I'm an Infinite Regressor, But I've Got Stories to Tell-Chapter 341
The Surrenderer III
After careful consideration, I reached a conclusion:
Oh Dok-seo was screwed.
Honestly, she’d been screwed from the moment she posted enough announcement notices on the SG Net novel-serialization board to reach double-digits. Now, countless stone tablets had washed ashore in Busan like a landing force, a veritable four-figure count of them.
Could there be a situation that better embodied the word “karma”?
Yesterday, we only needed to control Seo Gyu’s gym members, but as of today, these tablets weren’t just on Haeundae Beach, they were popping up on any Busan beach facing the sea.
Once again: Oh Dok-seo was screwed.
“C-Commander Noh! No, Do-hwa unnie! Please, just lend me 50 of your National Road Management Corps personnel! Please, I’m begging you!”
“You think I can just casually hire out 50 people from the corps...?”
As dedicated as the National Road Management Corps was to battling Anomalies, they didn’t have the resources to deal with something like this. Besides, these tablets gave off no hint of Anomalous energy. What potential harm did they pose? At worst, sailors might find them annoying when navigating and... a certain author going by the handle “LiteraryGirl” had her reputation severely tarnished?
Do-hwa felt no reason to care about that second part. Indeed, she was a normie with zero interest in subculture. Astonishingly enough, among the members of the Regressors’ Alliance, she was the only one who wasn’t a reader of LiteraryGirl.
“P-please! Look, I’ve been shipping you and the Undertaker since forever! Even when everyone said I was stuck in a minor fandom, I never lost hope! Take pity on me and help me out!”
“What the heck are you talking about...?”
The golden hour had passed. Now in this hour and day, countless people in Busan encountered these mysterious monoliths. Some glanced at them on their way to work at Dream Casino, some while walking their Sapsal dog on the sand. And among them, inevitably...
– Anonymous: Lmao, wtf hahahaha
Some were LiteraryGirl’s readers.
– Anonymous: I was on a morning stroll and I saw these tombstones? Stone slabs? Stuck on the beach haha. I’m a coward, but I got curious whether it was some Anomaly, so I went closer...
(Image)
– Anonymous: LitlololerlololarylololGirllololol
– Anonymous: Lmao is she posting indefinite-hiatus notices in reality now instead of on SG Net? Every day with this author is legendary lmfao
Countdown.
3, 2, 1.
Ready.
– [Samcheon] MeteorIsIceMagic: This looks like Busan?
Action.
– [Samcheon] MeteorIsIceMagic: Some of our guild’s scouts just got back from a night flight. The beach was jam-packed with those things.
└Anonymous (OP): oh rly? did the Road Management Corps say anything?
└[Samcheon] MeteorIsIceMagic: They said it’s harmless, so just ignore it.
– Anonymous: lmao f**k LiteraryGirl hahaha
– [Baekhwa] SixthGrader: Hoehee >_<);;
– Anonymous: Wth is this??
20 comments reached.
– [Baekhwa] SchoolNewspaper2: Weren’t there rumors that a Constellation read her stuff? Guess it’s true lmao
└Anonymous: Ah
└Anonymous (OP): O
└Anonymous: So that’s why these tablets suddenly appeared, huh?
50 comments reached.
Post becomes popular.
– [EasternHoly] KindlyOne: Wow, I’m zooming in on the pics and reading them. My blood is boiling from my dantian.
└Anonymous (OP): Right??? I gave up a year ago, but seeing that hiatus notice again raised my blood pressure.
└[NationalRoad] ForbiddenBooksDept17: Ugh, why does LiteraryGirl keep posting announcements if she’s never going to return? She could be writing during that time instead.
└[EasternHoly] KindlyOne: secret info our Saintess is also a readerㅋ
└[NationalRoad] ForbiddenBooksDept17: Haha, so is my squad leaderㅋ
└[Baekhwa] SchoolNewspaper2: Same with our guild leaderㅇㅇ
└[Samcheon] MeteorIsIceMagic: Our Great Witch too. Add her in.
└[EasternHoly] KindlyOne: lolol
200 comments reached.
300 comments reached.
Dok-seo begged Seo Gyu to use his authority as the SG Net admin to remove it from the “popular posts,” but he refused. By then, more than 30 identical posts were going viral, anyway.
– OldManGoryeo: lmao these guys are hilarious. At this point it’s not the author, but the readers who have issues lmaoooo
OldManGoryeo stepped in.
1,100 comments reached.
– Anonymous: How does LiteraryGirl have the nerve to keep going on indefinite hiatus?? Wouldn’t a normal person just keep writing?
