Chapter 153: The Horrifyingly Cruel Price

[Translator – Aren]

Truth can be cruel to some people.

And most of the time, telling people the truth is useless anyway. People have their own beliefs. They already live with their own worldview, and if the truth doesn’t fit what they think, they reject it. Logic doesn’t matter. People who go on about persuasion and debate must have only ever dealt with that rare handful who actually listen.

Of course, the pastor was one of them. Tell him the truth, and he absolutely refused to believe it. He even scolded me instead.

The pastor and I sat in a corner of Yeonghwa Station, unwrapping and eating chocolate bars like Calorie Balance and Class Time while having an argument out of nowhere.

"Baek Jemin. You believe what the Devil tells you?!”

"I’m telling you, it bought 1 second of my life. If it got 1 second of me in exchange, then of course what it gave me was the truth.”

"You idiot, if Satan made honest deals, he’d be an angel, not a devil!”

The pastor’s argument was perfectly straightforward.

Satan wasn’t good. Something that wasn’t good only spewed lies and never told the real truth. Therefore, nothing Satan said was worth listening to. Whatever I’d heard was bullshit. The truth about the Mist of the Other Shore was no different.

"You keep letting yourself get dragged along by lies like that, and next thing you know you’re looking up all kinds of ridiculous crap on YouTube. That’s how temptation works. It starts by luring you in with something that sounds convincing. Get a grip, Baek Jemin! And don’t watch weird shit on YouTube either!”

"YouTube?”

"There are all those pseudo-historians claiming the Bible is a lie. Just listening to them leaves me utterly dumbfounded. What do they mean there’s no evidence? It’s all written right there in the Bible. Tsk! Maybe that’s why our world was punished in the first place. Because of all those idiots who think they’re smart enough to deny the Bible.”

Come to think of it, I’d heard of something calledbiblical inerrancy before.

I knew there was no point debating something like this, so I decided to make a more productive judgment instead. The important thing wasn’t whether the pastor believed it. What mattered was that the 66 Society and its followers thought that way.

-Crunch.

I bit into the chocolate almond bar and chewed while getting my brain to move. Whatever the pastor thought, I could feel my mind spinning just a single encounter with the owner of the Double-Semicircle Grimoire.

I quietly shifted my gaze toward the pastor’s sling bag.

It seemed like he’d stuffed the grimoire away as soon as I woke up… Honestly, I felt both an icy fear and greedy curiosity toward it. I was certain that if it hadn’t been for that strange fragrance, I would have ended up a mindless fool.

I also had the feeling the contract hadn’t been properly completed.

If I made contact again, would I be able to escape?

It was still dangerous. Even if an elephant approached without any malice and playfully shoved you, a human would still get crushed. Even if the grimoire’s owner was more or less friendly toward humans, the end result of the human getting flattened wouldn’t change.

The Double-Semicircle Grimoire seemed closer to indifferent than anything else.

The reason it accepted my argument probably wasn’t some great act of goodwill either. It felt more like a whim. Maybe it spared me because my single second and the lives of billions of humans were equally worthless to the grimoire’s owner.

If every grain of sand is the same, you just pick up the one that catches your eye.

The grimoire’s logic was horrifying, but it was chillingly fair. The problem was that it wasn’t the weak sort of fairness humans liked to imagine. It was the fairness of nature. Just then, a slightly wrinkled hand settled over the sling bag and blocked my view.

"Baek Jemin, you crazy bastard. No!”

"Tsk..."

The pastor growled, and although I clicked my tongue in disappointment, I just accepted it.

I had already admitted it was dangerous.

Instead, I realized this was the perfect moment for Baek Jemin, the elegant human cockroach fired up by a threat to his survival, to show off a damn amazing display of absolute vigilance. I immediately pulled out the notebook Sergeant Lee Jinho had given me. I wanted to dig out the meaningful sentences buried among the utterly chaotic, seemingly meaningless scribbles.

Before all this, I would’ve cursed him out for writing these absolute chicken scratches, but Sergeant Lee Jinho probably hadn’t been in his right mind when he wrote this notebook either. I cut him some slack and went through the entries one by one.

Of course, that didn’t make anything that wasn’t there suddenly appear.

Instead, sentences I hadn’t been able to decipher properly before became clearer when I compared them against what we've experienced. 

"This wasn't a 9, it was a 6. He deliberately wrote the day backward.”

"Huh? So every time he wrote a note, he flipped it around and then back again?”

"Yeah. Looks like he didn’t want anyone to know.”

He’d crammed the writing in like a scrapbook, and on top of that, he’d written the numbers for the dates backward, so I hadn’t been able to make them out properly. Still, now that things had calmed down somewhat, with my heart pounding from the threat to my survival, my eyes flew across the page.

