Chapter 54
“What an unfamiliar ceiling.”
It had once climbed to second place on my bucket list of things I wanted to say before I died, but now I’d said it so many times that I was sick of the phrase.
“Are you awake?”
A familiar, gentle voice reached my ears.
As I listened, I somehow felt my eyes beginning to close.
“But don’t fall asleep again.”
“Professor Cheon.”
“Why?”
“Are you angry?”
“A little.”
“I see... I’ll try to pay you back quickly. Now that I’m officially an academy student, I should be eligible for some tax relief, at least.”
“I’m not talking about money.”
Professor Cheon lightly tapped my arm, which had been made bulky by several layers of tightly wrapped plaster casts.
“I wish you’d value your body a little more.”
Professor Cheon looked at me with a bitter expression.
My body.
Even now, I was still confused.
Whether this truly was ‘my body.’
The body was governed by the mind, but the totality we defined as the mind was, in essence, also part of the body.
What exactly could define ‘me’ as ‘me’?
The memories of my past life? There were countless spells capable of manipulating memories.
The knowledge from my past life? Knowledge was no different from memories. In terms of physical ability, my current body was actually far superior.
Even my personality had changed in many ways.
I had experienced it once in my past life, so the sense of alienation was less severe, but I often found myself horrified by the extreme loneliness and emptiness that seemed to visit me from time to time.
Sometimes reality didn’t feel like reality, but rather an illusion endlessly unfolding at the hands of someone with a truly twisted hobby.
Sometimes I felt as though the person called Noname was moving on their own, like a game character set to autoplay, while I had become a bystander standing one step away.
I doubted every object and phenomenon in the world. Light, sound, smell, and taste—none of them were things I was truly feeling.
Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method), page 34, line 21: ‘ie penſe donc ie ſuis (I think, therefore I am),’ was it?
What could I accomplish merely by thinking? I didn’t even know where I existed.
The more I thought that way, the less I cared about my body.
Because I could exist as myself only within relationships with other people.
If I had ended up stranded on a deserted island, I was sometimes seized by the fear that I would forever lose control of my body to some unknown entity.
Unable even to define what my true self was, I had to quickly think of something reassuring to say to the professor.
“I’ll be careful next time.”
I wasn’t confident in expressing myself.
Vocabulary was a kind of intelligence, too, and since I hadn’t had many conversations, I lacked balance in that regard.
It was ridiculous to tell a lie fit for an eight-year-old, even as I succeeded on the first try with a fifth-circle spell I hadn’t cast in ages—something no one would ever believe.
“You have a kind heart.”
“Pardon?”
“They say that when a baby fell into a well and all the villagers looked away, one passerby jumped into the well to save the baby. Mencius saw only that one person’s actions, rather than those of the many villagers, and concluded that human beings were inherently good. Isn’t the world beautiful because there are still people like Name?”
“Ah...”
“I’m proud of you. But if something like this happens again, be sure to contact me first. I’ll be on your side, no matter where or when.”
“Yes... I’ll remember that...”
Cheon Gyu-jin really was a man whose next move was impossible to predict.
But thanks to him, my tangled feelings seemed to have become somewhat more organized.
“Is there anything you want to eat? It must be about time for you to get hungry.”
“What time is it?”
“Eleven in the morning. You’ve been lying there for eighteen whole hours.”
“I really want the chateaubriand steak I couldn’t eat yesterday.”
“Unfortunately, drink these potions for now. You didn’t even finish yesterday’s daily dose, did you?”
Professor Cheon laughed heartily as he lined up a whole bagful of potion bottles.
“Ugh. Is this why you asked?”
“You need to take them properly if you want to recover quickly. I don’t even want to imagine you getting sick, too.”
When he put it that way, I had no choice but to drink them.
In the end, I drained two bottles in front of Professor Cheon.
My stomach felt bloated.
“Is there anything uncomfortable when you take the potions?”
“I’m used to them now. But, how should I put it... I think something solid would be better than a liquid. Um... Would you say that taking them this way makes me need to use the bathroom often?”
“I’ve already consulted professors in the Department of Food and Nutrition. We should have a definite answer within a few days.”
“That’s good news. I hope they’re small pills.”
“It would be better not to get your hopes too high.”
At school, whenever one of the girls said she was going to the bathroom, they all rushed off together in a great herd, and it was so embarrassing I could have died.
Thinking back to when I’d inhaled mana potions as a gas from capsules, nothing could be more convenient than that, but the efficiency issue meant I probably wouldn’t be able to complete my daily dosage.
“I heard you treated your friend’s mother. I don’t know much about diseases, but I heard it was incurable. Where did you learn magic like that?”
“Aaaah, well... I learned about it from papers published by the Korean Neurological Society. I vaguely heard that treatment had already reached the commercialization stage in the United States...?”
“Really? But wasn’t the fifth-circle spell you used, ‘Akashic Records,’ a materials-engineering spell used for molecular printing?”
“What do you mean? Akashic Records isn’t merely a 3D printer. If you know the molecular structure perfectly, it can generate the same substance semi-permanently, and since it’s reversible magic, reverse reactions can easily be created as well. It can even perform the function of biomaterials, acting only on specific receptors like an animal hormone. In other words, it’s theoretically an all-purpose...”
I stopped speaking for a moment and glanced at him, wondering if I’d been talking too much by myself.
“You can keep going.”
“No, it’s a little embarrassing.”
