Yangwon, whom he met at the café they had agreed on, was perfect from head to toe.
In a fluttering pink dress, with bright, radiant makeup,
it made him wonder if the whole world had dumped all its beauty stats into her.
Even though he had come out looking neat in a suit he never wore in his life, compared to her, he looked unbearably shabby.
“Hey, Yangwon, you look so pretty today. Seriously.”
“Hehe, well, I’ve always been kind of pretty.”
At the sight of her wrinkling her nose and laughing playfully, Suho felt as if his heart were melting.
He had planned to confess after they ate something delicious, but his thundering heart didn’t seem like it would hold out until then.
Without realizing it, he fiddled with the ring in his pocket.
‘Should I ask her what she wants to eat first, or should I tell her I passed first...?’
First, I need to look cooler. That way the mood will be smoother, too! Suho decided to lay the groundwork first.
“Yangwon, I have something to tell you. I passed both the first and second rounds at the agency this time.”
At those words, Yangwon’s eyes widened.
“Really? Wow. That’s amazing. That’s so great!”
Yangwon rejoiced for him and congratulated him as if it were her own affair. You, who are happy about my success, really are... my angel.
“Suho, you’ve been preparing for so long. You must have really worked hard, huh? Congratulations. Really.”
“Ahem, well, I did okay. I didn’t even work that hard, but I just ended up passing. Haha.”
Yangwon seemed to be in a good mood.
As expected, choosing today was the right call.
The universe was lining up every bit of timing for him.
Whew, whew, be brave.
Very good. The mood was good. Suho resolved to ride this momentum all the way to a confession.
“Yangwon, so what I mean is... I have something to tell y—”
But Yangwon cut him off and started chattering first.
“Suho. It’s not just anywhere, it’s the agency? That’s so great. Seriously! But do you want me to tell you something super amazing?”
“Huh...? Uh, sure, you go first.”
Yangwon was smiling so brightly, as if she were that happy.
What on earth was she about to say? Seeing her like that, Suho found himself smiling as well.
“Ta-da!”
Beyond the screen of the smartphone Yangwon held out, some slick-looking man was smiling.
And he was pressed affectionately against Yangwon, with his arm wrapped around her waist, holding her close.
“......”
Suddenly, his vision seemed to go dark.
“My boyfriend. Handsome, right? My boyfriend works at an agency too, and do you know where? Inyeon! Inyeon Agency. Wow, isn’t that so crazy?”
In that instant, a sharp ringing filled his ears.
Yangwon kept talking, but it felt as though her voice was getting farther and farther away.
“You and Inyeon really must be fated. How did you happen to pass there of all places? My boyfriend is the team leader of the External Cooperation Department there. Isn’t that cool? I’ll put in a good word for you. Tell him to look after you, hehe. What do you think, grateful? Ahem. I really should show you my boyfriend in person sometime. I’ll set a date!”
There was no way it was true.
Yangwon already had a boyfriend?
And that boyfriend was a team leader at Inyeon Agency, the place he had fought so desperately to get into?
Not even a contract worker, but a permanent employee...
Not just a permanent employee, but a team leader...
A team leader, of all things...
While he was half out of his mind, Yangwon said she had a call and stepped away for a moment before returning.
And then she said,
“Ah, Suho. I feel so bad. What should I do?”
“Uh... huh?”
“You said you’d buy me something delicious today, so I came out, but my boyfriend said he missed me so much he took half a day off. Ugh, he’s such a fool, seriously. Anyway, so I think I’ll just have tea and head out first. I’m really sorry. I’ll buy you something tasty next time.”
“Uh, uh... yeah, then, then you should go. I’m fine.”
Fine, my ass. You fucking idiot, you moron!
He wanted to beat himself up, but he couldn’t let any of it show.
“Oh, my boyfriend’s calling. He says he’s in front of the café. I’m going! Thanks for the coffee. Get home safe!”
With a face as happy as if she owned the whole world, she answered the phone and stood up.
She gave Suho a perfunctory wave, then disappeared in an instant, her airy dress swaying.
“......”
Suho sat blankly in the café for an hour like a stone statue.
Then he rose like a zombie, shoved the flowers and ring he had prepared into the café trash can, and left.
