1
Ch 1
The Day After Discharge, I Met a Celebrity on a Backpacking Trip
“Seolrok, so what are you going to do from now on?”
That was what my father asked me as soon as I returned home after being discharged from the military.
I answered.
“First, I’m going to go backpacking for a few days.”
I had already made plans for what I would do after my discharge, and traveling around the country with a backpack was
one of them.
“No, I mean what are you going to do to make a living from now on?”
“Oh.”
I had enlisted late. While all my college friends joined the military between the ages of twenty and twenty-two, I
stubbornly stayed until I graduated before enlisting.
So saying, “I’m going back to college,” wasn’t an option.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to become a writer?”
There was a “don’t tell me” in front of it. Even though I had graduated from the Department of Creative Writing, he was
saying becoming a writer was something he hoped I wouldn’t do.
But I wasn’t offended. My father knew very well how terrible I was at writing. He himself had quite a knack for writing.
You could even infer that from my name.
Kim Seolrok.
My father loved novels. He especially adored mystery novels. That was why he named me Kim Seolrok. He wanted me to grow
up smart, like Sherlock Holmes.
Unfortunately, my father’s wish never came true. I wasn’t that smart.
Still, perhaps because my name resembled that of the protagonist from a novel, I had been interested in novels from a
young age. Then I became obsessed with dramas and movies, and eventually devoured comic books and novels like crazy.
That was how I ended up graduating from the Department of Creative Writing.
My dream had always been to become a writer. Whether it was a poet, a drama writer, or a novelist, it didn’t matter. I
wanted to become a writer who wrote.
Eventually, though, my dream had narrowed down to becoming a drama writer. That was because of my mother’s influence.
She was a drama fanatic who couldn’t live without dramas.
“I’m going to become a drama writer.”
“Even if it’s your dream, you need to know when to give up. You have to look at reality.”
Making a living as a drama writer was my dream.
Not having the talent to do so was my reality.
“I’ll start as an assistant writer and learn step by step.”
My father never stubbornly tried to make me give up on my dream.
He simply took one step back, saying, “Is that so?”
That was why I loved and respected my father.
Of course, my father was also a building owner. He owned an entire seven-story commercial building.
“Where are you planning to go backpacking?”
“Backpacking is backpacking. I’ll just go wherever my feet take me. If I get some inspiration, I’ll write, too.”
Wasn’t that incredibly romantic?
Cold wind came rushing in.
It was cold. Why was it cold? Because it was winter, of course.
And instead of a padded jacket, I was wearing a coat. Of course it was cold when I was wearing nothing but a coat in
winter.
The reason I wore a coat was simple. Coats were cooler than padded jackets, weren’t they?
Besides, I was a Marine. I wasn’t afraid of something as trivial as the cold. I had literally been discharged just
yesterday. So I could endure this much.
“Ugh! My head.”
A throbbing pain began to spread through my head.
Was it because of the cold? Or was it because I had been struck by lightning out of nowhere while walking down the
street last night?
After being struck by lightning, my body had stiffened for a moment and I had collapsed, but I became fine almost
immediately, so I hadn’t even gone to the hospital.
I searched it up and apparently quite a few people survived being struck by lightning without suffering any lasting
problems.
I thought I was one of them, but perhaps it had finally caused a problem.
‘Or not?’
Was I just being overly dramatic over a headache this minor?
Come to think of it, there had been plenty of times in the Marines when things were much harder and more painful than
this.
Considering I was whining over something like this, maybe civilian life had already gotten into me. It seemed all the
military spirit had drained away.
Even my appearance was like that. I didn’t look like a soldier at all. At least, that was what I thought.
‘If it gets worse, I’ll go to the hospital.’
It wasn’t painful enough to ruin my plans, so I decided to stick to what I had planned.
Yeongdeungpo Station.
I was standing in front of the train platform with a duffel bag over my shoulder.
“Fuck, it’s cold.”
But honestly, this winter was on another level, so even a Marine was having a hard time.
It really was unprecedented.
Every year the news claimed it was a record-breaking cold spell, but this time it was actually true. The Meteorological
Agency was always going on about record-breaking cold waves, but this time it was the real deal.
I stood in front of the platform with my hands in my pockets, doing a shuffle dance to keep myself warm.
Soon, the train came in.
But it brought a gust of wind with it.
“Ugh! Fuck!”
I hurriedly turned my body away from the wind blowing straight into my face.
The duffel bag hanging from my shoulder slid down over my shoulders as broad as the Pacific Ocean.
It was three in the afternoon on a weekday. An awkward time to do anything.
Perhaps because of that, there weren’t many people around.
I adjusted my fallen duffel bag and boarded the train.
Seat 12A.
