I'm an Infinite Regressor, But I've Got Stories to Tell-Chapter 321

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◈ I’m an Infinite Regressor, But I’ve Got Stories to Tell

Chapter 321

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The Skeptic XIV

Allow me a moment to defend myself.

It’s not that my cognitive abilities are defective just because I failed to reach the blatantly obvious conclusion until Ji-won pointed it out. Rather, after living roughly ten thousand years in a ruined world, I simply forgot how society functioned back when law and order still functioned as normal.

No, before that, is it even right to be learning about “the normal social processes under law and order” from Yu Ji-won of all people? Doesn’t that violate some fundamental law of the universe?

Either way, I decided to provide a bit more of a “Yu Ji-won–tailored” service, and the result was a success.

Du-du-du-du...

My used Matiz rattled and groaned, as if its engine were muttering, “Just... kill me... now...”

Ji-won, who had been ready to report me to the police as a would-be stalker just moments before, now sat in the back seat, feeling every vibration of the Matiz.

A heavy duffel bag lay at her feet.

And across her lap rested a hand axe.

I turned the wheel with ease and spoke to her via the rearview mirror. “So? Feeling more secure now?”

Driving posed no problem for me. Maybe in this era, with civilization intact, a Matiz would be considered a piece of junk, but after living in an apocalypse, it felt like a top-of-the-line sports car. No random ghosts stowed away, no actual wails emerging from the engine. To me, it was practically a racing vehicle.

“If I try anything fishy at all, just swing that axe and crack me in the back of the skull.”

She pursed her lips and clutched the handle of the hand axe on her lap, apparently not used to its weight. “There are a few dozen things I could point out here, but first, you just ran your third red light.”

“Huh? Did I?”

“Yes. Luckily no other cars were passing. You should be more worried about dying in an accident than being killed by an axe.”

“Ahh, sorry about that. I’m still not used to this ‘traffic light’ contraption. And are all these lanes really necessary? One lane could handle everything.”

“Pardon me, sir. Did you immigrate here from some third-world country?”

Adapting to modern civilization wasn’t easy. Still, I delivered Ji-won to her job site safely.

And that’s the crucial part: safely. Had my senses been any duller than the average Awakened superhuman, we’d probably have ended up in “seven collision accidents” rather than “arriving without incident.”

“That was... quite the unusual driving style.”

She got out, her legs shaking like a newborn goat’s. Future Yu Ji-won would have had no trouble keeping her balance, but this version of her was still young.

“At least we got here fast, right?” I said breezily.

“That was closer to racing to meet death, but yes. At least it’s clear now that you don’t intend to harm me.”

“Oh! So you’re finally going to trust in my earnest good will?”

“Not exactly. If I do go missing, the police can just pull CCTV of your driving. It’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”

Anyway, from that day on, Ji-won regularly used my “commuter service.”

Sure, the path she took to “trust” me was bizarre, but hey, a win is a win.

Yu Ji-won was a strange kid.

Well, that went without saying. She would one day grow up to be a kidnapper and torturer, so it stood to reason that her personality wasn’t exactly normal.

Still, the adult Ji-won hid that abnormal side very skillfully. She turned “lack of emotion” into “cool-headed judgment” and “sadism” into “ruthless but daring execution.” These inborn flaws became strengths that someone in society “had to” shoulder. It was basically her survival strategy.

On the other hand...

“I’m sorry...”

Fourteen-year-old Yu Ji-won was different. She still hadn’t learned enough tactics to blend in with the world.

“Do you know me?”

For a beat, I was silent. “What do you mean, ‘Do I know you?’ Ji-won, I drove you all the way to Uijeongbu just yesterday.”

“Ah, so you’re Mr. Matiz.”

Bow.

When we met again in the alley, she greeted me as if only just realizing who I was.

“I’m really not good at recognizing people’s faces. My apologies.”

She was clearly abnormal.

Granted, I knew from the future that Ji-won generally didn’t bother remembering people she deemed useless. If you could offer her even a slight advantage, however, she’d show off an uncanny memory. Dang Seo-rin, Noh Do-hwa, Cheon Yo-hwa, and especially me, the Undertaker—she remembered all of us from the moment she first met us in that convenience store.

