Chapter 411 |
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The Reincarnator I
――I don’t remember my first life.
That’s because I don’t have a good memory like you do, Doc. Ah, of course, I did have a chance to improve it, but I naturally refused.
A Complete Memory Ability, you ask. Ahaha. What kind of curse is that, who in the world would want to receive such a thing?
...It’s faint, at best.
There are two scenes that I can barely recall.
There was a playground in my neighborhood. A playground covered in sand. Yes, it was an old one.
I would meet with children whose faces and names I didn’t know there during the day, and we would part ways in the evening.
"The children I used to play with at the village playground in my youth. They must all be dead by now."
But, that wasn’t actually true.
I had joined the resistance in Busan. Of course, I was a non-combatant, not a combatant.
Ah. For your reference, a massive organization like the ‘National Road Management Corps’ obviously didn’t exist back then.
There was no such thing as an ‘awakener’ either. Strategy guides hadn’t been discovered like they have been now... and people with strange abilities hadn’t been found yet.
But then, a man who was leading a part of the resistance at the time was about to pass by me when he suddenly stopped.
The man’s rank was much higher than mine. I was a non-combatant, while he was a combatant, and on top of that, he was in charge of the most dangerous reconnaissance team.
The man spoke.
"By any chance, aren’t you from □□□ village?"
I don’t remember his exact words.
As I’ve told you, my memory is terrible compared to yours, Doc.
But I probably said something like this.
"Yes, that’s right. How did you know...?"
"Oh. I knew it. Don’t you remember me? It’s me. Whenever it snowed, we used to run all over the apartment complexes having snowball fights."
"Ah..."
Honestly, it was absurd.
Who would remember a childhood like that?
I can guarantee you that a person makes far more friends before the age of 12 than they do after the age of 12.
It's just that we parted after playing just once at the playground. We parted after kicking a soccer ball on the field. We parted after throwing the winter snow.
You just can't recall their faces or names.
"What’s your name?"
"Su-yeon."
I just ended up smiling vaguely.
"It’s Su-yeon, Reconnaissance Team Leader."
"What’s with the Team Leader. Just speak comfortably."
"Ahaha..."
It was an era where you couldn’t be comfortable.
The day the hordes of aberrations, though back then we just called them monsters, finally arrived. Anyway, on the day the stain of the Void reached Busan and everyone fought a desperate battle.
That man fought without giving up until the very end, gathering everyone, combatants and non-combatants alike.
I lost an arm too.
Or was it a leg? Perhaps both.
Just as my eyes were getting so heavy they were about to close, in the distance, in the middle of a swarm of countless monsters.
The man who had acted like he knew me, saying we were from the same village, was fighting while bleeding from his entire body.
As I closed my eyes, I wondered.
"We’re going to be defeated anyway."
"The world is going to end anyway."
"Why is that person fighting so hard?"
That was my first life.
A scene I no longer remember.
And...
“――And that man, was you, Doc.”
I was at a loss for words for a moment.
“What?”
Go Yuri smiled faintly.
“So, in a way, we were actually ‘childhood friends’. Ahaha. Isn’t that funny?”
“...”
“My second life was a little later. When I was born, oh my. The Void had already arrived and my parents had already fled to Busan, you see.”
Despite my question, Go Yuri quietly continued her story. Slowly, as if not blaming a child who couldn't keep up with her footsteps.
“My parents ran a bakery.”
Busan. A bakery.
“But the world was so broken. You can’t afford to leisurely run something like a bakery. Just like me in my past life, my father went to war as a combatant and my mother as an assistant... and both of them passed away.”
Go Yuri’s expressions were varied.
She would sigh, then she would smile, and then she would rest her cheek on her hand.
The night gallery.
A one-person play flowing softly in an exhibition hall where hundreds of regressions were displayed.
“At a young age, just as all the children in Busan did, I went to war as a child soldier.”
“...Jeong Seo-ah.”
I said, as if spitting it out.
“The bakery owners have a different child in each cycle. One of them...”
“Yes, that was me.”
A bright smile.
“It didn't have any special meaning. Even if it was the body I was reborn into, as I said, the timing was far too late.”
“...”
A world she was born into too late.
An era where there was no longer even a chance for salvation.
“I showed combat power that was no different from my first life, and so I was eliminated. Hah. It’s embarrassing... Someone like me is disqualified from being a Reincarnator.”
