As Medic’s singing died away, silence settled over Deep Blue. Sin Haeryang came into the counseling room with his clothes soaked in blood. Judging by how clean his hands were, he seemed to have washed them at the sink. Sin Haeryang swept his eyes over the desk in the counseling room once, then over Joseph. He was only looking at a person, so why did I want to avert my eyes? The feeling of tensing up without realizing it when a police car is nearby, even though you’ve done nothing wrong, ran down my spine.
“We just sat here and waited.”
There had been absolutely no plotting behind your back, passing a knife between us and conspiring to make a break for it. As I offered an excuse out of a guilty conscience, Sin Haeryang gestured for me to sit down on the floor. Joseph was already tied up and rolling around down there, so now Sin Haeryang and I were added to the floor of the counseling room, which had not been cleaned once since my first day on the job. Sin Haeryang said, as if explaining it to me.
“I sent all the injured out.”
“Well done. ……Now let’s agree not to make any more injured people.”
Joseph looked at Sin Haeryang sitting there quietly, then wriggled and struggled to shift into a more comfortable position before speaking.
“Engineer Team A means Korea, right? Are Korean engineers used to firearms?”
Sin Haeryang did not even answer the question. Joseph worked hard to strike up a conversation with Sin Haeryang, who was ignoring him.
“Someone like you, good with guns and in need of money, would be completely welcome on our side. If you join, we’ll treat you well. There won’t even be much for you to do.”
Joseph, who had been trying to stab Sin Haeryang with a knife until three minutes ago, seemed to have changed his method of attack. I had nothing to say about this response. So the Infinite Church proselytized like this too. Well, people must have joined because they proselytized. Were they not proselytizing to me? Or was I next after Sin Haeryang?
“Mr. Sin. If you join us, you can get what you want. Think about it. You must have had a reason for coming here too. Money? There aren’t many religions as rich as ours. We don’t even tell you to make offerings. If anything, wealthy celebrities raced each other to join and donate, so we’re overflowing with money. Within the order, there’s also a well-established welfare system prepared for ordinary believers. ……Why are you so indifferent to money? I’ve never heard that Asians dislike money.”
When Sin Haeryang showed little reaction, Joseph must have grown anxious, because he began asking about something else.
“Then are you bored or lonely? We have so many members that at least one of them is bound to be your type. With a face like yours, the believers might take number tickets and line up in front of you the moment you join. It’s fine if you want prestige, too. The number of prominent figures who have joined the Infinite Church is far greater than you’d imagine. If there’s a position or seat you want, you can rise to it much more easily than you think.”
I had only known Sin Haeryang for a few days, but he didn’t seem like the type to cling to any of those three things. If he were someone who wanted that sort of thing, would he really live working as an engineer at an undersea base located three kilometers below the surface? ……I didn’t know. I needed money.
“Even if it isn’t something so worldly, you can achieve what you want here. It doesn’t matter if your wish is absurd. You want to go back to before you got sick? You came to the right place. If the hospital has given up on you, the last place you should go is the Infinite Church. A friend left you? You bought the wrong stock? Your lover betrayed you? You want revenge? You want to find the culprit? You suffered an injustice? Someone went missing? There’s no religion more suited to you than the Infinite Church. You want the dead to come back to life? You want to undo an accident or incident from the past? You can make it happen in our religion.”
Sin Haeryang was listening to him with an unwilling expression. Hearing what Joseph was saying from beside him, he sounded exactly like a snake-oil salesman. If left alone, he seemed ready to sell some cure-all medicine next. Then what was the point of studying hard? According to him, all you had to do was join the Infinite Church without doing anything.
“What kind of nonsense are you—”
“You can even bring the dead back to life?”
Since Sin Haeryang had asked the Infinite Church believer a question, I closed my mouth, though I had been about to argue. Surely he wasn’t falling for this, right? If the Infinite Church said it was possible, what was he planning to do?
“How do you bring a dead person back to life?”
At Sin Haeryang’s question, Joseph’s face brightened like an angler holding a fishing rod that had just gotten a bite.
“It’s possible! You just go back to before that person died. If they died in an accident, you stop it beforehand. If it was a disease like cancer, you go back to before it developed, keep tracking it, and deal with it early.”
What power did a shark-loving religion have to make that possible? Even with cutting-edge science, we’d barely made it to Mars, so how were they supposed to go back to the past? If that were possible, I’d be the first to go back to before my traffic accident. Sin Haeryang looked at Joseph as if he were a clown, then asked.
“The Infinite Church can do something like that?”
“Yes! Look here! The Savior, who carries the miracle of traveling to the past, has appeared before us. Now the Savior will guide us.”
Joseph, who had been looking at me with rapturous eyes, pushed all responsibility onto me as if throwing it away, and the so-called Savior nearly jumped as he denied it.
“Excuse me? This is the first I’ve heard of it. I don’t know how to do anything like that.”
