WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
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Chapter 471: That Woman C VIII
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* * *
Everything in this world had its pros and its cons.
But you had to be careful about the order when you read that sentence.
The original meaning was, "If there's an upside, then a downside comes after it."
Flip it around, reading it as, "Since there's a downside, surely an upside is coming next?" and you could land yourself in serious trouble.
Example: a writer who diligently keeps to a posting schedule will, someday, absolutely hit burnout.
If each day's update is a small battle, then burnout is the inevitable downside, the thing you might compare to one enormous war.
Winning the battles meant nothing if you lost the war.
So you weren't supposed to grow smug over the upside right in front of you. You had to brace for the downside.
On the flip side... what happens when a slump arrives for a writer who never posted anything to begin with?
What kind of upside could possibly come from that? Before you even get to wars or whatever, haven't you already lost the very first battle? Isn't it nothing but downside?
In the same vein.
"Reverend."
"Oh, yes! Miss Yu Ji-won. What can I do for you?"
"It's nothing complicated. I came to ask that you stop summoning Mr. Matiz every morning to indulge in kisses under the pretense of talking in your sleep."
"..."
One-sided love had no upsides either.
* * *
Cheon Yo-hwa, the absolute authority of the Cult, was by no means stupid.
Blaming sleepwalking and pretending she couldn't tell dream from waking had only worked for a day or two.
Her own little sister and the attendants were scheming together every single day to quietly use her betrothed as a living, breathing alarm clock, and there was no way she hadn't caught on.
'Huk. Wait, have I really been kissing sunbae, no, Mr. Go Yuir, in reality this whole time and not just in dreams?!'
To say it again, Cheon Yo-hwa was not stupid. Which was exactly why she made the wisest decision possible.
'Wow! Jackpot! Let's keep playing dumb!'
A run-of-the-mill romcom character would have launched into embarrassment, self-denial, scolding everyone involved in the scheme, and so on, but Cheon Yo-hwa didn't waste her time on such unproductive processes.
Obviously. The moment she let on that she "knew" anything, this sweet secret rendezvous would be over, so why on earth would she lend an ear to the voice of her conscience?
'This time I'll drag him under the covers, play totally clueless, and feel out Teacher's ribs...'
'Hmm. Surprisingly, he does have abs. Is his body fat percentage just naturally low?'
'Sunbae always wears the same perfume, and honestly it's so strangely nice. What product is it? Should I have the kids look into it?'
'Tomorrow, in secret, really, really in secret... ihihi.'
Thanks to all that, Cheon Yo-hwa had been savoring her Go Yuir tasting course in full swing, like a chef relishing premium beef cut by cut.
She had been enjoying it. Until.
"Uh..."
A faint tremble.
Across from her sat the rival who had abruptly requested an audience. Facing Yu Ji-won, Cheon Yo-hwa fought to keep her expression in check.
"Kisses in my sleep...? Hmmm. I'm sorry. What might this be about, Miss Ji-won? I can't think of a single thing it could be referring to."
"Is that so?"
Yu Ji-won, on the other hand, had always stuck to being a blank-faced character, so she had no need to manage her expression at all.
A mere tilt of her head was enough to set the other person's heart pounding, no different from the realm of the heart-sword[1].
"Lately, every dawn, Mr. Matiz goes off somewhere and comes back. When he returns there's always a deep scent of orange clinging to him."
'Is your nose's species, like, a puppy or something?'
"Wondering whether he might be meeting with your younger sister, Reverend, I deliberately scheduled things with her yesterday morning. Even so, the orange scent didn't change."
'Insane. You pinned down the culprit on top of that?'
"The orange scent was concentrated over Mr. Matiz's whole body, his lips in particular. In other words, the reasonable conclusion is that you, Reverend, exchanged kisses with Mr. Matiz."
'No. By what method did you even figure out that his body scent pooled on his lips??'
"Yet from Mr. Matiz's heart I detected nothing but bewilderment and tension. Which means it was not a voluntary kiss but one forced upon him by another's will."
"..."
"Therefore, I humbly make this request of you, Reverend. Please do not force unwanted physical contact upon Mr. Matiz."
Silence fell.
Beyond the blank face, there was one more thing about Yu Ji-won that had to be addressed, and that was her gaze.
Yu Ji-won rarely looked away.
Always perfect posture. From a head that never wavered in the slightest, her two eyes stayed fixed on the other person as if they knew nothing but moving straight ahead.
Combined with this girl's particular looks, it gave off an aura that made her hard to treat lightly.
It felt as though, the instant you let a word slip, every word and every sentence was laid bare in mirrors on all four sides, which made her unpleasant to deal with.
But.
"... Really?"
Today, Cheon Yo-hwa looked Yu Ji-won straight in the eye too.
A shadow resembling a smile hung at the corner of her mouth, as if it were the one trace of decorum she had left.
"I wouldn't really know. But let's just suppose my sleepwalking or whatever flared up and somehow I ended up kissing sunbae, no, Mr. Go Yuir. At that moment, in Mr. Go Yuir's heart... would there really be only 'bewilderment' and 'tension,' like you said, Miss Ji-won?"
