I'm an Infinite Regressor, But I've Got Stories to Tell-Chapter 428

[Dok Seo-mon’s glaring attack!]

[It was super effective!]

Frightened by Oh Dok Seo’s unusually sharp glare, I mumbled a few random excuses and ran away as fast as I could.

A sigh escaped my lips.

“Life really isn’t easy…”

“Ahaha. You’re sweating cold, sir. Maybe oh Dok Seo was just overreacting a bit?”

Go Yuri said.

By the way—just to restate it—at this moment, Go Yuri was equipped with a 24-hour stealth function.

Literally, she had become one with me, and thus in this world, only I could see her.

“Think about it. Miss Dok Seo always has flirting equipped on the tip of her tongue. ‘I’ll save you,’ or ‘Only I can understand you.’ She says those kinds of things all the time without the slightest hint of embarrassment, doesn’t she?”

The demurely smiling face in front of me now, the lightly humming voice as if amused—

All of it was merely a personality formed by countless Go Yuris from within my memories, combined together into one composite being.

In a sense, it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to say that I was currently suffering from an extreme form of dissociative identity disorder—multiple personalities.

With the small distinction that in my case, communication between personalities happened freely and in real time.

“Then? If Dok Seo was acting just like always, where did my bad feeling from earlier come from? Was it just my instinct throwing a tantrum?”

“Oh, that’s obvious.”

Go Yuri chuckled softly.

“If Dok Seo hasn’t changed, then the only possible conclusion is that you have, Guildmaster.”

“What?”

“Guildmaster, toward Miss Dok Seo.”

Go Yuri pronounced it deliberately, as if to leave no room for doubt.

“You felt some kind of sixth sense telling you that if you kept staying near her, you might start to develop emotions quite different from before. So before that could happen, you ran away.”

“……”

But no matter how clearly someone enunciated nonsense ‘non-sense’ it didn’t suddenly turn into truth.

“Are you saying… I almost fell for that little brat Dok Seo earlier??”

“Yes.”

“You’ve finally lost it, Go Yuri!”

“But if you think about it from the other side—it’s the same, isn’t it? The people who fell for you, Guildmaster—they all did so when they’d lost hope, and you were the one who reached out to help them.”

Go Yuri’s face wore a bright, teasing smile, like an emoticon stuck in place.

“So maybe you’re the same, Guildmaster. You were getting ready to wrap things up cleanly, when—bam. Someone you never expected, Dok Seo, worked tirelessly across hundreds of regressions just to help you.”

“……”

“When you save someone, they save you in return. Hwaaah~ Such an old proverb passed down through the Infinite Void itself…”

“I’ve never heard of such a proverb!!”

Absolutely not, no matter what happened!

There was no way I could ever admit that.

Me, feeling my heart flutter for Dok Seo? Ha! That so-called little sister must be insane. Oh Dok Seo? O-O-Oh Dok Seo?! I’d rather date the Inunaki Tunnel or the Meteor Shower!

“Guildmaster, I’m living inside your brain, so even if you say that in your head, I can still hear everything.”

“Could you respect a bit of privacy, please!”

“Hmm. Well… I think your privacy disappeared the moment you decided to seal your entire life story inside a novel and publish it to the whole world.”

“……”

“And for the record, the Inunaki Tunnel’s true form is a little girl, and the Meteor Shower’s true form is a married woman soothing a child. Oh my. I had no idea your tastes were that broad, Guildmaster.”

“It’s just a figure of speech! I meant I’d rather hold hands with monsters than get flustered over Dok Seo!”

“Only hold hands, you say? My goodness.”

“I really can’t have a single proper conversation with you!”

Go Yuri chuckled.

“I’m sorry. But it can’t be helped. Siblings are destined to tease each other to death over every little flaw…”

“E-eh, Undertaker-san?”

At that moment, someone called out from behind me.

Japanese.

When I turned my head, a person with black hair, wearing an apron, stood there, holding a box in both arms.

“Ah. Kurosawa.”

“Y-yes! Good evening.”

She bowed deeply.

Kurosawa Touka.

To me, she was more familiar by the shorter nickname “Kuro.”

She hurriedly lowered her head, flustered.

On the work apron she wore, four characters were printed:

[Dang Family Flower Garden].

At a glance, she looked a bit scatterbrained, but surprisingly—just a short while ago, she had marched straight into Dang Seo Rin’s flower shop and made a passionate PR pitch about the “108 reasons you must hire me.”

The Dang Family Flower Garden, long run in traditional K-style clan management, had been moved by her youthful passion.

As a result, Kurosawa became the flower shop’s first-ever foreign employee.

“Still working this late?”

