Epilogue (7)
A wind I could not place brushed past my hair. I was already later than planned. Even if I went back now, it was not as though I could head straight home.
‘I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but still.’
On one side of the garden stood a tree heavy with nameless white flowers. Every time I looked at that tree, that day came back to me as naturally as breathing.
I had seen off my twenty–five–year–old younger brother.
Beneath the shade of a tree overflowing with the scent of plum blossoms meant for me. In that moment, the Han Yuhyun from before my regression met his death. My younger brother’s figure vanished into white, and flowers poured down like a blizzard. Every blossom on that enormous tree scattering all at once… I stood there blankly in a sight I would not have been able to forget even in a dream.
The mound of plum blossoms swallowed my ankles, buried my knees, rose past my waist, and climbed all the way up to my chest. Even then, I did not move. I probably would not have moved even if they had piled all the way over my head. I was simply numb. It did not feel real.
“Ah…”
I had sent him away with my own hands. I had nodded and let him go. Yet when the empty space he left behind actually opened before me, I could not believe it. I looked down at my vacant hands. Regret came rushing in a beat too late. Should I have held on to him, in that suffocating moment?
Rustle—
A tiny movement reached me.
My body moved before I could think. I flailed through the petals and thrust out both arms. A white, small, warm little bundle. A newborn baby. His eyes were squeezed shut as though he were asleep. The faint sound of steady breathing reached my ears.
I hurriedly took a towel from my inventory. Thankfully, I still had an unused spare commemorative Dodam towel. I wrapped the baby in the clean, soft towel and cradled him in my arms.
“…This child…”
– He is the Origin.
Chirp said as he landed on top of my head. The flowers piled high around us slowly began to disappear. The white tree was once again hanging down countless empty branches.
– Under normal circumstances, he would have devoured every world and been born as something no different from a god.
I remembered the future White Bird had seen. The tree standing alone while snow fell around it.
– But now, that child was born in Dad’s arms. He was drawn by the power of the Origin’s nurturer, but he does not possess the complete power of the Origin.
“…That isn’t going to make something go wrong with him, is it?”
I anxiously examined the baby in my arms. He looked like an ordinary child. But when I thought of the power the Origin possessed, he had to be closer to a premature baby born before he could fully grow.
– He will be fine. The immense mass of power too great for an immature body to hold or handle will remain here.
Chirp looked toward the white tree. I also lifted my head. Before I knew it, snowflakes were falling one by one.
– If Dad raises that child to full growth, the power left behind here will also return to its owner and make him complete. Only then will the Origin who did not devour the worlds be perfectly born.
“So he wasn’t born as the complete Origin right away. I’m supposed to raise him.”
Well, of course. Just because I had gained the qualifications of the Origin’s nurturer did not mean I could instantly replace the act of devouring every world. Taking time to raise a young child suited the title far better.
The snowfall grew heavier and began to settle. It seemed as though the baby would be cold at this rate, so I took out a cardigan and wrapped it over the towel.
“Then what happens to the Origin’s power that’s left here?”
– It will remain as though asleep. Since there is no longer any need for it to consume in order to be born, it will not devour the worlds. The natural cycle of accepting and sending off the dead will continue, but direct movement will vanish. The Origin’s self is not here. It is in Dad’s arms.
“The worlds of the fifth Origin will be safe now, then. Will the dungeons in our world disappear too?”
– No. What has already happened will not be reversed.
“…Right. Of course.”
– The dungeons in Dad’s world will continue to appear and grow stronger until the point before Dad turned back time. That has already happened. After that, they will remain as they are.
“That’s enough.”
The dungeon difficulty four years later had risen considerably, but not to the point that we could not stop it. The Hunters of the present would become far stronger than they had been then.
White snow once again covered the ground where blades of grass had begun to show through. The sight seemed to carve the truth of Yuhyun’s departure clearly into me. I no longer had any reason to remain here either.
“Let’s go home.”
Chirp told me that today was the seventh day. Before the power of Final Recompense completely disappeared, I left the snowy plain where snow fell.
That was how I should have gone home.
‘Banned from entering because I’m alive. What kind of nonsense is that?’
I had managed to get as far as the area near the dream world. But Han Yujin of our world was already a dead man. The existence our world could accept was the dead Han Yujin, not the living Han Yujin.
In the end, I was stranded, unable to go forward or back, clutching a baby and stamping my feet, wondering what would happen if Final Recompense ended like this. Myungwoo and Tree found me. That was how I ended up going to stay in Rookie’s domain, the area Myungwoo had now taken charge of.
“Honey will be lonely when you go home.”
The child, Rookie, said. The now young Rookie looked similar to before, yet different. His hair was still curly, but it was a soft sky blue, and fox ears stood sharply from his head. His eyes were a sparkling pale pink.
Rookie had poured out all of his strength to support the system alone and nearly disappeared entirely as a being. But Rookie’s old seniors, the system creators, had caught hold of his scattering body and reformed it. In the true shape of the fox he had accepted into himself. His fur, however, was the color of the sky he used to look at beyond the window, and his eyes were the same pale pink as the flower he had once received as a gift.
