WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 474: That Woman D I
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Dang Seo-rin was happy.
"So like, some Outer God spent more than millions of years pretending to be 'me,' and across tens of thousands of cycles it burned through its Lifespan and died every single day, but in the end those memories only stuck around as faint afterimages and we still reached the happy ending, so it's all gooood...!"
That was right.
Imagine, if you would, that you were Dang Seo-rin, specifically the eldest daughter of Busan's Dang Flower Garden who had finally reached the happy ending route.
All she had done was cooperate for a few weeks with LiteraryGirl, who claimed, "I've played this game before!"
And yet by the time she came to her senses, insane leveling and stat growth had come bundled with it.
Just listing the skills she had acquired gave you this: 'The mental strength to overcome the trauma of losing her family,' 'But since they were actually alive and well, family bonds that had become even deeper,' 'Political connections built through the mayor of Busan,' 'Business channels gained by exporting flowers all over the world,' 'A voluntary slave who came asking to please let her work part-time, saying it was fine to use her for free,' 'The nerve to face world annihilation without even blinking,' 'Reliable comrades who shared that nerve,' 'Lee Ha-yul's cuteness,' 'The courage to snort even if an anomaly appeared in the middle of the night'...
Every single one was an overwhelming life experience.
They were nourishment for life itself, and connections she could never obtain again even for a mountain of gold. In fact, it would be a bit of a problem if it ever became possible to get them again.
Most of all.
"Un-der-taaaker♪"
She had found love.
"What're you doing, what're you doing? You got time today?"
"My apologies. Wait just a little."
"Eeh, why? What're you doing?"
"I was making you an affogato."
"Kyaa!"
Love.
Dang Seo-rin could truly feel that love was the noblest miracle permitted in life, no, in the universe.
Love's greatest enemy was time. No one knew whether this love would last one year, ten years, or fifty years. Life was the real thing.
But Dang Seo-rin had beta-tested it for not fifty years, but for tens of thousands of years and more.
At this point, the game deserved to be called god-tier just because it had finally gotten an official release.
'This is fate. This is romance!'
Dang Seo-rin wanted to stomp and clap for her past self, the self from the fourth cycle who now existed only as the vaguest feeling.
Because back then, when the Undertaker had lost all his companions and was starring in the bleakest misery story imaginable, it had been Dang Seo-rin who took him in.
Thanks to that, Dang Seo-rin had succeeded in buying low on a premium stock that was about to ascend like mad.
Maybe some riffraff like What's-her-name Do-hwa or Who-even Yo-hwa would call her a coward, but.
'If you're mad, you should've gone and [saved] him yourselves, no?'
Ah...
Dang Seo-rin could look up to Hecate without a speck of shame.
In dating sims too, the most orthodox way to clear a route was to aim for the moment when the other person was at their lowest and then start flirting.
No one was allowed to call her trash for that. Dang Seo-rin did not have even the slightest intention of ending this romance with flirting alone.
"Undertaker. This is so good!"
"Hm. You still call me Undertaker quite often."
"Ah, yeah. It still doesn't quite stick in my mouth somehow."
It was half true and half false.
The current Dang Seo-rin was Super Account Dang Seo-rin, who had inherited only the choicest Experience Points built up over the previous cycles.
Where would the veteran chops of someone who had once built Busan's biggest guild from nothing, then commanded power across the entire Korean Peninsula, possibly go?
Awakeners were all crazy. Every last one of them. The very person who had gathered those lunatics, organized them into a single army, and commanded them with perfect discipline was none other than this tactical genius, Dang Seo-rin.
'Here, the title [Undertaker] works way better on me than [Go Yuir].'
Flash.
The strategic mind of the greatest witch in history, one who blasphemed even the gods, gave off a sinister gleam.
'There are... surprisingly a lot of people of interest who came into contact with this man while he still had the real name Go Yuir.'
To borrow the dating-sim metaphor again, how strong your bond with the target was came down to seniority.
In other words, how long ago you had met.
The earlier the point at which you met, the more frighteningly solid that bond became.
