By Zephyria 
✽ ✽ ✽
Aaaaaaaah!
A man’s despairing howl, sounding as if his heart were being ripped out, echoed through the ruins overflowing with death. The voice of Chaos, which had been watching with interest at first, eventually subsided.
The forgotten god of antiquity gazed gloomily at the apostle who, despite the addition of their malice, had recovered his humanity and was now despairing because he could not abandon his human nature.
The countless voices that always resonated as one began to split into fragments.
「What is a heart’s desire?」
「It is the truth that drives life forward.」
「All living things naturally desire and long for, thus they flow without stagnation; this is evolution.」
「That which we crafted could not do so.」
Chaos is a god who failed and cannot generate life. The magical beasts originating from Chaos cannot evolve. Even if evolution is forcibly accelerated by the energy of Chaos, they cannot reproduce; they end with a single generation, unable to lead any meaningful species change.
Thus, Chaos stole and overlaid the humans, the creations of god. The result was the same. The followers, who lost their identity as humans as Chaos’s hatred rained down upon them, also had their longed-for desires crushed, losing their source of power. Just like Edokus, who scattered fragments of hatred across the world, having forgotten even his mother’s voice.
「However, apostle. You are different.」
「How is it that you remain human even now, without knowing what your own heart’s desire is? Is it because of your origin?」
Tae-un’s torn pupils gazed only at the corpses he had protected and slaughtered, as if he couldn’t even hear the voice of Chaos.
「I shall give you one last chance. Since you have already overcome the fate of death once, I wish to see if you will overcome it again to remain human, or return as our follower.」
〈Brother…〉
That was the final memory of this cycle.
He felt some kind of liquid dripping onto Lee Han-gyeol’s corpse, but it likely wasn’t tears. What falls from the eyes of a monster who has returned after crossing the line of humanity that Kim Si-baek had guided him toward is nothing more than foul, rotting discharge.
Listening to the shrieks of magical beasts and the screams of people, Tae-un lay blankly on the rooftop. Until he was chewed to death by a magical beast that leaped up onto the roof.
Even as he was held by a priest who had rushed up to the roof searching for a child, Tae-un let his unfocused gaze drop. Until he was attacked by a magical beast while being carried on someone’s back during the evacuation.
On the rooftop, Tae-un thought.
What was the point of enduring for 7,777 days? What was the point of saving them? In the end, he would become a monster, and he would try to kill even the returned Kim Si-baek without recognizing him.
Everything he had built up through repeated deaths until now was meaningless. The patheticness and misery of having killed and died without even knowing the true future sank him with a density equal to despair. It was all because of him. Because of him, Kim Si-baek disappeared, his existence was erased, and now he had to be forced back and die again.
Once he gave up on himself, it became self-abuse.
After returning from being a monster, Tae-un realized that magical energy, condensed by the direct breath of Chaos, resided near his heart. The black mark revealed on the surface of his skin was like a tattoo. He also knew that the magical energy would gradually erode him, and eventually, he would return to that monster. Chaos would not give him a second chance.
He peeled back the skin where the magical energy was condensed and gouged out the flesh. He destroyed the brain that the voice of Chaos pursued. And when he returned to the rooftop, Tae-un woke up with a clean body without a single wound, and the magical energy had consumed him a bit more.
If he could not touch his body, he tried to break his mind. He did anything that would act on the brain and damage the psyche. Alcohol, nicotine, drugs, pleasure, poison… there were so many harmful substances created and developed by human greed, yet when Tae-un returned to the rooftop, he woke up with a mind that was incredibly lucid. He couldn’t even go insane.
Tae-un truly wanted to die.
Before he became a monster and killed Kim Si-baek and the ones he loved, he wanted to die.
From then on, he didn’t even know which cycle it was. He didn’t know when he had been separated from the people at the orphanage. He didn’t know if they were dead or alive.
