And So, I Decided to Become Mayor
The trouble wasn't coming from a single direction. It erupted from all sides, without warning. Seoul headquarters had heard nothing about new projects for months.
The work underway in Gwangseong City was halted with a notice of contract cancellation, and the Yeojin branch office was, for all practical purposes, half shut down.
What remained were a few unpaid service fees, receivables I couldn't touch at all, and the mounting tide of rent and labor costs.
I hammered away at the calculator every day. What could I cut? Who would I have to let go? Where could I squeeze out more money? But no matter how much I scrimped, the number that came out was always negative.
The word "break-even point" had become meaningless now. What good was a break-even point when there was no revenue to break even on in the first place?
In the end, I told my parents. I hesitated for days before the words would leave my mouth. At my age — fifty knocking at the door — asking my parents for help felt shameful. But there was no other way left.
That night, my father gazed at me in silence for a long moment, then said flatly,
"Understood. Let's take out a loan against the house."
I knew all too well that those words weren't easily spoken. That house was practically my parents' entire fortune. The place they had lived their whole lives, the last bastion of their old age.
An old detached house on the outskirts of Yeojin City. It wasn't worth much, but to them it was life itself.
I believed that money would keep the company alive. Just a few more months, I told myself, and the opportunity would come again. No — I wanted so badly to believe that, I had no choice but to believe it.
So I went out on a limb, took even greater risks. I held onto a few more employees and kept the office open.
Each time a contract came in, I threw myself at it as if betting everything I had. It was too late by the time I realized how reckless that was.
After a month or two, the interest payments grew tight. By the third month, the principal repayment schedule began to unravel. Even then, I thought I could somehow extend the terms or cover it with another loan.
But a house in the provinces made for weak collateral. My credit rating had plummeted, and the additional loan was denied. The financial institution decided there was no room left for negotiation, and that decision came down cold and fast.
A collection notice. And just one month later, the auction began. It was an astonishingly simple process. A few pieces of registered mail, a public notice posted online, and the moment I stamped my confirmation. The house was no longer ours.
Legally it was still there, but emotionally, I had already left it.
My parents said nothing. My father silently smoked cigarette after cigarette, and my mother cleaned the rooms as she always did. That silence — saying nothing at all — was the most terrifying thing of all.
Every night I blamed myself. Had I been greedy for nothing? If I had just stayed in Seoul from the beginning, would none of this have happened? Had I destroyed my parents' entire lives?
My chest felt hollow. Sometimes when I closed my eyes, I could see the real estate registry. The stamp on it — FORECLOSURE INITIATED — wouldn't leave my head.
It really happened in the blink of an eye. Less than a year. In that time, I had been demolishing my own life — and my parents' along with it.
My employees had all left. One by one they cleared their desks, packed their things, and walked out — and in the end, not a single one came back. The lamps that once glowed above each desk went dark one by one, and the low hum of the photocopier fell silent.
When I opened the door, I was alone in the empty office. It was quiet. Desolate. No — even the word "desolate" felt too warm for what it was now.
And then, into that dead silence, work arrived for the first time in ages. Yeojin City Hall called in a hurry. It was an urgent matter, they said — could I come help right away? No contract, no conditions. Just the words, we need your help.
Had they still remembered me? Someone who had held out in this city for so long — someone who, at the very least, had kept his seat until the end. There must have been many reasons, but whatever they were, work was in my hands once more.
In that moment, I hesitated. The truth was, by then I'd been thinking of returning to Seoul. I had told myself over and over that there was no reason left for me in this city, nothing left I could do. And yet, strangely enough, that one phone call held my ankles in place.
This might be the last one.
I accepted without a flicker of hesitation and started working before the contract was even drawn up. Gathering materials, revising drawings, writing explanations, erasing them again. And just like that, the time that had ground to a halt began to move once more.
I stayed up several nights in a row, and when I stepped outside the office into the pre-dawn air, a thought came to me unbidden.
Even so... am I still someone useful?
