C3 < Three Lives (2) >
***
The next day, after breakfast, he packed his bag.
Perhaps due to the acorn incident, Jang-gun growled at Jin-hyeok. Even though they were blood brothers, he wondered if the dog was getting a bit too overbearing. Still, being a year older, Jin-hyeok decided to endure it.
“I’m going!”
He rushed out as if being chased, afraid of being bitten on the heels by Jang-gun.
Fortunately, even though Jang-gun was faster than Jin-hyeok, he only followed behind, not biting or overtaking him. He followed Jin-hyeok until they reached the wide stream, barked loudly, and then returned home.
Memories were gradually returning, but he still couldn’t grasp the situation as he went to school for the second time. He could run faster than yesterday, and he wasn’t out of breath.
Jin-hyeok sat down at his desk, closed his eyes, and meditated. He inhaled through his nose and imagined it. The air traveling through his brain, to his lungs, to his dantien. When he exhaled, he reversed the process, releasing it through his mouth. Throughout the process, he consciously felt the shape and beat of his heart.
After a few breaths, the sweat on his forehead cooled, and his stiff legs loosened. A current ran from the top of his head to his toes, and his body temperature rose.
‘I don’t know what this is, but I just do it.’
He wondered if it was a perk of being a regressor, as those fraudulent web novel authors claimed, but breathing was a privilege of the living.
He thought back to the past.
There were those who had often been like that.
Guys who were more mature and serious than their peers. They would watch their friends play with a smile, or wander around the garbage incinerator with their hands behind their backs, or collect empty bottles from the mountain and mutter to themselves as they came down. Although they lived ordinary lives without anything particularly remarkable about them, they seemed mature in their own way, now that he thought about it.
‘Weren’t they also regressors?’
Unable to mingle with their peers because they were too childish and trapped in their own world.
His meditation didn’t last long.
Slide—clunk.
The old-fashioned sliding classroom door opened, and a girl entered. She had her hair tied in pigtails and was wearing a skirt.
“Hi, Son Jin-hyeok. You live far away, so you came early again today, huh?”
“Oh, yeah. Come in. The commute wasn’t······.”
What was he saying?
The girl widened her eyes, and Jin-hyeok quickly shut his mouth. Damn it, what was she doing talking about her commute at her age. Still, it was worth having a conversation.
‘Let’s see, this little girl is······.’
This girl is Kim Min-kyung. She lived in a village that was located in the opposite direction from Jin-hyeok’s house, following the bus route, based on the school. She had big eyes and cried easily. In the first semester of second grade, he almost got into a fight when he tried to stop another kid from bullying Kim Min-kyung.
Like smoke scattering in the air gathering back into a bonfire, Son Jin-hyeok’s memories slowly returned. Would they fly away with his next exhale, disappear when he closed his eyes? He absorbed all the memories that were coming back.
‘It seems those web novel authors weren’t all liars.’
It wasn’t perfect, but wasn’t it like a video playing back slowly, with memories flowing in? Those guys were half-liars.
He was happy about the memories that were seeping in, and he gradually recovered his memories by talking to his friends.
*
‘I know I’ve come back to the past.’
His eyes were fixed on the front, but Jin-hyeok’s thoughts were buried in an unsolvable problem. Even without borrowing Socrates’ words, it was a difficult question.
‘Who am I, after all?’
He uttered it aloud. Someone might have burst out laughing. They might have patted his head and said how cute he was, or even given him a knuckle sandwich.
Contemplation of one’s existence usually begins when one firmly recognizes one’s own domain or role as a member. For instance, a sense of responsibility as a father, a mother. But Son Jin-hyeok merely wanted to understand. The current situation.
It wasn’t a question he asked because he didn’t know who he was. Why, who was he, that he had been given this opportunity to return to the past? Even when something like this happened, the question “Why did I come?” should have come first. He didn’t have the luxury to list the order of questions and rearrange them.
Because.
“Son Jin-hyeok-.”
“Yes-.”
Everyone was looking at him.
