-Parallel World
I raised myself up and felt my side with my hand. It was fine.
Even when I looked over my entire body again, I couldn’t see a single wound. There wasn’t even a trace of being stabbed.
No matter how I thought about it, I couldn’t understand. Just how much time had passed while I had been unconscious?
“Um, Mr. Mage… Could you please get up now?”
Suddenly, a halting voice came from somewhere. I quickly lifted my head and looked around.
It was night, and I was in a dark back alley without even a streetlamp. There wasn’t a human shadow in sight.
“Over here. Under you, Mr. Mage.”
The voice came again. From directly below. I sprang to my feet.
After jumping out of the van, I had been sitting on top of a garbage bag in the corner of the alley, checking my body.
But the garbage bag was talking.
“Thank you, Mr. Mage. You were a little heavy.”
Now the garbage bag was wriggling. A terrible stench wafted up.
But when I looked closely, it wasn’t a garbage bag. The thing that uncurled its rounded body and squirmed up to stand in front of me was…
“What the hell? …A zombie?”
I wasn’t the sort to be easily startled, but I flinched and ended up backing away.
The one standing before my eyes looked exactly like a rotten corpse brought back to life. The word “zombie” came out on its own.
Thinking maybe I’d seen wrong because it was dark, I blinked and glared at him again.
But there was no need. He opened his mouth again and confirmed my suspicion.
“Yes. I’m a zombie. I’m sorry, Mr. Mage. The competition for spots around Itaewon is too fierce, so I came up this way. But I haven’t done anything. I’m just sleeping rough here.”
I wondered if I was dreaming. A zombie was speaking perfectly well.
His speech was halting, but it was intelligible. No. More importantly, why was there a zombie here in the first place?
‘Has something gone wrong with my head? Or am I already dead and in the afterlife? But even then, this doesn’t make sense. Why would a zombie…?’
Thinking the zombie might disappear if I came to my senses, I clicked my tongue and shook my head.
That didn’t make the zombie before my eyes vanish. Instead, the things around us suddenly began to fly.
Cardboard, rags, a worn-out sack, Styrofoam—things that looked like the homeless zombie’s household goods—rose into the air and spun around.
“Eek! Mr. Mage, I’ll go! I’ll leave this place right away!”
The zombie screamed and headed toward the far end of the alley with a staggering gait.
He fled in utter panic without even thinking to gather up the belongings floating in the air.
After a short while, the odds and ends fell to the ground as if they had lost power.
“What the hell is all this? Where am I?”
Left alone, I muttered in a daze.
In a world where talking zombies existed, that zombie had repeatedly called me a mage.
Come to think of it, those guys who had been dragging me away earlier had also said something about a mage. Had they been talking about me?
If I had to make even the slightest guess, there was the matter of the sword suddenly lifting on its own, and the odds and ends just now rising into the air.
Was all of that something I had done?
Everything was incomprehensible, but I couldn’t just stand there in a stupor forever.
I started walking. I walked out toward the outside of the alley where the zombie had fled.
Thankfully, the world wasn’t entirely strange. At the very least, the city scenery didn’t confuse me.
It was a residential alleyway you could see anywhere in Seoul.
In particular, the view that unfolded resembled the neighborhood on the hill you found if you went up behind Itaewon—in other words, the appearance of Bogwang-dong, where I had lived.
‘This seems like my neighborhood…’
The zombie had also mentioned Itaewon a moment ago. The problem was that it had been a zombie saying it.
Once I came out of the alley and looked around, I could tell roughly where I was.
It was the lower part of Bogwang-dong. It seemed those bastards hadn’t managed to drag me far.
I began climbing the hillside road at a brisk pace. It was the way home.
* * *
The top of Bogwang-dong. A rooftop room on an old multifamily house. That was my home.
I found my place quickly. The scenery along the hill looked a little different, but it wasn’t greatly different from the neighborhood as I knew it. Maybe it only looked different because it was night.
But as I climbed the outdoor stairs leading to the rooftop room, unease brushed through me.
What if this world wasn’t the world I had been living in? What if someone else was living in my house?
Those thoughts came to me without beginning or end.
Feeling my heart pounding, I entered the passcode on the door lock. Fortunately, the door opened with a cheerful sound.
I let out a sigh of relief and stepped inside.
It was my room. My simple home, just as it had been, with nothing much in the way of furniture besides a mattress and a desk.
“Zombies, mages. I must have been seeing things for a moment.”
Thinking it was probably because I had woken up after losing consciousness, I sank heavily into the chair in front of the desk.
I rubbed my dry face with both hands and looked at the desk, where a strange book caught my eye.
