Chapter 4 : Restart
Chapter 4: Restart
Baek Woohyun spent his days living an ordinary life, as college students on vacation generally do.
Occasionally meeting with Jeong Nayeon or other friends to eat, and doing to his heart’s content what he’d so desperately wished for over there, what he wanted to do.
It was a very peaceful and leisurely daily life that someone might say was living the good life just playing around.
However, if asked whether this lifestyle made him completely happy, the answer was negative.
Though it was clearly the daily life he’d desired, no matter how much time passed, the whisper in one corner of his mind showed no signs of disappearing.
The whisper he’d heard when meeting Jeong Nayeon—’this isn’t where I should be’—only grew larger the more he lived life in reality.
It was the same no matter who he met or where he went. The sense of disconnect from reality only grew as time passed, and no matter what he did, it wouldn’t diminish.
To resolve this, Baek Woohyun had even considered psychiatric counseling. Just as soldiers who returned from battlefields and suffered from PTSD generally did.
Unfortunately, he gave up because he didn’t know how to tell his story.
In fact, even if he somehow told everything, it was questionable whether the doctor would believe him. Who would easily believe a story that started with entering a game world?
“……Huuu.”
Baek Woohyun, who let out a murky sigh, leaned back against his chair.
He stared ahead with a gloomily sunken expression. Precisely, at the virtual reality connection device placed in one corner of the room.
The jet-black body still maintained its luster even though it hadn’t been opened once recently.
‘I thought I’d never use it again.’
Since returning to reality, Baek Woohyun had never used the connection device even once.
It didn’t simply mean he hadn’t played Reverse Planet. Literally, he hadn’t even touched the connection device at all.
The reason was naturally because he felt fear that what happened before might repeat. One experience of being dragged into a game world was enough.
He’d even been thinking of continuing not to lay a hand on it until he gained certainty that the connection device was safe. Even if that became his entire life.
Since he could never know if it was safe until he tested it himself, it was essentially a vow never to use the connection device again.
But now, ridiculously, he was seriously contemplating using the connection device.
No, beyond simply using the connection device, he was contemplating whether to run Reverse Planet again.
As if he was desperate to step foot into the hell he’d barely escaped from.
“Heu—”
Suddenly, a bitter smile spread across Baek Woohyun’s lips.
It was because he recalled the thought he’d had when meeting Jeong Nayeon the day after returning to reality.
At that time, he’d thought that anyone who would return to the hell they’d escaped from would either be a lunatic who’d half-lost their mind or a wreck addicted to hell.
And that perhaps he, who felt that the reality he’d barely returned to wasn’t where he should be, might be both.
Looking back, something seemed to have been off right then.
“I barely escaped after ten years, yet I’m trying to go back in less than ten days. It’s not even funny. …Right?”
Baek Woohyun asked those who had appeared in the room at some point and were looking down at him.
No answer came back.
The connections from the past who had once been with him but had now become specters were merely looking at him as always.
With haggardly gaunt faces, shedding tears of blood.
They circled around him here as they had over there. As if appearing in dreams wasn’t enough, showing themselves even in broad daylight like now.
He knew without needing to say what they were demanding of him.
Revenge.
They would want him to kill all the culprits who had caused them pain and ultimately taken their lives.
Therefore, they must want him to connect to Reverse Planet again…
“……”
But did they know?
That even if he connected to Reverse Planet, if he didn’t cross over to that world, it would just be a virtual reality game.
That even if he killed researchers there and enacted revenge, in the end it would only be fake.
Perhaps such facts didn’t matter to them at all. The emotion of vengefulness didn’t operate that rationally.
If they thought that as long as they could release even a bit of the boiling resentment, it didn’t matter either way—
‘—No.’
In fact, it was all just excuses.
The one who wanted to go back wasn’t anyone else but Baek Woohyun himself.
He was also the one trapped in the contradiction of calling that place hell and viewing it as terrible, yet ultimately thinking that place was where he should be.
Baek Woohyun, who had been staring at the connection device with half-closed eyes, rose from his seat.
In the end, he knew well that there was only one choice he could make. No matter how much he worried, that wouldn’t change.
Then there was no reason to hesitate needlessly.
If he’d made up his mind, he just needed to act on it.
Hasn’t it always been that way?
Here and over there.
***
[Welcome to 《Reverse Planet》!]
[Character creation procedure is currently in progress]
Baek Woohyun slowly looked around.
A room that felt desolate entered his vision, with walls, ceiling, and floor all made of gloomy gray alloy, and the only furniture being a bed and a full-length mirror.
It was an extremely familiar room to him.
Because it was where he’d first woken up in that world, and the place he’d stayed when not being dragged to experiments.
But that wasn’t what was important right now.
‘A game, huh…’
The fact that this place right now was merely a game.
Only that mattered to Baek Woohyun.
‘A game, not reality.’
“Huuu—”
Baek Woohyun, who clenched and unclenched his fist once, sighed. It was a sigh he’d lost count of.
Has the path to cross over to that world been completely blocked? Or had he not crossed over because he hadn’t satisfied some condition?
Was connecting to Reverse Planet with the connection device even the right condition for crossing over to that world in the first place…
Fragments of thoughts that couldn’t be organized tore through his mind.
It couldn’t be helped.
How much anguish had there been before connecting again?
He’d even been prepared not to return to reality at all this time, yet only an ordinary game had started, so he couldn’t help but have many distracting thoughts.
‘For now.’
But that was only for a moment.
Baek Woohyun, who had been examining the room, slowly went to stand in front of the full-length mirror. Because only it was faintly glowing in the entirely ashen room.
