the world after the fall
Jaehwan saw the people. Or rather, he saw those who were once ‘human’ just until a while ago. Unlike in <Chaos>, they didn’t look like corpses. Rather, they were replaced by trees, rotten and dried up trees. Trees that knew that the land had no nutrients but couldn’t leave the land. They were looking at Jaehwan.
‘I see it now. I finally see it.’
Jaehwan then remembered Mulack’s words. He said there was no Big Brother in the Nightmare of the Beginning.
This world did not have eyes because eyes were everywhere. They all looked directly at Jaehwan. Jaehwan looked back at them and smiled.
‘If I can see them, I can fight them.’
There were countless eyes within those trees, and Jaehwan looked at them. There was the sound of roots being uprooted, just like a tree pulling out its own roots. Jaehwan walked and walked. The other trees were horrified.
How? How can this be?
How can a tree… walk on its own?
Trees were shaking — specifically their roots, trunks, and branches. They were terrified by Jaehwan who was not afraid of facing all these eyes. They wished that someone would punish that walking tree and burn it down. However, nobody volunteered and just moved out of the way. And Yoonhwan was among those trees.
‘Ah…’
He wasn’t sure why Jaehwan looked like he was shining in between all this chaos. He just saved a man and was walking back. That was it.
But why did it feel like he had witnessed that scene multiple times?
Yoonhwan teared up with an emotion that he could not understand or explain. He turned and there Seoyul was, crying. They smiled at each other as if they knew something like this had happened before. And then they looked at Jaehwan again.
“Well, have we become weird too?”
“…Maybe.”
“It reminds me of that. The novel that he wrote once…”
Through the trees, Jaehwan was walking toward them.
Just like people who found the exit out of a long nightmare, Yoonhwan and Seoyul ran toward Jaehwan.
The door to the new world was beginning to open a man’s smallest and darkest box.
Unique worlds existed in this world. It was not a parallel universe. It always existed together in the same world that people could see. It was somtimes labeled as delusion, but the possibility was always there.
Of course, this unique world was different from the unique world that Jaehwan knew.
In this place, having a unique world didn’t allow him to make a [Setting] or utilize it. Unique worlds moved in a more complicated way in this world.
-Jaehwan, please…
The doctor gave him a small notebook that he took out from his clothes as he was taken to the hospital. It was the record of Jaehwan’s story. It was so severely discolored that it showed how much it had been read through. Jaehwan understood how the doctor had succeeded in reaching his unique world.
-Jaehwan, there’s only one way to defeat reality. It’s not like <Chaos> or <Depth>. You cannot fight the world alone now.
Even in this place, people could enter someone else’s unique world and believe in the same thing to live on. They could enjoy the free world outside or classical mechanics and other oppressions, but…
-I am just the first. You must let people know about your world.
That was only possible when a lot of people believed in that world. In the last page of the notebook, there was the doctor’s short novel that Jaehwan once ripped away. The novel had been taped back with the pieces of paper.
‘He didn’t throw it away.’
Jaehwan read it again. It was a boring and uninteresting novel. But maybe the doctor wanted to change the world with this. Maybe he wanted to show it to the world and invite people over to the World After the Fall. Jaehwan touched the paragraphs of the novel for a long time.
‘Doctor, if that is what your wish…’
Jaehwan turned on his laptop computer. There was an unedited novel that he was working on before he quit. He opened the document, erased everything, and began typing in other words.
One by one, the white document was soon filled. Memories slowly began coming back. In the same way he would stab or slash, Jaehwan kept on typing. Stories began to play from his head. Just like when he succeeded in his [World Stab] for the first time, or when he acquired the [Fall], his head exploded with countless realizations.
The paragraphs were rough and weak. He didn’t have good metaphors and he had many grammatical errors.
But he kept on going. Just like he didn’t give up on his stabs, he kept on writing. Even when a crude paragraph made him think harder, he did not give up and kept on typing everything down. He did it as if this was the reason why he lived that world, as if this were the reason for the history of his life. He grew suspicious, understood, forgot, created another theory, proved it, and edited.
He wrote and wrote again.
After an uncertain amount of time, Jaehwan finally finished the prologue of his novel. As he read through the completed prologue and fixed any errors, a certain question came to him.
‘Oh, what was the doctor’s name by the way?’
It was strange. The name that was clear until a while ago, the name that was shown in various media stations, was fuzzy now. Jaehwan then found the doctor’s name written below the title of his short novel.
‘…You’ve got to be kidding.’
Jaehwan smiled as he looked at the name. It was a funny name.
Jaehwan opened the web novel website and there were countless novels waiting to be read. Jaehwan saw all of these novels in a new light now. He thought maybe all these novels had their own unique worlds. Some were crude and some were great, but all of these had various unique worlds to create this universe as a whole.
Jaehwan typed in the doctor’s name as the pen name and opened a novel with the same name as the doctor’s short novel. Then a message popped up to add a description for the work.
Description?
Jaehwan thought long and hard about it as if he was a god showing his unique world for the first time. He couldn’t make it sound too grand or else people would avoid it. But it couldn’t still be too weak because people wouldn’t anticipate it either.
Jaehwan opened up the note again.
In that note, Jaehwan read through the paragraphs that the doctor had left very slowly. And at some point, one sentence caught his attention. He grinned. Yes, maybe this was the only fitting sentence for the beginning of this story. This was it. Jaehwan positioned his hands over the keyboard. And he gave himself ample time to type in each word carefully.
-This is the story of a man who did not return while everyone else returned to the past.