The cool sea breeze brushed across my sweat-soaked forehead. Parasols had been set up around the beach beds, providing some shade from the sunlight. Yet every time Kim Jaehee said something beside me, it felt as though I were trudging through the icy waters of the deep sea. Seeing my startled expression, Jaehee offered a slightly better alternative.
“If that’s not enough, we could offer Mr. Muhyeon a little more to the altar and see what happens.”
“······You already took my fingers. Are you saying that wasn’t enough?”
Jaehee shrugged.
“Honestly, two fingers are far too little to use as a sacrifice. I don’t know who cut them off, but even by weight, they probably wouldn’t amount to more than a few grams.”
“They’re a few grams that are very precious to me.”
Kim Jaehee clenched one hand into a fist and brought it to her chest.
“A person’s hand weighs about 400 grams. About the same as a heart.”
She opened the hand she had been holding in a fist. Then she gauged her fingers by eye and continued.
“The missing fingers······probably amount to around thirty or forty grams. I don’t know who stole them from Mr. Muhyeon, but to take only a few finger joints? Isn’t that far too little?”
They probably hadn’t had the chance to cut off and take any more. There had been too many people inside the auditorium. Losing even that little had been enough to make a person howl and weep. A tooth weighed about 0.5 grams, too, but losing just one gram would be enough to make someone beat the ground and cry. Just look at Sanghyeon over there. He’s making a miserable face even now.
“If I were presiding over the prayer ritual, you know? Suppose I offered a sacrifice at the altar, presented jewels, and shouted over and over that I wanted to return to the past, but nothing changed. And then all the armed believers stared at me with grim expressions, asking whether we’d been deceived. I’d make excuses and say it was because the sacrifice was too small. It seems we need to offer something about the weight of a heart for it to work. Or perhaps the head would be better. A finger is far too little, after all. That must be why we failed. Let’s cut off something larger and try again.”
Don’t say such unsettling things. That’s frightening. The cultist Kim Jaehee gave a faint smile and continued.
“If we offered Park Muhyeon to the altar whole, maybe we could return to the past. And if that still didn’t work, we could kill him and try again. Perhaps we’d obtain a new savior.”
No matter how many of my fingers we cut off and offered, the Infinite Church might not be satisfied. Even if they killed me, there was no way to know whether they could create a new savior. It wasn’t entirely impossible, I supposed. After all, an incident called “me” had already happened once.
“······No matter how desperate people are, would they really think something so irrational? Wouldn’t they conclude that the Infinite Church had been deceiving its believers because the ritual failed?”
“When people are desperate, they can do anything.”
“Even desperate people can make the right choice.”
“But choosing to do something bad is more comfortable and easier.”
“You lived by thinking that way, joined a lunatic religion, and became a terrorist.”
I had no idea what was happening at the First Undersea Base. But I found myself thinking it was fortunate that I couldn’t see the spectacle myself.
What would have happened if I had taken the elevator down to the First Undersea Base with Kim Jaehee to look for my fingers? If the believers had discovered us instead of us finding the fingers, they would have offered me to the altar on the spot. I might already have been dead.
“Then the people from the Infinite Church might come looking for me to kill me, or to cut off something larger than my fingers.”
“Yeees. That’s what I’d do.”
I questioned the suspicious person standing closest to me.
“Aren’t you going to try, Jaehee?”
“For one thing, I can’t even get within three meters of you, Mr. Muhyeon.”
Kim Jaehee said that, yet she came quite close all the same. But then her gaze shifted to the two tall people. If she attacked me now, whether it was Kang Sujeong or Shin Haeryang, one of them would probably fly over and subdue her within three seconds. Jaehee seemed to have reached a similar conclusion.
“I don’t have the strength or stamina to abduct you, cut something off, and run away. You want me to sprint across this sand that my feet keep sinking into, on a broken prosthetic leg, evade those beasts, and flee to the First Undersea Base?”
Shin Haeryang’s gaze periodically turned in this direction. More precisely, his eyes swept over Jeong Sanghyeon, me, and Kim Jaehee, then over Riko and Emma lying on the beach beds, as well as the other injured people and surfers in the distance. He was like an armed android scanning for danger across a broad area.
Kang Sujeong also appeared relaxed as she stood there. But although she hadn’t even raised her arms into a guard position, her feet looked ready to move at any moment.
“······I don’t think that’s possible. I think I understand why Salome, who obtained the Savior’s head, was so pleased. She must have been happy because it was something difficult to obtain by her own power. I’d love to rip out Mr. Muhyeon’s warm heart, lie down before the altar, and demand the past, but the me who exists in reality has trouble even standing. The most I can actively do right now is lie down and complain.”
Kim Jaehee glanced at Kang Sujeong, then flopped backward onto the sand. She didn’t seem to care at all that she was getting sand all over herself.
