Ties from My Previous Life (3)
What on earth was I supposed to say?
No answer came to mind.
She said she used to like me. That was possible, I supposed.
Thinking back, I hadn’t exactly been kind to her. Yet the fact that we’d kept in touch for such a long time made it believable.
But still… what could I possibly do for her now?
No matter how logically or wizard-like I tried to reason through it, the person she had loved had ended his life by throwing himself from a building.
It couldn’t have been a positive influence.
Of course, they hadn’t been actual lovers, so it probably wasn’t a devastating shock.
Still, some emotional turmoil would have been inevitable.
“...Did it work out?”
That was all I could ask. A faint hope lay behind the question.
It might not have been me. It could have been someone similar.
Others must have liked him too. That was an undeniable fact.
But…
“No. It ultimately failed.”
“There’s still a chance it could work out later, isn’t there?”
Even if it had failed this time, if she hadn’t confessed, opportunities would remain.
Even after a confession, enough time could pass for the other person to accept it.
The possibility wasn’t zero.
Human relationships were built on countless possibilities…
That was what made them human relationships…
“It can’t happen. He’s already not in Korea anymore.”
That single statement shattered even the slightest remaining possibility.
How was I supposed to explain this?
When I died, I had no family. No lover.
So I had chosen death without hesitation. I thought it wouldn’t matter to anyone.
After all, the only one who might feel sad would be the landlord whose building value would drop.
But this… I had never expected this.
Gone abroad? After the Great Chaos, the world was barely holding itself together.
Trade continued only in limited ways through the powers of various hunters.
In a situation like this, there was no way he would have left the country. Even if he had, his life would have been extremely unstable.
That was her roundabout way of saying it.
That he was dead.
“I should have confessed sooner. Then maybe I wouldn’t have any regrets.”
It was unfortunate, but what Lee Jihyun was talking about really was me.
Even if she had confessed, the outcome wouldn’t have changed.
The person I was back then and the person I was now were completely different. I wasn’t sure whether I would have accepted her confession.
But even if I had, if I couldn’t become a wizard, the result would have been the same.
If anything, I might have lived with even greater guilt.
Just losing someone was an enormous shock.
If the cause of death wasn’t an accident or murder but suicide… the pain would be beyond words.
Of course… I couldn’t be certain. Ever since becoming a woman, I had felt that many things were no longer the same.
And it had only been a month.
There was nothing I could say with complete confidence.
“Ah. Did I bring up too dark a topic? Let’s eat first and talk afterward, okay?”
Lee Jihyun seemed to realize she had gone too deep and smoothly changed the subject.
When I glanced beside me, Jihu was already happily eating while watching NewTube.
I supposed I should try this food now too.
I scooped up a large bite and put it in my mouth.
“Ugh.”
“Ah. It doesn’t taste good to you? This place isn’t very good at making that particular dish.”
It used to be my favorite food.
Unfortunately, the moment I bit into it, the taste was shockingly awful.
“Yeah. It seems my body just doesn’t accept it anymore.”
I couldn’t understand why I had liked it so much before.
“I thought it would be delicious. You never really know until you try it, right?”
It was clearly a conversation about food. A perfectly ordinary conversation about food that shouldn’t have been any different from before.
Yet the way it felt like the person she was referring to was me… was that just my imagination?
Why had Lee Jihyun opened up her heart so easily to me?
Was she overlapping Baek Sowol with Heo Donghyeon?
Did the emotion called love somehow connect to the soul?
On top of that, even my sense of taste had completely changed. It used to be delicious, but in this body it was unbearable.
The only common point was memory.
Honestly, if someone had erased Baek Sowol’s memories and implanted mine instead, the differences were so vast that I wouldn’t be able to argue against it.
There had been that little overlap between the two of us.
So why did Lee Jihyun…
“...”
In the end, I left every bite of food untouched.
I simply couldn’t eat it.
It was ridiculous. After only a few months, eating the same dish from the same place, yet I couldn’t stomach it at all.
It was so absurd that a laugh escaped me.
Still, regardless of whether I could eat or not, my hunger remained unchanged.
I decided to order a few other things instead.
“You seem to come here often. Could you recommend something?”
Since I had always ordered the same thing, I had no idea what else was good.
I asked Lee Jihyun.
“They do chicken skewers really well here. Try one. The sweet-and-spicy flavor might suit your taste.”
What Lee Jihyun recommended was closer to a snack than a proper meal.
I didn’t particularly like sweet things. But ignoring her suggestion outright might seem strange.
I ordered immediately, and the chicken skewers arrived shortly after.
I took a large bite.
?
It’s good?
The result was completely unexpected.
Did I like sweet things now?
I used to enjoy beverages, but never to this degree.
Since I only drank regular Americanos at cafés, I had never noticed.
So sweet things could taste this good?
...Ha.
I felt the change in my body on a visceral level.
Things that used to taste bad now tasted good. Food I once loved I could no longer eat.
It wasn’t strange. Taste perception differed according to genetics, after all.
It was just more painful because Lee Jihyun was sitting right beside me.
