Chapter 1
“Student Ha Su-yeon, are you conscious?”
Myeongjeon turned his head and looked at the doctor. An ordinary middle-aged man’s face. A face he had never seen before.
“Are you unable to open your mouth, or unable to hear?”
Unable to understand what was happening, Myeongjeon chose silence. But the medical staff seemed to have interpreted his silence differently.
“When you tested him, nothing came up, right? Were there any problems with his speech, hearing, or vision?”
“No, there weren’t any particular problems.”
“Then why…”
After stepping away from Myeongjeon for a moment to speak with the nurse, the doctor returned and examined his body from one place to another.
“There’s nothing wrong with you… Student Ha Su-yeon, can’t you hear me?”
“… Um, who is Ha Su-yeon?”
The doctor, who had been bringing his face close to Myeongjeon and trying something, pulled back and stared at him with a puzzled expression after hearing that.
“Who is Ha Su-yeon…? You mean? You’re a student, Ha Su-yeon… Don’t you remember?”
“Ha Su-yeon… That’s my name?”
Myeongjeon asked back. Ha Su-yeon, Ha Su-yeon. There was no one named Ha Su-yeon in his memories. Not among his family, friends, or any of his other acquaintances. He had even used a different nickname on Mule (mule, a music community site).
But ‘Ha Su-yeon’ is my name.
What is he talking about?
Myeongjeon and the doctor stared at each other in bewilderment. Then, as if he had suddenly come to his senses, Myeongjeon looked down at his hands and chest before hurriedly feeling all over his upper body.
“A mirror!”
“Pardon?”
“A mirror! Give me a mirror!”
After fumbling around a few more times, his expression gradually changing, Myeongjeon suddenly asked for a mirror. He took the mirror the nurse handed him and held it up to his face.
The person reflected in the mirror looked nothing like the face Myeongjeon remembered.
White skin, slightly upturned eyes. She looked hollow-eyed, perhaps from having spent a long time in the hospital, but even that gave her a decadent rather than sickly air… She was a girl with that sort of face.
If he had seen her while walking down the street, he would surely have thought, That kid is definitely going to become an idol or something when she grows up… That was the kind of appearance she had.
The problem was that an appearance like this should never have appeared in this situation… that is, while Myeongjeon was looking at his own face in the mirror.
* * *
“You don’t remember anything.”
“No. I don’t remember a thing.”
This was a lie.
Myeongjeon remembered not only the life he had lived as Seo Myeongjeon, but also the life of the student named Ha Su-yeon.
No, to be precise, he remembered it.
Ha Su-yeon.
She was sixteen years old, currently a first-year high school student.
She was quite tall for a girl,
and her face was pretty enough.
She had a lively personality,
and because of that, she had quite a lot of friends.
Her hobbies were browsing SNS platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, and looking up fashion-related information.
Digging further into her memories, at school… she had been one of the popular kids. Apparently, she was what people generally called an ‘iljin.’
Her grades were decent, and she had never done things like openly rebel against her teachers, but she seemed to have gone around in a group, picking fights with other students and bullying anyone who looked easy to push around. On top of that, she seemed to have drunk and smoked a little.
And the reason she had been lying in this hospital bed was…
As he dug through his memories, Myeongjeon found the whole thing utterly absurd. And no wonder, because the accident this girl named Ha Su-yeon had suffered…
After three friends split three bottles of soju between them late at night, the three of them rode a shared electric scooter and raced down the road before hitting a curb and being sent flying.
Because of that, the other two friends broke their arms and legs, while this girl named Ha Su-yeon entered a vegetative state.
… People said everything was self-inflicted, but was it really all right for someone to die like this? Myeongjeon did not spend much time on the internet, but he knew what young people called incidents like this when they went around online.
‘Natural death.’
* * *
As he mourned the absurd accident, Myeongjeon thought,
‘Rather than someone like me, a man who has lived such a long life, entering this body, it would have been better if this girl were still alive…’
Myeongjeon had no purpose in life.
More accurately, it would be right to say that he had lost it. He had already learned how painful an unachievable dream could be.
Of course, this girl named Ha Su-yeon had no purpose in life either… Beyond merely having none, she had already begun going astray—though he was hardly someone who could look down on anyone for living a dissolute life—caused trouble on her own, and died.
If they were both in the same position, without a dream, shouldn’t the younger person be the one to live longer?
But even if he wanted to return the body, there was no way to do so. No, even before that, he could not believe that something fit for a movie or novel had actually happened to him in real life.