"..."
"I think there'd be more. A bit more."
Cheon Yo-hwa propped her chin on her hand.
"Believe it or not, I've never once gone through life without being told I'm pretty. And besides... I'm sorry to put it this way, but it's not like I'm just a face, right? Don't I have rather more going for me elsewhere?"
"..."
"Ahaha, please don't tense up so much, Miss Ji-won. It's all hypothetical. Yep, yep. Just talk of an IF!"
"Mm."
And yet, even though it was the first time since they'd met that Cheon Yo-hwa had bared anything that could be called real hostility.
"Pardon my intrusion."
For some reason.
Not a single shadow fell across Yu Ji-won's face.
It was as if the thorns Cheon Yo-hwa had loosed left no wound, no scratch on her at all.
"I only wished for you, Reverend, to think of Mr. Matiz first and foremost."
"...What?"
"I had guessed that you, Reverend, might hold a heart similar to mine. It seems my judgment was mistaken. My apologies."
"..."
"You're already absorbed in building the time capsule, and here I am holding you up to tack on pointless words. I'll take my leave now."
"Oh."
Yu Ji-won bowed at an angle as upright as her gaze, then left the audience chamber.
"..."
For some reason, Cheon Yo-hwa couldn't bring herself to stop her.
* * *
Everything in this world has its pros and cons.
Of course, this proposition was, at the end of the day, a maxim meant for life's winners, the ones who had succeeded in claiming the upside.
As Holden Caulfield, the senior of all cool-type light novel protagonists[2], put it, "if it's nothing but losers gathered together from the start," you couldn't even come up with the idea of trading pros against cons one for one. This was a point the genius linguist Master Kumagawa Misogi[3] agreed with too.
Even so.
'...I.'
'I didn't put sunbae Go Yuir... first?'
Even when the downside had been handed over first.
A single alchemy, like a miracle, that interlocked with that downside to wring out an upside in spite of everything.
A blade for the loser had been permitted to human beings.
'...Really?'
Self-awareness. Reflection. Introspection.
'Even in front of sunbae Go Yuir, I was thinking only of myself first, not of sunbae...? Me?'
The first mirror every human being is born carrying inside their heart.
"..."
Cheon Yo-hwa thought.
In the depths of her private bedroom, where no one was allowed near. Seated before the mirror she had set up at the Outer God's request.
She spoke alone.
"Why? I thought sunbae, and even Yu Ji-won, were beautiful. I'm not lying. I truly, genuinely thought them beautiful. So why am I the selfish one?"
"Because you didn't know. Because you weren't used to it."
A monologue before a mirror always came in two layers, so from the reflected face Cheon Yo-hwa's echo answered back.
"From the moment you were born, a life for your own sake was never permitted to you, Cheon Yo-hwa. A Sacrifice. A living altar. That was the role you were assigned, and your father was the pressure piled on top of it."
The Cheon Yo-hwa inside the mirror murmured without expression.
"You always felt that your life had been stripped away from you, and that feeling was no illusion."
"...But. I, I killed my father. I took every bit of the Cult's power into my own hands. I became an adult, an adult stronger than any adult. Then... shouldn't things be different now?"
"Time cannot be turned back."
Cheon Yo-hwa shook her head.
"The childhood your father stripped from you can never be restored. You know that. And it isn't only you who knows, everyone does."
"..."
"So no matter how much you whisper, [now things have to be different], what good is it? You are fated to forever crave a substitute father and take your revenge on the world, all to be compensated for a past that can never be restored."
The time capsule project progressed smoothly.
The sleepwalking trait Cheon Yo-hwa had come to possess. The signs of self-division she suffered because of the mirror. All of it was proof that her authority for handling the Outer God had reached its peak.
In other words, a trivial 'side effect.' Nothing more than a 'downside' she'd been saddled with as the price for an overwhelming upside.
Cheon Yo-hwa's wits for telling dream from reality grew thinner and thinner. It was because the resolution of the reality she could manipulate within her dreams had risen sharply.
"Then am I... even if I do end up together with sunbae Go Yuir. Even if we come to share love, will it always be like this?"
This very conversation, too.
Cheon Yo-hwa carried it on in her bedroom not only in reality but identically inside her dreams.
The Cheon Yo-hwa reflected in the mirror was sometimes the same as now, sometimes far younger, and at times wore the Baekwha Girls' High uniform dyed pitch black.
"Can I not love sunbae the way Yu Ji-won does? Can I not think of the other person before myself? Can I not accept the other person, purely, just as they are?"
"No."
"Why? I... I was a 'vessel' from the moment I was born. A child destined to be an empty vessel that receives my father's will, the god-nim's will. So why is it that I can't even put first the one person I love?"
"Because that person is not a god but a human being."
"..."
"He isn't perfect. He isn't complete either. Accepting the person you love doesn't mean cutting out your brain and physically taking them in."
Cheon Yo-hwa murmured.
