“Center Director, you seem to ask people questions when you’ve already decided on the answers yourself.”
“I don’t think that’s wrong.”
Seeing his confident voice and habitual smile, I felt even more tired than when I was at the banquet hall.
“Judging by that expression, it looks like I’m tormenting you.”
While talking with the Center Director, I had a vague idea of what business he wanted to discuss with me. He was trying to dig into my identity again, which I had deliberately pretended not to know and refused to reveal the last time we met. He’d been going on about Buddhas and pigs, but it was so obvious that he wanted me to reveal my identity with my own mouth, and it was irritating.
“Then you can keep thinking that way by yourself.”
“You mean that you’re the 27-year-old Woo Jeongjae who has regressed?”
I couldn’t help but frown. I knew that he knew I had regressed, but I didn’t expect to hear it so directly.
“Or would it be more accurate to describe you as ‘an S-class Esper who went berserk because they couldn’t receive Guiding’?”
Even though his voice was calm without a hint of mockery, strangely, my heart sank and various emotions collided inside me. Without even having time to distinguish which emotions were real and which were fake, they poured out. I gripped my seatbelt tightly to gather my overflowing emotions. It was difficult to breathe. I felt like I was having a nightmare with my eyes open. Our conversation entered a brief lull. During that time, the traffic light must have changed because the car started moving.
After some time passed, the fragments of emotions sank below the surface, and rationality gradually returned. As the unstable waves spreading in all directions calmed down, I became aware of the Center Director’s presence.
I was angry at the Center Director for disrupting the daily life I’d barely regained, but I also felt embarrassed about showing vulnerability in front of him.
‘When did he find out?’
There were too many things to consider: trying to cancel the contract with Joo Seolhyeon but only forming a temporary Guide contract. Looking for other temporary Guides and contracting with several of them. Ability metrics coming out similar to before the regression.
‘Why did the Center Director regress? Wasn’t I the only one who had my mother’s keepsake?’
The meaningful words he had thrown at me flashed through my mind. The Center Director had been trying to make contact with me continuously with some purpose since before.
“Why are you telling me this?”
What I couldn’t understand the most was his attitude the first day I saw him after regressing. He wasn’t as friendly as he is now. His attitude changed completely after I cleared the A-class dungeon.
As we seemed to be getting closer to our destination, a police station appeared not far away, and I could also see the café I’d mentioned. The Center Director leisurely pulled the car over to the curb and looked at me.
“Why am I telling you this? Because I don’t want you to die from going berserk again.”
At his blunt expression, I struggled to maintain my composure.
“I’ll help you get your revenge.”
I didn’t ask the foolish question of who the target of revenge was. The person the Center Director was referring to was the only one in this world.
“Why do you automatically assume I want revenge?”
“Don’t tell me you think he’ll just fall away naturally if you only terminate the temporary Guide contract? Isn’t that just deceiving yourself?”
“…”
“You can think that way because you have a weak heart. But if you continue with such a complacent attitude, you’ll walk the same path as in the past without any benefit from having regressed.”
The Center Director advised me seriously, as if no one knew me better than he did. If I hadn’t peeked into the Center Director’s memories and didn’t know that he had manipulated the matching rate, his words would have sounded very reasonable. But from my position of knowing the truth, the Center Director and Joo Seolhyeon were cut from the same cloth.
“I’ve never thought about revenge, so I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. Thank you for giving me a ride.”
I didn’t want my words to drag on and let the Center Director detain me, so I conveyed my message simply and quickly opened the car door and got out. I could feel the Center Director’s gaze on the back of my head, but I didn’t shrink away and entered the café more confidently as if to show him.
‘He manipulated the matching rate to pair me with Joo Seolhyeon, and now he’s trying to get rid of Joo Seolhyeon?’
I wasn’t sure about anything else, but it was clear that the Center Director wasn’t talking about revenge for my sake. The hypothesis that something had happened between Joo Seolhyeon and the Center Director, and he was trying to use me to get rid of Joo Seolhyeon, seemed more plausible. But the connection between Joo Seolhyeon and the Center Director had formed after he contracted with me. And it had only been a month since the contract.
‘Can something have developed between them in just a month?’
I couldn’t think they knew each other before contracting with me. After all, the current Center Director wasn’t the same person I knew five years ago, but someone who had regressed along with me.
Something that would make Joo Seolhyeon incur the Center Director’s wrath right after the regression…
Suddenly, I remembered that the Center Director and Joo Seolhyeon had shared a room on Quardo Island.
‘Could Joo Seolhyeon have discovered that he regressed?’
Even I had planned to keep my regression a secret for life, so I didn’t think the Center Director would be much different. Like me, it might have created a sense of crisis for him if someone unrelated, who hadn’t regressed with him, found out about this fact.
‘But that’s their problem, not mine.’