July 13th.

The day 150 thousand UN troops were deployed in the first wave. I vaguely remembered hearing that the UN forces would be stationed in the rear rather than on the front, while the existing Korean martial-law troops were redeployed toward the blockade line and the UN forces handled the shaken public in the rear.

Sergeant Lee Jinho’s notes recorded that day, and after that, amid the chaos, he stopped properly writing down the dates.

+Initial strength: 86 people. Includes 8 civilian Operators and special personnel. Uncertain.+

Fortunately, the reason he wasn’t certain was explained right afterward.

+Gunfight immediately upon return. Warrant Officer Lee KIA.+

There was a clear pattern to the notes.

The lines he added later, while relatively clearheaded, contained no mention whatsoever of sacrifices or magic. In contrast, the barely legible scrawls he’d scribbled down during the early chaos referred to sacrifices in fragmented words.

The more carefully I examined what was written in the notebook, the more those vague, incomprehensible fragments began sorting themselves into legible information.

No escape without a sacrifice. The initial reconnaissance team numbered at least 80. The officer originally leading them, or the senior member who successfully returned alive, was a warrant officer. The problem was that military command had doubted their very resistance badly enough to mistake them for monsters at first and opened fire.

It pissed me off that the answer key, the Double-Semicircle Grimoire, was sleeping peacefully inside the pastor’s sling bag while I had to use my own brain.

But it was also true that I had no way to pay its price.

If Elegant Human Cockroach Beak Jemin hadn’t found an opening with a sudden flash of intelligence, if I hadn’t possessed my natural intuition and the inspiration I’d honed as a wizard, even a plausible inference would have been impossible.

Here, I also had to factor in the testimony of the Muslims who claimed they’d escaped Seoul.

"It looks like the moment someone crosses into the world beyond the fog, the people left behind can no longer perceive it. On the other hand, people who’ve been dunked in once and made it back out seem able to retain their memories even after crossing worlds.”

"So those Muslim bastards who said they escaped Seoul sacrificed someone too? Those bastards should be shot!”

"They escaped before we did, so there may still have been fog back then. Maybe there was a period when this world had fog too. This is the kind of thing we can probably find just by digging through the phones, so let’s search.”

"Who? Me?”

"Of course you should do it, Pastor.”

My time was too valuable to check every little thing like this with Past Sight. If I could dump the work on the pastor and preserve one second of my time, worth more than 8 billion human beings, that was simply efficient division of labor.

Of course, the pastor grumbled that I was a goddamn bastard, so I had no choice but to overwhelm him with my completely logical argument.

First, I opened a bottle of water, gulped it down, crushed the bottle, and set it aside.

-Thump.

-Phew...

Taking off my gas mask and drinking water felt refreshing. I’d gotten used to the faint smell of blood by now. Sitting on the comfortable floor of this subway station, I tucked Sergeant Lee Jinho’s notebook back inside my clothes and spoke.

“Let’s sort out only what we know for sure."

First. The Mist of the Other Shore and sacrifices should essentially be treated synonymous. I pulled out one of the 2038-model phones I’d looted and checked its specs again. I'd been so distracted by the 5TB of storage that I hadn’t examined it properly. If my theory was correct, then this world had to be a parallel world.

And I was right.

"This isn't the future of our world. It’s a parallel world.”

"How are you so sure? No, more importantly, I’m looking through the weather forecasts right now. Don’t talk to me. Looks like the weather service here was trash too. It's nothing but people cursing them out.”

"This is important, so listen. The phones here have 128GB of RAM.”

"What!!!"

Our world was a palace where the AI boom had sent RAM and SSD prices through the fucking roof, so the fact that people here walked around with 128GB of RAM on their phones was enough to convince me. This was a world where RAM was somehow dirt cheap. Maybe their semiconductor boom had gone slightly off course.

And these weren’t even flagship phones. These cheap budget models just strewn about here randomly were already this good. Another major find was that the internet was still alive, letting us dig up news articles about how the Republic of Korea in 2038 had been wracked by severe social unrest during a massive economic downturn.

The root of it all was that AI had failed to catch on and was kicked to the curb. This world had taken a completely different path from ours, where AI had only just begun to emerge and the infrastructure surrounding it was already in the process of being built up.

But the pastor was focused on something completely different.

His eyes had gone wide as he stared at the phones with cracked screens scattered across the floor, the ones he’d been considering as nothing but trash until now.

"Th-then…doesn’t that mean these things are practically gold dust?!"

"Oh come on.”

I hadn’t thought of that.

I needed to grab them right now, but we didn’t have any backpacks right now!

Still, I couldn’t waste this chance to show off my intellectual side. I was finally on a roll! I desperately suppressed my material greed, then stopped the pastor and continued.