Was it her first battle.
Go Yuri, no. ‘Jeong Seo-ah’ was killed in action.
Just before her eyes closed. She saw it then, too.
Far away, at the final defense line, she saw the figure of one person fighting in the middle of a battlefield where bullets rained down.
The man who was a ‘childhood friend’ in her previous life and a distant ‘superior officer’ in this life was being pierced through the chest by a tentacle, breathing his last.
She suddenly thought.
Why was she living a life like this?
What is life?
From her third life onwards, her memories truly started to become vague.
“I didn't want to forget the 1st and 2nd lives, so I diligently took notes and such. But from the 3rd, how should I put it? Ummm. It became hard to feel any meaning,”
Go Yuri said.
“I was continuously born as the child of different parents, as a different person.”
Reincarnation.
She was born in Japan. She was born in Germany.
Reincarnation didn’t care about nationality. However, the era was relatively fixed.
Based on the point when the Void arrived, the earliest she could reincarnate was 20 years prior.
Go Yuri couldn’t understand why she was repeating this reincarnation so many times.
To consider herself a Buddha or the Dalai Lama, she had never received any sort of enlightenment or anything of the sort.
She just kept on living.
“In any case, we have to stop the end of the world, don’t we?”
She vaguely set a purpose for her life.
“I... that is, ‘Jeong Seo-ah’ died. But when I went back to Busan after reincarnating again, my parents were perfectly fine.”
Of course, Jeong Seo-ah’s parents didn’t recognize her.
In the place she should have occupied, another child, a new ‘Jeong Seo-ah’, existed.
Nevertheless, to her, those two were still her parents.
“With each reincarnation I repeated, the number of people who were my parents, my family, and my friends gradually increased.”
Their nationalities were different. Their statuses were different too.
The degree and color of the love she received were also different.
“Still, they were all very precious people.”
“...”
“Did you know? I was even born as Ms. Noh Do-hwa’s younger sister once.”
“What?!”
Go Yuri covered her mouth with her hand.
Ooh-hoo-hoo.
A delighted laugh escaped.
“That surprised you the most.”
“N-no. But still. I’ve never heard that National Road Management Corps Director Noh Do-hwa had a younger sister...”
“Of course not, Doc.”
Go Yuri’s head tilted slightly.
“When you are born again, when you reincarnate. The ‘me’ of the past life disappears.”
“...”
“Miss Noh Do-hwa. She was really kind. She was very cold to other people, but, at least to me, his younger sister. She became a proesthetic limb doctor for me, who had suffered from a disability in my legs since birth.”
“What...?”
“When I became the child of Ms. Adele and Mr. Emit.”
Shock followed shock.
Like a wave.
“I felt a little sorry.”
“Old Man Scho’s, child? The two of them didn’t have any children...”
“Even so, I was an adopted child. Both of them poured out more love than I deserved on young me. However, during that time, I was desperate to stop the end of the world one way or another.”
“...”
“I was confident, too.”
She had already experienced hundreds of reincarnations.
Go Yuri was fluent in numerous languages. She had reached a level of knowledge and a realm of experience that an ordinary human would find difficult to achieve.
“Gathering funds was easy. So was gaining power. I poured all the resources I could possibly use to prepare for the destruction.”
“...”
“My parents..., Mr. Emit and Ms. Adele worried about me. Still, I persuaded them and headed to the Korean Peninsula by myself... and died trying to block the advent of the Outer God ‘Taegeuk’.”
Go Yuri looked up with a blank gaze.
At the painting titled, "Title: Ten Legs".
“When I looked for them in my next lives, Mr. Emit and Ms. Adele. They never adopted a child again.”
“...”
“And for some reason, whenever the time for Taegeuk’s advent came around, the number of times the two of them came to Korea on business trips increased.”
A small murmur.
“As if their lost daughter was there.”
“...”
“Isn’t it strange? Neither of them should have any memories of a past life.”
Go Yuri said.
“The Schopenhauer couple started coming to Korea. Noh Do-hwa-ssi’s younger sister was gone, and the reason she wanted to become a proesthetic limb doctor was gone too. But from the next life on, she always became a proesthetic limb doctor.”
“...”
“If a child was born under different conditions at a different time, with a different gender, the name would likely change. But the bakery owners always named their child Jeong Seo-ah.”
Go Yuri turned to look at me.