On my way home, my feet turned toward a 24-hour gamjatang restaurant nearby. My stomach felt hollow and empty. One spoonful of the hot broth warmed my mouth, and for the first time in a long while, something inside me loosened. It wasn't my body melting — it was my heart.
I ordered a bottle of soju. Drinking alone at this hour would have embarrassed me once, but not anymore.
These days I couldn't sleep without a drink. Usually I drank quietly at home, but tonight — just tonight — I needed comfort from somewhere, not from someone.
One glass. Two. Three. The alcohol went down with unusual ease. In a corner of the empty restaurant, I drained my glass in silence.
The days I had endured in this city passed through my mind one by one. You held on. You really did well, I whispered quietly to myself.
By the time I stepped out of the restaurant, the alcohol had begun to lift me.
"There it is. Gamjatang and a bottle of soju. What is life, really, but this?"
But the streets were utterly empty. Four in the morning — hailing one of the few taxis still running in this small city was close to a miracle.
Nothing to be done about it. I headed back to the office. I threw down the folding cot I'd been using so often lately, collapsed onto it without ceremony. I didn't even have the strength to take off my coat. And the moment I closed my eyes, my mind went suddenly blank.
Ah... this is nice.
That was my last thought.
Outside, dawn was slowly breaking — but inside the office, the silence held. And that silence was never broken again.
"...Where am I?"
My eyes opened. An unfamiliar noise circled at the edge of my hearing.
Beep. Beep.
A steady mechanical rhythm. A heart monitor. And when my vision cleared, I saw it — a hospital room ceiling glowing white. The cold glare of the fluorescent light stung like needles.
Consciousness was surfacing faintly, but the sensation was impossibly vivid.
A hospital?
I slowly raised my hand. And in that instant, a strange wrongness washed over me. My fingers were long and straight. My skin was smooth and elastic.
Unblemished skin. Healthy, glossy nails. These were definitely not the dry, cracked hands I'd had just yesterday.
What is this...?
My eyes went wide. My heart began to pound. Deep down I knew it couldn't be true — and yet I couldn't deny the one thin thread of possibility.
I sat up and looked around the room, and there in the corner sat a small mirror. My hand trembled. The scene looked familiar somehow, and yet entirely alien. I picked up the mirror. And then I froze solid.
"What is... this...? It's me?"
The face in the mirror was unmistakably mine. But it wasn't the me of now.
Twenty-seven? No matter how I looked, that's what it was. Skin without a single wrinkle, eyes full of life, a jaw line stripped of every trace of fat. The haggard face of a fifty-year-old worn down by exhaustion was nowhere to be found.
I swallowed hard, unable to believe it. My head was spinning.
I was working overtime yesterday, and the day before that too. No, wait. Yesterday I stayed up until dawn finishing a report, then drank at the gamjatang place... and then went back to the office and fell asleep.
I'd finally felt at ease, for the first time in ages.
I closed my eyes thinking I might never wake again... and this is what happens?
In the stillness that seemed to slice through the air of the hospital room, all I could hear was my own breathing. The vividness of every sensation only made the whole thing feel more unreal.
"What is this? What on earth has happened?"
No... what is this situation?
My thoughts were a tangled mess. But one thing was certain: I was now in someone else's body. I had no idea what any of it meant. I was simply lost.
Clack.
Just then, the door to the hospital room opened, and an unfamiliar man walked in.
Where have I seen that face before...?
An imposing presence. An overwhelming air of authority. And in a flash, memory clicked together like a puzzle.
...Five-term National Assembly member, Yeo Byeong-guk?!
He walked toward me slowly. Looking down at me as I sat up in bed, he spoke in a deep, weighty voice.
"It's Dad. You're awake. That was a close call. I keep telling you to take better care of yourself."
...Hold on. What? Dad?
In an instant, my mind went blindingly white.
What is going on here?
Yeo Byeong-guk sat down beside the bed, studying me carefully.