I checked the watch on my wrist. While the Center Director had completely turned my insides out, thanks to him, we had arrived earlier than I expected. Now that I was at the café, I thought it would be nice to buy a cup of coffee for the hardworking police officers and headed to the counter. I reached into my inner pocket to find my wallet, but nothing was there.
“How may I help you?”
The part-timer stood in front of the register looking at me, and I embarrassingly said “I’m sorry” and went outside the café. Fortunately, the Center Director had already left, and his car was nowhere to be seen.
“I’m sure my wallet was here in the bathroom… Ah!”
I remembered that when I received the call from Woo Jeonghyun earlier, I hadn’t put my wallet back in my inner pocket but had left it there.
“This is bad.”
I checked my watch again. It was already well past 8 p.m. Even if I picked up Woo Jeonghyun from the police station and rushed in a taxi, it would definitely be past 9 p.m. And it was uncertain whether the wallet would still be there by that time.
It was a headache, but since it happened due to my carelessness, I couldn’t blame anyone else, so I first went to the police station to find Woo Jeonghyun.
Fortunately, Woo Jeonghyun didn’t throw the first punch, so the investigation ended more simply than I had worried. The only concerning thing was that the perpetrator had been transported to the hospital for treatment, so I couldn’t see his face at the station.
‘I hope he doesn’t file a lawsuit later claiming excessive self-defense or something.’
When Woo Jeonghyun was going through his troublemaking phase, he once threw a punch at someone in front of me, and from what I saw, he had a habit of repeatedly hitting the same vulnerable spot. Seeing that, I realized anew that Woo Jeonghyun was only a gentle lamb to his family.
“Have you eaten?”
I asked Woo Jeonghyun as we walked along the night streets.
“It’s fine. I’m not hungry.”
I thought he had been crying when he called, but maybe he was just a bit emotional at that moment, because his face was more composed than I expected. Normally, I would have told him about losing my wallet and asked, “Do you want to go find it together?” but his mood seemed too heavy. I tactfully walked beside him in silence, waiting for Woo Jeonghyun to speak first.
We walked silently like that for tens of minutes. Before we knew it, we had completely left the vicinity of K University and reached area A where residential complexes were concentrated. Finally, Woo Jeonghyun broke his heavy silence.
“Hyung, do you remember the day I had my wisdom teeth removed?”
There were benches placed at every street lamp along the walking path that formed the boundary between districts, and instead of answering, I pointed to one of them.
“Shall we sit down and talk?”
The early summer night was pleasantly cool, making it quite nice to either walk the night streets or sit on a bench and talk.
I sat down on the chair first and patted the seat next to me, and Woo Jeonghyun plopped down beside me.
“Why did it hurt so much back then?”
I was about to ask what the connection was between that memory and him hitting someone today, but not wanting to damage Woo Jeonghyun’s glass-like sensitivity, I nodded along.
“I remember. You cried like the world was ending and wouldn’t listen to mom.”
“I did cry from the pain, but it wasn’t that bad.”
Seeing Woo Jeonghyun unable to objectify himself, it seemed like he had completely forgotten what happened that dawn, so I told him the story myself.
“The day you got your wisdom teeth removed, mom made porridge and told you to eat it, but you threw a tantrum saying you couldn’t eat because it hurt too much. You locked yourself in your room, but then you got hungry at dawn and crept out to eat the cold porridge, and I caught you.”
“Do you really have to mention that in this situation?”
Looking at my brother’s contorted face, I felt the stress that had built up throughout the day fly away. I burst out laughing under the cool night sky, then barely calmed down after receiving his sharp glare.
“Why bring that up suddenly? Are you going through a second puberty or something?”
I asked Woo Jeonghyun as I stretched out my legs and leaned my back against the bench. My brother had his wisdom teeth removed during his turbulent middle school years.
“Puberty… Maybe so.”
I had deliberately thrown it out as a light joke, but Woo Jeonghyun’s face was dead serious.
I thought it had ‘only’ been a month since I lived apart from Woo Jeonghyun, but for my brother, it seemed like it had been ‘as long as’ a month. The Woo Jeonghyun I knew well wasn’t the kind of person who would smile desolately with a face that looked like it might cry. I felt a surge of emotion wondering who had made my brother like this, when Woo Jeonghyun mumbled as if talking to himself.
“I really feel like I’m going back and forth between heaven and hell dozens of times a day because of that person.”
“That person?”
“The Esper I contracted with.”
“Ah.”
If I had been a little quicker on the uptake, I could have immediately known who Woo Jeonghyun was referring to. Only after hearing his answer did I realize how stupid my question had been. Feeling sorry for interrupting him, I gave him a look encouraging him to continue. Woo Jeonghyun rested his chin on his hand. My brother slowly blinked as he stared somewhere at the undergrowth swaying in the gentle breeze.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