"Second. Setting the matter of the Mist of the Other Shore aside, it looks like the fog originally served to keep the monsters contained as well.”

I remembered how thick the fog had been when we fought the Human-skin Tapeworm, and in other areas where monsters appeared. Whatever its horrific true nature, the fog inevitably spread throughout the areas where monsters were active and seemed primarily to weaken them.

But there was no fog in this world. At least, we hadn't seen any so far.

Then if the fog was gone, was there any reason for the monsters to remain gathered together in one place more densely than necessary? I could think of two main explanations for why there were so few monsters here. One was the damn awful possibility that eh monsters from this 2038 parallel world were crossing over into ours. The other was that they were already spreading across the world after the Korean Peninsula completely went to ruin.

Either possibility was enough to explain the monsters’ absurd numbers.

10 million people was certainly a lot, but judging by what the military in our world was doing, it was still a number they could afford to sacrifice. Yet the monsters just kept coming and coming. There was a reason for that. Humans form other worlds and other futures, people who hadn’t been sacrificed to the Mist of the Other Shore and had instead degenerated into monsters, were pouring in in hordes. It was a choice straight out of hell.

If you didn’t sacrifice humans to the fog, they became monsters and crossed into other worlds. But if you tried to sacrifice them to the fog, they’d obviously raise hell and fight back. I had no idea how the 66 Society had managed to make this possible.

There was only one possibility.

It was truly horrifying and made absolutely no sense, but the way the 66 Society had strangely seemed to want nukes launched until now made one insane theory surface in my mind.

"Nuclear war."

"..."

"If you wanted a single event shocking enough to slaughter the greatest number of people in the shortest span of time, create a social and political power vacuum, and seize control of the governing structure, an accidental nuclear war would do the trick.”

I remembered how dumbfounded I’d been when the two tactical nukes aimed at Gangnam Thousand-Miles Eyes had been neutralized. I’d even wondered whether they’d properly performed the necessarily arcane preparations to bypass magic that could neutralize them.

But who said the 66 Society couldn’t do the same thing?

All they’d have to do was persuade the political leadership or seize control somehow. Once they had the nuclear warheads, going on the assumption that there was some kind of spell that could turn people into fog, even if I didn’t know how the process worked. Inscribe it onto the warheads, launch them, and that would be the end of it.

Humans turn into fog along with the nuclear explosion.

The people who’d believed they could somehow deal with the monsters even if they came pouring out would watch the entire nation fall apart and realize the age of every man for himself had arrived. The age of magic would begin.

When I brought up that possibility, the pastor looked at me like I was complete trash.

"Don’t you ever join the 66 Society. Even those awful bastards would ostracize you for being a piece of shit.”

"Ah, why?”

“Because your ideas are trash-like! If the 66 Society is creating the fog and connecting worlds with it in the first place, then they’re the ones bringing the monsters here!”

"That’s way too much of a non-wizard way of thinking.”

Why turn humans into monsters when you could turn them into fog and put them to good use? You’d get a far better yield by preparing nuclear missiles inscribed with that fog-conversion spell, stirring up chaos throughout human society, and then starting a nuclear war. Why would they bother doing something so pointless?

It could be a side effect of magic, but the same question applied there. If you could turn humans into fog, what was stopping you from turning monsters into fog?

Just then, several memories suddenly flashed through my mind.

When I’d killed monsters inside the fog during the Seoul expedition. The way their corpses had disappeared. I distinctly remembered some of them turning into fog and being absorbed.

"..."

Could killing monsters turn them into fog?

Then nuking them would probably give a better yield… But I wasn’t sure yet, so I’d leave that aside for now. In any case, there was another reason I’d gone through this long preamble while speculating about the monster population and the 66 Society’s objective.

"This world failed to organize any resistance. The density of monsters inside Seoul is probably dropping drastically as well. Monsters are basically creatures obsessed with reproduction and feeding, so they would’ve spread toward places with more humans. I don’t know how serious the international community’s nuclear discussions are, but now that they've already missed the golden window, there’s a high chance nukes will be used to stabilize the front lines. They’d probably target land borders like the Amnok andTumen Rivers, or port facilities likePohang andBusan. I’d like to think we still have a little time before Seoul itself gets nuked.”

"Uh...."

"That means if there are a small number of survivors left, there’s a good chance they’ve settled in facilities where supplies are concentrated. Especially places with enough bottled water that they don’t need to rely on the water supply. Since escaping immediately is impossible, water is surprisingly heavy and bulky, which makes it difficult to transport. Moving your base to where the water already is would have to come first. And with fewer monsters around, the burden of defending the place would’ve gone down too.”

