Record of a Thousand Lives

Kang Yoon-Soo frowned at the assailant’s words. He was certain that he had not mentioned his regression to anyone in this life. ‘It doesn’t feel like another hallucination…’ He dropped the wild tusk boar’s carcass and walked toward where the voice had come from.

Whiing!

A couple more arrows flew past him, but he did not stop moving and easily avoided every one of them. He asked coldly, “Who are you?”

He knew that the assailant was hidden behind a boulder, and he nimbly dashed toward the back of the boulder as he drew his longsword. However, his sword stopped in midair the moment he came face to face with the assailant.

“Why…” he murmured, his voice trembling. He found it hard to hide his surprise as he asked, “Why are you here?”

The assailant responded, “Why? Am I not allowed to be here?”

Sirian smirked at Kang Yoon-Soo.

***

It was Sirian Lanchecaster, the Corrupted King of All Things, and the strongest human on the continent. However, Kang Yoon-Soo was supposed to meet Sirian at the later stages of the legendary quest; why was he here in the mountain ranges now?

Kang Yoon-Soo bit his lips as he tightly gripped his longsword. He said, “You… It’s not possible for you to be here right now. You should be guarding the doors of Pandemonium right now… just as you always did.”

Sirian slung his longbow onto his shoulder and smirked. “Look here, my emotionless friend. Have you forgotten how you killed me in the ‘previous world’?” he asked.

Kang Yoon-Soo could not help but frown at those words. In the previous world, his 999th life, he was the one who had killed Sirian. However, that had not stopped the war with Pandemonium from breaking out.

His thoughts were conflicted as he tried to suppress something welling up from his chest when he suddenly noticed something peculiar. “Where is Riberion’s Magic Spear? Why are you using something like a bow?” he asked.

“Who knows? Maybe you’ll get to know once you get hit by it,” Sirian answered as he drew his bowstring.

Kang Yoon-Soo immediately ducked and avoided the arrow, but he figured out the identity of the assailant at the same time. He sighed and said, “I knew it. You aren’t Sirian.”

He charged toward Sirian and swung his longsword. Sirian jumped to the left to avoid the longsword, but Kang Yoon-Soo was a step faster. The longsword swung down in a crescent arc, slicing through Sirian’s body.

“Kuh!” Sirian’s body was cut in half and turned black. His corpse was no longer recognizable; it looked closer to a pile of charcoal than a human corpse.

A doppelganger was a monster that read another’s mind and transformed into something from their thoughts. The Sirian that had appeared in front of Kang Yoon-Soo was just a doppelganger who had read his mind.

If the doppelganger truly wanted to shake Kang Yoon-Soo up, it should have transformed into the Demon Lord. However, the Demon Lord was not a being that a lowly creature like itself could dare imitate, which was why it settled for Sirian instead.

‘Something is strange…’ Kang Yoon-Soo thought. Based on his experience from his hundreds of lives, doppelgangers never left their habitats, and they didn’t live in the Hatar Mountains. ‘I should be meeting a doppelganger in a few days, but that was a variant and an exception. Why did a doppelganger that shouldn’t be here suddenly appear?’

At the very moment he was lost in thought, a whisper teased his ears.

‘The calamity is almost here. You have to prepare for it.’

Who was the one who kept whispering to him? What was the approaching calamity?

It had been a very long time since Kang Yoon-Soo had been full of questions he did not know the answer to.

***

Pitter-patter… Pitter-patter…

The vast mountain range was covered by rain.

“He’s late…” Shaneth muttered, sticking her hand outside the cave. A trail of rainwater fell from between her fingers.

“Maybe he’s planning to catch a tiger or something,” Henrick said as he fiddled with his sculpting knife.

“Hmm… I’m still getting worried,” Shaneth replied.

“Do you really think he’s someone who would get lost?” Henrick grumbled.

“It’s raining… What if he catches a cold?” Shaneth asked as she looked out of the cave.

“Who knows? He seems to be the kind of guy who would be fine even after getting hit by a hailstorm,” Henrick said as he tossed a piece of wood he had been sculpting behind him.

“What are you so carefully making?” Shaneth asked, tilting her head.

“This and that,” Henrick answered as he took another piece of wood and started to sculpt it. He continued, “But do you know?”

“Know what?” Shaneth asked.

“What do you mean ‘what’? That guy, Kang Yoon-Soo’s identity,” Henrick replied as he skillfully and accurately sculpted the piece of wood with only his right hand. He continued, “A youngster like him has knowledge that even an adventurer with decades of experience would never have, and he’s eerily emotionless. I’ve met different kinds of people, but it’s my first time meeting someone as emotionless as that guy. Are all Travelers like that? What the hell is he anyway?”

“I’m not so sure either…” Shaneth replied. She took a moment to think deeply, before slowly answering, “...but I believe he’ll tell us when the right time comes. He doesn’t answer anything he doesn’t want to answer, but…” She hesitated for a minute before saying adamantly, “He’s a good person. He’s someone I can trust and depend on.”

“Oh really? Hmm… I’ve been wondering for a while now,” Henrick said.

