Chapter 1. The Reason for the End
A land where everything had turned to ash, with nothing left but magma. The molten lava that had once flowed everywhere slowly erased the traces of its passage and returned to the place where he stood.
The time of the world began to rewind.
This made it the sixth time. Humanity—and Earth—once again met its end at the hands of dragons.
The man, Yu Ji-tae, gazed up at the crimson-stained sky.
As he always did when the final moment arrived, he decided to calmly reflect on the past apocalypses.
All of this began when hatchlings—infant dragons—came out to play. As they were wandering about, a distortion in dimensions caused them to arrive on Earth by accident, and that became the root of the disaster.
The world they lived in was different from Earth. The young dragons did not know this. Naturally, they also had no idea what consequences their actions would bring.
The hatchlings played freely, just as dragons in other worlds did.
However, the results that followed were, for the most part, close to the worst possible outcomes.
"..."
Every adult dragon has a duty to protect hatchlings.
Such protection sometimes manifests in the form of vengeance. When a hatchling is killed by someone, dragons gather together without regard for clan or lineage and reclaim the price in blood.
That was why Yu Ji-tae's clock had been turned back six times.
He was not weak. Having lived for nearly a hundred years, he had spent at least several decades walking through battlefields of carnage.
He was clad in every authority and blessing that a being could possess. By now, as an individual, he was capable of standing against most entire nations.
Yet even Yu Ji-tae could not protect this vast Earth against dozens of dragons.
It was an irresistible force.
"..."
There was a time when the repeated regressions were truly painful.
If only he could die together with humanity when humanity died. But the authorities and blessings that had made him the strongest in this world held tightly to his life and would not let go.
In the end, the only thing he could do was sever this endlessly repeating chain of time.
That was to stop the apocalypse itself.
So what had been the cause of the apocalypse?
There was one who, driven mad by war and unable to control himself, became soaked in blood and died in insanity.
There was one who trusted humans too much, was naïvely used and discarded, and ended up dying in a garbage dump.
There was one who, steeped in loneliness, cried day and night in a narrow alley before taking his own life.
These three outcomes, slightly misaligned or intertwined in different ways, led the world to its end.
The cycle was roughly ten to twenty years. That was also the period of forced "play" imposed upon them.
Before his eyes lay the Republic of Korea, completely rewound.
His dull, emotionless gaze swept across the world.
Asphalt-paved roads. Buildings rising high above them. People moving hurriedly with umbrellas in hand. Between them, the blaring horns of black and white cars continued. Perhaps it had rained— even the sky was a gloomy gray.
In a world filled with nothing but monochrome colors, a man of an even deeper ash-gray stood there.
The corners of his lips curved faintly. It would likely be an easy journey—but this time, it would be different.
At last, he had a sense of it.