Chapter 149: The Reclaimed Half

[Translator – Aren]

The pastor and I walked along the tracks in silence for a while.

We didn’t even have the luxury of talking. Instead of stalactites, pale lights dotted the ceiling, with water dripping from cracks overhead. Too much had happened in too short an amount of time. I was still confused, but we couldn’t stop moving.

I took the left, the pastor the right.

The pastor and I walked slowly, making as little noise as possible. We were worried something might catch the scent of our living breath, or pick up on our presence and follow us. The pastor quietly recited a prayer, while I prepared to tuck my rifle under my left arm in case something happened.

Once a real chase began, there probably wouldn’t be time to draw a knife. If things went bad, I'd have to grab the muzzle with my right hand and rip the flesh open if necessary, scattering Hands-branch, Stage 1 [Blood of the Right Hand].

At the same time, regret over letting my guard down mixed with the indignant thought of ‘How the fuck was I supposed to see this coming?’

I’d only planned to dip one foot in and pull it right back out. Who could’ve known that the moment I did, I’d sink in completely?

And yet, part of me was secretly thrilled that the rumors about the underground had turned out to be true.

I’d wondered whether anything underground could really threaten a Great Archmage like me, but this was weirdly exhilarating. Just when I’d been thinking that even if something magic-related was going on down here, how impressive could it really be compared to stealing a nuclear warhead, something this absurd happened.

-Splash. 

As we stepped across the damp floor, the fear slowly began to fade, and excitement took its place. Even with my rifle raised as I walked, I couldn’t completely hide how thrilled I was.

It was a pleasant kind of betrayal.

If magic really was capable of something like this, I could even understand why the 66-Society looked down on non-wizards. I’d never expected the phrase “soulless clay” to hit this hard.

The 66 Society.

From what I’d seen, they seemed perfectly willing to applaud a Great Archmage, were academically open-minded, and didn’t seem to have any vermin-like non-wizards getting all uppity without knowing their place. Maybe switching over to their side really was the right call.

That was when I heard breathing through a gas mask.

-Huuff—.

I could feel the pastor looking at me, but rather than saying anything, he chose to keep watch.

Because a strange noise had joined the others. Not screams, nor groans, but a sort of clattering sound. Now that I knew there were more monsters than humans down here, I accepted the backlash without hesitation.

Ears-branch, Stage 2 [Hearing Monster Voices].

As the clattering grew louder than the dripping water, the pastor’s heartbeat and mien began to quicken. I had to go one step further and read both the number of approaching monsters and what was inside their minds.

-Clickclickclick...

The walls, or the ceiling. 

A considerable amount of noise came from beyond the whitish, flickering beams of light. They reflected the light in brief flashes even in the dark underground, and since they were moving along the ceiling and walls, I immediately knew what kind of monster it was.

A white monster crawling toward us across the walls and ceiling, that distinctive sound it made when it came closer. Its habit of living and lying in ambush in dark places outside our field of vision.

Predator Spines.

They were still some distance away, but the sound struck the tunnel walls and bounced around, reverberating clearly toward us. This was my first time facing them while using Ears-branch magic.

And I regretted it.

The contradiction of having to hear what I never wanted to hear in order to survive.

The backlash of Ears-branch, Stage 2, was facing the various forms of ruin exactly as they were, raw and completely unfiltered. Not through hallucinations or illusions, but through the voices of those who had already been ruined.

'Pe…People…’'

Inside the bodies of monsters, human selves buried beneath the monsters’ senses noticed the pastor and me and opened their eyes.

If people could hear what was inside a monster’s mind, what would they expect to hear? Desperate cries begging to be killed? Or one last shred of altruism begging someone to make them stop?

Ears-branch magic revealed the truth.

-Clickclicklclick…

The closer the footsteps came, the more [Hearing Monster Voices] let me hear the thoughts of those trapped in Eternity, and the more disgust surged through me.

'Spill it out.’ 'Huhihi…Huhihi…' 'Let me feel it. Come here…!’ ‘Come to me. Tremble. Shake in fear!'

The human selves addicted to the monsters’ senses crashing over them like waves, the human minds people believed would remain noble and sublime no matter the circumstances, weren’t as great as they imagined.

They were only human.

Humans who were weak against pain, surrendered to fear, and became addicted to pleasure.

Now I understood why Shin Nain gagged, recoiled in disgust, and made such a fuss every time I used Tongue-branch, Stage 2 [Desire Amplification].

"Baek Jemin, what are you going to do?”

The monsters…

"Baek Jemin!”

...Or at least the Predator Spines still retained some degree of humanity.

