Episode 1 Prologue
"Hey, Kim Hyeonu."
Hong Jeonghyeon, who went to the same middle school as me, calls out from behind.
A guy who didn't even bother pretending to know me back in middle school keeps acting like we're close now that we're in high school, even though we're in different classes.
"I heard you scored within the top 3% nationwide on this mock exam?"
This seems to be the reason he's acting so friendly.
In middle school, I had barely hovered around the upper-middle of the class, but after entering high school, my grades shot up vertically.
I started studying during winter break of my third year of middle school, and after a few months of doing that, this is where I ended up.
Studying, which made other kids groan and struggle, was strangely easy for me, but there was another reason my grades came out well enough to shock the nation in such a short time.
When I studied a chapter, I could predict what kinds of problems would appear on the test.
I could just see it at a glance.
The types of problems that could come out in this chapter were this and that, and if this teacher wrote the exam, they'd focus on these areas.
The mock exams were no different.
Looking at past mock exam questions and the parts emphasized in the online lectures nowadays, I could more or less guess.
It was easy.
Very easy.
Studying—no, reading the patterns, reading people's psychology—it was all so easy for me.
Hong Jeonghyeon approached and chattered away.
I brushed him off and walked past.
Because his motives were plainly obvious.
He simply wanted to find out the secret behind my rapid grade increase and take it for himself.
He didn't have a shred of genuine affection for me.
That day, I went to the department store with my mother.
It was to buy new sneakers because I'd been growing like a weed lately.
When exams ended, my father, mother, and I—the whole family—would go to the department store to buy clothes and sneakers that fit, both as a reward for my grades and because I needed them, and I loved those times.
Spending enjoyable time with my parents browsing the stores, then eating out after leaving the department store.
To me back then, that time was the happiest, and it was also the reason I studied.
But today, Father didn't come.
A dinner appointment with the Chairman whom my father served had suddenly come up.
In life, there are times when plans suddenly change like this.
And sometimes, on such days, a turning point in life occurs.
That day was the turning point of my life.
The person who had allowed our family, which had lived in crushing poverty on Geojedo in Namhae, to live without envying others was the Chairman.
By chance, a connection formed between my father and the Chairman; we moved to Seoul, our circumstances suddenly improved, and the first place we went with our spare money was the department store.
The grand exterior of the building, the splendid lighting, and the faint background music flowing over the luxurious marble floors.
To young me, this place was truly a new world.
Even after ten years had passed, the department store was still a new world.
But I didn't know then that on this day, I would enter a truly new world.
My mother looked on with satisfaction as I tried on a rather expensive pair of basketball shoes, rolling my feet.
Over that picture of such happiness, a terrible sound overlapped.
Creak!
At that sound, my mother flinched and turned her head.
Following my mother's gaze, I turned as well.
At the unpleasant sound accompanied by an eerie vibration, other people also stopped moving and focused on the noise.
Then, with a thunderous BANG!, one side of the ceiling collapsed.
Quite a few people who had been underneath disappeared in an instant, and beyond the cloudy dust, all that remained were piles of cement.
It was silent.
Everyone was dazed by the suddenness of it all.
A few seconds passed like that, and then a belated scream from a woman rang out.
"Kyaaah—"
Starting with that woman's scream, people began to run frantically.
Fwip!
My vision shook.
Because my mother had hastily grabbed me.
And then she ran.
My mother even threw away the shopping bag containing the rather expensive items and desperately ran while holding my hand.
I, running in my new basketball shoes, was simply dumbfounded.
What kind of situation is this? What is happening right now?
Then, again with a thunderous BANG!, I once more felt a fwip sensation.
Something had hit me, and I fell.
My head hurt.
Holding my aching head in the dusty haze, I heard my mother's voice.
"Hyeonu! Hyeonu!"
"I'm over here, Mom."
"Are you okay? Are you hurt?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. What about you, Mom?"
A brief silence passed, and then my mother answered.
"Mommy's fine too. Come here, son."
I crawled on my hands and knees toward the direction of my mother's voice.
When I saw my mother in the white dust, I thought my heart would stop.
A large chunk of cement was covering the lower half of her body as she lay face down.
"Mom!"
I quickly got up and tried to move the cement chunk, but my mother let out a groan.
"Ugh! Stop, Hyeonu. If you do that, Mommy hurts more."
Tears flowed down.
"Mom~ Mom, what should I do? Mom~"
I, for whom everything had been easy thanks to my excellent mind, didn't know what to do at this truly critical moment.
The fear of death, the despair at the overwhelming situation, the sadness at possibly losing my mother—these negative emotions must have covered everything.
My mother reached out her hand.
"Come here, Hyeonu."
My mother pulled me in and embraced me as I knelt before her face.
It must have hurt terribly.
Because with her body trapped under a chunk of cement, she had to wrap herself around me to protect me.
With a body smaller than mine, and one that couldn't even move at that.
And yet, my mother said this.
"Let's just stay still like this with Mommy. Some men will come to rescue us soon."
I could only cry.
"Mom. Mom……"
"I love you, Hyeonu. Mommy loves you so much. Even if Mommy dies, I'll protect our Hyeonu."
"Sniff, Mom. Don't say that. You won't die, sniff sniff sniff."
And then, hearing another thunderous roar as something collapsed, I felt a dull thud in my head and lost consciousness.
That day was the most tragic day in my memory, and the day I entered a true new world that drew a line severing my previous life.