The lovely little fox was taken into Myungwoo’s arms. Along with his power, Rookie had also lost a great many memories. He still possessed knowledge as a transcendent and system creator, but he could not recall much of his past.
Myungwoo said he would take responsibility for Rookie now that he had become a child, and the system creators acknowledged Myungwoo as a formal administrator and creator who would succeed Rookie. They said he was still lacking in many ways, but Rookie, with his wealth of knowledge, could supplement Myungwoo.
“I’ll still visit often after I go home.”
I reached out and stroked Rookie’s, no, Haneul’s head. Myungwoo had thought hard about giving Rookie a new name. He had even asked Rookie for his opinion. At the time, Rookie was still shy and often hid under chairs in the form of a little fox. He had peeked out with only his head showing and said he liked the blue sky. He also liked his fur very much, he said. Then he hesitantly asked whether Myungwoo was his family. Myungwoo had thought about it for a moment before saying that, in that case, he would give him his surname.
And so Rookie became Yu Haneul.
“The system connection to our world has been cut off, but Myungwoo is an exception. I can meet him through dungeons.”
“But Dad is still clumsy.”
Haneul spoke anxiously. At first, Haneul had cautiously called Myungwoo “Sir Myungwoo.” But after I came here and called myself Dad to the baby, he wavered for a while and then yelled, “Dad!” at Myungwoo.
Myungwoo had been completely flustered then. But what could he do? In the end, Myungwoo had joined me on the list of colleagues who had become fathers without ever even getting to date.
“Haneul can help him. Tree is there too, and if things really get bad, you can wake up Mr. Lighthouse Keeper a little.”
Haneul nodded. Then he looked into the baby crib beside me. I also looked at the sleeping child.
“Honey, you’re not going to cry again, are you?”
“I’m not crying. Why would I cry?”
“But you cried all the time.”
“No, that was…”
It had been a little like that for a few days after I came here. Especially when night fell and everything around me went quiet, the emptiness and raw ache inside me became almost impossible to endure. It would have been better if I could have gone straight home and at least had Yuhyun there, but I could not even do that. The empty space felt unbearably large… Sometimes, even during the day, I would be looking after the baby and suddenly burst into tears, startling Myungwoo and Haneul.
Still, considering I had sent off a younger brother who was practically my child forever, wasn’t crying for a few days actually on the composed side? These things happen.
“Oh, our Bin is awake. Should we go inside with Dad?”
The sleeping baby opened his eyes. I picked him up, partly to change the subject. Maybe Yuhyun’s influence had not been absent after all. The baby’s hair, pure white at first, had turned gray, as though black had mixed into it. His eyes, also once white, had become a silvery shade tinged with dark red.
This child was newly born. I could not look at him and overlay a dead person onto him.
That had been hard at first. He was not Yuhyun, and yet I could not completely separate him from Yuhyun either. Myungwoo had said to me then,
‘It’s no different from reincarnation, is it? Wouldn’t it be stranger to try not to connect them at all?’
It was common and natural to see traces of a predecessor in a descendant. If someone particularly resembled a departed person, or had a similar personality or tastes, people often said they might be that person reincarnated. Even when they said that, the person was clearly someone else.
‘He wasn’t someone you hated. He was your younger brother, someone you truly treasured and loved. As long as you don’t treat them as completely the same, I think it’s fine.’
Even if they were separate beings, this child could not have been born without Yuhyun. The two were undeniably connected. And yet I began to feel that blindly denying and hiding that fact was also wrong.
Over the past three months, I had slowly accepted it. At first, I had planned to give the child a one–syllable name, like Gyeol, Seol, or Byeol. In the end, however, I included the generational syllable Yu. I wanted to.
Han Yubin.
I had debated between the bin that meant “to shine” and the bin that meant “water’s edge.” Since the child as he was now suited the shining bin, I chose the former. I could still call him Bin as a single–syllable nickname, so it seemed fine.
I carried Bin inside with Haneul. At first, being unable to go back right away had left me frustrated, worried, and miserable. But now I thought that perhaps being given time to sort out my feelings had not been so bad. Of course, if I could have gone, I would have gone straight home. There were so many kids waiting for me.
“Myungwoo still hasn’t come back? He can’t have been caught by some weird transcendent again.”
“I’ll go check!”
Haneul changed into a little fox with a whish and disappeared. Myungwoo was not a transcendent, but he had become an administrator on the level of a system creator, and he had ended up receiving plenty of attention from the transcendents. He was a little like me in the past, when I had been a weak F–rank with coveted skills that drew the eyes of S–ranks.
This was Rookie’s domain, so transcendents could not approach directly. Tree also covered for him to a degree, and we had spread the word that Young Chaos was behind him. But there were still quite a few bastards who kept trying to worm their way in somehow… Myungwoo had been pretty stressed. He had even sighed and asked me how I had put up with it.
“Bin, time for food.”
