Dimensional Archive
“Baek Siyun!”
The manager’s voice boomed clear past the food court doors.
I turned my head, still holding the duster.
Lunch hour at the food court of a Seoul amusement park.
The tray return was empty, and the tables had already been wiped down once—there was nothing left to fuss over. Only a few customers drifted past; almost none of them came as far as our storefront.
The manager leaned against the cashier counter and looked at me.
“Hey. You were on open, right?”
“Yes.”
“It’s dead today and we’ve got nothing going on. Want to leave early?”
I thought a “yes” would jump out of me the second I heard it. Strangely, I paused instead.
Leave early.
On paper, that was pure gold. But days like this always felt like I was getting shortchanged somehow.
If they were going to send me home early, they could’ve just told me not to come in. They were always going on about how busy we were and how they needed to hire more part-timers—and then never actually hired anyone, just worked the people they already had half to death. Then, on a day with no customers, they’d toss out “Want to leave early?” like they were doing me a favor.
I smacked my lips for no good reason.
“Hmm~...”
One of the manager’s eyebrows went up.
“What, you don’t want to go home?”
That wasn’t it either.
I shrugged and grinned.
“No? I’ll take the early leave! Please make sure I get it!”
The manager snorted a laugh.
“Fine. Clock out at one and go.”
“Yes, sir.”
I answered lightly, but something about it sat wrong. Good—but a kind of good that still managed to be irritating.
I looked around the hall.
Glittering food court signs, the smell of oil, food smells, that vague fried-batter haze, kids’ voices drifting from far off.
Working inside an amusement park made it sound like you had some glamorous job, but day after day it was just a noisy workplace. Less a land of dreams and adventure, more a land of scrubbing tables and utensils until your hands went numb.
Cleanup didn’t take long.
I wiped a few tables one more time, squared the chairs, checked around the return counter, made sure nothing was backed up.
This kind of work was easier with two people… but thanks to them never hiring anyone, it was always just me grinding myself into the ground. Absolute bullshit, honestly.
One o’clock.
The second I clocked out and stepped outside, I let out a long breath.
“Haa...”
It was nice. It was.
But it didn’t leave me feeling clean.
When was my day off again. Monday off and Sunday off? Or Tuesday off and Sunday off? It was always something like that. Never two days in a row. Not ever.
Fucking ridiculous.
If you’re going to give someone a break, just stick two days together. Instead it was always one Monday off, a few days of work, one Sunday off. Some weeks it was a Tuesday and a Sunday.
That way, a day off never felt like a day off. The second you rested once, you were already thinking about going back in. Not rest—just barely catching your breath.
I rode the staff elevator down, chewing curses under my breath.
We’re short-handed, we need to hire, we’re doing interviews—and then they never hired anyone, just worked the existing crew harder, and when the customers dried up they tossed early leave at you like a gift.
Aah, fuck it.
If that was how it was going to be, why not just work me like full-time staff. Oh, right. I was a part-timer doing more work than the full-timers. For fucking minimum wage? Well, there were incentives, but...
I got that far and finally let out a hollow laugh.
Full-time was even worse. Work under those people? I wasn’t about to stake my life on this job to that degree.
Just earn enough, live enough, hang on enough.
That was my way.
I’d already eaten lunch. Even if I went home, there was nothing to do. Game, phone, webtoons or web novels, lying on the bed killing time.
Today, that felt a little wasteful.
The weather was better than I’d expected. The sky was lightly open, and the wind was still a bit cold, but it didn’t have winter’s knife-edge to it.
Spring.
Something I’d seen a few days ago floated up without warning.
The plum blossoms were out, wasn’t it?
So instead of going home, I changed direction.
Seongdong-gu, Hadong Plum Blossom Street.
They said you could see plum blossoms there.
I rode the subway, stood packed among people and swayed with the car, got off and walked—and the whole time, the curses I hadn’t finished earlier kept circling my head.
No two days off in a row was bullshit. Saying they’d hire and never hiring was bullshit. Tossing me a half-assed early leave like today and acting generous was bullshit too.
The funny part was that I’d still show up tomorrow, even while I was cursing all of it.
Rent left every month, card bills rolled in right on schedule, and Seoul melted money faster than you’d think… no. Faster than you could even imagine.
I was born in Busan.
I went to school in Busan, grew up in Busan, and stayed there until roughly past twenty.
Seoul had been a vague longing. A city I just wanted to try living in once. Everyone went up, something was there. If I kept living only in Busan, it felt like my whole life would end in Busan, and for some strange reason I hated that.
So I used university as an excuse and came up to Seoul.
At first I really meant to attend. But once I was there, it just wasn’t it. Waking up, walking into a lecture hall, marking attendance, sitting through subjects that did nothing for me, mixing halfheartedly among people. That life never stuck to me.
In the end I dropped out.
I was pretty scared telling my parents, but they didn’t fight me all the way. I said I wanted to try living in Seoul, said I’d work, and I really did work. That work was hall duty at a Seoul amusement park food court.
