By Zephyria 
〈Hey! Are you going to act like you’re the only one who’s special until the very end? Just because you’ve lived in Seoul and worked for a big corporation, you expect me to just say “yes, yes” to everything you say?〉
〈No, Cheol-hun hyung. What does the past have to do with anything? Whether it’s you or me, we’re both just scraping by now.〉
In a village where you’d encounter a distant grandmother or uncle no matter where you went, the house became exceptionally noisy on the days a relative from next door visited. On that day, too, he woke up to an argument in the middle of the night, and as he stepped outside, his mother quickly soothed him.
〈Did the noise wake you? It’s fine, go back inside and lie down.〉
The anomaly occurred just as he leaned into his mother’s embrace while yawning.
〈You think I’m just your errand boy?!〉
There was a crashing sound of something falling over inside the room, followed by a single, short scream, and then an instant of silence. It was only then that something red began to ooze thickly from beneath the sliding door.
The arms of the mother holding the child grew stiff with tension, and even the child, who had been yawning repeatedly, widened his eyes in surprise at the ominous shift in the air. The door creaked open, and the relative stepped out, panting heavily. In one hand, he held a knife dripping with blood.
The mother hurriedly hid the child behind her. To the frozen child’s ears, only fragmented screams reached him. Soon, the mother too collapsed, and the man roughly grabbed the arm of the child, who stood stunned, unable to follow his mother’s final voice telling him to run.
Red droplets of blood fell from the raised blade onto the child’s face.
〈…Fuck. Consider yourself lucky you survived because your face looks so damn much like your mother’s.〉
After hesitating, the man lowered the knife. Instead of killing the child, he searched the house and found a suitcase. This suitcase was another source of the inferiority complex the man had harbored toward the child’s father. Even during the era when overseas travel was banned, the child’s father had once used this bag to go on business trips abroad.
Having killed the root of his inferiority and seized both the symbol and the offspring, he fled his hometown.
〈I met your mother before that bastard did. You know that? Huh? I’m saying that I should have been your father.〉
At first, the man seemed to intend to raise the child properly. As if by making the boy his own child, he could overcome the sense of failure that had crushed him his entire life.
However, from the starting point—killing the child’s parents and kidnapping him in a suitcase—catastrophe was predestined. It didn’t take more than a few days before the man began to lay hands on him.
The child was left abandoned in a house where the fires of calamity blazed. The heat that scorched even his brain and the murky air soon made his consciousness flicker. Through the precarious, fragmented gaps of awareness, the child wept sorrowfully. Was he going to die, like Mom and Dad? Would it hurt a lot? Mom and Dad bled so much.
Crushed by a precocious fear, the child cried. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die. But the hand of salvation did not reach him. Isolated from the world, the child faded away quietly and alone.
Just as the sobbing pleas for life and the whimpering cries for help were gradually subsiding, a touch reached him—not one of salvation, but that of a god.
「The longing of such a small and fragile life is truly great. Let us try changing fate. I wonder if death can be overcome.」
「Child, what is your true heart’s desire?」
The moment he closed his eyes while exhaling his final breath and then opened them, the child had returned not to a secluded semi-basement room in Seoul, but to Gyeongsan on that night.
This was the first time Kim Si-baek read Tae-un’s regression.
Death by burning, death by freezing, exsanguination, shock, accidents, starvation… Kim Si-baek saw every death the five-year-old child experienced. Even after the memories of the child repeating death were gradually crushed and the longing for his parents was worn away and vanished. Continuously. Continuously. Continuously.
〈Kid. What’s your name?〉
Until a boy spoke to him, bowing his head beyond the small window of the semi-basement room. Continuously. Continuously. Continuously.
「The origin of our child is longing. The longing born from the will to survive, though it became distorted through repeated regressions, eventually reached you and allowed you to overcome death.」
The leisurely voice of chaos flowed into the ears of Kim Si-baek, who was reading the scene of himself saving Tae-un from Tae Cheol-hun as if he were a stranger.