Did anyone really think those childhood-friend archetype characters who were always teased as the "losing heroine"[1] were actually destined to lose?
On the contrary, they were the strongest contenders, which was exactly why they got hit with concentrated fire and all sorts of sabotage.
In that sense, Dang Seo-rin had as many as three rivals she absolutely could not relax around.
Cheon Yo-hwa: "Huh? How long have we known each other? Ah, we started taking lessons from teacher around high school."
Yu Ji-won: "We lived in the same neighborhood from childhood. We formed a direct connection around middle school."
Go Yuri: "A bond from a past life. Siblings. Since birth."
...There did seem to be one pink-haired anomaly using a shameless cheat key, but anyway.
'No matter what anyone says, the person who saved [the Undertaker] from the pit of despair and raised him into a proper regressor was me, Dang Seo-rin.'
That was truly the case.
Go Yuir's university years? She did not know them. His childhood? She did not know that either. Siblings from a past life... What even is that, you otaku?
But if it was [the Undertaker] instead of [Go Yuir], the story flipped one hundred and eighty degrees.
'[The Undertaker] was the first president of my fan club, he opened a radio channel for me, and I taught him how to choose clothes, how to trim his hair and eyebrows, how to spray perfume, how not to give up even before absolute despair and defend human affection, how to manage an organization, and how to seize a city's public sentiment. You all should respect me...'
Literally.
Dang Seo-rin had turned the Undertaker into a person.
The reverse was also true. The Undertaker had turned Dang Seo-rin into a person as well.
So who would dare deny it?
'The two of us are tied together by a red thread[2]!'
The unmistakable route conqueror. The protagonist.
That was why Dang Seo-rin, confident and yet not careless, prepared the final strike to put an end to this long battle.
"Oh right. Undertaker. Shouldn't you start making good on that promise you made me soon?"
"Promise?"
"The trip around the world!"
"Ah."
"You're not telling me you forgot, right?"
"As if I would. It's just... Well."
The Undertaker smiled in a way that was hard to read.
"It suddenly feels new again, that I can really keep the promise I made with you."
"..."
Her heart pounded.
Whenever Dang Seo-rin saw that man's smile, which seemed to hold not decades but tens of thousands of years of wistfulness, she felt like she was going a little crazy.
If there were a world championship for men who looked best with that kind of smile, the Undertaker would win seventeen straight times, make the competition itself boring, and then retire in leisure...
There was no real need to hide it now, but Dang Seo-rin was looking at him through some rather thick rose-colored glasses.
If something as thick as battleship armor plating could still be expressed with a cute little phrase like rose-colored glasses.
'This isn't just a world tour.'
'This is a journey blessed with the most romantic name in the world, a honeymoon.'
The AI installed in Dang Seo-rin's brain spun up magnificently.
The question of whether she had ever actually gotten engaged to the man in front of her, or even officially started dating him, was cleanly filtered out by DangGPT.
AI always cared more about the user's star rating than about logical facts.
No, to put it bluntly, what did it matter that there had been no official engagement and no official relationship yet?
'Yeah. There will be from now on.'
A world tour. A world tour.
For at least the next two years, probably, days of the two of them traveling around together would unfold.
Time solved many things. Two years was more than enough time for the relationship-plus-engagement package, plus one extra product on top.
'Nobody can object to this world tour. Of course not. It's the most foundational promise of all, one that was planned all the way back in the fourth cycle.'
She would gently push aside the annoying Go Yuir family and go on a romantic, literally romantic, trip.
It was a truly perfect operation.
'Hehehehe.'
Dang Seo-rin was wearing a Great Witch-grade smile when the Undertaker casually checked his notebook.
"Ah. But before we properly set out on the world tour, there's somewhere we need to stop by first."
"Hm? Where?"
"America. Ji-won is planning to go study abroad at Stanford University."
"...?"
Yu Ji-won? Stanford? All of a sudden?
"Stanford... You mean that prison anomaly?"
"It certainly was an experiment that appeared as an anomaly in the past. That's right. It happened there."
