Chapter 10: The Crown Prince of Baekyang

Despite the gauze hat, I could see him frowning. No, I couldn’t see it, but I could tell. He was definitely frowning. After a moment, a stiff reply came back.

“…No one calls me that. I mean, you shouldn’t.”

“Good. Then we won’t confuse each other. Not many people call me that either.”

“…Who are you…?”

The boy sighed briefly and put a hand to his head. Yun-jo stared blankly at him. The boy pointed to a small table.

“Sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

Actually, he didn’t really want to sit, but the voice sounded like it would explode if he pushed further, so Yun-jo chose to sit quietly instead of being cheeky.

After confirming Yun-jo was seated, the boy turned his gaze back to the desk. He tried to find where he had been reading, but his eyes kept slipping over the complicated characters. Unlike usual, the text wouldn’t sink in.

It seemed he needed some time. Time to think about what to do with this fellow…

“Hey.”

The boy looked up. Yun-jo, who had been watching him, smiled when their eyes met.

“I’m hungry.”

Though hidden by the veil, the boy must have had a very dumbfounded expression at that moment.

Not long after, a breakfast tray was brought in.

They said it was just leftovers since breakfast time had passed, but it was quite plentiful. Yun-jo was really hungry, so he cleaned everything off the table except the plates and utensils. He even finished the sweet pickled fruit the old man had brought, then stood up, thanked them for the meal, and looked at the boy.

The boy, who hadn’t eaten, just kept reading without even glancing at Yun-jo. Yun-jo cleared his throat and asked.

“How long are you going to stay here?”

The boy replied.

“For a while.”

“Hmm… okay. I’ll probably come around this time every day.”

“This time?” The boy looked up from his book, but Yun-jo was already gone. Only an empty plate with leftover fruit seeds remained on the small table.

He had vanished like smoke.

Yun-jo appeared near the west gate and stopped a passing woman to ask.

“Excuse me, what time is it?”

“It’s the hour of the Snake.”

The woman, who seemed busy and was about to pass by quickly, looked up at Yun-jo and was momentarily speechless, her eyes wide. Then she cleared her throat and spoke again.

“Ahem, it’s about three quarters past the first hour of the Snake.”

“Thank you.”

Yun-jo bowed his head politely and left.

If it’s three quarters past the Snake hour, that’s roughly 10 AM. Not too different from what he had estimated.

‘I’ll have to sleep early for a while.’

To make it to the action base at the promised time, he had to be asleep by nine at the latest. The good thing was that he had already visited the base, so he could move there without climbing over walls.

Yun-jo had no intention of breaking his promise. It was one-sided, but a promise was a promise.

Since he had said he’d come again and then left without waiting for a reply, he had no idea what the boy’s reaction was, but he probably looked dumbfounded. Just thinking about that face under the gauze hat made him chuckle.

Still, he never told him his name.

Of course, he didn’t show his face either. He hadn’t expected him to keep wearing that veil. Maybe Yun-jo’s persistent requests to see his face drove him to not even turn his head toward him later.

Actually, Yun-jo had already guessed the boy’s name. He had also seen his face before. So not getting an answer wasn’t a big disappointment. Rather, the fact that he didn’t reveal anything at all made Yun-jo more certain his guess was correct.

The boy’s name was Sahyeon.

The Crown Prince of Baekyang.

Eternal Sun is set in a country called Baekyang. As a nation, it naturally has a ruler and social structure. The capital, Wonkyung, is an ancient city with a magnificent imperial palace, where the emperor, empress, and countless officials and courtiers reside.

Players who log into the game can do whatever they want according to the concept of adapting to another world, but there is one thing they cannot do: break the world setting or change established facts. That was the game’s fundamental premise and a rule everyone had to follow.

The Baekyang imperial family existed only as basic game settings. The same went for the emperor, empress, and crown prince. Players could not interact with them, and no such situation ever occurred. They were usually just referred to as the emperor, empress, and crown prince, so their names were rarely used. However, their names and descriptions could be found in the setting data.