– Anonymous: I don’t get it. Someone please explain LiteraryGirl’s mental state.
└dolLHoUse: Not simple
Boom.
SG Net exploded.
From Pyongyang to Seoul, Sejong, Busan, to even across the Chinese mainland and Japanese archipelago—courtesy of AOIM-GPT’s stellar translation—all these regions’ power players were now united, all reading in the same language.
We might fight each other for various reasons, but we all shared one thing: we despised authors who went on indefinite hiatus.
A grand unification of Asia. A stunning miracle.
On the old internet, folks sometimes posted that if East Asian countries ever stood united, they would “theoretically” be the strongest in the world. Of course, there were no more states in the apocalypse, yet now that national borders had fallen, East Asia had ironically decided to prove that “theory” in practice.
“Uh, hyung... It’s looking pretty rough. I’m not even sure mobilizing the Constellations will help,” Seo Gyu said. “These guys are convinced the Constellations are on their side, so if we try to suppress them, we might get hammered instead.”
We were in a corner of the room where Dok-seo was gnawing her fingernails. If you listened closely, you could hear a rapid-fire rap verse escaping her lips:
Whydidthishappen
Whydidthishappen
Why
Thissodoesn’tmakesense
Iwasreallyreallygonnacomebacknextmonth
Whycan’ttheyjustwaitonemonth
Whydotheyhavenopatience
It’scompletelynonsensical
From a reader’s perspective, her attitude was infuriating. But for my own part in it, my surprise stemmed from another source.
‘I can’t believe even her mental fortress can shake like this!’
Unlike the characters in the original anime who used the AT-Field, her mind was more like a fortress of hardened steel.[1] Usually, if an author posted a hiatus announcement and then went to play games, they’d feel guilt. I promised my readers I’d write, they’d sigh to themselves, but here I am just gaming like the trash I am. But in Dok-seo’s case...
Haha! I’m taking in nutrients from other works to feed my readers better. There’s no other author like me!
That was how she genuinely thought about it. It wasn’t self-justification or escapism either. She sincerely believed it, 120%.
On top of that, in my hundreds of iterations, she’d never once used macros for her hiatus notices. Every notice was handmade—painstakingly typed out, letter by letter. Why? Because that was how she showed devotion and courtesy to her beloved readers!
The perfectly obvious courtesy, some might say, would have been actually writing the dang novel. But that argument never reached Dok-seo.
‘Even that adamantine spirit is crumbling now!’
Truly the work of an Outer God. It might not have been able to save its Miko’s rotten mind, but it could most certainly drag that mind by the hair and drown it in a well.
She looked even more unstable than in iteration 888, when she secretly had an AI ghostwrite her chapters and got caught by me.
[Mr. Undertaker. Sim Ah-ryeon finished a week’s worth of tasks this morning and is rushing down to Busan now. If we don’t resolve this before she arrives, Oh Dok-seo’s state might deteriorate even further.]
A similar Telepathic message must have reached Dok-seo too. She snapped out of her muttering and jerked her head up.
“N-no! I can’t handle Ah-ryeon unnie on top of this! My dignity! My honor! They’ll die! I’ll be butchered, strangled, then utterly massacred and ground to meat paste!”
I watched in silence.
“Y-yes! It’s all the Admin of the Infinite Metagame’s fault! I won’t forgive it! Outer Gooood!”
She dashed off. Seo Gyu, who oversaw SG Net, stared after her with a baffled expression.
“Uh, hyung, aren’t you going after her?”
“...Should I?”
“Of course. You picked her up at Busan Station. Her, Ah-ryeon, me—all your responsibility.”
“I’m only human, Seo Gyu.”
“Huh...”
Ignoring Seo Gyu’s dubious look, I went after Dok-seo. Much as I didn’t want to, who else would take responsibility for that kid?
“Stop that right noooow!”
When I arrived, Dok-seo was violently shaking the precious laptop—the main body of the Admin of the Infinite Metagame—that I had stored in my room.
“I-I’m your Miko! Your agent on Earth! Why are you slandering the person most important to me? Is it... Does it make you happy? Huh? You sadist? Why frame me as an enemy of the world over something that never even happened?!”
[Heeheeheeheehee.]
A cheap speaker played giggling on loops while the character for “laughter” was displayed on-screen. The white-haired avatar was carefully retracing the letter with a brush pen.
“S-stop laughiiiiiing!”
[Kieuk-kieuk-kieuk.]