Tae-un simply staggered aimlessly through the ruined city. If he ran out of strength and collapsed, he would become prey for a magical beast and wake up on the rooftop. …He missed Si-baek hyung. But meeting him meant coming closer to the inevitability of killing him. He wanted to see him, but he must not meet him. I want to see him. I must not meet him. I want to…
〈If there’s someone you want to see, wake up!〉
The shout of a girl massaging his cold limbs cut through his hazy consciousness. The face reflected in his narrow field of vision was someone familiar even to him. Oh Hae-ryung. He had occasionally encountered her at Justina’s shelter, but since she wasn’t an ‘important person,’ he had ignored her.
Oh Hae-ryung, whom he had never spoken to beyond necessary words and hadn’t even met in this cycle, kept talking to Tae-un and tried to save him by performing emergency first aid. Even though her own limbs were gaunt and her complexion pale from not eating properly.
〈Are you going to die here even though there’s someone you want to see? I have someone too. I won’t die. I’ll never die! I’ll escape Seoul and meet my dad and younger brother, and I’ll free my mom from her grudge!〉
〈…〉
〈Think about the person you want to meet. They must be alive somewhere. I believe my dad, brother, and older brothers are alive too!〉
〈…〉
〈My dad is a really cool doctor. He’s saved more than a few people in the emergency room. My younger brother fights with me all the time, but he’s probably crying every night saying he misses his sister. And my older brothers…〉
Oh Hae-ryung, who had been massaging Tae-un’s body to get the blood flowing without even realizing her own arm hurt, suddenly gave a small laugh.
〈There’s not much to say about my older brothers. Actually, I don’t even know their names well. They’re half-brothers from my dad’s side, and all I know is that one character in their names is Baek and Un. This is a secret I’m only telling you, but my mom ran away from her trashy ex-husband, leaving only the brothers behind…〉
Tae-un, who had been letting her words slide, felt a sudden, chilling shiver at the familiar content.
〈…How old are your brothers?〉
Not knowing that he had regained consciousness and was listening, Oh Hae-ryung was startled. He pressed her for answers, but all she knew was what she had just said. Baek and Un.
With millions of residents in Seoul, there would be others besides the Kim Si-baek brothers who shared the name characters Baek and Un. They weren’t even particularly rare characters. And among them, brothers whose mothers had disappeared due to their father’s domestic violence… Damn it. Damn it. Damn it!
Tae-un left Seoul with Oh Hae-ryung and met her family in Daejeon. Oh Hae-ryung’s father, though deeply devastated upon learning of his wife’s death, readily showed him a photo. In the frame was a middle-aged woman who bore a resemblance to Kim Si-baek.
Kim Si-baek’s half-siblings, whom he hadn’t even known existed, were here. …If so, what about Kim Si-woon, who was thought to have died in the past? Kim Si-baek had said he hadn’t confirmed his brother’s body.
The ringleader of the human trafficking organization had been executed, but several accomplices were still serving their sentences. Since he didn’t need to worry about the aftermath, Tae-un easily found him at Jeongseon Prison. The fact that Tae Cheol-hun was imprisoned there didn’t even register in his mind.
Since it had happened 20 years ago, the accomplice didn’t remember everything about what happened to the children at the time. Tae-un changed the direction of his questioning.
〈If you’d known the family of the detective who came to arrest you was one of our old products, what would you have done? Of course, I would’ve lied and said they were already dead even if they were alive!〉
Tae-un smashed the accomplice’s head against the wall and killed him, laughing at why he asked such an obvious question, and then left the prison. He did so after obtaining a list of foreign organizations that had dealt with them at the time. Tae-un easily obtained information that even the detectives couldn’t get through torture.
The organization mainly operated around Japan and China, but Tae-un headed for the United States first. One reason was that the routes were connected, but it was also because the American organization had already been wiped out before the Great Cataclysm.
Everything would disappear anyway once he regressed. Even in a strange land, he used any means necessary to obtain information on the organization left in the official records of the FBI, and finally, he obtained the name of a boy who had failed an organ transplant 20 years ago and had gone through two adoptions.
Cloud Carter.