"Mom...?"
No, wait a minute.
Mom?
Kim Giryeo has a mother?
Well, of course he must have biological parents. But that's not what I mean right now.
I don't know all the details, but... there was the orphanage and everything.
Anyway, hadn't Giryeo said he had no family?
For a moment, the other person's words caught me completely off guard.
Family.
For a wizard who had stolen someone else's body, there could hardly be a more troublesome concept.
"Um, could you perhaps give me some proof that you're actually my family...?"
I cautiously asked for confirmation.
The woman on the other end of the line gave an awkward laugh before answering. Her name was Lee Hwayoung, she was forty-nine years old, and she told me that if we met in person, I would recognize her face immediately.
"Lee Hwayoung?"
Flinch.
The instant I heard that name, something stirred inside my brain.
A sense of certainty.
An unmistakable sense of certainty.
My body itself seemed to be signaling that the name and age matched the information stored within it about Kim Giryeo's mother.
"So it's true, huh."
As the memories began to stir, I adjusted the phone against my ear.
At that moment, Lee Hwayoung made a suggestion.
If I was all right with it, could we meet briefly tomorrow?
Naturally, I agreed without much hesitation.
Meeting a family member might be dangerous, but to be honest, my curiosity about the original owner of this body was even stronger.
"Yes. Then I'll see you tomorrow."
"– Our son, now that you're all grown up, you're even speaking politely to your own mom?"
"Th-that's... I-I was outside, so..."
There would undoubtedly be plenty of risks.
But if things went badly, I could always pass it off as memory loss.
With that decision made, I ended the call and raised my head.
But just then, a strange sensation suddenly surged through the tear gland of my right eye.
"Huh."
...Ahn Yoonseung turned toward me and froze in shock.
"H-Hyung-nim?"
Gulp.
Without warning, clear liquid began spilling from one of my eyes.
The tears pouring from the gland quickly ran down my cheek and dampened my face.
Only belatedly did I realize something was wrong and try to stop them.
But I couldn't.
The tears simply wouldn't stop.
My body kept pouring them out as though I had been stabbed deeply with a kitchen knife.
From the outside, the sight of me standing there expressionless while tears streamed uncontrollably down my face must have looked strangely eerie. ŘАŊ∅𝐁ĚṤ
"Are you okay?"
This is strange.
I'm not sad right now.
I just had a perfectly ordinary conversation, and now I'm suddenly crying my eyes out.
Something is definitely wrong.
In that case, there can only be one cause for this bizarre reaction...
"The body's...?"
I couldn't finish the thought.
Before long, fragmented memories began pouring through my half-open eyes.
"..."
Metaphorically speaking, it felt like someone had violently yanked open the door of a room packed to the brim with belongings.
.
.
.
Memory is truly fascinating.
How can experiences and emotions be stored through nothing more than a few combinations of chemical molecules?
Vivid memories are like completed paintings.
Even with my eyes closed, they remain just beneath the darkness of my eyelids, faintly glowing with color.
***
Kim Giryeo's earliest memory was of a playground.
"Kyaaak!"
"Hahahaha!"
"Ah, what is it! Stop playing dirty!"
A memory of standing some distance away, watching a group of children play around brightly colored horizontal bars.
[White Light Orphanage]
Kim Giryeo was an orphan.
He didn't know how he had ended up there at such a young age, but at least he understood the reason.
– Hey! Are you done talking?
– Yeah, I'm done. F*ck! Hit me, then! Hit me!
His parents, who had spent every day fighting, eventually divorced.
And in the end, both of them gave up on raising him.
Surprisingly, however, life at the orphanage wasn't all that bad.
He had been fortunate enough to end up in a conscientious, well-run facility.
They fed him proper meals and made sure he got enough rest.
On top of that, there were occasional cultural activities, such as movie outings and even camping trips.
At times, it honestly felt as though he was living better there than he ever had with his parents.
Back then, his parents would frequently complain that they had run out of money and feed him nothing but a 1,000-won loaf of bread from the neighborhood mart.
In any case, thanks to support from the government and the orphanage, he was able to enter high school without any major problems.
It would be a lie to say that growing up had been easy.
Still, considering he had made it this far in good health, perhaps things hadn't been so terrible.
Kim Giryeo stood inside the school auditorium, neatly dressed in his uniform.
– A-ah, can everyone hear me? We will now begin the entrance ceremony for the 20XX academic year's incoming students.
