The Cost of Luck
I snapped my phone shut and opened my notebook. Tucked inside was a page where I'd laid out every question that still had no answer — things I'd been meaning to ask Bodi one of these days.
I hadn't fully trusted him yet, so I'd planned to save them for later, but...
I decided to move the conversation up. The other guy was far more unhinged than I'd expected — practically itching to kill me. Whether Bodi's words turned out to be true or false, I needed information, and I needed it now.
"Bodi."
"You called?"
The moment I spoke his name, Bodi appeared, same as always. Unlike the previous system, he took a human form, and I caught myself treating him like an actual person more often than I meant to.
"I'll get straight to the point. I've got a few questions."
"Of course. Ask me anything. Ah — we should probably change locations first."
The instant those words left his mouth, the world around me shifted.
A virtual space of Bodi's making: the rooftop of a high-rise, the city glittering far below. I had no idea why he'd brought me somewhere like this, but...
"You were the first one who told me that whatever's been interfering with me is connected to Lumen Entertainment."
"That's right."
"You're not in league with Hael, are you?"
Bodi's expression curdled in an instant.
"Me? With that guy?"
I hadn't really expected an honest answer just for asking, but...
The change in his face was too sudden, too visceral, to be a lie. A laugh burst out of me.
"You're not?"
"I never had any intention of teaming up with a bastard like that, and I never will, so please don't lump us together."
"You sure?"
"If you were going to doubt me anyway, why even ask?"
I leaned against the rooftop railing, and the wind whipped through my hair. It was a world Bodi had fabricated, but it felt real enough to touch.
"Anyway. You're a system too, so you probably know a lot of things."
"Well. More than a human would, I suppose."
I took a step closer.
"What I want to know most is how that kid managed to switch bodies so many times. I lucked out at the last minute and got a Soul Exchange Ticket to swap with Won Ji-an — but how can he just hop into other people's bodies whenever he wants?"
It had been bothering me for a long time. Calling it a freely usable ability was an understatement. It was a cheat code, plain and simple. And if he had that kind of power, bringing me down should have been easy. He could have slipped into my body and thrown himself off a building — the same way he'd done with Yoon Hyeon-min.
So why hadn't he used that method when he was trying to destroy me? Was he waiting because he wanted something from me first? Or were there restrictions? That was the fundamental question, and the answer would change everything about how I prepared.
"So. Do you know something?"
Bodi was sitting precariously on the railing, one shift away from the drop. If anyone would know, it might be him. He'd uncovered the truth about Hael's existence last time, after all.
"Hmm. Well..."
He trailed off. And then the answer that came back was —
"I don't know?"
For a second I felt like I'd been hit in the head with a hammer.
"That's it?"
I stared at him, betrayed. Bodi shook his head, smiling.
"No, of course that's not it. I just said that because I wanted to mess with you. Are you mad?"
So he'd been teasing me. Every time I saw him, I was reminded of just how infuriatingly he talked.
"I don't know for certain. But I can make inferences — roughly how it might have happened, that sort of thing. I can deduce based on the information I have. It just won't be exact."
So it could be wrong. It sounded an awful lot like he was saying he wouldn't take responsibility even if it all turned out to be garbage later.
"In the world I originally came from, you don't go around making overly confident claims. Because eventually, the moment comes when you have to answer for your words."
Ah. Right. This guy had been human once, too. Something he'd picked up the hard way, living an actual life...
In the end, whether I believed him or not was my choice. Not that I had much of an alternative.
"Still, isn't it better than having nothing? When I told you it seemed connected to Lumen Entertainment, that ended up being right, didn't it?"
"Fine. I get it. Talk."
Anything was better than nothing. I needed him to dump every scrap of information he had.
Bodi, who'd been watching my face, finally opened his mouth.
"As you know, the system has a gacha — the function for drawing items. It's purely luck-based."
"Yeah. I know."
"That's how you obtained the Soul Exchange Ticket and were able to switch bodies. Of course, there was the cost of lifespan."
I nodded.
"But if you're lucky enough, you could obtain items with even higher performance than that. An item that doesn't just swap souls, for instance — one that forcibly seizes them entirely."
So in my case, I'd swapped bodies with Won Ji-an. But there were items that could put someone into a coma and then possess them — the way it had happened to Jeong Hui-min and Yoon Hyeon-min.
Well. I'd expected this much.
"But the condition of burning your own lifespan in exchange for possessing someone else's body would still be the same, right?"
"Well, yeah."
Bodi shrugged.
"There are cases where customized items get generated based on the other person's situation. But whatever it is, they'd have some kind of restriction on their end too."