“Why, do you think? Doc.”
“A hole... in the heart.”
I barely managed to say.
“The Void.”
“Yes.”
Go Yuri nodded.
“I was someone’s most precious child. Someone’s most precious younger sister.”
“...”
“When I was alive, when I was people’s irreplaceable confidante and family. Those people were happy because of me. Even Miss Sim Ah-ryeon, who is lying on your lap there.”
A smile formed on Go Yuri’s lips.
“You see, I’ve been born as a child with cerebral palsy quite a few times. At that time, Miss Ah-ryeon was my unni.”
“...”
“Her younger sister couldn’t speak well. Couldn’t express herself. Couldn’t move her body. So Ms. Ah-ryeon, she would always draw various pictures in a sketchbook, and she would show them to me and play with me.”
She was happy.
The fact that in a past life she had been a mastermind wielding great power behind the scenes of the government wasn't very important. There would be a next life anyway.
“Ta-da, ta, ta-daaaa...”
In front of her eyes, her unni.
No, if you considered the actual length of time she had lived, she was just a kid who was overwhelmingly younger than ‘her’.
In any case, the person who was her unni in this life spread open a sketchbook and, ehehe, she laughed.
“H-how is it?”
It was good.
Though she couldn’t speak.
As she conveyed a sound closer to a cry than a voice, uh-oo-uh, Shim Ah-ryeon smiled as if troubled.
A slightly tearful face.
“I-is it good? I, if you could just... even without words. It would be really nice if I could understand you...”
You had a talent.
Hundreds, no. Thousands. She, who had now lived a number of lives where counting them had become meaningless, could say for certain.
This unni’s talent was enormous.
It wasn't an empty compliment. She had no memory of seeing someone who could draw as well as she did. At least among the currently living painters and aspiring painters, she was the best.
However, even a person like this dies.
It wasn't the fate and lesson of humanity that everyone dies someday.
Monsters that no one at the current point in time could even imagine would appear, wield an unreasonably absurd violence that made it impossible to resist, and kill everyone.
“Haaah. I, it would be nice if I could be sick for you instead... S-sorry. That unni is the only one who’s okay...”
This... shining talent before her eyes.
This painter who could become greater than anyone.
...This unni who, for the sake of one younger sister who was lying on a sickbed for her entire life and dying lonely without a single friend, would run to the hospital as soon as school was over to show her pictures.
She will die.
And, herself too.
“...!”
From a distance, a voice was heard.
Her unni was crying.
Severe cerebral palsy. On top of that, stained with complications. The fact that she had endured for years up to this point was because of the ‘Reincarnator’s’ superhuman mental strength.
“...T-Teacher! My sister... i-is. My sister. Please, please......!!”
A life that did not last long.
As she felt the sensation of it being cut off, as she eavesdropped on her unni’s faintly audible cries, she thought of something.
Ah.
I wanted to save children like you.
Sorry.
I’m sorry, unni.
For not being able to save you.
I’m sorry for being born like this.
“Doc.”
“...”
“Have you ever thought about it? Why would someone who lived an ordinary life suddenly want to draw?”
Still.
Go Yuri was looking up at the painting.
“Despite having other amazing talents. The ability to organize citizens in an apocalyptic world and operate a wide-ranging government, why would she choose the route of a proesthetic limb doctor of all things?”
“...”
“Why do people often feel like they’ve lost something even when living an ordinary life. Why isn’t there a precious someone by their side? Why do they feel like they’ve lost their life, when they possess the treasure that is life?”
“...”
“Why did she awaken an ability to feel other people’s emotions without words?”
Go Yuri turned around.
Our gazes met.
“Doc. According to a certain myth, the guidance of destiny plays a part when a person chooses a profession. It’s a theory that says regardless of what you did in this life. What you will be ‘possessed’ by is already decided.”
“...Karma.”
“Correct.”
Go Yuri smiled.
“Karma. Cause and effect. Usually, it’s the concept that this life is decided by what you did wrong, or what you did right, in your past life... But I... I think the complete opposite.”
In your past life.
What did you lose?
What kind of hole was bored into your heart?
□.
“I am the one and only reincarnator.”
She was someone’s loss.
“I am the life before the life that decides what people like, and what they dislike. I am the starting point of all routes.”
She was someone’s precious person.
“I am...”
She was.
“The cause that awakened the awakeners.”
She was the first awakener.
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