“Your frail body, your legs that don’t move, your parents who turn away from you—all of it is karma from your past life. Do you want to escape? From everything in your past life?”

 

The boy agreed to Park’s question, and after that, the boy’s life became so uneventful that it was almost boring.

 

🦋

 

Inside a private room at a spacious restaurant, a boy in a school uniform sat with a man and a woman who appeared to be his parents. 

 

The middle-aged woman rubbed the back of her neck as if tired and kept checking her watch. 

 

The middle-aged man sitting across from her finally couldn’t hold back and spoke.

 

“I know you’re busy, but today is Dowon’s high school graduation. Can you stop looking at your watch?”

 

The woman snapped back irritably.

 

“I told you I have a business trip. I’m leaving on a flight tonight. Just making time today was already pushing it for Dowon’s sake.”

 

“Is that more important than your son’s once-in-a-lifetime graduation?”

 

Instead of watching his parents raise their voices, Dowon stared boredly at the plate in front of him. His parents, who had divorced when he was in middle school, never let things slide smoothly whenever they met.

 

If they were going to keep fighting like that, it would be better if they didn’t meet at all, even if it was for their child’s sake.

 

“Dowon was in the hospital and couldn’t attend his elementary or middle school graduations. This is the first graduation since he got healthy, and you’re really his mom?”

 

“Stop it. I’m sick of you acting like this. It’s just a graduation. Am I not allowed to go because I’m out having fun? Why do you keep making me out to be a bad mom? If I had as much free time as you, I wouldn’t have done this.”

 

“Don’t make excuses. Would you act like this for the new kid you had after remarrying?”

 

“Don’t compare an adult child to a five-year-old!”

 

“If you didn’t discriminate, there’d be no reason for that!”

 

At the father’s shout, the mother finally stood up. Shaking her head as if fed up, she took a card from her bag and pressed it into Dowon’s hand.

 

“Congratulations on graduating, Dowon. Buy whatever you want as a graduation gift. See you at the college entrance ceremony.”

 

With those words, the mother left the restaurant’s private room.

 

It happened before the appetizers even arrived. 

 

Dowon shoved the mother’s card into his pocket carelessly and said indifferently to his father.

 

“Let’s just go. It seems the fun family dinner is over.”

 

Only then did the father seem to notice Dowon, glancing at him cautiously.

 

“I’m sorry, Dowon. I shouldn’t have done this in front of you….”

 

Even if he apologizes, it’s obvious he’ll just do it again next time. 

 

Maybe because he’s an artist. He gets drunk on his own emotions, can’t distinguish the place, spits out things he should and shouldn’t say, then apologizes easily and repeats the same thing….

 

Anyway, he was poisonously incompatible with a mother who was set up with a businessman’s mindset down to every last hair.

 

I couldn’t figure out how the two of them had gotten married and even had a child. 

 

Sometimes, when Father drank and sobbed while telling old stories, it seemed they had been unable to live without each other back then.

 

…Until Dowon was born, that is.

 

A child who had been plagued by seizures of unknown cause since birth. 

 

After Dowon was born—whose home was the hospital because no one knew when he might stop breathing—the couple fought endlessly. 

 

The father couldn’t understand a mother who went to work, leaving a sick child behind, and the Mother felt suffocated by a father who made her feel like a criminal.

 

When Dowon lost the use of one leg due to a seizure in middle school, the Father blamed it as if it were the Mother’s fault, and Dowon’s parents divorced because of that.

 

After that, miraculously, Dowon’s body returned to normal, but the marital relationship remained shattered and unrecoverable, and so here we were now.

 

A relationship where they pretended to be family but didn’t particularly feel like one.

 

Dowon stood up from his seat and casually spat out the words he figured his father wanted to hear.

 

“It’s okay, Father. It’s not like I don’t know Mother is busy.”

 

“W-Well, then? Then today, just the two of us….”

 

“I’ll eat with friends. Mother gave me a card, so I should use it.”

 

“Ah…. Friends, uh, who…”

 

Before Father could say anything more, Dowon left the restaurant.

 

The moment he escaped the stifling interior, the cold outside air poured in. 

 

Perhaps because of his height, towering over other people’s heads, gazes poured in like a flood. Dowon pressed his hat down firmly and started walking. 

 

His aimless steps stopped at a fast-food joint open until dawn.

 

The friends had merely been an excuse to leave the place.

 

Until middle school, he had barely attended school because he was sick, and in high school, he often skipped due to growing pains as his stunted height shot up all at once. 

