WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 351: Ruin (12)

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Just from looking at the current "Kim Jun-ho," it was obvious that every plan I'd come up with had already failed. Which meant I needed to try something I hadn't tried before.

"...There's really nothing else."

Nothing came to mind besides attempting companion regression with someone new. The plan with the best odds was probably regressing that player they called "the Empress." But I'd never even seen the Empress in person, and I'd heard her personality wasn't great, which made me hesitant.

Or I could stay in reality a bit longer and search for a new path. No matter how much I hated the weight of everyone's attention, no matter how much I hated carrying so many lives on my back... none of that compared to losing Choi Ji-won forever. If there truly was no other way, I was even prepared to defend Earth when the monsters invaded.

But if I had to name the plan with the best odds, it was still.

"The Hero."

Convincing the Hero had the highest probability of success. If she just let me out within a single day, everything would be resolved.

Since persuading the Hero was both the most likely and the easiest path, all my focus turned to her. What would I need to do to convince her? Why had she rejected my proposal in the first place? Why hadn't she felt drawn to the idea of a regressor?

There were several possibilities, plenty of room to experiment. I started with the first question I'd fire off the moment I arrived, running through one scenario after another.

"...This is strange."

Unlike me, the Kim Jun-ho of this world sat holed up in the corner of his room, muttering "this is strange" over and over.

Looking at it from this Kim Jun-ho's position, it really was a hopeless situation. Everything had already happened to him. Regressing gave him no chance to set anything right.

The Hero? Say he convinced her and got out in a day, so what? Choi Ji-won had already left, and the connection to the World's Center had already been severed.

But the part that made me want to say "this is strange" too was that this Kim Jun-ho's despair wasn't ordinary despair.

If he'd been crying and mumbling "this is strange" like before, or lying in bed muttering to himself, I would've just written it off as expected. But.

"This is strange."

Pulling out a laptop, a notebook, even his phone, writing things down feverishly while repeating "this is strange" over and over, that wasn't a normal state to be in. Like me searching for a way out, he seemed to be searching for something too. Like me spotting a sliver of hope and racking my brain over it, he seemed to have spotted some thin lifeline in the dark.

"...Is this just how I am."

Was this my personality? If there was any glimmer of possibility, I didn't give up even in a hopeless situation. I at least tried. For a regressor, time was infinite, and as long as I didn't move to the next floor, there was no ending. Choi Ji-won wasn't someone trivial enough to give up on so easily. She was worth staking a life on.

Even if it meant locking myself inside a prison of time I'd built myself.

"This is strange."

This Kim Jun-ho, and I too, agreed it was too soon to give up. I couldn't give up like this.

"...Keep at it."

Each of us, in our own place, kept trying to reclaim some kind of normal life.

Time passed, indifferent to any of it.

* * *

"...When does this end."

By feel, quite a lot of time had passed, but the vision the book was showing me showed no sign of ending.

I'd laid out a systematic approach to reaching the Hero, and prepared in advance how I'd adjust my plan depending on her reactions. I wasn't sure how accurate this kind of approach to human psychology really was, but I'd calculated nearly every possible outcome, so it should be fine.

And well, even if things went sideways with the Hero, that was fine too. I didn't only get one chance.

"Guess this one's winding down too."

One thing I'd realized from spending so much time inside the vision was that my sense of time and "that Kim Jun-ho's" time didn't match up. What felt like about a week to me was a much longer stretch for him.

From my perspective maybe an hour had passed, but for the Kim Jun-ho of this world a week had gone by. Other times I'd only looked away for a moment and it had gone from day to night. If it felt like a long time to me, then to this Kim Jun-ho it must have felt like an eternity.

So what had this Kim Jun-ho been doing all that time? That's... not easy to describe.

Opening photos on his phone. Hesitating over whether to call the contact saved as "Choi Ji-won." Getting drunk and calling her anyway, receiving some warm comfort, then sobering up and slamming his head against the wall in self-loathing before regressing again. Groaning over how the notebook he'd been filling in reset to blank pages every time.

Even living through such a wretched daily grind, this Kim Jun-ho never stopped moving. He called people, searched things up, sometimes went outside to check things in person. Sometimes he entered the Tower and wandered Floor 26. Sometimes he called someone out for a drink.

"...Gathering information."

Right. Everything this Kim Jun-ho did could be summed up in one phrase: gathering information. The greatest advantage of regression was carrying information from the future back into the past, and that was the exact routine I always ran whenever I hit a crisis.

