Emit Schopenhauer — I’m an Infinite Regressor, But I’ve Got Stories to Tell

Emit Schopenhauer is a German infinite regressor and master swordsman who becomes Undertaker's first true companion in repeated time. Known as Old Man Scho, he helps defeat Ten Legs, teaches swordsmanship and discipline, and proves that a second regressor can make an impossible world bearable. His inability to save his wife Adele within the minute after regression ultimately breaks that partnership, reducing most later cycles to a final phone call, a prepared cup of coffee, and his immediate death. (Chapters 1–3, 18–19, and 118)

Biography

Two regressors against the end

Undertaker meets Emit during his sixth regression and discovers that the older man possesses the same power to return after death. Emit learns Korean with extraordinary speed so the two can coordinate, improving from a greeting to greater fluency than Undertaker within a handful of cycles. Alternating sacrifice and survival, they test routes together until the tenth regression, when their combined sword attacks and Dang Seo-rin's layered song finally destroy Ten Legs. The victory dissolves their mutual suspicion, and Emit becomes comrade, senior, and sword mentor rather than merely a second source of future information. (Chapters 1–3 and 18–19)

Their shared lives expand beyond individual battles. Emit helps establish Freiheit Academy, where Awakeners can train rather than rediscover their abilities through fatal mistakes, and his sword instruction shapes Undertaker's later combat foundation. Mornings with coffee, exercise, study, and blunt lectures make habit Emit's answer to a world that repeatedly resets the body. His insistence that learned discipline survives even when muscle does not becomes one of the earliest models for Undertaker's own routines. (Chapters 2–3 and 27–28)

Adele and the end of the partnership

Every regression begins at 1:59 p.m. on June 17. Adele is attending a conference in Seoul when a Gate erases the area one minute later, and she keeps her phone silent during events. Emit can call three times and obtain only seconds with her before she dies. At first, the impossible interval drives him toward greater sword power, teleportation, resurrection, or any ability that might cross the distance. After centuries of failure, his goal contracts from saving the world to hearing Adele's voice and remembering details of their life together. (Chapters 1–2)

Beginning with the twenty-third regression, Undertaker repeatedly finds Emit headless on the old hospital roof, still holding the smartphone used for his last call. Emit eventually explains that he is tired and asks Undertaker to keep trying until salvation is possible or admit that it is not. Thereafter he makes Adele's call, prepares a café au lait for the companion who may visit, leaves a note, and kills himself with his own Aura. The pattern guarantees another regression but leaves Undertaker to carry forward the campaigns and the guilt of surviving their partnership. (Chapter 2)

Sword Demon possibilities and remembered return

Later encounters with Emit require careful distinction. The Sword Demon who appears in an unconscious world realizes an extreme, corrupted possibility of Emit's martial talent, filling the sky with Aura and forcing Undertaker to fight someone shaped from memory and unrealized potential. Other dream, simulation, and final-battle scenes restore versions of the Sword Star long enough to fight beside the alliance. These manifestations reveal what Emit could become, but they do not establish that the ordinary man who calls Adele retains a permanent Sword Demon state. (Chapters 132–135, 422, 436, and 441–442)

Appearance and personality

Emit is a German man in his sixties with white hair, gray eyes, and a heavily muscled body maintained through habitual training. He normally carries a sword and projects the solid physical presence expected of the Swordmaster and Sword Star. His age never makes him frail: even early in the regressions he can release enough Aura to destroy massive targets or end his own life instantly. The Sword Demon possibility magnifies that presence into a night-sky-like field rather than replacing his ordinary appearance. (Chapters 1–3 and 132–135)

He is blunt, conservative in manner, skeptical, and fond of scolding Undertaker as an impolite junior. Beneath the severity, he learns languages for his companion, brews excellent coffee, laughs openly after victory, and entrusts Undertaker with the most vulnerable truth of his life. Repeated grief makes him obsessive, exhausted, and ultimately unwilling to continue ordinary cycles. His surrender is not indifference to others; it is the collapse of a loyal man whose accumulated years with the world cannot compensate for seconds with the one person he most wants to save. (Chapters 1–3 and 118)

Abilities

Infinite Regression

Emit returns when the world regresses and retains enough continuity to remember earlier cycles, making him the only ordinary human who initially shares Undertaker's temporal burden. His starting point is the old Baekje Hospital rather than Busan Station. The two regressors can divide experiments and sacrifices, but their resets are entangled: Emit's repeated early suicide fixes the world's return even in routes where Undertaker abandons his own effort. The precise interaction between their authorities is revealed through later alternate-route material rather than a visible status system. (Chapters 1–2 and 441–442)

Swordsmanship, Aura, and cutting

Emit possesses exceptional natural sword talent, earns the titles Swordmaster and Sword Star, and serves as Undertaker's senior instructor. His Aura can be projected through a blade, destroy great targets, reinforce movement, and release an explosive force precise enough to kill instantly. Later training material identifies his deeper Awakening as the ability to cut anything. In ordinary use this first applies to physical substance; Undertaker and Oh Dok-seo believe dedicated cultivation could extend it to abstract concepts and make him effective without depending entirely on Leviathan's Aura system. (Chapters 1–3, 18–19, 27–28, and 427)

The Sword Demon represents that potential pushed into an anomalous possibility, with immense aerial sword techniques and Aura resembling a star-filled night. Because this is a corrupted unconscious-world form, it is not a permanent advancement of the ordinary Emit. Likewise, Swordmaster and Sword Star are honorifics rather than dated stages in a formal ladder. Accordingly, ordinary Emit has no chronological power progression distinct from those titles and anomalous possibilities. (Chapters 132–135)

Relationships

Undertaker: Emit is Undertaker's fellow regressor, senior swordsman, language-learning counterpart, and first companion across destroyed worlds. Their trust is forged against Ten Legs and broken not by betrayal but by Emit's exhaustion. Undertaker continues treating his absent mentor as a standard for loyalty and martial possibility. (Chapters 1–3, 18–19, 27–28, and 132–135)
Adele Schopenhauer: Adele is Emit's wife and the center of his repeated grief. Each cycle gives him only a brief phone call before Seoul disappears. His wish to save her drives his growth; accepting that he cannot do so drives his suicide pattern. (Chapters 1–2, 95, and 118)
Dang Seo-rin: Seo-rin leads the coalition whose layered Cursed Song allows the two regressors to reach Ten Legs' hearts. Emit respects the battlefield structure she provides and fights as one of its decisive blades. (Chapters 18–19)
Hong Bi-cheong: The Sword Star and Sword Marquess flank Undertaker during the battle in his divine realm, representing two radically different lives organized around the sword. (Chapter 436)

Items

Sword: Emit's recurring weapon and the focus for his Aura and cutting ability. The precise blade varies by route, and no single named sword is established as permanently crossing regressions. (Chapters 1–3, 18–19, and 132–135)
Smartphone: Emit uses the phone to call Adele during the seconds before Seoul vanishes and records their conversations so he can replay her voice. Undertaker repeatedly finds it clutched in his hand after death. (Chapters 1–2)
Coffee equipment: The abandoned hospital café's tools let Emit prepare café au lait for Undertaker before going to the roof. The drink becomes a recurring farewell and proof that his care survives after he stops joining the wider campaign. (Chapter 2)