Chapter 1 — Iteration Forty-Seven
The first sensation was cold.
Not the cold of wind, or winter, or hospital steel. It was deeper — the kind of cold that began inside the bones and crawled outward, like frost etching patterns through a pane of glass. Somewhere far away, something was screaming.
Ah.
Right.
That was him.
Kim Jae-hwan remembered now.
The blade sliding between his ribs.
The smell of wet earth.
The taste of iron filling his mouth.
The sound of boots walking away from him, five sets, each pair familiar enough to name by footstep alone.
The forty-seventh death.
He did not thrash this time. He did not curse. There was no pleading, no desperate clawing at life. He simply watched — not with eyes, because those had already dimmed — but with the vast, unfading clarity that comes from having died too many times for terror to hold any novelty.
Then the world shattered like glass dropped onto marble.
The ditch vanished.
The blood vanished.
The pain vanished.
And Kim Jae-hwan opened his eyes again.
---
A ceiling.
Yellowing, with a hairline crack shaped like a branching river. He knew that crack intimately. He had stared at it forty-six times already, counting the smaller fractures like constellations.
He was… back.
His throat didn't hurt anymore. His lungs didn't feel flooded. His heart wasn't torn open. His body was small again — light, soft, not yet hardened by monsters and wars.
He drew in a slow breath.
Nineteen years old lungs.
Nineteen years old heart.
Forty-seven lifetimes worth of memories.
He lifted one hand. It looked unfamiliar — smooth, unscarred. No white lines across the knuckles from sword hilts. No burn marks. No tremor from old nerve damage.
He flexed his fingers.
They obeyed.
"…Regression confirmed," he murmured.
His voice sounded younger. It always did. The first ten regressions, hearing that voice had filled him with relief. The next ten, determination. After twenty-five, bitterness. After thirty-five… exhaustion.
After forty-seven?
Nothing.
There was truly nothing left.
Jae-hwan sat up in bed. The motion was fluid, practiced — the body might be nineteen, but the habit of waking after death was ancient. He felt no disorientation, no panic. The world clicked immediately into its familiar shape, like pieces of a puzzle he had long ago memorized.
Morning light was filtering in through threadbare curtains. Outside, he could hear the street vendor in front of the school gates yelling the same advertisements. Down the hall, the old neighbor's television would be tuned to morning dramas at volume twenty-seven. He knew it was twenty-seven because in regression twelve he had borrowed the remote once out of boredom.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed.
Feet touched wooden floor that creaked exactly twice.
All variables constant.
All actors in position.
He allowed himself a long breath, not because he needed to calm down — there was nothing left in him frantic enough to require calming — but because humans breathed like that when waking from nightmares, and he had long ago perfected the performance of humanity.
"Iteration forty-seven," he whispered, as if reciting a serial number. "The starting point remains unchanged."
He stood.
His body felt unbearably light. For centuries of subjective time he had lived inside bodies infused with power — S-rank mana density, muscles trained to lethal perfection, bones reinforced by potions and artifacts. Returning to this fragile, pre-awakening frame was like being trapped in wet paper.
He raised his hand again and clenched it.
Weak.
Pathetic.
Human.
He smiled faintly.
It would be fixed soon.
---
The door burst open without knocking.
"Jae-hwan! Are you awake yet? You'll be late again!"
He turned his head.
There they were.
His mother's worried face.
His father's forced smile behind her.
His younger sister peeking from the hallway, eyes bright and curious, the same eyes that would later watch him bleed but look away when offered debt forgiveness.
He examined them with clinical detachment — cataloging micro-expressions, posture, clothing, unchanged down to the smallest detail. He knew exactly what they would say next.
"Honestly," his mother sighed. "You're at such an important age. If you oversleep now—"
"—you'll oversleep through your future," his father finished with a weak laugh.
Right on schedule.
Kim Jae-hwan tilted his head and shaped his lips into the warm, sheepish smile his nineteen-year-old self used to wear. The muscles remembered the motion.
"Sorry, Mom," he said gently. "I'm up."
His sister grinned. "Oppa looks half-dead."
He almost laughed.
If only she knew.
He rose, walked past them, brushed his mother's shoulder lightly in a gesture of casual affection — and his mind, behind the mask, replayed the moment years from now when these same hands would sign documents turning him over to the government in exchange for erasing their debts.
He felt nothing.
Not anger. Not hatred.
Not even sadness.
He had burned through every emotion sometime between the thirtieth and thirty-eighth death, like a star exhausting its fuel and collapsing into something denser and colder.
Only purpose remained.
He washed his face. In the mirror, a stranger stared back at him — his old self, the version that still believed in heroes and guilds and sacrifice. Soft eyes. Gentle jawline. Hair slightly messy.
He touched the mirror.