I didn’t have some grand dream, but I at least felt like I was paying my own way for staying in Seoul.
That was how I became who I was now.
A one-room studio on the outskirts of Seoul.
Part-time, five days a week.
Games, web novels, YouTube.
Exercise now and then.
Few friends, even fewer messages, a life that was mostly quiet.
Not a total wreck—but not going well either.
A life rolling along in the middle.
But a life that didn’t stop.
While I was thinking that, I arrived at Hadong Plum Blossom Street.
The plum blossoms were quieter than I’d expected.
Not a flower that crashed over you like cherry blossoms. You had to get close to see them, and look up to find them beautiful.
White, pale, thin.
The petals clinging to every branch trembled lightly under the sunlight.
They weren’t flashy enough that you looked longer instead of less.
I stood for a long time looking up at them.
A little wind blew. The petals shivered, barely.
Childhood came back.
In Busan, when I was small, I’d been walking some street with my mom and seen plum blossoms.
I couldn’t remember exactly which neighborhood. Only that a cool wind had blown that day too, the way it was blowing now, and that my mom had said something like, “Aren’t the plum blossoms pretty?”—that much lingered, faint.
Cherry blossoms were like a festival, plum blossoms like a prelude. A flower that felt like something was about to begin.
I think she’d said something like that too.
The memory was blurry, but the feeling was still there.
I looked up at the blossoms and lifted my tumbler. I took a sip of the café latte I’d made at home. A little too much milk. It suited the day in a strange way.
“Like a word winter never quite swallowed.”
The mutter slipped out on its own.
After I said it, I snorted.
What am I doing.
Early leave from food court hall duty, coming to look at flowers, and now I was playing at being a poet.
Still—today was a little bit that kind of day.
I’d gotten off early, seen plum blossoms, the sky was clear, and for some reason everything looked all right.
Pretty things are always brief.
I muttered it again, then immediately mocked myself inside.
Like you know anything. Looking at a few plum blossoms doesn’t make your life literature. So what if today was nice~ You’ve got work tomorrow.
That only made it funnier.
A good day—but a day that kept snagging whenever you tried to call it good out loud.
My life was exactly like that.
Not completely bad, but too awkward to call it cleanly good.
I walked a good while longer.
I barely took any pictures. I wasn’t the type to keep that kind of thing. Even if I did, I never looked back at them.
Instead I looked with my eyes for a long time.
White petals, thin branches, shadows on the ground, people’s footsteps, the grain of the wind… things like that.
Then, around the time the sun tipped a little lower, I went home.
When I opened the studio door, the familiar smell hit me.
The particular quiet of a small room, the smell of unused electronics, detergent, clothes, a very faint dust smell.
I threw my coat toward the chair and dropped straight onto the bed.
The springs sank under me once.
I didn’t want to do anything.
Didn’t want to look at my phone, didn’t want to boot a game, even washing felt like a chore. So I just lay there. Staring at the ceiling, breathing, feeling the plum blossoms from earlier still sitting in my head.
It was a good day.
That thought came.
Not that it was amazingly good or anything.
The moment I thought it—
Something inside my gut twisted hard.
“Ugh.”
My eyes snapped open.
I thought I’d gotten food stuck, but that wasn’t it.
It wasn’t just my stomach. Deep inside my body, something twisted all at once, wrenched, and bored its way in. Not pain—more like something had entered me and was forcing open a place for itself.
My heart dropped.
I tried to sit up on pure reflex.
And the next moment—
My whole body hurt like it was going to burst.
“Ghk…! Ugh…!”
My breath locked.
Arms, legs, shoulders, ribs, neck, fingers. Nowhere was free of pain. It felt like someone was working me over with blunt weapons, every part of me at once.
No—worse than that. The memory of military hazing flashed and was wiped clean in the same second.
Ten times that.
No. Ten times wasn’t enough.
My blood felt like it was boiling, my bones melting and resetting, iron nails driving in between every muscle fiber.
I rolled off the bed.
My shoulder slammed the floor, and even that didn’t register under the greater pain swallowing my body whole.
“Hah—kh…! Ghk…!”
I couldn’t even scream properly.
And then all that pain poured into my eyes.
The backs of my eyes burned.
Like someone had pried my eyeballs open and poured fire into the sockets. It hurt so much my throat closed. I tried to scream and no sound came. My mouth just hung open, leaking strange little noises—ghk, kkh, ghk.
I had no idea how long it lasted.
Seconds.
Minutes.
Whether I’d blacked out and come to again, I didn’t know.
Then, at some point, the pain went out like a lie.
I lay face-down on the floor, soaked through with cold sweat, gasping. My fingertips shook. My heart hammered like mad. My whole body felt like it had died once and barely come back.
Only much later did I manage to lift my head.
“…God damn it.”
The second the words left my mouth—
A window opened in the empty air in front of my eyes.
A translucent panel with a thin stream of blue light running through it.
It had popped up like an ad window, and yet it was unnervingly sharp.
First Connection Privilege is being granted.