[Will you finalize your character’s appearance as is?]
[Yes/No]
Baek Woohyun, who read the system message, checked his appearance in the full-length mirror.
Dark circles as dark as his jet-black hair, pale skin in stark contrast, and clouded eyes that occasionally flashed with madness.
It was a face that at a glance made one feel this person looked somehow dangerous.
It hadn’t been like this when he’d first returned to reality.
The person in the mirror had been an ordinary college student, and he’d even felt a sense of disconnect because of it.
But as time passed, his appearance changed to himself from over there. As if claiming that the body follows the soul.
With a bitter smile, he selected [Yes].
Either way, he had no intention of changing his appearance.
[Please set your combat assistance percentage]
[Combat Assistance Percentage: 50 percent ▲/▼]
*[Combat assistance is a system that provides overall help in combat, including posture correction, movement support, and supernatural ability usage correction. The higher the percentage, the greater the help you can receive]
[Will you finalize it as is?]
[Yes/No]
‘Combat assistance, huh.’
Since returning to reality, Baek Woohyun has conducted fairly in-depth research on Reverse Planet.
Because he’d speculated that there might be something related to ‘that place’ there.
Unfortunately, there was no connection at all, so he’d given up.
Anyway, the combat assistance system was one of the things he’d learned in the process.
People clamored that this system was the primary contributor that allowed Reverse Planet to rise to the ranks of a national game.
As virtual reality games generally do, there inevitably exists an entry barrier in directly fighting and using supernatural abilities, and the combat assistance system had dramatically lowered this.
In fact, it was information that didn’t really matter to him.
And that remained the same now that he’d restarted the game.
It was because he didn’t feel the need to be loaded down with something like this when he’d fought just fine over there where there was no combat assistance system.
He set the combat assistance percentage to 0, then finalized it.
After finishing the rough settings and entering [Baek Woohyun] in response to the request to decide a name, Reverse Planet finally began in earnest.
—Test Subject No. 48.
A low male voice that echoed through the room.
Baek Woohyun raised his head and directed his gaze toward where the voice came from.
There, a surveillance camera and speaker looking this way were installed. This too was a familiar sight to him.
Sickeningly so.
The voice—probably the researcher in charge of Baek Woohyun—continued speaking without caring what reaction he showed.
—Since you awakened in the last experiment, it’s been a week. So, how do you feel? Is it bearable?
‘They’re not showing before awakening after all.’
Baek Woohyun thought while ignoring the researcher’s words.
Certainly, considering that Reverse Planet was a game, it was a reasonable decision.
The experiments before ability manifestation were merely torture.
Since they just repeated acts close to torture until awakening, all to create artificial ability users, it would have been difficult to implement as a game.
Though for him, who had directly experienced all of that with his own body, it was an ambiguous feeling.
—You’d better adapt quickly. Otherwise you’ll die. Once awakening occurs, the experiment intensity increases. This is advice coming from pure goodwill.
“……”
‘Pure goodwill? Ridiculous.’
Baek Woohyun stared at the surveillance camera with coldly flashing eyes. He ridiculed the word goodwill, but he knew very well that the advice itself wasn’t false.
When he manifested abilities over there too, several other Test Subjects had died, unable to withstand the suddenly increased experiment intensity.
And that had been the same for him as well.
Though he’d awakened, having only acquired the first Core Element using the system, he’d nearly died in the first experiment.
If not for the body strengthened by the Core Element’s additional effects, he would have lost his life.
—Are you listening, Test Subject No. 48?
“……”
—Well, fine. It’s your freedom whether to accept the advice or not. I’ll also freely start the experiment. Exit the room.
Soon, with a clack, the door opened.
Baek Woohyun obediently followed the researcher’s instructions and headed outside.
Because he recognized that resisting would be meaningless anyway since everything was just proceeding according to a predetermined storyline.
Of course, separate from that, if a situation came where he could kill the researcher, he would act without mercy.
Since this was a game, it would only be fake, but even that alone could somewhat appease the clamoring specters’ resentment.
The place he arrived at after walking straight through the corridor connected to the door was a somewhat larger room.
Unlike where he’d originally been, it was just a large room with no furniture placed in it.
However, it wasn’t entirely empty.
‘That’s…’
In the room stood something humanoid covered in a pure white shell, and seeing it, Baek Woohyun’s eyes narrowed.
Because he recognized the identity of this bizarrely shaped thing at once.
‘Etinel.’
Etinel.
A byproduct that the research facility had obtained while conducting Project: Transcendence in the past, and the culprit that had taken the lives of countless Test Subjects.
That damned thing had been nothing less than a grim reaper to the Test Subjects including Baek Woohyun.
After all, it was a weapon designed from the start to kill awakened ability users.
‘It’s still an early version.’
The early version Etinel was merely an object that was just strong and hard.
The problem was that it was strong and hard enough to easily subdue most awakeners, but conversely, that meant it had nothing particularly special besides that.
Considering that it would become stronger through improvements as time passed, and the final version would even partially handle supernatural abilities permitted only to awakeners, it was still at the toy level for now.
‘Ah, right. I remember. It starts from here.’
Right after awakening, and Etinel.
The two pieces of information combined in his mind and dredged up memories from the distant past.
Having realized what would start from now, Baek Woohyun’s eyes shone pitch-black.
The same thing as a moment in the past would occur, but the result would certainly, and completely, be different. No one else but he would make it so.
—The content of this experiment is simple. Fight the Etinel with your manifested supernatural ability.