I’m an Infinite Regressor, But I’ve Got Stories to Tell
Chapter 360

WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

Editor: LiteraryGirl

Chapter 360

──────

The Missing XII

The Regressor Alliance hatched an audacious plan of Collapse: every one of us would willingly fall into Corruption, yet three members had to be left out.

“Saintess, please help us from the non-Corrupted side.”

“Of course. But our final goal is to rescue the Saintess of the 267th cycle.”

First, the Saintess.

“After we beat the Night Goddess Nut—no, Hecate—we somehow have to break into the 267th cycle, a world where time has frozen forever. But if, at that moment, the current Saintess also exists...”

[...There will be two identical versions of one person in the same frame of time—basically a doppelganger. It would practically be a well-crafted, open invitation for Void-tainting...]

“Thank you for understanding.”

The Saintess exhaled softly. [Mr. Undertaker, you know this. Even if I let myself Fall, there’s still a way I can help you.]

“That option is off the table. Asking the Saintess to sacrifice herself to save the Saintess is nonsense.”

What she had suggested was simple: fall into Corruption first, then pick the right moment and die by suicide.  

No doppelgänger, no problem—so she said.

Even through the Telepathic silence, I could feel her dissatisfaction. I allowed myself a wry smile. It was so like her to consider her own life trivial.

“Even setting aside the sacrifice,” I said gently, “we have no idea what could happen if we tried it.”

[You’re worried about a time paradox?]

“Yes. It’s only a hunch, but... if the paradox actually fires, I have a very bad feeling about what the fallout might be.”

At that, the Saintess finally relinquished, and I sensed her nod of acceptance. [If Mr. Undertaker’s intuition says so, I trust it. Very well. I’ll help you from the safest line I can hold.]

Next person off the list.

“Ah— Sorry, sunbae. I’m sitting this one out!”

The older twin, Cheon Yo-hwa, flashed me a sun-bright grin. Amazingly, the very woman who had proposed Project Collapse was asking to be excused. Her face was so smug that I treated her skull to a good old knuckle-grind.

“Kyah! C-corporal punishment is wrong!”

“Hey. Hey. You’ve got some nerve. Ah-ryeon and Ha-yul went through hell to Corrupt themselves, and you just bow out? Huh?”

“A-ah-haha...” Yo-hwa rubbed her own head as an awkward smile broke free on her face. “Um, yeah. People say I have no shame, which is fair enough. But I do have a solid reason!”

“And that is?”

“Nut— Uh, her real name’s Hecate, right? Anyway. We can’t predict exactly how we’ll fight the Night Goddess, but... once the battle begins, anyone who’s Corrupted and fails to break free of the Great Witch’s grip will be turned into her minion.”

I nodded. “Which is why we have to weaponize Corruption. If we leave you as you are, you’ll end up a brain-washed doll for Dang Seo-rin.”

“Exactly, sunbae!”

“What?”

Her face hardened, deadly serious. “I’m... going to become a parasite inside an Outer God!”

I stared back at her, entirely silent.

“No, no! Don’t make that face! Eh? Eh?” she whined, poking my waist with her elbow. “I’ve thought it through from every angle, so trust me, sunbae. Please? I have to slip inside Hecate and turn into a lion-hearted—no—a lion heartworm.”[1]

“Trust begins with details. Explain the stunt so I can agree.”

“Sometimes you can’t explain a plan! Honestly! You hide bad news from us all the time!”

She hit me with facts so hard that I lost my words for a beat there. So that was what the others felt with me. Still under mirror-therapy, I watched her slide a thermos my way.

“And this is?” I prompted.

“My blood. I drew it little by little. Drink it before we start.”

I stared at her.

She stared back.

“...Yo-hwa.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” she protested. “Handing someone a syringe of your own blood and saying, ‘Drink up!’ looks insane. It feels like some creepy prank and could easily be misinterpreted. But there is a real, real ritual meaning behind it.”

“What are you plotting?”

“Obviously, I’m plotting the brilliant scheme that will save the world under your command, as always.”

“So slamming your blood like a shot is somehow linked to saving the world?”

Yo-hwa flopped to the ground, prostrating herself on the spot as if worshipping Buddha. The technical term for this is, of course, dogeza.

“Please, sunbae. Don’t ask, just do it... Do it.”

Then she raised her legs while staying face-down, balancing only on her arms and head. Behold, the evolved dogeza: a “grand-bow.”  

She popped her finisher like it was nothing.

“Sunbae, if you refuse the one request of my life, I’ll follow you around in this pose. Forever.”

“You little monster.”

The world was already doomed; birthing a grand-bow monster on top of that was too much. And so, with a deep and suffering sigh, I granted her wish.

Moving on, why no talk of our superstar Oh Dok-seo, you might ask?

Simple: she didn’t need to Fall. She was effectively in permanent Corruption already.

