Chapter 134

Father, 'Jung Geonho' — deceased (cause of death: illness)

Of everything the system had shown him, this was the one event Kang Hajin hadn't known about.

And it was also the one reason Kang Hajin came to regret this past-viewing.

Events further back can be viewed as well, if you'd like. Shall we?

"…nah. I'm good."

Hajin shook his head, recoiling from Thirteen's offer.

Because his gut was telling him to stop digging into what had happened to Siwoo any further than this.

Jung Siwoo's become this much of a talking point, and this is still a fact he's kept so thoroughly buried that not one mention of it has surfaced anywhere. Even the company doesn't seem to know…. Learning something like that this way — it's just rude.

It was a completely different feeling from viewing the Selreg's past before.

To Hajin, who still hadn't quite managed to hide how shaken he was, Thirteen carefully floated up a message window and spoke.

…I did tell you, clearly. That I didn't recommend it. I perceive everything at the level of text-events, but… for the Fixed Regressor, who has to face this person directly, it means something different.

Yeah. I'll listen to you better next time.

Complicated expression still on his face, Hajin let himself slide loosely down onto the bed.

Even knowing what he now knew, he had no intention of treating Siwoo any differently from before, but…

It did leave a bad taste in his mouth, that much was true.

"You could've been a little more insistent about stopping me…."

At Hajin's belated grumbling, Thirteen replied, unruffled.

Of course, it wasn't a method I was eager to recommend…. But I judged it to be a necessary process either way. In order to find the Selected Regressor, the Fixed Regressor is going to have to come to know a great many more people's timelines from here on.

Something like an unseen weight hung inside the text of Thirteen's next message.

What it means to interfere with someone's timeline. I hope you don't forget the feeling you have right now. I'll say it again: coming to know someone's 'life' is never an easy thing. Especially since you're a human, Fixed Regressor — if you grew numb to something like this, that could truly be dangerous.

Thirteen stopped there, but Hajin could roughly guess what he was trying to say.

Hajin, who had to find the Selected Regressor, was going to be checking through countless people's past timelines this way from here on.

Right now it happened to be through error compensation, but going forward — through Comrade recruitment, quest rewards, any number of functions loaned out under the name of 'System' — he'd be seeing more and more.

"…what you're saying is, don't sink too deep into it. Yeah, I get it now."

Just as, through all those endless regressions, Hajin had for a stretch there forgotten what living even meant —

If, at some point, he started accepting someone's past and future and present as nothing more than 'quest rewards' and 'letters on a screen'—

Then I might not be any different from Retty, or that Selreg bastard.

He had no interest in making the same mistake he'd made with Lee Yugeon twice over — thinking he had the whole man read off a stat window alone.

Hajin nodded, as if to say he understood. And Thirteen, in turn, seemed relieved.

Then, we'll close out the viewing of Jung Siwoo's past here.

"Yeah. The rest I'll figure out on my own once we get closer — or something."

Of course, even the getting-closer step alone was already a mountain range on top of a mountain range.

Reminded once again that Jung Siwoo was a genuinely hard person to find a crack in, Hajin bolted back upright into a sitting position.

"For now, still — work to do."

He'd ended up learning about Siwoo's past without meaning to, but he did have a clear objective: gathering clues about the Selected Regressor suspects.

Now that debut was actually right around the corner, that meant that at the very least, the strong suspects needed to be narrowed down to a definite few.

After going through this much hell, he had no interest in living through something like the Selreg gets eliminated in the finals and triggers another regression.

"Let's walk back through it, one step at a time. We've already got a few big clues."

On an empty system window, Hajin started writing out the clues he'd gathered so far.

label: Clues on the Selreg The current life is fake. The original life was as an orphan. The base personality doesn't recognize the regressions. The base personality instinctively senses past timelines. Likes the current life, relies on me (Kang Hajin).

Below that, Hajin pulled up the profiles of every trainee still in the running besides himself, and settled in to work through his reasoning calmly.

"So I went back and walked through that whole infinite-regression thing from the other day again, and…. doesn't something feel off?"

In what way?

"While I was running myself ragged trying to stop Lee Yugeon from walking off — what the hell was that Selreg bastard actually doing?"

The Selreg didn't want Yugeon to walk off.

Which meant if he'd turned time back to keep Yugeon on the show, naturally the Selreg himself had to have made some kind of move toward that too.

At the time Hajin had been half out of his mind and hadn't had the headspace for it, but with everything settled now, he could bring the sequence of events back into focus a lot more clearly.

"That day, there was someone who told me Lee Yugeon was headed out the fire exit with his suitcase."

And that wasn't all.

"The part where we traced the Yugeon-controversy post back to that one origin post — that wasn't something I figured out on my own either."

Somebody had, without question, been beside him in those moments.

The problem being — he couldn't quite remember who.

Hajin scrunched his brow trying to force the memory out — then, as if he'd hit on a great idea, went "Ah!" and looked at Thirteen.

"Yah. Stuff like this — can't we check it through past timelines? I mean, I'm on Team Kang Hajin now, right? And Kang Hajin's on Team Kang Hajin. So we could just pull up my past timeline and check!"

Hajin's eyes lit up like that Western uncle from the story — {the one who supposedly jumped out of the bath shouting Eureka}(#3yecch300j8x).

But hearing that, Thirteen immediately started dripping nervous sweat and shrank down out of Hajin's line of sight.

Hajin, who knew perfectly well that was the reaction Thirteen gave whenever something was making him twitchy, asked with a seriously? face.

