Chapter 185

I heard the alarm that the worldline was breaking. I prepared my heart and looked around my surroundings. I knew that the 15th regressor was Do-Seung since there was a total of fifteen semi-transparent figures connected to Do-Seung, and I just called the last one among them before. Yet, I didn’t know who the twenty-seventh regressor would be. Would it be Woon? Dong-Jun or Yeon-Hoon?

Creak.

The door opened then and the first one to approach me was...

“...Tae-Yoon...?” It was Do-Seung again this time. I didn’t know what would happen. Do-Seung stared at me wordlessly and I looked back at him warily. A short silence passed between us until Do-Seung opened his mouth.

“Tae-Yoon.”

“...Why?”

“Come here.”

“...?”

“...Let me just hug you once.”

“...What?”

Do-Seung just said he wanted to hug me. He was usually such a reserved guy. I hesitated, wondering what he was getting at but Do-Seung began to approach me.

“If you won’t come, I will go.” I didn’t know whether it was because the person approaching me was Do-Seung or I just had a warped mind, but it felt like he was coming to hit me instead of hugging me.

“Bong Tae-Yoon, you bastard!”

Clang!

“....!” True to my fears, Do-Seung swung his fist but I barely managed to block his attack with a frypan.

“Haa...aahh...this really hurts...” It seemed he received quite a lot of damage from the hard frypan and gripped his fist tightly in pain. It seemed this was a regressor who didn’t have a good memory of me like the second regressor. I tried to suppress him with the frying pan when Do-Seung caught onto what I was doing and warned me.

“I dare you to hit me with the frying pan again.”

“I’m sorry,” I replied. Ignoring his warning, I tried to strike him hard on the head, but in that short moment, Do-Seung wrapped his arms around my waist tightly.

“...?”

I thought he would push me down to the floor and punch me when he suddenly said, “I wanted to see you, Tae-Yoon.”

“...What?”

This wasn’t some ply to get me within his reach but a genuine embrace.

“I’m sorry that I tried to hit you just before. But you really drove me crazy so many times...so, I just wanted to hit you once,” Do-Seung said.

I stared at Do-Seung in bafflement. It appeared that the fifteenth regressor was someone who was better at expressing himself than the Do-Seung I knew.

Creak.

It was then, I heard the door open, and another person came out.

“Where...is this place...? Just before, I...” The twenty-seventh regressor finally appeared, and I knew who it was just by his voice.

“Woon?” The twenty-seventh regressor was Woon. Simultaneously, he stared at Do-Seung hugging me.

“...What am I seeing...?”

Seeing how this situation could invite misunderstandings, I pushed Do-Seung away from me, and then, Do-Seung whispered into my ear, “Do I have to hide the fact that I’m a regressor right now?”

It seemed Do-Seung didn’t realize that Woon was probably also a regressor like him. It seemed I needed to set things up straight first.

***

I explained how Do-Seung was the fifteenth regressor and Woon was the twenty-seventh regressor. Perhaps, it was because the two realized that each other were regressors, their eyes seemed to turn teary.

“Ah...Woon.”

“Yeah...”

“Are you okay...?”

“No...”

Even in my world, the two’s relationship was especially close. Not only did they spend a long time together as trainees, but they also shared each other’s childhood stories. Thus, it appeared that they empathized with each other’s hardships more strongly.

“You went through so much.”

“No, you went through more.”

“No...It might be my fault you suffered so much...”

“Let me interrupt you guys there,” I cut off the two’s conversation. “I know you guys are in the middle of an important conversation, but I have a couple of questions to ask.”

If possible, I also wanted to let these two talk all day long. But right now, the worldline was only temporarily broken and wouldn’t stay that way forever. I needed to retrieve all the information I could get in the limited time frame.

“Yes, ask, Tae-Yoon.”

“I will answer everything as best I can. Go on.”

“Okay, let me ask Do-Seung first,” I said and looked at Do-Seung. There was one most important thing right now.

“Do-Seung, do you remember everything when you regressed the second time?”

“Yeah. I have all my memories from my regressions.”

“Then, do you remember how you tried to kill me then?”

“...What?”

I wanted to know how connected the regressors’ memories were. Based on his reaction, it appeared that he had no recollection of trying to kill me when he was the second regressor.

“I definitely felt angry enough to want to kill you...but I never really hit you before.”

“Then, you don’t have any memories of me calling you like this after your regression was over?”

“This isn’t the first time? You called me before?”

“...Hm, yes.”

“...Wow, that just gave me the chills.” With this, it was confirmed.

Regressors shared memories during the period of their regressions– no, it didn’t need to be shared but were naturally connected since it was all their memories anyway. Yet, they didn’t recall the memory of me calling them after their regression. That was a bit strange since that meant there was a slight disconnect. I decided to pass over this point to ask my second question.

“So, you know you are the fifteenth regressor.”

“Yeah.”

“And you didn’t regress more times than that?”

“...Yeah.”

“Then, is the number of times a person could regress decided?”

“...”

After receiving my question of whether one’s regression count was set, Do-Seung parsed his lips. It seemed this was a sensitive question.

“...The count isn’t decided.”

“Then, what happened?”

“You can choose it yourself. If you keep failing the missions and fail to save any of the members, the system asks you.”

“Does it ask if you want to stop?”

“No, it asks if you want to choose someone else to regress or if I want to try one more time. There’s no option to stop.”

