EP.107 The Answer We Had Been Searching For Was Not Far Away (3)
‘The world is regressing.’
Back to the day when she awakened her powers.
Back to the day when she became the ‘Daughter of the Kraken.’
Of course, Parang has no memory of any regression.
Her childhood spent in an orphanage from the moment she was born.
The moment she regained her past life memories and awakened with a status window.
And up until now. Parang remembered all of those lives continuously.
The world was the same way. Right now, Parang could look up the internet and recite exactly what had happened to the world the day before her awakening.
“Tell me… tell me more details. What are the conditions for regressing? What causes it? Are all the memories from before the rewind fake?”The confused Parang bombarded Alice with questions.
The kind Alice didn’t get flustered by Parang’s barrage of questions, and answered her step by step.
“Calm down. I’ll explain everything I know. First, you asked about the conditions for regressing?”
“Yes.”
Parang nodded. Now that she knew the world was regressing, she absolutely had to find out when and under what conditions it happened. Fortunately, Alice gave a clear answer.
“It’s when you die, Parang. The world regression when you die.”
To be precise, there was one more condition besides death, but this was information that the current Parang shouldn’t know.
“When I die, it regression…”
“That’s right. The timing varied, but the pattern was always the same. The Kraken senses your death, then rewind.”
Parang looked at her hands with trembling eyes.
…Even from far away, a monster can immediately sense when its egg is broken.
When she dies, the Kraken senses it, and the world regression. Back to that very day when she awakened.
“How pitiful. Do you still believe you’re human?”
The voice she heard in her dream echoes.
Parang shook her head to dismiss that thought.
‘No. Go away. I’m not, I’m not a monster.’
Her chest felt tight. Was it because they were underwater?
“Why… why did it have to be me…?”
To this question that wasn’t really a question, Alice answered.
“It’s definitely related to the Kraken. Even as the world kept regressing with each round, the Kraken’s memories remained intact.”
“The Kraken…”
This damned mass of tentacles is everywhere.
“As for whether the memories before the rewind are fake… I can’t answer that. That’s in the realm of philosophy.”
“That’s… true.”
Are the memories from before March 19, 2018 my memories? Or are they the memories of the first round me? Or are they no one’s memories at all?
As Alice said, this was philosophical territory. Parang didn’t want to contemplate such things in the midst of everything else. Skip this issue.
She decided to only ask questions that would help deal with the current situation.
“Then besides the Kraken, what about that… eyeball monster? Does it exist in all time periods?”
“No, it’s not in all time periods. That eyeball monster has existed since the first rewind. In other words, it didn’t exist in the original round… the 0th round. And… since it appeared, it has clashed with the Kraken in almost every round. I mean they were hostile.”
“Hostile with the Kraken… huh.”
“Right. Even my previous escape was thanks to the conflict between the Kraken and that eyeball.”
By ‘previous,’ she must mean when Alice escaped from that cocoon and ate the Kraken’s tentacle.
“When you say ‘almost every round’… does that mean the eyeball’s actions changed with each round?”
Parang asked while deep in thought. If something showed noticeably different behavior in each round, it must also be related to the regression.
But the idea that the eyeball had self-awareness and acted differently in each round while being conscious of the regression… that was somehow hard to accept.
Alice’s answer didn’t stray far from Parang’s frame of thought.
“That’s… a bit unclear. The few rounds where the Kraken didn’t clash with that eyeball all ended incredibly quickly. At most a month, and some time periods only lasted a day. You probably died in some freak accident or something like that. So there wasn’t even a chance for them to clash. I think if you had stayed alive in those rounds, the Kraken and eyeball would have clashed.”
Alice pondered for a moment, then added.
“But it didn’t show exactly the same behavior in every round either. As rounds repeated, that eyeball kept getting stronger. At first it was completely overwhelmed by the Kraken, but as time passed, they became almost equal in power.”
“It gets stronger with each round? Just continuously, like that?”
“That’s right. The eyeball in each subsequent round was definitely more powerful than in the previous one.”
“In that case… my odds of winning get worse and worse with each rewind.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
Alice closed her eyes for a moment. In the blink of an eye, tens of thousands of possible paths flashed through her mind once again.
