Sim Ah-ryeon

Sim Ah-ryeon is a healer, painter, and founding Busan Station survivor whose infamous OldManGoryeo persona turns public hatred into medicine. Once dismissed as an inconsequential low-level healer, she learns that hostility directed at her can cure cancer, regenerate limbs, and sustain an army. The Grudge Orb is only the public shape of a stranger power: Ah-ryeon perceives and consumes emotions, and her uncertain distinction between human feeling and everything else makes her both a compassionate savior and a corruption risk. (Chapters 11–13, 69–70, 128, and 447–454)

Biography

OldManGoryeo becomes the Healing Angel

Ah-ryeon survives the Busan Station Tutorial as the frightened woman whose scream sends hundreds of people running after Seo Gyu's death. In most cycles, Undertaker remembers her only as an easily overlooked extra with weak healing: enough to ease a cold or a scraped knee, but not enough to justify a place in a late-stage party. In the cycle where SG Net connects the peninsula, however, he tracks the malicious user OldManGoryeo to Pocheon and discovers Ah-ryeon painting quietly behind the masculine online persona. (Chapters 6 and 11–12)

Her neighbors know a completely different person. As the local Healing Angel, Ah-ryeon works as a school nurse, art teacher, and librarian, treating injuries and severe illness without payment; her healing has grown strong enough to cure cancer. She explains that the change comes from the Grudge Orb. Curses, spite, and hatred directed at her extend health and strengthen any medical ability she already possesses. SG Net gives a shy woman access to hostility at national scale, so provoking strangers as OldManGoryeo becomes the power source for genuine public medicine. (Chapter 12)

Undertaker chooses not to end the trolling after exposing her. Ah-ryeon is ashamed that innocent people can be caught in her provocations, yet insists that resentment lets her help one more patient. Her posts become more venomous, her healing more valuable, and her place in the guild more secure. The contradiction never disappears: her gentle in-person service depends on an online mask designed to be hated, while falling activity or hostility on SG Net can sharply reduce the power on which her patients rely. (Chapters 12–13 and 69–70)

Healing until humanity blurs

As the alliance learns to cultivate abilities deliberately, Ah-ryeon's private vice becomes military infrastructure. Undertaker and his co-conspirators place blame for Anomalies on a fabricated mastermind so that public rage flows toward her, and Dang Seo-rin trains her singing for ten years. At the Yalu River defense line, Ah-ryeon enters battle as the Eastern Holy State's Saintess and sings a Latin requiem. The wave of healing regenerates missing arms, legs, eyes, and blood, restores trampled vegetation, and lets a vastly outnumbered army survive four nights against the Monster Wave. (Chapters 127–128)

The victory fixes her public image as the Northern Saint and the peninsula's “indestructible barrier of life.” She returns to the northern front whenever new waves appear and holds it for eight years, even though worship, battlefield duty, and hatred were roles others built around her. Ah-ryeon rarely complains about the burden and still asks only for praise and a sweet café mocha when the work ends. Her endurance makes the saintly myth truer than its fabricated origin, but by the twenty-second year her accumulated power begins producing a corruption phenomenon. (Chapter 128)

Other failed routes show that erosion visually. In the Reality Online world, each return finds her less recognizably human: first a detailed woman, then a crude green-haired figure, and finally a polygonal mass with very long hair and a large wooden easel. She continues to paint, post memories of Undertaker's coffee, and return at the very end so he will not face the shutdown alone. Her plant-like overgrowth and association with Udumbara reveal healing pushed past restoration into uncontrolled proliferation, without making her loyalty or artistic attention disappear. (Chapters 117 and 128–129)

The emotion drinker

A later route begins again at Busan Station, where Undertaker kills Lee Baek's gang and finds Ah-ryeon crouched beside a crushed sandwich. Her timidity proves to be an intelligent survival performance: she refuses to look up until promised she will live, instantly understands a warning conveyed by hand taps, and recognizes Undertaker as someone like herself. Asked directly about her ability, she gives a simpler and more unsettling answer than the Grudge Orb description: she can feel emotions, consume them, and become stronger. (Chapter 447)

Undertaker spends the following years “raising” that power by turning Ah-ryeon into humanity's supposed ultimate enemy. Celestial messages blame her for catastrophes, while an alliance deceived by the scenario dismembers her under controlled supervision. Although hatred should feed her, her reserves eventually decline. Ah-ryeon explains that most attackers' feelings do not register as fully human to her; their false understanding makes them resemble animals in an aquarium. Undertaker's guilt, fascination, protectiveness, and fear are different. In her eyes he is the one person whose emotions possess enough complexity to restore her instantly. (Chapters 448–450)

