The Lucky Letter
Whirrrrr.
The computer hummed as it worked. I switched it on and checked whether any new Little Magician Rumi merch had dropped, then logged into the portal with my small hands, typed in my ID and password, and started digging through the inbox.
I entered giveaways every day, so every so often an email would arrive announcing that I'd won a prize. That was why the first thing I checked whenever I booted the computer was my mail. Today, though, a strange message was waiting. It hadn't come from the account that usually wrote to me. I opened it to see.
This letter began in England...
If you read this, you will never again be able to win any of Rumi's merch.
To keep that from happening, you must send this email to two people.
"Huh...?"
I read it through and couldn't help falling into a panic. I wouldn't be able to get Rumi merch anymore? This was enormous. I barely managed to still my finely trembling brows and read the mail once more.
The contents hadn't changed. It said that only by sending this email would I be able to receive Rumi merch from now on.
Having read it, I sank into terrible deliberation. If I didn't forward the mail to two people, I would never be able to obtain Rumi merch again, and that fact threw me into confusion. But if I did send it to two people? I could get the merch—while the two who received it would never again so much as lay eyes on any.
"Hnnn..."
Tears welling, I sat there wondering whether I ought to send the mail to someone else. Rumi's merch was supposed to go fairly to everyone. That was Rumi's creed. Forwarding this email would be no different from betraying it.
If Rumi, who held justice above all else, ever found out, she would be terribly disappointed in me. I was certain that Rumi herself would never, ever send a mail like this to another person.
"Waaah!"
I collapsed in front of the computer and had no choice but to sob. Inside my head, an angel and a devil were at war. The devil's side insisted I send the mail; the angel's side insisted I mustn't cause harm to anyone else. They clashed furiously.
Then a clever idea occurred to me. What if I asked Bora and Haru? Neither of them seemed particularly interested in Rumi. They only paid her any mind because I liked her. If I hadn't cared, Bora and Haru probably wouldn't even have known Rumi existed.
In an unmarried household with no children to raise, you wouldn't recognize a single character from a kids' cartoon. If you were married, you might learn them by watching those shows alongside the children you were raising. Even so, I had to get their permission. Sending the mail in secret, without asking, would be no different from betraying the faith of Bora and Haru, who had taken responsibility for me all this time. And yet my feet wouldn't move. If they knew what I was thinking, how betrayed would they feel?
The clever plan I'd hit upon grew awkward to actually carry out. I pulled a crying face and spun the blameless mouse wheel up and down. Even my outstanding mind couldn't produce any other solution. All that came to me were rotten ways of shoving the responsibility onto someone else.
If Bora and Haru saw me like this, they'd be disappointed...
I slammed the keyboard, whack, whack. That wretched mail was dragging out my violent side. Tears came for no good reason. Eyes brimming, I had no choice but to pace the room. Standing still didn't feel as if it would calm me at all.
Just then the door opened, and Haru came in. She looked as if she'd only just gotten off work, in a coat and a skirt. Seeing me in tears, she startled and hurried over.
"Hana! Why are you crying? Did someone bully you?"
"Wuh... wuh... over there... a weird email came!"
Still held in Haru's arms, I showed her the message. Haru looked it over calmly, then smiled and said,
"Hana! This is just a prank email. Spam!"
"Really...?"
"Yeah!"
At Haru's words my mood suddenly lifted. I didn't know who they were, but to send a mail stuffed full of lies like this... I devoutly prayed they'd be struck by lightning while walking down the street.
"Hana. Want to go buy some Rumi merch today?"
"Really? Haru, you're the best!!!"
Haru must have noticed how unsettled I was, because she offered to take me shopping for Rumi merch. I smiled and changed clothes so we could go out. Haru really was the best.
"Truly... remarkable..."
Thanks to a notebook a certain graduate student had brought him, Park Guil had made a groundbreaking discovery. No other scholar could produce results to match his.
Sheets of printer paper, fresh from the machine, were piled like a mountain across the desk. Park Guil's eyesight was none too good, so he put on his magnifying glasses and carefully read down through what was written on each page, one after another.
One capable graduate student had turned up an unexpected result. Park Guil, of course, held to the attitude of a fair educator, and he intended to list the graduate student who had brought the notebook as a co-author. Swallowing an achievement alone did not suit his character. If someone had put in the effort, it ought to be shared. That was Park Guil's creed. In any case, he kept reading the symbols written across the pages, brow furrowed all the while.
"This is absolutely—absolutely—not a linguistic pattern concocted as a joke. Someone who knows Gate Language wrote this. Of that there can be no doubt. And yet, to think there exists in this country a person who commands Gate Language to such a degree?"
Just in case, Park Guil mobilized every connection he had in an attempt to find the notebook's owner. The effort ended in failure. He could scour every corner of the nation and still be nowhere near finding the person who had written it. Korea might be a small country, if one chose to call it small, but to Park Guil just now it was an enormously vast continent.
Then the assistant beside him spoke.
"Couldn't this be one of the hunters who happens to know the language? Hunters' abilities are all different. Someone could suddenly acquire an ability related to language, couldn't they?"
Asked that, Park Guil shook his head.
"I made inquiries with the government. They informed me that, among all hunters certified to date, not one possesses an ability of that kind."
To operate as a hunter in Korea, one had to be certified by an agency run by the government. Just as anyone who wished to drive a car had to obtain a driver's license, anyone who became a hunter had to be issued a separate license before they could work. If they were caught operating without registering, a tremendous punishment awaited them.
There was even a government agency devoted specifically to catching unregistered hunters. Registration, of course, came with enormous benefits, so there were no hunters who declined it—not unless they belonged to that truly minuscule handful possessed of peculiar ideas.
"Still, the tastes of whoever knows this language are pretty unique."
"So they are."
Ought there not to have been the sort of sentences used in the stern rites of some ancient document, or else sentences possessed of dignity? And yet the Gate Language written in this notebook contained the opening lyrics of Little Magician Rumi.
"Doesn't it seem like someone who enjoys pranks is the one who knows Gate Language?"
The assistant said it while looking over the Gate Language extracted from the notebook. Until now they had not even known the sentence structure, let alone achieved a decipherment, but the discovery of this notebook had allowed them to produce results. The sentence structure had been grasped, and they had found that Gate Language was used by combining words.
"Something... something feels as though it is just about to come within reach."
Park Guil thought that if the material had only been a little richer, he could have achieved tremendous results in deciphering Gate Language. A single song's lyrics, after all, were hardly sufficient for interpreting a language in its entirety.
Even so, having succeeded in deciphering the linguistic pattern, they had managed to decipher languages discovered at other gates. That alone was an achievement capable of turning the field of linguistics on its head. One of the assistants, who had been diligently analyzing the pattern, let out a hollow laugh and said,
"Don't tell me... the person who knows this Gate Language is a little kid who likes Little Magician Rumi?"
The assistant had struck the truth dead-on, but that line of reasoning vanished at once beneath Park Guil's bellow.
"What nonsense is that! The hand does look somewhat like a child's, but as I see it, this is a smokescreen. Without question, they possess the mindset of someone who wishes, however faintly, to let it be known that they understand Gate Language."
Park Guil staked everything he had on the conviction that the person who knew this Gate Language was, in a word, an attention seeker. The notion that a child might know it made far less sense.