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Jaehwan looks at the book he still holds in his hands.
Then he looks up at Yoo Joonghyuk.
It’s undeniably the same character he’d read about. They have similar attitude problems, a similar reluctance to explain anything, and his appearance is remarkably similar to what had been described in the novel. If Jaehwan is honest, the novel had gotten a little carried away in describing how beautiful he was—the Yoo Joonghyuk in front of him looks fine, but not in a world shattering way as Kim Dokja had made it sound.
But he can pin that on Kim Dokja’s personal preferences. There was a lot wrong with that man, after all.
He looks back at the novel in his hands.
Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint.
He’d heard about it before—it’s been on multiple bestseller lists, unlike Jaehwan’s own novel that barely sells enough to stay in print. It’s an isekai story like any other, with a protagonist that appeared to have no clue that he was the protagonist, and instead believed that the actual protagonist was—
He looks back at Yoo Joonghyuk.
“So you wrote this?”
“No.”
“Then who did?”
“A… person I know.”
“So the story is true,” Jaehwan muses, turning the book over in his hands. This foolish tale of people who had no clue how to live, trying to save each other, over and over. “You’re here to bring him back.”
“Yes.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s world, it appears, hasn’t ended yet.
They’re yet to end up at the Nightmare of the Beginning.
Convinced that they’ve reached the end of the world and made it through, and now in desperate search of another end to give them a sense of purpose again.
A feeling that Jaehwan knows too well.
“It’s a lost battle,” Jaehwan says, handing him back the novel. “I can’t help you.”
/
“We aren’t asking for your help,” Yoo Joonghyuk deadpans, the next time he finds him.
Jaehwan looks at him. “Then what are you asking for?”
“That you pay your debt.”
Jaehwan knew that this day would come. Ever since he got that shady email from tls123. He had known better than to make shady deals on the internet, but when you’ve reached the end of the world, there is very little left in you to care about internet safety.
“This is beyond what I was asked to do.” He squints at Yoo Joonghyuk. “Aren’t you capable of handling your companion’s…disappearance on your own?”
Disappearance is putting it mildly.
Kim Dokja had fallen into millions of pieces and been scattered across the universe.
He’s probably been reincarnated and living quite happily in those worlds as well. As happy as one can be, in this broken world that is.
“I can not destroy the world that he’s built,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, “as long as he’s dreaming life into it.”
“And what makes you think I can?”
“He’d dreamed of your world before. You destroyed it without a second thought.”
There’s a shake in his hands that Jaehwan forces himself to still.
Yoo Joonghyuk spots it but says nothing.
Jaehwan knows that Kim Dokja has read about his world. It’s mentioned in passing in the novel that tls123 had written.
But no part of Jaehwan’s story had been enough to stick with him. To change anything for him.
Not like Yoo Joonghyuk’s—which he had dedicated his life to.
“He didn’t love my world the way he loves yours,” he says, and it doesn’t even make him bitter anymore. Jaehwan knows that not everyone gets to be loved. To be cared for. Everything is chance in this world, everything is chaos. “That must have made it easier to destroy.”
Yoo Joonghyuk stares down at him.
He’s a dangerous man.
Jaehwan tries not to see it—but he knows that he might lose if they fight. He knows, that there’s no way out of this situation but to follow Yoo Joonghyuk and pay off his debt.
But even if Jaehwan’s world had ended years ago—he still has no respect for regressors.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s story isn’t one of endurance—it’s a story of someone who made a mistake and forgot about it and then blamed it on every part of the universe besides himself.
If he hadn’t chosen to regress, he would have died as a happily married man surrounded by people he loved, but he threw it all away for a second chance.
“Come with me,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, as if he dislikes Jaehwan as much as Jaehwan dislikes him, “and try.”
/
Jaehwan doesn’t know a lot about Yoo Joonghyuk.
He doesn’t know a lot about Kim Dokja, either.
All he knows is the butchered story that has been sent around the universe, in an attempt to revive a dead man—but Jaehwan knows better than anyone that the written word is never true.
He wrote his own story himself—and half of it is a lie. Feelings that he never had, that he wrote in to make himself look human. Doubts that he’d lived with that he’d never breathed a word of, for fear of shaking the image of the undeterred protagonist.
It was in writing The World After the Fall that Jaehwan realized he didn’t know who he was.
A human, a monster.
Something uglier—in between.
He didn’t know who he was, so instead, he wrote about the person he tried to be.
So when he reads ORV, he reads between the lines. He looks deeper at what’s been left out, at the words that have been brushed over for fear of telling too much of the truth. This story about Kim Dokja has not been written by the man himself—it’s been written by people who claimed to love him.
