Chapter 27: Luxury
Chapter 27: Luxury
My old life: twenty hours a day in bed, hiding in an underground shelter, minimizing energy use however I could.
So a life without sleep was genuinely refreshing.
While the sun was up in the outside world, I sorted through the shop list in my one-room, looked for ways to help Han Ye-ji, and watched the two siblings go about their peaceful daily routine. Then, once the sun set, I slipped into Han Ye-ji's dreams to keep her company.
Sometimes we tangled together shamelessly, sometimes we sat shoulder to shoulder and rested quietly.
And when the lucid dream ended, morning dawned again in my one-room.
Put simply, I was starting to want a break.
I wanted to be lazy. Even if I wasn't napping, I wanted to sprawl on the bed doing nothing, indulging in idleness. Staring at the list for a hundred days wouldn't magically earn me points, and once I'd settled on a list, it stayed settled. Meaningless busywork was the worst kind of misery.
On the other hand, if I spent the rest of the time watching Han Ye-ji, that would probably make her uncomfortable too.
She wasn't out on a deployment with the Suppression Squad.
What was the point of watching her flop around on her living room sofa and bicker with her little brother for twenty-four hours straight?
I wasn't so much of a voyeur that I needed to keep watching when she bathed or ducked into the bathroom.
I lay on my one-room bed, sluggishly rationalizing it all to myself.
The truth was, the little brother was straining my eyes a little.
Watching an easygoing girl slouch through her home life in her underwear? That was fine by me.
But a guy? Not happening.
Who in their right mind wants to watch a male student doing his skincare routine while he shrieks into his phone about idols and dramas? Not me.
I drowsed lazily on my bed. Beyond the screen, Han Ye-ji was sprawled on the sofa, dozing to an internet stream.
The same stream as always. Han Ye-ji kept watching one game broadcast after another, all of them more or less the same kind, as if proving her tastes were set in stone.
...Hard to criticize, knowing she never had time to actually play games and could only catch streams in her spare moments.
She didn't watch anything else. A girl who enjoyed game streams, as girls do.
The catch was, her taste in games ran broader than you'd expect.
From slow, methodical shooters where you crept around and took careful shots—
To versus games so fast-paced they looked nauseating on a small screen.
Plus the horror games, puzzle games, and the cute little casual games she had on right now. She watched everything.
'Well, Nightmare's in trouble.'
Didn't play a single one of them, but the games she'd watched already numbered in the hundreds.
Big-name online titles. Single-player retail games.
I couldn't have listed them all if I tried, but most of them were probably sleeping deep in Han Ye-ji's unconscious.
Though honestly, I couldn't think of anything worse than a muscle-bound pigtailed girl shooting nipple-beams at people.
Just the mental image of those gleaming pectorals put me in a bad mood.
[The Constellation, Lethargic Nightmare, advises you to stop cooping yourself up in your room and go out for once.]
"Constellation? Ah, well, I'm most comfortable resting at home, actually."
[The Constellation, Lethargic Nightmare, asks if you intend to stay in bed for half a year without going out.]
"...No, not that."
[The Constellation, Lethargic Nightmare, suggests you at least visit an arcade.]
So I drove Han Ye-ji out of the house—she'd practically fused into a trinity with the sofa cushion and her smartphone.
Seemed like it would do her more good to actually play games at an arcade or a PC bang.
If she played mainstream stuff, maybe the nightmare monsters would be less grotesque.
Surely Han Ye-ji wouldn't fire up a game full of muscle-women in string bikinis in a crowded PC bang. Right?
Grumbling under her breath, Han Ye-ji threw on some light clothes and grabbed her wallet.
Spending all year in a uniform and gym clothes must have been suffocating—or maybe it was just habit—but at home she wandered around in nothing but her underwear and shorts. From graduation day until now, I hadn't seen her wear anything but shorts.
No wonder her brother nagged her to put on proper clothes.
Personally, the shorts-and-bra look suited me just fine, so I left her to it.
[The Constellation, Lethargic Nightmare, requests a tour of the neighborhood.]
"Mm, I don't really get around much. All there is to see is my old school, the snack shop I liked, and the convenience store where I used to work."
In baggy shorts, a T-shirt with a stretched-out collar, and flip-flops, Han Ye-ji shoved through the front door and headed out.
Lunchtime, with the sun at its hottest—but when your Constellation tells you to go out, you go.
"Come to think of it, it's been a really long time since I came here. Even when I got my weekend pass from the Academy, I just stayed home..."
[The Constellation, Lethargic Nightmare, advises you to get some sun.]
