The Weight of Old Scars
Perfume (3)
EP.86
The first place Park Jocheol opened his eyes was none other than a funeral hall.
‘Huh?’
It was an all-too-familiar place. Yet inside the completely empty mourning room, there was only Park Jocheol.
Just as confusion clouded his mind, a quest window appeared before his eyes: Overcome Trauma. The moment he understood its contents, he couldn’t hold back the string of curses boiling up from deep inside his chest.
“Fuck this shit……”
Park Jocheol was wearing mourning clothes. He frantically rubbed his dry face, trying to shake off the unpleasant sensation that made goosebumps rise all over his body. His heart refused to calm down. The nauseating feeling kept twisting his insides until dry heaves followed.
Only now did he notice the wounds covering his body, stinging sharply, yet they couldn’t compare to the pain squeezing his heart as if it might stop any second.
“Huu… haa… huu…”
Park Jocheol took deep breaths to endure the sudden surge of stress. His gaze landed on the memorial tablet engraved with the deceased’s name.
Park Sangpil
Seeing his father’s name on the tablet, memories of the past he desperately wanted to forget flashed through his mind.
The bus rollover accident.
His father, the driver, had died. His mother, who had boarded the bus that day just to see her husband’s face for once, was critically injured and lying in the ICU. Park Jocheol, a high school senior at the time, had no choice but to hear the news of his father’s death at school.
“……”
It had been his father’s accident. The exact circumstances weren’t clear, but according to the police and doctors, it was concluded that his father had suffered some kind of heart problem that caused the crash.
But the real problem came after that.
The damage from the accident was far greater than expected. Even with his father’s insurance money and various government supports, it wasn’t nearly enough to cover everything. Countless passengers had lost their lives. Pedestrians unlucky enough to get caught in the chaos suffered serious and minor injuries. Park Jocheol’s family simply didn’t have the means to compensate all the victims.
‘I went straight to the bank, didn’t I?’
Back then, Park Jocheol had learned firsthand what it felt like for blood to run cold. He had tried everything to raise money. Not just for the hospital bills and compensation for others, but at least for his mother’s medical expenses.
But no bank would give a loan to a minor. The next thing he looked into was loan sharks.
“……So this is around that time.”
At that moment, one particular memory surfaced in Park Jocheol’s mind. The sound of footsteps from a visitor who had come to the funeral hall while he was drowning in grief.
Tap. Tap.
The unfamiliar sound of dress shoes echoed solemnly through the funeral hall. Even though it was all in the past, whenever he had nightmares, that sound would ring endlessly in his ears. It was a truly terrible noise.
“Name: Park Jocheol.”
Flip.
At the voice coming from behind him, Park Jocheol turned his head. A gaunt face with a slender silhouette, dressed in a neat suit, was indifferently flipping through documents while standing behind him.
“Third-year high school student. Preparing for the police academy. Top academic performance… Only son of a bus driver father and a writer mother. Recently attempted to take out a private loan for his mother’s hospital bills but failed. And…”
“……”
“Well, looks like it’s all correct.”
The man’s indifferent eyes scanned Park Jocheol from head to toe.
“You’ll have to come with me. Oh, of course after the funeral is over.”
This was the day the connection between Park Jocheol and the National Intelligence Service began.
After the funeral ended, the nameless NIS man offered Park Jocheol a deal. He would cover his mother’s medical costs and the newly incurred debt—if Park Jocheol would visit the loan sharks once more.
“What exactly do I have to do?”
Park Jocheol already knew the answer, but he asked the gaunt man as naturally as possible. Since the fourth floor’s quest was to overcome trauma, he had initially planned to quietly refuse.
The moment he got entangled with the NIS was undoubtedly the worst moment of Park Jocheol’s life. He thought that if he could just avoid that, the quest would naturally clear.
‘Wasn’t this the trauma?’
But the Tower wasn’t that lenient. Events that had already happened naturally followed him. In the end, a situation was created where Park Jocheol could not refuse, and the story flowed on as it had before.
“Well, it’s something like an infiltration mission. You know, like the agents in those Mission Impossible movies. That’s what you’ll be doing.”
At the man’s words, Park Jocheol lifted his head and stared directly into his eyes.
Park Jocheol’s mission was to infiltrate an organization and extract information related to drugs. It was his first mission, one that would last for about five years or more.
But that was only the official mission statement.
“You’re quite good at lying.”
“……Lying?”
