Chapter 371

Regression (18)

-00 : 52 : 19

I casually pulled up the status window to check the time left. Less than an hour until Floor 4 ended.

"Ugh..."

"Chomp... chomp..."

The junior angel had already collapsed from exhaustion a good while ago, and Eom Hong-jun-ssi looked worn out too, sitting on the ground and gnawing on dried meat. Well, fair enough. He'd done a lot to earn that fatigue.

"Well, this should be enough..."

I glanced sideways at the senior angel, who was still watching me, then lay down cleanly in the snow. That angel probably had plenty on its mind too. Probably wondering why Archangel Raphael hadn't intervened yet. I wondered about that myself, but decided not to worry about it too much.

What I was thinking about instead was what came "after." Where to go from here.

Floor 4 had turned out remarkably well, all things considered, for how bold the attempt had been. I'd built a connection with Eom Hong-jun-ssi, succeeded in keeping every human on Floor 4 alive, and would soon receive an Elixir. Oh, and my identity staying hidden and the clues I'd gathered about divine power were a bonus on top of that.

If I invested a lot more time here, I might be able to reach a complete, or at least excellent, understanding of divine power. Whatever I learned here would help enormously going forward. There'd be plenty of uses for it, in all sorts of ways.

But I had no intention of trying Floor 4 again anytime soon. Maybe once or twice more at most, not the way I used to, camping here and digging into Floor 4 for as long as it took.

Shouldn't I be trying to see a perfect ending here?

No.

I wasn't who I used to be. I could regress across floors now, for real. Which meant I didn't have to obsess over clearing this floor perfectly. If I had another goal, I could go pursue that first.

In other words, I'd gained something like a free save point in a game. My position had changed completely from before, back when clearing a floor once meant I could never come back to it. To put it even more simply, I'd gone from broken to something past broken.

Of course, the appeal of understanding divine power and prying information out of the angels was real. But right now, I had a few things that mattered a lot more than that.

First, I needed to check whether my current strength was enough to hold back the monsters closing in on reality. Second, since I'd stopped Michael Zetter, I needed to check the butterfly effect that would follow from that. And third, there was the question of how to handle the other people I'd built connections with across my past regressions. Literally everything from here depended entirely on my own will.

"Five minutes left, huh."

Well, honestly, everything I just listed mattered, but none of it was my actual top priority right now. My real top priority was something I could only confirm once time passed.

-00 : 00 : 00

-Congratulations! You have cleared Floor 4!

Time passed, and when I blinked, I found myself back on Floor 1. I let out a long breath and, without even checking the reward summoned in the corner, went straight back to reality. My heart was pounding loud. I guess I'd been more anxious than I realized.

I closed my eyes to settle the anxiety. Narrowed my senses down, and narrowed them further. Just a moment ago I could feel the presence of every living thing near this building, but now all I heard was the white noise of this quiet room.

"Guess I'll meditate a bit."

I sat cross-legged on the bed, pushing down the negative, oddly twisted thoughts crowding my head. When had this started? Probably around the time I was struggling to make it back to the Tutorial. I needed to settle myself down a little.

Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat the deep breaths. Calm the self. Down, further down. I pictured a still lake and slowly breathed in, breathed out. In, out.

I forgot my worries. I forgot myself. Once I'd let everything settle and thought I'd found complete calm, I opened my eyes slowly.

-Sizzle.

The satisfying sound of meat cooking. A stew bubbling away. A familiar scent drifting faintly through the mouthwatering smell of food.

It felt like a dream somehow. The whole scene lacked any sense of reality, and I blinked without meaning to.

"You're already awake? It's not ready yet."

Choi Ji-won turned to look at me, pouting a little as if troubled. I could tell just from her eyes. That was... Choi Ji-won.

Not the Choi Ji-won who didn't know me, who looked at me like a stranger. Not the Choi Ji-won who backed away, troubled, when I acted too familiar. This was the Choi Ji-won I'd kept carefully in my memory. My girlfriend, Choi Ji-won.

I found myself springing up off the bed before I even realized it. It couldn't be an illusion. I needed to confirm it myself.

"Can I hug you?"

"...I'm cooking right now."

