Chapter 253 - Episode 32. The World After the Fall (3)
Chapter 253: Episode 32. The World After the Fall (3)
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“Good grief...”
The counselor known as Teacher gave a troubled smile, complicated emotions showing in every wrinkle. Teacher let out a small sigh, thought for a long while, and only then spoke.
“All right. Jaehwan’s world may truly exist.”
Jaehwan’s eyes wavered. Teacher went on with a smile.
“I will acknowledge that possibility.”
A cold hypothesis crossed Jaehwan’s mind.
Teacher was certainly unlike ordinary physicians.
Could Teacher too be some kind of gate created by the 「First Nightmare」? Considering everything Jaehwan had experienced so far, it was not entirely impossible.
Even while Jaehwan’s thoughts continued to spiral, Teacher kept speaking.
“But whether that world truly exists or not, Jaehwan, you need to understand this. If you try to protect your world, the people you love will become unhappy.”
A few faces surfaced from the haze of memory.
Faces were all Jaehwan could remember. Like objects with their labels torn away, those faces had no names attached to them.
An old man who especially loved slashing and was always picking fights.
A handsome blond man who carried a law dictionary everywhere.
A woman who built towers, grumbled constantly, yet always fought on his side.
A child who had trusted him more than anyone else in the world.
As a swell of longing rose inside him, Jaehwan struggled to remember their names. But no matter how hard he tried, he could not. Only their expressions came back to him.
As they watched Jaehwan, who lived only to destroy this world, they had often worn sad smiles.
Had they not been afraid of the end as well?
Had they not feared the System collapsing, feared the world coming to an end?
...
Jaehwan thought of his mother’s face, waiting behind the office door.
“Jaehwan, you said that ‘tower’ would appear ten years from now.”
When Jaehwan slowly raised his head, Teacher continued.
“How about this? Until those ten years are up, you keep coming to the clinic I run.”
“Why should I do that?”
“If, ten years from now, that thing you spoke of, the ‘Tower of Demons’...”
“Tower of Nightmares.”
“Anyway, if that ‘Tower of Nightmares’ appears, I will believe what you said. And I will do whatever you tell me to do.”
It was a proposal Jaehwan had never expected. Teacher quickly added another line.
“Ah, of course, I will not charge a single thing for counseling over those next ten years.”
“Why would you go that far?”
Jaehwan could not understand it. Whether Teacher meant it or not, there was no reason for Teacher to do so much for Jaehwan’s sake.
Teacher spoke in a warm voice to Jaehwan, whose gaze was sharpened by doubt.
“Would it count as a reason if I said I do not want to see a boy’s future ruined?”
“...”
“But I have a condition as well.”
“A condition?”
“If that tower does not appear ten years from now, then you must give up your world as well.”
That too was something Jaehwan had never expected to hear.
With unsteady eyes, Jaehwan looked into Teacher’s.
“What do you say?”
There was no hostility in those eyes. If anything, they looked deeply worried for him.
Jaehwan’s confusion only grew. And that confusion touched a question he had stubbornly refused to face.
What if I’m wrong? What if Teacher is right?
What if there had never been such a thing as the 《Tree of Illusion》 from the very beginning, and all these memories were something I made up? What if this thing called “reality” had existed in plain sight all along, and I had merely been running away from it?
Then what happens to me now?
Jaehwan curled in on himself. Like an old king trying to defend a fallen kingdom, he stayed hunched over for a long time.
And after who knew how long, a small voice drifted out from the ruins of that fortress.
“All right.”
Teacher smiled.
“It’s a promise.”
* * *
Time passed quickly. In the meantime, Jaehwan made several more promises with Teacher.
One, until the ten-year deadline was up, he would avoid telling other people about things like the 《Tree of Illusion》 or 《Big Brother》 if he could help it.
Two, whenever he felt the urge to talk about the 《Tree of Illusion》, he would tell Teacher.
Three, for ten years, he would faithfully visit the clinic once a week.
During that time, Jaehwan graduated from elementary school and entered middle school.
He was thrown into ordinary competition.
He went to class and studied as though climbing a tower. He grew older in the ordinary way. He raised his grades as if leveling up and stacking stats, and read books as if collecting skills.