So Jaehwan knew, just two pages in, that barely any of it was bound to be true.
It’s an engaging read, he’ll give it that. It’s touching, and heartbreaking, and even hilarious at times, but Jaehwan knows that it’s meant to be. It’s meant to make you fall in love with Kim Dokja, to hope for him to return.
It’s been written carefully, manipulatively, to trick the fragments of the Oldest Dream into believing he was worth all these desperate attempts to bring him back.
The real Kim Dokja is probably an entirely different person.
And Jaehwan can tell, just reading the words that tls123 has written. The jumps in logic, the hidden information, the complete omission of the pain that Kim Dokja’s companions had caused him. Mentioning any of it might make him not want to come back—so there’s nothing in the story but their love for him. As if Yoo Joonghyuk himself hadn’t stabbed his supposed companion within the first two hundred chapters for the sake of ‘the greater good’.
While the long lasting effects of his every death on the sanity of his companions is delved into—their inability to save him even once is something that’s blamed entirely on him as a person instead of as a measure of how shitty a protagonist Yoo Joonghyuk was.
But as Jaehwan reads these words that were not written for him, he’s filled with a certain longing for someone he will never know.
He doesn’t think Kim Dokja really exists.
Not the way he’s been written, that is.
The real Kim Dokja is probably much more cynical. Much harder to understand. Much less willing to return, after being scattered in pieces across the universe.
But someone like him, who could love a person so dearly just because he had heard their story—
It makes Jaehwan’s chest ache.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s world was designed so that it could never reach the end without the presence of Kim Dokja.
But Jaehwan’s world was never like that.
There was just him, fighting the System while everyone screamed at him to stop—and then this endless, dead reality that he was returned to as a result.
/
Yoo Joonghyuk, it turns out, is a masterful chef.
This means nothing to Jaehwan, as Yoo Joonghyuk is also incapable of sharing food.
He cooks by the campfire, expression far too dark for someone who is simply adding salt to fish, while Jaehwan watches him and wonders once again why he was the protagonist of a story. What could be so compelling, about a man who tried and tried and accomplished nothing until someone appeared out of nowhere and saved him?
Then again—perhaps that was what was compelling.
Because the Ways of Survival wasn’t a novel about Yoo Joonghyuk being saved—it was a novel about his endless despair.
A novel even more endless than the one that Jaehwan had scrapped together about his own life.
It was that story that had fascinated Kim Dokja, and no one else—a story where no matter how many times someone was saved, they were lost again, where suffering was endless, where the main character was forced to pick himself up and keep walking no matter how much he didn’t want to.
Ways of Survival is a story that Jaehwan can understand. Can appreciate, even. Because to him, it sounds like reality.
Whereas Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint sounds like a fantasy of foolish children desperate to be loved. To be saved.
A cycle of destruction of its own.
There’s nothing Jaehwan can think of that’s more ridiculous than meeting someone after all of this—after all of these years of this—who could make him want to live again.
There’s nothing more ridiculous he can think of than Yoo Joonghyuk having met Kim Dokja.
And that’s where ORV loses him.
That’s where Yoo Joonghyuk loses him.
If he’d accepted that Kim Dokja was gone, and kept going, he might have regained Jaehwan’s respect. But this, trying to piece him together from literal nothingness—
“You realize you have to lose something, right?”
Yoo Joonghyuk glances at him. He looks annoyed, but he always looks annoyed when Jaehwan talks to him.
They don’t make a good team, to be honest.
“What?”
“For your story to be realistic. You have to lose something.”
Something flashes across Yoo Joonghyuk’s face.
It looks disturbingly like nostalgia.
“Perhaps that’s why he didn’t stick with your world,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, as if to himself. “That’s what that fool hated most about any story.”
“Loss?”
“Reality.”
Jaehwan shakes his head.
“You’re all alive,” Jaehwan says. “You and your companions. You’ve survived. You’ve rebuilt the world. Kim Dokja is out there, living his own life. It’s time you learn how to live.”
Jaehwan has no patience for people like Yoo Joonghyuk.
For people who have given up on life so many times that they no longer have a reality to call theirs.
For a man who has reached the end of the world and then fought his way back to the beginning and called it love.
For someone who can not let go.
Yoo Joonghyuk flips the fish in his makeshift pan.
“You talk a lot for someone who has nothing to live for.”
Jaehwan is quiet.
“That’s what it means to live,” he says simply.
To stay in the present when there’s nothing in it to keep you there.
Yoo Joonghyuk could never do it.