Leaving Myeongjeon lost in thought, the doctor wrote something on the medical chart for a while. Then he quietly spoke to the nurse before leaving the hospital room by himself.
“Excuse me, miss nurse…”
“… Yes?”
After watching her, Myeongjeon blurted out a familiar form of address without thinking. The nurse looked at him with an expression that seemed to say, ‘What did he just say??’
“… No, Nurse.”
“Yes?”
“Um, could you tell me what day it is today?”
At that, the nurse glanced at her phone before saying, “Today is October 14.”
October 14.
Since he had gone in to record a CCM session on September 15… about a month had passed. If a month had passed, his funeral would already be over… and his home would have been emptied by his hard-nosed landlord by now.
What a life—to abandon his parents, friends, and siblings alike, then die playing nothing but guitar.
What a truly hollow and futile life it had been.
As he stared blankly ahead, the nurse left him with the words, “I’ll bring your guardian in when they arrive, so if anything happens before then, press this button to call me.”
A guardian.
If she meant a guardian… it would be this child’s parents. What should he say? Since Myeongjeon’s own parents had passed away long ago, he could not think of anything useful to draw from his experience.
But even before thinking about her parents… what kind of life was he supposed to live?
Myeongjeon did not know.
Would this life even continue in the first place? It could be a dream, and even if it was not, perhaps the body’s owner would return when he woke up. Was something like that even possible? But the situation he had found himself in was already beyond common sense.
Yet if his instincts were right, Ha Su-yeon had died, and now he had to continue living as Ha Su-yeon…
How was he supposed to live now?
Should he live as he had before, obsessed with the guitar?
Even though he had accomplished so much, he had never been satisfied with any of it. Should he run after that one goal he had failed to achieve—the dream of being recognized for his own music?
I’ve already tried all that, though.
If he had been a young rock star who died in his twenties with golden artistic potential, before he could show everything he was capable of… perhaps he might have thought that way.
Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain… If he had been one of those who died before fully blooming, leaving like moons that never managed to wax full before sinking away… perhaps he might have thought that way.
But he was far too old to think like that.
He had lived the life of a prodigy who learned in an instant whatever he was taught,
the life of an arrogant genius who could play a song he had never seen before after looking at it just once,
the life of an ascetic who entered training because he was dissatisfied with his own skill,
the life of a prodigal who let go of everything he held and chased nothing but dissipated pleasure,
and even the repentant life of someone who regretted all of it, found his way back, and picked up the guitar again…
He had already lived through every one of them.
He had experienced all of those things,
and even then lamented the limits of himself that he could not break through,
and after realizing that lamentation, sorrow, and even crying his heart out could accomplish nothing,
the lingering attachment to all of it
was something that a weak man had managed, with great difficulty, to cut away…
That man was Seo Myeongjeon.
‘And at the very end of a life like that, this suddenly…’
He already knew that effort was meaningless. Would things be different in this body? In this life? If he worked for another stretch of time as long as all the years he had already spent trying, would anything change?
He knew that nothing would change at all.
Therefore, let’s give up that kind of life.
Let’s set aside a life devoted to success and just live an ordinary one.
He would live a woman’s life rather than a man’s, but that was fine too. Wouldn’t something new be better than something he had already experienced once?
With that thought, Myeongjeon tried to put aside his concerns about the life ahead.
But a single thought poked out from a corner of his mind.
‘Can I separate the guitar from my life?’
He had not touched the guitar solely for the sake of success. There had been times when he played it to earn other people’s recognition, but if he went back to when he was even younger…
There had been a time when he played guitar for other students at school. There had been a period when he strutted around under the title of ‘the best guitar player in the world.’
Let’s go back even further. To the days when he begged his parents to get him a guitar. To the days when simply strumming the guitar aimlessly at home was fun. To the days when he listened to the blues and rock music his older brother played and wondered, What kind of music is that?
He had been with the guitar since then.
More than anything else in the world. More than family, friends, or anything else… even more than the very concept of sleep, the guitar was what he had spent the most time with, together and side by side.
Could he separate that guitar from himself? Could he live a life unbound by the guitar, unbound by music?
… Therefore, let’s make music.
Not to become great, to be worshiped, or to receive praise…
Back to before all that.
To when he simply loved music.
To when, as a child, he simply loved the guitar.
Back to the time before burdens like that pressure had somehow settled onto his shoulders.
That would be good.