I replied to Kim Jaehui with a wry look.
“If I end up experiencing something that painful, I probably won’t even try to meet you next time, Jaehui.”
The reason so many precautions are written on this decompression chamber is probably because once a fire starts, it truly can’t be contained. If I’m burned alive, would I want to see Kim Jaehui again out of fear? Don’t even try such a thing.
Kim Jaehui looked at the decompression chamber I was lying in, then turned her head to look at another chamber located about four meters away and whispered. Shin Haeryang was lying with his eyes closed; it was ambiguous whether he was asleep or simply had them shut.
“So I briefly wondered if I should burn our team leader in your place, Savior.”
The shock of Kim Jaehui’s words only began to register after several seconds. When Kim Jaehui smiled at the decompression chamber where Shin Haeryang lay, I got goosebumps. Aaaargh!
“Oh, please! Jaehui! Hold yourself back! Just for today, please be the absolute kindest Kim Jaehui you can be!”
What did Team Leader Shin do to deserve this? Kim Jaehui rested her arm on the back of the chair, propped her chin, and spoke.
“Since you say so, Savior, I’ll behave quietly and nicely today. ……Though it’s boring and dull. There are bound to be days like this in life. Instead, please understand if the next time we meet, I’m a bit more radical and lacking in patience, enough to burn you or those around you. The chance to wound and kill the Savior with my own hands is so attractive that my fingers tremble.”
Every time Kim Jaehui opened her mouth I was terrified; if I could have burst out of this hyperbaric oxygen chamber midway, I would have already opened it and fled. I began to feel that the hyperbaric oxygen treatment—with still sixty minutes remaining—was far too long.
I felt like at any moment, while saying something like “I’ve changed my mind, Savior,” she might try to roast me with a gas torch she’d gotten from somewhere. I couldn’t close my eyes to rest, nor could I fiddle with ash.
“……I don’t understand what’s attractive about it in any way. When you ought to be striving to be the best person for someone else, why would you want to become the worst possible scoundrel?”
If you’re going to call someone a savior, shouldn’t you treat them better? You have to treat someone well for them to stay in your memory. Why do you want to kill me while calling me a savior? Why do you want to hurt me? I can’t understand it with common sense.
“I had a feeling you wouldn’t understand.”
Kim Jaehui looked at me and spoke with a low sigh.
“My world has already collapsed long ago. When I see a world spinning along just fine, I want to reduce it all to dust.”
Why can’t a shark just bite away Kim Jaehui’s mental state? Rather than my perfectly intact side.
I heard narration saying, *“The red wolves targeting prey have begun sprinting for survival. If their stamina runs out, nothing but their destined death remains,”* and turned my head toward the video panel. The prey the red wolves were targeting was a fawn that had fallen behind. Watching the frantic little backside of the desperately running fawn and the red wolves pursuing it, my mind grew twice as troubled. I ordered the AI to turn off the video panel entirely.
“I’m not a savior who can save others. I can barely save myself, and it’s hard to take responsibility for my family. I’m not that kind of good person.”
“……It’s better because you’re imperfect. You’re worthy of becoming the messiah of a pseudo-religion where only broken or robbed people gather. And so what? It’s a world where perverts uglier than you, dirtier and more incompetent, pretend to be saviors and suck the lifeblood of believers.”
“Wasn’t there someone decent among the others, rather than me?”
Elizabeth took the diamond with her, so it might be the most important thing in this undersea base. If I break it, would something good happen to me? Maybe I could stop this strange loop. Or perhaps I could pass this ability on to some other decent person. I asked just in case, but Kim Jaehui answered in a skeptical tone.
“I didn’t like any of the candidates inside Mugyo. Did you know that even inside a pseudo-religion there’s a subtle hierarchy? East Asian disabled men treated like they barely existed would shed secret buckets of tears, so imagine how happy and relieved I was when I learned you had become the savior, Muhyeon.”
In a tone that suggested she’d never shed a tear, let alone snot, Kim Jaehui shrugged and spoke.
“The people here won’t let you go easily no matter what kind of person you are, Muhyeon.”
I could practically hear my ordinary life twisting like a pretzel. To shake off the surging worry, I tried to envision the most positive future possible.
“If tomorrow comes someday, will I long for today too?”
Kim Jaehui thought for a moment, then her eyes widened.
“Probably? Because I want to go back. It varies from person to person, but almost everyone ends up missing it. For the first five to ten repeats, you try your best to achieve efficient, good results, right? But after more than twenty times, you grow indifferent even if people die right beside you. Around thirty-three repeats, it feels like being forced to watch a boring drama or movie thirty-three times. You know exactly how everything will turn out. Right now, you’re very hopeful and passionate, aren’t you? Imagine watching my death or Team Leader Shin’s death about fifty times. The deaths of others too. Some die acting selfishly, some die sacrificing themselves, and you feel moved, sad, regretful, and sorry for each one—but what if you see someone die a hundred times? What if you see five hundred deaths? What do you think? Would you still find death lamentable and desperately want to save them? Who knows. You might be different, Muhyeon.”