The teacher called out his name, and Jin-hyeok stood up from his seat. It was Teacher Choi Eung-mook. He was Jin-hyeok’s homeroom teacher in second grade, when the school was still called a national elementary school. He was always smiling, and he was Jin-hyeok’s favorite teacher out of all his teachers from his previous life.
“Our class president, Jin-hyeok, got a perfect score on this test again. Let’s all give him a round of applause?”
“Wow!”
Clap clap clap-.
The teacher’s words and the admiring gazes of the children were chillingly familiar. It was insufficient to simply say they were familiar. It was something he had already experienced once.
‘Memories are becoming clearer and clearer.’
The lesson. Even though he had learned the material once in his previous life, there was no way he could remember the details. But was there ever anything difficult in second-grade lessons? Besides, Jin-hyeok had been a top student at the most prestigious university. Even back then, he didn’t brag about it, even though he had given up everything himself.
During class, he looked at the blackboard, and during breaks, he looked at the children playing and tried to recall his memories. He frowned uncharacteristically for a child, and his deep brown eyes, full of contemplation, were as dark as the abyss.
“Jin-hyeok, how come you’re so mature? You’ve become even more sensible since you came back from Chuseok.”
No, I’m just spacing out. How can I be sensible? And I’ve only become mature since the day before yesterday. But he didn’t have the heart to contradict his teacher.
He just smiled awkwardly.
‘This is really confusing.’
Nine years old. He wasn’t a smart nine-year-old in the 21st century, where early childhood education was common. There were still children who hadn’t even memorized their multiplication tables.
“Teacher, Jae-sook peed-.”
There were also kids who couldn’t bring themselves to ask to go to the bathroom during class and ended up relieving themselves in their seats. A child named Kang Jae-sook sobbed, burying her face in her desk and shaking her shoulders. She was so innocent because she wasn’t cunning or arrogant.
*
The daily lessons for second grade at a rural elementary school ended after five periods.
Until lunchtime after the fourth period, Jin-hyeok couldn’t recall all his memories. It meant he didn’t know what was going to happen. His confusion didn’t subside.
Especially.
‘My adoptive parents.’
He couldn’t remember why he had to live with them. He hadn’t been able to recall it by the time school ended. It also meant he couldn’t remember why his parents had left far away.
Recovering memories was a more difficult task than he had anticipated. He had thought that the 30 years would feel like a physical distance. But it was strange that even Jin-hyeok, with his brilliant mind, couldn’t easily recall it.
‘I wish the memories from this point would come back.’
Someone approached Jin-hyeok, who was sitting there in a daze.
“Jin-hyeok, do you want to come to my house today?”
“Your house?”
It was a girl named Lee Hae-won. Her house was further inside than Jin-hyeok’s, closer to the sea. Her parents ran a store at the bus stop. The only store in the village. They also provided lodging for bus drivers who were on their last run, so they made a decent living. That’s why Lee Hae-won always dressed like a princess, something that was hard to find in the countryside.
“Uh-, well. I’m your friend, but I-.”
“Let’s go-, we promised to do something fun together today.”
As if she was about to drag him away, Lee Hae-won grabbed Jin-hyeok’s arm.
Only then did he remember what he had done at Lee Hae-won’s house today in his previous life. They had picked up stones on the beach, flipped over small rocks to catch crabs, and played. He had also eaten snacks that Lee Hae-won had brought from her parents’ store.
It was shocking. When they reached a shady spot, Lee Hae-won lifted her skirt, sat on a rock, and grinned, saying she would show him something good. To be honest, at nine years old, he should have known better.
‘I mumbled and didn’t say anything, then made some excuse and went home.’
He had felt embarrassed and flushed. As the memory returned, his heart started to pound again. It felt as if even the emotions he had suppressed in his previous life had returned, and the shock he had experienced as an innocent country boy came back to life.
“Uh, okay. I’ll go next time. Mom told me to come home early today.”
“Okay. It’s a promise, right? Jin-hyeok, you can’t look at other people’s things. Got it?”