The Undertaker gave a wry smile.
"But it's also a school that's fairly famous for classics related to ancient Greece. Yu Ji-won has been preparing to study abroad for a long time."
"Heeeh..."
Dang Seo-rin let it pass by like she was hearing about some foreign country, which, well, she literally was.
In truth, Dang Seo-rin had never had much interest in academics. Since childhood, she had only ever planned to inherit the family flower shop and expand it further.
She had once been interested in politics too, but not anymore, now that she had inherited the memories of regression, even if imperfectly.
Maybe it was because once she had actually tried it, she lost interest. She wanted to enjoy her private life more freely.
"But wouldn't studying in America cost a lot?"
"Yo-hwa said she'd help."
"Ah. Then there really won't be any problem."
"For reference, I hear Yo-hwa's family has been rolling their money lately as if they entrusted a fund to the Saintess herself."
"Eek..."
A fund manager? The Saintess, meaning Ye-ji?
When Dang Seo-rin pictured the Saintess, always shut up in a room operating a computer, her expression turned strange.
'Does that... fit her?'
But as soon as the Undertaker told her about the Saintess's fund-manager-level returns, Dang Seo-rin immediately decided to entrust her retirement planning to that person too.
'Ah, I've met a benefactor...!'
Returns like that without any regressor cheats like Bitcoin or the lottery?
The Saintess was a god, and she was invincible.
"Ji-won said she'd just go on her own. But even so, I think it would be right to go to California together and stay with her until the various little odds and ends are taken care of."
"Hmm."
Dang Seo-rin thought it over.
The AI started spinning furiously again.
Demon Seo-rin: "What are you thinking so hard about? One of the trickiest ones is volunteering to leave on her own."
Angel Seo-rin: "Still, if you're worried, go along when the Undertaker goes. There should be a lot of good restaurants there too. It'd be a nice chance to test how well you and the Undertaker travel together."
Demon Seo-rin: "Let's butt into the precious settling-in period of their study abroad life. Kihihi!"
Angel Seo-rin: "Ihihi!"
Hm.
The opinions from both sides were so logical that she had no choice but to take an integrated course of action...
"Then I'll go too!"
"You too?"
The Undertaker blinked.
"It probably won't be very fun, since there'll be a lot to deal with related to studying abroad..."
"Mhm. I'll just think of it as a personal vacation. And if it's California, aren't Los Angeles and Las Vegas nearby too? I'll look around all of them while I'm at it."
"Hm."
"What? Do you not want me coming along?"
"No. Not at all."
The Undertaker answered instantly.
In the end, Dang Seo-rin succeeded in squeezing herself into the party.
The Undertaker even handled the annoying ticketing for her, so Dang Seo-rin packed her suitcase all pretty, humming away without a care in the world.
And so, on the day of the trip, at Incheon Airport.
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
This was absolutely not some cheap trick to pad the page count, like the 'Level Up! Level Up!' parade technique from rental-shop-era fantasy novels.
From the top down, they were Yu Ji-won, Jeong Ye-ji, Sim Ah-ryeon, Cheon Yo-hwa, Cheon Yo-hwa, Oh Dok-seo, Lee Ha-yul, Noh Do-hwa, and Dang Seo-rin.
Where had the Undertaker gone, you asked? He had run off saying he would buy coffee.
"What the hell."
That was Dang Seo-rin.
"Why are you all here?!"
"Th-then what about you, Guild Leader of Samcheon World?"
"There's no Samcheon World, and I'm not the Guild Leader!"
"Hoah. B-by that logic, you're not the Undertaker anymore either..."
Damn it. Dang Seo-rin swallowed the curse. To think that, as someone born human, she had tried to mix words with that villain OldManGoryeo. She had been foolish.
At that moment, one of the two Cheon Yo-hwas raised a hand. Unlike the Undertaker, Dang Seo-rin had no mystical power to tell from appearances alone which one was older and which one was younger.
"Ah. Wait. I paid for all the plane tickets and hotel costs for this trip."
"..."
