By Zephyria 
Kim Si-baek had witnessed an Id Portal just before mutation only once. Even then, he had felt a danger that seemed to shake the very universe, but now, an even stronger intuition tightened around his skin with a chilling dread. The entrance was fluctuating, like a supernova on the verge of exploding in deep space.
Tae-un’s Id Portal emitted starlight with a noble yet precarious brilliance, as if forbidding anyone else’s approach. Do not enter. A human’s rightful instinct for survival rang a loud alarm. The gruesome image of a magical beast fused with the world flashed through his mind.
But so what? What was the problem with it being dangerous?
Kim Si-baek cast one last fleeting glance toward the lower part of the rooftop where Biyendwe and the rest of the party remained, then entered the Id Portal without hesitation.
Kim Si-baek had once wondered what the mental landscape would be if Tae-un became the host of an Id Portal. He had thought it might be a day that had caused him great shock in his childhood, but that was not the answer.
It was a fragment of a world in ruin.
The earth flowed and the sky poured down. The air hardened like resin, and the celestial sphere plummeted. The flickering stars lost their light, and the microcosm twisted. Like an unskilled painter spilling paint on a sketch and stirring it with a brush, or like a world stitched and patched together haphazardly from pieces of felt, it was a mess. The fragments that made up the world lacked consistency, did not harmonize, and were not natural.
On skeletal, withered winter branches, spring buds and summer leaves were attached in torn pieces; they fluttered in the autumn wind before being struck by hail and falling. Seasons were entangled, and day and night were blurred. The sky from ten years ago and the sky from ten years in the future were crudely grafted together. It was as if a madman had torn time and space to shreds and crushed them into a pulp.
As a human, as a living being, a rightful repulsion flared up like an allergic reaction. Kim Si-baek bit his lip hard to settle his churning stomach. The dizzying pain of tearing flesh and the metallic taste of blood helped steady his consciousness.
They said the Id Portal laid bare the host’s inner self. Did that mean Tae-un’s interior was like this? Kim Si-baek grit his teeth at the horrific scenery that felt as though it could drive even the observer mad. Find Tae-un. I have to find Tae-un.
Steadying his breath, he took a step forward, then quickly looked down at the squishy sensation beneath his feet. As his gaze landed, the dark floor instantly brightened as if a thick fog had lifted.
What lay on the floor—or rather, what composed the floor—were corpses. A five-year-old child. A teenage boy. Young men in their twenties and thirties. Though their clothing differed, their ages varied, and their causes of death were distinct, the commonality among the bodies was that they all bore gruesome wounds. And…
“…Un-ah.”
Every single one of them had Tae-un’s face. They were his corpses.
Some corpses lacked everything from the neck up, some were so crushed that their features were unrecognizable, and some had incomplete limbs, but how could he not recognize him?
Any attempt to understand the meaning of the corpses lining the Id Portal was futile. A devastating shock, the likes of which he had never even imagined, tore through him like a scream.
It was then that Kim Si-baek’s trembling hand touched the face of the child who had died without even being able to close his eyes.
[Finally, the last quest. Shall we kill the Apostle of Chaos and return to mak slecht?]
[Quest 16]
[Kill the Apostle of Chaos (0/1)]
[Remaining Time: Until the Apostle undergoes exuviation]
As the final quest appeared, Tae-un walked toward him from a distance.
Unlike Kim Si-baek, who had been hesitant even to touch the corpses strewn across the floor, Tae-un approached with steady strides, stepping ruthlessly over the bodies that shared his own face. That sight gave Kim Si-baek a new surprise and realization. …Tae-un was accustomed to it, to his own corpses. Would it be an overreach to assume he was accustomed not just to the corpses, but to the very concept of ‘his own death’?
Tae-un’s dry gaze scanned the surroundings.
“So this is what’s inside my head… It’s embarrassing to have all this exposed to you, Hyung. It’s like being out here naked.”
