Mutation
"Why didn't you dodge the bike? You stood at the alley forever — I figured you'd get out of the way!"
"……I needed this."
"Huh?"
"I needed certainty."
I'd stood before that alley for a long time, deliberating. I remembered the dream with perfect clarity — the instant I stepped in, a bicycle would slam into me — and the obvious conclusion was that turning around and taking another road would be safer.
But I needed certainty. Proof that this was real, not a dream.
So I'd walked in on purpose, and the moment I took my first step, there it was — a bicycle hurtling straight toward me. Maybe because I already knew it was coming, I could have dodged it easily enough, yet the sheer fact that the bike had actually materialized froze me on the spot.
"Let's start with a detailed explanation of misfortune factors."
"Huh? About what?"
"Everything you know."
My head was still a tangled mess, but getting a handle on the situation came first. The Fog, flustered by how suddenly serious my expression had turned, began to talk anyway, and after listening for a good long while, I condensed it all into a simple summary.
"So the reason misfortune factors and happiness factors latch onto people in the first place is the energy radiating out of them?"
"Yep! Factors move according to energy!"
The energy a person radiated, apparently, changed from day to day — which naturally meant the types and quantities of factors drawn to that energy changed daily as well. And according to how many happiness factors and misfortune factors managed to attach themselves, the events of the following day were decided.
So in the end, energy is where everything begins.
When I asked what standard the energy changed by each day, the Fog answered with a single word: fate.
"The way a human's energy will shift is part of a great current that's decided before that human is even born! No matter what a person does, they can't change it!"
"Then my traffic accident two days ago — that was an event decided before I was born?"
"A model student, as expected!"
Laughing, the Fog conjured the crown from our first meeting. It bobbed up into the air and floated toward my head, and as I stared at it blankly, the Fog hastily waved its hands and made it vanish.
Look at that — learning to read the room already.
"Haah…."
A sigh escaped me at a situation that defied all common sense. I wasn't exactly a person with an overactive imagination, you know.
Of all the ways I'd found to survive tedious days over the years, my choice had been books. First I read everything the orphanage had to offer, and once I enrolled in school, I emptied out the school library. I'd finished even that last year, so now my weekends belonged to the city library.
I'd read whatever I could get my hands on without hiding anything, which naturally included fantasy novels like HarXporter. But I'd never once come across anything resembling misfortune factors in any of them.
Which meant, at the very least, this wasn't some setting my own brain had invented.
I was still chewing over the Fog's words when something snagged — a wrongness I couldn't ignore — and I tilted my head.
"Wait a second. This doesn't add up."
"Huh?"
"You said every event is predetermined, and that managing the factors as they move along that current is your job."
"It is…?"
The Fog looked completely lost as to where I was going with this.
"Then how do you explain changing my fate two days ago? You brushed off my misfortune factors, and the serious injury I was supposed to suffer never happened. You — the manager — interfered."
"……Huh. You're right?"
The Fog answered dazedly. I asked it again why it had done such a thing, but it only repeated that it didn't know — that its hands had just moved on their own.
After muttering to itself in a corner for a long while, the Fog suddenly gasped.
"Wait! What if you're a mutation?"
"What?"
"That's it! You're a mutation!"
The Fog came sprinting over — and grinning ear to ear about it, too.
"Let's experiment! We'll see if your fate can change again! If it shifts this time too, then you really are something special!"
"You're the manager here. Is that allowed?"
"Nobody ever ordered me to manage anything, so what's it to you? I just snapped out of it one day and realized I was doing it, that's all!"
"What?"
The more of the Fog's words I heard, the deeper I sank into a labyrinth. So I simply chose to stop listening. He doesn't really know anything either, does he.
"Haah…. Fine. So how are we running this experiment?"
Just in case, I asked whether my misfortune factors could be peeled off directly, but the answer was the same as before — they were stuck far too tight. In the end, we settled on the same approach as yesterday: hear about an event in advance and try to evade it.
The Fog warned me that this time I'd have to listen with real concentration, so I did exactly that. And the next day — really and truly — I dodged the misfortune.
I fell asleep still reeling, and when I met the wildly excited Fog again…
"Unbelievable! It actually works!"
The Fog behaved as though it had tossed a manager's social responsibility and conscience straight into the garbage.
"You really are a special existence! You're the best! This is so much fun!"
There was something a little off-putting about how hugely it laughed wearing a kid from the class next door, so I asked it to change into something else.
"By the way — the misfortune I dodge, it doesn't go to other people, right?"
"Nope! For that to happen, the misfortune factors stuck to you would have to migrate onto another human, and yours are still bonded nice and tight!"
Beaming, the Fog — currently a gym teacher, having declared a burly pair of forearms to its taste — gave me a bright grin. Only then was I finally able to shake off that lingering unease and settle comfortably into the chair it had made for me.
It still didn't quite feel real… but I had genuinely dodged it. Misfortune itself.
I had no idea how reliably this method would hold up, but as long as I kept at it, I could prepare in advance for all the various events waiting for me down the road.
I was sitting quietly, still unable to take it in, when the Fog — which had been bouncing around the space on its own — came sidling over.
"Human, aren't you happy? I thought you'd be over the moon. You're full of surprises!"
"I am happy. It just hasn't sunk in yet."
"Hehe! I'm happy too! This is so much fun! I hope it stays this fun!"
