Memory Unlocked (3)
And then, all at once.
Ah. So that's it.
A memory surfaced—my time climbing the Greek and Roman mythology world alongside Yang Myeonghyeon.
Prometheus's prophecy. That prophecy, nothing but a string of things that had been nearly impossible to grasp.
'You will heal humans, and only humans, until your life runs out.'
He had said Yang Myeonghyeon would heal humans, and humans alone.
Yang Myeonghyeon's face had gone cold and bloodless at that.
'Unlike Asclepius, god of medicine, your fate flows according to desire.'
'...And is desire a bad thing?'
'When you heal others and are meant to give of yourself, harboring personal desires is what brings your fate to its limit.'
Maybe Yang Myeonghyeon's Perk could only heal humans.
Come to think of it, I'd never once seen him use it when he himself was injured.
'So you're telling me to abandon my desires? Am I a being who isn't allowed to want anything?'
There had been something unusually raw in the voice with which Yang Myeonghyeon pushed back against Prometheus.
Suppressed emotion welling up and surging against the back of his throat—that was what it had sounded like.
'When Mr. Go isn't around, I need to use the Docent Perk and take a proper look at my memories of Yang Myeonghyeon.'
A character I had created had slipped free of his novel and become a being with a will of his own.
I had no way of knowing what kind of life Yang Myeonghyeon had lived inside the notebook's story after it ended.
Yet as his creator, shamefully enough, something about his existence had sent a faint chill through me.
"Anyway, the two of us have both cleared the 31st floor, haven't we?"
Go Gyumin apparently didn't feel like pressing me about Yang Myeonghyeon or chattering on about it either, so he abruptly changed the subject.
As the blazing sunlight left us nearly sweating, a rough wind swept past and cooled our body heat.
"Did you view the memory exhibition too, Jisan?"
"I did. It was a memory tied to my wish."
"Same here."
Go Gyumin's gaze was hanging somewhere far off in empty space.
What he was looking at wasn't the scenery before his eyes, it seemed, but his own memory from moments ago.
"My wish—don't you think it's laughable?"
Thrown out with a light laugh, the question caught me off guard, and my mouth flitted open and shut as I struggled to answer.
He'd just fired a fastball right down the middle, and I found myself debating how to wrap up a tactful reply.
"No, not at all. Everyone's concerns can be different, after all."
"You don't mean that."
I tried to smooth it over, but Go Gyumin cut my words down with another fastball.
...He wasn't wrong. Honestly, it was at least partly empty courtesy.
People always ache more over their own sorrow than anyone else's.
"...Honestly, I did wonder whether it was a wish weighty enough to justify joining this tower's climb."
After a brief hesitation, I finally admitted it to Go Gyumin plainly.
Compared to my wish, bound up in a wretched past, Go Gyumin's was far too simple.
And while I couldn't turn back the flow of time by my own will, wasn't effort and passion something a person could summon through their own will?
"Yeah. Everyone who's ever known me has reacted that way."
There was a reason beating around the bush would have been pointless.
Go Gyumin was already accustomed to how people responded upon hearing his wish.
While I had at least hidden my expression and feelings, if those close to him had heard his wish, they probably would have heaped reproach upon him.
"Pansori is an art, you know. Most artists are starving, right?"
Go Gyumin idly dragged his foot across the ground.
Dry soil crumbled and scattered beneath his kick.
"And yet I was lucky—my life was hardly so destitute that I lacked for anything economically."
Had his family simply been well-off from the start?
Go Gyumin seemed reluctant to elaborate, so I didn't press further.
Because I'd heard his wish on the lower floors, he seemed to be deliberately avoiding mention of his family circumstances in any detail.
'I appreciate the consideration, Mr. Go, but your face gives everything away.'
The subtle pauses as he chose his words, the deeply furrowed brow.
That awkward form of consideration didn't seem to suit his temperament at all.
"And my singing got pretty good reviews, too. Even I thought I had some real skill."