He walked down the street with his focus vacant and unfocused, and before he knew it, he had come to a large road.
Without taking a bus or the subway, he trudged along in a daze and arrived home hours later.
But he passed his house and kept walking.
He walked until the sunset faded and the sun went down.
Then, when it began to grow dark, he reached a small playground in some neighborhood he didn’t even recognize.
Only then did he realize that his legs hurt like crazy. Feeling as if he might collapse, he draped himself over a swing for a moment.
“Euhuhuhu... you stupid idiot, you moron, you dumb bastard... hngh...”
Only then did tears stream down his face. His chest, which had felt like it would burst, now felt as if it were being torn to shreds.
Yangwon having feelings for him, my ass. He had just been in her fishpond.
Suho himself was, what, about the twenty-seventh male fish in that pond?
Yes, he had vaguely known. To Yangwon, he was a human being with no value whatsoever.
But Suho’s mentality was too precarious to accept that fact.
On his phone was a message from Inyeon Agency.
[Interview Schedule Notice]
After staring blankly at it for a long while, Suho simply deleted the message.
He had become afraid he might go there and meet that team leader bastard who was supposedly Yangwon’s boyfriend.
He had thought about it while walking all day,
but no matter how much he walked, no matter how much he thought, he couldn’t sort out his situation.
It just felt as though his entire life had gone to shit and been thrown into the gutter.
“Yeah... my life was always like this... As if everything would ever work out... insane... fuck.”
With a self-mocking hollow laugh, he hooked his arms around the swing and leaned back.
Then a meteor fell from the sky.
It had been a very long time since he had seen a shooting star.
It was the first meteor he had seen since the one he had seen as a child at his grandmother’s house in the countryside.
“Huu... They say you’re supposed to make a wish at times like this... What should I wish for? For things to work out with Yangwon? Hehehe... bullshit... how pathetic and clingy...”
He stared blankly at the sky, not even knowing what wish he should make.
But the direction in which the meteor was falling seemed strange.
“Uh, uh... what is this... uh, uh...?? Uh?!?”
It seemed to be coming this way.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!! Aaaaaaagh!”
Suho flailed, lost his balance, and tumbled off the swing.
Then, with light flickering before his eyes, he lost consciousness.
* * *
When he opened his eyes, he was in some pure white space.
An endlessly stretching white space.
A white sky, a white horizon.
And there, a white table and sofa were set.
‘...Am I dead...?’
Was this heaven? Or the waiting room for heaven? No, was it some kind of reception desk?
He should have been hit by something like a reincarnation truck, but it seemed he had gotten the meteor ending instead... What a shame.
Huh, but if it was a meteor, wouldn’t a lot of people besides me have died too? Why am I the only one here? Ah, does everyone get sent to a different waiting room?
While he was lost in idle thoughts, an old man appeared before Suho’s eyes.
Whether he had appeared by tearing through space or had been there from the beginning,
the old man was simply there, with no way to tell where he had suddenly come from.
The old man appeared naturally in front of him and sat on the sofa beside Suho.
As expected, he had white hair, a white beard, and a white suit.
Fortunately, the skin of his face was that of a fair-skinned white man.
If even his face had been white, Suho would have thought he was a ghost and fainted.
Fortunately, his eyes were blue as well, mysterious eyes.
How fortunate they weren’t blood-red.
“Sit.”
A deep, resonant voice that seemed to make the space itself tremble.
Unable to refuse, Suho found himself sitting down on the sofa.
“Hmm, Jeong Suho. Is that right?”
“Uh... uh... yes, that’s right. But where is this? Am I dead? Is this heaven?”
“Hoho, dead? You are still perfectly alive. This is merely a place prepared for a brief conversation with you.”
“Th-then who are you...?”
“I am...”
The old man gathered his thoughts for a moment, then answered simply.
“An administrator.”
“An administrator? What do you administer...?”
A playground manager? Well, it had been a playground inside an apartment complex, so was he the apartment security guard?
But Suho’s expectations missed the mark magnificently.
“I am the administrator who manages the 27,174th universe.”
“Ah... I see... I do. What? What is the 27,174th universe...?”
“Hmm, your people’s knowledge of the universe is still far too low-level, so I’m not sure how to explain it. To put it simply...”
A simple explanation was good.
