only 14 years old, Ji-won had already learned to distinguish between her family’s poverty and her own. She’d freed herself from relying on her parents’ allowance, instead filling up her own bank account through her own labor.
“Is this for real?” I muttered.
As you all know, Ji-won’s face was basically at the Status Ailnt: Kingdom-Toppling Beauty level. That was as true in middle school as it was later. She put her naturally extraordinary looks to work, making a living as a fashion model.
It wasn’t just her face that captivated people either.
“I may be polite, Director, but I owe it to your generosity. Not all adults would lend a helping hand to a child like . Being able to work with soone as wonderful as you is my good fortune.”
“Huh? Wow, Ji-won, you sure talk in a unique way! Haha!”
No matter which set she went to, Ji-won delivered her complints in a flat tone of voice that sounded deeply sincere.
She was “pretty,” “polite,” and “young,” and people found it painfully hard to brush her off, so all the modeling gigs out there practically fell into her lap.
“This is a middle-schooler’s idea of socializing?”
She was truly a force that broke the ecosystem.
She had a mature build for her age, a distinctively expressionless face that intrigued people, an air about her that could look childlike or strangely grown-up, and that disarming bit of charisma that soothed the hearts of weary adults.
Thus, 14-year-old “serial-killer-in-the-making” model Yu Ji-won was basically inhaling all the possible gigs in her age bracket like Kirby on a binge.
“...Seriously?”
Every day, she juggled classes and modeling jobs until well past 10 PM, then transferred from subway to local bus on her way back ho.
“What are you doing coming ho at this hour?!”
No sooner had the villa’s front door slamd shut than I heard a man’s shout from the third floor, her father’s voice.
Yesterday it was her mother who blew up, and now it was his turn.
“You little brat! Watch your tone, huh? Huh? Huh?!”
“I’m sorry. I was held back at school studying.”
“Don’t lie to ! I called your teacher, you know! Don’t you try to—”
“I apologize. I really was studying.”
“Hey! You... You little...!”
“I’m sorry. Please don’t hit my face, Father. If there’s a mark, everyone will notice.”
The yelling didn’t stop even after fifty minutes. The verbal altercation broke out into physical violence a few tis, but Ji-won always tried to shield her face. She wasn’t the only victim either. Her mom and grandmother were also caught in the abuse, until everyone was hurling insults back and forth.
So it wasn’t by chance that Yu Ji-won adapted so quickly when the apocalypse ca. Her world had fallen to ruin from the start.
During these two weeks, I didn’t just learn about Ji-won. I also investigated the area around her.
The slum rested on a steep hill, with crooked concrete poured through different decades so the alley and stairways resembled geological strata.
I stepped into the multiplex building across from the villa where Ji-won lived. On the building’s first floor, there was a small monthly-rent apartnt, and I rummaged through the mailbox in front.
National Health Insurance
Personal and Confidential
■■■
The recipient’s na was all static, blurred out by so glitch.
“So even Cheon Yo-hwa, who built this ‘past tiline’ for , couldn’t fully create a na in place of the real occupant’s identity...”
Inside the run-down building was a tiny studio apartnt about 7 to 8 pyeong in size.[1] A battered desk stood inside, stacked with ID cards like a driver’s license and a resident registration card.
■■■
The sa glitch. An unreadable na.
Yet the photo was clearly —or rather soone who looked exactly like , except younger by a few years.
I silently flipped the license over and over. Only the na was censored. The face was obviously that of a “younger Undertaker.”
There was no point trying to hide it.
“In this tiline, or at least in the world Cheon Yo-hwa is showing , the ‘past ’ was apparently living in this neighborhood.”
Then, another burst of shouting from beyond the shabby window. The father’s furious hollering echoed out, followed shortly after by the clipped and composed replies.
“You think I’m doing this just to squeeze money out of you? Huh? You—!”
“I’m sorry. I’m out of cash. Please forgive .”
It was so loud I could easily hear it all from my one-room across the street.
“Huh.”
So, incredibly, it turned out that in the “forever-lost mories” of my past, I was a resident of the very sa neighborhood as a 14-year-old psycho middle-schooler.
“...Is this for real?”
It was real.
For the ti being.
Breaking news.
The 20-year-old Undertaker (I learned my age from the ID card) used to be neighbors with 14-year-old Yu Ji-won.
“This is crazy. I can’t tell if it’s all Cheon Yo-hwa’s trick or if it’s so actual reconstruction from a database of the past.”
Whether it was real or not wasn’t that important anyway. My past was always a blank canvas, and my present mission was to paint a “connection to Yu Ji-won” onto that empty space.
The quest requirents were basically this:
(1) Intervene in Yu Ji-won’s life.
(2) “Imprint” the idea that she was “destined to be Leviathan’s Miko” all the way back in this era.
(3) Return to the present so we can use the newly affird “Miko of Leviathan” to defeat the Outer God.
Steps 2 and 3 could be figured out with ti. The first step was my imdiate priority.
I had to intervene in her life.