"Your singing was genuinely magnificent, Mr. Go."
"Well, there were easier paths I could've taken, but I didn't hate singing, and people told me I had the talent for it, so I walked the pansori road without much agonizing over it."
Go Gyumin spoke matter-of-factly, boasting of his pansori ability.
No—it hardly counted as boasting. There was no real pride showing in it.
It wasn't arrogance or showing off confidence. It was simply an objective account.
'I'm jealous.'
But regardless of his tone, I envied him.
When it came to art, I had lived my whole life doing nothing but envying others.
Go Gyumin would never know what it was like to have a life where no effort or striving yielded any result.
"But you know, there was something I lacked."
"And what was that?"
"Living in this Korea where everyone's racing forward—I didn't have any passion. In this 'palli-palli' nation, of all places."
"......"
"If you spend your youth just idling the time away, you're supposed to come out of it with at least some achievement or lesson learned, aren't you?"
Not every citizen of South Korea was like that, of course, but I sympathized with Go Gyumin to a fair degree.
For someone with his leisurely disposition in particular, the world outside the arts must have been all the harder.
"Without even the passion or drive to make an effort, I drifted along like water on a stream until I reached this age."
His tone wasn't one of complaining about his pathetic life.
This time too, Go Gyumin was simply recounting his own life story without any feeling attached to it at all.
"...But if maintaining your life isn't painful, and you don't have the will for it yourself... is there really any need to strive?"
I offered a careful counterargument.
This wasn't mere consolation. I genuinely wondered.
If Go Gyumin had actually gone job hunting, things might have been a little difficult for him.
But he seemed to have lived a reasonably successful life in the arts world—so why did he crave effort and passion so badly?
"True. I used to think that way too, back in the day. Everyone's standard for living is different, so there was no need to let it bother me."
Go Gyumin quickly showed a bitter smile.
It was an unusually conflicted expression for him—something I rarely saw.
"But you know, as I got older, this useless emotion started growing in me."
"And what would that be?"
"Ambition."
Ambition.
Unless you were a Taoist sage, it was an emotion anyone could carry—yet Go Gyumin was only experiencing it now, this late in life?
"I've gotten old, but I'm still only middle-aged, and they do say this is the age of living to a hundred, don't they?"
"That's right. You've just got some farsightedness, Mr. Go—you're not actually as old as you think you are."
I tossed out an awkward little joke to lift Go Gyumin's spirits.
It could have come off as disrespectful, but thinking back on his usual words and behavior, it seemed like it might suit his tastes.
"Aaaaawfully kind of you."
True to form, Go Gyumin found it at least a little funny, and he stretched the word out deliberately as he sniped back at me.
I lifted the corners of my mouth in imitation of him.
This was the first time I'd ever crossed that kind of line in conversation with someone else.
"In any case, most people have their lives set in stone by the time they reach my age."
Go Gyumin raised one hand and drew a line in the empty air.
As if an invisible wall stood there.
"It's the period where you struggle to keep up what you've been doing all along—or even if the work changes, you pursue a stable old age rather than stimulation. Something like that."
This was another generalization rather than a universal truth.
But it was true that people tend to settle into similar thoughts and ways of living around the same age, the same stage of life.
"But you see."
Go Gyumin rested his chin on his hand and tilted his head slightly.
"Only when everyone else had stopped to sit back and rest comfortably—that's when I slowly started getting curious."
At that moment, Go Gyumin's eyes gleamed with genuine light.
Had I ever glimpsed anything in his eyes that could be called fire before now?
His eyes were, for the first time, giving off a light at a slightly different temperature than usual. Ambition.
"What would my life be like, I wondered, if I lived it devoted to my singing?"
The wind blew again.
It was a dry, dusty gust, but Go Gyumin only scrunched his face and didn't rise from his seat.
"What must it feel like to strive, to sweat for the sake of a goal?"
His low, murmuring voice felt as distant as someone reading a fairy tale aloud.
