By Zephyria 
Having grown into a young man over the passing years, Cloud was working as an office employee for a certain guild, his face bearing a striking resemblance to Kim Si-baek.
〈…….〉
Even as he tracked him down to this point, the lingering hope wouldn’t stop, but upon facing Cloud, he could no longer deny it. This man was undoubtedly Kim Si-woon.
To Cloud, who asked who he was, Tae-un answered after a long hesitation.
〈……I am a close younger brother of Si-baek hyung.〉
How would he react? Would he ask who Kim Si-baek was, like the others? If he had been erased even from his brother’s memory, then I, I…… As Tae-un floundered in a confusion that swallowed him like a murky swamp, Cloud suddenly became impatient.
〈Do you know my brother?〉
Ah.
Tae-un’s face contorted with a sensation he couldn’t identify as either joy or sorrow.
After learning the truth that he would become a monster, he asked Chaos for the first time. Why was it that only Tae-un’s brothers remembered him?
After hearing the explanation, Tae-un screamed, chewing through a pain that felt like a saw blade scraping his heart.
〈……If you hadn’t saved me then, what would Si-baek hyung’s future have been?〉
「If you learn of it, you will surely regret it.」
〈I’m already doing that to death right now.〉
Chaos smiled and showed him a future that existed yet did not exist.
In that future, Kim Si-baek won the first-ever Olympic gold medal in fencing for Korea in the next Olympics. The news of the first gold medal was accompanied by the touching story of him searching for his younger brother. In every single future, he reunited with his brother. Up to this point, the future remained unchanged.
After that, his future shifted slightly depending on whether he retired early due to injury or not. However, the core remained the same. In Kim Si-baek’s contacts, his brother was always saved as the first entry, and his pride as a fencer remained completely intact.
In the future where Tae-un did not exist, he shone brilliantly and was happy beyond measure. It was Tae-un himself who had tarnished that perfect future and stolen his brother away.
「It is the future the apostle of the young god offered us to save you. Truly, it was a future worthy of our enjoyment.」
Tae-un regretted that he had not died. He truly, truly wanted to die. He should have died in that semi-basement room at five years old. He should have closed the window of that semi-basement room, curled up in a corner so that those warm eyes could not reach him, and died miserably, like the monster he was.
In the middle of a brutally destroyed city, listening to the sound of Federal Bureau of Investigation hunters swarming to arrest him, he asked again.
Upon the answer he received, Tae-un finally saw the ‘right path.’
Kim Si-baek’s mother always died shortly after the Great Cataclysm. The place where the mother and daughter were was too far from the orphanage, so no matter how many times he regressed, he couldn’t save them. Oh Hae-ryung also hid somewhere after her mother’s death, making her difficult to find. Nor could he leave the orphanage vacant for the entire duration to search for them. It took a considerable amount of time to accept the truth that he could not save them.
However, since they were close to Justina’s shelter, he could give her hints about the hidden survivors. In most cases, Justina found and protected Oh Hae-ryung.
As for Cloud, the eldest daughter of his adopted family was an Awakened.
He heard that she had died trying to protect her family during the Great Cataclysm without fully understanding her abilities, and the surviving family members had been scattered. All he could do was analyze the eldest daughter’s abilities as Cloud remembered them and inform him before the connection was severed. Fortunately, that alone allowed the eldest daughter to protect her family and build a reputation as one of the top hunters in Oregon.
In Korea, Tae-un repeated the tasks he had done to the point of exhaustion. Saving, killing, saving, killing…… If things went slightly awry, he started over. The difference from previous cycles was that he now went to the United States to find Cloud before ending the cycle.
〈Do you know my brother?〉
Cloud, who became a magical beast scholar with a high probability, always asked the same question, and Tae-un killed him amidst his longing for Kim Si-baek. Then one day, while fiddling with a hot heart emitting a steaming heat, he suddenly realized.
Ah. I could actually go crazy.
He stopped doing that as well. Until he reunited with Kim Si-baek, shouldn’t he at least look like a normal person?
Thanks to—or because of—becoming a monster who had crossed the line once, he gained new powers. Chaos told him it was an ability possible only because he was their apostle. Since he wasn’t a complete apostle, there were limits, but it was reasonably useful. Especially in the direction of eliminating demonic terrorists who carried out attacks.
