WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
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Chapter 473: That Woman C X
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* * *
The Cult was a band of Outer God followers who, unlike the usual frauds, never even put a name on their sign. Among its believers it went only by "the Cult," "Head Temple," or "Big House."
When they raised their prayers as one heart and one will, centered on the Cheon Yo-hwa twins, I'll record what happened across the whole of the earth.
"What's wrong? Tired?"
"Mmmm, sorry. I'm suddenly sleepy."
The report on that bad ending went as follows.
First, thirty seconds.
"Haaaaaaah. Ah, me too."
"Right? Is it the weather...? ..."
No matter the time zone, a severe sleeping sickness fell over all of humanity in every region.
"Huh? Hey! Look at that!"
"Wooooooooaaah!"
The soccer player showing off a brilliant dribble across the grass was thrown into total confusion when the three defenders blocking him all collapsed at once, one after another.
But the player was a pro. The striker slipped past all three in an instant and struck the ball, and when even the goalkeeper crumpled in some random spot, the net rippled.
"Wuaaaah!"
The soccer player who'd scored a goal for the ages sprinted off to celebrate.
It was a derby match, too. A performance more than worthy of hero treatment from the fans.
But something was wrong.
The roar of the crowd that should have welcomed his charge, the cheers of the fans, somehow grew quieter the closer he got.
"...?"
The soccer player turned around, bewildered.
Pft. Pft. His own teammates, who'd been chasing after him to join the celebration, were dropping one by one.
They had all fallen asleep.
"Huh?"
Slump.
Soon the one who'd scored collapsed in the corner of the pitch like a puppet with its strings cut.
The stadium packed with tens of thousands fell silent in an instant.
"What the... What is this? What?"
A home-team spectator who'd been filming the whole thing on his smartphone let his mouth fall open.
He couldn't believe what was happening before his eyes.
In barely a minute, the entire stadium, so frenzied moments ago, had stopped breathing.
"Crazy, crazy, crazy! Hey! Wake up!"
"..."
"Is it, is it terrorism? Poison gas? Damn it, what is this?"
And then a minute passed.
On the last spectator's recording smartphone screen, a jet of red sprayed up with a pshhk.
Pop, pop, pop.
The humans who'd fallen asleep soon sank into eternal rest. No one had touched them, yet their heads burst like watermelons, scattering bright red pulp in every direction.
It wasn't only the stands. The green grass, too, was stained here and there with red paint.
Heads blown clean off, only the away-team and home-team uniforms flapped limply, pressed flat under the red.
"...!"
The last spectator ran like a madman. He couldn't even scream.
He had no idea what was happening. He just had to escape, somehow.
Pop, pop! Shoving through the human heads bursting in real time, the blood soaking his whole body, he swallowed his screams and broke desperately out of the stadium.
"God! God!"
The smartphone screen he was clutching shook without pause.
His gasping breath, his groans, the red explosions, all of it was being recorded.
But even after he left the stadium, his despair didn't end.
The streets were already plastered all over in red, and at the sight he could only stop dead.
"No way... A, a dream?"
"Hey! Hey there!"
Far off, a survivor seemed to have spotted him and came running, shouting.
But there was no time even to feel relief. Before he could finish crossing the intersection, pop! The survivor collapsed onto the asphalt and his head went flying.
"Y, yeah. There's no way this is real. There's no way this is reality. It's a dream. Damn it, it's a dream!"
That was the last audio recorded on the smartphone.
At last the phone fell to the ground, the screen lurching wildly. Then a deep, deep red liquid washed over the camera lens, and nothing more could be recorded.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
At a crossroads with no pedestrians crossing and no cars passing through, the traffic light flashed red.
The Cult's prayer went on.
"..."
"..."
The Cheon Yo-hwa twins only pressed their foreheads together, gripping each other's hands tight.
In this very moment.
There was no denying it. The center of the earth lay between the twins' touching foreheads.
'I can feel it.'
Cheon Yo-hwa trembled at the overwhelming sense of omnipotence.
'My power is growing absurdly strong.'
'If before I could only borrow the believers' brains to run simulations... now it's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of times more.'