Even as time passed, the memories of the 《Tree of Illusion》 did not fade easily.
Thinking about it made it impossible to stay sane, so Jaehwan did his best to live without calling those memories to mind whenever he could. He kept repeating to himself that he just had to live like that for ten years somehow.
His mother was happy.
Watching her, Jaehwan found comfort as well. He felt as though he was living properly, and whenever that thought came to him, something like a strange revulsion would rise inside him. When that rising revulsion became too much to bear, he would go find Teacher and spill out long stories about the 《Tree of Illusion》. After that, he would usually feel a little better.
That was how those ten years, as long as ten billion years, passed in quiet calm.
Even after entering high school, Jaehwan studied diligently and spent time among ordinary friends.
When he was alone, he usually spent his time reading. What interested him most were books on the humanities and sciences, because he hoped to find a theoretical foundation that could explain what he was going through.
Of course, he failed.
At some point, instead of searching for theories that could explain his reality, Jaehwan began devouring other “stories” that would let him turn away from it.
Swords and magic.
Reincarnation and regression.
Genre novels overflowing with all manner of monsters and people with abilities.
Whenever he read such novels, Jaehwan felt as though he had returned to the old days of the 《Tree of Illusion》 where he had once lived.
For a little while, he could forget the tragedy of reality. Every time he read a book, it felt as though he had gone home. The air of the 《Tree of Illusion》. The heat of those moments when he fought against absurdity. The sense of existence that only those who stood against the world were allowed to feel.
The 《Tree of Illusion》 was his hometown, and only that place was his reality.
A world without Adapters or Awakened Ones.
How could a world like this possibly exist?
Whenever he sank deep into a novel and then returned to reality, Jaehwan was once again seized by a painful sorrow. It felt like waking up on top of a pile of garbage. Whenever that happened, Jaehwan went searching for other genre novels like a patient looking for painkillers. If he did not, he could not endure it.
Given that, perhaps it was not quite right to say that he “spent time among ordinary friends.” Wherever he was, Jaehwan always remained on the outside. He was dark, and he was often alone.
But that did not mean Jaehwan had no friends either. Unbelievable as it was, there were friends who approached Jaehwan first.
Yoonhwan and Seoyul.
When Jaehwan first met them in high school, he thought he was dreaming.
Without realizing it, Jaehwan called out Yoonhwan’s name.
“Huh? How do you know my name?”
“The Tower of Nightmares...”
Jaehwan, who had muttered it without thinking, flinched and shut his mouth.
The place where Jaehwan was supposed to meet them had originally been inside the 《Tower of Nightmares》. He had never once met Yoonhwan outside it. Everything about becoming friends with Yoonhwan had happened inside that tower.
That was how it was supposed to be.
“The Tower of Nightmares?”
And yet, when Yoonhwan heard Jaehwan’s muttering, Yoonhwan’s eyes wavered.
For a moment, Jaehwan hoped.
Maybe. Maybe Yoonhwan too.
“What’s that?”
Seeing Yoonhwan’s blank, clueless expression, Jaehwan quickly changed his own. The social mask he had practiced countless times over the past few years came to his aid.
“It’s just something from a novel I know. There’s a character named Yoonhwan in it, and since you have the same name, it came to mind.”
As he said that, Jaehwan pointed at Yoonhwan’s name tag. Yoonhwan’s eyes lit up with interest.
“There’s a guy with my name in it? What kind of novel is it?”
For a moment, Jaehwan lost the ability to speak. Why had he called it a “novel”? He knew he had to say something, but nothing came to mind.
Someone saved him.
“Hey, Kim Yoonhwan! Who are you bothering again?”
“Ah, I’m not bothering him.”
Long hair scattering in the sunlight streaming into the classroom. With a strange sense of déjà vu, Jaehwan looked at the girl coming toward them.
She was someone Jaehwan knew too.
Han Seoyul.
Seoyul approached with Yoonhwan in a light headlock, and her eyes turned to Jaehwan. Her pupils widened slightly.
“Ah, you’re that kid. The one who won a prize in the writing contest in first year.”
“A writing contest?”
“You don’t know? He’s famous for being really good at writing.”
Jaehwan looked down at his helplessly captured right hand as it was shaken back and forth.