/
What makes them different, Jaehwan thinks, is that Yoo Joonghyuk isn’t actually human.
He never has been.
He was created to keep someone alive, and has endured for years for that same purpose.
Yoo Joonghyuk had a Creator. He had Meaning. He had a Story, with a beginning and an intended end, a goal to keep going towards, a man to keep trying to save, over and over.
Jaehwan has none of this.
Jaehwan is human.
He was born because he was born and he will die because he will die. He will not be pieced together by the people who loved him, not only because Jaehwan hasn’t spoken to them in months but also because in this world, it is not something that can be done.
In this world, you die, and it is a relief, and you stay dead.
He might die in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a day, in the middle of something that he’s trying to do.
He might die before he helps Yoo Joonghyuk destroy the world he needs destroyed.
As a human, there is no plot to Jaehwan’s life.
There are just days that follow days that follow days until the end.
But Yoo Joonghyuk was brought to this life as a Character. He may deny it, and insist that he’s broken out of those constraints, but what he can not deny is that it’s given him his biggest crutch.
When the rest of them fall apart in the sheer pointlessness of it all—Yoo Joonghyuk will always have someone that he was put on earth to save.
“You were written to keep him alive,” Jaehwan says once, while Yoo Joonghyuk skins a rabbit. He already knows that none of it will be offered to him to eat.
Yoo Joonghyuk knows who he’s talking about immediately. “Yes.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“Why?”
“If you were truly trying to become your own person—why still chase what you were written for?”
Yoo Joonghyuk stares at him for a moment.
“If you’d met that fool,” he says, “you would do this for him too.”
“Say what you want,” Jaehwan says dryly. “It’s not love that’s brought you here, Yoo Joonghyuk. It’s your fear of what to do after the end.”
“I know that,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, as if Jaehwan hasn’t just said the most cruel thing he could think of. “That’s why I’m chasing him.”
“You admit it?”
“I don’t know how to live after the end,” Yoo Joonghyuk says easily. “But I know that he doesn’t either.”
Jaehwan frowns. “Does that make it better?”
“It does.”
“How?”
“Do you always ask these many questions?”
“No.”
Yoo Joonghyuk sighs.
Jaehwan is struck with the sudden thought that he has no idea which one of them is older.
They’ve both lived far too long to keep track anymore.
“Kim Dokja is worse than me,” Yoo Joonghyuk says. “He’s worse than you.”
An insult uncalled for, but Jaehwan lets it go.
“He’s so bad at living that he’s created an endless world and irreparably damaged his own reality so that he’d never have to return to the place that he’d lived in.”
“And he makes living easier for you?” Jaehwan deadpans.
Yoo Joonghyuk looks far too serious.
“Yes.”
Jaehwan doesn’t press him further.
There’s the familiar ache in his chest again, that comes with seeing a life so unlike his own.
What was it about Kim Dokja, that could make this all worth it?
Jaehwan pretends not to know, but he’s afraid that he does.
He knows that he does, when he flips through the pages of Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint again, watching Kim Dokja do every single stupid thing he could possibly do in rapid succession.
He can’t put into words what it is about Kim Dokja that draws him in.
He is by no means a particularly rational person—or even a particularly sane one. A mess of a person, who had one hyperfixation in life and ended up becoming a god because of it. Trying to keep everyone he loved alive, without realizing that the one he’d been hoping to save all along was himself. And the guilt of that shaking him so badly that he instantly reverted to destroying himself completely instead.
There is nothing about Kim Dokja that defines a good role model.
A broken man in a broken world.
Perhaps that’s what love is, Jaehwan wonders. The trust that even the broken pieces of a person that understood you could keep you going forever.
A scattered existence across the worldlines, that could still keep you looking at the sky and thinking he’s somewhere out there.
Perhaps that’s what love is.
Jaehwan doesn’t know if it’s worth it.
He doesn’t think it’s any less delusional than the rest of everything that they live through.
But it sounds—a little less lonely.
Jaehwan is so lonely.
/
“I had a companion once,” Jaehwan admits.
Yoo Joonghyuk is sharpening his sword. He has a pretty great sword, even if it pales in comparison to Jaehwan’s own. Not everyone can have a sword that’s been possessed by a demon.
“He was with me till the end. He died, and I found him again. He didn’t remember me, but with time, his memories came back.”
There’s a disturbed sort of familiarity in Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes. This is a story he would relate to. Not just because of Kim Dokja—but because of all of the lives that he’s lived, over and over, finding the same companions and watching them die.
“And then we were together again.”