"There aren’t many. Four. If gunshots ring out, more will swarm in, so I’ll handle them.”

"You?...Will you be okay?”

"Yes."

I slung my rifle over my shoulder and cursed inwardly.

Fuck.

Where was the line between human and monster? Even a serial killer addicted to murder gets put on trial as a human instead of being classified as harmful wildlife, so should I count these as human too?

At that moment, a deeply chilling realization flashed through my mind.

The 66-Society and the Seoul wizards had a very simple answer to that question.

Magic...

Then, at the very least, I was unquestionably human.

I knew four Predator Spines were approaching in the distance, and the subway tracks weren't even covered in fog, yet I wasn’t really worried. A minimum level of caution, unease, and fear remained inside of me, but I felt no unnecessary tension.

Thanks to the True-Body Sarira prayer beads wrapped around my left arm, I felt incredibly reassured.

Having them take the backlash for Tongue-branch, Stage 1 in my place was unbelievably comfortable. The fact that Buddha's amazing body was here with me right now made it even easier to act boldly.

A threat to survival.

The fact that we were isolated sent my cockroach-like brain into overdrive.

Eyes-branch, Stage 1 [Cognitive Expansion] 100%

A sign appeared.

Some of the pale lights that had remained perfectly steady began to flicker. Shadows stretched long, then overlapped, forming an unusually dark patch.

They were coming from there.

-Huuuuuff…

I stood incredibly still, breathing through my gas mask.

Hand-branch, Stage 1 [Blood of the Right Hand].

Since I’d smeared it over my left forearm beforehand, I had more than enough for defense.

If my goal was just to hold out, there was no need to use Tongue-branch, Stage 1 to push it to 100%. If this were a long-term expedition or reconnaissance mission, I might consider using it at 100%, but at least survival itself wasn’t a problem.

What I needed to take into account was the amount I was bleeding.

If possible, I needed to conserve blood and act with the nutrients that would already become harder to replenish in mind.

And there was something else I’d worried about after going through this absurd situation.

If my perception and common sense had been manipulated, would [Blood of the Right Hand], a power that imposed humanity’s common sense, still function properly? What if all of humanity had been manipulated? A limitation I’d never even considered before forced me to choose another method.

Heart-branch, Stage 2 [Physical Enhancement].

I’d burn my own calories and settle this with brute force.

If Predator Spines were three times stronger outside the fog, then Great Archmage Baek Jemin, with gear, superior magic, experience, and no carelessness on his side, was 666 times stronger. More importantly, there was a spell I’d been wanting to try.

-Clickclickclick...

The lights still illuminated the underground, albeit faintly. The noise was coming from the patch of shadow the sign had pointed out. I recalled the military’s records on Predator Spines from long ago. Photosensitivity. A tendency to flee from light.

If that hadn’t changed, they would move away from the area illuminated by my L-shaped tactical light.

-Huuff—.

I elegantly let the hem of my poncho billow and pulled up my gas mask with an exaggerated motion. My right eye was now remains. It merely sat there like a prosthetic eye, unable to take in any visual information.

But a wizard’s remains were fundamentally body parts imbued with magic. A type of Cursed Object.

In that case...

I removed my eyepatch with my right hand and stuck my tongue out with a long 'bleeeh.'

There was no way the half of the world that the greatest Great Archmage of all times, Baek Jemin, had sacrificed would amount to nothing more than a mere 28-minute miracle. Only I was absolutely precious in this world. No matter how much the rest of those worms cried out, the scales belonged to me alone.

And Great Archmage Baek Jemin’s scales were now clearly topped to one side, declaring that the price I had paid was far heavier.

Tongue-branch, Stage 3 [Information Alteration] 100%.

I commanded the dead right eye beneath my eyelid.

"Come alive, breathe, and stop the enemy."

My eyelid peeled open.

My dead right eye began rolling around on its own. I still couldn't see through it, but I could clearly feel my right eyeball rolling around and rubbing against my eyelid. Regardless of what I wanted, it moved however it pleased, looking in a completely different direction from my left eye.

A part of my body moving independently of my own will.

The unpleasant sensation of the nerves and blood vessels still attached to the dead eye being dragged along with it.

It was the backlash of [Information Alteration].

Because I was manipulating remains implanted into my own body, the depersonalization backlash of [Information Alteration] manifested like this.

The back of my neck went stiff, and my shoulders tightened.

A wave of nausea and dizziness washed over me, while my spine sent out prickling pain as my body screamed under the overwhelming stress.