Soon, the announcement calling for the national anthem echoed through the hall.
Even now, the musty smell of those old wooden floorboards remained vivid in his memory.
Unfortunately, what came afterward was far less pleasant to remember.
During his first year of high school, an unprecedented disaster struck the world.
***
Dungeon Shock.
Yes.
Anyone living in the present era would remember it.
Monsters roamed freely through the streets, and seas of flame straight out of a movie spread before people's eyes.
Who could possibly have imagined that Seoul would end up like this for a reason completely unrelated to war?
[Breaking News. Thanks to the efforts of the newly Awakened Choi Jin (22), the operation to retake Seoul's northern border on the 7th has succeeded...]
Fortunately, thanks to the emergence of Awakened individuals, Earth's social systems recovered more quickly than expected.
During the earliest stages of the Dungeon Shock, the number of gates was still so small that they could almost be counted on one hand.
By around the following year, South Korea's educational institutions gradually began functioning again, and regular school attendance was eventually restored.
For Giryeo, it wasn't until his second year that he was finally able to attend high school properly.
"Kids, this is your first time having face-to-face classes, right? All right, let's take our time and work through the material."
Eating lunch at school.
Playing soccer with friends.
Going back to the orphanage after classes and doing homework.
Seen from the outside, it was an utterly ordinary school life.
And yet, why did the memories from this period look so faded?
As though the colors were slowly draining from the scenery.
[From: Seohyeong Gu]
[Subject: How have you been?]
One day, Giryeo, now a high school student, checked his inbox and found an email from Gu Seohyeong.
But he never replied.
In fact, he couldn't even bring himself to open it.
"Seohyeong..."
Sorry, but Gu Seohyeong wasn't exactly someone he welcomed hearing from.
"Seohyeong is still doing well."
Giryeo had maintained a strange distance from other people for a long time.
He was naturally introverted, and perhaps because he had been teased throughout elementary school for having no parents, he had developed an inferiority complex he could never quite shake.
Ridiculous as it might have been.
From the outside, Gu Seohyeong's family seemed perfectly stable.
On top of that, Seohyeong herself had achieved considerable success as a child actor.
So how would someone like him look in the eyes of someone like her?
Perhaps not merely pitiful.
Perhaps even laughable.
"..."
Giryeo suddenly felt ashamed.
Logically, he knew Seohyeong would never think of him that way.
But the embarrassment remained, and it was enough to make him avoid her.
The same thing happened with the friends he made in high school.
Once he began regarding his family background as a weakness, he grew afraid that others might look down on him because of it.
As a result, he rarely opened his heart to anyone.
"Kim Giryeo! Want to go to the internet cafe after school?"
"No, I can't. My parents are coming home early today."
Nor could he find any comfort for those feelings back at the orphanage.
There was little point in people carrying the same wounds licking one another's injuries.
If anything, it only made them ache more.
Perhaps because the facility housed so many young children, fights between residents broke out fairly often.
Giryeo, who was naturally pacifistic, inevitably felt out of place in an environment where strength so often determined status.
"It's suffocating."
It was truly a dilemma.
Throughout his school years, Kim Giryeo lived with an uneasiness he couldn't explain.
Only much later did he realize that what he had been feeling was loneliness.
He had convinced himself that having no family no longer mattered.
But in reality, that had been nothing more than self-hypnosis.
His heart hadn't grown stronger.
It had simply been growing sicker.
"Oh, I'm seriously going crazy."
"Why?"
"I fought with my mom this morning. No, she says she won't give me any allowance because I'm not going to school during vacation. Does that make any sense?"
"Wow, even I won*"
"Ah—I seriously want to run away from home."
On an overcast day, while listening to his classmates complain, Kim Giryeo suddenly found himself wondering about his biological parents.
But almost immediately, he dismissed the thought.
'What's the point of looking for them now?'
***
And so the day of graduation arrived.
"Three years have passed since we first entered this school, filled with excitement at the thought of a new beginning. Now, we are preparing to take our first steps into society..."
The student council president stood onstage delivering the graduation speech.
And somewhere in the audience, one student suddenly realized he was in serious trouble.
"Society."
The truth was...
His grades weren't very good.
Perhaps it was because there had been no one around to guide him.
Or perhaps he was simply stupid.
Despite his generally exemplary behavior, Kim Giryeo's academic performance had always been lacking.
Eventually, he gave up on the idea of attending college.
And because of that, he would now have to leave the orphanage immediately after graduation.