She said that, but she set the frying pan down anyway, and spread her arms to welcome me, and I pulled her into a hug.

"Thank god."

I buried my nose against her shoulder, her ponytail brushing softly against it.

I thought it to myself, like reciting it.

"Really... thank god."

Really... really, thank god.

I'd been telling myself, to keep my sanity steady, that of course Choi Ji-won would be back. But deep down I knew there was a real chance her memories hadn't returned at all.

Honestly, this whole "pattern" thing was just my own inference. It wasn't some fixed law. There'd been plenty of room for it to turn out wrong.

"When I actually entered Floor 4... my memories just came back, all at once."

But hearing Ji-won say that, it seemed my reasoning had held up after all. Thinking about it again, I really, really felt grateful.

Either way, with Choi Ji-won back, I could finally relax. Maybe because of that relief, I ended up doing nothing but goof off for about three months straight. Well, given everything I'd gone through, I think a little rest like that is fair to allow myself. Because honestly, truly... it had been rough. Really rough.

We played around, and played some more, and even once I'd gotten used to doing nothing but play, every day still somehow felt new. Around that time, Ji-won never said it out loud, but she'd clearly started harboring a quiet thought. Shouldn't we start thinking about regressing and climbing the Tower again soon? No, wait, Jun-ho's probably exhausted too...

"So, uh, Ji-won-ah. I need to tell you something."

I decided to confess a kind of sickness I'd been suffering from.

"...Sickness?"

"Yeah. Sickness."

"...I'm listening."

Choi Ji-won's expression turned serious in an instant. This was exactly why I hadn't wanted to bring it up, but it was something I had to say, so there was no avoiding it.

"So what is this sickness... exactly?"

"It's not anything that serious, honestly."

The sickness I'd caught was simple enough.

"I... I don't feel like doing anything anymore."

Apathy. Right now, I was suffering from a severe case of apathy. Spending time with Ji-won was enjoyable, and something I wanted to keep doing endlessly. But beyond that, there wasn't really anything else I wanted to do.

There was nothing I desperately wanted to eat, nowhere I particularly wanted to go, nothing I particularly wanted to own. The whole world outside Choi Ji-won felt like it had lost its color.

"I think I get why."

I'd had similar symptoms before, honestly, but never this bad. The cause was obvious enough.

"I think it's because... I got too strong."

There was nothing I couldn't do now. Nothing on this Earth was beyond my reach.

If I wanted to become famous, I could. If I wanted to eat something, I could eat it. If I wanted some event to happen, I could make it happen. Given enough time, I could bend reality itself however I wanted.

I was practically a god now, one who'd traded mental fortitude for the power to manipulate reality. Genuinely, functionally omnipotent.

Maybe that was exactly why everything felt so distant and vague. In a word, I'd lost my desire. The only thing I still wanted was time with Choi Ji-won, and I already had that in hand, which meant I'd lost the engine that was supposed to drive me forward.

"...I think I roughly get it."

Choi Ji-won, listening beside me, spoke carefully.

"A lot of my friends really wanted something badly, and then once they actually got it, they lost all interest. I lost interest in kendo for a while too, after I won a big competition. In your case, Jun-ho, it just seems like... that scope got way too wide."

"You think?"

Hearing that it was a common enough thing eased my mind a little. It meant she probably had some idea of the solution too.

"For me... I started by just handling whatever was right in front of me. Even without anything I wanted to do, there's always something you have to do. If you throw yourself into whatever's right in front of you without thinking too hard, you find yourself wanting things again eventually."

"So in my case..."

Climbing the Tower? Or holding back the monster invasion? Both mattered, really.

"I think I get it, roughly."

Still, the immediate direction was set. Climb the Tower again. And keep close watch over Earth. Neither would be difficult for me now.

"But... let me rest one more month. That's fine, right? I want to see how the world's holding up first. Then I'll climb the Tower again. Promise."

"Okay, really."

At the time, I still hadn't noticed it.

A question that would've occurred to me if I'd thought about it even a little. A fact I hadn't been able to see until now, blinded by the goal right in front of me.

"First, let's head up to Floor 15. See the elder again. It shouldn't be hard."

The future waiting for me wouldn't be nearly as easy as I thought.