This was different from simple, straightforward pain or the mental anguish of loss. Terror at the feeling that I had lost all control, along with a crushing sense of helplessness, surged up inside me.

However, the cold reason I possessed as a wizard crushed all that confusion beneath it.

Now I understood what it meant to apply [Information Alteration] to yourself. The original use of [Information Alteration] was to control parts of your body that had become remains in whatever way you wished.

Its purpose was to make even your own remains part of your versatility as a wizard.

I shuddered.

At the disgust of something dead inside my body coming alive, breathing, and moving…

And at the omnipotence of being able to control even my own dead body part!

-Creaak—.

It was a chilling auditory hallucination.

I could feel my left eye and my dead right eye looking in two different directions. I could feel the dead eye’s pupil watching and keeping guard over the places I wasn’t looking instead of the place I was. 

Outside the fog, Predator Spines were incredibly agile and overwhelming.

They were at least twice as fast as usual. A Predator Spine could twist and spring through the air faster than ascuttle fly could dart around. They even made clever use of the distinctive clicking of their rib-bone legs.

They crawled freely across the walls and ceiling, raising their heads and wriggling like caterpillars while tapping randomly in every direction. Whenever the ceiling lights or my tactical light caught them, I would sometimes glimpse a shadow curling itself into a ball and dropping away.

Their intelligence had developed.

They knew humans were trying to detect them through sound.

The truly horrifying part was the sign.

The sign I was seeing through Eyes-branch, Stage 1 [Cognitive Expansion], was shifting. The Predator Spines slipped out of the deep shadows and searched for places where the light was relatively weak. Every time they did, the lights flickered more violently, while the shadows created by the wavering sign began closing around us like a tightening band.

Their range and behavior even changed whenever I moved my left arm, the one coated in [Blood of the Right Hand].

Whenever I looked ready to swing my left arm, they flinched and skittered backward. When I simply stood there with my fist clenched, they inched closer in alternating arcs between the walls and the ceiling. The smoothly stripped bones gave off an ominous gleaming glow.

-Clickclickclick.

Every time that distinctive sound echoed out, my human instincts warned me.

They knew how to hunt. 

Against prey that fought back, they didn’t rush in recklessly like Predator Spines inside the fog. Instead, they subtly closed the distance and pressured us through sound. Outside the fog, the monsters were closer to intelligent predators than mindless monsters.

Born from humans yet hunting humans, those blasphemous predators knew human behavior all too well.

[Hearing Monster Voices] let me hear the human selves steeped in excitement separately from the monster instincts waiting with calm patience. The human selves were so consumed by anticipation of the pleasure to come that they could no longer even form human words. The monsters’ instincts came through as dull impacts, like chalk tapping against a blackboard.

A human mind and a monster’s body.

Both were targeting humans.

In an absurd situation where ordinary humans weren’t even allowed to stand their ground against them, I, more absurd than anyone, actually took a step forward first.

-Splash.

The moment my foot tapped against the wet floor, the shadows stirred.

The four Predator Spines split apart at once, their sharp tail singers flashing. I had no idea how long a living person could have survived against pack tactics optimized for hunting. The human eye had clear limits when it came to tracking movement.

Outside the fog, Predator Spines were monsters that could easily close in while making a mockery of human motion perception.

They began crawling toward us separately along the floor, both walls, and the ceiling.

The signs had already lost all meaning. Even my L-shaped tactical light began flickering, trying to shut itself off on its own. Light could no longer hold the monsters back. Whether it came from the sun or from something humans burned to create it.

Only death could stop the monsters.

What stopped those living monsters of Eternity, those new lives born from the desecration of humanity, was a dead eye.

The half of the world I had sacrificed, my dead right eye, finally showed its true worth.

-Ratatatat!

Along with an auditory hallucination like dried-up blood vessels snapping apart, a bizarre flash swept across the subway track.

At that moment, the Predator Spine clinging to the ceiling stiffened and dropped.

-Cruuunch!

At the eerie sensation of the dead, rigid eye scraping against the soft, living eyelid, a murky dark-red beam like cloudy blood lit the wall in place of the flickering lights.

At that moment, the Predator Spines crawling along like centipedes shuddered before losing their grip and tumbling down.

The last one was on the floor.

One Predator Spine, the one on the floor, had begun backing away in terror under the watch of my left eye.

That was when the dead eye rolled around and looked in the exact same direction I was looking.

-Flash!

Before the terrified Predator SPine could even writhe, its body began twitching madly in tiny spasms. It wasn’t to the point that it was twisting its whole body, but enough to make its legs tremble violently.