His head had already started hurting from the word universe alone.
“You people use the term multiverse, do you not?”
“Yes, we do.”
Suho knew that much, too. He had seen it a lot in movies.
“It is an extremely rudimentary concept. At any rate, if I am to explain it in words you can understand, that is the only option. This universe that you observe and understand, this universe that has been expanding for 13.8 billion years since the point you call the Big Bang, is not the entirety of the universe. It is an exceedingly tiny part. Practically one portion of an infinite cosmos. Countless other universes exist besides this one. More than you can imagine.”
“I... feel like I’ve heard something like that before...”
What was with this sudden space science, multiverse theory nonsense...
“Then you are the administrator who manages our universe among all those many universes...”
“That is correct.”
“Th-then... aren’t you... God?”
“God? If you mean the Creator, not even close. The Creator, who made all those universes, is the true God. As I said, we are merely administrators.”
“Administrators...”
“And I am not the only administrator. There are as many administrators as there are universes...”
His voice sounded somewhat self-deprecating.
For some reason, even a being called the administrator of the universe felt pitiful. Right, so you’re just one of the countless employees in a big corporation.
“At any rate, today I have come to meet you, who have arrived at an extremely low probability.”
“...A low probability?”
“Yes. In any case, this 27,174th universe—I shall simply call it our universe. Within our universe are trillions of galaxies, and each galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars. Within that, the solar system is exceedingly small, and the Earth where you reside is smaller still, beyond measure. Do you understand?”
“Yes... yes... I suppose so. I understand.”
“In our universe, once every one million years, we select one being on one star and grant that being their desired request. I have come to find you because of that. The purpose is to adjust the balance of causality within our universe and... never mind. Judging by your expression, you would not understand this anyway.”
“Yes, yes, thank you.”
His head already felt like it would burst from all this absurd information.
“Th-then... so...”
“Yes, so you have been selected. However, your condition is rather strange. Have you understood correctly?”
“Yes... yes? Yes, yes... probably...?”
The old man who called himself an administrator frowned faintly.
“Explain it back to me once.”
“Uh... well, so. There’s a wish-granting event that happens about once every million years in our universe, and of the trillions of galaxies, our galaxy happened to be chosen, and among the hundreds of billions of stars in it, Earth happened to be chosen, and then, in the year 2038, out of the world population of 9.1 billion people, I was picked, so you’re going to grant one of my wishes... right?”
“Oh! You look dazed, but you listened properly. Yes, that is correct. So what is your request? I will grant anything. Ah, of course, it is impossible if it exceeds the capacity of our entire universe. Other than that, it is possible. Tell me just one thing, anything.”
“I see... No, um, I mean, I see. Within the range permitted by the capacity of the universe...”
Ahaha... A hollow laugh kept slipping out.
If this old man was telling the truth, he didn’t seem to be dead. It looked like he was having some kind of insane dream.
Still, what a bizarre dream. This wasn’t winning the lottery of the lottery of the lottery—what kind of ridiculous probability was this?
What a strange dream. A strange dream indeed.
Suho felt pathetic about himself, and at the same time, rather pitiful.
I guess I really was desperate for something like this...
Strange. I didn’t even drink in the middle of the day. I must have fallen dead asleep at that playground...
You idiot. Even after ending up like this, you’re still thinking crap like this... Heh, what a damn pathetic bastard...
As Suho was despising himself, the old man asked again.
“Do you need more time? Tell me what you desire.”
When a cosmic being suddenly tells you to make a wish, what are you supposed to say? In any case, it was nothing but an absurd, groundless dream.
Suho just said whatever came to mind.
Still, the one who came to mind was Yangwon.
It was pathetic, but he couldn’t help it. Right now, the biggest issue in his life was her.
“Phew... Then I’ll go with this. Cheon Yangwon. Give me Cheon Yangwon.”
Yes, even now, even if only in a dream, this was what he wanted. The unattainable Cheon Yangwon—if he could have her even in a dream.
But at Suho’s words, the old man suddenly went rigid.
What, do dreams lag too?
He wanted to wake up from this cliché dream already.
But he didn’t wake up, and as if the screen had frozen, the old man remained still with his head slightly lowered.
The atmosphere grew serious along with him.
