Chapter 261 - Episode 32. The World After the Fall (11)
Chapter 261: Episode 32. The World After the Fall (11)
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A few people let out startled cries, but that was all.
No matter what happened to a tower like that, they were too busy marching forward.
The Teacher was barely clinging to the leaning tower. His body flailed in midair, looking as if he could fall at any moment.
Why was no one saving him?
Jaehwan shouted at the people. No one looked his way.
They stood rooted in place like trees with roots sunk deep into the ground. They did not so much as twitch, like trees that only waited for sunlight where they stood. Like fragile plants that knew they would die if they moved even a little.
Jaehwan bit his lip.
Why did no one feel shame in this world of numbers?
The women's groups calling for human rights. The labor unions speaking for workers' rights. The university student alliances demanding lower tuition fees. Even the riot police blocking all those protesters.
None of them looked at the Teacher. They acted as if he did not exist.
Then Jaehwan realized something.
It was a sad and piercing realization.
The reason none of them would save the Teacher.
It was because the Teacher was not “a person of this world.”
To them, the Teacher was something they could not understand. Because they could not understand him, they excluded him. In their eyes, the Teacher was someone who could not be seen.
Like a life-form that existed beside them while living in a different universe. Like someone from a parallel universe who existed only as a hypothesis. The Teacher was a delusion that was here, yet not here.
Only Jaehwan could see that delusion.
A creaking sound rang out from somewhere.
It sounded like the roots of a giant tree being torn from the ground.
Jaehwan took one step forward, then another.
“Jaehwan, don’t.”
Yoonhwan’s hand reached out too late and grabbed his collar. Jaehwan shook it off and moved forward.
Just a little farther. Just a little more.
He pushed through the crowd as if carving a path through the impossible. Emotions surged within him as he shoved person after person aside. Some cursed at him and struck him. Others poured out complaints.
He was swept into a nearby brawl, leaving scratches on his arms and bruises on his legs. Jaehwan ignored every wound and kept moving.
At last, he reached where the Teacher had fallen.
The smell of garbage piles and old steel beams filled the air.
Jaehwan supported the Teacher, who lay collapsed beneath the ruined tower. Amid the protesters’ shouts, the Teacher slowly opened his eyes. His pupils trembled, then a faint smile appeared on his lips.
“Finally…”
Jaehwan silently looked down at him.
What should he say? How should he say it?
Only after his lips moved several times did Jaehwan finally manage to speak. Yet even then, it was not what he truly wanted to ask.
“Who are you?”
Jaehwan continued.
“You knew about the Tower from the beginning, didn’t you?”
“...”
“Cheongheo? Cayman? Karlton? Runald? Who are you? Who the hell are you that you…”
The Teacher, who had been quietly looking up at Jaehwan, asked, “If I tell you who I am, will you believe me, Jaehwan-gun?”
Jaehwan opened his mouth and held his breath.
The Teacher coughed up blood and laughed.
“Perhaps, as you said, I might be old man Cheongheo. I have a fair amount of medical knowledge, so it would be plausible enough.”
“...”
“Or perhaps I am Karlton. Just as he always carried a law dictionary with him, I always kept Freud’s complete works close at hand.”
“Wait…”
“Or I could be Runald. After all, I can say that I am now your only Follower.”
“...”
“If I am none of them, does that mean I have no right to believe in your world?”
Blood flowed from the back of the Teacher’s head. It seemed he had struck his head when he fell.
The Teacher spoke again.
“I’m sorry, Jaehwan-gun. This is all because of me. I ruined you. I destroyed your world, and I dared to diagnose it.”
“Don’t talk. You’re…”
The Teacher continued.
“But Jaehwan-gun, in a sense, that was not me. I was not the one who labeled your world a delusion, turned it into a symbol as I pleased, and judged it. It was not my will.”
Jaehwan wanted to ask.
Then what was it? If it was not your will, who was it?
“That was…”
The Teacher’s voice grew quieter beneath the protesters' roars. He looked as though he was about to lose consciousness. Jaehwan shook his body to keep him awake while listening even more closely.
Then the fading light returned to the Teacher’s eyes for an instant.
Jaehwan asked in a hurried voice. This time, it was the question he truly wanted to ask.
“What am I supposed to do now?”
“...”
“There’s nothing I can do in this world. What is this world? This reality you spoke of…”
“Didn’t you come all this way because you already know the answer, Jaehwan-gun?”
The Teacher gave a small smile and looked up at the sky beyond Jaehwan’s shoulder.
An empty sky with nothing in it.
Yet his gaze was endlessly delicate, as though he could see something beyond it.
“It is a beautiful sky.”
