Grab the Regressor by the Collar and Debut - Chapter 439

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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439. Your Well-Being (1)
“Have you made your decision?”
At my question, Dan Ha-ru nodded slowly.
I’d been prepared to tell him to reconsider if I saw even a hint of hesitation, but as his eyes lifted gradually, there wasn’t the slightest trace of conflict in them.
“…Want to take a walk? We need to get ice cream anyway.”
This time too, Dan Ha-ru nodded readily and stepped toward me.
‘But if he’s here… is Jeong Si-u alone inside?’
I was briefly concerned about Jeong Si-u, who was unusually shy, but remembering how he’d been enthusiastically getting fleeced at cards by Mother and Kang Ha-won before I left, a brief absence seemed fine.
With a sharp mind like his, he’d quickly recover his losses from that mother-and-son con artist duo. If things got bad, I could always video call our group’s card shark and ask him to play on his behalf.
“….”
“….”
Walking down the street like this, words didn’t come as easily as I’d expected.
It was something I’d have to discuss eventually, and truthfully, it was a conclusion I’d somewhat anticipated. Yet hearing it directly from the person involved carried a different weight entirely.
“Does it have to be disappearance?”
Still, it was something I had to ask.
Perhaps it was something I needed to hear for the sake of a decision I might have to make someday.
I forced open lips heavier than gold.
“There’s a good alternative called fusion. It’s not like jjamppong or half-and-half with extra radish became the default for no reason, right? We’re born into a people who mix everything together when something’s left over, so why insist on keeping only one of the two?”
“…You really do talk a lot.”
For someone with heavy lips, I’d certainly said too much, hadn’t I?
But I couldn’t help it. Once these heavy lips opened, I had to pour out as much as possible, grasping at straws.
I pressed Dan Ha-ru for an answer, feigning ignorance as he sighed in exasperation.
Dan Ha-ru, whose eyes had always sparkled, now gleamed with a cool light as he delivered his conclusion in an even, measured tone.
“I’ve lived too long. I’m tired of it.”
“That’s not something an eighteen-year-old face should be saying, is it?”
“You live through ten thousand cycles. See if you don’t get tired of it.”
Ten thousand times?
It was an astonishing number just to contemplate.
I wasn’t sure if that was an exact count or merely a figure of speech, but… somehow I felt this creature before me might have actually experienced that. Especially if I factored in all the minor loops from shorter regression cycles.
And since he said “more than ten thousand times,” it could mean even more than that. I myself had lost count of how many time loops I’d experienced during the infinite regression incident, so Dan Ha-ru probably stopped trying to count properly at some point.
‘…Just thinking about it feels abstract.’
It felt like I’d caught a glimpse of Dan Ha-ru’s life, something I’d only vaguely sensed until now.
“I don’t even remember what my first eighteen felt like anymore. It’s absurd to even mention age to me in the first place. I’ve repeated a jumbled life countless times—twenty-six yesterday, eighteen today.”
What must it feel like to manipulate time at will?
Before my eyes now stands someone who, at least for a time… or perhaps for a very long time, has wielded divine power.
He has lived through vast ages, repeated long stretches of time, forgotten endless days, and built up memories again and again.
Perhaps he can no longer be called an “ordinary human”—a boy who has walked through time for an eternity.
That boy reflected on his life with utter detachment.
“After living like that, the one thing I’ve realized is that life in this world is all the same in the end.”
“…Wow, the legend of an old soul in a young body.”
“You’ve experienced it yourself, haven’t you? There’s nothing special about living. It’s always grueling, sometimes hollow, eternally lonely, and endlessly filled with failure.”
Isn’t that a bit too pessimistic?
My lips, worth their weight in gold against such nihilistic sentiments that would make Schopenhauer weep, twitched again—but I barely held back, sensing Dan Ha-ru’s words weren’t finished yet.
Sure enough, Dan Ha-ru turned toward me with a faint, mocking smile and continued.
“But then, very occasionally, a beautiful flower blooms on the street.”
“….”
“And in that moment… maybe you’d crack a small smile. Maybe a sudden surge of dopamine-like optimism would flood your mind—’If I keep living like this, perhaps one day happiness will come’—without warning.”
That’s how everyone lives, after all.
The emotion woven into that softly murmured voice was a color I couldn’t dare define.
I seized the moment for a counterattack, opening my mouth quickly. My voice seemed to tremble slightly, shamefully so.
“Then just live that way. Don’t you know Candy? ‘Even when lonely, even when sad, I won’t cry. I endure and endure, then look up at the blue sky and laugh and laugh, and live on—we wild rose girls’?”
“…What year were you born? What kind of old manga is that….”
“My mother likes it. Anyway, don’t change the subject.”
“You’re the one who changed it. Regardless, I hate it. I hate being lonely, and I hate laughing at the blue sky like that either. I’m done now.”
With those words, Dan Ha-ru stopped walking. I’d been moving faster, so I took several more steps before I could come to a complete halt.
When I turned around, our eyes met immediately. Dan Ha-ru, wearing comfortable clothes and pants—probably slippers belonging to Kang Ha-won—was….
“Kang Ha-jin.”
…truly, truly at peace.
Perhaps the most at peace I’d ever seen him.
“I couldn’t live that way.”
“…What do you mean?”
“You know.”
