A Second Life, and a Decision to Run
After Representative Yeo Byeong-guk left, I decided to take my time sorting through the situation.
What on earth was going on? Right up until recently, I distinctly remembered being worn down from overwork — and then I'd opened my eyes to find myself in a hospital room.
Worse, the face in the mirror wasn't the one I knew as mine. I raised my hands and studied them: smooth skin, long, slender fingers. The owner of this body was a young man named Yeo Mu-jin.
I opened his phone. Call logs, text messages, memos, a personal social media account — I combed through everything, and a rough sketch of a life began to emerge.
Graduate of the Business Administration department at Hankook University. Immediately after, he'd founded a startup in artificial intelligence — the hot new field everyone was chasing. From the look of things, this kid had worked himself ragged just as hard as I ever had.
He was still in the early stages of the business, apparently, running himself into the ground chasing expansion without a moment to breathe.
The message history told the story: investor meetings, sales meetings, internal meetings, back to back without a gap. He'd been living not as himself, but as a company's CEO — to the point where his own life seemed to have ceased to exist.
And looking more closely, it turned out this young man was no technology expert.
He'd majored in business, so he was strong on planning, sales, and building networks — but when it came to actual AI technology, he was completely out of his depth. So he'd left the technical side to a co-founder and his engineers while pouring himself into business development, marketing, and fundraising instead.
Running an AI business in this day and age meant you had to track the trends fast. Managing a company without truly understanding its own technology couldn't have been easy.
And then there was… the most practical problem of all. Money. His memo app was crammed full of numbers.
Payroll deadlines every month, office rent, operating costs, the budget for a new project… It was nothing short of a war waged against money itself.
"This kid had it rough too, huh."
A fellow sufferer. I remembered my own failures in business, and how hard those years had been.
Yeo Mu-jin had also been a CEO. He must have had to cover his employees' salaries before ever paying himself, meeting investors endlessly and swallowing the stress that came with it.
Poor kid. Looking at it this way, he was different from me in some ways, yet remarkably similar in others. One had worked himself to the bone trying to save a company; the other, trying to save a city. Each of us must have simply endured, day after day, in our own way.
I was lost in thoughts like these when a question suddenly occurred to me.
What's happened to me right now?
I picked up the phone at once and dialed. I punched in my own number and pressed the call button and —
"The number you have dialed does not exist."
My heart plummeted. No way. I double-checked the number and dialed again, but the result was the same.
Uneasy now, I searched for my own social media accounts. Nothing. It was as if they had never existed at all. Not a single trace of me remained anywhere.
…Something was seriously wrong. I gripped the phone and thought it through slowly. In forty-odd years of life, I had never married, had no girlfriend, and outside of family, barely anyone I kept in touch with.
I'd spent my entire thirties in graduate school, and because I'd come out of a no-name regional university, a professorship had never been more than a dream. In the end I'd taken a job at an urban planning consultancy and lived a life of nothing but work.
Friends? Right — let me just call a friend or two.
But… damn it. Not a single number surfaced in my memory. I used to keep a handful of close friends' numbers memorized back when I first carried a phone, but once smartphones became everyday life, the need simply vanished.
These days no one memorizes numbers; you scroll through your saved contacts and tap.
Maybe I could try the companies I'd worked with? A quick internet search would turn up their numbers, so reaching them wouldn't be a problem… but then what would I even say?
Hello, do you happen to remember me?
Ridiculous.
What about my apartment, then? I remembered my address — going there in person might yield some clue. I couldn't leave the hospital just yet, though, so for now I pulled up the property registry online instead.
And there… a stranger's name was listed. The place was not mine. Someone else owned my home.
Only then did it become certain. I spent days searching for any evidence of myself, but nowhere on earth was there a record proving I had ever existed. The email accounts I'd used, documents, even old newspaper articles — nothing came up.
…This is impossible. Can a person just vanish without a trace like this? And not just one or two things — my entire life is gone?
After days of agonizing, I arrived at one conclusion.
I was in a parallel world. In other words, I had come to another world that existed alongside the one I'd lived in — arriving in it as a different person.
The only difference, really, was that a potbellied man in his late forties had become a young man in his late twenties.
My body had unmistakably grown lighter, but my mind had not.
The world felt alien, and I was no longer myself. The unfamiliar face in the mirror, the smooth hands, even the jet-black hair… none of it felt quite real.
Strangely enough, though, the most vividly real sensation of all was hunger. The porridge and few side dishes the hospital provided simply couldn't satisfy it.
"Man… what I wouldn't give for a bowl of sundae soup right about now."
Absurd, I know — but the familiar taste of a rich, hot broth kept lingering on my tongue.
So I sprang into action. At this rate, my stomach was going to give out before my head did. Shuffling along in my slippers, I cracked open the door of my hospital room and slipped carefully out into the corridor.
Taking the emergency stairs instead of the elevator was my own brand of stealth. It was early dawn, the halls nearly empty, and I figured a quick round trip to the gukbap joint down the street would be easy.
But my great escape came to a pathetic end on the first floor of the hospital.
"Where do you think you're going, sir?"
A nurse planted herself squarely in my path. Even behind her mask, I could feel the sharpness of her glare.
"Ah… I was just… going to get some fresh air."
"In a hospital gown, shuffling along in slippers?"
"Well, 'walk' doesn't quite… should I say I'm feeling restless?"
"Go back to your room. You may be twenty-seven, but you're still a hospitalized patient."
And so I was hauled back to my room.
