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# Chapter 04. What Is Your True Identity?
From far away, Kim Min-jae came striding toward him, his face flushed red with anger.
As the distance between them closed, he suddenly reached out and grabbed Sim-rok by the collar.
“Hey. Are you crazy? Have you lost your mind?! What the hell do you think you're doing right now?!”
“What?”
Sim-rok remained as calm as ever, which left Kim Min-jae speechless with disbelief.
“What? What do you mean, what~?! Do you even know what the hell you just did?! And you're saying that?!”
“What did I do?”
At Sim-rok's shameless attempt to play innocent, Kim Min-jae was about to yell again, but then shut his mouth.
He had realized there were too many people watching.
“What? Are those two fighting?”
“Huh? Isn't that Kim Min-jae? The one from GC…”
“Wow. It really is him. But who's the guy he's grabbing by the collar?”
“Exactly. Who is he?”
As the son of a major conglomerate chairman, Kim Min-jae had nothing to gain by causing an unnecessary disturbance.
In the end, he released Sim-rok, his hands trembling with anger.
“……Just wait until we get home.”
Suppressing his rage, Kim Min-jae walked past Sim-rok and disappeared into the distance.
Left alone, Sim-rok watched his back and let out a small laugh.
“You're going to have a hard time if you get this angry over something so minor.”
Was it merely the fact that Sim-rok hadn't switched their exam papers?
Compared to what he was going to do from now on, that was nothing.
“You'll only exhaust yourself if you react to every little thing.”
Muttering to himself, Sim-rok walked out of the department building.
The Theory of Novel Writing exam he had just taken was the last exam of the midterms.
On his way home.
Perhaps because it was the end of April, most of the flowers blooming on the trees had already withered, but here and there, the trees still gave off the fresh, green scent of spring.
“It's been a while.”
A university he had thought he would never have a reason to visit again.
He never imagined he would walk through these grounds once more.
“It feels a little different.”
The scenery was no different from what he remembered, yet somehow it felt different from back then.
Students who had finished their exams were gathered in small groups, smiling as they chatted together.
Here and there, students who apparently hadn't finished their exams yet could be seen with exhausted expressions.
In a small park on campus, one group had even spread out mats and was drinking.
Perhaps this was what they called youth.
The surroundings were overflowing with vivid energy.
It was a sight Sim-rok hadn't seen fifteen years ago.
‘Back then, I didn't even have the time to look around.’
At the time, Sim-rok's mind had always been filled with family problems.
He had constantly engraved into his mind how he should behave and what kind of expression he should wear, then repeated it over and over.
He had no room to pay attention to anything else.
‘But now, that has to change.’
From now on, he had to broaden his field of vision, even if only a little.
This was part of preparing himself for what he needed to do so that he wouldn't repeat a life spent shut away in a small room, writing for someone else.
He needed to figure out what he had to do to make the most of an opportunity that would never come again.
Sim-rok recalled events from the ‘Forest of Memories’ that would be useful to him in the future.
“Ah, right. Today is that day.”
Today was the day Chairman Kim Jun-hwan would return home after a week-long business trip.
His relatives would also gather for a family meeting.
The very people who had constantly harassed his mother, Jin Se-yeong.
At this gathering, too, they had nitpicked everything she did and berated her.
‘Sigh. I'm already annoyed.’
Just thinking about having to see their faces made his blood boil.
But—
At the same time, he thought he might be able to use this situation to his advantage.
“This time, I won't just take it.”
As though making a promise to himself, Sim-rok muttered those words.
After leaving the campus, he raised his hand and hailed a taxi.
In the past, Sim-rok would have walked a long distance just to delay getting home for as long as possible.
But he had no reason to do that now.
No, if anything, he wanted to get home as quickly as possible.
There was something he absolutely needed to confirm.
After telling the driver his destination, the taxi set off.
As he watched the scenery outside rush past, a soft hum unconsciously escaped his lips.
“Student, something good must have happened?”
At the taxi driver's casual question, Sim-rok nodded.
“Yes. I think I'll be able to see someone I've been wanting to see soon.”
“Oh? Really? Can I ask who?”
Sim-rok gently raised the corners of his mouth and readily answered.
#
“Professor, I'll leave these documents here.”
“All right. Thank you, as always.”
After the teaching assistant left the private office, Lee Hyo-seok savored the aroma of the coffee he had brewed into a cylindrical teacup.
“Good.”
Lee Hyo-seok was in a good mood.
And it wasn't simply because the coffee beans smelled good.
Exam season always excited him.
It meant he could freely read the writing of young aspiring writers who dreamed of making their literary debut.
Because of Lee Hyo-seok's reputation, students from other departments also continued to enroll in his classes.