After confirming my seat, I put my duffel bag in the luggage compartment.
When I sat down, there was nothing on the seat directly across from me except a book and a bag.
Did she go to the bathroom?
Looking at the title of the book, I saw that it was Daddy-Long-Legs.
I thought it might belong to a child, but then I noticed the bag.
It was a luxury brand.
I took a book out of my own duffel bag.
The title was The Little Prince.
It wasn’t because I wanted to become a prince or because I had some kind of prince complex that I was reading this book.
I had simply brought it because I wanted to give off an impression of innocence during this trip.
The purpose of this trip...
There wasn’t much to it.
Just like I had told my father, it was a pure backpacking trip.
I’d write if inspiration struck me.
Of course, there was also something else I was hoping for, even if only to the slightest degree.
In movies, people often meet someone special on trains, don’t they?
Maybe the same thing would happen to me.
I wasn’t having any impure thoughts.
I simply wanted to meet my future wife by pure coincidence and have a sweet, romantic relationship with her.
Something completely clean, pure, clear, transparent, and pristine.
I opened the book to a random page in the middle and began reading.
I had read it when I was very young, so I didn’t remember much of the beginning anyway.
I just started reading from the middle.
The content wasn’t important.
What mattered was looking innocent.
I hadn’t even finished reading a single sentence before I carefully observed the seat in front of me.
There was a strand of long hair.
Long, straight hair confirmed.
I crossed my legs and narrowed the space between my brows as much as possible, giving myself a serious expression.
There was a scent.
A pleasant scent.
It was a scent I had never encountered in the military base I had been in until yesterday morning.
Keeping my eyes fixed on the book, I focused on my peripheral vision.
A woman was sitting in front of me.
Even through my peripheral vision, I could tell she was incredibly beautiful.
She was wearing a hat and even a mask, yet she was still unbelievably beautiful.
By the time you became a sergeant in the military, your radar usually developed to the point where it could rival the US
military.
She glanced at me and began reading her book.
How should I talk to her?
I turned the page while thinking of a natural way to start a conversation.
Of course, I had only read the first sentence.
Then, perfectly timed, the voices of an elderly man and woman behind us gradually grew louder.
“You cheated on me! You think I wouldn’t know!?”
“Has this old man gone crazy!?”
I inwardly cheered at their argument.
I shouldn’t have, but I did.
As if I had been handed an excuse, I let out a small laugh and glanced at the woman sitting in front of me.
She glanced back at me too.
As expected, she was incredibly beautiful.
Only her eyes were visible on her face, but her beauty seemed to break through the mask and hat.
The couple’s argument grew louder.
And with it, my excuse to talk to her grew stronger.
I subtly looked behind me before leaning forward.
With a slightly playful smile, I whispered,
“It’s noisy.”
She looked at me and nodded.
“It is.”
“...”
I had nothing else to say.
It was because it had been far too long since I’d had a conversation with a woman.
It wasn’t because I was a loser.
Maybe it was because I had been struck by lightning last night.
I wasn’t normally a loser who couldn’t talk to women.
Should I compliment her?
If I gave her a compliment with a little sense and style, maybe the atmosphere would improve.
“You’re a celebrity, right? It’s obvious.”
“...!”
She gasped in surprise.
The eyes looking at me trembled violently.
“Uh... Is it that obvious?”
“...!”
This time, I was the one who was surprised.
She really was a celebrity.
Now that I knew she was a celebrity, I could see it.
The eyes visible above the mask looked incredibly familiar.
Even though I could only see her eyes because of the mask, it felt as if I could see her entire face beneath it.
She looked just like someone I had really liked until I was a private first class...
“...Kim Sori?”
“Gasp!”
She flinched so hard that her whole body trembled in surprise.
And her reaction surprised me as well.
‘She really is Kim Sori?’
The visual center of the girl group Blackback and its only popular member.
Perhaps because her agency was a small company, the group itself was nothing more than a third-rate group, almost
completely unknown.
But she alone had been actively appearing on variety shows and in advertisements.
However, a former member who had left the group for health reasons revealed that “Kim Sori bullied me.”
After that, her career completely went downhill.
She left the drama she had been filming, was dropped from the variety shows she regularly appeared on, and lost all the
numerous advertisements she had been doing.
The group itself eventually disbanded as well.
I didn’t know the other members of the group or their songs, but I had liked Kim Sori.
She had been the very definition of bright and cheerful.
That was why the revelation that she had bullied a member of her own group had come as an even greater shock.
Perhaps because she was flustered, she awkwardly smiled and said whatever came to mind.
“...Hello. The weather is really... cold, isn’t it?”
“What? No. I’m a former Marine, so I can handle this much without a problem. Haha!”
“...”
