The 100-Won Coin
Lee Dong-oh moved like a machine.
He woke at the exact same time as yesterday to the sound of his alarm, stared at his expressionless face in the mirror, and finished his mechanical tooth-brushing.
He shouldered the same bag that pressed down on him with the same weight every day, left the house, and walked toward the usual bus stop while breathing in the early-morning air that still held the heat of the asphalt.
When the front door of the bus arrived at the precise same time as always, he tapped his familiar transportation card and settled into the window seat facing the stop he always used.
Even the spot he chose inside the bus rarely changed.
Like a satellite locked in a predetermined orbit, his body followed a thoroughly programmed manual.
The bus’s destination was Hankuk University—the place where Dong-oh mortgaged five days of his precious youth every week.
That didn’t mean he had any special purpose or grand goal in attending university.
He hadn’t chosen his major out of a deep thirst for knowledge, nor did he possess any lofty dream or ambition he was determined to achieve.
He simply went because everyone else did, because staying inside the fence called “school” at this stage of life was the socially “safe” thing to do.
It was closer to struggling just to survive each day and to avoid falling behind or straying from the enormous path everyone else seemed to have agreed to walk in a single file.
After safely graduating high school, one naturally went to university; after university, one built up specs to squeeze through the needle’s eye of employment.
After getting a job, one earned just enough money not to draw too much attention, met a suitable person when the time came, married, and took on an enormous debt that would require a lifetime of slave-like labor to repay in order to buy a house.
Then one had children and raised them to repeat the exact same process.
It was simply following the order of life that someone’s invisible hand had laid out, without a single question.
Most people called that an ordinary, stable life.
But Dong-oh thought of it as a life perfectly domesticated by the framework of a vast society.
The familiar scenery outside the window flowed by slowly, as if copied and pasted every day.
The faded sign of the convenience store he had seen yesterday, the day before, and perhaps even a year ago; the white shirts hanging in front of the laundromat; the people lined up at the crosswalk with lifeless eyes; the faces staring blankly at the black screens of their smartphones while their thumbs moved.
In that gray cityscape, not a single person looked special.
Everyone seemed like parts of a giant machine, and he himself was merely the most ordinary, easily replaceable one among them.
“They say if you wish hard enough, it comes true…… Was that all a bright red lie?”
Dong-oh leaned his head deeply against the bus window and slowly closed his eyes.
The faint vibration of the engine traveled through the glass and into his mind.
“I wish something new would happen so this boring, awful routine would slow down or change completely.”
He knew better than anyone that it was an unrealistic fantasy.
He didn’t even hope for the kind of things that appeared in comics or novels—flying freely through the sky, handling scorching flames at his fingertips, or secretly reading the inner thoughts of people whose eyes met his.
Actually, he desperately wanted those things.
If possible, even such overwhelming powers wouldn’t be bad at all.
What mattered was escaping the eternal cycle of today being exactly the same as yesterday and tomorrow being exactly the same as today—breaking free into something completely different from now.
Something strange that only he could see suddenly appearing in the real world, realizing the hidden side of reality, or obtaining supernatural power that ordinary humans were never allowed to possess.
Dong-oh had wished for that every single day, quite earnestly.
“I’m wishing so hard, so why isn’t it happening? Maybe I’m not wishing hard enough after all?”
After thinking for a moment, Dong-oh furrowed his brows slightly.
That couldn’t be it.
At the very least, the number of people on this vast campus who spent every minute of a boring professor’s lecture staring out the window and imagining the world ending or being dragged into another world to become a hero was probably not that high.
The same went for someone who, while picturing the terrifying scene of the bus to school flipping over, had spent years repeating the fantasy of dramatically awakening superpowers and heroically saving everyone around him without missing a single day.
Dong-oh firmly believed in strange psychological phenomena like the placebo effect and the nocebo phenomenon described in medicine and psychology.
Patients could miraculously improve after taking fake flour pills with no medicinal effect, and simply believing a harmless substance was lethal poison could make the body actually feel pain and break down.
People could even develop hypothermia and freeze to death from the mere illusion and fear of being trapped in a broken freezer, and ordinary parents could temporarily display superhuman physical ability to lift a car weighing several tons when their child was in danger of being crushed under its wheels.
What these phenomena proved was clear.
Belief didn’t only affect a person’s abstract emotions.
Sometimes it could change human physical abilities and even create actual physical phenomena in the real world.
So what if someone possessed a stronger, purer belief that exceeded the level an individual could normally hold?
Couldn’t it go beyond simply changing one’s own body and even alter the enormous reality and rules of the world surrounding that person?
Dong-oh had believed that for a very long time.
Perhaps belief wasn’t a passive way of subjectively interpreting reality, but a powerful force that objectively decided and created reality itself.
Unfortunately, however, his reality hadn’t changed in the slightest.
Morning still arrived without fail, the bus moved along its set route and stops without error, and the old, dreary brick buildings of Hankuk University still stood proudly in their place today.
In the end, what was lacking might not be the rules of the world, but the purity and depth of his own belief.
Dong-oh had held a religion since childhood.
But the feeling of trying to believe in God and the feeling of secretly believing in the existence of superpowers or magic were slightly different.
God was someone he had been taught he “had to believe in” by his parents and environment, so he tried to believe out of obligation, whereas supernatural abilities and fantasy were instinctive targets that made his blood boil and his heart race just by thinking they existed.
Honestly, he believed more desperately in magic that could shatter reality than in the salvation of an invisible god.
He didn’t know whether that was theologically correct or blasphemous.
Maybe he would receive severe punishment later.
But Dong-oh thought that even divine wrath and punishment would be better than slowly dying of thirst in this dry, uneventful peace, because at least it would provide some kind of stimulation.