Jaehwan stared blankly for a moment before muttering, “Can you… see something?”
“I can see the sky.”
“Not that. I mean, something like eyes…”
“Eyes? Ha ha. Jaehwan-gun, there is nothing in this world’s sky.”
The corners of the Teacher’s mouth trembled.
“Because there is no 《Big Brother》 in this world.”
His voice calmly spoke of despair.
Yet it was also the voice of someone facing that despair head-on.
“There are other things instead.”
Other things.
“Jaehwan-gun. Wasn’t it you who taught me about worlds? Cheongheo, Karlton, Runald, Andersen, Cayman, Sirwen, Yu Seolha… Wasn’t it you yourself who told me the stories of all those people?”
“...”
“Your world still exists. It has not gone anywhere. It remains whole within you.”
Biting his lip as though in pain, the Teacher said, “Do not see the world through other people’s eyes. See it through your own eyes. Please, through your own eyes.”
My eyes.
“This is not a symbol or an analogy. It is not a metaphor or an allegory. It truly exists. Jaehwan-gun, that world truly exists.”
Jaehwan’s body began to tremble.
The shiver that began at his fingertips ran through his entire body. A familiar sensation flowed through him, and heat gathered in his eyes.
Jaehwan slowly closed them.
Then every gaze in the world vanished, leaving only his own.
In the quiet darkness, Jaehwan concentrated.
The eyes I lost.
Before long, something like a circular ring began to appear in his vision.
A snake devouring its own tail.
Jaehwan knew that snake.
Ouroboros.
He heard something spinning furiously.
It was a sensation far too old, far too familiar.
Yes.
It was time to begin again.
Jaehwan slowly opened his eyes.
Something was bursting within his mind. Like tiny stars exploding, something was blossoming inside him.
It felt like the moment of his first Awakening, when the System had fallen away from him.
Afterimages of different universes overlapped. This world and another world were linking together.
The Teacher had been right.
This was not a figure of speech. It was not a symbol or a metaphor.
This was…
“Can you see it? Jaehwan-gun, can you… see it?”
The Teacher looked up at Jaehwan with an expression that seemed both smiling and crying. The Teacher who had told him the truth was now asking him about that truth.
“Your world really did exist after all. Right? Ha ha, I… I was not wrong.”
With those final words, the Teacher lost consciousness.
Jaehwan hoisted the Teacher over his shoulder and looked around.
The landscape of the world had changed completely. The roaring cries had vanished without a trace, leaving behind a world filled only with hollow groans.
It was a world Jaehwan knew all too well.
Had this world I turned away from been watching over me all along?
In the lonely scenery of an Unique World where everything seemed to have fallen, Jaehwan finally felt a deep sense of relief.
This was his world.
The world he had protected for ten billion years.
The world that declared the destruction of all worlds.
The world that regained salvation by giving up on salvation.
This was The World After the Fall.
Jaehwan looked at the people.
No, he looked at the things that had clearly been people only moments ago.
Unlike in 《Chaos》, the people here did not look like corpses.
Trees stood where the people had been. Rotten, decaying trees. Trees that could not bear to leave the soil even though they knew there were no nutrients left in it.
Those trees were looking at him.
Jaehwan remembered Mulack’s words.
There was no 《Big Brother》 in the 「First Nightmare」.
There were no eyes in this world’s sky.
Because eyes were everywhere.
‘Little Brother.’
Countless eyes hanging from the trees stared at him. They watched his actions, criticized him, and lectured him.
Jaehwan met those eyes.
Then he smiled.
‘If I can see them, I can fight them.’
He walked carelessly toward them.
With a creaking sound, he walked and walked, like a tree pulling out its own roots.
The trees that saw him were shaken.
How could a tree…
They trembled. Their roots, trunks, and branches all trembled. They trembled in fear as they watched Jaehwan, who was not afraid in the least before so many eyes.
The trees wished for it.
For someone to punish that walking tree. To burn it.
No one stepped forward. They only moved aside.
Yoonhwan was among those rooted trees.
He could not understand why, in the middle of all this chaos, Jaehwan alone seemed to shine.
He had only saved one person. He was only walking back.
Why did it feel as though he had seen that scene over and over again?
An emotion he could neither explain nor understand filled his heart.
Yoonhwan’s eyes reddened as he suddenly turned to the side. Seoyul wore a similar expression. Like people who had only now realized shame, the two looked at each other.
They awkwardly met each other’s eyes, as if something like this had happened before, and looked together at Jaehwan.
“It feels like this happened before.”
Jaehwan walked toward them through the thick trees.
He walked with firm, unwavering steps.
Like people greeting the end of a long nightmare, Yoonhwan and Seoyul ran toward him.