Which left him with a serious problem.
"How am I supposed to live on my own from now on?"
I've been saving money for a deposit through part-time jobs, so I guess I'll look for a place near the factory first?
After the graduation ceremony, Kim Giryeo walked out of the auditorium at an unhurried pace.
The athletic field was crowded with students carrying bouquets and taking photographs with their families.
But by then, he had long since exhausted whatever jealousy he might once have felt toward scenes like that.
He didn't think much of it anymore.
"Phew..."
But who could have imagined that his own graduation ceremony would end with a scene like this?
"G-Giryeo-ya!"
Rustle.
The moment Kim Giryeo stepped outside the school gates, he suddenly stopped.
A bouquet of soap flowers had been thrust directly in front of him.
"D-did the graduation ceremony go well? Congratulations."
"Who are you?"
"Wh-what do you mean, 'who'...?"
The middle-aged woman holding out the bouquet stared at him.
Then she said,
"I'm your mother. Do you remember me?"
What?
What did you just say?
***
She introduced herself as Lee Hwayoung.
Afterward, sitting across from Kim Giryeo at a table, she took out several old photographs and told him they were from his childhood.
One of them showed a newborn baby held in a woman's arms, staring blankly at the camera.
The woman in the photograph bore an unmistakable resemblance to the person sitting in front of him now.
"I'm sorry Mom came so late."
The woman, her lips painted with burgundy lipstick, continued speaking.
She explained that sending him to the orphanage hadn't truly been her choice.
Her circumstances had simply been so difficult that she had never been able to bring herself to face him again.
"The world has been so chaotic lately! So many people have died. And through all of it, I kept worrying that something might have happened to you..."
It seemed the Dungeon Shock had played a major role in Lee Hwayoung's decision to search for her son.
She explained that after witnessing a catastrophe on a global scale, she had realized that if she postponed their reunion any longer, she might never have the chance to see him again.
That realization had finally given her the courage to reach out.
"Things still aren't completely settled, but... I really wanted to see you, Giryeo."
Lee Hwayoung appeared only at the very end of his school years.
When the other children from the orphanage heard about it, they all responded in almost the same way.
"Isn't she just after your settlement money?"
Ten million won.
The independence settlement fund provided to children aging out of institutional care.
Unfortunately, there had been cases in which biological parents who had abandoned their children suddenly returned years later in an attempt to claim that money.
"Someone who never showed her face until now suddenly comes back on the day you're leaving the facility? Even with everything that happened during the Dungeon Shock, that's a little..."
"Exactly."
"I heard the older girl who left two years ago went through something similar."
Everyone warned Giryeo not to trust the mother who had suddenly appeared before him.
And the person most directly involved couldn't help agreeing with them.
A mother who had never once visited her son suddenly showed up just as he became an adult and qualified for a settlement payment.
Of course he was suspicious.
"Giryeo, would you like to live with Mom?"
But why?
Despite all of those doubts, Kim Giryeo couldn't bring himself to turn his back on the family that had finally returned to him.
"Yes?"
"– If you don't have anywhere else to go... come live with Mom. Actually, I've already found a place where we can live together."
They had gone to a galbitang restaurant after the graduation ceremony.
There, after carefully explaining her circumstances, Lee Hwayoung asked whether he would come live with her once he left the facility.
Kim Giryeo decided to accept.
Despite all the warnings from the people around him, the loneliness that had accumulated inside him for so many years ultimately determined his choice.
Starved for affection, Kim Giryeo chose to follow his mother.
"It'll be okay."
If his peers were right and his biological mother truly wanted nothing but his settlement money, then all he had to do was firmly refuse to give it to her.
Besides, living with his mother would save him a great deal in living expenses.
So, even financially speaking, this was a perfectly rational choice...
After leaving the orphanage, Kim Giryeo moved into the rented room where his mother, Lee Hwayoung, was living.
At first, the reunited mother and son were awkward around one another.
But after about a month, that awkwardness gradually began to disappear.
During all that time, Lee Hwayoung never once mentioned the settlement money.
"Son, wake up and eat!"
Seaweed soup was served in an ordinary white bowl rather than on a stainless-steel cafeteria tray.
Why did such a simple meal make him so happy?
"Eat plenty."
Kim Giryeo gave an awkward smile and picked up his metal spoon.
For a time, he truly believed his dream had come true.
A small room.
A quiet life together with his family.
If life could simply remain like this, that alone would have been enough.