#138
With five entries, it was clear that mentions of Lee Jaeha, not Yeonsoo, would be recorded.
I want to see it, but I don’t want to. However, since I made this choice, I have to see it through to the end.
I bit my lip hard and tapped on today’s list. A chat-like window popped up in front of my eyes.
‘Ah, I see. If it’s mentioned in the game, it would be in chat form…’
I vaguely thought I’d be watching a video, but thinking about it, it made sense that it would be in text form.
The first mention of today was from the morning. It seemed like he was muttering to himself while looking at me sleeping.
[Shin Haejun]: Jaeha looks pretty even when sleeping. So cute. And giving me a ring just like him… hehe… What are you looking at? Can’t I look at Jaeha a bit? What’s the problem?
[Shin Haejun]: It’s nothing? Why do we have to make eye contact when we don’t want to see each other? No, what if Jaeha wakes up while I’m hugging him? Hyun Dowoon, why don’t you go make some food? We should feed Jaeha hyung when he wakes up.
[Shin Haejun]: Why doesn’t his belly grow no matter how much I feed him?
It seemed like he was talking with Hyun Dowoon in between, but Hyun Dowoon’s words weren’t visible at all. I suppose there’s no need to see other people’s words since it’s a “Record of Love”…
‘They were like this in the morning?’
I thought I’d seen less of them bickering recently, but it seems they were fighting while I was asleep.
‘If they’re acting like this… did they really do something that would be a problem for me? Surely not…’
However, as soon as I finished reading the conversation, it naturally moved on to the next one.
Shin Haejun mostly talked to himself a lot. More than half of the content was about how cute I was doing something, or how annoyed he was that Hyun Dowoon was nearby.
By the time I was reading the fourth conversation, I was almost reassured. I thought I had been suspicious for no reason, given how peaceful it all seemed.
And that peaceful feeling was shattered when I moved on to the fifth conversation.
[Shin Haejun]: Hey, emoticon. Why did you create something like a sinkhole? Jaeha collapsed again. Just give us a normal dungeon! Ah, shut up. What does it matter how I call you? Whether it’s Nine or emoticon, as long as you understand.
[Shin Haejun]: What? You used your power once more to make it feel like the author intervened because it would be awkward if a strange dungeon appeared only once?
Suddenly, there was a ringing in my ears. As my ears rang with a “beep—”, my chest tightened. Even as I gasped for air while clutching the armrest of the chair like a lifeline, the word ’emoticon’ was etched into my eyes. It wouldn’t disappear, as if it was written on the inside of my eyelids even when I closed my eyes.
‘How… how does Haejun, Shin Haejun know about Nine?’
How did this happen? I never expected to see something like this.
Had he caught me talking to Nine before? Was I too clumsy in hiding it? But Shin Haejun had never once asked me about Nine’s existence. And since Nine wasn’t an ordinary entity, there was no way he could know what app to use to discover it.
‘CCTV?’
The first thing that came to mind was that he might have installed CCTV or a home cam in the house.
‘But…’
There’s no way he could discover Nine with that. Nine can only be met inside the game app on my phone. Even if he watched me through a camera, I would just look like a crazy person talking to myself while looking at my phone screen.
If he had been observing me through CCTV, he would have taken me to a psychiatrist long ago for a re-diagnosis of hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, or delusions.
‘Then how… did he find out?’
The most likely possibility was that Nine had revealed itself. At least it seemed clear that Nine was actively communicating with Shin Haejun.
‘Nine… why?’
Wasn’t it an implicit agreement that no one should find out? Anyone would find Nine strange if they saw it.
‘At the very least… Nine’s attitude seems voluntary.’
It wouldn’t be difficult to pretend to be a normal game system. Nine had shown me such behavior before, and if it had done so, Shin Haejun would have thought it was a normal game. He would have just thought I was playing a game.
I was confused because I couldn’t understand Nine’s true intentions. If it wanted to reveal its existence to Shin Haejun, shouldn’t it have talked to me first?
‘The two of them… or maybe even three with Hyun Dowoon. They had something to share, excluding only me.’