The dead eye kept rolling around afterward, then, the moment it realized there were no more monsters, turned to look at the same palace as my left eye.

Bizarre.

They had once been eyes that looked in the same direction, yet I was so overwhelmed by revulsion and this sense of omnipotence that the corner of my mouth just couldn’t help twitching.

So I closed my right eye.

As I felt the eyelid closing over it, I could feel the dead eye trembling as though pleading with me. Now that it was alive and breathing, it had developed a survival instinct, and the eye spoke to the mind it had once been connected to.

A dead fragment of myself was conveying its will to me.

A little longer. I want to live and breathe a little longer.

But useful or not, I couldn’t take this overwhelming disgust.

It had been part of my body. The half of the world I had sacrificed had returned to me. It was even obeying my will…

And yet, the very reality of a dead eye living, breathing, and moving around on its own was horrifying enough to drive me insane.

If I could dig it out myself, I wanted to.

I wanted to gouge it out with a knife right now.

I wanted to stab it until it burst completely and kill it! 

Desperately suppressing that murderous urge, I slowly deactivated [Information Alteration].

Then I felt the dead eye stiffening again.

It was over.

I steadied my staggering posture and strode forward to finish them off. The strength of Predator Spines lay in their agility and unpredictability. If they were frozen stiff, there was no reason to fear them even outside the fog.

I crushed the skulls of the fallen Predator Spines underneath my boot one by one.

-Crunch!

I took down all four without sacrificing much. I hadn’t injured myself, and I hadn’t fired my gun. The strange flash I’d emitted was a bit concerning, but given the enclosed environment of the subway tracks, there was little chance anything had seen it.

And even if something had, it should’ve been enough to discourage the monsters from approaching.

I put my gas mask back on and slowly turned toward the pastor.

"I did it.”

"...Baek Jemin. Are you alright?”

"I’m fine.”

"No…”

Apparently, the pastor had deliberately avoided turning around because he was watching our rear. 

To think he missed Great Archmage Baek Jemin’s damn awesome highlight reel. He’d basically missed out on a lifetime’s worth of entertainment. But before the pastor could even realize what he had missed, he met my eyes and simply stared at me for a while.

"Baek Jemin. You’re deathly pale.”

“It’d be weirder if my face looked all rosy and healthy after seeing those monsters."

"...Tsk. Fair enough."

Taking down four Predator Spines without extending anything was good enough already.

I loosened my rifle sling again in case we ran into trouble, then continued down the tracks with the pastor while keeping watch to the left.

Aside from the occasional breath leaking through my gas-mask filter, it was completely quiet. Before long, we reached another section where the ceiling had cracked open.

-Splash.

Something in a shallow puddle between the rails struck the surface of the water. I didn’t want to look, but the instinct to survive forced my eyes toward it. And, naturally, I ended up regretting it. In that shallow puddle, revolting life forms writhed against one another with such disgusting force that cockroaches would’ve seemed like familiar neighbors by comparison.

But humans possess both the aversion to looking at something disgusting and the curiosity that makes them want to look at it anyway.

Caught in that cursed contradiction, I had to desperately resist letting my curiosity win. Curiosity really was fucking awful at times like this. Learning about it wouldn’t do me any good, yet I still wanted to know.

Life was already overwhelmingly exhausting enough even when you only looked at good things, yet here I was trying to shove more fucked-up shit into my head. As a human being, I already knew more than enough about that crap. Just go.

While the cold reason of human Baek Jemin warned me to just leave it, Curiosity monster Baek Jemin wanted to pry into someone else’s ruin despite being disgusted by it.

What the hell were these things? Why had they ended up like that? What kind of behavioral pattern did they have? Who had they originally been, and what were they thinking now?

I somehow managed to force myself to stop caring and kept walking down the tracks.

Too many things were tangled together in my mind, and too much had happened in this short time, so my head was a complete mess.

That was when the pastor made a sound.

"Shh."

He raised his index finger to tell me to be quiet, then pointed toward one side of the wall.

Wondering what it was, I turned my gaze and saw something I hadn’t expected to find down on the tracks.

A subtle current of air, slightly different from the stale, damp humidity characteristic of underground spaces.

A tiny breeze, barely strong enough to make the ends of my poncho sway, was leaking through a gap around a door in the wall.

"Looks like it serves as a vent or something.”

"Wouldn’t that mean it connects to the outside?”

"What do you want to do?” 

I squeezed my eyes shut and thought.

But not for too long.

"Let’s go."

Whatever was in there, there had to be something.

Even a single clue was precious.

Even if I had to risk my life for it.