“Oh, yeah. It’s because Infinite Metagame surrendered, I guess? I’m pretty much in ‘always Corrupted’ mode.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve already fused completely with an Outer God. Basically, there’s no point switching between normal and Corrupted versions. And yep, it’s still me—the first shrine-maiden ever to swallow an Outer God. No one left who can rival me...”

Dok-seo sipped cola and stared blankly at the sky.

“When I was yanked into a past cycle, I panicked, but... I’m good now. I actually did wonder why everyone else stayed put and only I warped after you, mister,” she admitted, then shrugged. “I kinda figure Metagame got totally absorbed by me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re the axis of all regression. When you rewind, others can’t chase that timeline. But Metagame’s different. You know this, mister. It sensed your rewinds and kept inching after you.”

Right. Maybe regression itself was a cliché of fiction. As the overseer of all stories, the Admin of the Infinite Metagame had tools to answer whatever questions the existence of a regressor could pose.

“So from Metagame’s perspective, this isn’t the 173rd cycle. It’s just the extension of the 999th world where the Regressor called ‘mister’ lives.”

“Huh,” I mused.

“Even in the 999th cycle, there’s no ‘laptop’ here. Normally, Metagame would split half-and-half between the notebook and me. But for this stage, everything that it was and is—all of its power—was absorbed entirely by me.”

Was it my imagination? Dok-seo’s eyes looked harder than ever.

“Once this stage ends, you’ll forget everything—golden scales, contract, and all. But I won’t. Someday, mister, I’ll remember the world after this doom.”

“...Because you’re the slowest prophet.”

“Yep.” She flipped her cap backwards. “Sure, I still haven’t recalled the 555th cycle, let alone started chasing the 1000th. But that’s future me’s problem. Present me’s got work to do.”

“Like handing tomorrow’s you your daily upload schedule?”

“Exactly, exactly.” The self-proclaimed great author grinned and offered up her right hand. “Let’s go, mister. Let’s crystal-punch that bratty girl who thinks she’s the Outer God of this universe.”

I took her hand and mine, and we shook on it—which could have been a stirring moment until someone beside us timidly raised a hand.

“Uh, hyung-nim?”

It was Seo Gyu.

“Sorry to butt in, but is there nothing for me? Like, Corruption or something? Or am I just supposed to stay mind-fogged in this utopia?”

“Ah, Seo Gyu, sorry. For you to rampage, SG Net would have to explode in user count.”

“Oh.”

“But as you know, right now SG Net is a ghost community with only Ah-ryeon logged in. So there’s no chance.”

“Ah...”

The apocalypse’s last muscle-man drooped his deltoids in gloom.  

Let us have a moment of silence.

Myself, Yu Ji-won, Sim Ah-ryeon, Cheon Yo-hwa, Lee Ha-yul, and Oh Dok-seo. Six people in the strike team.

‘A party for the ages.’

All of them except me were Corrupted, though not to the point of total nihilism. Ji-won, for example, still treated me as an equal. Corruption has wild-caught and farm-raised grades, perhaps, like martial arts power gained by demonic techniques versus the pure internal energy of the orthodox schools.

‘Even so, they’re indisputably the strongest this world has to offer.’

With this team, we could probably wipe out a Monster Wave in one sweep.

“Mr. Matiz,” Ji-won said, drawing close. She was shorter than usual—strangely unfamiliar yet familiar. “Where is Hecate? I haven’t been able to see Her Excellency Dang Seo-rin lately.”

“On the moon.”

“Pardon?”

“Literally, Dang Seo-rin is on the moon.”

Ever since our last talk she had stayed up there, never returning to Earth.

“She must have steeled herself for our fight,” I explained. “Knowing she can’t fully control herself as an Outer God, she exiled herself as far from Earth as possible.”

“...Whatever verdict you reach, perhaps she has already decided to lose.”

“Possibly.”

Another reading existed, though.

Since ancient times, the moon acted as the wellspring of sorcery. It was a mirror hung in the sky, a hole to the Otherworld. The philosopher Parmenides once said the moon shines because it “always looks upon the sun,” likening it to the universe’s eye. Just as a human blinks, the cosmos’ eye blinks between crescent and full. In other words...

“Hecate may have chosen the battlefield that most favors herself. Is it Dang Seo-rin’s heart that refuses to wreck Earth, or the Outer God’s instinct to repaint the world in her color? I can’t say which will win.”

Right now, Seo-rin stood too close to Hecate. Unless you possess Complete Memory like I do, a mere human ego can hardly survive inside an Outer God. It was a miracle she still even looked like “Dang Seo-rin.” And that miracle existed only because of me. I could recognize that much, at least.

I turned to my comrades and said, “The Outer God named Nut, now called Hecate, never shows herself carelessly.”

The strike team looked back—all of them still Yu Ji-won, Sim Ah-ryeon, Cheon Yo-hwa, Lee Ha-yul, and Oh Dok-seo, even under the thrall of Anomalous power. They were the last humans standing in the 173rd—no—the 1000th world.

