The text vanished instantly.
‘Am I insane?’
Wasn’t that a far more rational conclusion than deciding all of this was reality?
However, that rationality was quickly shattered by the absurdity provided by God. The distant existence beyond the text manipulated me in an incredibly convenient way.
Kwon Taehan’s death.
No matter the method, that was an absolute law.
If Kwon Taehan died, the timeline was deleted. I tested this while assuming countless different variables.
I imprisoned Kwon Taehan.
I abandoned him until he committed suicide.
I caused accidents.
Without killing him outright, I destroyed parts of his body and observed the progress of the world while he remained powerless.
I deliberately cornered him until he chose to take his own life himself.
Naturally, I even killed him personally.
And every single time, I returned to the exact same point.
The current timeline has been deleted <2> times.
The current timeline has been deleted <13> times.
The current timeline has been deleted <27> times.
The current timeline has been deleted <41> times.
The current timeline has been deleted <85> times.
The current timeline has been deleted <130> times.
The text changed rapidly.
A warm welcome to the beginning of ‘Seo Jehyun’!
Beginning.
And once again, the repeatedly restarting 0th timeline.
There was no escaping it.
By the time I had killed Kwon Taehan in every way imaginable, I realized something.
If Kwon Taehan died, the world collapsed.
And I returned to the original point in time.
Current timeline: Regressor Kwon Taehan’s 0th life.
Was all of this because Kwon Taehan was a regressor?
Yet Kwon Taehan remembered none of the deleted lives before this. Only I remembered everything.
And there was one more strange thing.
That number.
0th life.
Why did Kwon Taehan continue living only the 0th life?
Fuck, what kind of method would make his life start being counted too?
How could I avoid deletion and move on to the next stage?
No, what even was “next”?
‘Ah.... Fuck.’
Killing Kwon Taehan was largely meaningless....
Then what about my own death?
I realized suicide was meaningless in the very next deleted timeline.
The current timeline has been deleted <131> times.
Seo Jehyun’s “grace period” totals 11 months.
Around the fifth repetition, I also realized what this “grace period” meant.
It was the amount of time between my death and Kwon Taehan’s death.
By this point, even I could no longer fail to understand the nature of this situation.
This world existed solely for Kwon Taehan.
If Kwon Taehan’s life ended, everything stopped.
And after deletion, it restarted from the same point.
The mission to save the world, S-rank Hunter, noble convictions, and opportunities arranged by God solely for Kwon Taehan.
Every single thing carried significance.
Why had a being called God chosen Kwon Taehan?
And why was I beginning this world alongside him?
This disgusting cycle was unbearably fucking revolting.
The moment my sanity truly snapped and my destructive urges exploded was around the 200th deletion.
Until then, I had thoroughly destroyed only Kwon Taehan, or myself.
But this time, my mindset was different from the beginning.
If God had arranged all of this for Kwon Taehan, then I wanted to defy that intention.
I wanted to witness God’s failure.
In other words, I wanted Kwon Taehan to fail miserably.
What would crush Kwon Taehan most effectively?
The answer came through experience.
Kwon Taehan despaired far more quickly when I was extremely close to him rather than a complete stranger.
Because he was unstable, desperate... and miserable.
Every single time, Kwon Taehan needed “me.”
I stayed by Kwon Taehan’s side as an ally, then near the point we reached the most dangerous S-rank Dungeon, I spread false information and got most of Korea’s Hunters killed.
A magnificent achievement accomplished through Agitation and a cult.
After learning the truth, Kwon Taehan stared at me for a long time with betrayal-filled eyes before turning away.
‘No.’
This was unexpected.
I wanted Kwon Taehan to kill me.
I had done all this because I was curious what would happen after he killed me.
If Kwon Taehan reacted like this, then everything became meaningless.
‘Taehan, you have to kill me.’
‘.......’
‘You were betrayed. People died because of me. More than just one or two. Do you really think your goal can still be achieved while leaving me alive? Think rationally.’
‘Seo Jehyun, please!’
‘.......’
‘Shut up....’
He shouted angrily while crying, his eyes bloodshot red.
‘Then you never should’ve approached me in the first place! You should’ve just been someone I could hate enough to kill! No, you shouldn’t have acted like a person from the start. You should’ve stayed like this! You should’ve kept being horrible the entire time!’
‘The betrayal’s overwhelming enough to make you want to kill me.... I’ll keep getting in your way from now on too, so think carefully.’
At that, Kwon Taehan ground his teeth and stared at me.
After the anger faded, an astonishingly calm voice emerged.
Even though his expression itself looked closer to despair.
‘I’m not killing you.’
‘Why?’
‘.......’
‘Ah.... Fuck, you’re seriously pissing me off. Even now? Even after all this, you still won’t kill me?’
‘.......’
‘Fuck, Taehan! Then what the hell am I supposed to do?’
‘You did all this because you wanted to die? For a reason that pathetic?’
A pathetic reason.
This fucking bastard had no idea how many things I had tried....