Escape: failed. Gukbap: failed. Self-esteem: rock bottom.
Damn it… so there's no freedom in this body either.
I slumped back onto the bed, stared at the ceiling, and sighed. And then the thought returned.
Is the world I lived in really gone?
While I lay in that bed straining to find myself, Representative Yeo Byeong-guk came to visit several times with his wife.
When the two of them came, they simply sat with me in quiet companionship, exchanging few words. Mostly it was Mrs. Yeo who talked — about this and that — while I listened in silence.
I was still in the process of learning who Yeo Mu-jin even was, so I had little I could say in response. I merely nodded, or smiled faintly, or offered some small reaction.
They must have assumed my low spirits were from the illness, because they never stayed long before heading home.
The days passed like that. Then, one morning — exactly one week after I'd woken up — Representative Yeo came to the hospital room alone. And he asked me once more.
"Do you intend to run in the Yeojin mayoral by-election?"
When I'd first heard the question, it had left me dazed.
But over the past week, I'd had time to think through everything and put my heart in order.
At first I'd focused on finding out who I was. I'd searched for traces of my old life while simultaneously getting to know the man called Yeo Mu-jin. And naturally, that led me to look more closely at this place — Yeojin City.
Astonishingly, aside from the fact that I didn't exist here, Yeojin City was almost exactly the same as the world I'd come from. The look of the city, its problems, the conflicts simmering within it… everything matched what I remembered, precisely.
It had taken time to absorb. But now it was sorted. And now… Representative Yeo was waiting for my answer once again.
The memories that had been surfacing in my mind all week came flooding back. Old dreams. The ideals and ambitions I'd held while studying urban planning.
I wanted to build a city where everyone could be happy.
Urban planning is not merely the business of designing roads and arranging buildings. It decides the lives of the people who live there and shapes their future. Someone once put it this way:
'First, people make the city. Then, the city makes the people.'
And now, I found myself holding the chance to change that city with my own hands.
I bit my lip, lightly. Then I made up my mind. I lifted my head and looked Representative Yeo straight in the eye, and answered in a firm voice.
"I'll run for the Yeojin mayoral by-election."
The next morning, Representative Yeo came to my room again, resolve etched across his face.
"The by-election has to be held quickly."
I gave a light nod. I knew the campaign schedule was punishingly tight, but I didn't expect it to be much of a problem — because the odds of my losing this election were close to nil.
There was no need to build a new campaign organization from scratch. A solid machine was already in place, and Yeojin City had always been my father's district. In other words, his political base and organization would flow directly to me.
And almost immediately, a new figure joined my campaign.
Kang Seol-heon — my junior from university, and a genuinely capable political strategist. She had started her career as an aide to a Yeojin city councilor and later become the youngest council member ever seated through proportional representation.
She already had extensive hands-on election experience, and running the campaign machinery posed no difficulty for her at all.
"Don't trouble yourself over the logistics, sir. Yeojin's election organization is built on your father's district base anyway."
Kang Seol-heon and I had known each other, in a manner of speaking. Same university, but different departments, so we'd never been particularly close.
Perhaps because of the position I now occupied, she addressed me naturally in polite formal speech. Given that I was her senior and we'd known each other before, I could have spoken casually — but forcing informal speech on someone I was meeting for the first time in this life felt awkward, so I let it be.
Just as she said, the campaign organization was already fully assembled. There was no need for any elaborate strategy. There wasn't even a reason to set up a separate policy planning team.
Because the city's policies already lived inside my head. The urban planning knowledge and experience of my previous life remained intact, and I understood the realities of Yeojin City better than anyone.
The decay of the old city center.
The entrenched culture of real estate speculation.
An administration fixated exclusively on new-town development.
A chronic shortage of public infrastructure.
I was the only candidate who could solve these problems. Some people might sneer and call me a 'dreamer.'
But I was different. In the past, I'd believed it was possible — if only I could do it myself — but I never held the authority to act. And now? Now the chance to seize that authority had arrived.
There was one catch, though. With the by-election called in such haste, no fewer than five candidates had thrown their hats in the ring.
To be precise, five candidates had registered for the Democratic Republican Party primary alone. Counting me, that made six. In a small city like this, the single most decisive factor in becoming mayor was securing the party's nomination.
Given that the previous mayor had fallen from grace in a corruption scandal while representing the United Korea Party, winning the Democratic Republican nomination would make victory in the general election all but automatic. The problem… was getting through that primary.
The strengths I possessed were exactly two: a degree from Hankook University, and the image of a young, fresh politician. And… the halo of a five-term National Assemblyman for a father.
But that 'father bonus' was a double-edged sword. It could win me support, yet handled carelessly, it could just as easily brand me a 'silver-spoon politician.' The moment I showed the slightest arrogance instead of humility, my defeat was sealed.
Fortunately, my father was the party's district committee chairman, so the campaign organization would most likely tilt in my favor.
But politics is never that simple. One misstep, and I could become 'the young candidate riding his daddy's coattails.'
And that image is fatal. A green kid wet behind the ears acting full of himself? Instant free fall into the abyss.
So what was the play? There was exactly one way to win the primary: squeeze every drop out of the image of youth and innovation.
Persuade the people hungry for 'new change,' draw a sharp contrast with the entrenched interests, and plant the conviction that I was not merely a congressman's son — I was the man who could change Yeojin City.
Once I cleared the Democratic Republican primary, the general election would take care of itself. Surviving the primary — that would be the real fight.