As if he were describing a world he could never hope to reach.
"But even with the ambition, the drive never actually came."
Before long, Go Gyumin had recovered his usual manner of speaking.
Still, that glimpse of his yearning, however brief, had struck me as rather refreshing.
'Well, hearing the whole story, I can understand it.'
It was closer to a thirst arriving late in life than simple laziness.
Only, even that thirst had never transformed into the kind of drive that could move him to action.
Some might curse ambition unaccompanied by effort. But the fact that he'd entered this tower at all meant the reason behind it had been desperately real to Go Gyumin.
"So that's the most earnest wish of my life."
"It's a relief this museum doesn't have an abstention rule."
"Haha! Abstain and you're straight off to become a Component, so even the great Go Gyumin has to grit his teeth and hold out somehow."
'At least he doesn't lack the will to survive, thankfully.'
If even his drive to live had hit rock bottom, he would have been eliminated back on the 1st floor.
Having explained his wish, Go Gyumin chuckled and turned his head away.
After laying out the basis for his own wish, it would only have been fair to ask about mine as well, but he didn't.
'His consideration runs a bit too deep for a man like him, and honestly it's a little burdensome. But going into detail would only darken the mood, so it's better not to talk about it.'
It was a past I couldn't help but invite sympathy for, paradoxically—yet I had no wish to be pitied.
That said, if even that sympathy could be turned into a useful tool for climbing the tower, the story would be different.
'No matter how pitiable my past looks compared to others, there's no one inside this tower who'd show me sympathy at the cost of themselves.'
Sympathy that did nothing for my climb was meaningless.
Then, suddenly, someone thrust a hand out from behind and tapped both our shoulders.
No presence had registered at all, yet here they were appearing out of nowhere.
He smelled like an NPC, so I swiveled around at once.
"You there, outlander. You're the one wanting to live a life of fierce striving, aren't you?"
A bald, elderly man bared his teeth in a grin at us.
His belly protruded, but his back was ramrod straight.
Running my eyes over his garb, I guessed he was something like a Roman noble.
"And I can show you a world brimming with effort and passion."
"Ah, well, I'm not really thinking about that right now. It's a wish I dream up outside the tower, you see."
Go Gyumin answered curtly without even turning his head properly.
Effort that had nothing to do with his own life, apparently, warranted not even a shred of interest from him.
"Now then, come along and see."
Yet despite Go Gyumin's curt response, the old man was already walking off with his back to us, heading toward the cluster of buildings.
As if utterly certain we would follow.
"Mr. Go, this looks like the same pattern as before. An NPC appearing to guide us into a quest, right?"
"Hm, you think? Seems a bit fishy to me."
"Everyone in the tower is fishy."
"Can't argue with that."
Convinced, Go Gyumin rose from where he'd been sitting beside me.
The old man's pace was astonishingly quick, so he and I hurried after him with long, wide strides.
"All right, sir, lead the way. But what exactly is this world you keep going on about?"
"You'll find out when you get there."
The old man marched ahead without offering any proper explanation, and Go Gyumin grumbled his discontent yet again.
Even for a quest-related NPC, refusing to play nice—that was Go Gyumin for you.
"My mom always told me not to follow strangers."
"Haha, did she now?"
"Yep. She's passed on now, though—so she went off after a stranger herself, down to the underworld."
I hastily reeled my smiling mouth back down and pinned it in place.
'...Is he allowed to say things like that?'
Go Gyumin's deadpan delivery of such dangerous jokes made keeping my expression in check a real struggle for a moment.
Keeping up with his brand of comedy every single time was, frankly, going to be impossible.
"Jisan, your face is a sight to behold right now."
"I... don't think I'm very quick on my feet in conversation, so please go easy on jokes like that."
"Ooh, scary."
I walked along the path the old man led us down, trading idle banter with Go Gyumin the whole way.
Entirely blind to the sinister undertone lurking in that face of his, as the man grinned back at us with bared teeth.