Ah, seriously, his reaction made me want to kill him.
No, I had already done that too many times.
Instead, I wanted to preserve him forever only at the exact moment he fell into absolute despair.
So that even if he wanted to die, he never could....
Only then did Kwon Taehan let out a hollow laugh.
‘I’m not killing you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s what you want.’
Above that twisted smile—which was not even a victorious grin—the text appeared.
Destruction is approaching.
Please discover compelling plausibility for destruction!
Plausibility for destruction...... 91%
It was familiar text.
But this was the first time plausibility had risen this high.
And at that moment, I realized something enormous.
Even this had been arranged by God.
The protagonist chosen by God was Kwon Taehan, and he absolutely had to prevent destruction.
But what exactly was destruction?
What could truly be called destruction?
The countless manifestations of S-rank Gates?
Or most of humanity dying?
Or perhaps this very “cataclysm” itself?
‘Aha....’
‘.......’
The answer had actually been there from the beginning.
Kwon Taehan saw messages telling him to save the world.
From what?
From destruction.
Destruction had never been a specific point in time to begin with.
It was simply some conceptual “something” Kwon Taehan had to save.
The ending of the world through Kwon Taehan.
And what Kwon Taehan saved.
The crisis that drove him furthest into despair.
‘Why you of all people?’
‘...What?’
Why Kwon Taehan specifically?
But questions like that no longer mattered.
What I truly wanted to know was something else.
‘No.... Why me?’
Yeah.
That was what I wanted to know.
What exactly was plausibility for destruction?
If Kwon Taehan was the “protagonist,” and all of this could only be reached through overwhelming “plausibility,” then what exactly was this?
Yet somehow, it also vaguely made sense.
Because defining the existence beyond the text as “God” was the natural thing to do....
After all, only those flat existences printed into words were gods.
Like the beings written in the Bible and other myths.
Then did Kwon Taehan require suffering and plausibility in order to become something close to a god?
If so, was I merely nourishment for his ending?
Kwon Taehan had shouted that I should never have acted like a person—
yet perhaps he was the one who had already transcended humanity.
Living in a world where everything revolved around him alone, how could he....
How dare he?
How could a living person be loved by an existence beyond the text and build a world entirely for himself?
Kwon Taehan was not some breathing line from mythology.
He was merely an ordinary human standing alive before my eyes.
So why him?
I stared at Kwon Taehan and let out a low snicker before quickly making my decision.
‘Yeah.... Fine.’
‘.......’
‘See you next time?’
There was no longer any value in examining him further anyway.
Kwon Taehan would die soon regardless.
Instead of watching that disgusting life, I decided to observe the grace period instead.
After confirming Kwon Taehan remained standing there blankly, unable to understand my words, I pulled an artifact blade from my chest and immediately killed myself.
Right before my life ended, I saw Kwon Taehan rush toward me in panic and desperately try to stop the bleeding, but it meant nothing.
The current timeline has been deleted <207> times.
Seo Jehyun’s “grace period” totals 3 hours.
After that, the timelines continued piling up endlessly.
One particularly striking thing was that the more my timelines repeated, the more the violent emotions boiling inside me gradually settled down.
And strangely enough, the more my intensity wore away, the faster Kwon Taehan grew attached to me.
It was not simply because I understood things about Kwon Taehan through experience.
The duller and more meaningless my life became, the more Kwon Taehan regarded me as human.
The more the timelines repeated, the more tedious and empty my life became....
But borrowing Kwon Taehan’s words—
I became increasingly “human.”
‘Even though I was human from the start.’
However, the “Kwon Taehan” who could have argued against that had already been deleted.
And even after accumulating exactly twice that many timelines, Kwon Taehan still remained in the 0th round.
Then around that point, I realized one more thing.
Kwon Taehan had never truly died even once.
No matter how many times I stabbed him, no matter how many times I shattered his limbs, every version of Kwon Taehan from those moments was simply deleted while remaining only inside my memories.
Reality and dreams mixed together chaotically, creating a faint confusion inside my head.
I could not kill Kwon Taehan.
The moment I realized that, I truly...wanted to kill him.
I wanted to force him to live through countless futures.
Yet at the same time, I wanted Kwon Taehan to survive until the very end.
Because I wanted to see what Kwon Taehan would become after all this plausibility finally reached 100%.
I wanted to stand beside Kwon Taehan and watch him continue forward to the end—
while at the same time violently intervening and cutting his life short.
If I finally managed to truly “kill” a Kwon Taehan who had never actually died even once before, would it feel different?
And if I finally witnessed a timeline that was “not deleted,” would that feel different too?
The current timeline has been deleted <433> times.
The current timeline has been deleted <489> times.
The current timeline has been deleted <562> times.
The current timeline has been deleted <617> times.
Yet strangely enough....
A warm welcome to the beginning of ‘Seo Jehyun’!
Living through countless meaningless deleted lives over and over again—
was not all that bad either.
Because from the very beginning, I had always been someone destined to live a somewhat dull, quiet, boring life anyway.