 

Even so, perhaps because of his mother, the president of a thriving company these days, or because he resembled his father and had a decent face, people overflowed around him, but Dowon had no particular interest in social relationships.

 

To be precise, it was more accurate to say there was nothing in the world that piqued his interest.

 

Dowon’s life was, in truth, a bit boring. 

 

Now that he was healthy, everyone told him to live doing whatever he wanted, but what was he supposed to do if he had no desires at all to begin with?

 

Aside from the obligatory exercise for rehabilitation and prevention, along with managing his diet and medication, Dowon spent most of his day doing nothing, lying blankly in bed or sitting in a chair.

 

Late in the evening, Dowon sat inside a fast-food restaurant, ordering some random set meal and, as usual, staring blankly. For quite a long time.

 

Then, suddenly, a couple caught Dowon’s eye.

 

A man was carrying a drunk woman on his back as he entered. 

 

It was the end of the year, so drunken couples were hardly rare, but this pair stood out because the man was wearing pitch-black sunglasses at night.

 

‘Thoughts like Can’t he see? But he doesn’t even have a cane?’ 

 

Drifted vaguely through Dowon’s mind.

 

The man in sunglasses turned toward Dowon and froze.

 

At that moment, a memory from five years ago, nearly forgotten, resurfaced. 

 

A young monk he had met at a shaman’s house deep in the mountains, dragged there by his grandmother’s hand after his parents’ divorce.

 

His face was a blur in memory, but the sunglasses over his eyes felt familiar. 

 

While Dowon was blankly trying to revive that hazy recollection, the man in sunglasses quietly approached and asked,

 

“You were told to come when you found someone you like. Why didn’t you?”

 

“I don’t have anyone like that.”

 

Right. That’s what had happened.

 

Answering instinctively to the abrupt question, the man muttered to himself, as if without thinking,

 

“But then why didn’t you die?”

 

His furrowed brow, as if he couldn’t comprehend, was a bonus. Then, as if he had come to some answer on his own, he nodded slightly and asked Dowon,

 

“Anyway, it’s a good world, isn’t it? Even people with no will to live manage to get by somehow. A hundred years ago, with such complacent thoughts, you’d have starved or frozen to death.”

 

Spouting incomprehensible nonsense was the same five years ago as it is now. 

 

Dowon didn’t respond, and the man in sunglasses adjusted the woman on his back, gave a slight bow, and said,

 

“Then I’ll see you later. My Lord.”

 

It was a bizarre encounter. Nonsensical ramblings he couldn’t even make sense of.

 

Yet that night, Dowon had a dream. His first wet dream in a long while.

 

🦋

 

In the pitch-black depths of the mountain, Dowon stood alone.

 

Only the sound of ragged, gasping breaths reached his ears. And Dowon was moving his steps, chasing that faint, feeble breathing.

 

“Huff, huff, huff…”

 

Disheveled hair swayed before his eyes. It was a very small woman. 

 

A woman with skin that gleamed white even in the dead of night was dragging a limping leg, fleeing in a frenzy.

 

Even in her utterly disheveled state, she was beautiful.

 

For Dowon, who had never cared enough about others to form opinions on their appearance, this was an utterly unfamiliar sensation.

 

“Argh…!”

 

The woman stumbled and fell. 

 

Dowon approached and looked down at her. He wanted to help her up, but being in a dream, his body wouldn’t move as he wished, which frustrated him.

 

The woman’s face, noticing Dowon’s presence, turned pale with fear. 

 

Only then did Dowon realize she was fleeing from him. 

 

Because in this dream, Dowon was nothing but worthless trash. His body climbed atop the terrified woman and gripped her throat. 

 

That alone was enough to confirm that in this dream, he was indeed trash.

 

He forced a kiss on her parted lips, slipping his tongue inside. 

 

It was intoxicating enough to make his brain melt, but Dowon struggled to regain his senses.

 

He had never had a taste for overpowering someone by force. No, he had never even thought about what his tastes were. 

 

Since he had never met anyone he was drawn to, how could he know what his preferences were?

 

Yet, he had never been particularly drawn to petite women, nor had he ever fantasized about intimacy outdoors, and above all, to force himself on a woman frozen in fear—ugh.

 

This dream was wrong. He had to wake up immediately.

 

“Sob, ugh, ah, hnng…”

 

But the woman pinned beneath him was beautiful even as she cried.

 

So much so that if Dowon woke from this dream and found she didn’t exist in reality, he wouldn’t be able to bear it.