The man’s eyebrows twitched slightly at Park Jocheol’s words. Back then, Park Jocheol had asked why they would give such an important task to a mere high school student who didn’t even know his own abilities. It was a perfectly natural question.
But the man had not readily given him the reason.
「Why are you curious about that?」
「Pardon?」
「You need money for your mother’s treatment. We need a young agent with a clean past. Besides, it’s not that difficult. Just go in, do odd jobs, and wait until we contact you.」
Wait for contact.
And exactly five years after Park Jocheol entered the organization following the NIS’s orders, he received another call from the man.
「Withdraw.」
There was nothing else. No explanation of why they had thrown him into a den of thugs, what he was supposed to have done—nothing.
But as time passed, Park Jocheol came to understand.
‘They were testing whether I was worth using as a tool.’
Could he remain loyal to the NIS for five years without complaint? Could he carry out any dirty work without mercy if it was given as an order?
Loan sharking, as everyone knew, was deeply tied to money and people. And people connected to money often harbored a venom beyond imagination. Fighting was the baseline; there were plenty of people who wouldn’t hesitate to commit acts that abandoned all humanity…
“What do you mean by lying?”
At the man’s reaction, Park Jocheol looked at him with an expressionless face. He had already experienced that world once. Knowing the true intentions of this devilish instructor who was trying to shove him back into that pit of evil, he could speak even more boldly.
“Drugs my ass. You’re just planning to throw me in with the gangsters and make me roll around in the filth.”
“……”
“I can roughly guess your intentions. Fine, I’ll prove my worth. Just ten days… Wait just ten days.”
“Oh…?”
For five years, he had done far too many filthy things among the gangsters who ran the loan shark business. Beating people. Stabbing them…
There were already so many things from those five years that he regretted. It was something he never wanted to do again. But one memory from the past rose up—one that Park Jocheol desperately wanted to change.
When Seo Seyeong opened her eyes, she found herself standing at the entrance of the university campus she had once attended.
“Where…?”
It was the time when summer was slowly fading. Until the quest appeared, she had even wondered whether this was a dream or if she had simply been trapped in a hellish nightmare all this time.
But that lasted only a moment. The instant she read the system message, she clearly realized this was not a dream—it was the fourth floor of the Tower.
“……”
Seeing the word Trauma, she was momentarily overcome by a heavy mood. She knew all too well what her trauma was.
‘Are they in the ICU around this time…?’
Seo Seyeong’s parents had been caught in a bus rollover accident during the summer of her twentieth year. They had been hovering between life and death.
A bus driver had suddenly suffered a heart attack and driven the wrong way down the road. Many people lost their lives in that accident. And the two who would soon draw their last breath were none other than her parents.
“……This is seriously the worst.”
To experience the death of precious people once again.
If the fourth floor of the Tower intended to recreate her trauma, there was no way for her to avoid it.
Step. Step.
She first headed toward the hospital where her parents would be. Since the quest was to overcome trauma, avoiding it would only prolong the pain. Like the saying that it was better to get hit first, no matter how difficult, she intended to face it head-on.
‘That person would have done the same.’
Suddenly, the face of Kim Siin, whom she had met at the company, came to mind. A person with the courage and boldness to confront fear. An amazing person who didn’t avoid crises but instead turned them into opportunities.
She could see people walking around her, but they didn’t really register. After all, they were nothing more than illusions. Moreover, the version of herself from back then hadn’t had the luxury of paying attention to her surroundings, so even the world recreated from her memories felt somewhat blurry.
Korea University Hospital
Yet even in that haze, the hospital sign stood out clearly. Her parents were in there. Of course they were in a state where they could never wake up again, but the thought of seeing them once more filled her with complicated emotions.
The fear of having to watch their final moments again. And the faint hope of being able to see their faces at least one more time.
Vrrr.
After passing through the hospital entrance, she naturally took the elevator up to the ward. It had only been a few months, yet it was a path she could never forget for the rest of her life.
And when she finally arrived in front of the hospital room, she carefully opened the door.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
“Ah… aah……”
Seo Seyeong had thought she no longer had any tears left to shed. She had believed she had overcome it. Her parents had already passed away, and eight years had gone by since then, so she thought she would feel no lingering attachment.
But at that moment—
“Is that you, Seyeong?”
“Aigoo… Our daughter must have been so scared. Why are you crying like that? It breaks your father’s heart.”
Gentle voices directed at her reached her ears. The two parents who should have been lying motionless in their beds were looking at her with warm, kind smiles.