“Easier said than done...”
Think about it. Neighbors in the sa town can be both close and incredibly distant. Adding in a status gap of a “college freshman in a studio apartnt” and a “middle-schooler victim of dostic abuse” only made that equation more awkward.
At least Cheon Yo-hwa had the “tutor-student” connection with her older sister. ? I had nothing.
“Let’s see... How would I realistically get close to a 14-year-old kid?”
Forcing closeness out of nowhere would be pointless.
I could do sothing like rob a bank, hand Ji-won a huge pile of cash, and proclaim, “Hey, now you’re free! Problem solved!” However, that wouldn’t matter. What actually mattered was that the version of in this era ford a “natural bond” with the 14-year-old Ji-won.
If it wasn’t at least sowhat believable from the vantage point of my past self, I couldn’t accept it, even as a rewriting of history.
“Well... That younger would definitely have tried to help her sohow.”
I drumd my fingers on the flimsy plastic desk, thinking.
“When the Void ca, I risked everything to rescue the Yo-hwa sisters. That implies I had a soft heart, even as a teenager. No way I could ignore the kid next door getting beaten up every night.”
Of course, that younger probably didn’t know all that much about Ji-won. At best, maybe I had so basic sympathy for her.
“But to Yu Ji-won, sympathy and concern would be worthless.”
Even if I “happened” to et her whenever she took out the trash or said hi because we were neighbors, she’d likely see no value in .
“So I have to solve her problem. That’s the only thing that matters to her.”
And the main problem in her life is her family. If she had enough money, that might solve it.
However, as I said, abruptly giving her a wad of cash would break narrative causality.
“How can the of this era naturally, and believably, help Yu Ji-won make money...?”
At that mont, my eyes fell on my driver’s license lying on the desk.
Yu Ji-won had to shuttle from subway to subway to get to her photo shoots...
“Yes, that’s it!”
I’d found a way for “a random local college student” to get close to “a middle-schooler from an abusive household” in a natural way.
One week later.
Sa as the first ti I entered this rewritten past, I t Yu Ji-won in the middle of the narrow alley.
“Hello. If it’s not too much trouble, could you move aside so I can get by?”
She greeted with the sa line as before. The difference was that last ti, she carried trash bags in both hands. Now she was lugging a large duffel bag full of modeling gear.
I offered a friendly smile.
“Hey, Ji-won. How are you?”
“Do I know you...?”
“Nah, I’m just a neighbor. I live in the building across from yours.”
“I see.”
Sniff sniff.
She gave a subtle twitch of her nose, then lowered her head slightly.
“Pardon . I’m not very good at rembering faces. Next ti I see you, I’ll be sure to greet you properly.”
Well, yeah. If she decides you’re useless to her, she won’t bother rembering your face.
“Actually, I’m in a hurry. Could you please let pass?”
“Where are you headed?”
“Uijeongbu. I have work.”
Uijeongbu, practically on the opposite side of Seoul from here.
It wouldn’t be easy traveling that far on public transit, carrying all her gear and trying to keep up her condition for her job.
I pretended to be surprised.
“All the way to Uijeongbu? That’s pretty far.”
“Yes. It’s my usual routine. It’s no problem.”
“Still, that looks pretty tough...”
I glanced at the heavy duffel bag slung over her shoulder.
“How about I give you a ride?”
“Pardon?”
“I’ve got a car. It’s an old Matiz I picked up secondhand, but it still runs.”
Blink.
She tilted her head.
“Could you say that again?”
“I’ll drive you. I don’t have any plans today, so I can take a spin and drop you off.”
“...”
That’s right. Yhe idea was to beco Yu Ji-won’s “road manager.”
Balancing school and work had to be exhausting; the ti lost in commuting must’ve been her biggest burden.
And I had a way to fix that: a used Daewoo Matiz, which I’d hurriedly purchased a few days prior.
If I approached it from that angle, I could definitely get closer to this expressionless psycho-in-training middle-school model. It was a perfect tactic.
“Hmmm.”
While I patted myself on the back, Yu Ji-won tilted her head the other way.
Amusingly enough, that tilt was the sa gesture she’d do in the future.
“Let summarize. A certain Mr. Matiz, who claims we’ve t before, though I don’t recall it, an adult male older than , offers to drive , a 14-year-old girl, all the way across the city to Uijeongbu. For free. Simply because he has nothing else to do, and also the car is a dingy old secondhand Matiz. Is that correct?”
“Uh...”
“So you agree with that statent upon review?”
“Huh, well... yeah, it’s definitely suspicious. Sounds a bit like a stalker, doesn’t it?”
Yu Ji-won nodded, tilting her head back to center to stare directly at .
“Thank you. Then we are in agreent on that point.”
“...”
“...”
“...”
“...?”
“...”
Um.
Is it safe to assu our first eting just failed spectacularly?
Footnotes:
[1] A pyeong is a Korean unit of asurent that is used for area and floorspace. One pyeong is about 3.31 square ters or 35.58 square feet.
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