Chapter 245 - Episode 31. Big Brother (10)
Chapter 245: Episode 31. Big Brother (10)
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Understanding Jaehwan’s condition, Mulack spoke.
[Your fate is astonishing, and tragic. You may be the only ‘being’ in this universe to have endured so vast a tragedy.]
Jaehwan gripped the broken Dokbul and slowly pushed himself up.
He knew he could not win. But he could not kneel here.
[Do not stand.]
He could not give up here. Even if he had failed to attain Transcendence, even if he had no power at all, he had to stand.
[If you stand, you will die.]
He had never once crumpled simply because he lacked strength.
Barely managing to rise with Dokbul as support, Jaehwan panted for breath. Mulack quietly extended a hand toward him. The landscape around them shimmered, and before long, a small ‘tank’ appeared at Mulack’s side.
Opening the lid of the tank, Mulack said,
[I have changed my mind. If you listen to me, I will place you inside this ‘tank’ and preserve you. A ‘being’ like you is worth preserving. But if you remain uncooperative to the very end...]
Jaehwan smiled without a word.
He had not come all this way just to crawl into a tank and drag out his life. Even if he lost here, he would not give up until the end. That was the courtesy he owed the ‘Clothes’ that had perished in his place.
Seeing Jaehwan smile, Mulack sighed and shook their head.
At last, Mulack’s hand slowly shifted to aim at Jaehwan.
[Need some help?]
Jaehwan doubted his own ears.
That voice was one of the countless voices he had heard inside the Fall of Time.
‘You...’
[As for who I am, hm... let’s say I’m someone who spent one hundred million years doing nothing but Stabs.]
‘What?’
[And not one hundred million times, one hundred million years. Do you understand what that means?]
His right hand, gripping Dokbul, trembled violently.
Something was trying to settle into that hand.
[Hey, are the rest of you not helping? Just because you’ve all achieved Transcendence, are you going to pretend you don’t know me now? You’re not all trying to become things like 《Big Brother》, are you? Tch. These bastards, nobody’s answering.]
The voice kept muttering to itself.
[Out of the sixteen here, I’m probably the weakest, but even someone like me... no, wait, you should be the one begging. Hey, first self, hurry up and pray with all your heart for this great body to descend.]
But Jaehwan was in no state for that.
The space distorted by Mulack was gradually crushing him. Jaehwan could tell that the force bearing down on him was power born of the Fall of Time. The very same power that had imprisoned him for ten billion years. The power of the Fall of Time, spanning all of space, was crumpling his Unique World. Silver light spilled out with a groan. The pressure was so overwhelming it felt as though his head might burst at any moment.
An irritated voice rang out.
[Seriously, you have no style at all.]
Something seemed to settle into his arm, and then the arm holding Dokbul moved on its own. It was a sensation on an entirely different level from 「Selflessness」. In that instant, Jaehwan’s right arm slipped free from every constraint of space-time. The once-incomprehensible fabric of space-time felt as fragile as a sheet of paper, and something like a flash blazed.
The space-time before his eyes was tearing apart.
The darkness that even 「Constellation Rending」 could not cut. The supreme realm he had not been able to reach even through a million years of training was unfolding right before him. The darkness was crumbling to powder.
The shattered soul forms of the Masters spilled out from fragments blown free of 〈Panopticon〉.
Mulack’s eyes filled with bewilderment.
The sixth stage of Awakening.
「Editing」.
The ultimate Stab, repeated for one hundred million years, was finally revealing itself through his hand.
* * *
[This is impossible...!]
As Mulack screamed, Jaehwan watched a storm of Stabs dominate time and space.
What kind of span was one hundred million years?
Jaehwan had never once tried to imagine a stretch of time that long.
Even the roughly one million eight hundred thousand years he himself had been forced to live through still did not feel quite real to him, yet there existed a being that had lived one hundred million years and done nothing but Stabs.
And that being was one of his own ‘Clothes.’
[Wahahahahahahahaha!]
Cracks spread throughout 〈Panopticon〉 beneath the storm of wildly unleashed Stabs. Even though he was wielding them with his own right hand, Jaehwan could not follow their trajectories. This was not an attack that unfolded within the category of speed, whether fast or slow. An attack like that could never pierce the power of the Fall of Time.
The one million eight hundred thousand years Jaehwan had lived proved that.
All speed was ultimately distance divided by time, and no Stab could escape the influence of time.
Yet the Stab now unfolding before him was not affected by time in the slightest.
Jaehwan could not understand how such a thing was physically possible. Perhaps it was only possible because it was not a physical phenomenon at all.
In other words, the Stab his right hand unleashed on its own had stepped outside the physical laws of this world. It was closer to an idea.
[Die! Die! Die!]
He could not tell whether he was swinging his right hand, or whether his right hand was swinging him.
As the surrounding time and space turned to rags, Mulack’s expression gradually twisted.
‘It hurts.’