What kinds of pieces had they written this time?
Lee Hyo-seok set down his cup and opened the document envelope sitting on his desk.
The winners wouldn't be announced until next week.
He could take his time reading them, but whenever he read a piece, he immersed himself in it and read each manuscript two or three times in order to give it as fair an evaluation as possible.
‘Not that there's really such a thing as good or bad when it comes to a piece someone poured their entire self into.’
Grades and rankings encouraged students to put more effort into their writing.
Moreover, Lee Hyo-seok himself held a certain position in the literary world, so it was only natural that students would try even harder to earn his recognition.
It was an indispensable prerequisite for producing higher-quality writing.
The difficult topics that were notorious for causing complaints every exam served the same purpose.
His theory of literature was that the more difficult the topic, the more closely he could look into a writer's inner world.
It wasn't for nothing that Lee Hyo-seok's acquaintances jokingly called him a ‘literary eccentric.’
“This is why absolute grading is so nice.”
Lee Hyo-seok's classes were also popular among students because, for the most part, he was known for giving generous grades.
Anyway.
“What should I read first…… Ah, that's right.”
Lee Hyo-seok flipped through several manuscripts before taking one out.
On the pages bearing the three characters ‘Yoo Sim-rok,’ sentences written in an elegant handwriting continued across the paper.
“His handwriting is quite good.”
A memory had been firmly etched into Lee Hyo-seok's mind.
Yoo Sim-rok had closed his eyes as though meditating, then opened them and written without the slightest hesitation.
The light he had seen in the eyes of that student, who was only twenty years old, still hadn't faded from his memory.
What kind of piece had he written?
Lee Hyo-seok was already looking forward to finding out.
“My goodness. Even at my age, I'm still getting carried away over nothing.”
With a self-deprecating laugh, Lee Hyo-seok began reading Yoo Sim-rok's manuscript.
And then—
“……Oh?”
His eyes gradually widened, and an involuntary exclamation escaped him.
“Perfect.”
It was a short piece of only around two thousand characters.
Naturally, it had a clean beginning, development, climax, and conclusion.
That much was possible for any student who had been writing since a young age.
‘But this piece…… The rhythm that carries the story, the pacing, the detailed and meticulous descriptions. Not a single part is lacking.’
No matter how talented a student was, they were still a student.
From the perspective of a professional writer, flaws in a student's writing were bound to become apparent.
After all, correcting those flaws and teaching students was part of a professor's role.
But in this piece, Lee Hyo-seok couldn't find a single part that needed correction or criticism, no matter how carefully he looked.
“To write at this level, he'd have to have read and written an extraordinary amount.”
The overall grammar and structure were impressive, but what surprised Lee Hyo-seok most of all was the content of the manuscript.
「……In the raging wind and rain, the puppet sways wildly.
The only thing it has to rely on is the single thread tied to its body.
The puppet looks around.
The other puppets, all resembling it, are also dangling from threads and swaying.
The names written across their chests are being washed away.
The puppet turns its head and looks down at one side of its own chest.
……
The puppet continues to sway.
With both hands covering its chest.
So that its name will not be washed away……」
Puppet, thread, wind and rain, name.
Each carried its own meaning.
If the puppet represented an individual, then the thread represented the connection linking one individual to another.
Individuals come together to form a society.
Within that society, the wind and rain presumably represented one of the countless aspects of society.
What exactly it represented wasn't important.
What mattered here was that the flow of society always affected the individual.
And this was where the ‘name’ became important.
A name turned an individual into a distinct existence.
「When I called his name, he came to me and became a flower.」
Just like Kim Chun-su's poem 『Flower』.
Puppets that all looked identical couldn't be distinguished without names.
They couldn't cut their threads simply to prove that they were special.
That would symbolize not ‘individual uniqueness,’ but ‘social isolation.’
The puppet, becoming a subject within the wind and rain, tries to preserve at least its own name.
It cannot help but be shaken by the immense currents of society.
But at the very least, it possesses the firm determination to protect its name, its existence as ‘I.’
“Whew.”
After finishing the piece, Lee Hyo-seok let out a deep breath.
A student's writing.
No, it had been a very long time since he had been this engrossed in any ‘work’ he had read recently.
Not only was it comparable to the works of established writers, its writing was powerful enough to overwhelm most ordinary authors.
At the same time, a question began to form in his mind.
‘Was this really written by a student?’
If Lee Hyo-seok had to describe Yoo Sim-rok's exam paper in one word……
It had ‘depth.’
It felt as though traces of a lifetime that had lasted far longer than the student's actual age had somehow seeped into the writing.
When students normally wrote on the topic of ‘what makes me myself,’ what they typically expressed was the determination to overcome whatever difficulties they faced rather than be defeated by them.
