Why Does the Ocean Continue to Move?

Chapter 24: Why Does the Ocean Continue to Move?

(Present | Fragmented Memories )

Please…

...don’t die.

promise me.

promise you’ll live.

Please. Please, just this once, be selfish.

“...who…?” I croaked. There was no one in the room.

I woke up from a dream.

The ceiling above me was unfamiliar.

Seoul.

Right.

I rolled onto my side.

It had been a few weeks since the Saintess smiled and “freed” me.

A penthouse, a new identity and a few hundreds millions won in the bank.

She didn’t say why. And I didn’t ask either.

I sat up and rubbed my face.

I shuffled over to the glass.

Seoul looked back.

Cars like fireflies, people like ants, all thinking they mattered. All convinced this was their only run.

My reflection stared at me from the window.

Black hair. Dark eyes. Han Si‑woo.

It didn’t fit anywhere inside my head.

“I don’t know you,” I told the man in the glass.

For a moment, I could almost see people else layered over him.

Different hair. Different jaw. Different smile.

Lately, when I slept, something followed.

Voices without faces. Faces without names. Laughter that turned into screaming halfway through.

Apologies that never reached anyone.

━━━━━━ʕ• · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·•ʔ━━━━━━

According to “It”, it was my third world.

I don’t remember the first two.

I don’t remember if there even were two before that one.

Might have been the thirtieth. Could have been the three thousandth. Numbers don’t mean much when your memories have been put through a blender.

After all, I didn't know my origin or my beginning, if there was even one. Only the things “It” told about me, and what I have to do.

When I couldn’t remember even that, “It” would just remind me, again and again.

I didn’t trust “It” or any word “It” says, but that’s all there is to it. Believing it or not.

[♪♪♪]

Every time they rang, I would wake up from a dream: Inevitable death and sea of corpses.

“Hey,███,” a faceless woman would ask me. “Why are you making that face?”

“I’m… tired.”

“Hehe~” She blinked. “It’s only the first day, you know. Is my training regimen really that rough?”

I didn’t tell her that, I saw her buried a few mins ago.

Same inn.

Same cracked ceiling.

Same stain shaped like a handprint in the corner.

Same greetings.

Same goodbyes.

At first, I thought it was deja vu.

A feeling you’ve seen this before.

I tried to convince myself it was just unusually vivid dreams overlaying reality.

Or maybe I could see the future: clairvoyance.

It took a few deaths before I realised how wrong it was.

· ─ ·𖥸· ─ ·

“Your name?” she asked for the first time. But it had already been the first time too many times.

Which one?

Nothing came out.

It used to bother me.

You’re supposed to have something solid there. A syllable your parents gave you. An identity. A label people can shout when you fall.

All I had was what It told me.

[PLAYER.]

Tool. Pawn. That kind of thing.

“Call me whatever you like,” I said.

She laughed and called me “mine” anyway.

The healer laughed. The mage muttered something about omens.

[♪♪♪]

I rolled my eyes.

She died three days later, crushed by a demon general.

The next run, I pulled her out of there.

[♪♪♪]

She died a week later, gutted by an assassin.

Next run, I killed the assassin guild first.

[♪♪♪]

Something else got the mage.

[࿐𝄞𝄢℘]

They died later. Over and over.

And I never knew what had killed me.

At first, there was a twisted kind of hope.

I can fix it.

No.

· ─ ·𖥸· ─ ·

Memory is a blessing.

It isn’t.

Not when you’re the only one who has it.

You save someone in one cycle, drag them out of a burning house, carry them six miles on your back to get them to a healer.

Next run, they look at you like you’re a stranger when you say hello.

You watch a friend bleed out all night in your arms because the healer’s hymn failed and the potions ran out.

Next run, he claps you on the shoulder and says, “Nice to meet you,” and you have to stop your hand from shaking when you shake his.

You kiss someone once, in a ruined chapel when the world is ending and you both know it, bitter and sweet and stupid and necessary.

[♪♪♪]

Next run, they bow and call you “Sir” with bright, unmarked eyes.

[࿐𝄞𝄢℘]

I built lives there.

Again.

We cleared dungeons. Cleansed cursed wells. Taught apprentices who tripped over their own robes and died heroically three loops later.

We drank together. Fought. Fell in love. Fucked. Buried each other.

You build something.

You meet people.

You bleed together.

You start to believe, against your better judgement, that maybe this time the script will change.

Then the world ends.

[♪♪♪]

Then you wake up.

Same ceiling. Same voices. Same questions.

“Nice to meet you,” the healer says, hand outstretched.

You have held her as she sobbed over three different corpses in three different loops. You have watched her die three different ways.

“Yeah,” you say, shaking her hand.

It doesn’t matter what you say. She won’t remember it anyway.

· ─ ·𖥸· ─ ·

I tried to optimise.