Through repeating numerous cycles, Tae-un learned that the image the public remembered most intensely was that of him as a boy leading refugees in Seoul. He approached demonic terrorists using an illusion borrowing that appearance. Those who had become seed bearers mostly enjoyed the irony that a hero of Korea was helping them.
After several experiences, he concluded that it was better to send messages directly to the consciousness of the seed bearers rather than facing them individually. Recalling a seed bearer who once said, “It’s like a game quest,” he delivered messages like quests.
By sending out dry phrases that required no emotional expenditure, Tae-un tested the seed bearers in various directions.
〈Could I use this for Si-baek hyung too?〉
「We were the ones who sent the apostle of the young god to mak slecht, and we shall be the ones to bring him back. Since your magical energy has diminished upon returning to human form, it should be possible.」
He had acquired a useful means.
There was one more new change. The name of a kind of instance dungeon related to the gaps in the mind varied by cycle, but it was generally referred to as the Id Portal.
「Child. It is because your mind overflowed into the world when you became our apostle. Had it been mak slecht, the apostle and the grand warrior would have purified it, preventing the phenomenon from manifesting.」
Chaos showed deep curiosity toward the phenomenon it was experiencing for the first time. For Tae-un, it was merely the impression that another annoying variable had appeared.
Tae-un built up cycles while controlling as many variables as possible. Since Kim Si-baek might reveal that he was a returner, it was better for the Director of the Supernatural Phenomenon Response Agency to be someone whose mind wasn’t rigid. As a result of his experiments, Director Noh was the optimal choice. However, the husband he had a 60 percent chance of marrying was a hindrance to his promotion; since they would inevitably divorce sooner or later, Tae-un simply induced the divorce to happen earlier.
Inducing a situation without killing was a tedious process with many variables, but Tae-un did not engage in unnecessary killing. Whether human or magical beast, they were equally worthless and meaningless, but the sole reason he repeated the cycles was Kim Si-baek. He could not stain this world with futile blood. Kim Si-baek wouldn’t want that either.
Oh Hae-ryung had a 50 percent chance of being employed by the Tobazyushu Husarsky guild, a 30 percent chance of becoming a nun, and a 20 percent chance of working at a regular job. No matter the means, as long as he built the bridge for them to meet, Kim Si-baek would realize she was his half-sister. Her appearance was too similar to their mother’s to deny.
As long as his family was safe, Cloud became a magical beast scholar with a 100 percent probability. Tae-un revised the sentences of the email that would make him rush to Korea in one breath, testing it several times.
As the cycles repeated, the world—especially the environment in Korea—was refined to near perfection. He obsessively corrected any variable that protruded even slightly. He also became more proficient in handling his abilities as the cycles repeated.
Chaos occasionally gave him news of Kim Si-baek. Since Chaos was not omnipotent, they only relayed his appearance while facing magical beasts, but that was enough. Since he was told that Kim Si-baek became an apostle at 28 and his physical time stopped, it was easy to imagine.
Because it was Kim Si-baek and no other, there must have been many people in mak slecht who had given him their hearts and grown fond of him. When he imagined Kim Si-baek smiling at others the way he used to smile at him, a terrible thirst and agony surged simultaneously.
He didn’t know how much time Kim Si-baek had spent in mak slecht, but it was certainly well over nine years. Perhaps a child who ruined his life was no longer of any value.
Could he have forgotten me forever?
It was around the time he was soaking in such depression.
「We heard the apostle of the young god mentioning you while conversing with his god.」
〈……Liar.〉
「Have we ever told you a lie?〉」
Chaos relayed that while protecting a city from magical beasts, Kim Si-baek had said, ‘It’s a relief that Un-i didn’t come. I like mak slecht, but I still hope Un-i lives in a peaceful and safe world without magical beasts.’ Because it was such a typical thing for him to say, it was painful for Tae-un.
Behind the pain was a selfish joy. He felt ecstasy that he was still remembered, and despair at his own future where he would inevitably betray those feelings.
When he came to his senses, he was back on the rooftop. He couldn’t even remember how he had died.
〈……Who killed me?〉