Lee Hae-won grinned.
It seemed she had been planning to do it today. There were precocious kids in the countryside, and there were incorrigible rascals, but in some ways, rural children were more cunning than city kids. Jin-hyeok concluded that it wasn’t a matter of the countryside or the city, but rather “it depends on the person.”
‘Is every moment repeating itself?’
Nine-year-old Jin-hyeok wondered as he watched Lee Hae-won walk away. He had changed, but why hadn’t the people around him changed? Was it because he had only been back for a short while? It was a question he couldn’t answer.
‘Should I go to Hae-won’s place?’
Hmm······what would I do there? My body is nine years old, but my tastes aren’t.
In his previous life, Jin-hyeok had never even kissed a girl. He had avoided women to the point of being obsessive, suppressing and eliminating not only his emotions but also his impulses. That’s why it was possible.
That’s right. Son Jin-hyeok had no experience with women. He had chosen to live a solitary life. Yet.
‘I feel like I have experience. A lot of it, too.’
He swore he had never dated. Was this a perk of being a regressor? No way. There was no way that fake memories, which were no different from the uncanny valley, could be a perk.
The blurry memories that were confusing Jin-hyeok flickered like ghosts behind a mask, hidden behind the darkness. Perhaps that ghost was a Casanova, thought nine-year-old Jin-hyeok.
***
It took three days, a whole three days, for most of the memories in his nine-year-old body to return. His friends, his parents, and the people of the village. But they were just memories from his childhood, so there wasn’t much to gain from the memories etched into his nine-year-old body. What Jin-hyeok needed were memories of the future. Especially, memories of the next few days.
His parents never fought, let alone raised their voices. They loved Jin-hyeok more than anything in the world. Even his father, not just his mother, treated Jin-hyeok differently from the way rural people usually did.
‘Now that I think about it, I never found it strange.’
His father. He was very different from the other men in the village, and even from the teachers at school.
First of all, his tone of voice.
- “Hello, sir. Did you have your meal?”
- “Min-kyung, if Dad comes, tell him that Jin-hyeok’s dad stopped by?”
The people of the village would shrink their necks, as if a snake had crawled down their throats, when they heard his father’s tone of voice.
- “Jin-hyeok’s father-, what’s this written in Chinese characters?”
- “Jin-hyeok’s father-. You have a house now, right? Will you give our second daughter’s name?”
Whenever they needed someone to think for them, they would always turn to Jin-hyeok’s father.
Even though his father always held Jin-hyeok’s hand whenever they went out, Jin-hyeok had never thought it was strange. It was strange to think it was strange because he saw his father every day.
Jin-hyeok was frustrated.
‘Focus, focus.’
The memories from his previous life were still missing.
The memories of losing his parents hadn’t returned yet, and he was living with his abusive adoptive parents. He was anxious because he didn’t want to relive that nightmare.
‘It’s only been a few decades, why can’t I remember?’
Finding the memories from his previous life was like walking through a long tunnel with only a single candle.
At that moment, two mischievous friends approached Jin-hyeok. They were Kang Jin-soo and Yuk Seong-chan. Their fathers didn’t know each other, but their names were perfectly matched. Even the teachers called them Jin-soo and Seong-chan together.
“Jin-hyeok, let’s go to the back of the school. There are tons of acorns falling down.”
“Hey, Jin-soo. The squirrels and chipmunks have to eat too. If you take all those, they’ll all starve to death.”
A change came over Jin-hyeok.
Sit-i-seo?
‘It means “three of us.”’
Starve to death?
‘Die?’
It felt like he had found a missing puzzle piece.
It was a flood of puzzle pieces, but it was an easy puzzle to put together in chronological order, and a welcome flood. It was the moment when the candle that barely illuminated the tunnel turned into headlights.
Tears streamed down his face.
“Hey, Seong-chan. Jin-hyeok is crying. Why are you talking about dying?”
Jin-hyeok waved his hands at the boys.
‘No, guys, that’s not it. Thank you.’
For making me remember.