According to the setting, the current emperor of Baekyang, Sagyeong, fell ill shortly after his ascension and had been bedridden for a long time, essentially a figurehead from the start. In place of the emperor, the state affairs of Baekyang were in the hands of the regent, Empress Ju. So character descriptions tended to focus more on the empress than the emperor.

As for the crown prince, it was even simpler. Just a single line of explanation below his name.

Crown Prince Hyeon is the legitimate eldest son of the Empress, age 10 at the time of release.

Eight years after release, he would now be 18.

That was all the setting, but since he was one of those characters you’d never run into, it was enough for playing the game.

But Yun-jo was different. He had met him before.

The first time was three years ago.

Not long after he started having dreams, Yun-jo wandered around without even knowing what kind of dream he was in. He had short dreams several times a day, as if logging out and back in repeatedly, and he often woke up in different places each time.

The places he visited were mainly somewhere on Yulsi Mountain, but occasionally he found himself in completely unfamiliar locations.

The first dream was exactly such a case. Whether because it was the first dream or because the moment was particularly striking, Yun-jo remembered it very vividly.

The moment he met the boy in a pavilion under a scorching sun.

At first, he had no idea where it was. The imperial palace was not a publicly accessible location in the game, so he knew nothing about it, and the setting was so different from the dreams that followed that for a while he suspected it was just a random dream unrelated to the game.

It was only after he became somewhat accustomed to the dreams that he began to suspect the place might be somewhere inside the imperial palace.

In the official release of the game, access to the imperial palace was forbidden. The coordinates were set to be unselectable from the start, but in the beta version, moving to the palace was possible. Of course, if you moved there, only a blank black screen appeared, but you could still select the coordinates.

After learning how to control his location in the dream, Yun-jo went there.

The palace was so vast that he had to go back and forth several times just to get a sense of the layout. The patrol guards walked around morning and evening, limiting the times he could enter, and he had to hide whenever he sensed someone, so he couldn’t move around freely.

And the structure was so complicated! Passing through layers of high walls, it was easy to lose direction and get lost.

In the midst of that, he discovered the pavilion from that day.

Set apart from the main palace, it was a space where the sky was hidden by endless high walls and roofs with long eaves.

Day and night, the gates were tightly shut, making it difficult to even enter. The pavilion and its connected buildings were surrounded by high walls, making it hard to see in or out. Even people rarely passed by.

Until then, Yun-jo didn’t know where it was. He only guessed it was an abandoned palace. There were so many buildings in the palace complex, and many of them were unoccupied.

Then one day, overhearing some passing palace maids, he learned that this place, so quiet it would be more believable as an abandoned palace, was the Crown Prince’s residence.

They said the Crown Prince was weak and confined himself to the pavilion, only reading books. Only the Empress’s trusted old servants guarded him, and no one could enter or leave freely, so even the Crown Prince himself couldn’t leave. Apparently, even though he was already fifteen, almost no one in the main palace had seen his face.

Hearing that, Yun-jo realized that the boy he saw that day was the fifteen-year-old Crown Prince, Sahyeon.

Having wandered since dawn, he was starting to feel tired even though it was a dream. It had been at least six or seven hours since he fell asleep, but there was no sign of waking. Usually, he would wake up after this long, but today he had taken painkillers, so he was sleeping very deeply.

Feeling that he had more or less accomplished what he set out to do, Yun-jo wanted to rest a bit with the remaining time, so he returned to the mountain.

On the highest peak of Yulsi Mountain, there was a mountain lodge built by Yun-jo himself. Since most players’ first task when starting the game was building a house, it was almost finished by the time he started dreaming.

Three sides faced cliffs, and the only path required climbing a steep slope through rocky crevices, making it a place rarely visited by people.

Nearby was Beom-il’s cave. That guy would smell Yun-jo’s arrival and come slinking out. Sure enough, as soon as he landed at the lodge, he heard thudding, earth-shaking footsteps, and Beom-il came running out from somewhere.

“Grrrroar!!!”

“Whoa!”

Before he could brace himself, Beom-il bowled him over, and his body lifted. Yun-jo tumbled down the hillside in a tangle with Beom-il.

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