Chapter 52
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“Haaaaah... f*ck, why the hell won't he answer the phone!”
Seo Noeul hurled the innocent phone onto the floor.
It had already been an hour since their mother entered the operating room, but there had still been no word from his older brother, Seo Maru.
“F*ck... f*ck...”
An ordinary Friday in March had been an entirely unremarkable day for Seo Maru, Seo Yuna, and Seo Noeul himself.
Perhaps because it was Friday, there were many orders requesting in-person delivery even at lunchtime, so Noeul considered himself lucky.
Since today's earnings didn't look bad, he decided that the whole family would get together for the first time in a while and make Yuna's favorite neobiani.
Of course, no matter how much he earned, it was nothing compared to what Seo Maru made in half a day, but someone had to stay beside their mother and nurse her all day.
There was no job better suited to coming and going from home whenever necessary than delivery work.
Perhaps their mother could eat if they minced the meat very finely before giving it to her.
“Mom, I'm home! How about neobiani for dinner tonight? Mom...? Mom!!!”
Their mother's abdomen had swollen so severely that it looked like a pregnant woman's and seemed ready to burst at any moment. Her complexion had turned a vivid green, so green that it was hard to believe red blood still flowed beneath her skin.
Seo Noeul still couldn't shake the memory of those agonizing thirty minutes.
It was a very rare symptom that appeared in patients with end-stage multiple sclerosis.
If the doctor hadn't been told by the emergency responder that she had multiple sclerosis, he surely would have mistaken it for an intestinal obstruction.
“The corticosteroid treatment stopped the acute relapse for now, but there's no telling when or how the disease might flare up next.”
An incurable illness did not call for major surgery in the first place.
But Seo Noeul couldn't bring himself to hurl curses in the faces of the doctors and nurses who had barely managed to keep his mother alive.
After all, weren't they the ones who had saved her?
Noeul turned his head away from his mother, who had been fitted with numerous IV needles in the hospital room.
“How much... how much longer does my mother have to live?”
“We don't know either. It could be three days, a month, or a year.
But as a doctor, I have to tell you that I don't believe she'll make it beyond that...
It would be best for the family to prepare themselves mentally in advance.”
“A year... only one year?”
“The patient has developed severe steroid resistance from the prolonged drug treatment, so increasing the dosage beyond this would only be lethal.
After one more relapse—in other words, the next time she comes to the hospital—we won't be able to guarantee anything.”
Seo Noeul felt as though his heart had dropped into his stomach.
He wasn't even an adult yet and hadn't done anything to repay his mother, so she couldn't be allowed to die so meaninglessly.
Besides, Yuna was only eight years old—far too young.
Noeul wasn't confident that he could give a child who was still desperately hungry for parental love enough affection to make up for it.
“A year...?”
“Seo Yuna? How did you get to the hospital so quickly?”
“Mom can only live for one year? Why...? What happened to our mom! Waaaaah!”
“Yuna, try to calm down.”
“I can't live without Mom! Mom, please wake up. Please, I'm begging you! I'll listen to you every single day and study hard, so please look at me!”
“Mom needs to sleep right now, so let's go outside and talk...”
“Waaaaah!”
Judging by Yuna's appearance, it didn't seem as though she had walked there.
But her transit-card pass only covered certain routes, meaning she would still have had to walk for quite a while after getting off at the final stop to reach the hospital.
Even if she had gone straight there after returning home and reading the note, she had arrived at the hospital far too early.
“Who brought you to the hospital?”
“Sniff... sob... Brother, is that really what's important right now?”
“I'm asking because I was worried you might have asked some strange person!”
“Name... Name called a taxi for me. My friend...”
“A friend? How did your friend know and arrange a ride for you?”
“We went home together... Name and me, but no one was there. Sniff... Then I saw your note and came right away.”
Only then did Seo Noeul spot a child wearing the same uniform as Yuna on the other side of the waiting room.
Was that Name?
It was a name Seo Noeul had heard before.
Once, Yuna had cried with unusual sadness.
She had tearfully confessed that she was upset because a transfer student who had recently joined their academy had placed first in the aptitude assessment.
‘Could that be the child?’
So a person's eyes could really lack all sparkle. That was how Noeul assessed his first impression of Name.
She seemed to be living in a world with a black-and-white filter laid over it, like a camera effect.
Rather than gloomy, though... yes, “profound” would have been the more accurate word.
* * *
“Here, do you like sikhye?”
Yuna's brother sat beside me and bought me a canned drink from the vending machine.
“Thank you.”
“Don't mention it. I'm the one who's more grateful.”
“What about Yuna?”
“She wouldn't leave your mother alone, so I eventually set up a cot for her. She should be asleep by now. If you can't open that, hand it here.”
The can opened with a crisp hiss, but the sound quickly vanished amid the commotion of the emergency room.
Anyone who had ever visited an emergency room would know that the place could be summed up as orderly chaos.
Screams and shouts could be heard from time to time, but hospital staff quickly restrained whoever was making them, forcing everyone to hold their breath and keep their emotions in check.
The same was true of Yuna's brother, Seo Noeul.
The sikhye was refreshing, but not particularly sweet.
“I'm really grateful. Our older brother isn't answering his phone either, so I was wondering how I was supposed to bring Yuna here.
Actually, I was planning to tell her to wait quietly at home, but it was obvious that my little sister would disobey and come looking for us.”
