Chapter 2 — The Weight of Memory
Time did not move the same way for Kim Jae-hwan anymore.
The clock on the classroom wall ticked dutifully forward in seconds and minutes, but inside his mind, years flowed in layered currents — overlapping, spiraling, intertwining until past and present could no longer be neatly separated.
The teacher's voice droned on about pre-Gate economics. Students took notes because exams demanded obedience. Someone in the back row slept with their head on their arms. Two girls whispered about idols. Life was normal here.
Normal. Ordinary. Human.
How quaint.
Jae-hwan sat by the window, chin resting lightly on one hand, gaze drifting out toward the schoolyard. To anyone watching, he looked like a typical bored student spacing out in class.
Inside his head, he was walking through forty-seven worlds at once.
He did this at the beginning of each regression — not out of nostalgia, but necessity. A full systems check. An audit of reality. Every timeline laid out, each mistake highlighted, each variable updated. Memory was not a burden for him anymore.
It was infrastructure.
A library.
A labyrinth.
A prison.
He closed his eyes.
And fell backward through time.
---
Regression 1.
He was twenty-four, idealistic, laughing too easily, believing people were fundamentally good. Gates had been new then — terrifying but conquerable. He had awakened later than most, but he had worked twice as hard, climbed twice as fast.
He remembered the thrill of first victory. The first monster falling beneath his blade. The cheers. The interviews. The naive gratitude when tabloids called him "humanity's rising hope."
He remembered sharing ramen with Lee Min-seok at midnight because they were broke hunters who thought friendship was forever.
He remembered Han Seo-yeon smiling shyly when she confessed, hands trembling, cheeks red. He had believed that smile. He had believed he was loved.
He remembered trusting the Guild Master. Trusting the government. Trusting his parents.
He remembered the trial.
The lies.
The camera flashes.
The moment his lover's voice trembled as she testified against him, eyes carefully not meeting his.
He remembered his sister's signature at the bottom of the document.
He remembered dying.
Alone.
Cold.
Afraid.
---
Regression 12.
He had stopped being afraid.
---
Regression 19.
He tried forgiveness.
He saved Lee Min-seok from a boss monster and pretended not to notice the stolen research. He married Seo-yeon again. He ignored the whispers and betrayals and bit his tongue until it bled because he believed — truly believed — that if he just endured, things would turn out differently.
He saved the world that time.
He remembered the parade.
The confetti.
The speeches about sacrifice.
He remembered the private execution order arriving the next week, stamped with the presidential seal.
He remembered his mother not being able to meet his eyes.
Regression 19 had taught him something important:
Saving the world doesn't make people better.
It only gives them more to ruin.
---
Regression 28.
That was the one where he screamed for three days straight after waking.
His throat had bled for a week.
No one had understood why.
He had stopped explaining eventually.
---
The teacher called his name.
He opened his eyes.
"Yes," he answered calmly.
A few students glanced at him — surprised he'd responded so quickly despite "spacing out". The teacher blinked, thrown off by losing whatever small satisfaction they had expected from catching a distracted student.
"…nothing. Pay attention," the teacher muttered, flustered, turning back to the board.
Jae-hwan returned to the window.
He wasn't actually spacing out.
He was processing.
Every timeline. Every failure. Every success turned poison. He remembered logistics down to decimals: mana density fluctuations during the Year 14 Gate Burst, black market artifact trade routes in Busan, which vice-minister liked to embezzle through shell companies.
He remembered screams the most.
People thought memory dulled with repetition.
They were wrong.
The first time someone died in his arms, the weight had crushed him. The fiftieth? The thousandth? At some point the human brain would normally break, crumble under the pressure.
His didn't.
It adapted.
It stopped classifying screams as emotional information.
They became data points.
He remembered where most of those throats had torn — which debris crushed which bodies — with the same mechanical precision someone else might remember multiplication tables.
He could still list the names of all 3,742 civilians who died because Kang Joon-ho hesitated in regression 33. He remembered the license plates of all the cars blocked in evacuation routes. He remembered the sound Han Seo-yeon made when she realized he had forgiven her in regression 17 only to die in her place two days later.