Next to my laptop lay a thick book I had never seen before. I slowly pulled the book toward me.
Unfamiliar, ornate letters were written on the cover. They looked like ancient script.
At the center, a geometric pattern had been engraved in relief. At a glance, it didn’t look like a modern book.
It was absolutely not a book I owned.
“What is this book?”
I opened it. Inside the book as well, unfamiliar letters formed winding rows. Of course, I couldn’t read any of it.
I quietly swallowed dryly. The shape of the book was like a grimoire that would appear in a game.
‘After zombies and mages, now a grimoire?’
Once again, I felt as if I had arrived at a reality I could no longer deny. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but doubt again whether my head was intact.
I got up from the desk and approached the window. I felt like I needed to check whether the outside world was normal.
The moment I looked at the city’s nightscape spread out beyond the window, I clearly realized that this was not the world I had lived in.
“What the…”
The hill in Bogwang-dong where I had lived was in the middle of Seoul, but it had been like the end of the world.
From my room, the place visible across the way had once held an Islamic mosque.
That place, which had always seemed ill-suited to a country called South Korea, had burned down in an arson set by an enraged crowd during the time of the Great Calamity.
After burning until not a single pillar remained, it had stayed as a black heap of ash, existing as a ruin like a symbol of a world being destroyed.
It was one of the calamities that had borne fruit from the seeds Samir had sown.
But now, that place was shining brightly like a monument illuminating a hopeful world.
An unknown building—a building that looked like a splendid palace—stood tall, lit up as brightly as daytime.
I couldn’t tell what the building was. It was a structure with a very lively exterior.
At the center rose a tall, pointed tower that spiraled upward, and around it were connected all sorts of round, colorful roofs.
Overall, it was dazzling with five colors, bright and splendid.
“What is that? A palace, or a temple?”
The building, so comical it almost seemed like a joke, yet flaunting its pride to the fullest, looked as if it were laughing at me.
“Anyway, it’s better than a burned-out ruin.”
I didn’t know what kind of world I had come to. But at the very least, the situation seemed better than in the previous world.
Was this a world where the calamity had not yet struck?
But then what about mages, zombies, and grimoires?
It felt as if I had stepped into a game or an animation.
I left the window and went into the bathroom. Suddenly, I wanted to confirm whether my appearance was the same. I looked into the small mirror attached to the bathroom.
Fortunately, I looked the same. My familiar face—only, to my surprise, without a single wound—looked back at me.
But the moment I met my own eyes in the mirror, a shiver ran down my spine.
My eye was different. The iris of my right eye was shining gold.
‘Ah…!’
A few years ago, I had been infected by the virus that swept the world, and lost the sight in my right eye.
The plague, which was also one of the calamities Samir had brought about, took the lives of countless people.
Losing the sight in one eye didn’t even count among the aftereffects.
In any case, while it was an inconvenient disability, it wasn’t as if the outward appearance of my eye had changed. But now that iris was shining gold.
And that wasn’t all. My field of vision was also brimming with rippling gold.
In that instant, a deep and radiant sensation swept over me entirely. Waves rose from my heart and whirled through my body, shaking me all over.
As I stood there feeling the waves, I realized that I was myself, and at the same time, another being.
I understood the fact that I was a mage.
The waves surged powerfully and swallowed me. Trembling, I was suddenly overcome by dizziness and lost consciousness.
* * *
When I came to again, I hurriedly raised myself up, examined my reflection in the mirror, looked around the room, and checked the view outside the window.
There were no further changes.
My right iris still shone gold, the grimoire lay on the desk, and the splendid palace-like building remained outside the window.
I breathed out deeply.
“I… This place is, in other words…”
I decided to sort through my thoughts and take stock of reality.
First, I, who had thought I would die from being stabbed, had come back to life. Without any pain or wounds.
This place was a world extremely similar to the one I had lived in, but it was a different world. A world where zombies spoke and mages existed.
Most astonishing of all, while my outward appearance was no different except for the fact that my right iris shone gold, another person’s memories were seeping into my consciousness.
Memories that I was a mage.
‘I’m a mage?’
Had I died and possessed another person’s soul? But rather than that, it seemed more accurate to say two consciousnesses were overlapping.
I was myself, and also another me.
It was utterly unbelievable, but for now, I had no choice but to accept it.
Putting it all together, it seemed I had been transferred, with my own ego intact, into the existence of someone in another world.
Where was this place? What were the waves I had felt?
I decided to think of this place as a parallel world. It was far too similar to the world I had lived in to call it a completely unfamiliar otherworld.
Whatever the case, the important thing was that I was alive. Whether this was a parallel world or another world, I had to live here.
‘I can live again.’
My heart beat.