Apparently, the Admin pronounces the Korean character for “lol” as “kieuk-kieuk-kieuk.” I added that useless factoid to my mental Akashic Records and stepped into the center of the commotion.
“Name your terms.”
[Hah?]
“Surely you didn’t do all this arbitrarily. You squeezed out your already-weakened power to produce thousands of stone tablets. In martial arts terms, you spat out your last innate energy,” I analyzed calmly. “You must want something. If it’s a reasonable proposal, I’ll consider it. State your demands.”
“Y-yeah! That’s right! What do you want? What’s so important that you started all this madness?!”
On the monitor, the 144p white-haired girl smirked.
[Go—search up the Three Kingdoms tag-at the novel-serialization board—right now lmao]
I tilted my head but complied.
SG Net’s novel-serialization board had tabs sorted into Fantasy, Martial Arts, and so on, but there was one very special feature distinguishing this site from older novel platforms.
Three Kingdoms.
No need to even search the tag, the Three Kingdoms genre was boldly displayed at the top of the site in a stately style. Throughout the previous cycles—thousands of years combined—Three Kingdoms was always massively popular. SG Net was in the throes of a total Three Kingdoms obsession.
“That’s because of you, mister.”
This time, it was Dok-seo who responded calmly.
“You push the popularity of any Three Kingdoms-based story, artificially inflating their views by at least 100 to 5,000 with a macro. Then you literally pay authors royalties based on those rigged view counts, so from their perspective, they’d be stupid not to churn out these stories. They’re guaranteed sales, no matter how trashy the writing is.”
“Silence. What do you know about the loyalty and camaraderie contained in Three Kingdoms?”
“I’m just saying, normal readers complain about why it’s always another Three Kingdoms whatever topping the charts...”
I had no interest in listening to the indefinite-hiatus demon.
With a snort, I clicked on the currently top-ranked Three Kingdoms work. I’d already purchased and read up to the latest chapter this very morning, so if the Admin had tampered with it, I would notice right away and—
Zhang Fei: Aha, Sister Liu Bei! Just rely on your lover Zhang Fei!
Liu Bei: Uh huh, sure! I trust you, little sister!
Mi Zhu: Goodness. You girls’ bond amazes me more every time I see it.
“Uwoaoooooooooooooook?!”
A cry straight out of Munch’s The Scream escaped my mouth.
“Eek! A-are you okay, mister? Hey, mister! Snap out of it! Is this a mental attack? An Anomaly? An Outer God? Don’t pass out!”
This novel, that novel!
All the stories I’d been reading—even logging in from multiple dummy accounts to give them 20 upvotes each because I sensed the author’s extraordinary talent from just the first three chapters.
The warriors of Shu Han, the strategists, and Wei, Wu, even Emperor Xian... Every single one, all of them had been replaced...
With girls!
“Ogh. Ughk, huk. Kugh. Kkh, snrrk.”
[Hehehehehe.]
[Don’t you find Romance of the Three Kingdoms turned Romance of the Sisterhood quite intriguing, Regressor?]
“I-I can’t... breathe... You, you scoundrel, Admin. How can you commit such a monstrous atrocity? How...?”
[Why? Don’t you devour every genre you see anyway?]
What nonsense. It was like someone saying they loved pineapple and also mint chocolate, so a chef lumped them together on a pizza to claim they’d “used all your favorite ingredients.”
“Wh-whatever it means! Don’t torture the old man, you nasty Outer God! Take that! And that!”
[I still have 3,122 more of your hiatus announcements, if you’d like me to show them?]
“Huwaaaaaack!”
A KO.
The Regressor and the Possessor collapsed side by side.
What no other Outer God could achieve, this so-called “weakest” Outer God, the Admin of the Infinite Metagame, had managed it.
I groaned. “Let’s... talk...”
[ ? ]
“A... A friendly negotiation. Why spill meaningless blood here? At this point, you can’t destroy the world, right? Let’s settle this nicely. Huh? Let’s both be happy...”
[Heh]
“Name your conditions, specifically. This time, I swear I’ll refrain from mockery or criticism. I’ll listen seriously...”
Bzzt.
Until now, the white-haired avatar had trudged around the desktop in an area about the size of a Recycle Bin icon, but now, the screen zoomed in.
Click.
In both hands, the Admin of the Infinite Metagame held up a text file like a signboard. Once more, the note spelled out the Outer God’s demands.
[You—must—respect—me.]
Footnotes:
[1] AT-Field is a reference to the nearly impenetrable shields called Absolute Terror (A. T.) Fields in Neon Genesis Evangelion.