I sat Bin in the baby chair. He was still not even four months old, but he could not only hold up his head and roll over, he could even sit on his own for a little while. He seemed to be growing a bit faster than an ordinary baby.
“Awoo.”
And he had started babbling too. He reminded me of Yuhyun when he was little, but at the same time, it was clear to me that he was a different child. When our eyes met, he smiled easily, and sometimes he cried too. Far less often than average, though. There were also ways he differed from ordinary babies, so I had struggled at first.
I took out a C–rank magic stone and ground it in the special blender Myungwoo had made for me. I put the finely ground powder into a small round container and slotted that into another custom–made item, a rattle. Then I handed the rattle to Bin.
“There we go.”
Rattle, rattle. Every time Yubin shook the rattle, the magic stone powder inside disappeared little by little.
At first, I had tried feeding him ordinary formula. But Bin did not eat well, and finally he started crying loudly. Rookie and Tree both said they did not know what was wrong, so in the end we woke the Lighthouse Keeper, and after all of us examined and worried over him together, we managed to find the reason.
Yubin could consume ordinary food. But the energy he could obtain from it was meager compared to the strength it took him to eat and digest it. It was similar to struggling to suck on a milk bottle only for hardly any milk to come out. On top of that, it did not taste very good to him, so of course he had gotten irritated.
‘Of course he got mad. You were giving him nutritionally empty formula when there were things like magic stones around, easy to absorb and quick to fill him up.’
According to the Lighthouse Keeper, Awakeners also became capable of taking in energy directly through mana as their rank rose. Even if they ate the same meal, an unawakened person and an S–rank had different energy conversion efficiencies or something. He said they could even endure without eating food by absorbing energy through their main attribute. Was that why Yuhyun had always tried not to eat properly? He did eat because of me, but he was a light eater. Yerim, on the other hand, seemed to like delicious food itself.
“Kyaaawoo.”
Bin shook the rattle hard. Immediately afterward, Chirp appeared with a pop. His sensitivity to magic power was no joke either.
– Chirp!
“Welcome, Chirp.”
A postcard was held in Chirp’s foot. Did Seong Hyunjae send it? Chirp, who could still cross worlds, often went to perch on Seong Hyunjae’s head. Unfortunately, he could not go to our world. Something occurred to me, and I opened my status window. Once the effect of Final Recompense disappeared, I had also returned to the system.
[The Young God’s Nurturer]
It was the title that had appeared in place of Perfect Nurturer. There was no measurable rank, and no title description either. All of the attached skills had disappeared as well. But according to the Lighthouse Keeper, my abilities as a nurturer should have grown stronger instead. If I cared for someone under my care, they would grow quickly in whatever way they wished, and if I cheered them on, their stats would increase. However, he said the Final Recompense skill seemed to have disappeared.
‘Better that way.’
If Final Recompense had not existed, it would have been impossible to reach this point. Even so, it was not an ability I wanted to keep having.
The influence keywords had disappeared, but the influence list still remained. And at the very front of that list was,
[Seong Hyunjae(?)]
That man had planted himself there. Yu Haneul was behind him. It had not happened through keyword application. Once he became close to me, trusted me, and followed me, it had appeared naturally. The keyword application effect itself no longer existed either. Since the title had changed, it seemed that even people who had once been deleted could be added again, because Yu Myungwoo’s name had appeared as well. Chirp was there, of course, and after about a month, Yerim, Peace, Gyeol, Seol, Byeol, and even people who were not here began to be registered. Even Chief Song was on the list.
Only Yubin and Yuhyun were absent. I thought it was because my title itself had been born by carrying the two of them within it. They were not on the influence list, but they existed as the title itself.
“Did Mr. Seong Hyunjae leave that with you?”
– Chirp–chirp!
Chirp answered energetically. Snowfall Tree, who was with Chirp, had said that now that his work was done, he would become young like Chirp. He would grow together with someone precious to him. There was still a difference, though. Snowfall Tree was still a bit smarter.
He had said that if Chirp continued growing by my side, they might split into two someday. If the two of them wanted that, anyway. Sharing one body was not bad, but a pair of birds would be nice to see too.
[Congratulations on your return. Han Yujin–gun seems to be returning first. Below is a small gift from me.]
A brief message was written on a picture postcard showing an unfamiliar landscape. A gift. Oh, it was something I needed. Much appreciated.
‘My birthday present never reached me because Myungwoo blocked it.’
Chirp could deliver something like a postcard, but anything more than that was difficult. All I had received was a birthday card. What on earth had he sent? The Elder had sent me a card too, and Myungwoo had hurriedly made me a cake before my birthday passed. I had thought they must have held a birthday party without me in our world and ended up crying again…
‘And everyone’s birthdays passed one after another too.’
The more I thought about it, the sorrier I felt. Especially for Yerim. I should have celebrated hers myself. The only birthday I could celebrate was Myungwoo’s, because he was here with me.
Just then, a door appeared on the living room side. The door floating in midair opened, and Myungwoo, Haneul, and Grace appeared. Judging from Myungwoo’s expression, he must have been caught by another strange bastard again.
–TL Notes–
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