The door to a new world was opening within humanity’s narrowest, darkest box.
* * *
Jaehwan arrived at an answer.
An “Unique World” existed in this world as well.
Like a parallel universe, it existed simultaneously with their world. Though condemned as a “delusion” and sometimes mocked, it had always left open that possibility.
Still, this Unique World was somewhat different from the Unique Worlds Jaehwan had known until now.
Here, having an Unique World did not mean one could easily construct a 「Setting」 or alter it. The Unique Worlds of this world operated according to far more complex and profound rules.
“Jaehwan-gun, this…”
The Teacher, who had been rushed straight to the hospital, handed Jaehwan a notebook from his pocket.
It was a counseling journal recording Jaehwan’s story. The pages had darkened so badly that it was impossible to know how many times they had been read.
Suddenly, Jaehwan understood how the Teacher had reached his Unique World.
“Jaehwan-gun, there is only one way to defeat ‘reality.’ This is different from 《Chaos》 and 《Abyss》. You must not fight the world alone anymore.”
The people here, too, could share someone’s Unique World and live believing in the same thing. Free from the oppression of classical mechanics and countless ideologies, they could enjoy a free world.
But.
“I am only the first. You have to tell people about your world.”
It was only possible when “many people” believed in that world.
On the final page of the notebook was the Teacher’s short story, the one Jaehwan had torn apart before.
A story clumsily pieced back together with tape.
‘He still had it.’
Jaehwan read it once more.
It was still a boring, uninteresting story.
Perhaps the Teacher had wanted to change the world with something like this. Perhaps he had wanted to sketch the world he had lived in after the fall and invite people into it.
Jaehwan ran his fingers over the crumpled sentences of the story for a long time and muttered, “But Teacher, my world was never popular to begin with.”
He turned on his laptop.
On the desktop was an edited manuscript for a genre novel he had been working on before leaving his job.
Jaehwan opened it.
After thinking for a moment, he deleted every sentence in the manuscript and began typing different words.
One, then two.
Details began to blossom across the white page, which had been stained a pale gray. Memories awakened again from oblivion.
Jaehwan kept typing, as if performing Stabs or slashing with a blade.
Countless stories took shape in his mind.
It was like when he first succeeded at World Stab. Or when he first obtained 「Fall」. Countless realizations burst forth in his mind.
The sentences were rough, and his writing was poor.
The metaphors were trite, and typos appeared everywhere.
Still, Jaehwan kept writing.
Just as he had never given up on Stab, he kept writing. He clutched his head over his terrible prose, but he did not give up and kept typing.
As if this alone were why he had lived in this world. As if it were the meaning of the life he had lived.
Doubting, Understanding, forgetting what he had understood, forming another Hypothesis, proving it, and finally Editing it.
Writing, writing, and writing again.
How much time passed?
Jaehwan completed the novel’s prologue.
He did not know whether this could change the world.
He had no idea how many people would read it and believe in it, or how many would laugh at this story.
Even so, he believed in his memories. He believed in existence.
Just as the people of 《Chaos》 and 《Abyss》 had willingly done, and just as the Teacher had done, Jaehwan still believed in hope.
That was why he could write this.
As he read and polished the completed prologue, a question suddenly came to him.
‘Come to think of it, what was Teacher’s name?’
It was strange.
He could not remember the name that had been so clear only moments ago, the name that had appeared in countless news reports.
Instead, Jaehwan found a pen name beneath the title of the Teacher’s short story.
Was this a joke?
Jaehwan stared at the pen name for a long time, then snickered.
What a ridiculous pen name.
When he opened the web novel platform, countless novels with all kinds of titles poured onto the screen as if they had been waiting for him.
Jaehwan thought.
Perhaps every one of those novels possessed an Unique World. Some were crude and some were polished, but perhaps all those novels were really countless branches of Unique Worlds that together formed the entirety of this universe.
Jaehwan entered the Teacher’s pen name into the platform, then created a page with the same title as the Teacher’s short story.
A message appeared, asking him to enter a work description.
A work description.
Like a god revealing his Unique World for the first time, Jaehwan agonized over it.
It could not be too grand. People would run away.
But it could not be too weak, either. Then no one would expect anything from it.
Jaehwan opened the notebook left behind by the Teacher.
He carefully read the sentences the Teacher had written in it, one by one.
Then, at some point, one sentence caught his eye.
A bitter smile formed on his lips.
Perhaps this was the only sentence fitting for the beginning of this story.
With an easy heart, Jaehwan placed his hands on the keyboard.
Then, slowly and carefully, he typed a single sentence.
This is the story of a man who did not regress until the very end, when everyone else returned to the past.
Footnotes:
Chapter discussion