It was nothing short of gorging.
'This is the god-nim's authority... no.'
'It's my authority.'
Drip.
From the heads of the people who had died at the same instant all across the world, a single drop, then another, of greasy blood began to rise.
Each drop held that person's scream, their cry, their lament. Some moved at nearly the speed of light, others crept along sluggishly like snails, and all of them flowed somewhere.
Into Cheon Yo-hwa's grasp.
A storm of blood rose across the entire earth. The current the single drops made, the whirlpool, surged into Cheon Yo-hwa's hands, clasped tight in prayer.
The Cult's believers who witnessed this strange miracle fell into ecstasy. It was true. Truly, the Reverend was one chosen by heaven!
'...I can't get drunk on this power.'
The Reverend herself, Cheon Yo-hwa, kept her thoughts endlessly cold even as her heart pounded like mad.
'Not all of humanity has died yet. The Cult is still intact. Right now, while the god-nim hasn't fully devoured me, while there's still humanity left in [me], this is the only chance.'
'One at a time. One at a time. Calmly...'
'Run the simulation.'
Squirm, squirm.
The blood drops gathered together and began to take form. A small box.
The younger sister shaped the Baku[1] not as a fairy but in the form of a box.
The older sister was cramming blood drops, one after another, into the box her younger sister had shaped.
"..."
"..."
The two sisters' breathing locked together.
An exceedingly intricate task.
If even one of them got drunk on the god's authority and refused to cooperate with the other, she would instantly be reborn as the world's one and only absolute god.
But Cheon Yo-hwa did not betray Cheon Yo-hwa.
It was a moment when only a single step, no, barely half a step, remained to become the one true god.
In that half-step they did not take, the two sisters had entrusted their own humanity.
'Hold it. Preserve it. Record it. Remember it.'
Cheon Yo-hwa kept her eyes closed.
But what unfolded behind her eyelids was not darkness. Full-color simulations were running endlessly.
Dream was reality, and reality was dream.
Before she knew it, Cheon Yo-hwa was walking freely through the illusions.
Suppressing the god's authority as it raged out of control, putting her own will and purpose above all, Cheon Yo-hwa ran only the simulations she desired.
Blink.
"...Hm?"
Before her eyes, Noh Do-hwa, in a wedding dress, was frowning.
"Who are you...?"
Blink.
"Eh?"
Before her eyes, Sim Ah-ryeon, smeared with paint, gave a start.
"Uh, uh-uh? S... student council president? Why are you suddenly in my room? A, at least knock first."
Blink.
"...?"
Before her eyes, Jeong Ye-ji, who'd been pulling raw ramyeon and the like from the ceiling to prepare drinking snacks, tilted her head.
"Cheon Yo-hwa? No. That's strange. Right now I'm clearly stopping time."
Blink. Blink. Blink.
A kaleidoscope unfolded behind Cheon Yo-hwa's eyelids. In each mirrored facet that made up the kaleidoscope, the protagonist of a bad ending was reflected.
And 'outside' Cheon Yo-hwa's eyelids, meaning on the layer that until just now had formed this world's reality, more and more people's heads were bursting.
Pop!
The Cult was no longer a safe zone either. The outermost ring, formed by the Oechul, began to collapse first.
"There isn't much time," Cheon Yo-hwa said calmly to all those bad endings.
"Right now I've pushed the authority of the Endless and the puppet master to its peak, and I'm running your reality as a simulation."
The Endless. The puppet master. These were unfamiliar names to Cheon Yo-hwa too, yet she used them now as if it were nothing.
Cheon Yo-hwa was already crossing the boundary.
"In other words, your reality has already passed into my hands. What you feel. What you live. All of it is now nothing more than a fleeting spring dream spread out by my authority."
"..."
"..."
"..."
The bad endings fell silent.
Even so, the facets the kaleidoscope reflected kept multiplying, and the rings formed by the Cult's believers kept bursting and bursting.
"Let me put it bluntly. From the moment I interfered, the bad endings you met were already reduced to mere playthings."
"..."
"..."
"..."