“Still, you look happy. You do, I mean, when you’re talking about magic.”
I felt my face getting hot if I said any more, so I changed the subject indirectly.
“Have you met Yuna’s family?”
“I couldn’t meet your friend because she’d gone home, but I did meet her two older brothers.”
“Two? Oh, Yuna’s oldest brother must have come too. He wasn’t there while I was.”
“He kept saying how grateful he was to you. I deliberately didn’t tell him about the magic you used. You would have done the same, right?”
“Thank you... It’s far too much money for Yuna’s family to bear.”
“It seemed that way.”
“I’m not helping her purely out of goodwill. Yuna could definitely become a great mage, so I thought of it as an investment... I’m not trying to foist it on you, Professor! I’ll earn it all and pay you back—”
“You? How do you plan to earn it?”
“Like before... through internet broadcasting...”
“Really?”
“Do you know how much it came to?”
“Want to guess?”
“Six million won...? No, seven? Eight? Surely it wasn’t more than that?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Ten million won...?”
“Ten million won and another eight hundred ten thousand.”
“That’s impossible! You should get academy benefits, so how could it come to more than ten million won?”
“I should know the details once I get home, but it looks like the tax reduction rate was reduced to half because of unauthorized use of a public place.”
“Ten million... Ten million...”
Professor Cheon laughed it off with an easygoing smile.
It might not have been a large sum to the professor, but once I’d resolved to repay it, there was no room for compromise.
“I will definitely repay every penny. I’ll pay you back with interest, too.”
Then the principal I had to repay totaled 10.93 million won.
In that instant, the promise Sia had made to me flashed through my mind.
[V-Tube requests payouts every quarter, so I’ll send you your share, including the part from your appearance, at the end of March.]
Right.
I immediately turned on my phone and checked my V-Tube views.
There were five videos uploaded from the sessions I’d done with her, with roughly 200,000 to 500,000 views each.
But views alone didn’t give me any idea how much revenue that meant, so I went to a website that calculated estimates and entered the link.
[Period filter: +1,812,618 views / + $2,517 ~ $2,832]
Roughly five to five and a half million won.
Even after taxes and splitting it with Sia, I calculated that I could take home at least two million won.
Even so, I was still in the bleak position of needing to earn another nine million won or so.
But I didn’t stream on Twish regularly, and I didn’t have any gaming content that viewers wanted, so my subscriber count barely remained in the four digits.
I hesitated for a while.
I could certainly draw viewers by streaming LoL while making use of my specialty and aiming for Challenger, but then I wouldn’t have anything to distinguish me from the other channels.
Besides, I still wasn’t used to reading the chat while gaming, and more than anything, I didn’t want to keep playing LoL.
‘Should I try World of Arcana instead?’
It was definitely more popular than LoL, wasn’t it?
But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what kind of entertainment I could offer on a World of Arcana stream.
It was an attractive option because the game clearly had an environment where I could use magic... but I’d have to ask Sia or someone else for advice about it later.
Knock knock
“Yes, come in.”
The door to the hospital room opened, and a man with a face that was both familiar and unfamiliar walked in.
“Oh, it’s that young man from earlier. Have you come to say hello?”
“Yes, it’s nice to see you again.”
“Then I’ll step out for now. Have a good talk.”
“Yes. Where are you going?”
“I’ll go buy some abalone porridge out front, so hang in there even if you’re hungry.”
Professor Cheon let out a groan as he struggled to get to his feet, and the young man gave him a slight bow.
Ah, now I knew where I’d seen that face before—it looked exactly like Yuna’s brother, Seo Noeul.
But unlike the 190-centimeter-tall Seo Noeul, his height was fairly ordinary, around 175 centimeters.
“Hello. I’m Yuna’s oldest brother, Seo Maru.”
So this was the eldest...?
“Yes, hello.”
“I came to visit rather suddenly, didn’t I? I’m sorry. I made sure to ask your father to let me know when you woke up.”
“Ah... Father.”
Professor Cheon was my adoptive father too, so he was technically my father. But being addressed that way felt incredibly awkward.
“May I sit here?”
“Yes, yes. Please, make yourself comfortable.”
Seo Maru hadn’t come to the hospital room empty-handed.
“I don’t know what kids like these days.”
I carefully unwrapped the packaging of the item he handed me.
“This...?”
What was it?
I couldn’t tell what it was.
It didn’t seem to be a simple doll.
It was a thirty-centimeter-long object shaped like a musical note, with two cute eyes and a mouth attached to its head.
“Your father recommended it, saying you’d definitely like it, so I bought it. This is a musical instrument called an otamatone.”
“Is this an instrument?”
Weren’t pianos, cellos, and bassoons—the kinds of things that looked majestic just sitting there—what counted as instruments?
I even wondered if I might be confused about the term ‘instrument.’
“It’s a real instrument. I’ll show you how to use it. Hold the head with one hand and the rod with the other. Then let a small amount of mana flow through it, like this.”
[Ahh~ Ah ahh~]
“...!!!”
A human voice had come from the musical note!
Seo Maru smiled with satisfaction as he showed me the other ways to use it.
“The sound it makes changes depending on the nature of the mana. If you let water-aspected mana flow through it, it produces a female soprano voice, while earth-aspected mana produces a male baritone voice. Want to try?”
“Yes, I’ll try.”
This was truly the most fascinating object I’d ever seen in my entire life.