“Hecate used to cloak the universe in night at the very instant that the world perished. I once thought she was like Infinite Metagame, sniping the last hit... but surely, it tied into Seo-rin’s condition.”

Ha-yul tilted her head. [So if Dang Seo-rin dies, Hecate descends?]

“Probably. I’m not certain.”

Questions remained about their link. Was Dang Seo-rin truly an Outer God or merely a priestess?   Either hypothesis left unexplained shadows, a fog of omen around my heart. Yet fog or not, this operation demanded everything.

“To Hecate, this world is post-apocalypse already. Humanity is fused to her Utopia, hence she can appear freely here... But for us, an impossible chance—the epilogue after the ending—has been handed down.”

It had been a chain of coincidences.

Dang Seo-rin’s power reached Outer-God class, so the golden scales worked near-omnipotence.

She granted my wish to call my future self.  

Oh Dok-seo tamed Infinite Metagame. Even if I were to forget this step forever, someday, she alone will recall so that no one—no god—can erase it as having “never happened.”

So many “once-in-a-lifetimes” stacked into inevitability. If I was a miracle to Dang Seo-rin, then my miracle stood before me now.

“Our one objective: sever the Outer God from Dang Seo-rin and rescue our ridiculous yet lovable pointy-hat devotee.”

Their gazes were of different colors and different passions, yet each and every one of them was already resolved. As well they should be. After all, this 173rd cycle had fought Monster Waves in endless war. Theirs was a world of veterans.

“If it’s the moon, the trip alone takes ages. I’ll clear a path,” Ji-won said first. She spread her hand, then closed it. The aurora that flowed across the night sky suddenly dropped like a net.

“Wh-whoa!”

“Oh.”

Startled yet compliant, the party let the auroral mesh wrap them, then ascend like a silent elevator.

Dok-seo muttered, “Wow, busted-tier. Ji-won unnie may be pint-sized now, but when she embraces Corruption, she’s the strongest human alive...”

“Thank you.”

“No, I’m the one thanking you! Free cruise into space!”

“Indeed.” Ji-won dipped her chin. “If you truly are grateful, then when you chronicle Mr. Matiz’s life later, please allocate me exceptional page-time.”

“Uh, wha—?”

“I felt goodwill the instant I saw you, Ms. Dok-seo. As befits a self-styled prophet at Mr. Matiz’s side, you radiate an uncommon Aura. I haven’t read your work yet, but I am sure it is superb.”

“Uh, uh! Yeah? Hmm. Well. That’s true. Ji-won unnie’s face is a national treasure! I’ll write you a special feature!”

“Thank you.”

Ji-won, you’re unchanging as ever. Corrupted or not, you sniff out power like a bloodhound and milk it for all it’s worth...

“We’ll soon arrive.”

Even beyond Earth’s atmosphere, we felt no discomfort. The aurora kept weaving, shielding us from harm. Under Ji-won’s command, Leviathan guarded us flawlessly, its auroral net even doubling as a mental barrier. The dragon did, after all, excel at brainwashing and hallucination.

A hopeless foe when an enemy yet so reassuring as an ally, these Outer Gods.

‘Wait. Infinite Metagame never felt reassuring, even as an ally.’

Let’s just file that cosmic horror under the umbrella term of “a big misunderstanding.”

As Ji-won said, the moon—Hecate’s sanctuary—drew closer by the second.

“Wow!” Yo-hwa exclaimed. “Beautiful. Spotless. A perfect mirror hanging in the middle of space...”

The others felt much the same, though they left their thoughts to the silence.

However, I could not be moved by the moon’s beauty. My eyes locked on its surface, on a lone figure still wearing a cone hat and cape.

My eyesight outstripped the team’s. I could zoom in further, clearer.

Far away, Dang Seo-rin seemed to notice my stare, and I sucked in a breath. Across the gulf of a whole universe, she shaped words with her lips, crisp and slow.

You’re here, Undertaker.

Maybe a bit late.

Or perhaps still early...

A chill ran down my spine. She still looked human—gentle smile, calm eyes—and no different from the Dang Seo-rin I knew...

Except for her left hand.

Hm? Oh,

This bothers you?

In her left hand...

There lay something that must not exist.

By every rule of common sense, an impossible sight condensed there.

Got bored waiting for you.

I was looking over Earth,

And it just caught my eye.

Go Yuri.

It annoyed me.

There it was, cleanly severed with pink hair and all. Go Yuri’s head was clenched in Dang Seo-rin’s left hand as if it belonged there.

The Great Witch smiled.

So I tidied it up.

Footnotes:

[1] Lions, like other carnivores, are susceptible to heartworm infection, although they are not the primary host like dogs. Mosquitoes transmit the parasite, and heartworms can cause serious health problems in lions, including heart failure and death. Basically, a parasite. It should also be noted that Hecate is associated with lions.

Join our discord at