WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
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Chapter 472: That Woman C IX
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* * *
There were people, here and there, whose only road to loving themselves wound the long way around.
"Unni! I, I really did it, I summoned a Baku[1]! Whoa. Collect enough data and an anomaly really does come into being that works just like an AI..."
"Right. A few years from now, 'holes' are going to start tearing open all over the world at once. We turn that to our advantage, defining as much of the void as possible as a 'tutorial dungeon.' That's the duty we'll be handed later on."
"Y, yeah. I heard. That's how we speed up the rate people adapt to the new age, right?"
Not once since the day she was born.
Cheon Yo-hwa had never loved herself.
"So then... anyway, this is the very first Baku ever summoned. What should we name it, unni? Something like Succubus Queen, maybe, or Fairy No. 1?"
"No."
A defect.
And no wonder, since not one lovable scrap could be found anywhere in her.
A deficiency.
A family decent enough to make her crave affection, sadly and by rotten luck, simply did not exist.
A loss.
A little sister who looked exactly like her. Even she registered to Cheon Yo-hwa as little more than a cute pet.
"This Baku will be sealed away by Go Yuir and his [time seal]. It'll vanish from the world for a while. And only in the happy-ending cycle that's bound to arrive someday, only at the very, very last, will it be opened."
"Yeah. And?"
"This is an extremely difficult incantation. So we have to be careful in the extreme, starting from the very work of naming it."
She was lacking in humanity.
For her, unlike all those other people lucky enough to be born otherwise, no shortcut to loving herself had ever existed.
Such a fate. To a person flung onto a long, winding route like Cheon Yo-hwa, a few choices were given.
"By number, it's not No. 1 but No. 404."
"...Oh, like when the internet's down?"
"Yeah. The Baku came from the authority of the god-nim we serve anyway, and that authority is the use of data. It couldn't be more fitting."
One. Inheritance.
Just as she had inherited hatred from her father, she too would pass her lack of self-love down to her children.
This route was the «Broad Road,» and the people walking it were many, so very many.
Two. Denial.
You refuse to acknowledge self-love at all. It is a concept that was false from the start, or else a wildly useless emotion.
This route was a very steep cliff path. People climbed it and fell to their deaths all the time, yet the road was not narrow for it, so anyone could stake their life on the ascent.
And last, the third route.
"Just slapping the number 404 on it isn't enough."
"Then?"
"Pandora's box."
Proof.
"In the original it was a jar, not a box, they say... But in a case like this, symbolic weight matters far more than fidelity to the source. Yeah. The No. 404 Baku, I'll shape it in the form of a 'box,' not a fairy."
"A box... Ah. Could it be?"
"That's right. A box. Just like a 'time capsule.'"
You acknowledge your own defect.
It had been a life handed nothing but flaws from the start.
But no one had done anything wrong.
To call the world wrong is mistaken, and since I, born into a world that is not wrong, am also not wrong, I too could surely reach your side.
"Into this time capsule that a failed regressor resolved to pass on to the next world... into the Pandora's box we shaped, I'll pack every last bit of hope."
"Hope..."
"Yeah. Hope."
This route was the «Narrow Road.»
It was fine if the person had been born riddled with defects. It was fine if she was a miko[2] designed from birth to be an altar.
No, it was precisely because of that that a method of love possible only for her existed.
"But, Yo-hwa. For this plan to work, the two of us sisters have to make a little, a tiny, sacrifice."
"...What kind of sacrifice?"
"We're going to be apart for just a little while."
"And exactly how little is 'a little while'?"
"Hmm. Roughly tens of thousands of years, give or take?"
"..."
Cheon Yo-hwa smiled.
"You trust me, don't you, unni?"
* * *
World annihilation drew near.
The press and the public had yet to sense it, but the cult, already warned of the future by a regressor, was receiving reports moment by moment through the feelers it had stretched across the world.
Strange disappearances. Mass hallucinations. Sightings of unidentified life forms. Abnormal contamination of records in reality and on the internet...
These were the aftershocks that had descended in advance, before the great main force could lift its head.
"If it's a cycle's world that's doomed to perish anyway, then it's better that I be the one to destroy it first."
And so the Reverend, Cheon Yo-hwa, resolved to become the earthquake herself.
"Uh..."
Across from her, Go Yuir blinked.
"My apologies, Reverend Cheon Yo-hwa. Have you, perhaps, been completely contaminated by the Outer God?"
"No, Go Yuir. It's the other way around. To hit MAX 100 percent contamination, I have to destroy the world."
"What?"
