Side Story — The World Before the Fall
Over the dry earth, Cheongheo’s sword moved like a brush. Its distinctive strokes were both delicate and grand. Whenever the sword-tip traced lines in every direction, form was born from nothingness.
Perhaps it was because he had grown old.
Every time he swung his sword, his breath came hard. His fingertips trembled faintly.
At the end of that trembling, a man’s face blossomed.
Cheongheo softly murmured his name.
“Hmm.”
The name simply would not stick to the man’s face.
Cheongheo erased the face, then swung his sword once more. Adding further strokes, he redrew the man’s face. Or rather, he stopped midway through.
“I… can’t remember.”
Since the man had always been taciturn, most of Cheongheo’s memories with him were shrouded in silence.
What he remembered were brief conversations. Fleeting expressions. The air of that day, when they thrust and swung their swords back to back.
“You little brat.”
He drew steadfast eyes and a pronounced nose. Still, it did not please him.
“Did he look like this?”
He tried drawing him this way and that, but the more sword strokes he added, the farther the image seemed to drift from Jaehwan’s form.
“Bah.”
Once more, he thought of the boy.
He recalled the boy’s thrusts, and the slash he himself had taught him. He imagined the boy’s merciless sword-tip cutting down lords and tearing gods apart.
The emotion he felt whenever he thought of him remained so vivid, yet cruelly, the boy’s face only grew fainter.
“How could this be?”
Cheongheo stared down at his hand, which had grown noticeably older.
“Am I getting dementia?”
With a light sigh, Cheongheo began swinging his sword again.
*
“Old man, your ‘Deadman Slash’ isn’t what it used to be.”
Cheongheo frowned at Runald’s sarcasm and retorted.
“What do you know about slashing?”
“I can tell Lord Jaehwan’s nose is crooked, that’s for sure.”
Runald twitched his lips as he looked at Jaehwan’s crooked nose, drawn in the air.
“You don’t need to save anyone anymore, so why do you keep practicing Deadman Slash?”
At those words, Cheongheo looked up at the sky. Runald looked at the same sky. At the far edge of that clear expanse, Runald knew what scene Cheongheo was imagining.
With that sky held in his retinas, which were slowly turning transparent, Cheongheo thought of someone.
“That brat left as he pleased. Who’s to say he won’t come falling from the sky again as he pleases?”
Might he smash through that sky and appear again, just as he did the day he turned his back on this world and left?
Might the day come when he, unable to endure the curse of time, falls with the collapsing sky, and Cheongheo’s ‘Deadman Slash’ becomes meaningful once more?
“Even a Jaehwan with a slightly crooked nose would be fine, if only he would come back…….”
As if something had suddenly occurred to him, Runald took a small music box from his robes. When he wound it, an old prayer drifted up into the sky.
Watching the prayer, Cheongheo muttered sourly.
“I can fix that measly nose with Deadman Slash.”
Ten years had already passed since Jaehwan defeated 「Big Brother」. A New World had opened and the system had collapsed, but Jaehwan had not returned.
As they waited for Jaehwan to return, each member of the group missed him in their own way. Cheongheo practiced Deadman Slash, Runald wound the music box, and Carlton recited strange ordinances.
“Gorgon Special Act, Article 1, Clause 1. The Castle Lord is alive.”
“Brother Carlton, there isn’t a Gorgon Fortress anymore.”
At that, people would chuckle.
Someone would chide them, asking how many times they had already had that conversation and saying that even the people trapped in 〈Epoche〉 did not repeat the same words so often.
Runald looked up at the sky with a deliberately bland smile.
The sky after 「Big Brother」 had vanished. To those who had never been able to see 「Big Brother」 in the first place, it was the same sky as ever.
“Old man, has the real world truly changed for the better?”
A question he had asked countless times.
Even so, Runald repeated the question once more, unable to keep from asking it again. Just as Jaehwan had never stopped thrusting.
“Do the things we did, the things Jaehwan did…… still have meaning?”