Vague, but I nodded for now. What I really wanted to know was how he'd managed to pull those items from the gacha more than once.
"Hmm..."
At my question, Bodi — who'd been gazing out at the night view beyond the railing — turned his head.
"This is just a hypothesis, all right? A hypothesis."
"Fine. Tell me."
Even after saying that, he was silent for a long time.
This is the first time I've seen that chatterbox being this careful.
I found myself wondering what kind of hypothesis would make him hesitate like that.
"Among the titles, there's one called Lucky."
"There's something like that?"
"Yes. A title that boosts your luck to an abnormal degree."
So he'd equipped a title that inflated his luck, then used the gacha to draw the items he needed — over and over. But a cheat-level title like that would make him practically invincible, wouldn't it?
"How do you get it?"
Bodi shook his head.
"It's not something you can obtain easily. It's an extremely rare title — very hard to get. You have to go to the brink of death and come back. Multiple times."
A title you could only earn by reaching death's door and surviving. And not once. Again and again.
"Ha. That's brutal."
Bodi smiled.
"Can't be helped. The original world has a way of giving people who've suffered a matching reward."
So suffering meant you deserved a reward that let you try to kill other people, over and over? The world really was rotten.
"But he's still young. You're saying he's been in near-death situations multiple times?"
"That's what I find strange, too..."
Bodi trailed off.
"The title itself is a cheat-level item that inflates your luck beyond anything normal, so it's genuinely hard to obtain — unless the near-death moments are so numerous that a single human being could barely live through them."
I looked at him, waiting. Bodi hesitated, then spoke.
"Unless he created them, that is."
"Created them?"
"There's a possibility he manufactured near-death situations from the start — specifically for the purpose of obtaining the title."
He added, almost as an afterthought, "Just a hypothesis, though."
So that was why he'd been so reluctant earlier.
"This 'creating' thing. How would that even work?"
I pressed him to be more specific. Bodi hesitated for a beat, then went on.
"As you know, the shop has physical recovery items. Use one of those, and you can restore a body that's been physically destroyed."
By then, a hypothesis had already taken shape in my own mind.
No way.
If the method I was thinking of was right, this guy wasn't just crazy. He was something else entirely.
"If I'm right..."
As he said it, Bodi's gaze drifted down — over the edge of the rooftop, into the dark.
"Jumping off a building, for example. Over and over. Dozens of times."
Of course, this is just a hypothesis, his voice added, somewhere at the edge of the wind.
"Whatever method he used, he may have driven himself to the brink of death, used an item to recover, and then repeated the same thing all over again."
...That's...
If the hypothesis was right, I finally understood why Hael was so far gone. He'd essentially tried to kill himself. Again and again. A physical recovery item restored the body — it didn't take away the pain of getting there. If you lived through the agony of dying, dozens of times, a complete mental collapse wouldn't be strange at all.
"That's how he boosted his luck?"
Listening to it, I felt like I was going to lose my own mind. It had been strange from the start. The day he'd possessed Yoon Hyeon-min's body, he'd been ready to throw himself off a rooftop like it was nothing. A normal person would have hesitated, even in someone else's skin.
Had he become so numb to death that the very idea that murder was wrong had just... disappeared?
If you'd killed yourself over and over, it made a sick kind of sense that you'd stop feeling anything about killing other people.
"That crazy bastard."
And just like that, I understood the garbage he'd been spouting last time — all that nonsense about a bungee jump commercial.
"It's a hypothesis, I'm telling you."
"It's a plausible hypothesis. Which makes it even more fucked up."
I took a moment to put my thoughts in order. If that was how he'd obtained the ability to inflate his luck, I was at a crushing disadvantage. If it was true, he wasn't even sane to begin with. A guy who'd killed himself and come back, over and over — if that was what I was up against...
"You're not exactly normal yourself, you know."
"What's that supposed to mean."
I played dumb, but he wasn't wrong. I couldn't pretend my own path had been entirely sane. It had been like living with bipolar disorder — swinging between extremes. Debut had steadied me somewhat, compared to before, but a thread of anxiety was still there, humming under the surface.
I'd reached something like stability after debuting. And then a new system and a new villain showed up at the same time, and it felt like I'd been dropped into a completely different kind of chaos...
I hadn't expected everything to magically fall into place the moment I debuted. The problem was that solving one thing just meant another one took its place.
Still. Now that I knew how he'd gotten the items, one mystery was solved. He hadn't stumbled into the title by chance. He'd gone after it on purpose, with a kind of madness that had a shape and a method to it.
Couldn't I do the same thing?
The thought struck me out of nowhere.