I smiled.

“It’s quite late. You’re just a part-timer, yet you’re working so hard.”

“I-it’s not just a part-time job! I really, truly want to learn everything about this flower shop… um, eto…”

“Hmm?”

Kurosawa set the box down.

Then, as though her earlier bow hadn’t been enough, she bent deeply again—ninety degrees this time.

“T-thank you so much for bringing my mother here to this village last time!”

“Ah.”

I smiled bitterly.

“Didn’t you already come with your mother to thank me before?”

“Y-yes, but still… I-I haven’t repaid your kindness yet, Undertaker-san! Until I do… no, even after I do, I must always remain grateful…”

Kurosawa didn’t speak quickly.

She didn’t seem the type to handle social interactions well.

Most likely, she’d learned more about fermentation than about opening her heart to others.

Yet even so, before running into me by chance, she had clearly practiced these words in her head many times, stringing them together carefully, one by one.

“When we arrived in Busan, I heard that Tokyo had fallen into chaos, and I was so worried. I thought, what if something happened to my mom—I thought I would go crazy.”

“……”

“But then I heard that Undertaker-san went to Tokyo and solved everything. I cried a lot… really…”

“You heard that from Dang Seo Rin?”

“I heard it from Miss Dok Seo!”

“……I see.”

Of course, the reason I’d gone to the Japanese archipelago wasn’t to save Kurosawa Touka’s mother, but to make an impression on the key figures who would later form the Magical Girl Council.

In other words—it was a favorability grind.

Bringing Kuro’s mother safely to Busan was nothing more than a side quest accomplished along the way.

But every alley is the front yard of someone’s home.

To the person involved, my side quest had been her main quest.

“Thank you so much! Th-thank you!”

“……”

The first “thank you” was in Japanese; the second, still clumsy, was in Korean.

Under the night sky, Kurosawa bowed her head deeply.

And beside her—

――――――――――

Please grant me luck. Please save me from all those small, accidental misfortunes—like being crushed to death by a falling rock.

――――――――――

A corpse, covered head to toe in black monkey fur, stood silently beside her.

A vision—seen only by me.

In a distant past, back in the 444th regression, I had picked up the Monkey’s Paw.

That was the tragic end of a girl named Kuro, found at the foot of Seongsan Ilchulbong in Jeju.

――――――――――

I’m sorry for being born.

Monkey’s Paw, please make me disappear.

――――――――――

Those were the last words she had written in her diary before she vanished.

And now, before my eyes, there was no longer a cursed, hairy corpse—only a girl, working late into the night, dirt and grass clinging to her apron, bowing deeply in thanks.

“I’m glad.”

“……? Sorry?”

“Go home soon. I kept you too long. Give my regards to your mother.”

“Ah—y-yes! Have a good night!”

Even as she left, Kurosawa kept turning back to bow again and again, even from a distance.

Once her silhouette melted into the darkness beyond the seventh streetlamp, Go Yuri spoke softly.

“She’s a good person.”

“……Yeah.”

“The path reached by a possessed one and a regressor working together—it’s not a bad sight.”

The situation had improved greatly compared to before.

Even under the crushingly tight schedule, Oh Dok Seo had managed to deliver as many Udambara as possible to the awakened ones before June 17th arrived.

These Udambara themselves were a variant improved by the Sword Queen.

Originally, they parasitized the user’s body, granting only a fake kind of immortality.

But the Udambara–Plum Blossom eventually transformed into a true blossom over time.

“Most of the monster waves have also been repelled.”

Go Yuri, reading my thoughts naturally, nodded.

“There are still a few small issues remaining, but those will resolve themselves once the Infinite Void is completely purged.”

“And the remaining Great Voids are…”

“One appeared recently in Seoul—White Night.”

Go Yuri smiled faintly.

“And the other is Dream Within a Dream—the unconscious underground I’ve rented out using the dreams of all humanity.”

“……”

“My final temple.”

Hình dạng

5.

“As everyone knows, my regression point is June 17th, around 13:59.”

The Tower of Babel.

Once again, in this regression, the meeting room of the National Road Management Corps had been established.

The members of the Regression Alliance wore serious expressions.

The one leading the meeting was Oh Dok Seo.

“And the White Night in Seoul—the starting point of the Infinite Void that turned everything south of the Han River into a wasteland—occurred exactly one minute later, at 14:00.”

“……”

“In short, there’s only a one-minute gap.”

Every member of the Regression Alliance listened with utmost care to Oh Dok Seo’s words.

It was an oddly unfamiliar scene for me, but for them, it felt natural.

‘It’s like…’

In the corner of the meeting room—

where no one but I looked—a reincarnator with pink hair stood silently.