In that instant, countless retorts poured out from many facets. Cheon Yo-hwa felt herself overloading, just slightly.
But she bit down hard on her lip. Without missing a single facet, a single bad ending, Cheon Yo-hwa split herself into countless pieces and answered every one.
"It's useless to voice your complaints to me. The fact that I could pull off something like this means the same thing can be repeated at any time. You understand, don't you?"
"..." "..." "..."
"If anything, I'd like you to thank me. At least I'm standing here not to make your reality a lie, but the exact opposite. To deliver all of your epilogues into reality. Hwaaaah. Really, my problem is that I'm just too kind."
A storm of blood rose.
At last the Cult's Naechul had their heads explode too. Like dominoes toppling, from the outer ring to the inner, the believers offered up their souls one by one.
There weren't many dominoes left.
"Please pray," Cheon Yo-hwa said, clasping her two hands together.
"Toward the final cycle that we, together with Mr. Go Yuir and the others, may someday reach. Earnestly recall the feelings, the memories, the love you want to leave there."
Shatter.
"Place it in Pandora's box."
Shatter. Shatter. Shatter.
The facets spread out like a kaleidoscope broke. Every broken facet was stained the red of blood.
When all the simulations shattered.
"Unni."
One last facet remained.
It was the facet once called 'reality.' But by now it was no different from the other simulation universes, reduced to a playground Cheon Yo-hwa could stir as she pleased.
There stood her younger sister.
"I saw it too. ...The Teacher and me."
"Yeah."
Blood gushed up behind her sister's shoulders.
The ring-shaped fortress wall formed by the Naechul caved in. Now even the ring of the Cult's elders, barely a few dozen surrounding them, was collapsing.
The storm of blood that explosion raised looked just like an evening glow, and her sister seemed to stand with a twilight made of flesh and blood at her back.
"I'm going to forget you, unni."
"Yeah."
"But once we open the time capsule, today's events too. And the things that happened in other places too. They'll all come flooding back, so we'll be able to play together like today again. Right?"
"...Yeah."
"I love you, unni."
Her sister smiled.
"Even in a world like this. Being born family with you, unni, made me so, so happy..."
And then her sister, too, was dyed by the glow.
"..."
Humanity had perished.
Every kaleidoscope she had spread out was broken, and there wasn't one facet that wasn't drowned in blood.
A world drowned in the twilight of a blood storm, worlds, and Cheon Yo-hwa walked through them as the last human left.
"...I'm sleepy."
She was tired.
She felt she might collapse at any second.
"I can't sleep. No, falling asleep here. Then everything would be for nothing."
But Cheon Yo-hwa didn't yield to the drowsiness and kept walking. She had a destination to reach.
It wasn't all that hard. By leaping from facet to facet, she could cross several regions in an instant.
Blink.
Still, even mid-walk, she couldn't stop her eyelids from opening and closing. Blink, blink. Utter exhaustion and helplessness wrung at her brows.
"Not sleepy-. Not sleeeepy-."
Every time she blinked, the scenery shifted in strange ways.
Now that all life had perished and belonged to Cheon Yo-hwa, the world could no longer hold its original form.
Just as she had once manipulated the dream scenery like a 'video' when she first learned how to use her authority.
Now the world took shape exactly as she gazed, exactly as she thought.
And the scenery that changed in this way was.
"Ahaha."
A vast laboratory.
Every human brain floated bobbing inside a glass jar. One brain ran one simulation, one bad ending.
"What is this... Bobbing brains. A lab where nothing but bad endings recording humanity's extinction keep running."
Cheon Yo-hwa let out a smile.
"Really. Someone who didn't know better would think it was a vision of hell itself..."
But it was a hell she had chosen.
Blink.
Cheon Yo-hwa connected herself to those countless simulation universes.
Carrying 'Pandora's box' carefully in both hands, to the same place each time.
Just as she'd arranged in advance with Go Yuir, she arrived at the campus of Stanford University.
"Hng, hng-hng-♪"
Humming. To keep herself awake.
There was no one around. Naturally. She had collected only perished worlds.
