Chapter 58: Mom
The call came on a Wednesday.
“Jake.” His mother’s voice was thin. Not weak—thin. Like a thread stretched too far. “I need you to come home.”
He was in the middle of a lecture on Dimensional Crisis Response. Three hundred students watched as their professor—the legendary infinite one, the man who had sealed cosmic doors and befriended gods—went pale, excused himself, and walked out of the lecture hall without a word.
Sol took over the class. She always knew when Jake needed her to.
He stepped through a portal into his mother’s apartment and found her sitting in the kitchen—the same kitchen, the same chair, the same smell of doenjang-jjigae that had been the constant in every version of his life.
She looked small. When had she gotten so small?
“Mom. What’s wrong?”
“Sit down, Jake.”
He sat. She poured tea with hands that trembled slightly—not from weakness, but from the effort of staying calm.
“I went to the doctor today. Dr. Kim, the one on the corner. He ran some tests.”
Jake’s infinite mana surged instinctively, reaching out, scanning—but his mother wasn’t a dimensional rift or a cosmic entity. She was a seventy-three-year-old woman, and the mana couldn’t fix what time had done.
“The results?”
“Pancreatic. Stage three.” She said it the way she said everything—directly, practically, as if she were discussing the weather or the price of radishes at the market. “The doctor says surgery, then chemotherapy. Sixty percent chance.”
“Sixty percent.” Jake’s voice sounded far away, even to himself.
“That’s better than fifty, which is what I’d give my chances of teaching you to cook rice.” She reached across the table and took his hand. “Don’t you dare look at me like that. I’m not dead yet. I’m just… fighting a different kind of monster.”
“I have infinite mana, Mom. I can—”
“You can nothing. This isn’t a monster you punch. This is cells. Regular, boring, human cells that forgot how to behave. Your mana doesn’t fix that.”
She was right. He knew she was right. Infinite mana could reshape mountains, seal dimensional rifts, and power the Weaver’s fabric. But it couldn’t cure cancer. It couldn’t turn back time for a single human body. It couldn’t do the one thing he wanted more than anything in any dimension.
“I’ll be here,” he said. “Every day. Whatever you need.”
“I need you to stop crying and help me make dinner. Your invisible friend is probably hungry.”
He helped. He cried while chopping onions and pretended it was the onions. His mother pretended to believe him. They cooked together—the infinite one and the seventy-three-year-old woman who had raised him—and the kitchen smelled like doenjang-jjigae and the fierce, stubborn love of someone who refused to let a diagnosis define her.
Above Seoul, the dimensional fabric shivered with Null’s grief. A message appeared on Jake’s phone, visible only to him:
I’m here. I’ll always be here. And so will she. For as long as she can.
Jake wiped his eyes. “The onions, Mom.”
“Of course, dear. The onions.”