Kim Jaehui took a sip of coffee, licked her parched lips with her tongue, and asked.
“……Do you remember the Korean folktale of the Brother and Sister Who Became the Sun and Moon?”
“I don’t remember it well.”
It’s because I’m in this undersea base. I think I’d remember if I were home.
Listening to Kim Jaehui’s story, an evil tiger ate a mother who was carrying a rice cake chest on her head, then came toward the house where the two siblings waited, wearing the mother’s clothes. ……Hearing up to here, I roughly remembered the plot. Still, I waited for Kim Jaehui to tell me the rest of the tale.
The siblings climbed a tree to escape the tiger and cried out to the heavens. “Dear Heaven, if you mean to save us, send down a new rope; if not, send down a rotten rope.”
When a rope descended from heaven, the brother and sister who grabbed it and climbed up survived, while the tiger who made the same wish grabbed a rotten rope and fell, dyeing the sorghum field below with blood, or so the story goes. Kim Jaehui finished the tale with a smile.
Watching Kim Jaehui’s beaming face, I clapped lightly from inside the glass coffin. Clap, clap, clap, clap! Would setting fire to one of the decompression chambers be worse for the savior’s mental health? It was far better to have her tell a traditional folktale than to leave her stewing over “ding-dong-dang” and the like.
Had the siblings received salvation? They became the sun and the moon, so was that salvation? Then what about the mother eaten by the tiger? What about the sorghum field drenched in blood because of the tiger? ……When I read this story as a child, I simply thought the tiger was like a bandit from the Joseon Dynasty and resolved to lock my front door tight. Listening to it now that I’m grown up, it feels strange.
“Even if you were a rotten rope that would break and leave you lying in the sorghum field, people would line up to hang from you.”
I had never thought of this folktale as so horrifying.
“Then…… Even if I shouted from the garden that Mugyo can’t send you back to the past, that you have no choice but to live with what you’ve lost, and that the salvation you want is all a lie—that you should just hurry up and escape this undersea base—would they still not believe me?”
“Hmm. It probably won’t work. But if you insist, I’ll watch!”
Kim Jaehui spoke as if it were someone else’s business and as if it would be fun, turning my stomach inside out.
That was when it happened. I turned at a loud banging to see Shin Haeryang pounding on his decompression chamber hard with his fist. As Kim Jaehui and I looked at the chamber Shin Haeryang was in, he pointed his finger forward. Was he telling Kim Jaehui to keep watch? Or that someone had come?
At Shin Haeryang’s gesture, Kim Jaehui rose from her chair and disappeared from my sight. Looking at the chamber containing Shin Haeryang, he was sitting still with his eyes open, unlike before when he had been lying with them closed. Tension coursed through my body as well.
Who had come? A Mugyo believer? There were still about twenty-five minutes left in the decompression chamber. Unable to get out, I was diligently inhaling oxygen when Riko entered the treatment room with blood splattered on one side of her face, her shoulder, and her arm. Then, with a blank expression, she walked in an almost zigzag pattern and sat in the chair Kim Jaehui had left.
Unlike Kim Jaehui, Riko sat straight in the chair placed before me, so I could see nothing but her back. She was splattered with blood like that; where was she hurt? Where did Jyang go? Riko stared blankly at the video panel playing on Shin Haeryang’s side.
Unlike me, who had been watching a video about red wolves, Shin Haeryang’s side was showing scenes of Australian camels being shot and killed with a machine gun from a helicopter. Someone who appeared to be a related party was spouting an interview in Korean subtitles.
["Camels are no different from living pests. Disposing of the corpses is more of a headache than killing them. Today we fired 1,500 rounds! If we shoot any more, the guns will break. Look how hot it is! Hahaha! I hope about 2,000 die tomorrow."]
I don’t know what Shin Haeryang said, but the AI quickly switched to another video.
In the next video, gray wolves were seen struggling to flee down a mountain. The swiftly running wolves collapsed one by one to the hunters’ bullets. Immediately after, the video on the panel turned off. It seemed Shin Haeryang had ordered the AI to turn it off. Shin Haeryang’s face, wearing a rare expression of frustration, became visible.
Since I could only see Riko’s back, I gestured toward Shin Haeryang and pointed at Riko. Then Shin Haeryang used an external speaker to ask her a question.
“You’re splattered with blood; where are you hurt?”
Thank goodness. It wasn’t a question about Jyang. When Riko didn’t answer, Shin Haeryang asked again.
“What about Meiji?”