Even if they had chosen the same puppet as their subject, wouldn't they have written about cutting the strings that bound them and forging their own path?
But this piece acknowledged that an individual could never completely escape from a vast society, while still expressing a small but firm determination to preserve one's ‘self’ within it.
‘Well, if someone argued that all of this was simply a fallacy of generalization, I wouldn't have much to say.’
Lee Hyo-seok readily acknowledged that his impression was nothing more than a ‘feeling.’
At times, the writing seemed to contain a depth that hinted at a lifetime of experience, yet scattered throughout were also expressions commonly found in students of that age.
Just like the 『Flower』 he had mentioned, the motif of a ‘name’ was something students often used when trying to express ‘what makes me myself.’
‘What on earth is this kid?’
During the exam, Sim-rok had spent nearly thirty minutes without writing a single word.
Forty minutes at most.
While everyone else had used the full ninety minutes, Yoo Sim-rok had written without the slightest hesitation.
Who would have thought that such a quiet student possessed this level of skill?
If he had this much talent, Lee Hyo-seok should have noticed it long ago.
So why hadn't he?
‘I want to know more about this kid.’
Lee Hyo-seok's curiosity began to boil over.
‘But…….’
Lee Hyo-seok wasn't in a position to simply act however he pleased.
As a professor, he had an obligation to judge the students fairly.
Besides, he had only read one student's work so far.
Perhaps the other students had written excellent pieces as well.
But instinctively, he felt it.
‘Could there really be someone else who wrote a piece this perfect?’
After much deliberation, Lee Hyo-seok eventually picked up his phone and called someone.
“Hey, yes. It's me. How have you been?”
The person on the other end was a writer he knew from the literary world.
Of course, he didn't call just one person.
This was a time when cross-verification was necessary.
“There is a piece I'd really like you to read. Could you spare some time?”
#
After getting out of the taxi, Sim-rok looked at the destination in front of him.
A luxurious, ultra-high-end villa that looked like something straight out of a drama stood before him.
“This place hasn't changed much, whether then or now.”
He entered the password at the front door and stepped inside.
Sure enough, the interior looked exactly like the image that came to mind when one thought of a chaebol family.
They really were rich, after all.
Once he entered the house, Sim-rok became a little nervous.
A sound was coming from somewhere near the kitchen.
With a feeling of anticipation, Sim-rok cautiously spoke.
“I'm home.”
“Oh, Sim-rok, you're back?”
And the moment he saw the owner of that voice, something surged up from deep within Sim-rok's chest.
His mother, Jin Se-yeong, was alive and standing right before his eyes.
“Did anything happen at school? You came home a little early today…… Hm?”
Se-yeong tilted her head as she looked at Sim-rok.
Her son's eyes looked strangely moist.
“Sim-rok? Are you crying? Did something happen at school?”
Only after hearing his mother's worried voice did Sim-rok realize that tears were running down his face.
“Huh?”
At the same time, he became aware of something surging violently inside his chest.
It was a remarkably unfamiliar emotion.
Ever since his father died, Sim-rok had never cried.
That wasn't an exaggeration.
He hadn't shed a single tear, not even for one day.
Because he was afraid that if he cried, he would collapse.
And if he collapsed, he might not be able to protect his mother and younger sister.
He was so afraid of that that he controlled his emotions.
All he could do was create expressions meant to put on a show.
Masks.
The longer that period lasted, the more uncertain he became about his own emotions.
He couldn't tell whether the expression he made came from genuine feelings or from meticulous calculation.
Perhaps that was why.
Even after his divorce, after his mother died, and after Cheong-a left—
Strangely enough, he never shed a tear.
He had thought his tear ducts had simply dried up.
He had believed that was the case.
But as though mocking that belief, tears now flowed uncontrollably from his eyes.
At the same time, the emotions surging through his chest were so unfamiliar that he couldn't even speak properly.
“……No. It's nothing…… I think some dust got in my eye.”
“Hm? Oh, you.”
It was an obvious lie, but his mother didn't notice and smiled as though relieved.
Sim-rok once again took in the sight of his mother as she had been fifteen years ago.
Her clear, healthy complexion and beautiful appearance, which people had praised endlessly.
She was in incomparably better condition than she would be in the future, when her illness had progressed beyond the point of recovery.
But if he looked more closely, he could see the stress and exhaustion accumulated around her eyes.
Sim-rok knew all too well how much his mother had suffered before and after her remarriage, and how much more she would suffer in the future.
He had been given another chance at life.
This time, he would never let such things happen.
Sim-rok firmly took his mother's hands and brought out the vow in his heart.
“Mom. From now on, I'll make sure you and Cheong-a are happy.”