Perhaps the world had not changed all that much.
Except that ‘aging’ had resumed and ‘death’ had come to all living things—the world still went on much as it had in the days when the ‘system’ existed.
People still craved strength, envied one another, and sometimes harmed one another. They took up weapons for their desires and did whatever it took to obtain what they wanted.
Of course, not everyone was like that.
“Hmm, who can say?”
There were also people who cherished one another and treasured their time together all the more as death drew near.
“I don’t know whether I’ll live long enough to find out.”
“Good grief, there you go saying unlucky things again!”
Everyone is given the same ‘once,’ yet no one spends that ‘once’ in the same way.
And Cheongheo had just decided how to use what little remained of his own ‘once.’
*
“That bastard’s face? Why are you asking me?”
Cheongheo replied to Yu Seolha’s grumbling.
“Come on, tell me. You’re younger than I am, so you must remember more, right?”
“By human years, I’m a grandmother too, you know. More importantly, why do you want to know what that bastard looked like?”
Instead of answering, Cheongheo drew a line in midair.
Yu Seolha pouted.
“A new hobby? I hear drawing is good for dementia, too.”
Even as she teased him mischievously, Yu Seolha never took her eyes off the sword-strokes Cheongheo was drawing. What was she thinking as she watched the strokes build, line by line? With a groan, Yu Seolha began to speak.
Her story moved from the face of Jaehwan as she remembered it to his manner, his voice, and old memories.
With every sentence she added, Cheongheo’s drawing gained depth.
At last, when the story ended, Cheongheo chuckled and said,
“You remember him remarkably well.”
“It was him, after all. Who wouldn’t remember?”
“Why didn’t you confess to him?”
Dodging the lightning bolts raining down from Yu Seolha’s chain sickle, Cheongheo continued searching for the next person with memories of Jaehwan.
“Runald. Have you felt any changes through the link?”
“If there were, I’d have told you by now.”
“The link is still intact, right?”
“I don’t know. It feels like it’s connected, but it also feels like it isn’t. Even I’m no longer sure.”
Runald. Jaehwan’s only devotee in this world. Even that boy was gradually forgetting Jaehwan as time passed.
“These days, I can’t remember Jaehwan’s face very well either.”
“It’s only been ten years.”
“Ten years isn’t ‘only’ ten years to a mortal.”
Perhaps he was afraid another span of time that was anything but ‘only’ would slip away. Runald began chattering away.
And it was not only Runald. Those who heard that Cheongheo was drawing Jaehwan’s face came to him one by one, without waiting for Cheongheo to seek them out.
“I’m telling you, that’s not it! The Jaehwan I remember……”
“Weren’t his eyebrows thicker than that?”
“His thighs were thicker.”
“Girl, when did you get a look at that?”
This was their small festival in the world Jaehwan had left behind.
They think of Jaehwan and miss him. They recall the words he left behind and remember the things they said to him. As if competing over who had influenced Jaehwan more, they pour out stories without pause.
By the time they had poured out so much that they felt there was nothing left to say, they picked up their beers.
“To the goddamn world after the fall!”
Now that they could get drunk, they drank, their fading memories serving as bar snacks.
They would go on forgetting Jaehwan. Amid the fated oblivion, they would live in the world after the fall that he had left behind. Some laughed, some cried, and all of them thought of the same person.
They feared that this moment would not last forever. And yet, at the same time, this moment alone was the only blessing left to them.
“You know it too, Master.”
One day, a drunken Yu Seolha said,
“You can draw that all day, every day, but he isn’t coming back.”
Her face flushed with drink, Yu Seolha soon turned to the others and began pointing at them.
“You lot. How long are you going to make the old man waste his life? What meaning is there in any of this?”
“Seolha. There isn’t a person here who doesn’t know that.”
There is something everyone knows but no one says.
But she was an Awakener. She was the sort of person who could not rest easy unless she spoke aloud the things others turned away from.
“That’s why I’m saying we should put an end to this shitty gathering already…….”