‘As I thought, it’s not time yet.’
Revealing the truth would have to wait. Right now, she needed to redirect Parang’s thoughts.
Alice spoke up.
“So, this is just my theory, but… I think that eyeball might be some kind of… ‘error data’ that occurred when the world started regressing. The fact that it didn’t exist in the 0th round before the regression began, and how it gets stronger with each rewind…”
Of course, this was a lie. It wasn’t error data at all. But it was a plausible theory nonetheless.
Parang nodded.
“Error data… That does make sense.”
Parang closed her eyes in thought.
“Then, besides the Kraken and the eyeball, are there no other beings that retain their memories after each rewind?”
Even as she asked the question, an answer flashed through Parang’s mind.
The subtly altered original story, his attitude of knowing everything, actions that made no sense from a normal person’s perspective.
“…Han Siwoo.”
While it seemed like an out-of-place name to bring up in a conversation about the Kraken and regression, if you considered him as someone who could rewind, too many things lined up perfectly.
‘What kind of thinking is this…’
Meanwhile, Alice could only shake her head at how quickly Parang had arrived at the answer.
‘This is getting out of hand.’
She had originally planned to keep it hidden, but now that things had come to this… Alice tried to subtly change the subject.
“Do you have any other questions about the regression?”
“In other rounds… was Han Siwoo dragged to the sea like he is now?”
‘Oh dear, she’s not letting this go.’
With no other choice, Alice switched to playing dumb.
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve only seen the Kraken’s memories, not Han Siwoo’s.”
“Are you saying that in all those rounds, there wasn’t a single one where the Kraken and Han Siwoo crossed paths?”
“…No.”
“Which round are we in now?”
“The 42nd.”
“42…”
It could be considered a lot, but then again, it wasn’t that high of a number.
‘It’s ambiguous…’
“Any other questions about the regression? Though… I’ve pretty much told you everything I know, so I’m not sure I could answer anything else.”
“Well… I can’t think of any other questions right now… Ah.”
As Parang pondered, a question suddenly occurred to her.
“Did the Kraken exist before the regression began?”
‘Why is her intuition so sharp?’
Alice was internally alarmed. At this rate, Parang might discover things that couldn’t be undone. Fortunately, she had barely dodged the bullet this time.
Alice told Parang the truth.
“No. The Kraken has existed since March 19, 2018. At least, that’s when the memories I’ve seen begin.”
“I see…”
After thinking for a moment, Parang seemed to reach her own conclusion and said to Alice.
“I think we’ve talked enough about the regression. Besides, I don’t think that was your main reason for wanting to meet with me.”
Alice internally breathed a sigh of relief. That had been a close call.
Besides, as Parang said, the world’s regression weren’t the main topic of today’s conversation.
“Right. We should get to the main point.”
Parang listened attentively to Alice’s words.
Alice was taking a risk to meet her while hiding from that eyeball monster.
That meant whatever message she wanted to convey was both urgent and important.
And here they’d spent all this time chatting about regression.
‘I feel a bit guilty.’
But well, it had been information Parang needed to hear, and Alice hadn’t shown any particular signs of urgency.
This level of delay seemed acceptable to her.
“Ah, before we get to the main point… there’s one last thing we need to address.”
“Hm? What is it?”
Parang tilted her head at Alice’s words.
“It’s important. It’s also the reason I asked to meet you alone today.”
“Ah… okay. Go ahead.”
Come to think of it, Alice had insisted on meeting only with Parang, excluding other Oceanos members.
Things like the world’s regression, the truth about Hive, Object, and Capulus’s secrets were shocking, but they were facts that other Oceanos members could know about.
There had to be a different reason why Alice wanted to speak with Parang alone.
She looked at Parang with the most serious expression Parang had ever seen on her face.
“Parang.”
Looking at Alice’s eyes, Parang felt an inexplicable chill run down her spine.
Whenever she got this feeling, something unimaginable always followed.
Today would prove no different.
“To you, am I a ‘person,’ or am I a ‘character’?”
“…Huh?”
Parang froze stiff, staring at Alice with a dumbfounded expression.
“You heard me correctly. To you, am I a real person, or a character in a novel?”
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