I'm an Infinite Regressor, But I've Got Stories to Tell-Chapter 337

The Self-Immolator VI

CONTENT WARNING: This chapter contains depictions of self-harm, suicide, and torture that readers may find disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.

As soon as Seok-hwa opened his mouth, the stench of gasoline spread in all directions. Oil trickled across his face, streaming from his head downward.

“Hurry! Set my body ablaze— Oooh!”

Yellow droplets burst in quick succession as the thin film of oil clinging to his parted lips kept bursting and re-forming each time he raised his voice. The spectators stirred at the eerie sight.

“Uh, uhhh...”

“He’s really going to start a fire!”

“Step back, please! It’s dangerous, move back! Everyone behind me, get back!”

“Whoooa, look at that, whoooa!”

Chaos overtook the scene. No onlooker could tear their eyes away from the monk, and Seok-hwa, as though the fluid covering him were not gasoline but the crowd’s excitement and attention made manifest, pressed his palms together with supreme confidence.

“...gategateparagateparasamgatebodhisvahagategateparagateparasamgate...”

“This is it! Everyone be on guard!”

The knight in charge of the ceremony—nicknamed “the kind one” on SG Net—lit a torch with a quick puff. He stood over two meters tall, so raising the torch was in itself a show of impressive might, drawing exclamations of awe from the crowd.

The knight turned his head. There, stooped close to Seok-hwa, was the last person remaining at his side: Old Man Shin.

“Sir, you need to come out of there now!”

“Oh dear...”

“Hurry! Should I help you out?”

But before the knight could say more, the monk slick with oil snapped at them himself. “Begone!”

Normal ears likely couldn’t make out the sound drowned by the cheers and noise of the crowd, but Su-bin’s plea reached mine clearly.

“Oh no, Monk, don’t do this.”

“Get lost! You hypocrite! The Buddha awaits this humble monk!” Seok-hwa’s eyes, glistening with oil, shone like a ravenous leopard at night as he cried, “Lowly mortal, you have no place standing in my way!” ȑÀＮO͍ВΕș

Su-bin glanced around once. Then, bowing his head to Seok-hwa—or maybe to the hundreds of onlookers, or even to the sky—he slowly retreated backward.

“Namu Amitabha, Kwan Seum Bosal...”

Once even Su-bin had stepped away, the knight who had guided Seok-hwa from Pyongyang to Sinuiju shouted, “Fire!”

“...gategateparagateparasamgatebodhisvahagate...”

He tossed the torch toward Seok-hwa. As the flaming torch traced a parabolic arc, the crowd’s uproar reached a peak.

“Fiiire—!”

To my eyes, the torch seemed to float slowly through the air.

“Young man.”

In a very distant past from the 53rd cycle, back when I first got to know the old man named Su-bin, I was working as an assistant in Do-hwa’s workshop. One evening, as the world was nearing destruction, Su-bin had gone out of his way, hobbling on his bad leg to come by the workshop.

“Aigoo, so our young assistant is still in Busan, huh? Eh? Why are you still here? Eh? And Noh Do-hwa too. How come young people like you are still here? Oh dear...”

Why?

Why did the old man remain in Busan, at the very brink of doomsday, instead of fleeing to another city like most? And why visit the workshop?

Was it loneliness?

“Young man. Let me off here.”

No.

If he’d come simply because he was consumed by loneliness, he wouldn’t have gotten out of the car halfway, refusing to let me drop him off at his home. Back then, he refused my help and went off by himself.

“This is far enough. You go on back.”

He left on his own.

Hence a hypothesis arose: What if it wasn’t because he was lonely but the opposite?

In the final moments of the world, maybe he worried that “Noh Do-hwa” or “me” would be lonely, so he came by to check on us?

“Thank you, young man. You’re worried about Noh Do-hwa, right?”

But I was there with Do-hwa in the workshop. Two of us, together, prepared to face the end.

Perhaps he was reassured by that. He saw that the two people who concerned him most were already in place, saying their final farewells as they should.

“Then this path is not yours.”

“We must each go our own way.”

And so, he departed without regrets.

A regressor is doomed to be lonely.

Do-hwa also had built her life to be like an isolated island in the corner of the world. Perhaps she caught the old man’s eye because of that.

If ever there exists someone willing to endure minor discomforts “like missing a leg,” then you can’t simply graft a piece of your heart onto them. Time is all you can lend. And maybe that old man was always ready to spend his remaining days with whomever looked loneliest in his world.

