Slot Two Activated
Monday came after the weekend.
"Hm?"
As Dagyeom came in to start his shift at the restaurant, his steps came to an abrupt stop at the entrance when he ran into someone.
The other person had frozen at the same moment, and of course it was Baek Jiseon, who had happened to come in around the same time.
Her eyes swept over Dagyeom in an instant, and a faint crease appeared between her brows.
The expression on her face clearly said, So you’re at it again with something you never used to do.
If he had been the old Dagyeom, that look would have made him shrink. Instead, he smiled back at her on purpose, bright and easy.
"Good morning."
"...Oh."
They said you couldn’t spit on a smiling face, and sure enough, she only gave a perfunctory reply before turning and going inside.
She would probably go on complaining about him behind his back later, saying he was showing off again or something, but Dagyeom had already decided not to waste another thought on Baek Jiseon.
And unlike her petty little self, the other staff members at the restaurant did not hold back their praise when they saw his changed style.
"Wow, that’s a lot better. A man’s looks really are all about the hair."
"You should’ve been walking around like this ages ago!"
Everyone’s reaction was so enthusiastic that Dagyeom actually felt his face growing hot.
And yet Hyojeong, the one he cared about most, was still avoiding him.
Maybe she thought he had changed his hairstyle because he was conscious of her, which only seemed to make her feel more burdened.
Honestly, I guess I did have that kind of motive too...
Still, that little pang of disappointment didn’t last long.
Dagyeom decided to relax.
He’d spent the whole weekend thinking, and he realized he’d been far too impatient because he’d gotten fixated on increasing his MP income.
I approached it too simply, like it was just an input-output problem. Human feelings aren’t vending machines.
He reflected on that, and from then on he changed his strategy. When he dealt with Hyojeong, he would do it as subtly as possible, making sure not to look obvious.
From that day on, Dagyeom kept his conversations with Hyojeong to a minimum and tried hard to maintain a comfortable distance that wouldn’t pressure her.
The change in his attitude clearly worked, and Hyojeong slowly began to relax and treat him the way she had before.
Time passed like that, and about a week went by.
At last, the decisive moment arrived.
"Ah!"
From a corner of the kitchen, where she had been slicing onions, Hyojeong suddenly let out a small cry.
The other kitchen staff were all too busy preparing for the lunch rush to notice, but Dagyeom heard it and went straight to her side.
Hyojeong looked flustered, clutching one hand tight against herself.
"What happened? Did you get hurt?"
"Ah... no. It just grazed me. I’m fine."
When Dagyeom checked for himself, the cut wasn’t deep, but blood was still running steadily from it.
"You’re bleeding. Wait here for a second."
Dagyeom quickly informed Jungbae and Seohee of the situation, then hurried off to fetch a first-aid kit.
"Let me see your hand."
"Yes…"
He seated Hyojeong on a chair in the kitchen corner, then quickly disinfected the wound, applied ointment, and carefully stuck a bandage over it.
"Keep this on so water doesn’t get into the cut."
Dagyeom rummaged through the storage room and even found a pair of latex gloves, which he put on her hand.
"I’ll take care of the rest of the vegetables and the dishes, so you go do something else. All right?"
"I’m sorry. You’re busy, and because of me..."
"What’s there to be sorry for? Things like this happen when you’re working. And if anything’s wrong, don’t force yourself. Tell me right away."
"Thank you, oppa."
The target’s affection for the user is 40 or higher.
Registration conditions met. Would you like to register the target Han Hyojeong to the slot?
There is 1 slot remaining.
At that instant, Dagyeom caught a subtle shift in Hyojeong’s expression and immediately opened the Customization Window to try registering the slot.
Slot 2 has been activated.
As a reward, 50 FCP has been awarded.
Thanks to Baek Jiseon’s interference, the plan that had been delayed for so long had finally borne fruit.
At last, my MP income is going to double!
It was a great achievement, something he had finally reached after more than a month of effort, and Dagyeom had to clench his jaw just to keep the grin from climbing too high.
If he could, he would have danced right there and then, but the restaurant was in the middle of the lunch rush, so he forced himself to calm down and focus on work.
By the time his shift ended and he had changed clothes, Dagyeom was just about to leave the kitchen when someone gently tugged at his sleeve.
He turned around and found Hyojeong standing there.
"Th-thank you for earlier."
She held the hand with the disposable bandage on it in her other hand and greeted him with a slightly flushed face.
"Don’t mention it. Is your hand okay? Don’t let it get infected, so clean it again when you get home."
Dagyeom answered with a calm smile, and Hyojeong gave a shy little nod.
"Um, oppa."
"Yeah?"
"I-I’ll see you tomorrow…"
After saying that much, she quickly turned on her heel and hurried away.
Why was she declaring that she’d see him tomorrow with such grave determination?
Still, that was kind of cute.
That night, Dagyeom lay on his bed in his room with the Customization Window open, checking Hyojeong’s information.
Nine hundred, huh.
The Customization Window never explained exactly what the total score meant, but Dagyeom instinctively thought of it as a number that quantified a target’s aesthetic level.
In that sense, Hyojeong was a little surprising. He felt a bit bad thinking it, but honestly, her total score was far higher than he had expected.
But when the Customization Window showed him her naked body, just as it had with Mi-hee, he understood the reason: it was all in her skin and her figure.
Her skin already seemed naturally good... but her body is a real surprise.
He’d never known, because she always wore oversized clothes, but Hyojeong’s body was more curved than he had imagined when viewed naked.