I watched the Fog crouch down beside my chair, laughing.
"Then you'll keep helping me?"
"Huh?"
"I can only dodge things if you warn me ahead of time. And it's not like warning me gets you anything out of it."
"Hmm… no, I suppose not…."
"If it's a bother or too much work, you can say no. But you have to say it now."
Joy is a fleeting thing.
Right now, a day without disaster felt like a gift — dreamlike, wonderful. But repeat it enough times and it would simply become routine. And what if, one day, everything suddenly snapped back to the way it was?
Days I'd been quietly accepting could come to feel so wretched I couldn't bear them at all.
"Don't decide it's too hard later and back out. Tell me now."
One day of this could be brushed off as a daze. But I had to settle things for certain — before this happiness started to feel ordinary.
The Fog went silent for a long while, perhaps startled by how suddenly serious I'd become, then answered with a vacant look on its face.
"Um… I think… that'd be fine…."
"Did you actually think it through before answering?"
"Mm-hm."
"Okay, then."
I held out my hand. When the Fog just stared at me, its face asking what on earth I was doing, I said "A greeting," grabbed its limp hand, and shook it once.
"I look forward to working with you."
The Fog nodded along in a daze, then soon murmured, quietly, that it looked forward to working with me too.
Only then did my heart finally settle, calm and easy, and I let myself sink back into the comfortable chair.
The Fog, which had been sitting in silence beside me, sprang to its feet a few minutes later.
"This is going to be so much fun from now on! Hehe. I can't wait!"
I watched the gym-teacher build perform handstands in midair for a while, and once I judged that enough time had passed, I spoke up.
"Then can you tell me what happens tomorrow?"
It was the first day of a life about to change completely.
"Yeonjae!"
"Hey."
Its habit of calling me Human! had gotten on my nerves, so I'd told it my name — and for the past two weeks the Fog had been calling it nonstop, without a moment's rest.
It was a little tiring, sure, but it wasn't like I had to pay a fee every time it said my name….
If anything, all I had to do was endure a few dozen repetitions of my name and I was repaid with a peaceful day. Admittedly, when it leaned right up against my ear and whispered "Yeonjae, Yeonjae, Yeonjae," I did get angry — but even there, it seemed to have gotten a decent read on me over those two weeks, because it had an uncanny sense of exactly when I was about to lose my temper and always stopped just short of the line.
"You dodged everything again today, perfectly! When you dodged that falling book, I honestly thought I was watching a movie!"
"Have you ever even seen a movie?"
"I'm just~ talking like a human! You're impossible — there's nothing you won't say!"
Dodging misfortune, by now, had become second nature.
In the beginning, the tension of having to react on time had kept my whole body rigid for every waking hour, and since my nights were spent talking with the Fog in my dreams, I couldn't say I'd been sleeping properly at all. For the first three days or so, I walked around like a remarkably lucky corpse.
But they say humans are animals of adaptation, and as I entered the third week, familiarity had settled in where the tension used to be. The bruises and wounds that had covered my body were gradually returning to normal, and the people around me seemed to be growing used to the sight of me warding things off at the last second, one incident after another.
There was quiet murmuring that something about me seemed different, but my social circle was narrow enough that no real rumors ever surfaced. Still, the change was coming — slowly.
Today, too, had passed without incident. I closed my eyes on a wave of contentment and let myself sink into the rocking chair the Fog had made for me.
I hope it stays this peaceful from now on.
"Oh, right! Tomorrow, some of your misfortune factors look like they're going to move onto another human!"
"What?"
— was, as it turned out, wishful thinking.
I snapped my eyes open and stared at it, and the Fog gazed back with its trademark guileless expression.
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Huh? Exactly what it sounds like? I can see the flow of your misfortune factors trying to move onto another human."
"Why? Is it because I keep dodging everything?"
"Nope, not that~ It's just that you've got SO many misfortune factors stuck to you! There's such a huge quantity attached that anyone who stays next to you can't help but catch some! And apparently you're going to be spending a lot of time pressed up against some human or other tomorrow?"
I went blank for a moment as the words sank in.
"……So just by being near me, people become unhappier?"
"Right? Even I've never seen misfortune factors so abundant they spill over onto other people! Nobody's factors stick as tight as yours do, either, haha!"
The Fog's bright, cheerful voice didn't properly register in my ears.
So that's it. All those things that happened over the years — they really were because of me.
"Then those people's fates changed because of me? For the worse?"
"No no~! Receiving misfortune factors from you is part of the current that was set for those humans when they were born!"
"So you're saying it's their fate to become unhappier because of me."
There had been plenty of hard times in my life, but the hardest thing had never been the pain of torn skin or spilled blood. It was the resentful stares from other people.
I'd tried to take them in stride, but now and then those stares had made me feel wronged — had made something rise up in my throat. So it really was all because of me.
"Who gets hurt?"
"Huh? Oh — this human here!"
The Fog swiped its own form away and changed.
Wide, sparkling eyes. A neat row of bangs. The corners of a mouth curving up into a smile.
A girl from my class. Park Ha-eun, I thought her name was — though we'd never once spoken.
"When? How does she get hurt?"
"Huh? Why do you ask?"
"Why do you think? So I can stop it."
"…? Why would you stop it?"
What?
The Fog and I stared at each other, each wearing the exact same expression of total incomprehension.