‘Ah.’

Even if someone looked like a vagrant, or a madman consumed by old, greedy desires, or perhaps someone with neither power nor fame nor many believers—maybe in that old man’s eyes, he was merely a “lonely person.”

Fwoooosh!

My train of thought blazed up like the flames.

The fire ignited the oil before the torch even made contact, and the built-in kindling—namely, Seok-hwa himself—began to consume him.

“G-aaaaargh!”

A shriek rang out.

“Uh? Uh—?”

“What the hell?”

Hundreds of onlookers recoiled.

Seok-hwa’s scream slashed through the air like a razor, grating the atmosphere around the ceremony site.

His cry...

“Ahhhhhhhhhhh!”

His cry carried the sound of unimaginable agony.

Everyone who had come at dawn had arrived with some measure of expectation in their wake. Would the monk really succeed in self-immolation? Perhaps it’d be interesting to watch. A person couldn’t possibly endure the pain of burning alive...

But a real scream always shatters your expectations with its searing edge.

“Gyaaaaaah, ahh, aaaargh! AAAAAHHH!”

Pain bled into the crowd on the back of a raw human voice, on the stench of burning flesh, the smell of oil, a crackling blaze. Every gap in the air flayed by the monk’s razor-edged scream seemed to bleed gaseous gore.

As humans can sense suffering simply by hearing it—the “Kwan Seum” principle—the entire ceremony site shook with Seok-hwa’s howl.

Clang, clang, clang!

And yet, from the onlookers’ perspective, an even stranger sound rose.

Clang, clang, clang, clang!

One might expect a person in such agony to thrash around, roll on the ground, do anything—but strangely, Seok-hwa did not budge. Even now, as his entire body burned, his seated posture remained rigid. Only his body and the platform rattled violently, as if they had been pinned together.

“Aaaaaaaaah!”

Clang, clang, clang, clang, clang!

The monk shrieked and the spectators couldn’t fathom it. The only reason he could keep seated, legs folded, was that he’d spent the night hammering nails and binding himself with rope. Naturally, everyone was dumbstruck.

“Sh-should we help him?”

Just going by the screaming, it seemed they should.

“But look at his posture... He’s staying so straight. Isn’t that some incredible level of discipline? He’s enduring the fire—it’s just his voice that’s breaking.”

From his stance alone, that would be a reasonable assumption to make.

“Ah-ah-ah-ah-AHHHH!”

Clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang!

The mismatch of sight and sound. No one knew if he was begging for rescue or wanting applause for managing to remain still despite the flames.

It baffled the crowd.

“Is he an Anomaly...?”

Someone muttered, “An Anomaly?”

“Look, the monk is trying to hold on, but he’s screaming non-stop... Maybe some Anomaly leaped into him the moment he caught fire, copying his voice?”

“Oh.”

“Well, it’s a situation Anomalies would love, for sure.”

“I heard he traveled from Busan, exorcising all sorts of wandering souls. Maybe they’re cursing him now.”

“Wow, so that means he’s enduring all those wrathful spirits while still sitting there?”

“Hang in there, Monk!” another shouted through cupped hands. “Stay strong!”

“Don’t lose to those Anomalies!”

“You can do it, Monk! Fight on!”

Amazingly, though it seemed absurd at a glance, they might very well have hit on a partial truth, for Seok-hwa burned for far too long.

“Aaaahhhh!”

Under normal conditions, the flames should have instantly scorched his throat and tongue to ash. At the very least, the wooden platform he was on should have turned to charcoal. Yet for some reason, his screaming and the platform’s burning continued beyond five minutes, as did the crowd’s heated cheers.

“Hold on, Monk! You can do it!”

Could Seok-hwa hear their voices? The cheers and support from the throng, which he had coveted so deeply, resounding across the entire ceremony ground...?

Ah—aaaah—ahhh—aaah――

After about ten minutes, the screaming ceased.

Seok-hwa had lost every organ that could produce sound—his lungs, throat, tongue, and teeth had all melted away. His muscles, which trembled spasmodically while nailed to the platform, were likewise consumed by flame.

Finally, the fire died down. On the char-blackened platform floor, the seated form remained in its meditative posture, charred into a coal-black statue.

“Heh.”

A murmur of awe drifted among the spectators.

“So he really was a venerable monk, after all.”

“Right? He kept his form flawlessly.”

“Enduring self-immolation even while some Anomaly latched on, that’s some potent spiritual power.”