Yu Seolha slumped face-first across the table. The others looked at her with pity or once again downed the liquor before them.
The struggle not to fall into despair sometimes drags people into even deeper despair. Even so, that struggle was the only thing they could do in the face of despair.
“After living for so long, I thought I had finally found life.”
Supporting the drunken Yu Seolha, Cheongheo smiled with hollow eyes.
“Now that I have found life, I understand even less what life is.”
*
The group held gatherings less and less often. Their efforts to find Jaehwan, however, continued.
Most joined the investigation party led by Sirwen and searched for Jaehwan. They searched for traces of the ‘First Nightmare’ or investigated the area of sky near where he had disappeared.
And so a year passed, then two more.
As the years passed, Cheongheo gradually grew old. Wielding a sword became difficult, and it grew harder for him to get around. His vision kept growing dimmer, and he spent more and more time staring blankly ahead.
Cheongheo realized he did not have much time left to live.
“In the end, I couldn't finish it.”
In the end, he could not complete Jaehwan's face. More precisely, he came to feel that he should not complete it.
The day would come when no one remembered Jaehwan. When that day came, people would see the faceless Jaehwan he had painted. And imagining that man without a face, they would wonder who he had been.
“You're here.”
At Cheongheo's words, the door to the sickroom opened. Sirwen stood there, wearing a surly expression.
“You're still alive?”
“Did you get my message?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you bring what I asked for?”
Sirwen let out a light sigh and frowned.
“What made you think that all of a sudden?”
“I came to think that Seolha was right.”
“What are you talking about?”
After a brief pause, Cheongheo spoke as he gazed at the unfinished painting.
“People of later generations will chatter on and on about that painting. They'll think I had a reason for leaving its face blank—that it was intentional.”
Sirwen studied the painting closely, then asked,
“Wasn't that intentional?”
“If I declare the painting finished as it is, then it will be intentional.”
“You mean you want to keep painting? From what I can see……”
“Do you think that painting is enough?”
Sirwen hesitated for a moment, then nodded.
“You've worked hard enough.”
“…….”
“Stop working on that painting now. You know it too. Some stories take on new meaning precisely because they remain unfinished.”
“That may be true of stories. But this is my life.”
Cheongheo went on.
“As you said, someone may think that painting is fine as it is. They may think it right to lay down the sword and mourn that fellow they can no longer see.”
“…….”
“But if I were going to stop like that, I would never have painted it in the first place.”
“Hey.”
“Even if the finished work is ugly, shouldn't I paint it through to the end?”
Sirwen did not answer.
“Sirwen, with your tower, it can be done.”
Perhaps this was the wrong choice. As so many people said, perhaps letting go of life and departing quietly was the true way to mourn.
Even so, Cheongheo could not abandon hope. The nearer death drew, the more he found himself returning to the same thought over and over like a child.
“Creating towers that can be cultivated is forbidden now.”
He thought of the path Jaehwan had walked. He thought of the man who, after passing through six stages of Awakening, must have seen the end of the world beyond that sky.
“It isn't cultivation.”
Cheongheo gazed at the Unique World rippling around him.
「Unique World」, Murim (Martial World).
He had created this Unique World out of longing for his homeland.
“I'm merely trying to open a new world one last time.”
What if he let go of this world?
And what if he could once again pass through 「Doubt」, 「Understanding」, 「Self-Forgetfulness」, 「Hypothesis」, and 「Proof」, and walk to the very end of the path Jaehwan had reached?
“You're too old now.”
Perhaps he could meet that fellow one more time.
“Tsk. Do you dream demons have no respect for the elderly?”
“I'm older than you, you know.”
“It's my final wish.”
Grumbling, Sirwen pulled a small tower from inside her clothes.
“Here it is. I don't know if you'll like it.”
Cheongheo looked for a moment at the tower's strangely familiar appearance, then spoke.
“When I die, seal my soul inside that tower.”
“There's a limit to evading death that way. Souls wear down with time too, and eventually perish.”
“I know.”
