Something's Wrong With My New Phone

It all started like this.

Hauling a body that throbbed and tingled in every joint like I'd been rolled up in a straw mat and beaten, I was on my way back to my studio apartment when I got stuck at a red light.

Of course the signal flipped the second I arrived, which meant I'd be waiting at least three minutes before I could cross.

Leaning on the safety post by the crosswalk like a makeshift cane, waiting for the light to change, it suddenly hit me that I still hadn't done today's homework.

Tsk…

The second I got home I was going to pass out cold. One wrong move and I could end up as one of those guys who "quit the game for real."

Granted, mobile game dailies were like the sun rising every morning at five—they'd come up yesterday, they'd come up today, and they'd come up tomorrow. Skipping a day wouldn't exactly end the world. But—

YOU ABSOLUTE MORON!!!!!! Are you saying it's fine if Lost Staff dies on you!? I don't care how tired or annoyed you are—logging in every single day to clear dailies with rewards thinner than a rat's tail and calling it joy is the destiny of whales like you!!!

The little kid inside me—the only one who truly knew how many dump trucks of cash I'd already driven into this game—was putting up one hell of a fight.

So, with fingers trembling like a gambling addict who'd just confirmed his hand was a 38 gwangttaeng, I forced myself to dig out my phone… and got so absorbed in finishing today's homework that I never noticed.

Yeah. Today's rewards are absolute garbage again.

"W-Watch out!"

In other words… the existence of the delivery bike maniac barreling toward me from behind at full throttle.

No matter how much better my physique was compared to my past life, when a human and a bicycle decide to make out, eight or nine times out of ten it's the human body that gets wrecked first.

What saved me from a future that might already have been observed somewhere was a helping hand that shot out from behind without a sound.

The only problem was that, at that exact moment, I had already stepped forward to cross the street.

Someone yanked me backward out of nowhere.

That alone would've been enough to send me sprawling—except the shoes I was wearing happened to be Crocs. And the ground around us was slick with water.

I slipped and went down hard on my back. My phone left my hand, clipped the edge of a jutting sidewalk block once, skidded across the asphalt once more, and dove straight into a puddle sitting in the middle of the crosswalk.

Then, for the finishing touch, it got crushed under the tire of a car that had just taken off on the newly changed light.

It was a combo so clean that anyone who thought they were decent at fighting games would've stood up and given it a standing ovation…

And just like that, my phone's life came to an end.

…Damn.

I'd seen enough of the whole sequence that I expected it to be bad, but the phone in front of me was even worse than I'd imagined.

I'd never tried it myself, but if you took a phone, smashed it with a hammer about a hundred times, then tossed it straight into a washing machine, it would probably look something like this.

That was roughly why I couldn't tear my eyes off it—

"I-I'm so sorry… Because of me…"

A voice so small it barely crawled into my ears pulled me back.

"Sorry?"

"I-If you want, I'll pay you back…"

"No, no, it's fine. Walking away without getting hurt is already a miracle."

"Still…"

I told her it was okay several more times—that if anything, I was the one who should be thanking her—but the wreck in my hand must have looked too horrific. In the end she pressed a sticky note with her number on it into my palm, told me to call if I changed my mind later, and only then walked off.

"…Shit."

I should've just done the dailies at home…

Regretting it now was useless, but that was human nature for you—the second something went wrong, you started jerking off to every "I should've" that came to mind.

So let's think positive. Positive.

Best-case scenario, I should've started with at least one broken arm. Instead I got away with a scraped palm and nothing else, right?

As for the phone…

"I was gonna replace it soon anyway, so whatever—this works!"

After mentally rearming myself, I headed straight for the nearest phone shop.

"Welco— Hic?!"

Yeah. Of course he jumped.

Right around closing time, a guy built like a bear walks in with one palm dripping blood. And the rain that had been drizzling all evening had made everything darker than usual.

"A-Are you all right, sir…?"

Maybe that was why.

I saw it clear as day—the shop owner's hand on the counter slowly creeping toward his own phone.

"I'd like to buy a phone."

"…Ah."

"Right now. Immediately. This second."

I was already exhausted enough to drop dead, and bleeding on top of it made me want to scrap everything, go home, and sleep like a corpse… but if I went offline completely, that bitch Lee Chaerin would kick my door down first thing tomorrow morning and throw an absolute fit.

The only mobile games she'd ever played were casual ones where you slid cute character blocks around and matched them. To her, spending real money on games wasn't just pathetic—it was personally offensive. If she found out I'd wrecked a phone doing game dailies?

I'd be looking at a minimum two-hour lecture full of every swear word in her vocabulary.

And it wasn't just that. I had enough people who might need to reach me that I needed a working line as soon as humanly possible.

I made that willpower extremely clear to the man in front of me, and apparently the grit that had kept this neighborhood shop standing while countless other phone dealers collapsed and vanished hadn't gone anywhere. The look that had been treating me like a complete lunatic a second ago suddenly turned bright and sparkling.

"Hmm… Looking for the latest model? Or is there a specific one you want?"

"Before that—any chance you've got leftover bandages? Or even just tissues…"

"Of course! That much I can absolutely do."

I could've sworn I heard something like because I'm planning to fleece you that much, but maybe I imagined it.