“You may not know yet. But you keep going back to the past, don’t you?”
“I can only go back to this morning.”
“If you keep trying, you’ll be able to go farther. You’ll get the hang of it too. You should listen to the stories of others as well. Elizabeth is one thing, but there are already quite a few people within the order who have experienced miracles like this.”
I didn’t think so. I didn’t know about other people’s cases, but looking at my situation, I thought you people had the wrong idea. This didn’t seem like something I could control. If I could control it, I wouldn’t have woken up in that leaking room in Baekho-dong, but in my own room at home. Sin Haeryang glanced at me once, then said bluntly, gun in hand.
“I’d prefer the dead not come back.”
“Why? You’re the one who asked whether it was possible for someone dead to come back to life. There must be someone you want to save.”
Unlike Joseph, who looked excited, Sin Haeryang answered in a gloomy voice.
“Can you pick and choose? Are you saying only the people I like can come back? If the bastards I hated, or the ones I thought were better off dead, came back with them, I can’t imagine a more horrifying nightmare.”
Joseph listened to Sin Haeryang and nodded lightly. Judging by what Sin Haeryang had done in Deep Blue, he seemed to think Sin Haeryang had already killed several people and buried them somewhere.
“Of course you only bring back the people you liked. You go back to the past and help that person avoid the death they would have suffered.”
Sin Haeryang listened in silence, checked the ropes binding Joseph once more, and said.
“I can see very well that you bastards are infinitely stupid. That’s why you believe that trash is a religion.”
“What!”
“Three years ago, I might have listened earnestly to this kind of insane bullshit too.”
At those words, Joseph gasped as if he had discovered a gold mine and shouted.
“You can still turn it back! You can save the person you want!”
“Leave the dead dead. What you bastards are trying to do shows no dignity for the deceased.”
Joseph, who had been smiling hard and explaining in order to recruit Sin Haeryang somehow, went completely stiff. Then he spoke, sounding faintly disgusted.
“I guess there was no one among the dead whom you truly loved. There’s no one you want to save, no matter the cost.”
Joseph did not seem to care that Sin Haeryang had a gun, or that until just moments ago, two people presumed to be his subordinates had been shot and sent to the hospital.
I began to worry that Sin Haeryang might shoot Joseph. I started debating whether it would be more efficient to throw myself forward and cover Joseph’s mouth, or to cling to Sin Haeryang’s arm. Sin Haeryang simply looked at him in silence without saying anything.
“They must have wanted to live too. As much as you miss the dead, don’t you think the dead want to see you too?! They’d want to go to school, eat delicious food, and run around playing with their friends! Why shouldn’t they come back to life? When worse pieces of trash and more horrific bastards are living just fine, why shouldn’t decent people come back to life!”
When Sin Haeryang showed little reaction, Joseph seemed to get angry and began shouting.
“When it comes to reversing a tragedy, all you need is for exactly one person to be able to go back to the past. What we want from the Savior isn’t even that big. You just have to send that person one warning! Tell them to make sure they get an endoscopy! Or to make sure they lock the window properly tonight before going to sleep! Or to blow out all the candles before bed! Or not to send their child to school, just for that one day! Those who joined because they want to save the dead only want one very small warning.”
He said what they wanted from the Savior wasn’t that big, but from the perspective of me, the person being called that Savior…… it seemed like they were asking for something rather incredible.
First of all, I didn’t even know if I could go back to my first day at the undersea base. And even if I went around saying that the Jujak-dong Research Center at the undersea base would be struck by a torpedo five days later, that it would flood, and that an armed cult disguised as an environmental organization called the Infinite Church would gather countless jewels the size of people, even if Elliot caught me and made me undergo another psychiatric evaluation, I doubted the undersea base employees would believe me and hand in their resignations.
Would people really follow a warning just because you gave it?
Dentists give patients countless warnings. If you eat like that all day and don’t even brush properly, you’ll get cavities. Don’t drink alcohol like water. Don’t smoke so much. If your teeth are sensitive, don’t eat so many cold things. Don’t eat so many sweets. Don’t think everything will be magically solved by brushing once in a while. Please floss. Even once a day. If that’s too much, then even once every two days. Even after giving advice dozens of times, patients whose bad habits bring them to the dentist never stop coming.
If I went back to the day before my traffic accident and told my parents, Please don’t take your son out to play this weekend and stay home all day, would they really listen? Joseph seemed to have given up on recruiting Sin Haeryang into the Infinite Church.
“Our child was only eight years old. They were a kind, good kid. Even if they’d lived until now, they wouldn’t have changed the world in any big way. Nothing would have changed much except that my wife and I would have lived happily! Why shouldn’t that child come back to life? Why shouldn’t we change the past!”
Joseph spoke to Sin Haeryang, his eyes bloodshot.
“You called us lunatics, but if we can make wishes come true, then it’s no longer a cult.”
Then he looked at me and said.
“That is why your existence is precious.”