351 – Ruin (12)

As you can see from the current appearance of ‘Kim Jun-ho’, all the plans I had in the past failed. That means I have to try a plan I’ve never tried before.

“… There’s nothing in particular.”

As for new plans, nothing came to mind other than trying to regress with someone else. The only plan that seemed more likely was to regress the player known as the ‘Emperor’? However, I’ve never seen the Emperor in real life, and I’ve heard that he has a bad personality, so I’m hesitant.

Or maybe I should stay in reality a little longer and find a new path. No matter how much I hate everyone’s attention and how much I hate carrying so many lives… it’s nothing compared to losing Choi Ji-won forever. If there’s really no other way, I’m prepared to protect the Earth when the monsters invade.

But if you ask me to think of the most likely plan, it’s still the same.

“brave.”

The warrior has the best chance of winning. If he can just get me out within a day, everything will be resolved.

The most likely and easiest way was to convince the warrior, so all my attention was focused on him. What should I do to convince him? Why did he reject my offer in the first place? Why did he not find the idea of ​​a regressor attractive?

There were many possibilities, and there was a lot to experiment with. First of all, I checked various scenarios, starting with the questions I would ask as soon as I got there.

“… It’s strange.”

Unlike me, the Kim Jun-ho of this world was stuck in a corner of the room muttering, “This is strange.”

If we think about it from Kim Jun-ho’s perspective, it is truly a hopeless situation. Everything has already happened to him, and even if he returns, there is no chance to fix everything.

Warrior? What if I persuade the warrior and he comes out in one day? Choi Ji-won has already left, and the connection to the center of the world has been cut off a long time ago.

But what really made me want to say ‘this is strange’ is that Kim Jun-ho’s despair was not an ordinary despair.

If he had cried and said, “That’s weird,” like before, or been lying in bed mumbling, I would have just let it go…

“That’s strange.”

It was not normal for him to take out his laptop, notebook, and even his cell phone, diligently write something down, and keep saying, “This is strange.” Just as I was looking for a way, he seemed to be trying to find a way. Just as I was thinking about hope and using my brain, he seemed to have seen a small rope in the darkness.

“…Is that because it’s me?”

Is this my personality? If there is a possibility, I don’t give up even in a hopeless situation. At least I try. For the regressor, time is infinite, and there is no end unless you go to the next level. Choi Ji-won is not a trivial being who gives up easily. It is worth risking your life for.

Maybe I’m trapped in a time prison of my own making.

“It’s strange.”

This Kim Jun-ho, and I too, agreed that it was too early to give up. We can’t give up like this.

“… Try hard.”

I am me. This Kim Jun-ho is this Kim Jun-ho. We each tried to get back to our daily lives in our respective positions.

Time passed relentlessly.

**

“…When will it end?”

It felt like quite a while had passed, but the illusions the book showed me showed no sign of ending.

I have a systematic way of approaching the warrior, and I have also prepared in advance how to change the plan depending on the warrior’s reaction. I am not sure about the accuracy of approaching human psychology in this way… but it is okay because I have calculated almost all possible cases.

And well, it’s okay if my relationship with the warrior goes wrong. I don’t only have one chance.

“Is this one also nearing its final stages?”

One thing I realized while spending time in fantasy is that my time flow and ‘that Kim Jun-ho’s’ time flow are different. So, what is about a week for me is a much longer time for him.

It was definitely an hour from my perspective, but for Kim Jun-ho in this world, it was a week, and there was even a time when day turned into night just by looking away. If I felt like a long time had passed, it must have felt like an eternity to this Kim Jun-ho.

What has this guy been doing all this time? That’s… not easy to describe.

I open the photos on my phone and hesitate to call the contact saved as ‘Choi Ji-won’. I call Choi Ji-won after drinking and receive warm comfort, but after sobering up, I hit my head with a sense of guilt and regress. I sigh at the fact that the notebook I used to write in has become a blank page.

Even while living such a miserable life, Kim Jun-ho never stopped doing anything. He would call someone, search, and sometimes go outside to check things out for himself. Sometimes he would go into the tower and walk around the 26th floor, and sometimes he would call someone over and have a drink.

“… information gathering.”

Yes, all of the guy’s activities could be summarized in the word ‘information gathering’. The biggest advantage of regression is that you can take information from the future to the past, and this is a routine I always do whenever I face a crisis.