"…what. Don't tell me that doesn't work either? Why? My response rate's high."

……. ( ⚆ _ ⚆ );;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; The thing is….

Thirteen fidgeted for a long time — then, unable to bear Hajin's dogged stare, came clean with a whimpering-cry sound effect going.

Not sure if the Returner meddled or what, but the timelines from that period have all been shattered and scattered in pieces…. Recovering them is possible, but it might take a bit of time…. ๐·°(৹˃̵﹏˂̵৹)°·๐

"Are you guys really the ones humanity's supposed to be trusting with our time…? Is this world really okay running on a system this made of glass?"

At Hajin's earnest inquiry into the state of humanity and the universe, Thirteen — apparently ashamed of himself too — went translucent and mumbled.

We're not some kind of omnipotent beings, you know…. This is a first for us too…. System is flustered at not being able to help….

"…yeah. Alright."

Hajin scrunched his brow trying to remember who that 'somebody' had been, drumming his fingers out of habit.

"Anyway. Here's my read. That Selreg bastard figured that to stop Lee Yugeon from walking off, my actions were the single most important thing. So he set up the situations one by one to make sure I was the one keeping Lee Yugeon on."

Looking back on it now, some of the things Hajin had chalked up to sorting themselves out 'naturally' at just the right moment might in fact have been the Selreg bastard pulling strings.

Things like the broadcaster and the staff's suspiciously quick response times.

"And that bastard trying to stop Lee Yugeon from walking off — I'm starting to think that might've been because of me too."

That's right. If it hadn't been for the Fixed Regressor, then most likely…

"No, not that kind of 'because of me.' I mean literally, because of me. If I'd blown that Blue Flare team stage, I could genuinely have been the one to go this round."

At this round of eliminations, Hajin's ranking had been 9th.

And that score had included the third-mission team benefit.

The vote gap with the 2nd-place Candy Crush team hadn't been all that wide either. If Lee Yugeon hadn't drawn the overwhelming vote pile he did — the top individual total — the results could well have flipped.

Setting aside vote counts entirely — Lee Yugeon's role in that performance was pretty enormous, too.

Blue Flare's stage had set every one of the teammates who worked on it together up on a nice launching pad.

But given how the results had actually shaken out, the person who benefited most from Lee Yugeon not walking off—

—was Kang Hajin himself.

"The people back then who either knew, or roughly picked up on, that I was in a spot where I couldn't afford to blow the third mission — four of them, total."

Hajin carefully worked through the trainees' profiles and lifted the relevant ones up into the empty space, laying them out.

Four profiles floated up neatly across the system window.

"Jung Siwoo, Seo Taehyun, Ju Eunchan, Dan Haru."

They were either people sharp enough to read a mood on their own, or people Hajin had directly vented his worries to.

Hajin gestured at Siwoo's profile among them.

"Of these, the one who most directly tried to keep Lee Yugeon from walking off was Jung Siwoo-hyung. Which is actually why I was thinking this hyung was the strongest candidate, you know?"

But if it was Siwoo — the idea that he'd turn time back on Hajin's behalf didn't come easily.

On top of that, the past he'd just learned about only cemented his hunch that Siwoo wasn't the Selreg.

"If the Selreg took a discarded timeline and reassembled his life out of it, I don't think he'd have left something like his father dying in his past."

After thinking it over, Hajin carefully removed Siwoo from the suspect tab.

Chin propped on his hand, humming with thought, Hajin looked at the remaining three.

"Ju Eunchan's my roommate, so I've told him plenty of times that the third mission mattered to me. Plus his family background's pretty unreal."

The second son of, no less, one of the country's leading furniture conglomerates. And a late-life kid at that, huge age gap from his older brother.

If life were a game, it was the kind of family background anyone would want to snap up first.

Hajin had, in fact, made full use of that family background to push out both the department head and Han Seongwoo — and in removing those two, Eunchan had come out with more benefits than he could count.

Add on top of that how well he took to Hajin, and motive was there too.

"Okay. Keep for now."

Hajin cut a sidelong glance toward Eunchan's bed, then moved on to the next candidate.

"Seo Taehyun. I don't really know his family situation, but…. motive-wise, he's on the clear side. He got a second shot at being an idol because of me, and he's close with Lee Yugeon."

But Hajin knew Seo Taehyun's past life.

Whether Hajin had been twenty-nine, or whether he'd been nineteen —

Taehyun had been living the same choices, the same current, in both.

"Compared to the paper-thin skittishness the Selreg's shown in his behavior so far, Seo Taehyun's lived his life way too solidly. If this bastard were the Selreg, he'd have hit a regression the second Cha Minseok came hauling that evidence in."

Hajin shook his head firmly and struck Taehyun off the suspect tab too.

Which left only one final candidate.

"Dan Haru."

Hajin's finger, tapping at the rail of the bed, abruptly stopped moving.

Because puzzle pieces of memory had suddenly surfaced.

"…when did Dan Haru even start at Miro?"

Sorry?

Even at Thirteen's question, Hajin — like he was possessed by something — didn't even bother answering, quickly flipping through profile tabs.

label: Dan Haru Age: 17 Birthday: December 31 Trainee period: 2nd year (cast by Ji Suho at 16) Position: Vocal Notes: — Parents live overseas — Seems close with his grandmother

As Hajin took in Dan Haru's profile, his expression hardened faster than he could keep up with.

In Hajin's head, at frightening speed, puzzle pieces were snapping into place — resolving into one enormous picture.

"…how did I not clock this as strange?"