“Now in this timeline, I am helping her by saving her a ton of commuting time, which can be quantified in real numbers. Yet she still forgets my face?” I grumbled.

Not that it happened forever. Over time, she started mixing me up less and less.

“Mr. Matiz, I look forward to your help again today.”

Nowadays, she’d greet me politely in the alley, almost like we had our own little rendezvous point. If we ran into each other somewhere else, like the supermarket, though...

“Oh, hey there, Ji-won. Doing some shopping?”

She tilted her head and aksed, “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

Just like that. She’d act like she had amnesia or something.

Once again, it was blatantly abnormal.

“Let’s test something...”

I went out to the alley at my usual time but in a different outfit. Instead of my usual crisp summer shirt, I wore a worn-out T-shirt, hunched my back like an old grandma, and even held a cane for good measure.

Before long, Ji-won came down the villa stairs. She spotted me, tilted her head a couple degrees, then walked past as if I were a total stranger.

No hello, no reaction.

“Huh.”

That deepened my suspicions.

I decided to up the ante. I snuck into her house while no one else was around—no family members in sight, perfect timing. In the bedroom, I pulled on an old set of her father’s clothes. They reeked of age and poverty, a musty smell that had settled in for years.

I waited on the living room floor, a bottle of cheap makgeolli in my hands, until she returned. She didn’t have a modeling job that week, so she’d be home early.

Bi-bi-bi-beep.

I heard a keypad chime at the door. Her grandmother, who suffered from dementia, couldn’t remember a more complicated code, so they kept it at 5555. Sometimes even that was too much. Her grandmother occasionally asked me, the neighbor, to open the door for her.

Ji-won stepped in, slipped off her shoes, and sniffed the air lightly. She looked at me on the living room floor.

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“Huh? Father, you didn’t go to church today...? Then who’s picking Grandma up? Where did she go?”

I stayed silent, feigning drunkenness, then staggered out the front door. Though she cocked her head, Ji-won didn’t bother stopping me.

Only when I made it back to the alley could I finally let out a sigh. “I did not see that coming...”

The distant city skyline looked strangely crisp under today’s sky.

And so, I finally learned something new about my would-be adjutant.

My long-standing right-hand companion, Yu Ji-won... can’t recognize human faces.

Prosopagnosia: the disorder of being unable to recognize or properly perceive faces.

We all get a touch of “face blindness” now and then when we suddenly bump into an old classmate on the street. However, Yu Ji-won’s symptoms were on a completely different level.

“Oh, yes, your guess was correct, Mr. Matiz. You figured it out.”

If she’d been an adult, she wouldn’t have revealed such a potentially exploitable weakness to someone who wasn’t even a close acquaintance, but the fourteen-year-old version told me without hesitation.

“I was born having difficulty perceiving or remembering people’s faces.”

“How severe is it?”

“To be blunt, if you replaced someone’s head with a full-body mannequin, I doubt I could tell the difference by looking just at the face.”

I had no idea. It was so unexpected that I nearly retorted, “But in the future, you recognized people fine!” but of course that future hadn’t happened yet.

Instead, I asked a question that fit the current timeline.

“Then how do you tell people apart? I mean, you manage to recognize the director at your photo shoots, right?”

“I rely on location and context,” she answered matter-of-factly. “If there’s a figure of a certain build and a certain outfit hovering near a camera, I deduce that’s the director. I can also try identifying people by their voices. But I’m a poor listener, and a lot of voices sound the same to me.”

It’s quite troublesome, she added.

“That’s why, whenever possible, I try to distinguish people by smell.”

“Smell?”

“Yes, their body scent. Most people tend to have consistent preferences about perfume or cologne.”

She stepped closer.

“If you don’t mind...”

Then she leaned in, nose near my chest. She circled slowly around my torso, sniffing quietly.

“I thought so.”

She wasn’t Awakened yet, so her eyes were still dark instead of their future hue. She looked up at me.

“This is quite fascinating... If my nose is correct, you, Mr. Matiz, have no body scent at all. Apart from a mild fabric softener, your body is entirely odorless.”

Indeed, that was my constitution. As Ji-won said, I literally had no distinct scent. Whether my body had always been like that or changed after I became an Awakener, I never figured out.