That boy had died a long time ago.
Now only the architect remained.
He dried his face calmly and began to list data inside his head — dates, dungeon spawn patterns, hunter awakenings, political shifts, marriage dates, betrayal nodes, weak points, leverage angles. Forty-seven lifetimes had formed a perfect simulation machine inside his skull.
He knew everything that mattered.
He knew who would betray.
He knew how the world would end.
He also knew he would not stop it.
He had stopped it before — in regression twenty-two, twenty-six, thirty-one. Each time, humanity survived.
Each time, they betrayed him anyway.
Saving the world had become meaningless.
Now, he would perfect how it ended.
---
Breakfast passed the way it always did — rice, soup, pickles, the faint sound of morning news from the living room. Jae-hwan answered questions like a good son, nodded in all the right places, laughed where appropriate.
"You're taking the Hunter Academy mock exam soon, right?" his father asked.
"Yes."
"Don't push yourself too much," his mother said, while meaning the exact opposite.
His sister kicked his ankle under the table. "If you awaken as F-rank, I'll laugh at you forever."
In regression three, those words had stung.
In regression forty-seven, they earned only an amused sip of soup.
After all, he would awaken soon.
He always did.
He finished eating, rose, grabbed his bag, and slipped on his shoes slowly enough to match the expected tempo of a normal teenager in a mild rush. Performance required precision.
Before leaving, he paused.
His mother was tidying dishes. His father was already checking his phone for unpaid notices. His sister was humming some pop song that hadn't charted yet.
He memorized the scene.
Not because he cherished it.
Because he would later use every detail against them.
"I'm heading out," he said.
"Take care!"
"Don't get into fights!"
"Bring back snacks!"
Same lines. Same cadence. Same smiles.
He stepped outside.
The air smelled of city dust and frying oil. Students crowded the sidewalks, laughing, complaining, living lives that would soon be devoured by Gates and monsters. Banners promoting guild recruitments fluttered on poles that did not yet understand they marked the boundary between the old world and the new.
Jae-hwan walked through it all silently.
A part of him remembered weaving among these people as a hopeful youth, dreaming of saving them. Now he walked like a ghost slipping through a reenacted play.
His phone buzzed.
He didn't need to check.
Lee Min-seok.
Right on schedule.
[Where are you? Running late again?]
The best friend who would later steal his life's work.
Jae-hwan typed back calmly.
[On my way.]
His fingers did not shake.
There was no anger.
Just anticipation.
The first target on the list.
Today's goal was simple: reenter the stage. Pass the right exams. Say the right words. Rebuild the scaffolding upon which his perfect revenge would be hung.
He reached the school gates.
Students milled around. Some waved. Some whispered. There — under the shade of a half-dead tree — stood Lee Min-seok, wide-shouldered, bright-eyed, face still unlined by guilt, holding two convenience store breads.
"Jae-hwan!" Min-seok waved. "You didn't eat breakfast again, did you? Here."
He shoved one bread into Jae-hwan's hands.
Forty-six times, Jae-hwan had accepted this gesture. The first few lives, he had considered Min-seok a blessing. Later, an irony. Now…
He considered him material.
A component in an equation of suffering.
"Thanks," Jae-hwan said softly.
Min-seok grinned. "What are friends for?"
Friends?
Jae-hwan almost repeated the word out loud.
Instead, he bit into the bread and smiled back with exact sincerity — not real sincerity, because that didn't exist anymore, but the flawless imitation honed over centuries.
"Yeah," he said. "Friends."
The bell rang.
Students surged forward.
And above the chatter, above the mundane heartbeat of an ordinary world, Kim Jae-hwan felt it — like a distant storm pressing against the horizon of reality.
The Gates were coming.
Not today. Not this month. But soon. And he knew precisely when and where each would bloom open like red wounds in the sky. He had maps burned into memory — casualty lists, emergency broadcast scripts, the sound people made when crushed under rubble.
He closed his eyes briefly.
Forty-seven regressions.
Forty-seven rehearsals.
This time, he would not stumble. He would not rage blindly. He would not let chance interfere.
He would take the world in both hands and break it deliberately.
For a moment, he wondered if anything of the old him still survived.
A laugh?
A flicker of compassion?
A lingering capacity for love?
Seo Min's face drifted through his mind — the little girl who had once thanked him for saving her in the first timeline and died anyway. Yoo Ji-ah's suspicious gaze. Han Seo-yeon's smile on their wedding day in regression fourteen before it all shattered.
He opened his eyes again.
Still nothing.
Good.
Emotion complicated calculations.
He looked up at the sky — pristine blue, innocent, unaware of the blood it would one day reflect — and whispered so quietly no one could hear him:
"Let's begin."
The bell finished ringing.
Iteration forty-seven had officially started.