The Perfect Replica
What I'd found was a single post, written by a mouse specialist on his personal blog.
The article was seven years old, but it had caught my attention at once.
Not long ago, PAV — a manufacturer specializing in mouse sensors — released a new model: the PAV 2933. It launched as a high-end product and was first installed, on a trial basis, in a handful of mice.
I received one of those mice from the manufacturer and used it for two weeks. The results were exactly what you'd expect from a high-end sensor. DPI, IPS, LOD, polling rate — every metric was outstanding.
There was just one problem. A single issue so severe that I had no choice but to judge this sensor unusable. Industrial waste, frankly.
That problem was Angle Snapping — also known as straight-line correction. In ordinary use, the feature corrects the mouse's movement so that it tracks in perfectly horizontal or vertical lines.
Plenty of other mice include this feature, and the function itself isn't the issue. The problem is that, unlike every other sensor, the PAV 2933 applies Angle Snapping automatically at all times, with no way to turn it on or off. Worse, its correction is unusually aggressive compared to other sensors.
For someone like me, who normally disables this feature, the thing looked like nothing but a bundle of fatal defects.
In conclusion: no matter how good the other specs are, I will never buy a mouse with a PAV 2933 sensor that forces Angle Snapping on at all times.
In short, every other spec was outstanding — but a single, catastrophic flaw made the thing all but unusable.
Now I get why he couldn't adapt to any other mouse.
Psychological attachment and the shape of the housing would have played their part, of course. But the heart of it was this: Rake had spent years adapting perfectly to that Angle Snapping.
Any other player would have swapped mice a long time ago. Rake hadn't. He had taken that aggressive straight-line correction and forged it into a weapon of his own.
Anyone else would have thrown the thing out, cursing the way it pulled their aim off target. He had used that same brutal correction to deliver skill shots that never wavered — flawless, unshakeable, absolute. That was probably only possible because he had once stood at the very peak of the professional scene.
Only a pro who'd been at the top could have pulled that off.
His body had already been rewritten around that mouse. Pick up anything else, and the skill shots came out wrong. Force the correction, and his focus crumbled with it.
I let out a short, incredulous laugh.
"This guy's a craftsman too. A real artisan."
At this point, calling him a pro gamer almost felt too small. He could have been called a Legend of Valhalla artisan, and no one would have argued.
"Anyway. I've found the problem."
Which meant the solution was simple: find a mouse with a PAV 2933 sensor inside it, and pull the part.
Then a new problem presented itself.
Whether it was because of that review or not, every mouse that had shipped with a PAV 2933 had been discontinued years ago. The reception had been so poor, and the sales so dismal, that even finding one secondhand was a nightmare.
A few listings had gone up on the used-goods marketplace, but most of the posts were years old. When I reached out, every single seller told me they'd already thrown the thing away.
Now what?
I sat there scribbling possible leads on a scrap of paper, trying to figure out how to get my hands on a sensor — and then the pen died.
"What, already?"
I popped the cap. The ink had run dry without my noticing. If I was going to keep recording numbers, I needed a pen, and this was the only one in the whole workshop.
Right. I'll step out for a bit.
A walk to clear my head wouldn't hurt either. I grabbed a jacket and headed for the little stationery shop in the industrial complex.
It wasn't far from the workshop. One look at the dusty notebooks and the state of the shelves told me the place had been standing for twenty years, at least.
Even so, the moment I stepped inside, the old woman behind the counter greeted me like an old friend.
"Welcome, dear. What can I get you?"
"Just a pen, please."
"Pens are in the back, over that way."
It was my first time here, but she treated me like a regular who'd been coming for years. Something about that put me at ease.
I picked a few decent-looking pens from the pile and brought them to the counter. She checked the prices one by one.
"That's 1,700, 2,300, and 800... comes to 4,800, but just give me 4,500."
"Thank you."
I pulled a 5,000-won bill from my wallet and handed it over. She stood up from her chair to make change.
And then—
Creeeak. Clunk.
The chair made a nasty sound the moment she rose.
"Aigoo, I really ought to replace this thing. Or just throw it out."
She grumbled as she fished out a 500-won coin and pressed it into my hand.
Broken? It still looks perfectly usable to me.
At least from where I stood, this chair was nothing like the X348 Rake had brought in. It hadn't reached the end of its life.
And she even knocked 300 won off for me.
"Ma'am — would it be all right if I took a quick look at that chair?"
"Hm? Oh, honey, I've had this thing forever. It'll be too far gone to fix."
She waved me off, shaking her head.
"I don't think so. From the sound of it, it isn't anything serious. Let me just take a look."
"Really? Are you sure it's no trouble?"
I smiled.
"You did knock 300 won off my bill."
"Well then... could I ask you to?"