“Even if you break this tower and climb out, you can't go to 《Chaos》 or 《Abyss》. You know that too, don't you?”
“I know.”
“More importantly, once you enter the tower, neither I nor anyone else will be able to contact you. I've set the time ratio to its maximum, so you'll spend an unfathomably long time alone.”
“I know that too.”
“Why go that far?”
“Because he did it too.”
Sirwen let out a deep sigh.
“Of course you would.”
“Keep it secret from the others.”
A month later, Cheongheo's funeral was held.
*
The moment he closed his eyes, Cheongheo felt his soul being drawn somewhere. He had experienced a similar sensation once before.
The day a tower first appeared in his world—'Murim.'
[Entry complete.]
The sight of the first-floor lobby spread out before his eyes.
Sirwen's voice buzzed in his ear.
―Take care.
“Thank you.”
By now, his funeral was probably being held outside the tower.
His body would vanish, and after a brief period of mourning, people would set out once more in search of Jaehwan.
Cheongheo looked around with a hollow expression.
This Tower of Nightmares was the very tower whose ceiling Jaehwan had once broken through to emerge into 《Chaos》.
Tower of Nightmares, 《Fortress of Regret》.
Cheongheo slowly stepped forward and began climbing the tower.
To set aside the unique world he had built up over the years and begin again from the first stage of Awakening. To follow the path Jaehwan had walked before him.
The first thing he had to accomplish was ‘ten billion slashes.’
*
Once, twice, three times, four times.
Time passed swiftly as his slashes accumulated.
Ten years, twenty years…….
Cheongheo went on slashing, his senses kept under absolute control. With merciless rigor and diligence, he drove his soul onward so harshly that he could no longer feel boredom. Just as Jaehwan had done—or perhaps with the resolve to surpass even Jaehwan.
Fifty years, sixty years…….
Then one day, as he slashed and slashed again, Cheongheo felt a shudder run through his entire body.
At last, he had reached the first stage of Awakening once more: 「Doubt」.
Now it really begins.
Cheongheo stared into the empty air for a moment, his eyes full of emotion, then resumed slashing.
*
After another hundred years had passed, Cheongheo began to feel as though the corners of his soul were gradually wearing away.
It was unmistakably different from training in the tower with Jaehwan or the other companions from Chaos. A chill of loneliness that stole over him without warning, despite his absolute control of his senses.
What could be happening outside the tower? What had become of the people he remembered by now?
Two hundred years, three hundred years.
Merciless time passed.
He endured that time thanks to the tower's rewards. With each floor he climbed, memories replayed as rewards.
The day he first met Jaehwan in Chaos.
The day they competed in thrusting and slashing.
The day they brought Mino back to life, and Jaehwan became the lord of Gorgon Fortress…….
Perhaps these memories were a small kindness Sirwen had left behind for Cheongheo, who would climb the tower alone.
Watching the memories over and over, Cheongheo continued up the tower.
His slashing never ceased.
And so a thousand years passed.
To doubt and understand the world anew. As he repeated the process of Awakening Jaehwan had undergone, Cheongheo gradually drew closer to the loneliness Jaehwan must have felt.
At last, Cheongheo once again stood before the fourth stage of Awakening― 「Hypothesis」.
Just as when he first Awakened, Cheongheo again failed to properly bring his unique world to fruition.
“So I can't do it after all.”
Perhaps it was only natural. Unlike the days when he had brought 「Murim」 to fruition as his unique world, he now had no enemy to face.
There was no system to destroy, no god or monarch to surpass.
Yet failing to Awaken his unique world did not mean his training had made no progress.
As proof, Cheongheo could now wield Jaehwan's ‘World Stab’ as a slash.
As he watched the blade cut through space, Cheongheo suddenly wanted to draw Jaehwan's face.
Could he draw Jaehwan's face now?
Now that he had become even a little like that guy, could he perhaps draw that guy's likeness into his unique world?
Cheongheo slowly drew Jaehwan. He drew his hands, arms, legs, and torso.