She definitely had some extra flesh on her, but her chest and hips were fairly large, and her arms and legs were longer than average, so rather than simply fat, she came off as lush and full-bodied, almost Western in the way her curves carried themselves.
And then there was...
"...Pink nipples."
Dagyeom couldn’t help admiring the clean, vivid pink nipples perched like cherries atop her full breasts.
What was even more astonishing was that, except for the hair on her head, there wasn’t a trace of body hair anywhere on her. Her armpits, her legs, even down there were all smooth as a baby’s skin.
At first he thought she might be shaving, but there wasn’t the slightest sign of it.
He wondered if this was what a hidden gem looked like, and he spent quite a while afterward almost trance-like, studying Hyojeong’s body until he finally pulled himself back to reality.
"This isn’t the time for that."
As with Mi-hee, there was something he needed to verify this time as well.
He examined Hyojeong from head to toe and picked out a place that would be obvious enough for either her or the people around her to notice if it changed.
What he found was a scar on her right elbow.
This is it.
Had it been left from stitching up a torn wound? It was about five centimeters long, dark brown with clear pigmentation, and very noticeable.
For the moment, Dagyeom left it alone and spent his CP on other areas first, finishing the customization. Then the next day, when he went to the restaurant, he stole glances at Hyojeong’s arm.
Recently the weather had grown much hotter, and she had started wearing short sleeves, which made it easy to confirm the scar he had taken note of the day before.
"Hyojeong, what happened to your arm? Did you get hurt?"
Watching for the right moment, Dagyeom pointed at the scar as if he had just happened to notice it while the kitchen staff were all gathered together taking a break, and naturally Jungbae and Seohee’s eyes were drawn there too.
"This wound? Ah..."
Hyojeong looked down at her arm in surprise, then quickly realized what he meant and answered with an embarrassed smile.
"It’s not a wound. It’s a scar."
"A scar? How did you get it?"
"I fell off my bike when I was little."
Seeing the other kitchen staff nod as if that made sense, Dagyeom was certain that his first objective had been achieved.
That’s enough build-up.
With that one remark, he confirmed that Hyojeong herself recognized the scar and, at the same time, stamped its existence into the minds of everyone else in the kitchen.
From that point on, Dagyeom began spending every daily CP that came in on erasing that scar.
He shaved down the uneven texture of the scar itself and blended the dark brown pigmentation so it matched the surrounding skin.
After a few days, the scar had faded enough that the difference was plainly visible, and Dagyeom laid the stage once more.
When the kitchen staff were gathered together goofing off, he brought up the scar on Hyojeong’s elbow again.
"Hyojeong, I think your scar has faded a bit?"
He asked as though probing to see whether she’d been to a dermatologist or had some sort of scar-removal procedure, but Hyojeong shook her head.
"Huh? It’s the same as always."
"Hmph—no, it isn’t. It used to be a little bigger than this."
At his repeated questions, Hyojeong turned her elbow this way and that, but she still shook her head, looking completely lost.
"It was always like this... I think you’re mistaken, oppa."
"It’s the same as before, what are you talking about?"
"Exactly. It was about that size when I saw it before too."
Jungbae and Seohee also took her side, saying he must have been the one who’d remembered wrong.
From their reactions, Dagyeom could be certain of one thing.
So the Customization Window also has the ability to alter memories and thoughts in everyone except me.
What still puzzled him a little was that when he’d improved Mi-hee’s skin with the Sap of the Sacred Tree, everyone had clearly recognized and reacted to the change.
Does it only alter memory and thought for changes created through customization?
Wait... then could it be?
The thought flashed through his mind all at once, and Dagyeom took out his phone to check the photo album.
He found the before-and-after photos of Mi-hee that he had taken earlier to confirm whether the Customization Window was real, and sure enough...
"Holy shit."
Mi-hee in the photos was no longer the gaunt, wrinkled woman she had once been.
As if some kind of synchronization had taken place, every photo he had taken of his stepmother back then had been changed to match the current version of her—like someone who had been customized until she seemed ten years younger!
That meant the Customization Window’s alterations and revisions applied not only to people’s memories and thoughts, but to records as well: photos, images, videos, and anything else that could store an image of reality.
But when I fixed Mom’s wrinkles at the very beginning, I was able to compare before and after.
Could it be that there was a threshold for when the alterations kicked in, and once that threshold was reached, the change happened all at once?
Or maybe the Customization Window modified memory and records organically, in real time, in the most efficient way possible.
As Dagyeom kept following that line of thought, he was reminded once again that the power he had been given was far more incredible than he had imagined, and a chill ran down his spine.
The shock was so strong that even extreme theories like a brain in a vat or a simulation universe flickered through his mind.
But he soon let out a long breath and wiped them from his head.
Forget it. Let’s not think about anything difficult or complicated.
In the first place, it wasn’t the kind of problem that would ever give him a satisfying answer if he kept worrying over it, was it?
Whatever the case, he had no intention of stopping his use of the Customization Window.
What mattered most to Dagyeom was overturning the life he had at the very bottom of the heap and living firmly in the present, and in that sense, he decided to focus his attention on the boost purchase that had now come right within reach.
It was only another 70 points to the next grade. If I invested FCP and pushed Hyojeong up there, the odds of getting 100 MP again, just like with Mi-hee, would probably be pretty high.
Dagyeom made up his mind to spend FCP if necessary and raise her grade for the sake of confirming it once and for all.