As time passed, Jaehwan too found it harder and harder to endure. It was not only because the tyranny of his right hand was tearing apart his soul form. Jaehwan’s pain spread more into the mental realm.
‘This bastard...’
Memories of a man were flowing into Jaehwan’s mind.
「I do it. I do. I can do it.」
They were the memories of a man who had spent one hundred million years performing Stabs.
「I stab. I stab. I stab. I stab. I stab. I stab.」
That man, who looked exactly like Jaehwan, had the number 3751 in place of a name.
3751.
It was merely a number attached for convenience, a number with no particular meaning. It was absurdly shabby for the name of a soul that had lived one hundred million years, but 3751 did not seem to have any complaint about it. To begin with, he was not the kind of being who cared about names.
The 3,751st Jaehwan.
His sole concern was ‘Stab.’
Having received the first self’s soul from his predecessor, 3751 spent all day repeating Stabs. Using the first self’s right hand, he stabbed into the darkness again and again.
One hundred thousand years, two hundred thousand years, three hundred thousand years.
One million years, two million years, three million years.
He loved Stabs so much that even if he spent all day stabbing, no, even if he spent hundreds of thousands, millions, or tens of millions of years stabbing, he never grew tired of it. Among Jaehwan’s ‘Clothes,’ there was no being more skilled at Stab or more in love with it than he was.
He was the part of the human called Jaehwan with only ‘Stab’ stripped out.
That was the man, 3751.
3751 continued to perform Stabs. He tried stabbing with perfect form, then with a sloppy stance. He tried stabbing very slowly, then very quickly. He tried stabbing in all directions at once, then driving all his strength into a single direction.
Every kind of Stab in the world.
All those Stabs unfolded from 3751’s sword point.
Of course, even 3751 sometimes thought. A person could not live by doing nothing but Stabs.
Why, for what reason, was he stabbing?
Why was he repeating this cruel act?
For whom? For what?
3751 would often stare into the darkness, then at the scrawls left behind by former ‘Clothes,’ and ask himself those questions.
‘What am I?’
A question countless ‘Clothes’ had asked over ten billion years, only to fail to answer in the end.
But a few ‘Clothes’ had succeeded in answering it, and survived.
「I am the very act by which I live.」
3751 was one of those ‘Clothes.’
Then the question led to another question.
「Then why am I performing this act?」
Depending on the nature of each Clothes, the answers split into many branches.
There were apocalyptic heroic answers like, “To protect justice,” and answers like an honest voter in a corrupt state, “To protect my conscience.”
There were cynical answers like, “Because it annoys me that there’s something up there,” and rather prickly answers like, “Because the first self wants it.”
Of course, there were also deeply personal answers like, “Because I want to get out of this place,” and answers that were highly advanced, philosophical, and noble.
But most Clothes died before arriving at any of those answers. And after countless answers vanished, the answer left at the very end was this.
「Just because.」
That was the answer of the man, 3751.
So 3751 repeated Stabs, just because. Without greed for salvation or longing for death. He simply stabbed into empty air, and stabbed, and stabbed again.
Only stabbing. That alone was how 3751 confirmed his existence.
As though trying to deny the fact that he had been born into this world for no reason, had come to exist for no reason, and was repeating this act for no reason, he kept stabbing, again and again, just because.
「Ugh, uh, uhhh...」
As a result, 3751 went mad tens of thousands of times.
「Hahaha! Hahahahaha!」
He was always drenched in madness.
「I’ll kill them! I’ll kill them all!」
He was always drunk on his own swollen ego.
「Ha ha, hahaha... ha... huuuh... ngh...」
And whenever the day drew toward its end, he cried. Just as he stabbed and stabbed again, he cried and cried again.
3751 stopped crying around the time his Stab had surpassed the concept of space. It was probably around the fifty million year mark.
3751’s Stab blazed with light.
And at last, the darkness tore.
It did not tear completely, but it was enough to be called a small nick.
3751 was startled. He rejoiced. He trembled, and for the last time, he shed tears. Tearing the darkness meant that much.
That small nick was proof that his efforts had not been in vain.
Proof that the path he had walked was not wrong.
A small ‘trace’ carved into that immense void was proving his existence.
At last, he came to know who he was.
From then on, his Stab changed.
He still stabbed, stabbed, and stabbed again as always, but something important had changed.
As the days of Stab piled up, 3751’s heart swelled with a vivid yet gentle emotion. He was glad that ‘Stab’ existed in this world, and glad that there existed something for him to stab at. He was deeply moved by the fact that he was capable of ‘Stab.’
A Stab filled with gratitude toward all things in the universe.
That there was something there, and that he could stab at it.
3751 realized the infinite truth contained within that act, and understood the meaning of the void granted by the distant universe.
Through Stab, he understood the universe. This universe had begun with ‘Stab.’
Even the first moment the universe was born, when particles collided with particles, had ultimately come from one thing ‘stabbing’ into another.
At last, he understood.
Footnotes:
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