“I really liked you a lot, Ms. Sori. But meeting you like this here... Wow. This is amazing. Where are you headed?”
“...”
She hesitated before slowly taking off her mask.
My mouth fell open.
A head the size of a fist, a puppy-like face, large eyes, full lips, a perfectly shaped nose, and pale skin.
She was insanely beautiful in person.
The camera hadn’t captured even half of her actual appearance.
I didn’t know whether it was because she looked different in person or because of what had happened to her, but her
overall impression also seemed slightly different.
Unlike the image I had seen on television, there wasn’t even the slightest hint of brightness on her face.
She fidgeted with her fingers as she spoke.
“...Please keep it a secret that you saw me here. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t post anything about it online...”
“Ah, yes. Of course. That’s not difficult at all.”
“And please don’t take any pictures either...”
“Sure, I understand. But you really are beautiful.”
“...Thank you.”
She couldn’t seem to smile happily at all.
There was something dark and lonely about her.
The public and the media had relentlessly attacked her, so she probably felt as though she had been driven to the end of
the world.
She had received an enormous amount of malicious comments, too.
‘Should I have just pretended not to recognize her?’
But it wasn’t like I had done it intentionally.
Her name had simply slipped out of my mouth without me realizing it.
That was when it happened.
Suddenly, a sharp pain pulled through my head, and my vision became blurry.
Then everything around me began to distort, and the scenery started to change.
‘What... is this?’
A hallway.
I had been inside a train, but suddenly a hallway had appeared in front of me.
I could see lecture rooms.
There were lockers and even a bathroom.
It looked like a university hallway.
And in that place, Kim Sori was mopping the floor.
Her clothes had changed as well.
The jeans that had emphasized her figure were nowhere to be seen.
Instead, she was dressed unmistakably like a cleaner.
‘This is ridiculous. Have I really gone crazy?’
Apparently, getting struck by lightning really had caused some serious problem with my brain.
The hallucination was incredibly vivid.
And yet, I was the only one sitting in a chair in the middle of it.
It felt as though reality and hallucination had become mixed together.
I tried to escape the hallucination, but nothing worked.
I shook my head, squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, slapped my cheeks repeatedly, and even hit my head hard
with my fists.
Nothing changed.
I had no choice but to watch the hallucination.
I had to watch Kim Sori cleaning the hallway.
As she cleaned the hallway, she suddenly looked at a blackboard that had been placed there for no apparent reason.
There was an unfamiliar mathematical problem written on the blackboard.
After staring at it for several seconds, she looked around.
Once she confirmed that no one was in the hallway, she stood the mop against the wall and picked up a piece of chalk.
Tap, tap, tap.
Making the sound of chalk against the board, she confidently began writing down the equation.
But then the door to a lecture room opened, and someone shouted at her.
“Hey! Don’t touch that without permission!”
A new person was appearing now, too.
Huh?
Wait, isn’t that Professor Lee Hyejeong?
Lee Hyejeong, an actress who was approaching old age.
She had appeared and was moving around.
As if...
As if she were delivering lines and acting.
I was watching a vivid hallucination.
No, but could this really be dismissed as nothing more than a hallucination?
At this point, shouldn’t it be called an illusion?
No, was it magic?
Or a superpower?
I had no idea what was happening, but as an aspiring drama writer who had graduated from the Department of Creative
Writing, I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing.
‘I have to write this down!’
It felt like I was watching an entire drama unfold.
I took my laptop out of my duffel bag.
Then I began pounding away at the keyboard at a speed that even surprised me.
Kim Sori looked at him with a face full of confusion.
“...W-What is he doing?”
It was understandable that he had spoken to her.
But then, in an instant, his eyes lost focus and he stared blankly into space.
He shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again.
He even slapped his cheeks repeatedly and hit his head hard with his fists.
Then he continued staring at her with vacant eyes.
And suddenly, he took a laptop out of his bag and began typing furiously.
She had only taken the train because she was going to her family home in Cheongju.
She had deliberately booked a weekday afternoon train because there would be fewer people around.
But she had run into trouble.
Of all people, someone like this had to sit in front of her.
He wasn’t wearing a military uniform, but anyone could tell at a glance that he was a soldier.
Even his bag practically screamed soldier.
But there seemed to be something seriously wrong with his mental state.
‘Did he get discharged because he was sick and is going home?’
Kim Sori carefully watched his reaction as she gathered her belongings.
She put her book into her bag and quietly stood up.
His head followed her movement exactly.
She got goosebumps and was just thinking that she needed to hurry to another train car when the laptop screen caught her
eye.
‘A script...?’
There was no way she could mistake it.
She had filmed several dramas herself.
What this crazy guy was typing like a madman was clearly a drama script.