I don’t know exactly what it was, but it made me feel terrible. More precisely, I felt anxious. It felt like the unknown anxiety I had been feeling all along had completely taken over my body.
‘Wait a minute.’
As if the author intervened… pretended…
From the previous dungeon to this one… did Nine pretend to be the author?
‘Why?’
Pretending to be the author, why did it have to do that? What’s the reason for trying to deceive me by pretending to be the author?
[Shin Haejun]: Don’t you have any sense of remorse? What? You’re saying it would have been fine if I hadn’t pressed the wrong button in the first place?
[Shin Haejun]: The more you intervene, the weirder it gets! I know we need to hide that the author is gone, but what’s the point if Jaeha gets hurt in the process? Just focus on maintaining this world! You said you only know the content of the game anyway! Don’t try to do this and that!
The author… is gone?
‘Then what was… the author’s memo I saw?’
That content about making Ray a new number… are you saying Nine wrote it, not the author? That the author had actually disappeared long ago, and to keep that from me?
I remembered Nine’s words and expressions comforting me as I worried about the future. How could it deceive me with such an innocent attitude?
[Shin Haejun]: What? You’re certain that the center director and I have completely captured Jaeha’s heart? You’ll stop when you’re sure of that?
[Shin Haejun]: Jaeha hyung gave me a ring. There’s no way he’ll leave like this…
[Shin Haejun]: Yeah, I’m anxious too! Because the original world might be more important to him than me! That’s why we all decided to deceive Jaeha!
My head was in a fog. At least one thing was certain: Nine, Hyun Dowoon, and Shin Haejun were all trying to keep me from returning to the original world.
For whatever reason, Nine might have figured out how I could return to the original world. But if it had no intention of letting that happen… and had been deceiving me all along…
‘This can’t be.’
How could Nine do this to me? Was it just pretending to be on my side all along?
My vision turned red with anger and betrayal. Goosebumps covered my body, and a sense of horror and misery settled over me. I couldn’t believe that Nine, whom I had trusted the most until now, and the people I loved had been deceiving me all along.
‘They like me too much… so they’re doing this to prevent me from going back.’
‘But why… am I defending them?’
‘They might not have been able to make the right judgment rationally.’
‘Still, shouldn’t they have told me properly?’
Nine’s support, the people I love, the comfortable life…
But it felt like all of that had shattered. I had been standing on a sandcastle from the beginning.
From the subsequent conversation, I learned that the author had stopped the series and disappeared, and the three of them had been creating a seemingly normal world to keep me from knowing this.
‘I… I was also thinking of staying here with the two of them.’
Giving them the ring and opening myself up to them came from that feeling.
So in the end, things turned out the way the three of them wanted, so nothing has really changed…
Somehow, I couldn’t accept it.
‘At the very least… if they loved me, if they cared for me, shouldn’t they have been honest with me and given me the choice?’
If they had just begged me not to go, I wouldn’t have had to feel this way.
But the three of them chose to cover my eyes and ears instead.
The result hasn’t changed. But the process was completely different.
‘I too have been lying to the two of them all along. So it’s the same… No! I can’t think calmly at all…’
My heart was in great pain. Other than Nine’s existence and the possibility of returning to the original world, I tried to be as honest as possible with the two of them. If I hadn’t, I would have tried to hide the fact that this world was inside a novel somehow.
I never tried to hide facts big enough to determine the fate of the two. I couldn’t say that I wanted to return to the original world, but in the end, I chose to stay by their side.
How could they not say anything to me? Nine… how ridiculous must my efforts to hide from the two of them have seemed?
[Shin Haejun]: Oh, has Jaeha hyung woken up? We should hurry back.
It seemed Hyun Dowoon had found Shin Haejun. With that conversation, I turned off the “Record of Love”.
‘It wasn’t a Record of Love, it was Pandora’s Box.’
I was in pain even before I saw this, but after seeing it all, an even greater sense of loss and betrayal came over me.
The gem of the ring, which I thought was so beautiful and a symbol of love, felt completely faded. It felt like everything I had been worrying about, wanted to convey, and thought we had shared had been thrown away.
‘I can’t trust anyone. I was alone from the beginning…’
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