The bus arrived at the main gate of Hankuk University with a loud screech of brakes, never once deviating from its scheduled minute and second.
Dong-oh naturally blended into the huge flow of people pouring out and stepped down the bus stairs.
Without anyone leading, everyone walked heavily in the promised direction toward the gentle uphill path leading inside the main gate.
People with their heads buried in short-form videos on their smartphone screens, people walking soullessly while holding iced coffee in one hand, people with earphones plugged deep into both ears walking quickly past others.
It was a familiar sight he had seen yesterday and last semester as well.
Probably tomorrow too, and until graduation.
Dong-oh adjusted his bag strap and slowly made his way toward the main gate.
“Whether it’s a god, a demon, an alien—anything is fine…… Can’t just one being that can break the rules of the world appear right in front of me?”
Without any real expectation, he swallowed the futile thought as he always did.
If a demon with sharp horns really appeared before him, he would have to carefully confirm the contract terms in writing in exchange for his soul, but the current Dong-oh was willing to seriously haggle over a few years of his lifespan at the negotiation table just to relieve the boredom of life.
After all, if it was this meaningless, colorless time he was going to waste anyway, losing a little of it wouldn’t be much of a loss—a self-deprecating thought.
That was when it happened.
Dong-oh’s gaze, which had been casually scanning the sidewalk blocks leading to the main gate, suddenly stopped on one spot on the ground.
A small coin lay alone in the gap between the gray cement.
At first glance, it was nothing special.
It wasn’t shining brilliantly golden in the sunlight like an ancient artifact the protagonist of a novel would find, nor were there unknown ancient magic symbols engraved three-dimensionally on its front and back.
It was just a 100-won coin, something so common anywhere in Korea that it had lost all value.
Its surface was covered in dark grime from years of use, and its edges were irregularly chipped and dirty from being stepped on and kicked by countless people.
Normally, Dong-oh wouldn’t have spared it even 0.1 seconds of his attention.
Stopping in the middle of a crowd and bending down to pick up a mere 100 won would have felt unnecessarily bothersome and embarrassing.
Yet strangely, his eyes wouldn’t leave the dirty coin.
There was no scientific reason or logical explanation. A strong impulse rose from deep in his mind that he absolutely had to pick up that coin right now.
Rather, if he passed it by without picking it up, he had the eerie premonition that he would miss the most important turning point of his life forever.
Dong-oh took a few more steps by inertia.
Then, as if drawn by a magnet, he finally stopped.
“What the hell am I doing in the middle of the street over a single 100-won coin?”
Even to himself, it was pathetic, and a hollow laugh escaped.
He felt like people around him were glaring.
But in the end, he turned back toward the coin as if pulled.
He crouched down in front of the coin, which was precariously placed in the gap of the curbstone at the edge of the sidewalk so it wouldn’t be kicked by the many students.
And he reached out with his thumb and index finger to pick up the dirty piece of metal.
The cold touch of the metal traveled through the nerves at his fingertips all the way to his spine.
At that very moment, along with a brief but intense sense of déjà vu, a strange illusion occurred.
It felt as if all the noise that had filled the surroundings had been erased at once.
He couldn’t hear the rough engine sounds of cars passing on the road right next to him, the murmuring voices of students heading to school, or the sound of the early-morning wind shaking the tree branches.
For a moment, it was so quiet it felt as if the entire world had been trapped inside a giant vacuum tube and had held its breath.
Dong-oh blinked in confusion, his eyes wide.
Instantly, the world’s noise that had been cut off came rushing back like a tsunami and filled his ears.
“……What was that?”
He stared blankly at the coin resting on his palm.
There was no physical change.
No smoke rose, and the temperature hadn’t changed.
It was still just an old, dirty 100-won coin.
Dong-oh carefully placed the coin on the nail of his right thumb.
For some reason, he felt like doing the childish coin flip he hadn’t done since betting his allowance as a child.
“If it lands on heads…… something very special will happen in my life today.”
It was an incredibly childish thought.
Even though a hollow laugh escaped at his own infantile idea, he looked at the coin with quite a serious expression.
“If it lands on tails…… just another boring day like usual.”
Dong-oh chuckled.
No matter which side came up, the harsh reality wouldn’t change.
And with this level of light belief—“if it happens, it happens; if not, whatever”—he thought no miracle could possibly occur.
He flicked the coin hard with his thumb.
With a clear metallic ching, the coin spun rapidly and soared into the clear autumn sky.
The rough morning sunlight reflected off the smooth edge of the coin as it rotated dozens, hundreds of times in the air, momentarily creating a beautiful silver ring of light.
Dong-oh quickly caught the falling coin on the back of his right hand and covered it with his left palm.
Then, exhaling a breath mixed with tension, he slowly removed his palm.
Not the number 100, but the face of Admiral Yi Sun-sin.
Heads.
“Special, my ass……”
Dong-oh muttered in disappointment and slipped the coin deep into the right pocket of his pants.
But at that very moment, the smartphone that had been in his pocket along with the coin he had picked up vibrated briefly and strongly.
Dong-oh casually took it out and checked the screen.
A new notice had been posted in the department group chat for his first major class at 9 a.m.
It said that due to the professor’s sudden personal circumstances, the morning lecture was canceled for the day.
Dong-oh stared blankly at the brightly lit smartphone screen for a long time.
“Is this…… the special thing the coin I flipped was talking about?”
Compared to the grand magic or superpowers he had hoped for, it was honestly a pitifully realistic coincidence.
He shook his head, attached no particular meaning to it, and put the smartphone back in his pocket.
It wasn’t the first time a class had been canceled due to a professor’s circumstances since he entered university.
The fact that the message arrived at such perfect timing right after he flipped the coin was a little uncanny and gave him chills, but he dismissed it as nothing more than a trick of probability and a coincidental accident.