Seeing the standing signboard, I wondered if this world was actually something like my life flashing before my eyes.
No matter how I thought about it, it felt too much like a dream.
Only after confirming that my mind was intact did it finally start to feel real.
This world was genuine.
It was the correct and true world line.
My heart was pounding so fast I wondered if it might actually be dangerous.
Honestly, I think my eyes might have gone a little wild, too.
I even thought about going straight upstairs to the PC café right then and there. In fact, by the time I had that thought, I was already four or five steps up the stairs.
But let’s think about it. Wasn’t it uncertain whether my account even still existed?
The same went for whether the owner of this body had an Odinson account, and since I didn’t know her personal information right now, even identity verification was impossible.
The moment I realized that, my mind began spinning furiously.
I recalled countless facts, reviewed them, organized my thoughts, and reached a conclusion all at once. The instant I did, I chose to go home without delay.
For now, merely confirming that the outside was an ordinary everyday world meant my reconnaissance had achieved its intended results.
Achieved its intended results? I’d even confirmed the good news that was Hela: Odindottir. Forget intended results—I had already exceeded my objective.
Giggling to myself, I ran home as if I were flying. There was a slight pain in my forehead and chest, but I had no time to care.
The villa that had looked unsettling just moments ago, like a deserted island in a concrete jungle, now looked like nothing but sweet my home.
As I caught my breath in the elevator, I thought.
So the sequel to Tyr: Odinson was Hela: Odindottir. The title changed. Well, Hela isn’t an Odinson, after all.
Since it went from Odinson to Odindottir, did that mean the game had become TS too?
Gasp, could this be the reason I got TS’d?
Was that why I couldn’t see it until I came to a world line altered into TS…?!
“Huh. Bullshit.”
Now that my head was spinning so smoothly, even dumb jokes flowed like water.
I opened the door with the key card, took off my shoes, and immediately checked the monitor.
When I shook the mouse, the monitor woke from sleep mode and was still stopped at the password screen.
Until just a little while ago, I had wanted to fall asleep and wake up back in my original world.
To be honest, I still couldn’t say I had no lingering attachment to that side.
What happened to that shitty-ass dead game’s eleventh anniversary?
Were my corpse-friends doing well?
Would the old man really succeed in turning a profit on his Asgal stocks?
Did holding out truly lead to victory?
Leaving behind all the relationships I’d built, and everything I’d accumulated over the course of my life, wasn’t as easy as it sounded.
The pay grade I’d built up thanks to passing the exam early, and the savings account I’d been steadily filling despite a civil servant’s paltry salary, weighed on my mind too.
But now, the situation had changed.
If someone threatened me with a knife and told me to go back?
Even if that knife split my stomach open, I would stay in this world.
Even if I died and only my soul remained, I would cling desperately to this place.
Not that shitty-ass ruined world line where Odinson had delayed its release five times, but this true and correct world line where they promptly announced and released the next installment.
“All right, let’s go.”
For that as well.
Right now, I had to unlock this first.
***
First, I cleaned up the pills scattered across the floor.
Until earlier, I hadn’t even wanted to look at them, but now I felt nothing.
At this point, what did something like this matter? I could toss them into the trash can without a second thought.
The bottle of sleeping pills… I shoved that into a drawer somewhere suitable and got it out of sight.
After ruthlessly clearing away the obstacles, I sat down in front of the now-clean desk.
There were some things I had thought of on the way back from outside.
I entered each thing that came to mind, one by one.
1q2w3e4r.
The reverse of that.
abcd1234
1234abcd
They were so-called standard passwords, but unfortunately, all of them missed the mark.
For now, I kept the monitor on and left it alone. Only checking the time with a glance.
Three minutes.
Exactly three minutes later, the monitor went dark. Shorter than I expected, huh?
The three-minute sleep timer set by the owner of this place was probably much shorter than the default. If it was set like this, there would be more chances than expected to enter the password.
In other words, there was a high possibility that it wasn’t an annoying password to type. Then something like a word might be much easier to use than repeating the same number. The likelihood of a word-style password increased.
Then password.
Or iloveyou.
iamjimin.
Watching the passwords I had racked my brain for get eliminated one after another was steadily disappointing, but it wasn’t bad.
Earlier, every time I hit a wall, I had been nervous and on edge. Now, it felt like I had come to an escape room café near Hapjeong Station.
I was even a little excited, my heart thumping.
