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 XXI

There is an epilogue.

As I have already stressed, this is nothing more than a side story, merely a manuscript that the regressor has never edited.

The Saintess of the Frozen World.

Was she not still waiting in the regressor's sickroom?

The stretch that was the 999th cycle and the 1,000th stage had yet to draw to a close.

Yet a side story is a privilege granted to only a single chapter. To speak of the Saintess I would need one more side story.

Therefore.

"…"

For the moment let us turn to someone else.

Across the time that has flowed since millions of years ago, across the lives that diverged into hundreds of billions of branches, let us speak of someone who, by chance, brushed against hers for the briefest instant.

"…Huh?"

He was a man without a birth.

He had no father. He had no mother.

Surely parents must have existed, but he could not recall them. He could not even verify their existence.

Because, as a regressor, the price he paid for an infinite future was a finite past.

It is not only death that makes everything go missing. There are things one lets go of simply in order to go on living.

'Busan Station concourse? Out of nowhere?'

Thus it was only natural that he had forgotten something.

'What the— I was just drinking with Dang Seo-rin and the world ended?'

He could not remember.

What moonlight had poured over the night sky of a city that existed nowhere. How earnestly his comrades had fought, ready to die, on a satellite as beautiful as a mirror. What kind of life had been there.

Who had worn what sort of smile.

'…I can't make heads or tails of this.'

That was the contract required for him to live on.

"You piece of shit! What kind of bullshit is that?!"

'Well then. First things first, let's save Seo-gyu.'

Life continued.

Perhaps the regressor had settled all the deferred payments in one lump sum.

There are things every human being is forced to pay as they live.

This universe collects memories at the price of life from every human equally.

Even a regressor endowed with [Complete Memory] could not be an exception, so long as he remained human.

— Still haven't given up, my friend?

That day too he dropped by a café, took a sip of the café au lait that had been placed beforehand on the table, and found a note hidden beneath the cup.

Reading it, the regressor let out a small snort.

"The one who doesn't know how to give up is you, you geezer."

Once, he had had a friend.

A fellow regressor.

Curiously, the two were very different.

Where he had resolved to keep on living in order to remain human, his friend had chosen endless deaths for the same purpose.

Thanks to that, the friend never forgot whom he loved most—and in return forever abandoned the chance to save that love.

He, on the other hand, saved his own love without realizing it—and the price was to forget whom he loved.

Which is the greater pain?

Pain belongs solely to the one who feels it, so its depth is hard to compare.

A person can only choose the kind of sorrow they will shoulder.

Even forgetting is a choice.

From the fact that no one remembers the pain of being born, it follows that every human sets foot in this world having chosen a single, common wound.

He was a man without a birth.

He was human.

"The Constellations don't exist. The Saintess of National Salvation, the Conqueror of the Alps… they're all characters I created."

He lived the life he had chosen. He carried out the flow of time he had decided.

"I awakened about twenty days ago. From that day my hair changed color, and I began having nightmares full of monsters."

"So you created the Constellations."

"That's right."

He recruited a Observer. He persuaded a Sovereign.

One by one he drew in the humans who would walk beside him.

And so, before he knew it, it was June 24.

"…"

It was time to go meet someone. That whole day had been set aside for a single person.

'Strange. My heart's pounding more than usual.'

He tilted his head.

In truth, to a regressor like him, feelings such as 'freshness,' 'novelty,' or 'excitement' were terribly faint.

Of course, they had trodden the same timeline hundreds upon hundreds of times.

No matter how dear the person he was about to meet, there was a limit, no moment could feel like a first meeting.

And yet.

'…It feels exactly like I'm setting out on a journey.'

For some reason today was different.

Was it because the weather was mild? No, the weather on June 24 was always the same.

Had he processed a different schedule than in previous cycles? Again, no, the regressor's timetable had long been perfected for maximum efficiency.

True, starting with the 1,000th cycle he had awakened a new ability.

I had planned to discuss that difference later, but it had not altered his itinerary.

Everything was the same.

Even so, for some reason, it felt different.

"Hm."

At the mirror he finished straightening his clothes, sprayed on cologne, and allowed himself a faint, elusive smile.

'Such a curious thing.'

Now then.

Let us speak about her.

"…"

She was a woman without a birth.

She had no father. She had no mother.

"Ah…."

Yet she believed she did have a father and a mother.

The moment she opened her eyes—no, the moment she was born—she took the corpses strewn before her eyes to be her family.

"Ah… ahhh… Mom… Dad… it's… a mountain…."

To be born, and from the moment of birth to carry an eternal wound—

that was the price she had to pay in order to live as a human being.

The flower garden was burned to the ground.

She believed it was because she had lost her reason in anger and incinerated the anomaly.

Swept up in her own flames, even the traces of her family had been reduced to carbonized fragments by her magic.

"Nh."

Staggering, she rose to her feet.

The first temperature she felt upon opening her eyes was the heat of her tears, the second was the chill of corpses.

The very first thing she experienced after birth was, of all things, the funeral of her family.

"Uh—nnh. Ugh… uuh…."

Unable to cast magic, unable even to muster the will to cast it, she dug the soft earth with a shovel.

She was used to digging soil.

But digging not to plant flowers but to bury family was something one could never grow accustomed to.

She was doing the same thing for the one-thousandth time.

Even so, it could never become familiar.