"The more my heart is dyed by god-nim, the more freely I can use god-nim's authority. In short, to raise the time capsule's completeness to its absolute maximum, the only possible conclusion is that I have to raise my own contamination as high as it'll go too."
"..."
Go Yuir pressed his lips together and looked to the seat beside him, to Yu Ji-won. He was asking her opinion with his eyes.
There had been a time when that kind of glance between the two of them used to hurt, leaving only Cheon Yo-hwa feeling shut out. But not anymore.
Yu Ji-won's clear gaze, looking straight at her.
Even in this very moment, meeting it, Cheon Yo-hwa's heart did not waver in the slightest.
Yu Ji-won opened her lips.
"What exactly do you mean by destroying the world, Reverend?"
"First, I'll become one in body and spirit with god-nim. Right after that, I'll tear down the boundary between reality and dream, bring god-nim down to earth, and harvest all of humanity."
"A harvest for what?"
"Data collection. And securing the 'brains' to process that data."
"..."
"I'll run simulations no different from reality, then load that information into 'Pandora's box.' Of course, the lovey-dovey love story of Go Yuir and Yu Ji-won will go into the box too."
At that, Go Yuir seemed a touch embarrassed, but Yu Ji-won was unfazed.
"The digitization of humanity's entire brain mass. It does follow logically. But since the time capsule will hold only Mr. Matiz's information and my own, do you really need data on such a vast scale?"
"Ah. No, I don't."
Cheon Yo-hwa smiled brightly.
"But I... I'm going to cram a whole lot of other people's stories into Pandora's box too, you see."
"Other people, meaning?"
"Noh Do-hwa."
"..."
"Sim Ah-ryeon, Jeong Ye-ji, Dang Seo-rin, and so on. Just like you, Yu Ji-won. And just like this world of ours."
Cheon Yo-hwa brought her two hands together.
As if in prayer.
"Every last apocalypse that ended in a bad ending and so was remembered by no one, all of them, I'll pack into Pandora's box."
"The worlds that fell away..."
"Yes. The beings who became defects."
To capture the perished spans of time.
"Each and every one of them is an apocalypse in its own right. A despair. So a time capsule that gathers every despair in the world is bound, inevitably, to become Pandora's box."
"..."
"But it's in that very place, where every despair has been collected, that the something you and I long for will be born."
"Hope, is it."
"Yes."
Cheon Yo-hwa smiled.
To flip a weakness into a strength.
That was her road.
"Someday Go Yuir will..., mm. All of us will reach a happy ending. The hope that we'll reach such a route. To pass that hope on, paradoxically, every despair has to be collected."
"..."
"But as you know, my power still isn't enough to run the despairs that happened in other cycles as simulations."
"Which is why you need to be devoured by the Outer God..."
Yu Ji-won closed her eyes for a moment.
Soon a murmur leaked from her lips.
"A rational conclusion."
"Thank you for understanding, Ji-won. No. Pandora, who will someday open the time capsule."
"..."
"She who opens the box of despair and hope shall, as is only fitting, be the most beautiful woman in this world. You too are part of the plan I've spun."
"Is that so."
Yu Ji-won.
The girl already slated, in the far distant future, to play the role of Pandora gave a small nod.
"I see. According to the myth, the opening of Pandora's box brought a great deluge that drowned the earth, did it not? Did the Reverend account for even that far?"
"Of course!"
"A splendid scheme."
Yu Ji-won held out her hand.
As they shook lightly, she asked.
"Reverend. When do you intend to begin the world annihilation?"
"A week from now."
That day was April 4th[3].
By the Reverend's command, the cultists gathered at the headquarters. Even as the sun set and the hour came when daily life winds down, the cultists kneeling on the floor did not stir.
Because for them, now was the very promised moment.
"It's strange, isn't it, unni."
"Hm? What is?"
The dead center of the headquarters.
There the twin sisters, one dressed in white miko robes and the other in black, sat facing each other.
The white miko, the younger of the twins, scratched her cheek awkwardly.
"Well. From the very start we were sacrifices, weren't we, born with the fate of offering this world up to god-nim? And yet, going round and round... it really did turn out that way, so it felt kind of uncanny to me."
"Ahaha. I know, right."
The sisters formed the innermost core of the headquarters.
Around them sat dozens of elders, drawing a circle. And then a larger circle again, a larger one still, a larger one beyond that...
Thousands of Naechul formed layer upon layer of rings. Among the Oechul, those of the deepest faith became, especially, the final rampart at the very edge.
"But the sacrifice Father planned in the first place and the sacrifice we've resolved on now are different things."
"Are they?"
"Yeah. Before, it was a sacrifice meant to throw us away... But now, we're offering ourselves up to ourselves, so that we can be left behind. So that we can come back to ourselves."