Seo Noeul explained why he had left the note.
“Is your mother all right?”
“Haa... I don't know. Her condition has never gotten this bad before. I don't know. I don't know anything...”
“You must be taking this very hard.”
What emotion lay at the foundation of his words? Resignation? Regret?
“Yuna tried to walk all the way to the hospital.”
“Walk? I definitely gave her a transit card.”
“There was no balance on it.”
“That's why Maru hyung should recharge it whenever he gives her spending money... She must have had a hard time walking to school, too. She would have had to climb the hill on foot.”
Seo Noeul scolded his younger brother.
Did this person really know nothing about his sister?
“Your name was Name, right? Name, how is Yuna doing at the academy? Is she getting along?”
“What did Yuna say?”
“She says she enjoys going to school every day. She likes her teacher, she has lots of friends, and learning magic is fun. Studying is hard, so she sometimes pulls the blankets over her head and cries, but her grades are good enough for her, so I think she's mostly satisfied.”
“...”
“Oh, right. She mentioned you, too. I heard you placed first in the second-year aptitude assessment. Please look after our Yuna.”
Without realizing it, I tightened my grip on the can.
The empty can crumpled far too easily beneath even my weak grip.
“Yuna has never once taken the bus to the academy.”
Seo Yuna... She wore a mask not only at school, but at home as well.
Neither school nor home had been a refuge for her.
I couldn't help feeling dismayed as I wondered how this young child had managed to get through an entire school year.
“To save 2,100 won a day, she walked for an hour and a half every day and climbed up and down 519 stairs.”
“She walked every day...?”
“You say she has lots of friends? I don't know about that. More often than not, I never heard her speak even once except during class.”
“...”
“From the moment she arrived at school until she left, she never even opened her mouth. She just sat there studying every day.
She even vomited in the school bathroom several times after lunch.”
“And you genuinely think Yuna is adjusting well to the academy?”
During the potion incident, I had examined her by putting my finger in her mouth to fill in the magic-circle parameters, and her oral acidity had been far too low.
I could tell that gastric acid had risen from her stomach into her esophagus and caused inflammatory damage.
Considering how often she vomited in the bathroom, stress-induced reflux esophagitis was a distinct possibility.
“Yuna is often deeply hurt when you all hide things from her.
Even when you're doing it for Yuna's sake.
Keeping things from Yuna, and not even trying to understand her. I think that's wrong.”
I fully understood that her brothers were staking their lives on trying to rebuild their family.
But the fact that they merely handed her a little spending money now and then and never paid attention until their sister had reached this state...
That was terribly misguided.
It was much like the reason this sikhye wasn't sweet.
All the food and drinks supplied to the hospital were made with reduced amounts of sugar or salt for the sake of the patients.
But anyone who drank them without knowing that would simply assume the product was defective.
Even if their actions had been intended for Yuna's sake, the pain she had endured was by no means insignificant.
At this rate, Yuna would continue wasting meaningless time, with eyes that could see but saw nothing and ears that could hear but heard nothing.
“Haaaaah...”
Seo Noeul clutched his head and sighed.
Even though Yuna's younger brother was, like his older brother, one of the two pillars holding the family together, his face still looked young to me.
Seventeen or eighteen at most.
He was far too young to take care of his family and shoulder responsibility for its future.
His older brother was only a year older, so he must have just reached adulthood himself.
Happy families were similar for similar reasons, but unhappy families were unhappy for their own individual reasons.
And sometimes, that unhappiness did not originate from anyone's fault.
Unless someone else broke the chain of misfortune, they would never escape the treadmill of that vicious cycle.
“Yuna likes you two more than anyone else, and she's proud of you.”
“I didn't know Yuna was having such a hard time... I thought she was just a somewhat whiny kid, but I guess she was sending us signals all this time. And I didn't even realize...”
“So don't blame yourself.”
Though he was immature, there was no way Yuna failed to understand his feelings.
“Did she say her dream was to become a basketball player?”
“She told you that, too? She didn't have much talent to begin with, so what does she mean, becoming a basketball player? It's just a way to make myself feel better. I'm only using our family circumstances as an excuse for my lack of talent.”
“Yuna was still supporting that dream.”
“Forget it. As long as Yuna keeps attending the academy, I have to stay home. I don't even know how much longer Mom will be alive. I have to be good to her while she's still here... while she's still here...”
He explained that caring for his mother, who was essentially a vegetable below the neck, required a guardian to remain constantly by her side.
In particular, it was important to turn her over at least once every two hours to prevent bedsores.
“May I ask what her diagnosis is?”
“Multiple sclerosis.”
I knew the disease well, too, from my experience researching it at the Mage Tower.
According to my memories of the previous world, when the erosion of [Sloth] began, the ‘Medusa’ phenomenon was the first thing observed extensively throughout the world.
Plants crumbled away, while the bodies of animals and humans hardened completely.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and multiple sclerosis.
Humans, who couldn't properly understand even their own bodies, were practically incapable of stopping an unknown erosion.
That was why humans rejected the contaminated and sometimes even slaughtered them.
Just as in apocalypse movies, where the protagonists kill zombies without the slightest sense of guilt.
“What did the doctor prescribe?”
“Huh? I think it was something called co... steroid. Why?”
“Corticosteroids. They can bring forward the time of recovery, but they can't affect the extent of recovery at all. Could I go see your mother in her hospital room?”