Either way, he dug a first-aid kit out from under the counter, I patched myself up roughly, and we got straight into the sales pitch.

"You said you don't have a particular model in mind, so how about we go with the newest one?"

"Got anything good?"

"These days they're all good. All of them turn out nice, but… the hottest thing right now is this guy."

From under the counter came a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠box so massive it barely looked like a phone package.

"So this one… you know Daeseong? Daeseong?"

"Yeah, I know them."

"This is the flagship they just dropped with high hopes. Originally only people who pre-ordered and won the lottery drawing could even buy it, but…"

But?

"Originally—ahem—there was someone who was supposed to pick it up… then they just disappeared."

He was laying it on like he was sharing some deeply confidential secret. I was too tired to care.

"So it had an original owner… meaning it's used?"

"Hey now! Tsk! Used? Look here, look here—seal's never even been touched. Not used. Brand. New. Un. Opened!"

"If it's not used, then it's leftover stock?"

It was painfully obvious he was trying to offload some expensive inventory he'd gotten stuck with. I wasn't about to play the sucker without a fight.

"Leftover stock? Saying it like that hurts my feelings. This is something you can't even get if you throw money at it~"

"Ah."

"Here, here—this is real-world footage. Just look at the screen size. It's on a whole other level. Whole other level."

"Oh."

The screen was definitely on the large side. I was a big guy to begin with, which meant my hands were a fair bit bigger than average, and the phone in the video looked like it would sit perfectly in them.

"More than anything… you play games at all? Games?"

"I do, yeah."

"Then this is perfect for you. They used new materials from the Tower in this thing, so it barely heats up at all."

That wasn't just sales talk. That one actually hooked me for real.

And honestly, it made sense—because the root of this entire disaster, the object of my love-hate relationship, the game Lost Staff, had earned itself the nickname "hand warmer factory."

Leave it running for thirty minutes and the back of your phone got hot enough to substitute for an actual hand warmer. And the lead director had flat-out declared there were no plans for a PC client—not now, not ever. Absolute madman of a game.

But a phone that didn't heat up on its own?

That was a custom machine built specifically to run mobile games.

"So how much is it?"

"Hmm… three million nine hundred…?"

"Excuse me?"

Oh for fuck's sake, it really was a stock dump.

"…That's the original price! ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I can knock it down for you! Of course I can."

After a long, tedious, and unnecessarily scholarly negotiation, we settled on a final price of 3.1 million won.

Full cash payment required, though.

"Tsk… ahh, at this rate I'm taking a bit of a hit here."

"You're not throwing in a case? Or at least a screen protector?"

"…Kid, you could run this shop instead of me."

Only after I'd also extracted two extra privacy screen films did I remember the presence of my ex—no, my old phone—shoved roughly into my pocket.

"Oh, right. This is my old phone. Any chance… it could be repaired?"

"We don't really do AS around here… but I'll take a look."

The second I pulled it out, his face went blank with shock.

"What in the world… Even a dump truck running over it shouldn't leave it looking like this."

"…Pretty hopeless, huh?"

"Looking at it… this isn't just smashed. Looks like water got in through the cracks after it broke… Yeah, that's going to be tough."

I'd asked on the off chance, but it seemed I'd have to write off whatever files were still inside.

The silver lining was that aside from some old photos with Aunt and Lee Chaerin, there wasn't anything truly critical on it. The pictures I could always ask Chaerin to share again later, depending on how things went.

"The SIM card might ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠still be salvageable, though."

"Really?"

"Hang on a sec. I'll check real quick."

Miraculously, the SIM survived. I headed home with it sealed in a little plastic bag roughly the size of my finger, plus the brand-new phone in hand.

Pssht—!

"Tsk, ow, what the hell."

I sliced my finger open forcing through the basic setup as fast as possible, then tried to install the game so I could finish the dailies I'd been interrupted mid-way through earlier—

"I'm sorry, what?"

What kind of nonsense was this.

Honestly, the first thought that hit me the second that message popped up on the screen was: Did I just get scammed?

And from where I was standing, it was a fair suspicion—dressing up a decent used phone as factory-sealed new stock was a pretty classic con.

But to pull a scam this blatant…?

A guy running a neighborhood shop…?

If this had been some package that showed up through mail order, I would've quietly accepted reality and filed a report with cybercrime first thing. But I'd bought this thing on-site, with my own eyes. And replaying the memory, every layer of packaging had looked factory-fresh—not a single trace of anyone having opened it.

In the middle of all that confusion… what I finally landed on was pure curiosity.

…But this thing is supposed to be a full terabyte.

As dumpster-fire-god-tier as Lost Staff was, even that storage-devouring monster of a mobile game only ate about eighty gigs.

Which meant something taking up at least nine hundred gigs was sitting in here… What, a collection of 8K porn or something?

The kind of pure, primal curiosity every man is born with.

Guided by that, I poked around in the phone settings—and the thing hogging that insane amount of space turned out to be a single app.

"So you're the culprit…"

All right then. Let's see what's packed in here so tight.

I hadn't registered a single card or anything yet, so I opened the app without much thought—and what floated up in front of my eyes was—

"…????"

Something was here that had no business being here.