Chapter 251 - Episode 32. The World After the Fall (1)
Chapter 251: Episode 32. The World After the Fall (1)
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「I wanted to see a story that was utterly impossible. I wanted to see an impossible story create a reality where it could become possible. Perhaps that is why this novel belongs to the modern fantasy genre.」
―From the afterword to 『The World After the Fall』
* * *
Destruction was always happening everywhere. Few people witnessed it, warned others, and asked for help.
Most people did not listen to those warnings. To them, some forms of destruction were not destruction at all.
Calling that destruction is a joke.
Some kinds of destruction were too small and trivial to be called destruction.
Yet sometimes, people died because of such trivial destruction.
Ten-year-old Jaehwan was one of those caught in that small destruction.
“Don't come any closer! I'll call the police!”
“I said I was taking him. What right do you have to stop me? Do you even earn any money? Or...”
“Jaehwan is my child!”
The shouting made Jaehwan's head hurt.
Where am I?
Jaehwan raised his small, ten-year-old body. His soft cheek, stuck to the little floor desk, stretched out before peeling away with a loud smack.
Workbooks lay scattered across the desk. Equations from the four arithmetic operations, along with scribbles, were spread over them in a disorderly mess.
They were not simple scribbles. They were drawings with a certain shape.
Jaehwan stared silently at them. He could not make sense of the drawings, but as he looked at them for a long time, he began to see their rules one by one.
A skinny man was holding something like a sword, using it to tear apart the problems and equations in the workbook.
Jaehwan blankly traced the drawing with his fingers.
Then memories flashed through his mind.
They came from somewhere beyond even the word distant. They shook the ten-year-old Jaehwan's mind, battered his sanity, and made his eyes roll back.
What is this? Why am I here?
What about Big Brother? What about Mulack?
Where is this?
......
I see. This place.
......
This is the 「First Nightmare」.
First Nightmare?
What was that again?
Clutching his head with both hands, Jaehwan felt his mind slipping apart.
His ten-year-old lungs heaved, and the room spun around him. At first, it seemed like illusions were flying through the air. Then he realized the objects in the house were actually floating.
A sharp scream rang out along with the crash of shattering glass.
Jaehwan looked down at a broken piece of plate.
A shard as sharp as a blade.
One word surfaced in his mind.
Stab.
Without realizing it, Jaehwan gripped the shard. A cut appeared between his small palms.
It hurt. But it was not painful.
“Ahhh! Let go! I said let go!”
The woman's scream rang out again.
Jaehwan looked toward its source. A woman he did not know stood there.
A woman he did not know.
“Mom.”
The word slipped from Jaehwan's mouth before he knew it. A moment later, he recoiled in shock at the fact that he had said it.
Mom? Did I have a mom?
I...
I was alone for ten billion years.
With his head throbbing as if it would split open, Jaehwan approached the woman with the plate shard in hand.
A man stood over her, threatening her with a raised chair. Jaehwan could not see the man's face clearly.
He moved closer.
Soon, the man's face came into view.
Ah.
Young Jaehwan froze in place as electricity raced through his entire body.
This...
His head hurt.
His grip tightened around the plate shard.
The man's face had no eyes, nose, or mouth.
Tiny numbers covered it, as though someone had meticulously edited over his face in a video.
Jaehwan remembered the equations written on his desk moments ago. He struggled to recall what they were called.
That face is an equation. That face is...
The System.
Jaehwan screamed and rushed forward without realizing it.
The woman's pale face. The man stumbling back in surprise.
His right arm driving forward with all its strength. Someone screaming. A strange smile curling over his lips.
I did it. I did it.
I killed 《Big Brother》.
A moment later, Jaehwan's entire body stiffened.
Big Brother? What is that?
The screams blended together into a single ringing in his ears.
The world lurched for a moment. When he came back to his senses, someone was holding him tightly from behind.
It was his mother's embrace.
His mother's embrace, which he had not felt in so long.
Held in her arms, Jaehwan swayed like a doll with its strings cut.
The man had collapsed to the floor, blood streaming from his arm.
The man's shriek.
The man's wound.
Blood running down between the torn flesh.
As though he had suddenly remembered something, Jaehwan looked down at the hand holding the plate shard.
The blood-soaked palm of a ten-year-old child.
Why?
The question twisted fiercely through his mind.
Why isn't it silver?
“Jaehwan, ah, Jaehwan!”
Not knowing what else to say, the woman only called her bloodied son's name as she held him.
Jaehwan raised his head with a vacant expression.
“Mom.”
The moment their eyes met, the woman's face went white.
“Ah... ah...”