He remembered trying to be a good person.
He remembered realizing it didn't matter.
The classroom faded away again as his mind continued its descent.
---
Regression 37.
He tried becoming a god.
Not literally — though with enough artifacts and power accumulation, the line had blurred. He didn't need governments. He didn't need guilds. He went into Gates alone, cleared what entire armies couldn't, dictated policy through sheer irreplaceability.
The world bowed.
He thought, briefly, foolishly, that power would prevent betrayal because fear would replace greed.
He was wrong.
They betrayed him anyway.
The method changed.
The motive never did.
Humans were marvelously inventive when it came to destroying what protected them.
That was when something inside him cracked — not dramatically, not all at once, not with shattering noise, but quietly, like a hairline fracture spreading through ice.
Regression 37 was when he began to see people not as people, but as systems of behavior.
Inputs. Outputs.
Push here, they react there.
Apply pressure, they fracture.
Give kindness, they betray.
He had tested it forty-seven lifetimes in a row.
The results were depressingly consistent.
---
A paper airplane hit the side of his desk.
He blinked and looked down.
Someone had thrown it — probably the boy two seats over who always pretended not to look at girls, the one who would die to a stray fragment of boss monster shell in seven years.
He opened the airplane.
On it was scribbled:
[Daydreaming again?]
Jae-hwan glanced sideways.
The boy grinned sheepishly and mimed getting scolded by the teacher. A harmless joke. A small moment of teenage camaraderie. Something that would have meant the world to him once.
He folded the paper neatly and set it aside.
He did not respond.
Attaching to people required effort.
Effort implied intention.
He no longer bothered with such things unless they served his designs.
The bell rang.
The class moved as one organism — chairs scraping, bags rustling, voices rising. Students spilled into the hallway like a breaking wave, laughing, shoving, complaining. Life bursting forward unaware of the disaster charts etched across the future.
Jae-hwan stayed seated for a moment.
He let the noise wash over him.
This world was beautiful in its ignorance.
He could almost, if he squinted and tilted his mind the right way, pretend he didn't know that in twelve years, Seoul's skyline would be half-devoured by a Calamity Gate. He could pretend he didn't know which hospitals would overflow, which bridges would fall, which mothers would scream until vocal cords snapped.
He could pretend.
He didn't.
He stood.
He had work to do.
---
Lunchtime found him on the school rooftop.
The door creaked the same way it always had, hinges rusted in the same spot. The metal railing was still dented from a fight between two upperclassmen that hadn't happened yet. The wind carried the familiar smell of cement, dust, and cafeteria kimchi stew.
He leaned against the fence and closed his eyes again.
Now came the second part of his internal audit — not just memory, but optimization.
He mentally laid out his list of primary targets.
Lee Min-seok.
Han Seo-yeon.
Choi Dae-won.
Kang Joon-ho.
President Yoon Tae-yang.
His family.
He didn't need to ask himself why.
The why had burned away long ago.
Only how remained.
In previous regressions, revenge had been hot — violent, messy, roaring through his veins until it consumed him as much as them. It had been cathartic. It had been uncontrolled.
He wasn't interested in catharsis anymore.
He wanted elegance.
He wanted artistry.
He wanted them to reach the heights they dreamed of, taste happiness so complete it melted their bones — and then understand, fully and inescapably, that every smile, every victory, every cherished moment had been given to them only so it could be taken away.
He wanted their worlds to collapse after they believed they were safe.
He wasn't a murderer.
He was an architect.
A designer of collapses.
A curator of despair.
He took a slow breath.
First: Min-seok. His fall required pedestal-building. Fame. Love. Family. Everything must be set up so that when he fell, the impact shattered not just him, but the entire narrative of his life.
Second: Seo-yeon. Her greatest weakness was not greed or ambition, as people claimed. It was the belief that love could be used as currency. He would give her the perfect love story — then show her it had been nothing but one-sided delusion sculpted by his hands.
Third: Choi Dae-won. Authority was his oxygen. Remove the system around him and watch him suffocate on his own irrelevance.