"They're all first class flights. And the hotels are all five-star, with really big rooms. I actually considered taking a private jet, but that felt like it'd stand out too much."
Damn it. Dang Seo-rin swallowed the curse. To think that, as an ordinary commoner, she had picked a fight with that titanium-spoon brat from a creepy cult. This lowly being had been foolish.
[I'm obviously going.]
Lee Ha-yul raised her sketchbook. There was a wildly overbearing confidence hanging around her chin that said no explanation should even be necessary.
Lee Ha-yul was acceptable.
"B-but if all of you are going... sniff. Then who's going to do my laundry and my meals and my cleaning...?"
Sim Ah-ryeon prattled on. A thoroughly filthy aura radiated from her whole body, the sort that made you not want to know any more.
Could you please just disappear?
No. Dang Seo-rin could understand everyone else. They had probably joined the trip for roughly the same reason she had.
"But Noh Do-hwa. Why are you..."
"Fuck. That bastard kept saying if everybody's going and I'm the only one left behind, isn't that just ostracizing me, and then he snatched my passport and booked the ticket anyway. I told him I don't give a shit about being ostracized, so I don't know what his problem is. Isn't this illegal...?"
Aha. So it was the Undertaker's meddlesome streak.
'Well. If it's a group trip like this, maybe it's not so bad after all?'
Come to think of it, the people gathered at the airport right now really were the hero party that had saved the world. They were comrades bound by ties spanning three lifetimes, thicker than blood.
They were fated to keep living together for the rest of their lives anyway, so what was one little group trip?
It absolutely was not because this was her first time enjoying the grandeur of first class for free.
'Right. Since it's come to this, let's enjoy it! As long as I'm not seated next to Sim Ah-ryeon, I don't care!'
Right after boarding, Dang Seo-rin saw, to her surprise, that the seats near Sim Ah-ryeon had been deliberately left empty, and she once again praised Cheon Yo-hwa's foresight.
Feeling utterly comfortable, she drifted off to sleep.
'Well. With this many people watching, what could possibly happen?'
But.
She should have thought a little harder.
About the final piece of foreshadowing.
About the prophecy that had still not been fully resolved even now, when the protagonists had reached the epilogue after the epilogue.
About the Prophets, who in every cycle died first of all, heads exploding, leaving dying messages behind for later generations, all the way until the happy ending was reached.
About the meaning of the dying message they wrote.
S U
The Prophets were wise.
The moment the Prophet sensed that there would not be much information left behind anyway, the Prophet left a message loaded with layered interpretations.
SU also meant the original name the reincarnator had first possessed. It was also the key that would later uncover the decisive Strategy Guide on SG Net.
Whether it also meant "beware Seo Gyu" was hard to say.
But above all.
Stanford University
Stanford University
It was also the destination of the journey they were currently heading toward, and the place where a girl who once held a one-sided love had buried a time capsule by sacrificing an entire world.
And finally.
S U R A J A N G
Surajang, a scene of carnage.
That was the word that would prove to be an eerily exact prophecy of the future that was about to unfold.
With only two letters of the alphabet, they had created a clue with this many layers of meaning, so how could anyone say the Prophets had not fully carried out the dignity and duty of their office?
But Dang Seo-rin knew absolutely none of that.
Not only Dang Seo-rin, but the vast majority of the people on that plane had no idea either, and simply enjoyed the excitement and flutter of travel.
Sadly...
Since ancient times, prophecy had never been all that useful in preventing future tragedies.
'This trip's gonna be fun!'
Surajang. Standby.
Only 25 hours remained.
Footnotes:
[1] "Losing heroine," or "make heroine," is anime, manga, and dating-sim fandom slang for a love-interest character, often the childhood friend, who is destined not to win the protagonist's affection.
[2] The red thread of fate is an East Asian belief that destined lovers are connected by an invisible red string no matter the distance or circumstances.
[3] The Prophets' dying message is layered wordplay. "S U" begins both "Stanford University," the trip's destination, and "S U R A J A N G," Surajang, meaning a scene of carnage or bloody chaos.
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