“······I see. Stay lying down, then. And don’t think about killing or harming me.”
“If I killed you, Mr. Muhyeon, I’d become a murderer immediately. Even if I erased your existence and tried again through the Infinite Church, there’s no way to know whether I’d be chosen as the new savior, or whether one of the savior candidates at the First Undersea Base would be chosen. In this situation, who would benefit most if you died, Mr. Muhyeon?”
“No one would benefit.”
When I answered firmly, Kim Jaehee let out a quiet laugh. I heaved several sighs before asking about the strange information she knew. Shin Haeryang was the same, and so was Kim Jaehee. They both knew all sorts of bizarre things.
“How on earth do you know how much a human heart weighs?”
“In an exorcism ritual for summoning demons that I attended once, we offered a pig’s heart of a similar weight. Those people were abnormally obsessed with the number four.”
“······May I ask why you went to a place like that?”
“I was curious whether it would really come true. I’d already died more than thirty times, so there might be even more unusual miracles in the world. I had to search diligently.”
“What sort of people usually do strange things like summon demons?”
Tell me, and I’ll avoid those people for the rest of my life.
“Bored twenty-year-olds with no future drink alcohol and want to see demons or ghosts.”
“I don’t think ordinary people in their twenties live like that.”
“No. They all do.”
Some places offered a pig’s head on an ancestral ritual table, so perhaps a pig’s heart wasn’t too strange. But as I listened to Kim Jaehee, I began to worry that perhaps all people in their twenties lived this way nowadays. My younger brother had said he joined some club after entering university. He wasn’t wandering around some bizarre place like that, was he?
Kang Sujeong and Shin Haeryang finished their brief conversation and approached us again.
“May I ask briefly what the two of you were doing in your early twenties?”
Kang Sujeong rolled her eyes for a moment at my question before answering awkwardly.
“I was······beating people up?”
“······I see.”
When I turned toward Shin Haeryang, he gave a similarly brief answer, like a vice-captain.
“······I was shooting people.”
“I see······”
They were the unusual ones. Surely. This couldn’t be average. I thought in turn of Baek Aeyeong and Seo Jihyeok and shook my head, then shook it even faster when I looked at Jeong Sanghyeon. The moment Emma got hold of the vodka she had found in the sand, she opened the cap and tipped it straight up, drinking from the bottle. She seemed to think her boyfriend was already dead. ······No. That couldn’t be.
Kang Sujeong and Shin Haeryang surrounded me, and Shin Haeryang spoke first, with difficulty.
“We gave some thought to your suggestion that we save the people at the undersea base, Teacher. It seems that you’re obsessively determined to save other people right now.”
As though she had received an invisible baton from Shin Haeryang, Kang Sujeong briefly glanced at my hand before speaking.
“I think your judgment may have been clouded because you saw so many terrible things while escaping the undersea base, and because your physical condition is so poor. If the undersea base collapses, it would be both a terrorist attack and a maritime disaster, but we can’t save everyone caught up in it. It’s fortunate enough that you managed to save your own life.”
Was that true? Even so, every time I died, I had been able to save one or two people. I barely swallowed those words in front of Kang Sujeong.
Yes. ······It seemed my mental state wasn’t normal. The loop was already over. I no longer had any extra lives.
Shin Haeryang began to explain carefully. In short, he said that the very idea of an ordinary injured individual attempting to rescue other hostages captured by terrorists was an effort beyond his own limits.
In a dangerous situation like this, merely keeping oneself safe and healthy was already exemplary behavior, and helping the people around you was more than admirable. Any attempt beyond that, he said, exceeded an individual’s capabilities by a wide margin.
A small number of armed people on Daehan Island versus armed terrorists from a cult that had prepared for a long time. If all the terrorists at the First Undersea Base abandoned the altar and came up to Daehan Island, that would be an exceedingly dangerous situation. Kang Sujeong and Shin Haeryang were completely right. In my mind, I understood everything they were saying.
And yet I couldn’t bear the restlessness of simply staying here on Daehan Island. There was still time before the collapse, and until then, the people beneath the sea would still be alive. I couldn’t shake the thought. I knew all too well how many hardships an ordinary individual had to endure to escape from an undersea base. Once I left Daehan Island, I probably needed to see a psychiatrist.
When I said I would do my best to follow Kang Sujeong and Shin Haeryang’s advice, Kang Sujeong thanked me for understanding and took hold of my right hand. Then she thanked me, saying that because I was there, Sanghyeon had at least been able to receive first aid. Since Team Leader Shin had also given me first aid, I earnestly returned her thanks.
Kim Jaehee and I briefly brought up the possibility that the Infinite Church might send a body thief or an assassin. Shin Haeryang seemed to have anticipated as much. But whenever Kang Sujeong heard Jaehee’s additional explanations, she wore an expression as if she were about to vomit.