“Should I congratulate you?” Yoo Joonghyuk says dryly, turning back to the fire.
“If you want to,” Jaehwan says, just as dry. “But it meant nothing to me that he was by my side.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes widen.
It haunts Jaehwan every day.
Because after his mother died—he truly had nothing holding him back anymore.
When he’d got into a fist fight with his superiors and raged at the system, the numbers that he still sees written over faces and the ominous eye that no longer dares to exist in the sky—
It no longer mattered to him, then, that Yoonhwan was by his side.
That he was still alive.
Nothing mattered, if it meant that Jaehwan had to keep living, day after day.
It haunts him, because if Yoonhwan died, and there was a way to bring him back—then Jaehwan would fight till the end of the universe for him.
But now, with him by his side—their companionship means nothing besides another thing he can lose any moment.
“When you meet Kim Dokja again,” Jaehwan says, “and you still feel empty. What will you do then?”
There will be nothing left for Yoo Joonghyuk to pretend is a purpose.
No one left to chase to the ends of the earth.
There will be nothing but him, and his own thoughts, and a world that was designed so no one could live in it.
“There’s no living in the world after the fall. With a companion, or not.”
Yoo Joonghyuk looks at him with clear disdain. “You writers are all the same. One badly written novel and you think you know all there is about the world.”
Jaehwan raises an eyebrow. “tls123?”
“She’s insufferable.”
“I thought it was the reader that was insufferable.”
“They both are.”
“...you don’t like anyone much, Yoo Joonghyuk.”
“I do not,” he admits. “But at least I’m not like you.”
“And what’s that like?”
Yoo Joonghyuk looks at him, and it’s an expression that Jaehwan hates.
A mix of pity and something he can’t identify.
“Lost,” he says simply. “With nowhere left to go.”
/
“What were you written for?” Yoo Joonghyuk asks him once, when he’s decided he’s had it with all of Jaehwan’s questions.
Jaehwan starts.
He’d been reading ORV again. They’ve just been biding time, at this point, until they can leave this world. To reach whatever part of the universe it is that Yoo Joonghyuk needs him to destroy.
“What?”
“You,” Yoo Joonghyuk says again. “What were you written for?”
The answer that first comes to him is that he wasn’t.
Jaehwan isn’t like Yoo Joonghyuk.
He wasn’t written for anything.
But—that isn’t entirely true.
Because while Jaehwan lived a life of his own—there’s another Jaehwan buried in the pages of the novel he’s written. The way that Yoo Joonghyuk was buried in Ways of Survival.
But what was that Jaehwan written for?
There was no sad, bullied child who needed him. No one that he needed to carry through the formative years of their life. No one to inspire, to convince to endure.
It was just Jaehwan. And his attempt at the truth.
“Because I lived,” he admits.
That was all there was to it.
Jaehwan had lived, had watched people die, and no one was left to remember it.
And a foolish part of him had hoped that if he could remind everyone that it had happened—maybe it would be like the end had never arrived.
It isn’t all that different from Yoo Joonghyuk’s attempt to bring back his companion.
Perhaps they’re similar in the worst of ways.
Yoo Joonghyuk is quiet for a long moment.
He’s so quiet that Jaehwan assumes that he’s gone back to thinking about his sword and has forgotten the conversation entirely.
He starts to turn back to his book, but then Yoo Joonghyuk speaks up.
“If you endure long enough you might see an end that you want to see.”
The words do something terrible to him.
A horrifying mix of rage and an urge to hurt someone.
Jaehwan has lived for too long. He doesn’t know if it’s longer than Yoo Joonghyuk has lived—but he’s forced to remember far more of his life. Yoo Joonghyuk has forgotten most of his memories, while Jaehwan has been haunted with far more than he can handle.
“You were created to keep someone alive,” he says. “I was created for nothing at all.”
They would never be the same.
Yoo Joonghyuk, with his foolish ideals of purpose, would never truly be human.
To be human was to be here for no reason.
For no end.
To be born because you were born and to die because you die, in this endless cycle of creation and destruction.
There’s silence for a long time.
“You would be different,” Yoo Joonghyuk says simply, “If you’d ever met that fool.”
It’s a pointless thing to say.
Because Jaehwan didn’t meet him.
There was no one who appeared, to help him through the end when he struggled to keep going.
The god of Yoo Joonghyuk’s world had seen his own, and passed right over it.
As if Jaehwan had deserved to struggle.
As if he had deserved to be this alone.
The Oldest Dream had seen nothing in him to save.
“Not all of us are lucky,” Jaehwan says bluntly. “Most of our gods couldn’t care less.”
/