‘Just as the reincarnator who once fought on humanity’s frontlines passed the baton to me, the regressor…’

Time flowed on like a river.

Ravenously.

Drinking the reincarnator’s soul, feasting on the regressor’s blood.

Licking clean all the wounds of mankind, leaving behind no fresh blood—only the faint scent of iron hanging everywhere.

Thus, though time was a river, its current was made not of water—but of blood.

“So my role, as the one who prophesied the truth of this world before you even regressed, is simple. I pave the way before you arrive.”

Even now, this old man still had one last mission to fulfill before stepping off the stage of history.

“One minute. Within just one minute, we must stop the White Night from erupting in Seoul.”

All Great Voids must be sealed completely.

Only then could the earth return to its original form, without a single death by anomaly.

“Not just Seoul. We also have to purge Dream Within a Dream. In other words, within that same one minute, we must hunt down the final abandoned god—Go Yuri, who secluded herself within everyone’s dreams.”

The □.

“Only if we do that will our world truly be freed from the anomalies.”

“……”

“The reincarnator’s billions of years. The regressor’s tens of thousands. My own mere decades. All of those years of effort depend entirely on this one-minute extermination.”

“I have a question.”

Yoo Ji-won raised her hand.

“We’re aware of the large-scale Void that appeared in Seoul, called White Night. But what kind of Void is it exactly, that it needs to be purged in conjunction with Go Yuri’s Dream Within a Dream?”

“It was incineration.”

The person concerned, Go Yuri, answered.

But her words didn’t reach the meeting directly.

Thus, Go Yuri could only participate through my mouth.

That wasn’t unusual.

That was the duty of Zero_Sugar—a shaman bridging the divine and the mortal realms.

“Guildmaster is a regressor.”

The trace of Go Yuri, the first human to reach the divine realm, spoke.

“The world always resets according to the regressor’s standard. But it’s never a perfectly complete reset.”

“……”

“Time always leaves residue. Even if people don’t consciously realize that the world is repeating through regression, faint… very faint afterimages remain.”

“I see.”

Yoo Ji-won nodded.

“In anomaly terms, it’s like All Creation’s Play or the Infinite Void. In human terms, prophets or possessors. The more regressions occur, the more remnants appear that can sense it.”

“Yes.”

Go Yuri smiled gently as she looked around at her ‘sisters.’

“Even a regressor who’s lived only tens of thousands of years has those remnants. So what about me, who’s been reincarnated for billions?”

“……”

“As with the Sword Queen, anomalies and awakened ones have appeared who could perceive my reincarnations. Rarely. But those rare cases accumulated over billions of years until they became delusion.” 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

For Go Yuri, it was a problem.

First—anomalies discovering the secret of her reincarnation.

Second—awakened ones inferring the meaning of the “□” carved into their hearts, weakening the powers she had granted them.

“So I decided to gather all that temporal waste and burn it away at once.”

“Burn…?”

“Erase every trace of the reincarnator. Make it so neither anomalies nor humans can notice. Thus, I would achieve victory over the anomalies—and leave a hollow scar for humanity. That was the purpose of the Incineration.”

And the place of that incineration was—

“South of the Han River.”

The name of that funeral:

“White Night.”

Go Yuri smiled.

“It was the white night I spread over the earth to bring down the world I had dreamed and dreamed again—Dream Within a Dream.”

Dream and night.

Therefore—

“If White Night fails, my entire plan collapses. I will no longer remain a faint afterimage within dreams, but fall back into being merely a single human who once lived in reality.”

“……”

The meeting room fell silent.

Perhaps because they all briefly glimpsed the mind of a reincarnator who had never hesitated to commit any act of slaughter to realize her plan.

“That’s right.”

Oh Dok Seo nodded, his tone unwavering.

“So we must prevent White Night from occurring—and at the same time purge the Great Void of Dream Within a Dream. Both are devices sealing the being called Go Yuri.”

“In the next regression, you mean?”

“Yes. The next one.”

Oh Dok Seo looked at me.

“And that will be your final regression.”

“……”

“There will be no more regressions. No more reincarnations. No more humans toyed with by anomalies. No more earth tainted by the Infinite Void.”

But then Oh Dok Seo added:

“I hope the ending will be one where, even after all the Voids disappear, Go Yuri and Go Yo-il still remain as humans.”

“……”

“Can you do it, old man?”

“Defeat the dual Great Voids left by the first and final abandoned god within one minute, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“A simple task, then.”

I smiled.

“I’ll show you my true skill, Dok Seo.”

Current timeline.

3,558th regression.

The Regressor began his final regression.