Enjoying it like this made the situation feel like a mystery novel. It also felt like solving a thought puzzle.
As someone proud to call myself a Sherlockian, my mind automatically shifted into detective mode.
I felt like there were a few more standard passwords, but even if I tried to search for them, both the phone and the desktop were locked.
Lastly, I took the driver’s license out of the wallet and checked Ms. Kang Jimin’s date of birth.
…It hit me anew, but the back half of the resident registration number started with a 4. This might take some time to get used to.
“Two, zero, zero, one…”
At any rate, the date of birth wasn’t the answer either. I put the license back into the wallet.
Now that I thought about it, there was another thing that was fortunate about being a woman.
If the back half had started with a 3, wouldn’t I have almost had to go to the military again?
“Mm…”
For a moment, a chill ran through me, but as long as the back half of my resident registration number started with a 4, it was a place I’d never have to go to again anyway.
With a sigh of relief, I gave a small chuckle and took the one million won from the wallet.
It was too much money to carry around in my pocket.
I left only two bills and placed the rest on the desk.
They were crisp, as if they had been deliberately withdrawn and prepared. For what purpose, I wonder… I did have an idea. Not none, at least.
…Come to think of it, seeing the cash belatedly reminded me of something else.
When I had looked up at the villa from outside, it had seemed quite ritzy, and I had wondered just how much the monthly rent on a building like this would be.
The moment I thought of monthly rent, reality began to hit me hard.
One million won was quite a lot if you called it a lot, but if you called it little, it was also an amount that could melt away in no time. I had never lived in a luxury villa like this, so it was hard to estimate how much would disappear into rent.
Even if I wanted to get any kind of information, the phone and computer were locked.
There wasn’t even a TV in this house.
I suddenly felt like a primitive person. How long had it been since I’d been this isolated in modern society?
Humans are social animals, and as you live, whether you like it or not, connections form. The number of people you like and people you dislike can only increase.
But right now, I had dropped into this world all alone. There wasn’t a single person in this world that I knew.
I truly felt like I was alone in the world. It was a strange loneliness, hard to explain.
Lee Jincheol had also lost both parents at a young age and had all ties with relatives cut off, but it hadn’t felt like being left alone in the world like this.
If anything, I had been blessed with people. People whose faces I had never even seen had come rushing over in concern.
…Come to think of it, what should I do if I meet an acquaintance of Kang Jimin’s on the street?
That’s… a bit… wow. Just thinking about it makes my vision go dark.
Should I claim memory loss, like in a cliché?
What if I get dragged off to a psychiatric hospital?
Could I successfully lie in front of a professional psychiatrist?
I knew myself well. I wasn’t that brazen or that clever.
I looked at the monitor, which had quickly gone into sleep mode.
I couldn’t get dragged off to a psychiatric hospital.
I wouldn’t be able to play Odinson there, after all.
Scratching my head, I turned around. I had put it off because everything had been so hectic, but now that I was stuck, it was time to go back to it.
What should you do if you lose your computer password?
Most people would think, “Then I should look up how to fix it on my phone.”
That’s right. This is where modern people stand.
We had come to rely on the internet for too much.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t. I mean that it had been that way for a long time.
In fact, if my phone had been fine, I would already have broken into the computer. I even knew the method.
Then why was I making this much of a fuss?
Well… I remembered that if you pressed some button or other, you could bring up the command prompt, and if you entered something or other, you could somehow unlock it…
But now that I actually had to do it, I had forgotten all those commands.
I’ll say it again: I’m not especially stupid.
This is just where modern people stand!!
We became able to solve too many things through searches, and from that point on, we began treating the internet like some external hard drive.
So it was only natural that we treated it as a detachable memory device.
In other words. What was it again. As long as we vaguely remembered the method, we stopped keeping the details in our heads.
I sat in the chair and rolled the wheels. The moment I sat down, I knew. This thing was expensive. The curve supporting my lower back in a stable way was extremely impressive.
Spinning the chair around, I looked over the room. An unfamiliar place. But now, it was my home.
Maybe because it had been neatly tidied up at the end, this room lacked signs of life. Rather than a house someone lived in, it felt like looking at a pension that had been cleaned up before leaving.
But if I searched, something would turn up.
If I opened the wardrobe, I would learn her fashion sense, and if I opened the refrigerator, I would learn her taste in food.
Of course, if you asked what that had to do with the password, I’d have nothing to say… but I’d hit a wall for now. I had to search for anything I could and retrace my steps.