* * *
I only regained consciousness three months later.
They found my mother a full day after the department store collapse; they said she had died holding me tight, just as a mother bird embraces her baby.
Hearing this, I was so shocked that I developed mutism.
Only after six months could I speak again, but I had changed somewhere.
From then on, people started looking different.
Normally it was fine, but when the other person spoke, they sometimes looked different.
The form of a wriggling lump of light, like an amoeba.
It was so bizarre that at first I thought I was dreaming.
But it was reality.
Because I saw that form far too often.
Even the hospital couldn't clearly identify the cause.
They said it could be damage to the frontal lobe from the severe impact to my head during the collapse, or a psychological problem stemming from mental trauma.
They said it would gradually get better with time, but it didn't improve one bit.
Moreover, after some time had passed, I learned one new fact.
When the other person looked like an amoeba, the words from their mouths differed from their inner thoughts.
At first, it only rang as a buzzing sound so I didn't understand, but as time passed the sound gradually became clearer, and before I knew it, it started sounding like clear speech.
From then on, I didn't talk to anyone.
I only studied.
But as long as I lived in a group called school, not talking to anyone was merely my own wish.
Because even if I didn’t say anything, the other person would speak to me first.
“Hey, I heard you placed in the top one percent nationwide on this mock exam?”
[Gloomy little loser. Look at his grades going up even after his mom died. Ugh, what a creep.]
I quickly turned my head away.
It was because if I turned my head and didn’t look at that grotesque lump of light, I couldn’t hear the voice either.
This kind of daily life was too horrifying.
Seeing a strange life-form squirming like an amoeba while hearing such dagger-sharp words was an unbearable agony.
I told no one about this reality of mine.
I couldn’t even tell my father, my only family.
Because even if I did, I would just be made to take those nauseating psychiatric drugs again.
As time passed like that, there were more and more days when I didn’t go to school, and in the end, I dropped out.
And I wandered.
Wondering if perhaps I had been possessed at the threshold of death, I secretly went to a shaman without my father knowing, and I even ran away from home, drifting through cults, prayer centers, and the like.
But none of it did any good.
And so I kept withering away.
In the end, I was even exempted from military service on the grounds that I had a mental issue, and one day, while I was holed up in my room, my father came home dead drunk and cried.
He just kept saying he was sorry, sobbing for a long time.
“I’m sorry, Hyunwoo. Sob, sob… I’m so sorry things turned out this way……”
Hearing my father’s inner thoughts as he said that shocked me beyond words.
Because I learned that day that my father had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, beyond any possible treatment.
But he wasn’t worried about himself in the slightest.
He was worried only about me.
Those tears fell because he pitied me for losing my mother when I was young and wandering afterward, because he worried that I was still living like that, and because he felt sorry for the me who would go on living this way in the future.
That was when I came to my senses.
Seeing my father’s tears made me pull myself together.
The next day, I told my father for the first time about this strange phenomenon that had happened to me.
And I told him that from now on, I would truly live properly.
At first, he was flustered when I said I could hear people’s inner thoughts, but soon my father held my hand tightly.
“Why are you only telling me that now? If you had told me sooner, I could have helped you……”
Not long after, my father did the best thing he could do for me and passed away.
That was connecting me with the chairman he served.
After my father passed away, I immediately began preparing for the high school equivalency exam.
And I also looked into this phenomenon that had happened to me.
I was curious whether there might be someone just like me.
I searched through portals, but there was no one like me, and even when I combed through books, I couldn’t find symptoms like these.
But while investigating, I learned one interesting thing.
It was savant syndrome.
It was a strange condition in which special abilities sometimes manifested in people born with it, or in those who had suffered trauma to the brain.
They said that among the people with savant syndrome, fewer than fifty in a population of 7.7 billion, most showed symptoms of autism.
Judging from that phenomenon, savant syndrome was a kind of abnormal condition in which, in exchange for one part of the brain’s function stopping, a new function manifested.
Naturally, a question arose.
‘Could I have developed savant syndrome from the brain trauma I suffered during the department store collapse?’
I couldn’t know for certain.
But the only thing similar to my symptoms was savant syndrome.
However, I had no autistic symptoms whatsoever, and there didn’t seem to be any brain function that had stopped.
The only thing that had appeared was the ability to hear another person’s inner thoughts.
I decided simply to believe that.
That I hadn’t been possessed by a ghost at the threshold of death, but that a part of my hidden brain function had merely opened due to physical shock.
After settling my thoughts that way, I went outside and began meeting people.
It was to strengthen my heart so I wouldn’t be shaken by any dagger-like inner words.
When I thought about it, every mistake I had made was because I had been swayed by my emotions.
Paralyzed by fear, I had failed to save my mother, and unable to withstand the inner thoughts of those around me, I had fled from reality.
I didn’t want to be like that ever again.
I sought out extreme jobs such as shipyards and deep-sea fishing vessels, as well as service jobs where I had to deal with many people, throwing myself into anything and everything.
It was to temper myself inwardly through hard work, and to grow accustomed to the thorny inner words of others by dealing with many people.
After three years passed like that, I had changed.
The me who panicked in moments of crisis and ran away when things became difficult had disappeared somewhere.
I had changed into someone indifferent to anything, calm no matter what urgent situation arose, and so insensitive that I wasn’t bothered no matter what kind of provocation someone threw at me.
Now I was confident I would no longer be shaken by unexpected situations or by people hostile to me.
My life was beginning now.