“They say he was from Busan, right?”

“Will this really stop the Monster Wave...?”

“If we open that up, bet we’ll find a bucketful of relics.”

Some onlookers pressed their palms together toward the monk who had burned himself in the Eastern Holy State’s territory like admiring a performer who staged an intense show so early in the morning.

“Namu Amitabha, Kwan Seum Bosal.”

“May you be reborn in Paradise, Monk.”

“Namu Amitabha...”

People gradually dispersed.

Once the crowd’s wall dissolved, I got a better view of the remains of Seok-hwa, the blackened statue of his body. Though all of him was burned to cinders, every part of the human shape stayed intact, save for his right foot, which should have been empty.

The prosthetic made by Do-hwa was no match for the flames and had burned away completely.

I silently glanced around.

(Ritual) Venerable Monk Seok-hwa’s Nirvana Self-Immolation (Event)

Under the flapping banner in the sky—

In the nearly deserted ceremony ground, after the audience had dispersed—

No matter where I looked, Shin Su-bin was nowhere to be seen.

There is an epilogue.

“So...”

A few days after I returned to the National Road Management Corps HQ, I found Do-hwa glaring at me.

“You’re saying you visited for fun, basically sightseeing while some guy got roasted alive in a big cozy ‘bonfire session,’ and then came back...?” she asked.

“Hey now, that makes it sound like I took pleasure in someone’s death, like I’m Yu Ji-won. Please be more mindful of your phrasing.”

In the corner, Ji-won quietly raised her head, puzzled.

For reference, Do-hwa had dark circles under her eyes and was petting her dog as if it were some government-approved narcotic. No, some source of healing. This official “state-level dog” also had “Doctor” in its name, and maybe one day, I’ll have the chance to talk more about it.

“Anyway, I wanted to find Old Man Shin and bring him back, but he vanished. So here I am, back alone.”

“Hmm...”

“Oh, right. Fear not, I haven’t forgotten your gift. Here, it’s Melona.[1] A handmade ice cream recipe replicated faithfully via regressor’s knowledge.”

“Get out...”

Weird. This gift always thrilled Seo-rin. Maybe I should have tried a B.B.Big bar instead? I’d keep that in mind for next cycle.

As I left (but not before handing the Melona instead to Ji-won), Do-hwa’s voice caught me by the neck.

“Ah. Leave, fine, but come back tomorrow. I’ve got something to give you...”

“Hmm.” I looked back at Ji-won. “Ji-won, is that telling me to leave or not? As the director’s right-hand woman, I’d like your reading on this.”

“Take the words at face value, Mr. Matiz,” she replied, tearing open the Melona wrapper (perfectly reproduced, by the way) with a blank look. “She asked you to leave for today, then come again tomorrow. Just interpret it plainly, please. As for how the director’s feelings are involved, that’s best left aside.”

“Oh.”

“Damn it, now you’re double-teaming me with your nonsense...”

A day passed.

When I arrived at HQ the next day, no sooner had I opened the door than something solid came flying at my face. I reflexively caught it.

It was a long-shaped box.

“What’s this?”

Do-hwa eyed me, still hunched over in that same slouch. “It’s Old Man Shin’s prosthetic...”

“Ah.”

“Sounds like that monk—whatever his name was—burned it to a crisp, right? So you can deliver it yourself. It won’t be the same as me fitting it personally, but it’s a decent enough device...” Then she muttered, “Well, that’s all a typical prosthetic is really for, anyway. Right...?”

I didn’t need Ji-won’s help interpreting that.

She’d let me off for ditching my job and running away on the condition that I personally deliver the prosthetic to the patient. I could accept those terms. Besides, leaving Su-bin without a proper goodbye had bothered me a bit.

“All right. If you prefer, I can carry you all the way to Sinuiju, so you can see him for yourself—”

“Stop. I mean it, shut up...”

And so I did.

Su-bun had vanished from the ceremony site, but I wasn’t too worried about finding him again. At least, not until I was about to ask Ji-won to check with the Saintess’s Telepathy for a location beacon.

[Ms. Yu Ji-won says he does show up on the Mini-Map, but something’s off.]

I tilted my head. “Off how?”

[He’s located in some hill near Sinuiju, and it hasn’t moved at all. He’s completely stationary.]

“Huh? That’s definitely strange.”

[Right?]