“I don’t. I can’t understand, so explain it properly, you bastard.”
“The hardship, the loneliness, the emptiness, the failures and falls. And then seeing the blue sky once and rising again with courage. That thing you taught Ha-ru.”
“….”
“I forgot that long ago. Or maybe I never knew it in the first place. No one ever taught me.”
Dan Ha-ru ran through time.
Before Dan Ha-ru grew weary,
before he suffered and grieved,
before the boy knew pain and shed tears,
he didn’t even allow the chance to face another sun that would come after—and when the moment came, he unhesitatingly turned back the clock.
At first, it was perhaps just a sprint toward ‘perfect happiness,’ but at some point, he lost both destination and direction, running endlessly. Blind obsession has a way of blinding a person’s eyes.
“…No matter how hard you erase with an eraser, you can never return to something perfectly new. After the first stroke is drawn, that pristine, stiff paper will only grow thinner and thinner, and the marks of heavily pressed letters will remain.”
“….”
“You might be able to draw a new story over it a few times… but eventually, there will come a moment when that messy paper becomes overwhelming. All those things already drawn, things drawn and ruined, things you started to draw but abandoned…. Too many possibilities have already existed and vanished on top of it.”
Was life to Dan Ha-ru something like a diary?
I imagined what a diary whose pages never turn would be like.
“All this time, I’ve folded and unfolded that paper countless times. I’ve done what I could, done it to my heart’s content. So now, I don’t really know what else I should write on that paper anymore.”
On that very worn and faded paper, what must those days have been like, written and erased countless times?
Are you now tired of those days that were painted and erased over and over on the same paper, and so you’re finally trying to close that diary?
“Kang Ha-jin.”
Dan Ha-ru, wearing the form of a boy, smiles toward me.
“I want to take out a new page now.”
The page turns.
“I want to live tomorrow, where so many possibilities still remain.”
On what I thought was the final page, a miraculous next chapter existed.
“Falling, crumbling, grieving, writhing in agony… and then crying every day, anxious whether a better tomorrow will come.”
“….”
“But even so… even so, when I see the sun rise again, I want to vow to live through it. Not with remorse or guilt for the time I’ve passed through.”
“….”
“When I see you all, I feel like I could do it too. No, with you all here, I feel like I could do it.”
This is a foul play.
I’m not entirely sure what the foul is, but it’s definitely foul play. Roughly speaking, it’s the kind of bad deed where you’d violate some law or other, and if you reported and sued for it, you’d get fined and have to serve prison time.
I’m trying to figure out what exactly it is right now, but anyway, that’s how it was.
Like this, like this….
‘Where does it leave no room to object.’
Isn’t it basic decorum between returners to at least leave room for persuasion?
Since the only returner I know is Dan Ha-ru and me, I wondered what I’d know about decorum, but anyway, everything I said was right. Actually, it seems I’d inwardly suspected Dan Ha-ru’s thoughts all along, but in any case, this was the first time I was hearing it. I’ll insist that’s the case.
I couldn’t help but be stubborn about it.
If I didn’t insist, I’d have to simply accept Dan Ha-ru’s “own peace” as it was.
“So….”
Dan Ha-ru let out a hollow laugh as if exasperated. That smiling face, bright and amused, was no different from the radiant one I’d always called serene.
“So stop crying already. Who said anything about dying?”
Only then did I turn my head and roughly wipe away the tears streaming down my face with my arm. I’d held back my crying so much that my throat ached and my eyes burned hot. The tears kept flowing no matter how much I wiped them, enough to make me irritable.
“Damn it, seriously…. I’m losing face….”
“You already suspected it anyway, from when I said I’d tell you.”
“…So what? I knew from the start you’d say it like that. I’d been thinking about it since the personality integration rate and synchronization weren’t rising properly in the first place.”
“Then why are you crying? You already expected it.”
“Is then the same as now!? Back then you just denied yourself without question or complaint, saying I’m not Dan Ha-ru anyway! But now…!”
“Now?”
Not teasing anyone in particular, just smiling brightly and provoking me, which irritated me so much that I shouted bluntly, and this bastard didn’t even flinch, nodding as if telling me to say more.
Over the kind and clear face of Sparkle, I kept seeing the expression of an old man who’d lived through everything in the world, and I really couldn’t adapt to it and was pissed off.
This bastard should just keep up the delinquent cosplay of a rebellious middle schooler with precocious angst all at once, so why suddenly gather all this maturity at once and act like this.
“…Does it have to be disappearance? What’s the difference from dying? You’d be gone, vanishing! You don’t have to… you don’t have to go that far. Sparkle wouldn’t want that either, would they?”
“Brother.”
This bastard is foul play again.
This deserved a red card—I should’ve ejected him from the arena immediately.
“I am Dan Ha-ru.”
Yet Dan Ha-ru still remained there.
He didn’t receive a fine or serve time, and he didn’t receive a red card and get ejected from the arena.
It was only natural.
This was nothing more than a young boy’s final ultimatum to reclaim his own name.
“I am Dan Ha-ru, and Ha-ru is me. You know that.”
“….”
“I’m not dying or disappearing. I simply… want to live as Dan Ha-ru.”
“….”
“Let me do that.”
The night breeze drifted gently across the darkness.
It was time for a new page to unfold in the life of the boy who had walked through time itself.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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