“About what?” Shaneth asked.

“Why do you trust someone as dense and emotionless as him?” Henrick asked.

Shaneth burst out into laughter, but after it subsided, she showed her burn mark and replied, “I don’t know, maybe because he made me pretty?”

“Huh? Did he put makeup on you or something?” Henrick asked.

“Tsk… I don’t want to talk to you, mister.” Shaneth pouted while sulking. Henrick just let out a small laugh as he went back to his sculpting. Silence filled the cave for a while.

Suddenly, Shaneth stood up and shouted, “Mister Kang Yoon-Soo!”

Kang Yoon-Soo was walking toward the cave from afar. He was under the rain without an umbrella, and Shaneth hurriedly ran toward him with a cloth to shelter him from the rain.

Then, Kang Yoon-Soo unslung the longbow from his back…

Whoosh!

Henrick ran toward Shaneth and pushed her down. An arrow narrowly missed her, barely grazing her head. She would have died on the spot if he had been late by a fraction of a second.

“Huh…? What’s going on…?” Shaneth asked in confusion. However, Kang Yoon-Soo drew his bowstring once again with his usual cold expression, and another arrow flew toward her.

Henrick pulled out his summoning box, but Kang Yoon-Soo suddenly began to speak. “Henrick, you are destined to turn yourself into a puppet by your own hands.”

Henrick stiffened for a second. Kang Yoon-Soo quickly drew his bowstring and shot an arrow toward Henrick. However, the rain from the heavens was on Henrick’s side; the droplets of water altered the trajectory of the arrow, and it narrowly flew past his eyes.

“What are you doing?!” Shaneth screamed at him.

Kang Yoon-Soo turned around to face her and said, “Shaneth, I will be killing myself.”

Shaneth’s expression filled with fear, and she started to tremble. Kang Yoon-Soo drew his bowstring once again and let loose another arrow toward her.

Whiiing!

Pshhk!

A sword swung down from above, blocking the arrow and splitting Kang Yoon-Soo’s head open. His corpse lay dead on the ground and turned into dust. The man who had swung the sword appeared in front of the two.

It was Kang Yoon-Soo.

“What the hell is going on?” Henrick exclaimed as he came back to his senses.

“A doppelganger imitates one’s worst nightmare,” Kang Yoon-Soo answered quietly. He was about to enter the cave when Shaneth suddenly grabbed onto the hem of his shirt.

“Please… Don’t die…” Shaneth pleaded shakily, trembling beneath the rain. Her breathing was rough, and it was unclear whether the streak of water flowing down her face came from tears or rainwater. She repeated, “Please don’t die… Please don’t die in front of me…”

Kang Yoon-Soo turned around and faced her before hugging her tightly. He said softly, “I won’t die. No matter what happens.”

***

“So that was a doppelganger that transformed into you?” Henrick asked.

Kang Yoon-Soo silently nodded before adding, “Although I’m not sure why such a monster appeared in the mountain.”

“Hoo, there’s something even you don’t know?” Henrick asked in surprise.

“So, everything was just an illusion from that monster?” Shaneth asked in relief. However, she hugged her chest with trembling hands, seemingly suppressing a fear that would not subside.

“I hope to never meet such a monster ever again…” Henrick said with a grimace. Henrick tapped his temple before asking, “But why are you so calm? It doesn’t sound as if you met that doppelganger.”

Kang Yoon-Soo was busy butchering the wild tusk boar he had carried back. He sprinkled just the right amount of salt on the meat he got from the carcass. The cave was humid thanks to the rain, so it would be difficult to smoke the meat into jerky, but that would help them preserve the meat for a bit longer. As he silently prepared their rations, Henrick chose to give up on hearing a response from him.

“Ah, never mind. There’s no way someone like you would even get played by a monster like that. You conned the Death General, after all…” Henrick muttered.

However, contrary to Henrick’s assumptions, Kang Yoon-Soo was actually deep in thought. ‘Something is weird… Why does it feel as if something is off…?’

Kang Yoon-Soo pulled the heart of the wild tusk boar from its carcass with bloody hands.

***

The trio took turns standing watch as they rested. The sky was still gloomy even after morning came, and they had to trek across the mountain range while getting rained on.

Henrick looked up at the sky that was covered with rain clouds and grumbled, “When will this damned rain ever end?”

“In four days,” Kang Yoon-Soo replied.

“I think you would make a killing if you opened a fortune-telling shop…” Shaneth commented.

Their dry rations had all run out after they trekked across the mountains for a few days. However, they did not starve to death thanks to the wild tusk boar Kang Yoon-Soo had hunted.

On a night they spent camping out in the thickly overgrown forest after four days of exhausting travel, the rain miraculously stopped just as Kang Yoon-Soo had said four days before. Everything in the vicinity was wet, but Kang Yoon-Soo managed to find some dry wood from somewhere.

Shaneth was stirring the pot with a ladle, as it was her routine to prepare the food whenever they camped. However, her hands stopped moving and she suddenly asked, “Don’t you hear something?”