In worlds where even Go Yuir had died, Go Yuri was absent too. She could tell that Go Yuri had always taken her own life immediately after his death.
"Heave-ho. Now then, let's see-."
Cheon Yo-hwa set the box down for a moment and began digging the soil at the appointed spot.
She used both hands to dig. A shovel would have been far easier, but the feel of the earth crumbling at her fingertips worked better at chasing off the drowsiness.
"Well. This deep should keep it from washing away in the rain!"
Her fingernails were all broken. Along with grains of soil, blood ran down from her fingertips.
Beaming, Cheon Yo-hwa laid Pandora's box inside the pit, shallow but unmistakably the deepest hole in the universe.
She buried it. Carefully.
She covered it. A few tears fell.
"Sunbae."
"If you do all this and still don't come back here later to dig up the time capsule... I'll be angry, you know?"
"Ji-won too. If you suddenly give up your studies abroad and insist on staying by sunbae's side, throwing a tantrum like that, even gentle me would get angry."
A small burial mound rose.
Come to think of it, a grave might have been the very first structure humans built to leap across time.
"...Ah."
Right after.
Cheon Yo-hwa realized she'd made a mistake.
"Before burying it I should have asked sunbae to lay a [time seal] over the box. I forgot."
Such a ridiculous mistake.
But it couldn't be helped. No matter how perfect the plan, once it goes live the operation is bound to tangle.
She had been desperate, after all, not to be devoured by the god-nim, never to fall asleep until Pandora's box was buried.
"Ahaha... Oops, oops♪"
Wriggle, wriggle.
Around the grave where the heart of despair was buried, water drops were moving. The Outer God who'd lost the Miko named Yu Ji-won[2]. The trace of Leviathan.
"Mm. Well, if I'd kept sunbae alive, Go Yuri might have caught on. So for security's sake this is actually better."
-...
"Okay. There's no helping it! Leviathan! I'll bestow on you the honorable role of grave keeper."
-...
"Go Yuri of course, but also sunbae, or anyone connected to sunbae, the moment it seems they're crossing the Pacific, trigger the Great Deluge without fail. When they don't come near, stay quiet. Understand?"
-...
"Then I'll let you wound me in return."
-...
Cheon Yo-hwa touched a water drop with her fingertip. At that, a blood drop blended into the clear water.
"Contract sealed, then."
Cheon Yo-hwa felt a little relieved.
With a guard stationed like this, even the formidable Go Yuri wouldn't go meddling beyond the Pacific without good reason.
A matter of matchups. Thanks to an SSS-rank Miko who could assassinate a pro reincarnator without batting an eye.
"Yeah."
Thud.
Cheon Yo-hwa sat down hard.
"It's over..."
Her head went suddenly blank.
She was sleepy.
She was really, truly sleepy.
"...Maybe this is my limit."
Cheon Yo-hwa knew, of course, that this was no ordinary drowsiness.
It was a sign that the Outer God of Taeguk[3] and the puppet master's Outer God would no longer permit her any 'self-awareness.'
If she closed her eyes like this. If she sank into that sweetest of unconscious states, that was when she'd truly become one body and one self with the puppet master.
"..."
In this vision of hell, set a hand's breadth apart from all realities, all worldlines.
Endlessly repeating simulations forever.
Until someone came looking for her.
"..."
That, too, wasn't so bad.
After all, she was a villain of the worst kind.
'A world that would have been destroyed by other anomalies anyway if left alone,' 'better this way, devouring humanity's souls first,' 'better to send a time capsule to a happy ending,' 'and while we're at it, collect the other worldlines' bad endings too.'
No matter what cause or excuse she put forward, the fact that Cheon Yo-hwa herself had destroyed the world did not change.
The even worse fact was that, despite exterminating humanity, Cheon Yo-hwa felt no guilt at all.
"Ahaha..."
The worst kind of human.
Blink.
Without even noticing it herself, Cheon Yo-hwa let her eyelids fall closed.
When she opened her eyes again, she couldn't gauge how long she'd dozed.
'...Hm?'
But strangely, what spread before her was not the bleak laboratory of hell.