"…"

After four days spent barely managing to lay her family to rest, she collapsed beside the graves, almost fainting outright.

After a full day unconscious, she opened her eyes in a haze.

A night sky stretched overhead.

'What… am I doing?'

Pale moonlight settled over her.

Her hair, her mouth, her whole body felt brittle. Ants crawled across her palms, but she could not care.

There are tears that evaporate in moonlight, not sunlight.

'Why should I keep on living?'

She was the human who considered suicide the earliest in her life.

'It hurts….'

It was agony.

Though they called her an anomaly, the void, the night sky, or an outcast deity, the very first thing she felt as a human was pain.

Should she just close her eyes like this.

"…"

At that moment.

Flames flowed across her skin—formless, soundless fire.

"I can't die."

She muttered.

"If I die… everything disappears."

Father was dead. Mother was dead. Even her siblings had been brutally murdered.

Accepting their deaths was impossible. How could one possibly accept such absurd, senseless deaths?

Much less—

She could not allow even the traces of their deaths to vanish as well.

'I will remember.'

She stood up.

Her arms trembled. Her legs shook.

Sleeping a single day had not restored the strength she had lost.

Nor had it erased four days of digging earth with the feeling she might die at any moment.

'Only I can remember.'

Even so, she rose.

'Let's live.'

Because she had wished not to end with such a conclusion.

'Let's keep living.'

She washed her hair. She washed her body. She washed away her tears. She laundered her soiled clothes. She folded them. She retched up her tears. She put away baggage. She cleaned the room. She wiped away more tears.

'Live, Dang Seo-rin. Survive.'

How wonderful it would be if she could not only survive but bring them back to life.

'You must live.'

Why is it that, for human beings, not only death but even bare life requires resolve.

Armed with resolve and another layer of resolve, she chewed through each second that followed the next.

Perhaps because her mind was consumed by that.

"…?"

One day she came to herself to find she was standing alone in the middle of a desolate crosswalk.

"…Huh?"

Strange.

Only a moment ago she had been buried in guild paperwork.

She had just formed a small group called the Samcheon World, and its leader had been absent for more than five days owing to a family death.

Naturally, the guild members understood her absence. It was an age in which family or friends were lost with terrifying ease.

That, however, did not make the backlog disappear.

"Hmm? Uh, so… where is this?"

In the middle of working she had thought,

Ah, when I finish all this, I really will have no home left to return to, forever.

"…"

She looked up at the sky.

'Where should I live?'

Released suddenly from work, the vaguely postponed worry stepped close.

She wore a vacant expression.

Since the funeral she seemed to have forgotten how to craft precise expressions.

What grand meaning could there be in moving the muscles of one's face.

'I need another place to stay… no, I hate that.'

She would never be able to call a new house home again.

Because when she returned, she would never forget the sight of her family, who had smiled at her only the day before, and her siblings, who had answered her as though annoyed, lying dead.

'…Ah. How about a train?'

An idea flickered.

'Mm, good. A train doesn't look like a house at all, and I can outfit it like a VIP suite if I want.'

Though impulsive, the more she chewed it over, the sweeter it became.

'I'll secure an entire train and turn it into a guild dorm. In this era commuting separately is a luxury.'

'In an emergency we need to muster our fighting power at once, and still keep at least a minimum of privacy…'

'Then maybe I should just occupy an entire station? Divide the guild among multiple trains. If the guild grows later, that certainly…'

It was then.

"Excuse me, are you all right—?"

A voice came from somewhere.

"Hello— over there—"

"…?"

"Are you all right—?"

Goodness.

She had reacted to the voice a touch too late.

She must have been lost too deep in thought without noticing.

She turned her head.

"If you stay there it's dangerous! No, don't move either! Please wait right there!"

Far away,

beyond the vast crosswalk, at the far end of the crossing, a man was waving his arm.

"Just a moment, please don't move carelessly!"

He was yelling something.

But to be honest, she paid no attention to his words.

'…A song.'

She was listening to a certain sound.

It seemed to be coming from that man.

The closer he came across the crosswalk, the clearer the sound grew, allowing her to locate the source of the song.

'A heart.'

The song was beating quietly in his heart.

Ever since she awakened—no, since the moment she was born—she had heard sounds from every object in the world.

For some reason nothing could be heard from the night sky,

yet the ground was always full of all kinds of noise and clamor.

"Please wait."

"…"

The man was different.

A slightly different song was spreading from his heart.

It sounded like a human voice. Like a machine. Like a piano, like a violin, like a cello, as though every melody were layered together.

She found herself thinking,

'…Beautiful.'

For the first time in her life.

'So very beautiful.'

She—

found something in this world beautiful.

He came closer and said something, she too said something to him.

There at the intersection.

He had no past to tell her, no way to say where he had been born or what childhood he had lived.

But she did not need it.

She could not speak her past to him; even if she did, all of it was fated to be a lie.

But that did not matter to him.

He had no birth.

She had no birth.

And yet between him and her, there was life.

A very strange, very beautiful thing.

"I'm called the Undertaker."

"I… I'm Dang Seo-rin."

This is a tale for such an intersection.

"My name's a bit odd, isn't it?"

"No."

Just as it is not strange for there to be one human who devotes himself to an outcast deity,

it is not strange for there to be one outcast deity devoted solely to a human.

"I think it's a lovely name."

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