Before the apocalypse, the world beyond one’s blanket was where danger lay. Nowadays, it’s “outside the city.” People flocked together in cities these days for a reason. Stepping outside a city’s boundaries drastically raised your odds of vanishing into the Void. Sure, traveling from one city to the next was dangerous, but to sit around on a random hillside that wasn’t even on a national road, and without budging?

“All right, I’ll go. Keep giving me directions, please.” freewebnoveℓ.com

[Got it.]

I hurried on. Not far beyond the roads maintained by the National Road Management Corps, the scenery grew glum. Living shadows took note of my presence, then skittered away the moment they sensed me.

‘This way.’

A faint trail of footprints, a left foot and a crutch, plus wheel marks scattered like stepping stones led me on.

They were barely visible. Ordinary folks would have missed them.

‘But it’s enough.’

I came upon a low hill where sparse brush left the view wide open. Following the direction from the Mini-Map to the very end, I found a broad slab of rock.

There, a figure that seemed to be Shin Su-bin lay burnt to death.

I heard the Saintess’s quick intake of breath as her sight took in mine.

I carefully checked the boulder’s surroundings. Where...? Where had he found it? A gasoline can identical to the one used to burn Seok-hwa lay askew, giving off that same odor.

Shin Su-bin’s body knelt on the rock, hands clasped as if respectfully praying to someone, or something.

‘Self-immolation.’

Out here.

In a lonely hillside no one would ever see.

With no disciple, no companion, no onlookers.

Alone.

Silent.y, I set the prosthetic box on the stone. Then I dropped onto the grass with a thump.

It was by chance that I ended up directly facing him—Shin Su-bin, whose burned body was pointed at the sky in prayer.

“...Departing like this, sir? That’ll sadden Miss Noh Do-hwa.”

No reply.

Naturally. Where his face should have been, there was no expression, only blackened charcoal in place of wrinkled limbs and features.

And yet, why did it feel like...

‘That’s your job now, Undertaker.’

...a chuckle rose from the mouthless remains?

Somewhere in that hillside, a few pine warblers chirped, still not consumed by the Void. I stayed there, gazing at the old man’s body that had silently given itself up to the world, until dusk fell.

Does the world brim solely with those who leave behind glowing names?

Throughout humanity’s vast history, countless unnamed individuals must have blossomed like flowers, then faded away without a trace, yet they surely existed. Perhaps among them had been those who attempted feats beyond human limits that would never be recognized in the annals of fame.

A leap of faith.

They did not wish even to display their deaths for others, seeing that too as “excess baggage of the heart.”

Casting off all honor and desire. Avoiding any onlookers, choosing a quiet place. Simply praying in their hearts for the end of all sadness.

Some offered themselves in works of art.

In a cathedral whose architect was forgotten.

In a buried sculpture.

In song.

In flesh.

In silence.

And so they vanished.

Exiled from time.

You can’t meet them in any normal way. They’re lost in alleys, erased data.

Perhaps the karmic lot of a regressor is to reunite with those who disappeared from the world. To encounter the story of “Shin Su-bin,” who was overlooked by most as just an ordinary old man, only now to discover the blank space he left behind.

Thus, a regressor’s destiny is not simply to chew on loneliness. We’re only visitors who pass by every alley of this world before leaving.

“Until next time, sir.”

I rose from a respectful bow to depart.

[Mr. Undertaker.]

Then suddenly, the Saintess spoke.

“Yes?”

[Mr. Undertaker, about his foot.]

I turned. How had I missed something so obvious?

Shin Su-bin had been missing his right foot. He’d given his prosthetic to Seok-hwa, and it burned up in Sinuiju. That should have been the end of it.

So where there should have been an empty space, a missing right foot—

Even though it too was charred crisp, I could see a perfectly “intact foot” in proportion with the rest of his body.

[What do you think happened?] the Saintess murmured. [Is it someone else pretending to be Shin Su-bin? Or an Anomaly lurking in the corpse?]

I don’t claim to know every secret of this world. But looking at that foot, it didn’t register as some suspicious puzzle to me.

“Who knows? Maybe it’s just ‘excess baggage of the heart.’”

[...?]

“Seems he left a final message not to grieve for him. That’s what I see, anyway.”

I let out a faint laugh and turned away.

This time I’d bring a B.B.Big bar instead.

Footnotes:

[1] Melona is a popular South Korean ice pop brand, known for its creamy, gelato-like texture and diverse range of fruit flavors, including the classic honeydew, but also banana, strawberry, mango, and more.