"..."
"Yo-hwa."
Squeeze.
Cheon Yo-hwa laced her fingers through her sister's.
Around the two of them, the entire crimson sunset chirped with the prayers ceaselessly chanted by the elders, the Naechul, the Oechul.
"My beloved sister."
"..."
"But the word love in 'beloved sister,' which I've said so many times until now, it was probably a little different from the love you hoped for from me."
"...Unni."
"I'm sorry I could only give you that kind of love. And, even knowing it, thank you for staying by my side all this time."
"..."
"Unni, starting today, I'll try."
Cheon Yo-hwa smiled.
"To be an unni my sister doesn't have to be ashamed of."
"...There's never once been a thing about you I had to be ashamed of, unni."
"Aw, that's an exaggeration. When you teamed up behind my back with the Eight Trigrams to slip Go Yuir in, weren't you a little ashamed then?"
"Hwaaaaaaa-."
The younger sister thrashed. Enjoying that thrashing through their laced fingers, Cheon Yo-hwa beamed.
"Also... mm. Sorry for never properly introducing Go Yuir to you! Truth is, I was already swamped just dealing with Yu Ji-won, and if you got tangled up in it too I felt like I'd lose my mind, so I left it alone."
"Ah. So that's it?"
"Honestly, I even imagined bringing him in as a live-in husband for both of us sisters. But no matter how I turned it over, Go Yuir seemed like he'd love you more than me."
"Ehh. Brother-in-law would?"
The younger sister laughed.
"No way, no way! Brother-in-law has never once looked at me like that. Aren't you blowing it out of proportion, unni?"
"Haaaa..."
"?"
"Honestly, this is exactly why there's no talking to a scrub of an ordinary person with no multiverse-simulation ability..."
"??"
"What can you do. Capable, pretty me will just have to understand and let it slide, sheesh."
"???"
The apology that lingered to the very end. The gratitude.
Words that would never again be shared in this life, and that maybe, even next time, and the time after that, would be shared again only once a near-eternal instant had passed.
"Ah."
And then the sun went down.
It was the last twilight this world would be granted.
"Unni."
Taking that twilight against the side of her face, the younger sister wore an expression with not a trace of the earlier lightness left in it, grave and serious, and.
"Mm."
Cheon Yo-hwa nodded too.
"Let's pray."
Her words rang as clear as a bell even within the evening glow.
The elders, already chanting the prayer, were the first to hear the Reverend's solemn toll, and they rang it through their own bodies and spread it far and wide.
"Formed of a swirling chaos, born before heaven and earth..."
"I do not know its name..."
"Silent, and vast, and empty, it stands alone and never changes..."
The Cult's Head Temple, designed and built from the very beginning for this day's rite, blended into the sunset and the night sky, the death of the sun and the birth of the moon, the crossing of yang and yin.
'A Spirit Bomb[4]... no. A burial of the living, maybe.'
Gripping their laced fingers tighter, Cheon Yo-hwa, together with her sister, intoned in a voice as clear as the night sky.
"To live is to die. If annihilation was decreed from the very beginning, then is not every human a living corpse?"
"Just as closing one's eyes does not stop life, so dreaming does not bring reality to an end."
"In each instant, dream and waking are held together, so the annihilation of the beginning is but an instant's dream, and the beginning of annihilation no different from a waking instant."
"So even if we are confined to nothing but the instant of here and now, how could we fail to behold annihilation and beginning directly?"
"Our great, great instant."
"Our small, small eternity."
The two Cheon Yo-hwas closed their eyes.
Up to here it was a prayer their father had taught them since childhood, one that recited itself on its own.
Now the highlight. Only the final prayer remained.
But...
"Please die together with me."
The order was switched.
The prayer the elder sister was meant to recite at the very end, the younger sister said first, and.
"Please live together with me."
The prayer the younger sister was meant to recite first, the elder sister said last.
And.
The god answered their prayer.
Footnotes:
[1] The baku is a creature of Japanese folklore (originally from Chinese myth) said to devour nightmares and bad dreams; here it refers to a dream-devouring spirit.
[2] A miko is a shrine maiden in Japanese Shinto tradition, an unmarried woman who serves at a shrine and performs ritual duties.
[3] In Korea (and across East Asia) the number 4 is considered unlucky because it sounds like the word for "death." April 4th thus doubles the omen, an apt date for an apocalypse ritual.
[4] The Spirit Bomb (Genki-dama) is the signature attack from the manga/anime Dragon Ball, in which Goku gathers energy donated from all living things into a massive sphere. This fits the ritual's gathering of energy from the assembled cultists.
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