Without realizing it, she fell backward and scrambled away from the child.
At least in that moment, Jaehwan was not her son.
To her, he looked like a demon. Or a monster from beyond this world.
The monster tilted his head at an odd angle and said,
“Mom, blood is red.”
* * *
“It is delusional disorder.”
The man in a white coat and silver horn-rimmed glasses said it without preamble.
The woman stared blankly at his face, then looked at the nameplate on the table.
Beneath the words “All-Purpose Counseling Center,” the title “Teacher” and the man's name were written neatly.
The man called Teacher was fairly well known in this field. No one knew what, exactly, he taught, but everyone called him Teacher. Rumor had it that politicians and business leaders sought him out during election season.
A friend had introduced the woman to him.
Her friend had warned her that taking her child to a psychiatrist might start strange rumors. It could affect the child's future. Most importantly, psychiatric care was expensive.
“Ma'am?”
As though he had read her thoughts, Teacher spoke in a kind voice.
“You need not worry about the cost. I do not charge much for this kind of counseling. It is a personal hobby of mine.”
“Ah, yes. Thank you.”
“You were referred here, so you have likely heard the basics. I am not a doctor. But I have cured more people than doctors have.”
Cured people. The woman wondered what that meant.
He was not a doctor. So he could not cure illnesses. Had he decided to cure people instead of illnesses?
At first glance, it even sounded more impressive than what doctors did.
“You came at the right time. Judging from the child's condition, it could lead to a developmental disorder if it worsens.”
The explanation felt incomplete somehow, but it was enough for a woman who knew almost nothing about psychoanalysis or psychiatric disorders.
More than anything, the prestigious certificates and polished plaques of appreciation displayed around Teacher's office supported his authority.
Hoping her words would not sound pathetic, the woman asked,
“Is my child in serious condition?”
“You must know, since you saw it yourself. The symptoms he displays...”
Teacher stopped there, but the woman seemed to understand what he had left unsaid.
She stared blankly at the table, then placed a hand on Jaehwan's shoulder. Jaehwan looked up at her.
The woman quickly averted her eyes, but Jaehwan could feel the trembling in her fingertips.
He realized that she was afraid of him.
“Did I raise him wrong?”
“Ma'am.”
“My child is fine. He studies well, he has lots of friends, and his teachers... It was only for a moment. It is all because of him. He... my child was only, just for a moment...”
Without answering, Teacher rose from his seat. He led Jaehwan to a counseling table set up in one corner of the office, then drew the curtain.
It was thin and simple, not nearly enough to block sound. The woman's tense breathing could occasionally be heard beyond it.
Teacher asked Jaehwan, who had lowered his head toward the table,
“Jaehwan-gun. Can you answer a few questions?”
Jaehwan gazed at Teacher for a moment before answering.
“You cannot cure me.”
Teacher smiled gently. It was a relaxed smile, as if he had already seen many children like Jaehwan.
“How old are you, Jaehwan-gun?”
“I forgot.”
“You forgot? Why did you forget?”
“Because I lived too long.”
“How long is too long?”
“Ten billion years.”
The woman gasped behind the curtain.
Teacher glanced toward the curtain, then began questioning Jaehwan again.
“What were you doing until a little while ago, Jaehwan-gun?”
“I was fighting Big Brother.”
“Who is Big Brother?”
Jaehwan did not answer.
Teacher wrote something down on a piece of paper, then continued.
“Why did you come to fight Big Brother?”
“To destroy the System.”
“The System? What is that? Can you explain it?”
With pain splitting his head apart, Jaehwan desperately tried to remember what the System was.
But he could not.
As though he had expected that, Teacher held out paper and a pen.
“Could you draw it for me?”
Jaehwan took the pen and paper and began drawing something. It did not take long to finish.
Teacher took the drawing from him.
It showed a giant tree, one with dry roots and a gaunt trunk.
Interest flickered in Teacher's eyes.
“Is this tree the System?”
Jaehwan did not answer. A terrible dizziness had swept over him.
Teacher continued asking questions even as Jaehwan struggled to breathe.
“...So, at this tree's root, there is something called a Tower. It kidnaps people from Earth and sends them climbing up the tree.”
“Yes.”
“And that is what you call 「cultivation」?”
Jaehwan nodded.
“And you survived that 「cultivation」 and climbed to the Tower's upper floors?”
The questions continued in that manner. Jaehwan kept answering them the same way.
Adapters and Awakened Ones.
Chaos and the Abyss.
Gods and Followers...
Without understanding why he knew any of it, Jaehwan focused on answering Teacher's questions.