"I think I got more than enough sun at the Academy..."
I was hardly one to talk, but I sent her a stream of nagging with a generous helping of self-interest mixed in.
Rolling around in bed was getting a little boring.
I was even starting to wonder if, once I had points to spare, I ought to buy some kind of entertainment—maybe a game console—for under a hundred leftover points.
But anything that wasn't a consumable or a mass-produced item usually cost in the thousands,
and I kept putting it off because I hated having awkward little leftovers in the tens or hundreds.
While I ran the numbers in my head, Han Ye-ji slipped from the early-summer sunlight into a shabby little snack shop down an alley.
Four tables. Maybe ten chairs. A tiny place.
Not only were the tables less than a meter apart—you could barely squeeze a single person between them.
'At this point it's less a snack shop and more a closet.'
"Ahjussi, I'm here."
"Oh hey, it's been a while. What kept you away?"
A middle-aged man with a deeply wrinkled face pulled on a fresh pair of disposable plastic gloves as he spoke.
The back-and-forth was easy and unhesitating—clearly a familiar rhythm. Compared with the way she second-guessed herself talking to classmates, it gave me a good sense of just how regular a customer she was.
"One rabokki and one roll of kimbap, please."
"Sure. Spicy?"
"Uh... black bean today."
The way Han Ye-ji wiped down the tacky table with water from the dispenser and a tissue looked so practiced it felt like her own kitchen.
Worn-out tables. A cracked spoon holder. A handwritten menu.
Inside five minutes, a generous bowl of rabokki and a fat tuna-mayo kimbap—bursting at the seams—landed on the table.
"Thank you for the meal."
"You always eat so fast. That's bad for you, you know."
"It's good, so I eat fast."
Maybe it's because she's a girl in her prime.
Han Ye-ji finished her kimbap and rabokki in under ten minutes and stepped back out into the alley.
What kind of person eats that fast? My frozen meal in the microwave wasn't even heated through before she'd finished.
"Uh, so where should I go now?"
But the snack shop she'd walked into so confidently appeared to be the end of her outing route. Her feet stopped at the edge of the alley.
A life going only between the snack shop, the convenience store, school, and home.
I thought about sending her to a PC bang, but she didn't play any games.
An arcade? If she didn't even play PC games, was she going to get into rhythm games or fighters?
I considered telling her to go shopping with her stipend and savings, but she said there was nothing she wanted to buy.
[The Constellation, Lethargic Nightmare, asks if there is truly nothing you need.]
"No... I mean, I've got a few summer outfits. My sneakers aren't even a year old yet, and my flip-flops and sandals are still fine..."
Here was a girl who looked like a high schooler, and the first things she mentioned when I told her to buy something were flip-flops and hoodies.
Come to think of it, her wardrobe had zero fashion pieces—just a pile of gray and black hoodies. Exactly like a guy with no interest in clothes.
No makeup. When she washed up, she used the cleansing foam her brother bought her. Lotion meant slapping on some body lotion and calling it a day.
Her hair was on the longer side, but she had no clips, no pins, no accessories—
just a plain black hair tie she used to pull it back, or else wore it loose.
'Wow... give her money to spend and she's got nowhere to spend it.'
Making her go out like this gave me a rough idea.
If I handed her cash and told her to use it, she'd probably just donate it to some internet streamer.
Not that that's a bad thing, but it left me feeling a little stuck.
She hadn't become rich overnight, but she was in a position where spending the money she'd saved over two years of part-time work was perfectly fine.
When I'd advised Han Ye-ji to rest properly, I'd meant: eat good food, buy what you want, go play.
I wasn't giving her the money myself, sure—but wasn't she about to walk into a well-funded government job the moment she turned twenty?
An Incarnation treated that well pinching pennies on a hundred-thousand-won outfit was just absurd.
Well... if she said there was nothing to buy, I couldn't exactly force a sale.
[The Constellation, Lethargic Nightmare, says to go home and rest if there is nowhere to go.]
Was I supposed to find this pitiable? Or was I supposed to call it frugality?
With my thoughts tangled, I sent the message—and Han Ye-ji's expression brightened instantly.
You really hated going outside that much...
She'd been dragging her feet heavily from the snack shop to the end of the alley. Now she practically skipped, light as air.
The route back was different from the one she'd come by. Was she stopping somewhere else?
She turned into another alley, and a convenience store came into view.
The same place where Han Ye-ji had worked part-time before her contract.
And so, Han Ye-ji's first true luxury came to an end: a one-person rabokki-and-kimbap set, one bag of potato chips, and a can of cola.