"Do you remember collapsing? You said you'd just started your own business and were run off your feet — you must have pushed yourself too hard. Thankfully, you seem all right now."
He paused for a moment, then fixed me with a piercing stare. And then, abruptly, he dropped something heavy on me.
"So. Have you given any thought to it?"
"...Thought about what?"
"Yeojin City."
His voice dropped lower.
"Your memory might be fuzzy right now, but you grew up there — you know it well. It's a small, run-down city these days. How would you feel about running in the mayoral election?"
Out of nowhere — what is he talking about?
"The... mayoral election?"
"That's right. Mayor of Yeojin City."
Yeo Byeong-guk crossed his arms and continued quietly.
"The previous mayor was arrested for violating election law. A by-election will be held soon. If you run, I'll support you with everything I have."
Yeojin City. A small city of barely a hundred thousand people.
Forget development — it could barely keep itself standing. It wore the title that's become so common these days: an area at risk of local extinction.
Hasty administration, failed development, and battles among the entrenched elite, all tangled together — a place where change was all but impossible to hope for.
When I was young, I thought of it simply as my hometown and took it for granted. But as an adult, looking at it, I could see the place slowly decaying. People were leaving, and only the elderly remained.
Viewed from a distance, the city seemed more hopeless with every look. Now and then Yeojin made the news, but never once for anything good. Corruption, accidents, conflict — not a single piece of good news, not one.
Granted, the news feeds on sensationalism by nature. Still, you'd think once in a while there'd be a story about good deeds, about positive change. But Yeojin City couldn't even offer that much.
Just recalling the reality made me sigh. The city had its urban core, but it also encompassed a broad stretch of rural farmland.
And even there, absurd things happened. Newcomers being told to pay into a "village development fund," outsiders being frozen out by longtime residents... these stories had even spread across the internet as memes.
The problem was, they weren't just jokes.
Look at the city's demographics and the reality was even bleaker. The birth rate had all but bottomed out, and the last remaining obstetrics clinic had shut its doors.
The elderly population, on the other hand, kept growing — the average age of the farming villages was now approaching the mid-eighties.
Would these villages even exist ten years from now?
That's how dire it was. And yet the city's own civil servants seemed to feel no sense of crisis whatsoever.
No — did they even recognize the crisis in the first place? People determined to do as little work as possible and quietly ride out their tenure.
"Nothing major's going to change on our watch anyway."
"Why stick our necks out and create more work for ourselves?"
Attitudes like these had become an utterly familiar sight. But it wasn't just the civil servants. The city's power brokers, its old guard, were no better.
They talked endlessly about "the future of Yeojin City" and rolled out grand plans — but look closer, and all they were thinking about was raising the value of their own land.
Some built connections to get their children jobs, some angled for lines into political power.
The really funny part was that even though they'd seemingly already feasted on everything the city had to give, they were still grasping for more. I honestly couldn't imagine what else there was left to squeeze out of Yeojin.
Truly, it was a dying city in every textbook sense of the phrase.
So then... how had it come to this? What exactly had everyone been doing while it fell apart?
There was a time I cursed this city. I'd come here full of ambition, taken on commissions hoping to do good work — and gotten caught up in power plays and political scheming that cost me my company.
Watching one badly chosen mayor bend the city's course for years at a time, I went through a phase of cursing the whole world — politics is evil, elected officials are incompetent.
And now, they were telling me to become that mayor. I wanted to ask, just once, in earnest:
Am I really the right person for that seat?
No — am I out of my mind to dive back into that political cesspool?
But... I knew too much to run away. I knew exactly how it had broken, and exactly how it could be fixed.
The fact that I understood this city's structure and its problems better than anyone had my ankles in a grip I couldn't shake. Before, I had no authority.
That's why nothing changed, no matter how loud I shouted. But now... there was an opportunity. Authority, knowledge, experience — I had all of it.
And above all, there was the desire to seize the last remaining possibility this city had left.
But could someone like me — who swore off politics entirely — actually pull it off?