Yoonhwan tilted his head and said,
“What are you talking about? Who is he?”
“Did you forget that novel from before? The prizewinning piece from the writing contest. The one with the tower and demons in it.”
“Huh? Oh, that? Wow, he wrote that?”
Only then did it seem to come back to Yoonhwan.
“Wait a second. Weren’t you in that novel too? That was the one, right? You were all happy because somebody in it had the exact same name as you.”
“Right. Your name was in it too. Even your personality was so convincing that I figured somebody who knew us must have written it. And now we’re meeting the actual person.”
“Really? He wasn’t that much like me. Especially you, Han Seoyul. It said you were a real beauty...”
Watching the two of them bicker, Jaehwan gave a bitter smile.
That was how Jaehwan once more came to have Yoonhwan and Seoyul as friends.
Of course, they remembered nothing. What the Tower of Nightmares was, what the Tree of Illusion was, what Rupture was.
To them, all of it was nothing more than the “story inside a novel” Jaehwan had submitted in literature class.
But whenever the three of them walked the streets together, studied for exams, went to cram school, and talked about the future, Jaehwan often felt as though he had gone back to the days of the 《Tower of Nightmares》.
Maybe that tower was still continuing.
Maybe nothing had ended, and I was still trapped inside that tower.
Whenever Yoonhwan jokingly said things to him, Jaehwan found it impossible to shake off delusions like that.
“Anyway, take care of me. We’re the kind of friends who climbed a tower together, right? And before long we’ll be climbing another tower too.”
“A tower?”
“Hey, look at that. Jaehwan always goes stiff whenever anyone brings up towers.”
“...”
“The ivory tower of scholarship! I mean college, college!”
The memories of the 《Tree of Illusion》 came back to Jaehwan as nightmares whenever he let his guard down, but as time passed, they came a little less often.
For living beings, oblivion was a blessing.
That was how Jaehwan gradually forgot the memories of the 《Tree of Illusion》.
But the more the total volume of those memories shrank, the more anxious Jaehwan sometimes became. Whenever he saw Seoyul casually putting him in a headlock, or Yoonhwan grinning and playing around, that feeling would creep through his mind like fog.
...
If only all of those memories had never existed from the beginning.
Then another three years passed, and Jaehwan entered university. It was an ordinary university in Seoul. He majored in Korean literature, not because he had applied with any especially clear goal in mind. If anything, it was because of Teacher’s recommendation.
“Korean literature or creative writing would suit you, Jaehwan.”
“Pardon? How so?”
As the years passed, the relationship between Jaehwan and Teacher changed greatly from what it had been at first. Teacher now treated Jaehwan like his own son, and Jaehwan no longer spoke casually to him. Whatever Teacher’s reasons might have been, Jaehwan too had come to accept that the way Teacher treated him was genuine.
“I told you, did I not? You have a literary sense, Jaehwan.”
“You’re teasing me again.”
“No, I mean it.”
Teacher spoke with a sly smile.
“Think about it. Countless people paying money to see the world you create. With that money, you could do many things. That money might even turn your world from a ‘delusion’ into ‘reality.’”
“I don’t need money.”
“Ha ha, Jaehwan. That is the sort of thing you say only because you are still young. In this world, money is everything.”
At that, Jaehwan let out a short laugh and asked,
“Are you allowed to say something like that?”
“You must not pretend not to know me when you become a popular writer someday. And do not forget to put my name in your author’s note. Better yet, what if you made the title of the book my name?”
“Then it would turn into your autobiography.”
“That would not be so bad.”
“If you pass away before the ten years are up, I’ll do that for you.”
Whenever he traded petty jokes with Teacher, Jaehwan would sink into a strange longing.
「...How about “Stab”?」
「Want me to make it the name of the skill?」
It felt as though, at some point, he had traded similar jokes with someone.
He could barely remember it now, but while climbing a lonely old tree, there had definitely been a time like that.
Memories no one could remember anymore, drifting like prayer that had lost its destination.
「Maybe that too was a kind of prayer. Though I do not know whether a god heard that prayer.」
Amid memories scattered here and there, Jaehwan now came to live in “reality.”
And so ten years passed, and at last the promised year arrived.
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