"Of course. Give me a moment."
I glanced around. Tucked in the corner of a shelf was a box with a note scrawled across it in marker.
"I'll just borrow this adjustable wrench for a second."
I took the wrench and stepped behind the counter. Up close, the chair was exactly what I'd expected.
Just a little loose on the inside. That's all.
Nothing dramatic. I tightened every loosened joint with a few turns of the wrench, set the tool down, and nodded toward the seat.
"Want to try it?"
The old woman sat down carefully. Then her face lit up.
"Oh my! It doesn't wobble at all!"
She stood up and sat back down, then did it again.
"And no noise! Good heavens, it was that easy to fix?"
I laughed.
"That's how it is with repairs. Once you know where the problem is, it's easy. If you don't, it can be endlessly difficult."
"Well, thank you either way. I was about to buy a new one. You just saved me a few tens of thousands of won."
"It was nothing, really."
"Wait right there. Let me grab you a drink from the back. Just a minute."
She was already heading for the room behind the counter before I could stop her.
"No, you really don't have to—"
She was already gone. I stood there and looked around the shop while I waited.
It really has been here a long time. Wait.
On a shelf of office keyboards and mice, tucked in the far corner, sat a box with a note written across it in thick marker.
PRECISION MOUSE!
Clearance stock. Just 10,000 won!
What's this? A precision mouse...?
Of all the words on that note, precision was the one that snagged my eye.
The old woman came back and pressed a cold can of soda into my hand.
"Here. Have a cold drink. Hm? What's that you've got — wait, those are still here?"
"Ah, sorry. Was I not supposed to touch that?"
She shook her head.
"Touch it all you like. Aigoo. Years ago the wholesaler dumped a few of them on me, said they were some kind of fancy mouse. They never sold, just took up space, so I shoved them back there. I didn't even remember they were still sitting around."
Hmm.
It was probably nothing. And yet that word — precision — would not leave me alone.
"Ma'am, would you mind if I opened the outer box?"
"Hm? I don't mind, but why?"
"There's a mouse I've been looking for. I thought this might be it."
"Is that so? Go ahead, then. No — just take the whole thing. Aigoo, it's nothing but clutter sitting here."
"Are you sure? I can really just take it?"
"Of course you can. You fixed my chair."
I bowed to her at a full ninety degrees, then walked out with the mouse box under one arm and the pens in my hand.
Could it be...?
The moment I got back to the workshop, I tore into the outer carton. The inner box emerged, and with it, the model name.
Unreleased Gaming Mouse
Cheonghu Soft
Wait a second. This is—
I pulled up the specialist blog in a hurry, opened the old PAV 2933 review, and checked the list of mice that had shipped with the sensor.
X348 · X347 · GE 5 · EI 103
There it was. This was one of them. No question.
The strange part was that this mouse had never been released at all. A few old articles confirmed it: the EI 103 had been scheduled to launch, then cancelled for unspecified reasons.
A moment later, I understood how a cancelled mouse had ended up in a twenty-year-old stationery shop.
Cheonghu Soft, a company that had carved out a place in the PC peripherals market with mechanical keyboards and mice, officially closed its doors today after failing to weather a collapse in profitability. Among Cheonghu Soft's flagship products were the EI line of gaming mice from years past, and...
Leftover stock from a dead company's warehouse, dumped onto a retailer. That would do it.
It happened more often than people thought — a bankrupt manufacturer's unsold inventory trickling down to little shops like this one.
"Good thing I fixed that chair."
A repair I hadn't thought twice about had just handed me the key to the entire replication.
All right, then.
I opened the EI 103 and checked the sensor with care. And there it was, still sleeping inside a mouse that had never been used even once: a PAV 2933.
I extracted it as gently as I could, set it aside like something precious, and started on the housing.
The sensor had been the hard part. The housing material, thankfully, was ordinary — the kind of plastic used in mice everywhere. Under any other circumstances I would have reached for something better. Not this time. This was about a perfect replica, which meant matching the original material from the first cut to the last.
Rake's X348 still had its shell intact, and there was no shortage of old YouTube footage of him using it. Between the two, I could get closer to the original than I had any right to.
Click. Click.
"Need to make this one actuate a little harder. And over here, a bit more..."
I burned through the entire day. And at the end of it, a perfect replica of the X348 sat on the bench.
Anyone who didn't know better would have sworn I'd gotten my hands on a factory-sealed original. This was something I had built from scratch, modeled on the X348. The proof was sitting right there in front of me: this replica had a Soul sealed inside it.
If there's a difference, that's the only one.
I packed the finished mouse, then called Rake on the spot.
"Rake. This is Kang Cheolwoo. Yes. Yes. The X348 replication is finished. No — this time I'll bring it to you myself."