Damn it, the dream was stuck buffering. Ugh.
After quite a long while, the old man opened his mouth.
“Cheon Yangwon... You truly want Cheon Yangwon?”
The air changed. So did the old man’s tone.
“......Yes. But... is that not possible?”
“Puhahahahaha! How amusing. In a galaxy as small as dust, so tiny it cannot even be measured, an even tinier being has dared to harbor such enormous greed. Hahahaha! Of all the wishes I have heard over the past ten billion years, this is the most absurd in scale. Hahahahaha!”
The old man suddenly burst into wild laughter. His hearty laughter rang thunderously through the space.
Suho shrank back at the sound.
“Hmm... Still, it is not something I cannot grant. It is an outrageous request, but not impossible. Events like this do not happen often, and above all, I promised, so I shall grant it.”
“R-really...?”
“However, for an ordinary human—moreover, a finite being with an exceedingly short life—Cheon Yangwon may be too much for you to handle.”
At the old man’s repeated question, stubbornness welled up in him.
“No. I can handle it just fine!”
No, fuck, just how incredible is Cheon Yangwon in my head that a being like the ruler of the universe calls it enormous greed... Seriously...
They said dreams were a reflection of the unconscious, and he felt even more pathetic.
‘I must really have seen Yangwon as something huge. Like coveting the entire universe... Heh... Still, does that mean Yangwon becomes my girlfriend, even if only in a dream...? What a goddamn pathetic thing to do...’
Even as he indulged in that foolish fantasy, the dream did not end.
Then the old man murmured in a solemn voice.
“The problem is the form. How should I convey this vast amount? Even if I specify a material with the smallest possible volume and the highest possible value in comparison, there would be no way to pile it all upon your tiny star. I have no choice but to borrow a subspace from another dimension. Clever. Did you perhaps intend even this?”
The old man said things Suho could not understand.
‘Uh... Does winning Yangwon’s heart require a subspace too...?’
He was curious, but the administrator kept talking, so he could not ask.
“I shall grant you a subspace in which to store Cheon Yangwon’s wealth. This space will be yours until you have used up all the goods you receive. Now choose what form they shall take.”
“Pardon...?”
What the hell is this now?
Store Yangwon?
Is he planning to give me hundreds of Yangwons? That’s not it.
‘I-I only need one Yangwon...’
Regardless of what he was thinking, the administrator continued.
“How about this? Whatever it may be, 1,000 Yangwon’s worth is a great quantity. So rather than making it 1,000 Yangwon’s worth of a single thing, if you choose 1,000 kinds of goods, I shall provide each good in the amount of 1 Yangwon’s worth. What say you?”
You’re giving me Il Yangwon instead of Cheon Yangwon...?
No, who the hell is that...?
Hello, just because they have the same given name doesn’t mean they’re all the same Yangwon...
Questions rose all the way to his throat, but the old man still did not give him a chance to speak.
“I did say I would grant anything, but artificially processed things are impossible. Anything processed by human hands has far too many forms, and the quality varies too much, making it difficult to establish a reliable standard. The concept of currency, which exists only within human agreements, is also far too insignificant, so I shall not consider it from the start. Thus, know that I will provide the goods only as substances, in the form of matter that exists within this universe—especially in the form of raw materials.”
As if about to leave, the old man turned his back.
“Call me whenever you choose a good. No, that would be too troublesome. I am a busy being as well... Hmm, there happens to be a suitable fellow. I shall place a storekeeper in your subspace. Receive what you need from the storekeeper.”
“Eh...? Yes...?”
“Well, will you not choose even one thing now? To confirm that the subspace warehouse is functioning properly, it would be best to decide on at least one of the thousand items in advance.”
“Uh... yes... well...”
He was dumbfounded by this insane dream.
My unconscious, what the hell do you usually think about?
“Let me see. Among the most classical goods of exchange used by you Earthlings... Hmm, there is gold. It is as common as cosmic dust, but it seems to be treated as rather precious on Earth. Will you fill one of the thousand with gold?”
“Uh... yes... sounds good.”
I don’t know what you’re talking about, but gold is good. Gold is always right.
“Very well. For now, 1/1000—the first item—has been provided in gold. We shall meet again.”
With those words, the old man disappeared,
and Suho was flung back into reality.