If you can’t win, you can at least lose slower.

Last time the city fell in three days? Make it five.

Last time twenty thousand died? Aim for nineteen.

Last time the demon general reached the eastern gate unopposed? Be there first.

“Just one more,” I told myself. “Just one more person than last time. Just a few more days.”

It sounds nice.

Up close, it’s pathetic.

A man bailing out a sinking ship with his hands because he refuses to admit the ocean is bigger than him.

Sometimes it worked.

We lived longer.

Sometimes it didn’t.

Something new broke. Some variable I hadn’t seen before turned up. A different demon. A different plague. A different stupid human choice.

[♪♪♪]

Wake.

[♪♪♪]

Die.

Try again.

The world got very small.

Reduced to cause and effect. If I stop that cart, the child doesn’t die that afternoon. If I warn that soldier, he doesn’t trip on that rock. If I sabotage that ritual, the goddess doesn’t accidentally melt half a city this cycle.

They never knew.

They never thanked me.

They couldn’t.

In their heads, it was the first time.

It was fine…

Even if they didn’t remember.

Even if the people I dragged back from death in one cycle watched me with blank eyes in the next and asked who I was.

Even if the woman I’d held as she bled out on a ruined bridge smiled shyly at me in another run, she pushed my hands away as if I

were a stranger.

The worst part wasn’t that they forgot.

It was that I didn’t.

Every version of them piled up in my head, talking over each other.

Happy. Angry. Betrayed. Dead.

My own reflection started looking unfamiliar.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked myself once, staring at a cloudy mirror in a cheap inn.

The man looking back didn’t have an answer.

I started to feel like a ghost haunting a story nobody else had read yet.

· ─ ·𖥸· ─ ·

[࿐𝄞𝄢℘]

After ten, twenty, fifty resets, or who knows how many, the lines blurred. I started mixing everything: Timeline, Faces, People.

I see a woman at a market and my chest hurts because it knew she died saving my life three collapses ago and here she is, haggling over cabbages, looking right through me.

I bump into a man in armour and flash to him stabbing me in the gut in a cycle where the Veiled Man whispered in his ear first.

I sit by a campfire listening to the healer talk about her brother, and have a flash of her talking about a sister instead, and then a third

flash of her saying she was an only child, and you realise you don’t know which version you’re in anymore.

The end bleeds into the beginning.

The beginning bleeds into the end.

You stop being sure which one you’re standing in.

If you strip the world of its linearity, what’s left?

Noise.

Movements.

Instinct.

You stop thinking about “why”.

[♪♪♪]

You think, “Next.”

Was this the loop where the healer had a sister? The one where the mage lost his arm? The one where the tank confessed he liked men and then got eaten right after, or was that different from people from different worlds ago?

I couldn’t tell anymore.

Memories layered on top of each other like someone had put the wrong scenes in the wrong order.

Sometimes I’d walk through a town and know exactly which stall sold rotten bread, which alley hid the cultist, which house held the old woman who’d throw water on us when we shouted too loud.

Sometimes I’d turn a corner and see someone whose face I knew so well it hurt, but in that cycle, they were a stranger.

“Do I know you?” I asked once.

She tilted her head, wary.

“No,” she said. “Should you?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

She closed the door in my face.

Fair.

· ─ ·𖥸· ─ ·

[࿐𝄞𝄢℘࿐𝄞𝄢℘࿐𝄞𝄢……]

If you do that enough, the edges between endings and beginnings start to smear.

I’d meet someone in a tavern and know six of their possible deaths, but not remember which one belonged to which run.

I’d walk through a market and get hit by the smell of spices and blood and realise I had no idea if I was remembering this version or a prior one.

Once, I stood over a grave with no name on it and knew, with a certainty that made my teeth ache, that I had stood there before.

Different stone. Different flowers. Same ache.

“Who was this?” someone asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

There is a point where you stop asking, “What’s the point?” because the answer is obvious and boring.

There is also a point where you start asking it again, not because you want an answer, but because the question has worn a path into your brain.

What’s the point of doing this again?

What’s the point of building something that will be torn down?

What’s the point of loving people who will look at you with blank eyes in the next run?

I didn’t know.

I still did it.

Habit is powerful.

So is spite.

“It’s better this time,” I told myself, watching a village celebrate surviving an attack that had wiped it out in the last three loops. “They lived three days longer. That’s not nothing.”

It felt like nothing.

But if I admitted that, I’d stop moving.

And I was very good at not stopping.

· ─ ·𖥸· ─ ·

[࿐𝄞𝄢℘…]

When hope rots, there are only a few options left.

You can lie.

You can go numb.

You can go mad.

Or you can try to leave.

I killed myself.

For the first time in too long, there weren’t voices in my head. No laughter. No pleas. No “save us”. No “why didn’t you”.