“Oh...”

And that was when I realized how adult Yu Ji-won managed to separate people so easily. It was by smell.

When people Awaken, a lot changes. Everyone always focuses on “they stop aging,” but in truth, their entire physiology can shift. Take hair color, for instance. Once this timeline’s apocalypse began, black-haired Yu Ji-won would Awaken, turning her hair silver and her dark eyes into a blend of purple and blue.

Body scent changes too.

“The Saintess exudes the smell of fresh running water.”

“Noh Do-hwa smells sharply of lemon.”

“Cheon Yo-hwa is orange-scented.”

“Lee Ha-yul strangely smells like freshly baked bread.”

“Sim Ah-ryeon has a faint mozzarella cheese aroma...”

In an apocalypse with plummeting standards of hygiene, Awakeners exuding these unique, often pleasant scents stand out like “chosen ones.” Hair color, eye color, and body scent are so vivid and straightforward that they can’t help but seem divine.

And in the future, Yu Ji-won was adept at Aura. Partly thanks to my teaching, sure, but to be honest, she already had a knack for it before we ever met. That implied she had extremely sharp senses compared to others.

“For her, all the important people in her life are Awakened, each with distinct body scents. It’d be easy to memorize them by smell alone,” I mused.

Then there was me, the Undertaker?

“In a world where everyone is covered in unique scents... I, who have no smell at all, would actually stand out the most.”

In a sense, I’d be the easiest one to distinguish. Plus, I was always wearing that barista outfit, wielding a cane sword. She could identify me at a glance just from my getup.

“Same goes for Dang Seo-rin, Cheon Yo-hwa, and Noh Do-hwa. They basically never change their clothes. They’re easy to recognize.”

That realization triggered a chain reaction, like toppling a row of dominoes.

“Mini-Map...”

That was the power Yu Ji-won would one day Awaken.

“In her Mini-Map ability, everything about a person’s appearance, their face and features, is ‘bleached’ away.”

An Awakened ability is practically a mirror reflecting how its user experiences the world. From that perspective, Yu Ji-won’s Mini-Map is telling.

A black-and-white chessboard world. People only distinguished by name labels stuck to each piece. No one’s actual form recognized as unique.

Ji-won habitually assigned Noh Do-hwa to the queen (♕), but that didn’t necessarily mean the queen was Noh Do-hwa. If she relabeled the bishop, the bishop would become Noh Do-hwa. If she labeled a pawn, the pawn was Noh Do-hwa.

“Seems like even now in her middle school years, the seed of that ability is already there.”

And maybe that was also why Go Yuri’s mental control never worked on her.

“Mr. Matiz?”

“Hmm?”

“Is there something on my face?”

“No, nothing... Anyway, hurry up and get in. We’ve gotta go all the way to Suwon today, right?”

“Oh, right. Thanks in advance.”

Du-du-du-du.

I merged into traffic, something I’d grown more accustomed to. Still, I found myself lost in thought.

‘Even if I meddle in this timeline’s past, she might not remember me in the future.’

She didn’t yet have the heightened senses the Awakened version would one day use, so her method of memorizing scents wasn’t that refined. A normal person’s senses can only go so far, after all.

‘I can’t even make her remember my name.’

Not long ago, I tried introducing myself to her as “Undertaker.” Yet for some strange reason, she’d completely forgotten by the next day and just went back to calling me “Mr. Matiz.”

I suspect I know why.

‘At this point in time, an Awakener called “the Undertaker” doesn’t exist. So that “nonsensical data” must get auto-deleted or forcibly smoothed out. Likely by Cheon Yo-hwa.’

Which meant I probably shouldn’t risk using Aura openly either. At least if Yu Ji-won failed to notice, it might slide by.

‘For all I know, Cheon Yo-hwa is constantly patching or editing our words and actions in real time. It’s possible that the me I believe I am and the me she sees are completely different.’

It put a lot of constraints on the actions I could take.

‘So.’

I couldn’t call myself by my real name, ■■■, nor by my alias, the Undertaker.

Meanwhile, Yu Ji-won, who couldn’t recognize faces, might never form a strong impression of me at all.

But I had an idea—a way to carve “my presence” deep into her mind despite those hurdles.