At this rate I can’t even bring up my own story…!
I wasn’t certain, but the circumstances clearly pointed to me. In a situation where the possibility existed, could I really mention it outright?
If we had been normal friends, it might have ended with a casual question in passing.
If we had grown close, she might even discover the columbarium.
But the ashes of the person she loved?
Umm…
...Ha. Why did everything have to get so tangled?
The urge to just let it go grew stronger.
Even if I went there, I didn’t think I would find any significant information. There was probably something else.
I decided to let it pass.
“Sis, so what about trying this?”
Beside me, Jihu kept talking, completely oblivious.
“Hold on a second.”
Read the room a little, would you?
Lee Jihyun felt a strange emotion as she watched Baek Sowol eat chicken skewers beside her. What should she call this feeling? It was the first time she had experienced it in her twenty-five years of life.
She had… been in love. He was the childhood friend who had been by her side from the moment her memories began.
But she had kept putting off her confession because she wasn’t confident he would accept it.
Being with him was comfortable and fun. He made her laugh. He had a strong eccentric side and was a four-dimensional person who idolized wizards.
She had fallen for that part of him. She had wanted to become his lover.
That was why she could never be sure. Because she couldn’t predict his reaction, she could never be certain he would accept her confession.
If he rejected her, their twenty-five-year relationship would shatter. So both of them had kept delaying it, each waiting for the other.
But…
But.
A month ago, sudden news had arrived.
Heo Donghyeon had committed suicide.
He had jumped from the rooftop straight to the ground.
Why…? Was it really because becoming a wizard was impossible?
Heo Donghyeon had lived with the word “wizard” constantly on his lips. It wasn’t strange. Wizards had such promising futures.
But it wasn’t a field one could enter through effort alone.
No matter how worthless a person might be, if they possessed the talent for magic, they were a wizard.
No matter how outstanding someone was, without the talent for magic, they could never be a wizard.
A profession decided strictly by innate constitution.
Awakeners themselves could only be the chosen ones, and this was a position that required taking one more step beyond that.
Because Heo Donghyeon had always tried to think rationally and logically about wizards, Lee Jihyun hadn’t given it much thought.
There was nothing wrong with hoping to become a wizard.
She had believed that even if he failed, while he might feel heartbroken, it wouldn’t cause any major problems.
After all, Heo Donghyeon was someone who had overcome every hardship and adversity in his life.
And not long afterward, Lee Jihyun realized how wrong that assumption had been.
When she heard that Heo Donghyeon had awakened, she secretly hoped he really had become a wizard.
No matter how low the odds, no matter how unrealistic it seemed.
No one who loved another person would want to see them sad or heartbroken.
But of course, by all probability, Heo Donghyeon was not a wizard.
And exactly one week later, he jumped.
On the seventh day after awakening, he gave up on life.
The fact that it had taken seven days revealed traces of the faint hope he had still been clinging to.
It was clearly visible in his search history, browsing records, watch list, and everything else.
Naturally, Lee Jihyun had done nothing at the time.
If… I had comforted him back then… would things have turned out differently…?
Of course it was nothing but lingering regret, but Lee Jihyun knew. Nothing would have changed.
If the woman named Lee Jihyun had occupied a large place in Heo Donghyeon’s heart, there was no way he would have thrown his life away so easily.
Therefore, even if she had confessed back then, she couldn’t have altered his fate.
But that didn’t mean the lingering attachment would disappear.
If she had confessed much earlier. And adding one more “if,” if he had accepted her confession.
If the two of them had become lovers.
Could she have stopped Heo Donghyeon from dying?
Or if she had been rejected. If he had been able to let go of his feelings early. Maybe he wouldn’t have suffered such a terrible shock.
Those thoughts kept circling around her.
But even sadness eventually becomes familiar.
Paradoxically, because she had lacked the courage to approach him, Lee Jihyun and Heo Donghyeon had been close yet distant.
That was why, a full month later, she could live on while growing accustomed to the earlier grief.
The dead were pitiable, but the living still had to continue living.
But…
What is this exactly?
And today, Lee Jihyun had met Baek Sowol by chance.
Baek Sowol was an incredibly special person. It was as if an angel had descended from heaven.
A mysterious aura like an angel who had become human and whose wings had transformed into hair. Because of that, Lee Jihyun couldn’t help but watch her closely.
And as she observed the girl’s behavior, Lee Jihyun felt something strange.
She had gone to the PC bang so naturally.
And she had poured out the secrets in her heart just as naturally.
Even her own parents didn’t know that Lee Jihyun had liked Heo Donghyeon.
It was a truth she had hidden so thoroughly.
Yet in front of Baek Sowol, it had slipped out without hesitation.
At first she thought it was because the girl seemed so mysterious that the secrets flowed freely, but after thinking about it carefully and letting time pass, Lee Jihyun finally realized the truth.
Just why does Sowol…
Seem like she’s imitating Heo Donghyeon?
Lee Jihyun.
She was feeling a clear sense of incongruity.
The incongruity of Baek Sowol imitating Heo Donghyeon.