Hearing this, I instinctively looked at Woon. Woon also looked at Do-Seung. All Do-Seung could do was hang his head low.

“I’m sorry, Woon...at that time, I thought you were the only one who could succeed in the missions.”

Woon looked a bit taken aback. Yet, his eyes soon softened as he said, “...It’s okay.” Then, he placed his hand on top of Do-Seung’s shoulders and said, “I understand. We have to finish these missions. It only made sense you made that decision.” Woon hugged Do-Seung and Do-Seung dug his face into Woon’s shoulders.

There was a short silence, and I waited a moment for Woon and Do-Seung to calm their emotions. Then, after they looked a bit more settled, I asked again.

“...I want both of you to answer now but how far do the missions go?” This was the question I wanted to ask above all.

𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

“Before that, Tae-Yoon, what’s your status in this world?” Woon asked.

“It’s the first week of our debut.”

“Did you get the mission to reach 500,000 sales?”

“Yes.”

“And did you clear it?”

“Yes, we did.”

“Hm...you still have a long way to go...”

“...Sorry?”

Woon stared at me intently. “First of all, I don’t know if there’s an end to these missions.” Woon gazed right into my eyes as he continued, “My mission even continued to reach first place in the billboard HOT100. I couldn’t succeed in any of my missions after that and ended up losing all our members.”

Billboard? First place in HOT100? Was this some kind of sick joke? I thought, of course, the missions would end with us receiving a top national award or reaching 1 million sales. But the more surprising part was...

“And you managed to do...that last mission?”

“Yeah, we did.” Woon managed to go that far. I turned to Do-Seung since in terms of regression count, he regressed the most number of times.

“Do-Seung, how far did your missions go?”

Do-Seung seemed to fumble with his memories a bit and said, “We got the Grammy award as the Artist of the Year.”

“...” This was a step past above first place in the HOT100. What in the world?

“The missions didn’t end even after you went that far?”

“Yeah, it didn’t.” How could the missions not end after placing first on the billboard and receiving the Grammys? A heavy silence fell over the living room.

“...This is the last question. What were you doing before you came here? Both of you failed your missions. Can you tell me what happened right after you gave up? Did you keep living after the failure...or was there something else?”

I pushed off my worries about my mission for now and went on to the next question. This was a question I mainly asked because of my curiosity about how the system worked. I wanted to know what happened to their worlds after they failed their missions.

“Ah...!”

“...That’s right...”

Both Woon and Do-Seung appeared stunned then.

“I don’t have any memories of...what happened after that...”

“Yeah...I just opened my eyes and found myself here...I heard that the worldline broke and a voice that told me to go meet Tae-Yoon...”

Both Woon and Do-Seung didn’t have any memories after they failed their missions. Then, a scary thought popped into my head. The idea probably occurred inside Woon and Do-Seung’s heads as well.

“...Did our world...get erased?” It was the possibility that their world could’ve been destroyed altogether.

“Do you have any memories after failing your last mission, Woon?”

“...No.”

“I also don’t have any memories after picking Woon as the next regressor.”

“...”

“...”

“...Our worlds must have really gotten erased.”

It was simple. Whether one chose the next regressor or decided to regress another time, the moment they failed the last mission, their world was discarded. The world line stopped at that moment. The two appeared to be in shock by this realization and Woon and Do-Seung had a hard time speaking again.

“Then, every time we regressed, we must have died each time too,” Do-Seung simply remarked. One world ended, and another world began. Since they had their previous memories, I thought their lives were reset. However, it seemed my members died in their worlds and were reborn into a new world.

“...Then, we must be like discarded memory files or something.”

“There’s no need for you to word it like that, Do-Seung...”

“Then, how else can we describe ourselves?”

“...That’s true.” It was as Do-Seung said. From the system’s perspective, the members in front of me right now were like files inside a computer trashcan that hadn’t been cleared yet.

“Hm.” I looked at my members.

‘They really did get discarded.

’ I wasn’t 100% certain of it, but I had an inkling that this could be the case. Just because they regressed didn’t mean that their existences continued limitlessly. They simply became buried along with their world and the system only moved the memories. If I had to make an analogy, it was as if I made a copy of a file to edit and I added content to the copy file.

Since the copy file was where the editing took place, the original file naturally became useless. As a natural course, the original files went to trash, and Do-Seung and Woon’s situations were like those discarded files. Do-Seung and Woon appeared shocked to realize that their worlds became destroyed after they failed their missions.

“Then...how many times...did I throw away a world...?” Naturally, they thought they ‘threw away’ the past worlds along with the people who used to live in that place, the relationships they built, and all the memories they made there.

“Woon and Do-Seung,” I said.

“...Hm?”

“...What?”

I planned to recover those discarded worlds.

“If I write over your memories onto this world, you would no longer be discarded.”

“Write over?”

“Our memories?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t want the memories of my members who had gone through so many struggles and hardships inside the numerous universes to protect the team from being discarded like trash. I wanted to save my members and that included my members from all universes. That was why I couldn’t leave any memory behind.

I didn’t know the exact method I would go about to do this yet. Yet, since I saw the semi-transparent figures attached to those two now through Insight, I thought there was a possibility that I could find something. Especially in a situation when the worldline was broken, I thought I could do something.

“But will that really be helpful, Tae-Yoon...?”

“Think about it again, Bong Tae-Yoon.”

It seemed the two thought differently, and Woon and Do-Seung struck back with their rebuttals.