“…”
“But thinking about it, this is actually a pretty good situation for you. As you can see, I’m the core. When an Id Portal is cleared, the host takes a heavy hit from the aftermath. Since I’ll be in a weakened state, it’ll be easy to deal with me even if I’ve become an apostle.”
“…”
“Conversely, if I kill you here, I’ll have even fewer obstacles outside. There is one grand warrior, but do you think he can beat me?”
Without responding to his words, Kim Si-baek stroked the gaunt cheek of the dead child. He wanted to close the child’s eyes, but they didn’t budge, as if time had been frozen the moment of death.
“What happened to you?”
“This is a kind of world of mental imagery. Who can accurately grasp their own psychology? I imagine even psychiatrists find it difficult.”
“Even in a mental landscape, people don’t usually carry their own corpses around in their heads.”
“But here they are.”
Tae-un murmured nonchalantly, flicking a bothersome corpse away with the tip of his foot.
Having been able to suppress some of his horror through the brief conversation, Kim Si-baek quickly scanned the floor.
The corpses did not cover every age. There were no corpses from before the age of five, which remained vivid in his memory, nor were there any up to the age of fourteen. The clothes worn by the corpses from age fourteen onwards varied. As they got older, corpses wearing guild uniforms began to appear, and a much smaller number of corpses were dressed in black suits.
And the five-year-old corpses were all wearing the same clothes. Clothes that Kim Si-baek recognized. The very clothes Tae Cheol-hun had never changed after kidnapping the young Tae-un from Gyeongsan.
Kim Si-baek fiddled with the worn-out clothes he had once replaced and thrown away. Tae-un had revealed that he had regressed once, and Kim Si-baek had confirmed this through a vision.
But what if Tae-un’s regression hadn’t happened only once?
The inconsistencies he had buried until now surfaced all at once. Those memories that were different only for Tae-un could all be cleanly explained if Tae-un had regressed and confused them with previous cycles.
That wasn’t all. Shortly after rescuing him from the semi-basement room, Tae-un had once had a nightmare. He said he dreamed of falling off a cliff and dying; when Kim Si-baek comforted him by saying such things were just meaningless dreams, he had barely given a faint smile.
〈I thought it was another dream about dying. I don’t have those strange dreams where I die and come back to life anymore.〉
At the time, he had dismissed it as a funny story born of a child’s imagination. Because Tae-un had never had the same nightmare or mentioned a similar topic since, it was a very old memory he had completely forgotten—until now, as he stood before the child’s corpse, shaking off the accumulated dust.
“…Un-ah, you told me through the system before that the Servants of Chaos had existed since 21 years ago.”
“I did.”
“Wasn’t it 30 years ago, not 21? When you were five.”
Tae-un showed no agitation, but that was precisely why Kim Si-baek could be certain. If it had been a completely wrong guess, he would have reacted with a relaxed dismissal.
Soon, Tae-un seemed to realize his own mistake; he furrowed his brow in displeasure, then brushed it off with a flat expression as if nothing had happened.
“Well, what does the timing matter?”
His halted steps began to move toward Kim Si-baek again. Beneath his feet, the corpses with his own face were ruthlessly trampled.
“Si-baek Hyung, it’s time to choose.”
Tae-un’s whisper flowed in sweetly, his arms elegantly spread to his sides.
“If you choose me, your precious younger siblings will die and this world will perish. Conversely, if you choose this world, everyone survives. Everyone.”
Everyone.
The corners of Tae-un’s mouth curved pleasurably as he uttered that word. Even as he asked the question, he smiled brightly, as if he were already certain of Kim Si-baek’s answer.
“What will you choose, Hyung?”
〈Who will you choose, between me and that child?〉
The problem of choice—which he first heard in a dream and had since subconsciously chewed over several times in conversations with Tae-un—Kim Si-baek finally understood completely.
The corners of Tae-un’s lips curled up into a smirk.
“I’m looking forward to it. Your choice.”
Before the lingering echo of his voice could fade, his form collapsed. Not as a human of flesh and blood, but as an ominous energy, crafted directly by chaos and infinitely close to its servants, flooded the murky world.