Fourth: Kang Joon-ho. He was born to be a hero. That was not sarcasm; it was simply a fact. So Jae-hwan would help him succeed — help him exceed — then ensure the greatest tragedy in human history bore Kang's name.
Fifth: President Yoon. Power tasted sweetest when swallowed whole. He would let the man devour the nation — then pull the floor out from beneath him.
And last, his family.
He lingered there.
Not long.
Just longer than he was comfortable admitting.
They were not monsters. They were not villains. They were weak — desperately, pathetically, mundanely weak. They had broken under pressure. They had bartered him away not out of malice, but fear.
Weakness did not excuse betrayal.
So he would grant them everything they wanted — wealth, security, prestige — and then peel it away slowly, piece by trembling piece, until they understood the cost of selling blood.
He opened his eyes.
The wind tugged at his hair.
Someone else stepped onto the roof.
He didn't need to turn to know who it was. He remembered the 0.3-second rhythm of her footsteps, the way she held her breath when deciding whether or not to speak.
Yoo Ji-ah.
The future detective. Anchor candidate. The one who, in enough timelines, would look at him and see something fundamentally wrong.
"Skipping lunch?" she asked casually, walking over to stand beside him.
He looked at her.
Black ponytail. Serious eyes. The faint crease between her brows that suggested she was always thinking one layer deeper than her peers. She wasn't an enemy yet.
She would become one.
Or something stranger.
"I'm not hungry," he replied.
"You never are," she muttered. "Ever since the aptitude test announcement you act like someone replaced you with a robot."
He smiled faintly.
She was closer to the truth than she knew.
"A robot would be more efficient," he said.
She snorted. "You're making it too easy."
Silence fell.
Not uncomfortable silence — just space filled with wind and distant shouts from the courtyard below. Ji-ah studied him openly, unembarrassed by her scrutiny.
In twenty regressions, she never noticed him.
In seven, she suspected.
In three, she remembered.
In one, she put a gun to his head.
He wondered, distantly, which stage this world would reach.
"You've changed," she finally said.
Everyone always said that around regression ten.
He tilted his head. "How so?"
"You look like you're… carrying something," she said slowly, as if testing each word. "Like you're walking through a different world than the rest of us."
He met her gaze.
For a split second — not long enough to be caught, but long enough to matter — he let the mask slip inside himself. Let the voices of the dead echo in his bones. Let the centuries of repetition sink through his stare.
She shivered.
Her instincts were absurdly sharp.
Good.
He would need her.
"I suppose I'm just thinking about the future," he said lightly, pulling the mask back on.
"Aren't we all?" she muttered, then paused. "Hey… Jae-hwan."
"Yes?"
"If you ever… need to talk about something, you can."
He blinked.
That line again.
Always at this point in the script.
She said it every lifetime.
He always declined.
This time was no different.
"I'm fine," he said.
It was the most honest lie he had ever perfected.
She studied him a moment longer, then sighed and headed back toward the stairwell.
The rooftop door closed.
He was alone again.
He looked up at the sky. The blue expanse stared back, indifferent, endless.
"Forty-seven lifetimes," he murmured. "And still repeating."
He had once wondered if there was a limit — a number at which he would stop waking up in this fragile teenage body and finally be allowed to rest. Now he suspected there was no limit at all.
That something watched him.
Listened.
Fed.
He had seen glimpses of it during near-death states in later regressions — a vast, unblinking hunger pressed against the membrane of reality, its attention cold and amused. It didn't speak, not in words, but the intent was clear enough.
Continue.
Suffer.
Dance.
He smiled without warmth.
If the entity wanted a show, he would give it one.
But it would not get the spectacle of despair it desired.
He would feel nothing.
He chose to feel nothing.
He straightened, rolled his shoulders, and pushed the centuries back into their shelves. The class periods ahead were trivial — formalities in the reenactment of his old life — but necessary ones. Every puzzle required foundation pieces.
Down below, students laughed.
Somewhere, a Gate pulsed faintly in a place only he knew yet.
The world turned.
Kim Jae-hwan walked back inside the school, mind sharp, heart hollow, plans already stretching years into the future.
Iteration forty-seven continued.
And this time, he would not save anyone.