「Then, what do you think the next longing was?」
He felt he knew the answer even without hearing it.
Kim Si-baek saw Tae-un dying in a world where he had disappeared.
He saw him struggling to save those close to him so that Kim Si-baek would not be sad or pained, and fighting to make the world even a little more stable and livable. He saw him discovering the truth and falling into despair at the end of a lonely battle that no one acknowledged. He saw him staining his hands with blood to save others, even while feeling a weary disillusionment with the human condition that revealed its bottom every day. He saw him committing suicide while fiddling with Cloud’s heart in a half-insane state.
Kim Si-baek saw everything, up to the moment the man, who had lived his entire life chased by death, finally chose death by his own will.
And the cycles reached their end, returning to the present. It felt as though an eternity had passed, submerged in a seamless flow of time that poured down like heavy rain, beating and soaking his body, but when he opened his eyes, it was but a fleeting moment.
「Young apostle of the god. Do you know what you must offer to receive our child?」
The afterimages of Tae-un dying, dying, and dying again stirred his consciousness chaotically, causing Kim Si-baek to bite his lower lip. The taste of blood filled his mouth. Tae-un had said there was no other way but to kill him, and the reason was perfectly valid. It was impossible for Kim Si-baek, whose divine power had not fully recovered, to face a Servant of Chaos alone.
However, while experiencing Tae-un’s time, Kim Si-baek surmised that he possessed a price that could substitute for him. Something very easy and simple.
He slowly looked back. There was no entrance to the Id Portal there, but outside, Biyendwe would be waiting with Gloiuken and Nasluik, as if every second were an eternity. The people he cherished and loved more than anything.
And if he returned to mak slecht, the people he had cultivated through his past life would be waiting. Not as a mere hunter with a unique trait, but a life as an apostle of god, shining with honor and light, awaited him there. Even a resting place as a holy spirit, to be recorded honorably after death, had been prepared for him.
The proof of the profound time spent caring for and sharing his heart with a young god who had almost no decent believers, and everything that allowed the human known as Kim Si-baek to live—all of it waited for him in mak slecht.
The place that called to him with a poignant longing just by thinking about it was Kim Si-baek’s home. A new home where he was not born, but where he believed he would one day close his eyes and be buried beneath the earth with those he loved.
Tae-un’s words—that there was no way to choose both—were accurate. There was only one home Kim Si-baek could return to.
And Kim Si-baek already knew what that was.
〈Hyung, who are you going to choose? Me, or that child?〉
The reason the voice he encountered in his dreams kept echoing in his ears was likely because he had subconsciously sensed, even then, that a ‘choice’ would be placed before him in the end.
It was not as complacent as dreaming of spending a few more years with Tae-un before returning. Even if he enjoyed more time on Earth, his future in mak slecht and his divine power as an apostle still existed.
But this ‘choice’ meant not only abandoning the immortality of an apostle, but returning as a mere human without divine power and throwing away everything he had built over decades in mak slecht.
Kim Si-baek let out a hollow laugh.
‘There’s no need to even think about it.’
When he realized that Tae-un, whom he had regarded only as a child, was establishing himself as a grown adult, he could have left him behind. Believing it would be fine without him, he could have left only the heart that cherished the child.
However, the relationship had changed through the desire that Tae-un ignited and which had spread to him as well. The expression “a child he cherished like a younger brother” could no longer fully define Tae-un.
He had seen Tae-un eating away at his own soul to lessen even a bit of the pain he would suffer upon returning after 7,777 days. He had seen Tae-un preparing for death in despair and wailing, yet smiling brightly like his childhood self upon reuniting with him. He had seen a soul, worn down by endless regression and despair, regain its vitality only in his presence.
From the moment they met in that semi-basement room, Tae-un’s choice had always pointed straight toward him. Then, wouldn’t his own choice be equally obvious?
Tae-un had discarded his soul and his life for him. In comparison, what he had to discard was utterly trivial.
Kim Si-baek chose.