“Ah.”
But though he had drawn every other part, he still could not draw Jaehwan's face properly.
Why? Why could he still not draw the face?
A bushy beard was reflected in his dust-caked blade. Cheongheo casually shaved it off, then looked at his face in the blade. Perhaps because he had used the same sword for too long, his reflection in its worn surface was as indistinct as Jaehwan's face.
*
Cheongheo went on drawing Jaehwan's face. Resolved not to stop until the face of Jaehwan he longed for appeared, until he could sketch that moment from life, he continued swinging his sword.
Five thousand years.
He reached the tower's final floor. The memories that had replayed over and over ceased to function.
Like a madman, he drew only one face.
Ten thousand years.
And drew, and drew again.
Having forgotten even why he had entered the tower, he devoted himself solely to drawing the face.
He could no longer tell how much more time had passed. Twenty thousand years? Thirty thousand? Perhaps a hundred thousand years, or even a million, had gone by.
Cheongheo laughed like a madman.
“Why can't I draw it?”
Are mortal humans incapable of even properly remembering another person?
Cheongheo was tired. His heart had worn thin, his emotions had eroded. His soul had reached its limit.
One day, after drawing and redrawing that face hundreds of millions—perhaps billions—of times, Cheongheo sensed death approaching once more.
Sirwen had been right.
He should not have entered the tower. He should have left Jaehwan's face blank and brought this whole story to a beautiful end.
Then he would not have come to such an ugly end.
Cheongheo gradually lost track of what he was drawing.
He believed he was drawing Jaehwan's face, but the face that emerged was different every time. Sometimes it resembled Runald's face, sometimes Yu Seolha's, sometimes Sirwen's, and sometimes his own.
Or perhaps it resembled something other than a face.
That nameless face was looking at Cheongheo.
It was asking him.
Why was he so obsessed with the being called Jaehwan? Why did he so desperately want to meet him?
“I…….”
Confronted with the question he should have faced long ago, Cheongheo stammered. Unable to put it into words, he added one more stroke with his sword instead.
A sword stroke of destruction cleaved the empty air. A landscape was taking shape across the vacant ceiling.
Brilliant light streamed from his entire body. It was the light of a leap into a new realm of Awakening.
Yet at the same time, Cheongheo's body was slowly crumbling away.
―He did not know his true name. The youngest son of a fallen scholarly family. When the family's property was confiscated and its members scattered in the upheaval at court, he, still an infant, was entrusted to Master Baekgyeol (白潔先生), a guest of the family.
Memories streamed past like a revolving lantern.
―A child with blue, hollow eyes.
The scent of his old homeland. The voice of the master who had first taken him in.
―Are you Master Baekgyeol's disciple?
The wound he suffered on the day he faced his lifelong nemesis.
―W-what on earth is that? What's a tower doing in the Heavenly Demon Tomb……!
The day he discovered the tower rising in Murim.
―Just a little farther. Just a little farther up, and we'll be there. Huyu! Mugeuk! We're almost there!
Memories of the companions who had climbed the Tower with him.
―Starting today, I am your teacher.
The day he first taught the children of the Rupture. And then.
―The Abyss Expedition ends here.
People brutally trampled beneath the wall known as a Lord. Memories of a thousand years spent with their very existence denied. Before that ancient history, Cheongheo finally faced his question once more.
Why was he trying to paint Jaehwan?
He already knew the answer.
―Kid. Do you really intend to challenge it?
The man who had returned both him—after the Abyss Expedition's defeat had driven him to a despair deeper than anyone's—and his world, long since destroyed, to the time before its fall.
―Do you think I can do it?
This was my destruction. What was yours?
In the end, the painting Cheongheo completed was not of Jaehwan's face.
What he had painted was his own back, swallowed by pitch-black darkness where even the stars had closed their eyes.
“To paint this…….”
And yet, the moment he faced that back, Cheongheo knew whom his painted self was looking at.