"Success is easy. When there's an upside, it's all you can see. The problem is what comes after. Can you admit your own failure? Can you find an upside in his downsides? Can you become his mirror, and he yours?"
"..."
"Life is not a story. Are you prepared to face him and walk beside him, knowing that all of this is an eternal epilogue that will never end? You?"
Cheon Yo-hwa could not answer.
A hasty answer was like front teeth. The only things they could bite into were tiny problems.
So before she answered, she watched.
「Please don't make that face, Saintess. I only want to be with the you in front of me.」
「Me too.」
The epilogues of others, not herself.
Examples. Precedents. Answer sheets.
「Okay, let's... do it... Guild Leader...」
Or wrong-answer sheets.
「I think I shouldn't regress anymore.」
「Why...?」
「I don't have the confidence to meet you again once you've lost your memories of now. I might even end up killing you.」
「Oh dear...」
One by one, even as tears flowed, even as blood leaked from her lips, she clenched her teeth and watched all of it.
Simulation. Imagining.
Long ago, Go Yuir had obtained various pieces of information from Go Yuri. That information had flowed in turn through Go Yuir to Cheon Yo-hwa.
Cheon Yo-hwa mobilized the Cult's full strength to secure the personal data of the 'Regression Alliance' candidates.
With only that information, at the height Cheon Yo-hwa had now reached, she could run as many 'simulations' inside her dreams as she liked.
"Ahaha."
Cheon Yo-hwa laughed. A dry smile.
"Sunbae, really. You have so many rivals..."
"Even if every last one of them ends in a bad ending."
Cheon Yo-hwa laughed. A twisted smile.
"No matter the love, ruin is destined in the end. No. It means that man called Go Yuir is the kind of human who only loves someone once ruin has already been confirmed."
"..."
"He tries to save people. He tries to resist a fate where ruin is settled. That's the path he chose. Can you be as earnest about his path as he is?"
"...I can't."
"Right. Cheon Yo-hwa. You can't deny it. In this entire world you're a human who only cares about yourself, plus your little sister and Go Yuir, more or less. The rest, the countless faceless nobodies, you regard as no different from bugs. You have no grievance with bugs simply existing, but the moment they crawl into your room and show themselves, you kill them without caring whether they're useful insects or pests. That's your nature."
"..."
"That's the kind of human you are, so how could you ever love a man like Go Yuir? Locking that man in a basement, brainwashing him, steeping him in carnal desire, this cycle. The next cycle. The one after that too. No. Making him your own possession across hundreds, thousands, millions of simulations. Isn't that the only way of love available to you?"
"..."
To say it again.
Cheon Yo-hwa was a human stained with countless flaws, yet she had a few virtues.
"...No."
She was not stupid.
"It is not the only way of love."
"What?"
"Maybe there's another way. Yeah. After running other people's epilogues as simulations, it's become even clearer."
She was honest with herself.
"I'll believe that sunbae will break through all these bad endings and someday reach a happy ending."
"...What are you saying? Belief? Ahaha. Does blindly believing carry some kind of transcendent power? You really are an idiot."
"Mm-mm."
She couldn't be stupid enough to deceive herself, and she was honest enough to acknowledge herself.
"It's not blind belief."
"Then?"
"For sunbae to reach a happy ending, I just have to prove that I, that Cheon Yo-hwa, am 'absolutely' necessary."
"..."
A path.
A narrow, narrow path.
She could make out the single path that, in this world, was permitted to her alone.
"Sunbae ran aground at a bad ending every single time. But I was never at his side."
"..."
"To put it the exact opposite way, if I support sunbae... And so, really, truly, if the path sunbae chose reaches its terminus."
Cheon Yo-hwa clenched her fist tight.
"If I can just prove that I cannot be absent from his happy ending."
"..."
"Then I won't need to blame myself anymore. By then, even in front of Yu Ji-won, I'll be able to speak of my love with my head held high."
"Because."
"Because, Yu Ji-won, you may be able to share a bad ending with sunbae, but his happy ending absolutely requires me."
"I'm a human who can never love the faceless masses."
"But if sunbae's path of trying to save those faceless masses is a summit that can't be reached without someone like me."
"Then my love for him is also the path to saving other people."
"My love is in no way something to be ashamed of."
"Not to him. Not to her. Not to me."
"The cynic, the mental patient, the one who longs for death, the psychopath, the sociopath, at the end of that path they're all justified."
"So."
Cheon Yo-hwa's smiles overlapped.
"Let's save this world, and prove my love."
From the very beginning,
she had been fated to love only one thing.
And that one thing, it seemed, had been the world to her.
Footnotes:
[1] Heart-sword: a concept in murim/wuxia martial-arts fiction for the highest tier of swordsmanship, where intent or will alone wounds an opponent without a physical blade.
[2] Holden Caulfield is the cynical teenage narrator of J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), here jokingly framed as the forerunner of detached, jaded light-novel heroes.
[3] Kumagawa Misogi is a character from the manga Medaka Box; the joke is attributing a profound linguistic observation to a fictional character rather than a real scholar.
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