Never Doubt the Power of Time
Hmm.
Grandfather had never once been wrong about money. Perhaps that was why. His flat certainty caught in my throat like a thorn and would not go down.
I was still standing there, blank, when he spoke.
"Anyhow. You start school tomorrow, don't you?"
"What?"
"First day walkin' into middle school. That's what I'm sayin'."
"Oh. Right."
"And the uniform? What'd you do about that?"
Oh.
Now that he mentioned it, I'd been stuck in Japan and forgotten the uniform entirely.
He must have read the panic on my face. Grandfather clicked his tongue.
"Head that empty, how you figurin' on runnin' a business?"
For a middle schooler, it was an oddly specific sort of scolding.
"Uniform's in your room. Go on and look."
"How did you know my size?"
"Already forgot the tailor came by when we had that tuxedo fitted?"
The Chairman, personally seeing to a school uniform.
Look at him. Considerate, even.
Perhaps he caught that look. Grandfather bellowed, for no good reason at all.
"Get on, then. Ready yourself for school."
A little later I slipped out of the study and headed for my room. On the bed lay a uniform, folded neat as a gift, and beside it a large bag and a comfortable pair of sneakers.
A present for starting school?
In my last life I'd been busy inheriting hand-me-down uniforms. Now I was getting presents just for walking into a new school. The happiness didn't last.
And with that, you think you can hit a hundred billion won in sales?
Grandfather's words kept circling my ear like a ringing that wouldn't quit.
Could he actually be right?
The night before I started middle school, I turned those words over, and over, and over again.
Meanwhile, in Hannam-dong, in Park Yugeon's office.
Once the staff had all gone home and he was left alone, the anxiety he had been pressing down would lift its head, quiet as a draft under a door.
A hundred billion won in sales. Was that even possible?
The office at dawn was dead still. Disquieting fancies fed on the silence and kept on growing.
Then—
"Stop!"
Park Yugeon shook his head hard. His little brother was probably up at all hours, worrying over how to grow the numbers.
If I'm this anxious, I should just work more.
Hideo, for one, said he ran several projects at the same time.
Better that a hundred times over than being chased by fear. Park Yugeon opened a college notebook at once.
If he was going to make something new, a kinetic action game felt right.
I won't be able to lean on the developers we already have.
Of course not. They were short-handed as it was. He couldn't dump a new project on them on top of everything else.
The most I can manage is chipping away at it alone, in the small hours.
Even if the scale had to stay small, wasn't there something distinctive? The way Hideo had brought in a card battle—a system anyone could see was fresh.
The thought caught its own tail and ran.
At first he was simply happy. The happiness didn't last.
Capacity again.
The more refined the system, the more the file size ballooned. What he needed was a reasonable compromise.
No.
He hit the wall of reality almost at once.
Wasn't there some other way? Not a compromise. Not a concession. Not a negotiation. Not a settlement. A shift in thinking that overcame all of it—a genuinely brilliant idea.
And while nothing worth calling a result appeared, the second hand kept moving. Tick. Tock. Tireless.
Thirty minutes passed, then an hour, gone in a blink, and for no good reason his mood sank. A brilliant idea.
Isn't that a ridiculous wish for a dullard like me?
Tick. Tock. Inside the turning of that second hand, he alone felt stuck in place.
A deep shadow had just settled over Park Yugeon's face when a knock came from outside the door.
At first he thought he'd misheard. But when it came again, he looked at the clock at once.
3:15 in the morning. Far too late for a visitor.
Pressing a hand to his jumping heart, Park Yugeon went to the door.
"Wh-who is it?"
"Yugeon?"
His breath caught.
"It's Dad."
He flung the door open. Park Jongin stood there in a suit.
"You're only just getting off?"
"I am. On the way home I saw the office lights were still on."
So he'd come because he was worried.
"Mind if I come in?"
Yugeon had been certain his father would tell him to go home. Startled, he nodded.
"Still more work left?"
"A little."
"From the look on your face, it isn't going well."
Park Yugeon managed an awkward smile.
A moment later, father and son sat across a table from each other.
When was the last time I talked with Dad, just the two of us?