Supermarkets or department stores. Or facility  that had a lot of separate water purifiers. Survivors were likely to have headed for those kinds of places.

The same would apply if reconnaissance teams or the other Supreme Archmages from our world were still alive.

That was the key.

"If the monster density has dropped, that means the monsters are already leaving Seoul. So I actually think the more we go toward central Seoul, the fewer monsters there are likely to be. On top of that, considering that Bukhansan was where the fog first appeared in our world, we should assume that any clues about the Mist of the Other Shore or how to escape are also somewhere in central Seoul!”

My super time as a human cockroach momentarily boasting my intelligence wasn’t over quite yet.

"Also, considering there may be monsters similar to the Yellow Gaze Monster, floating monsters like the Human-skin Jellyfish, and even hostile survivors, we should avoid exposing ourselves aboveground. Even so, with the entire water and sewer system contaminated by monsters, hardly anyone would choose the underground itself as a shelter when it’s so easy to get trapped down there. They’d need to be able to escape through underground passages if necessary, while actually living and keeping watch above ground. Probably barricaded on a middle floor with windows covered, rather than on a roof. They’d most likely be holed up in a major facility near a subway station connected to underground walkways.”

But my pounding heart was gradually calming down.

Ah. It’s ending.

The intellect of Human Cockroach Baek Jemin, which ran at full power whenever I felt my survival was threatened, was humbly settling back down again. Only then did I realize what the owner of the Double-Semicircle Grimoire had taken from me.

The memory that had convinced me I was a dumbass.

Whatever it was, it had taken away the memory that had been the most horrible to me.

But I couldn’t be happy about it.

It had taken away one of the most important things that made the human Baek Jemin who he was. Unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable!

Now I understood why it was called a devil. Even after losing that important turning point, I was still the dumbass Baek Jemin.

A dumbass who sacrifices things to achieve what he wanted and who, even if he forgets everything else in the world, still wants to remember what he sacrificed.

That indomitable conviction brought my brain, which had been spinning at full speed on its own, to a screeching halt.

I didn’t even know what I’d sacrificed. I didn’t want to just enjoy the benefits without knowing.

I, Baek Jemin, am someone who feels his own worth by looking back on what he has lost. I am a wizard who takes pride in remembering just how great a decision I made, the greater the thing I lost for it.

That Double-Semicircle devil…had taken my pride from me.

That anger cooled me right down.

Then the pastor asked in frustration.

"Hey! Why’d you stop in the middle of talking?! So? What are we supposed to do?”

I blinked at him, then looked him in the eye and answered as if it were obvious.

“That’s for you to figure out, Pastor.”

Human society existed for division of labor.

If I’d done all the reasoning up to this point, then it was only right for the pastor to handle the conclusion.

But the pastor didn’t seem to agree with that thought.

"Ah, you fucking bastard!”

-Flick!

That was one hell of a forehead flick. It actually brought tears to my eyes.

"Ah! Why‘d you hit me?!”

"You’re not some senile old man, so why the hell are you lucid one second and then turn brain dead the next?! It’s pissing me off!”

Still, there was no denying that my reasoning had helped us determine our range of movement, our operating area, and our objective. Even while bickering like this, the pastor and I began finishing our preparations to leave. Eventually, when we stood in front of the platform screen doors marked with red handprints, I tapped the screen of the superphone I’d picked up in this world. the one with 128GB of RAM.

-Tap.

This world’s time appeared before me.

October 21st, 2038, 2:14 PM.

"Let’s go.”

"Haah… Fine. At least there aren’t many monsters.”

The pastor and I shuffled over to the small gap beside the closed platform screen doors and climbed down with a few grunts.

-Thud.

Still, we were much better off than when we’d arrived empty-handed.

The pastor had chocolate bars packed into his sling bag, along with a few bottles of water. It was more meager than we’d originally planned, and this wasn’t even the world we lived in. But even in another world, in another future, Seoul seemed to remain a symbol of South Korea that drew countless young people toward it.

-Splash.

The pastor stepped forward first.

Hearing that there weren’t any monsters seemed to have lightened his mood a bit. I followed after him and raised my rifle.

"Don’t go ahead of me.”

"Why?"

"I think you’ll stand out more than I will.”

Naturally, I took the lead, and our exploration of this parallel world properly began.

This time, we couldn’t expect any support from the military… Maybe that was why my heart was pounding even harder. 2038. Another world. A future that had gone down a different path. Its ending had been a complete catastrophe, but the process leading to it looked utterly appetizing.

I adjusted my grip on the rifle, finished aligning the sights, and moved forward, naturally leaving the right side to the pastor.

Seoul.

A place I’d once said I would return to someday...

I ended up meeting it again in an unexpected form, in a completely different place.