That revelation forces the alliance to confront both Ah-ryeon's inhuman perception and Undertaker's responsibility for turning a person into a power project. Ah-ryeon knowingly provokes jealousy and pain because the resulting feelings nourish her, yet she also accepts torture, heals strangers, and tries to understand love through care rather than simple ownership. Noh Do-hwa refuses to treat her as either a helpless victim or a useful monster. When Undertaker chooses to flee with Ah-ryeon rather than continue the regimen, Go Yuri intervenes, argues that their mutual fixation will end in corruption, and kills Ah-ryeon in his arms. (Chapters 450–453)

Healer of impossible memories

Ah-ryeon's most extraordinary healing occurs in the Cemetery of the Sea of Corpses and Blood, Undertaker's divine realm. Yo-hwa and Cheon-hwa use hundreds of their remembered bodies to run Laplace simulations against Go Yuri; failed selves fall with their hearts split open. Ah-ryeon admits that she has never healed someone already dead, then causes red spider lilies to bloom from the wounds. The corpses rise, rejoin hands, and continue the simulation, turning her support into a necessary condition for erasing Go Yuri's powers. (Chapter 435)

After the final campaign, Ah-ryeon remains part of the small household that can ask Undertaker for favors without ceremony. Pandora's Box restores bad-ending memories in which their relationships took different forms, including the route where his attempt to cultivate her emotions became devotion, flight, and death. Ah-ryeon accepts those lives without abandoning her other attachments or claiming Undertaker as property. She survives as painter, healer, companion, and internet menace—still strange, but no longer reduced to the saint, villain, plant, or patient that another person's plan required her to become. (Chapters 473–484)

Appearance and personality

Ah-ryeon is a young woman whose ordinary appearance is easy to overlook. She has green hair, often disheveled or unwashed while she paints, and is repeatedly associated with a white doctor's coat reflecting her work as a healer. Her anxious eyebrows, lowered gaze, awkward smile, and hesitant speech create the impression of a frightened herbivore. Undertaker eventually recognizes that these expressions can also be a deliberate survival mask covering rapid judgment and a gaze that sorts the beings around her by whether their emotions feel human. (Chapters 11–12 and 447–450)

Corrupted forms exaggerate her link to growth and art. Her green hair becomes extremely long, her body turns plant-like or crudely polygonal, and a large wooden easel remains her defining silhouette even when little else looks human. During extreme regeneration, missing limbs reform like intertwined vines. These forms are not a separate character: Ah-ryeon's affection for painting, coffee, and familiar people persists through the bodily erosion. (Chapters 117, 128, and 449)

She is cowardly, socially anxious, whiny, careless, and hungry for praise. Online, she becomes a gleeful provocateur who can enrage an entire community and treat the resulting resentment as a delicacy. In person, she is gentle with patients, loyal to her guild, and remarkably willing to endure pain or public hatred if it produces healing for someone else. Her kindness is therefore real but not conventionally innocent; she studies feelings as colors and nourishment, can manipulate them with unsettling precision, and often understands another person's emotional changes before that person does. (Chapters 12–13, 69–70, 128, and 447–454)

Abilities and anomalies

Ah-ryeon's healing has no formal numbered realm system. Its apparent changes come from the amount and kind of emotion directed toward her, years of engineered public hostility, skill training, and corruption. “Grudge Orb” describes the hatred-to-health expression first recognized by Ah-ryeon; later chapters establish emotion drinking as the broader mechanism beneath it.

Healing and regeneration

Her baseline awakened ability heals minor wounds and illness slowly enough that Undertaker initially considers her a low-tier support member. Once empowered by the Grudge Orb, she can cure severe disease including cancer without demanding payment. Greater reserves let her restore missing limbs in seconds, close deep punctures immediately, withstand repeated dismemberment, and continue healing through damage that would kill an ordinary person. Her regeneration remains finite: constant injury can exhaust it, and an attack whose damage escalates faster than her recovery can still kill her. (Chapters 12, 114–115, and 449–453)

Ah-ryeon can distribute healing over a vast area through song. At the Yalu River, the amplified requiem restores soldiers' severed limbs, crushed extremities, organs, eyes, and spilled blood as the sound passes over them. Grass and flowers revive alongside human bodies, showing that her output is not limited to conventional medicine. In Undertaker's divine realm, she crosses a further boundary by healing remembered corpses that are already dead, using red spider lilies to return the Cheon sisters' sacrificed bodies to the Laplace loop. (Chapters 128 and 435)

Grudge Orb and emotion drinking

Grudge Orb converts curses, spite, resentment, and hatred aimed at Ah-ryeon into health and stronger healing. Intensity and number both matter. SG Net makes the skill practical because OldManGoryeo can attract the hostility of distant Awakeners at once; when the community's active hatred fades, so does her extraordinary output. Fabricated celestial stories later scale the same principle from trolling to global blame, making Ah-ryeon the supposed cause of every catastrophe so humanity's rage converges on one target. (Chapters 12, 69, 111, and 127–128)