No proper answer would come.
"Yugeon."
"...Yes."
"From where I sit, it looks like my boy is already working plenty hard."
Yugeon didn't answer.
"I'm not so sure."
He let a beat pass, then went on.
"Maybe the target's just too high?"
"And that target isn't one you set, is it?"
Yugeon nodded.
"If I want to meet Grandfather's expectations, doing my best doesn't feel like enough."
At his son's words, Park Jongin's face went soft with pity. How could it not? Living with a giant like Park Yonghak as your measuring stick. An existence you could work yourself to death and still never reach, and a life spent being measured against him every day. That was the way Park Jongin had endured for decades.
Perhaps Yugeon read the sorrow in his father's eyes. He asked, slowly.
"What did you do, Dad?"
"...What?"
"When expectations that high were crushing your shoulders. I wondered how you handled it."
For all the size of the question, Park Jongin's answer was simple.
"I admitted my limit."
Yugeon stared.
"I admitted I could never become your grandfather, and I filled the empty space with effort."
"But what if there is no empty space? What if you've already worked so hard that there isn't a single crack left, and effort has packed the whole thing solid..."
Park Jongin nodded, heavy. His face said he knew that feeling better than anyone. And that was why he spoke all the more firmly.
"Once I admitted the limit of what I was, the limit of my effort finally broke."
"What do you mean..."
"I told you about my time in the audio division, didn't I?"
Yugeon nodded.
"Back then I thought there was no room left to try any harder. I was already hanging on with a bloody nose. What more was I supposed to do? Then a thought came to me."
Yugeon waited.
"If cutting back on sleep wasn't enough, then fine. I'd listen while I slept, too. Somebody out there had built those speakers. How hard could it be just to listen? That very day I bought every product on the market and listened to them around the clock."
The story was famous. Not only the bedroom—he had put speakers in the bathroom and kept them playing. Or so Yugeon had heard.
"I did that for two solid years, and my ear opened a little. It left me with a precious landmark. Even if I can't trust the man I am, I will never doubt the power of time."
Never doubt the power of time?
The words had a strange resonance. The proof was that he wanted, right then, to get up and sit down at his desk.
Perhaps Park Jongin guessed the change in his son. He smiled faintly.
"Going to school from here today?"
"Yes."
"Need anything?"
"Could you... maybe give me a little allowance?"
"Allowance?"
Park Yugeon was splitting time, and then splitting what remained all over again. Whenever he did, he turned his father's words over like a spell.
Trust the power of time. Yes. Time would never betray him.
And there were results. The game itself was small, thanks to the limits of capacity, but because he had pushed the difficulty to the absolute extreme, its shape was this: challenge the same stretch over and over, and the play time grew.
A moment, though. Wouldn't looping the same stretch get dull? All the more so because skills and items ate so little capacity.
I could put in dozens of them. Hundreds. And still have room.
With that many possible combinations, the way you played had to turn over every time. So even clearing the same stage, you could always expect a new experience.
Park Yugeon explained the plan to Martin first.
"Bravo!"
Astonishingly, Martin shouted it with his mouth hanging open. The reaction didn't last. He recovered the particular cool of an engineering student.
"But there's one thing that bothers me."
Yugeon waited.
"It's obviously an homage, but it still doesn't hurt to be careful, right?"
What he meant was that there could be whispers of plagiarism, so they ought to settle the matter cleanly before they went any further.
"What if we just stamp Rogue right into the name?"
"Such as?"
"As in, we made it in the manner of Rogue... Roguelike! Hmm. Did I go too far?"
Roguelike. The sound of it wasn't bad. A kind of frontal assault.
Anyway. Planning, Park Yugeon. Development, Martin. What remained was the art—the design.
He couldn't drag in outside labor for a personal project. Somehow he had to solve it in-house. Even so, one person did come to mind. No need to look far. Right on the floor below, a talent who had gone all the way through a doctoral course at Seoul National University's College of Fine Arts was planted like a pillar.
Wasn't fine art a long way from commercial art?
This is no time to fuss over whether the rice is hot or cold...
Better to go and see.
Park Yugeon bolted down the stairs.