“So an ‘Unique World’ is a virtual space where one's ideals are realized. Is that correct?”
“Something like that.”
“And once it gains the faith of many people, the ‘Unique World’ becomes ‘reality.’”
Jaehwan nodded.
Through the curtain behind him, he saw a shadow sway. Each time Jaehwan answered, the woman's breathing trembled irregularly.
Every answer made Jaehwan's world clearer. As that world became more concrete, the history he had lived through became more absurd.
But young Jaehwan did not understand what was trampling that history beneath its feet.
With every question Teacher asked, Jaehwan saw Teacher's face change strangely.
Not his expression.
As the questions continued, complex rows of numbers covered Teacher's face. They were the same numbers he had seen on the man he stabbed.
Voices spoke in his head.
Stab him.
Stab him to death.
Jaehwan bit his lip until it bled.
No. I can't. Mom will be sad.
He curled himself up, trying to mediate the voices arguing inside him.
The questions stopped at once.
Blood dripped through his tightly closed lips. Startled, Teacher lifted Jaehwan up. He carried Jaehwan to the examination room's bed, called an employee, and had them tend to Jaehwan's injury.
A short while later, he called Jaehwan's mother aside.
She sat there with a deathly pale face.
“Jaehwan reads a lot of novels and comics! He has a vivid imagination...”
“Ma'am.”
“My child is very smart. My Jaehwan...”
At last, the woman burst into tears.
Teacher waited for her tears to subside. Only after she had used more than a dozen tissues and finally steadied her breathing did he slowly speak.
“Has Jaehwan-gun ever suffered violence from his father?”
The woman stopped breathing for a moment before she answered.
“N-no.”
“You may speak honestly. I can help you.”
“No! It is true. He would never hit a child.”
There was a kind of desperation in her denial.
Teacher considered for a moment before he said,
“But I can see traces of violence inflicted by his father in the child. Every symbol the child has drawn appears to be a metaphor for his father.”
The woman blinked with a blank expression. It was the face of someone who had never even considered such a thing.
Teacher began explaining anyway, alternately showing her his records and Jaehwan's drawing.
The drawing showed a tree, a Tower, and a man stabbing toward the sky.
“The tree and the Tower. Both possess imagery of ‘rising.’ Then there is the ‘sword’ and the ‘stab.’ Do they not feel somewhat alike?”
“I don't understand.”
“In psychoanalysis, they are often called phallic images.”
“Phal... lic?”
“That is right. In fact, I have rarely seen a case where the correspondences fit this well, so even I am quite surprised. If Teacher Freud were alive, I think he would have been very pleased to see Jaehwan.”
The woman nodded without realizing it. After all, Freud was a Teacher, this man was a Teacher, and the man before her was called Teacher too, so perhaps they were connected somehow.
The words Teacher had circled and the complex concepts of psychoanalysis were paired together.
They fit so perfectly that they looked like words born to be connected in that way from the beginning.
The woman understood less than half of what Teacher said, but she barely grasped that the situation was serious.
Dabbing at her tears with a tissue, she asked,
“Could he have used violence without my knowing?”
“I cannot say. What is certain is that the child shows signs of abuse. Ah, of course, this is not a medical opinion. It is my personal view. But as I said, I have cured people whom even doctors could not cure.”
The woman nodded anxiously.
“Then what should I do now...”
Perhaps it was because the expression that passed over her face was so utterly hopeless.
Teacher tapped the desk as though to comfort her.
“Please do not worry too much. The psychological scars appearing in Jaehwan are not necessarily negative.”
The woman's face brightened as she asked,
“What do you mean?”
“The symbols Jaehwan uses are more detailed, concrete, and even organically connected than those of any patients his age I have seen in my research. This is not simply a matter of an active imagination. You could say there is something literary about it.”
Teacher paused to choose his words, then continued.
“When I listen to Jaehwan-gun's story, I almost feel that a world like that could really exist.”
“What does that...”
“Do not misunderstand me, ma'am. I do not mean it in a bad way. The child's condition is serious, but if he can overcome these symptoms in a positive way, his artistic talent may blossom instead.”
“Artistic... talent?”
“Some studies claim there is a close correlation between delusional disorder and Savant syndrome.”
“Savant...?”
Teacher lightly shook his head. He knew the woman had not understood a word.
“It is a diagnosis often attached to geniuses. In any case, I only mean that you should not worry too much.”
With that, Teacher closed the file folder.
“For now, separate the child from his father. If you need help, I can contact the appropriate agency. I also recommend that you come in often for counseling for a while. Jaehwan requires treatment. More precisely, for Jaehwan's future.”
Footnotes:
Chapter discussion