The deeper ability is not restricted to grudges. Ah-ryeon perceives emotions as distinct qualities or colors, consumes them, and gains strength from feelings she recognizes as genuinely human. Hatred based on a false story can become emotionally thin to her, while Undertaker's guilt and attachment restore her after other sources fail. This perception lets her notice abrupt emotional shifts even across Time Stop, but it also encourages her to provoke pain, jealousy, and obsession in people close to her. The power's danger lies as much in how it changes her standard of humanity as in bodily corruption. (Chapters 447–454)

Anomaly painting and plant-like corruption

Ah-ryeon is an artist who records Anomalies through paintings and sketches. Her intense concentration lets her process bizarre entities as visual compositions, producing a practical record for the alliance and a personal way to understand phenomena that ordinary language does not capture. Easels, paints, sketchbooks, and later recording equipment accompany this work, but the artistic insight belongs to Ah-ryeon rather than to a unique enchanted object. (Chapters 11–12, 113–117, and 454)

At extreme output, healing's principle of growth begins to overwrite her human body. Limbs regenerate as vines, vegetation answers her song, and failed futures depict a green-haired, plant-like figure associated with World Tree Udumbara. This corruption can expand her endurance and regenerative symbolism while eroding ordinary appearance and social perspective. The latest Ah-ryeon is not confirmed to remain permanently in that form, and the final healing inside Undertaker's realm depends on remembered conditions rather than proving unrestricted resurrection in ordinary reality. (Chapters 117–129, 435, and 449)

Power progression

Relationships

• Undertaker: Undertaker exposes OldManGoryeo, recognizes the strategic value of Ah-ryeon's healing, and makes her a permanent guild member. He is also the emotion she finds most nourishing and the trainer whose optimization repeatedly endangers her humanity. Their bond combines rescue, dependency, guilt, fascination, domestic trust, and lives in which each refuses to release the other. (Chapters 11–13, 117–129, 435, and 447–484)
• Oh Dok-seo: Dok-seo is Ah-ryeon's roommate, friend, and fellow member of Undertaker's privileged household circle. They share recording work and daily life, and Ah-ryeon tries to restrain Dok-seo's self-destructive writing habits even while both indulge in disruptive internet behavior. (Chapters 149, 199–200, 406–418, and 473–484)
• Seo Gyu: Seo Gyu survives the Busan Station tutorial alongside Ah-ryeon and later administers SG Net, the platform that makes her Grudge Orb powerful. OldManGoryeo torments him as a user and moderator, but their linked abilities make his communications network and her healing mutually important to the peninsula. (Chapters 6, 12–13, 48, 69–70, and 111)
• Noh Do-hwa: Do-hwa recognizes that Undertaker's cultivation of Ah-ryeon can become an inhumane experiment. She distrusts Ah-ryeon's emotional provocations and refuses to romanticize her, yet her opposition helps force Undertaker to see Ah-ryeon as a person whose continued suffering cannot be justified by useful output. (Chapters 111, 127–129, and 448–453)
• Dang Seo-rin: Seo-rin trains Ah-ryeon's voice for a decade, making the Yalu River mass-healing requiem possible. Their later alliance and household life pair the peninsula's foremost magical singer with its strongest direct healer, despite very different temperaments. (Chapters 127–128, 433–436, and 473–484)
• Cheon Yo-hwa and Cheon-hwa: Ah-ryeon heals the sisters' dead simulated bodies inside Undertaker's divine realm, enabling Laplace to continue erasing Go Yuri's powers. Yo-hwa later includes Ah-ryeon's vanished endings among the lives preserved through Pandora's Box. (Chapters 435 and 472–476)

Items

• Pandora's Box: Ah-ryeon participates in the alliance's opening of the time capsule and receives memories of otherwise inaccessible bad endings, including lives that expose the full danger and intimacy of her bond with Undertaker. She is a recipient of the box's preserved memories, not its creator or custodian. (Chapters 476–481)
• Easel, paints, and anomaly paintings: Ah-ryeon's art supplies are her recurring working tools. The large wooden easel remains identifiable even in corrupted forms, while her paintings preserve visual impressions of Anomalies for study and expression. They are ordinary recurring equipment rather than a single supernatural artifact. (Chapters 11–12, 113–117, and 454)
• Camcorder and recording equipment: Ah-ryeon shares visual-documentation work with Oh Dok-seo, extending her role from painter to recorder of events and Anomalies. The equipment is interchangeable and does not possess a distinct supernatural history. (Chapters 406–418 and 476)