But the truly questionable part is ‘why’ he collects information. The notebook he uses is not a collection of sentences but a collection of words, so it is not easy to read (it is just a bunch of words, like a kind of brainstorming session). Even his handwriting is not bad, but more like a scribble. In the first place, he did not write the notebook to show others, but to organize his thoughts.

Of course, it was my own habit, so I gave up on looking into the notebook a long time ago and waited for Kim Jun-ho to spit out some meaningful information. I tend to talk to myself a lot even in my daily life.

“That’s strange.”

And now. I am circling around the table in the middle of my studio, thinking. I am the me of this world, dirty to the point of being ugly, but my eyes are sparkling.

“How did I get past the 25th floor?”

And just now, through the sentence the guy muttered.

“…ah!”

I immediately realized what he was worried about, what all the activities he had been doing were. Yeah, it’s weird. If you think about it, it’s weird.

What part is strange? Let’s summarize it again.

This world lost its connection to the ‘center of the world’. And the power called ‘accompanying return’ was somehow connected to the center of the world, and as a result of losing its connection to the center, accompanying return also disappeared.

What followed was a change in the past. All the actions that I and Choi Ji-won had taken together in the past became nothing, and history changed to something like, ‘Choi Ji-won and I just climbed the tower separately as colleagues.’ Choi Ji-won would have climbed the tower alone, and the same would have happened to Kim Jun-ho.

But here, I feel a sense of discomfort. No, I should feel a sense of discomfort.

In this world, I woke up on the 29th floor after being injured. That means the return point is set to the 29th floor.

In other words, I climbed up to the 29th floor on my own, without Choi Ji-won’s help. Well, that’s possible. For a regressor, the ‘time it took to climb the tower’ depends on the path taken, not on how easily the tower was cleared. Conquering a floor in 10 seconds doesn’t mean it was easy, and taking a year doesn’t mean it was difficult. It’s just a difference in method.

Here is the part of this world that I found strange, and now I have noticed it.

“Can I clear the 25th floor without Choi Ji-won’s help?”

How did a human being clear the 25th floor? If you think about it carefully, it doesn’t make sense.

The 25th floor was a maze filled with poison. I could sense the threat in advance thanks to the ‘Girl’s Cheer’ trait, but I couldn’t figure out what kind of threat it was.

Of course, I had Jiwon, and Jiwon Choi went inside the 25th floor first and created a technique called ‘Magic Filter’ for me. It was a feat that only a genius like Jiwon Choi could do, and it was a moment when I was certain that I would never have been able to break it without Jiwon.

But what about ‘the me of the changed history’? Even if it is possible to detect threats through ‘the girl’s cheer’, there is no Choi Ji-won who can create a technology called magic filter. There is no Choi Ji-won who can go in ahead and respond. There is no way to break the 25th floor without getting hurt.

But if it is impossible for me to clear the 25th floor without Choi Ji-won… that doesn’t make sense either. If that’s the case, then when I change the past through the ring, I should either come to my senses in the maze, or I should come to my senses without even entering the 25th floor. Strangely enough, there is no reason to come to my senses on the 29th floor, where the floor progression is the same.

There are two hypotheses here.

First, there was another helper besides Choi Ji-won. Perhaps that was what Kim Jun-ho of this world was investigating. What information did he obtain at the time, how did he break the 25th floor, and whether he received help from anyone other than Choi Ji-won in the process? Since he doesn’t remember, he must have collected testimonies from other people.

However, it seemed that the guy had not been able to get a clear answer for a long time, so there was only one answer left.

“There is a way for me to…break the 25th floor by myself, somehow.”

The fact that the world, and the history up until now, has changed this much means that it is possible for a human named ‘Kim Jun-ho’ to clear the 25th floor alone. No matter how long it took, or how his reason was distorted in the process, the fact that it was ‘possible’ was important. That is why history has changed this way.

But again. How? How did you do it? What did you have to do to break 25 floors alone?

“…”

I know the conclusion roughly, but I don’t recognize the process. In fact, I’ve been in similar situations several times through numerous regressions, and every time, what I did was the same.

““We have to do an experiment.””

Experiment. The process of establishing a hypothesis and proving that the hypothesis I established is correct. The Kim Jun-ho of this world jumped up from his seat and started contacting people here and there.

The moment suddenly changed, and I was sitting in a studio equipped with professional equipment.

“We have a very special guest today. He said he had something to say, so we invited him to our channel.”

“Yes. I have something to say.”

Perhaps this entire world that couldn’t connect with Choi Ji-won.

“I am a regressor.”

It seemed like this was the guy’s experimental stage.