Cheongheo let out a hollow laugh and murmured. Within the pitch-black darkness was the face he had ultimately failed to paint.
Some beings become clearer still through their absence. Perhaps what mattered was not what one painted, but what one did not paint.
Clutching his sword in a hand that was losing strength, Cheongheo began to paint over it one last time.
Creation.
Brilliant light streamed from his entire body, illuminating his new world.
“Show me again.”
Resolved to paint the whole world except for Jaehwan, Cheongheo continued to move his sword.
“The world after the fall.”
If this is the 「World After the Fall」, and that means I cannot see you again, then why not paint a world that can fall once more?
Driven by that obsession alone, Cheongheo continued cutting. Imagining Jaehwan watching him from the end of the painting—the point where the gaze came to rest—he swung his sword in one final strike.
With a deafening roar, his final sword stroke exploded against the ceiling. He heard the Tower collapsing. As the world crumbled, the force anchoring his soul was vanishing.
Even as death drew near, Cheongheo smiled.
Amid the crumbling scenery, Cheongheo dreamed one final dream. It was a dream of the world before its destruction. A world rife with absurdity, with a sky that had to be shattered.
It was a dream of swinging his sword alongside Jaehwan once more in that world.
His memories scatter amid the sensation of space-time warping. Death comes for him—a death against which skills, the system, and Awakening are useless.
Cheongheo accepted that death. At last, it was time to let go of everything. Time for him, too, to become clear through absence.
But why?
As time passed, his consciousness grew clearer. When he opened his eyes again, Cheongheo realized he had not died.
Before him stretched an unfamiliar landscape.
He was outside the ‘Tower.’
Where was this?
Chaos…… or the Abyss?
Had he emerged into the New World again?
Or had his painting truly become reality?
The moment he looked up at the pitch-black sky awash with starlight, Cheongheo knew instinctively.
「This is not the 《Tree of Illusion》.」
There was a boy on a hill beneath the falling starlight.
Cheongheo murmured, his voice barely working.
Kid, is that you?
But the boy who turned around was not Jaehwan. A boy far paler and more slender than Jaehwan.
Just then, a fragment of ceiling drifted through the air before the boy. He gathered the floating fragments one by one and fitted them together, then regarded the completed painting as though admiring it.
Then he gave a brief assessment.
“A dreadful Fable.”
Cheongheo stared at the boy, dumbfounded.
What did he just say?
“Did you paint this?”
When Cheongheo nodded, the boy asked,
“Why is this person thrusting at empty air with that expression on his face?”
Cheongheo's eyes widened.
“Who is this person?”
The boy could see him. The figure of the only man Cheongheo had not painted stood out clearly to him.
Cheongheo approached the boy. When he reached the edge of the hill where the boy sat, the boy made room beside him, as if inviting him to sit.
Cheongheo sat beside the boy and said,
“That guy.”
He continued in a trembling voice.
“He hates regression with a passion.”
Then the boy said,
“Someone I know does nothing but regress, every single time.”
“He does nothing but regress?”
The two spoke for a while. Though they did not even know each other's names, they spoke of the person each knew best.
Of the man who hated regression more than anyone, and the man who had spent his whole life regressing.
For a long while, they talked about the worlds those men had destroyed.
“But what were you doing here?”
“I was dreaming.”
“A dream?”
“A dream of the world's destruction.”
“Then does that mean this world has not yet been destroyed?”
The boy nodded.
Cheongheo looked up at the sky of a world that had not yet been destroyed.
A sky stained with indifferent starlight.
Gazing at that dazzling sky, Cheongheo asked,
“What is this world called?”
“《Star Stream》.”
Star Stream.
Cheongheo repeated the name to himself, then said,
“A fine name for destruction.”
Then the boy laughed.
“I think so too.”
“May I watch the destruction here with you?”
The boy nodded, and Cheongheo slowly lay back, facing the sky and breathing heavily.
With a soft thud, a faint breeze stirred.
In the distance, a meteor like a thrust was streaking off somewhere.
『The World After the Fall』 Complete
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