But what genuinely puzzled me was why he was gathering information in the first place. His notebook was made up of scattered words rather than full sentences, hard to parse (a kind of brainstorming, just words crammed everywhere), and the handwriting had crossed the line from bad penmanship into something closer to scribbles. Of course, he hadn't written the notebook to show anyone. He'd written it to organize his own thoughts.

Naturally, since this was my own habit, I'd already given up trying to decipher the notebook and was just waiting for this Kim Jun-ho to blurt out something meaningful out loud. He talked to himself a lot anyway.

"This is strange, though."

And right now. Pacing in circles around the table in the middle of the studio apartment, deep in thought. This world's version of me looked shabby, filthy enough to be called ugly, but his eyes still burned with something sharp.

"How did I clear Floor 25."

And just now, from the sentence he'd muttered.

"...Ah!"

I understood at once what he'd been agonizing over, what all his activity had been building toward. Right, it was strange. Thinking it through, it really was strange.

What part was strange? Let's lay it out again.

This world had lost its connection to the World's Center. And the power called "companion regression" had been tied to the World's Center in some way, so once the connection was severed, companion regression vanished along with it.

What followed after that was the rewriting of the past. Every action Choi Ji-won and I had taken together in the past had been erased, and history had shifted into something like "Kim Jun-ho and Choi Ji-won were just companions who climbed the Tower separately." Choi Ji-won would have climbed alone, and the same would have gone for Kim Jun-ho.

But here's where something felt off. No, it had to feel off.

This world's version of me had woken up on Floor 29 after taking a wound. Meaning, his regression point was set at Floor 29.

That meant he'd climbed all the way to Floor 29 purely on his own strength, without Choi Ji-won's help. Well, that part could make sense. For a regressor, "how much time it takes to climb the Tower" depends on which route you take, not on how easily you clear the floors. Conquering a floor in ten seconds doesn't mean you took the easy path, and taking a full year doesn't mean you took the hard one. It's just a difference in method.

The part that struck this world's version of me as strange, and the part I'd now noticed too, was this.

"Can I, alone, without Choi Ji-won's help, clear Floor 25?"

How had a person like me managed to clear Floor 25? Thinking it through properly, it didn't add up.

Floor 25 had been a maze filled with poison. Thanks to the trait Girl's Cheer, I could sense danger in advance, but I had no way of knowing what kind of danger it was.

Of course, I'd had Ji-won. Choi Ji-won had gone in ahead of me and invented a technique called "Mana Filter" for my sake. That was a feat only a genius on Choi Ji-won's level could pull off, and I was certain, without her, I never would have cleared it.

But what about "me in the changed history"? Even granting that Girl's Cheer alone could sense the danger, there was no Choi Ji-won to invent something like Mana Filter. No Choi Ji-won to go in ahead and prepare countermeasures. No way to clear Floor 25 without taking a wound.

And yet, if it were truly impossible for me to clear Floor 25 without Choi Ji-won... that didn't add up either. If that were the case, shouldn't I have come to inside the maze after the past was rewritten through the ring, or come to before ever entering Floor 25 at all? There was no reason, strange as it sounded, for me to wake up on Floor 29, the exact same floor progress as before.

Two hypotheses followed from this.

First, that there had been some other helper besides Choi Ji-won. That was probably what this world's Kim Jun-ho had been investigating. What information had he gathered back then, how had he cleared Floor 25, whether he'd received help from anyone other than Choi Ji-won in the process. With no memory of it, he must have been collecting other people's accounts.

But it seemed this Kim Jun-ho hadn't found a clear answer after all that time, which left only one possibility.

"I... in some way, alone, there's a way to clear Floor 25 by myself."

That the world, that history up to now, had shifted like this meant that it was possible for a human being called "Kim Jun-ho" to clear Floor 25 alone. However long it took, however twisted his reasoning became in the process, the fact that it was "possible" mattered. That was why history had changed this way.

But again. How? How had he done it? What exactly would it take to clear Floor 25 alone?

"..."

I had a rough idea of the conclusion, but no grasp of the process. Actually, over the course of so many regressions, I'd run into similar situations a few times before, and whenever that happened, I always did the same thing.

"Time to run an experiment."

An experiment. Set a hypothesis, then prove it correct. This world's Kim Jun-ho shot up from his seat and started making calls in every direction.

Right after, the viewpoint shifted in an instant, and I found myself sitting inside some studio outfitted with professional equipment.

"Today we have a very special guest with us. He said he had something he really needed to say, so we invited him onto our channel."

"Yes. I have something to say."

Probably the whole world where I'd failed to reconnect with Choi Ji-won.

"I'm a regressor."

This seemed to be that guy's experimental stage.

Footnotes:

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