It was a playground.
A somewhat old playground, or one left to neglect.
The sun was just setting, so the children who'd been on the swings until moments ago all seemed to have gone home.
In the middle of that playground, a very small girl and a middle-school boy crouched, building a sandcastle.
There was no failing to recognize their faces.
Cheon Yo-hwa as a child.
Go Yuir in his middle-school days.
'...Huh?'
What on earth was this.
Cheon Yo-hwa, already eaten away by drowsiness, could only stare blankly at the playhouse going on in the playground. Her thoughts weren't turning well.
Only.
"I'm super super rich, you know!"
"Sure, sure. You're rich."
From a playground that felt so impossibly far away, only the conversation passing between the girl and the boy reached her faintly, mingled into the red glow.
"It's true! I've even got servants and everything!"
"Wow. Then I can't figure out why a rich young lady like that is sitting alone in our neighborhood playground."
"They say this is the neighborhood the Teacher lives in... So I lied to my father and snuck out here!"
...
Had she had a past like this?
'Five years old? Or four? Back then I... I'd met Go Yuir?'
Cheon Yo-hwa searched her memory hard.
But she failed.
'...It won't come back.'
The Outer God's authority no longer obeyed her will.
'More than that, so that's how I talked when I was a little kid.'
Cheon Yo-hwa gazed on and on at the sunlit playground.
Maybe the scene before her was a lie, an illusion the Outer God's authority had thrown together on its own in response to the Miko's desire, right before she closed her eyes for good.
Maybe it was the projection of the inferiority complex she'd secretly held toward Yu Ji-won, the greed to have met 'sunbae' even a little earlier, to have had a bond before Yu Ji-won did.
Maybe.
"Big brother, why are you playing with me?"
"A kid I've obviously never seen in our neighborhood is sitting on the swings alone in the playground. Of course I'd worry."
"Worry? You're worried about me?"
"Yep."
"Big brother, you're a pushover!"
"..."
Maybe a coincidence like this really had happened in the past.
'...Aah.'
A brief meeting, about an hour. A crossing.
Her four- or five-year-old self naturally didn't remember the face of the boy who'd played with her that day, and the boy, too, didn't remember the girl he'd looked after for that hour.
'Sunbae.'
The girl and the boy were building a sandcastle.
But neither had much talent for construction. The sandcastle the two made actually looked just like a sand grave.
'Sunbae...'
A tiny sand grave.
'It seems I'm the kind of person who can only prove her sincerity by offering something up.'
'A flaw. A lack.'
'I don't know how to love myself.'
Above that sand grave, the children's laughter rang out in bright peals.
'To love you...'
To become someone who could love wholly.
'I think I threw everything away.'
She had staked everything.
Even her humanity.
'...So, when that day comes.'
When everything has succeeded.
'When I get to confess my feelings to sunbae.'
When you come to dig up that smallest sand grave in all the world.
'I think I'll be able to... love myself a little, with confidence.'
It had been a life born riddled with flaws.
A world destined for a bad ending.
Even someone like her, even a world whose destruction was reserved, if they could become something at all.
'Sunbae.'
The glow was sinking.
Her eyes were closing.
Someone came to the playground, a servant who seemed to have come to fetch the girl, and seeing it, the girl shot up and ran over.
The girl seemed to wave, saying bye-bye. She couldn't hear what the boy answered, but surely he answered her properly.
'...I like you.'
And then.
Her eyelids closed.
An eternal instant of darkness took her in.
The girl who had lost her name decided to place her farewell in the sand grave.
'Please, let it reach.'
Pandora's box.
A time capsule.
Today's glow.
A single love letter.
-That Woman C. Fin.
Footnotes:
[1] The baku, here meaning a dream demon, is a creature of folklore said to devour nightmares and dreams, fitting Cheon Yo-hwa's dream-and-simulation powers.
[2] A miko is a shrine maiden or priestess who serves a deity; here it denotes the human vessel bound to an Outer God.
[3] The name Taeguk evokes the Korean yin-yang symbol, but here it refers to the anomaly worshiped by the Cult.
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