Chapter 1: A Second Chance?

“Kim Jinho!”

I hear someone shouting my name loudly. Ah, looks like they’re here.

“Jinho! Where are you! Please, just make some sound, Jinho. Okay?”

The bastards were running around everywhere calling my name, looking quite desperate.

“Jinho, please. Please, Jinho.”

But I was already at my limit. I could feel the consciousness I’d been forcing myself to hold onto growing fuzzier and fainter.

“…Here he is! Jinho! What the hell…!”

Still, I held on and endured until the very end, then blacked out completely as I heard the footsteps drawing closer. f*ck, so it ends like this again. That one thought filled my entire mind.

“…Morning…?”

I definitely died. Kim Jinho, twenty-seven years old, barely scraping by on part-time jobs—I had definitely died. And in a situation that was truly fucked up.

Let me organize this. I’m just a perfectly ordinary Korean man. 178 centimeters tall, no belly fat but no muscles either, average-looking face.

Thanks to studying my ass off in high school, I got into a prestigious university, but my grades were a mess, and I never built up any specs like TOEIC or TOEFL scores. I just barely graduated by taking my graduation exams, begging my professors, and scraping through my thesis. So naturally, I became unemployed right after graduation.

My parents never showed much interest in me, so I’d had to earn my own living expenses since college. On top of that, I’m now saddled with student loans, so if I don’t work multiple high-paying gigs, it’s hard to make ends meet. The one silver lining is that they don’t say anything about me staying in this house, so at least I have a roof over my head.

I thought I’d just live out my whole life that way—average, slightly lacking. No, I didn’t think that—I was destined to. But unlike me, I happened to stick around someone who always seemed to attract only extraordinary things, and somehow got entangled, which landed me in this absurd situation.

Who is that someone? My childhood friend from next door, Chae Yeryeong. Even the name sounds like a protagonist’s—pretty face like a gisaeng’s brother, ridiculously smart, raised in a warm family with plenty of love so no dark side, kind to the point of being ridiculous, popular, and disgustingly lucky. The only reason I could become friends with someone who’s my complete opposite was simply because we lived next door.

Well… we do have one decisive thing in common, but… Anyway, the most fundamental reason was just that we lived next to each other, and because he was kind.

So why is that bastard connected to my death?

Like I said, he was popular. Having received all the love in the world since childhood, he was even more popular with guys—probably because of his pretty looks—and that continued into university.

At the university I graduated from, there was a ski club that supposedly only gathered the top elites. Chae Yeryeong got snatched right into that club as soon as he enrolled. I was also dragged in by him, but the treatment I got was completely different from Chae Yeryeong, who was treated like a prince.

The elite five-man squad that treated him like royalty were all from families you couldn’t ignore. They had different majors but hung out together often, and according to Yeryeong, their families had been close since childhood, so they grew up as childhood friends.

Thanks to those senior hyungs backing him, Chae Yeryeong breezed through school. And because he dragged me everywhere he went, I somehow ended up mixed in with that group too.

Oddly inserted among those six, I felt a maddening sense of alienation, but my heart had already turned to steel, so I wasn’t about to let that hurt me.

I’d decided to just figure out how to not make things awkward when I had to be around them, but since my hiatus, Yeryeong’s enlistment, and the seniors’ graduations meant we didn’t run into each other much, it wasn’t really a problem.

But the real problem started after graduation. Honestly, Yeryeong probably didn’t notice, but to my eyes, after watching them for years, the five men’s interest in Chae Yeryeong went beyond mere affection for a close junior. I watched nervously, thinking that the moment Yeryeong caught on or any one of them made a move, shit would hit the fan. But strangely, from the time Yeryeong started dating a girlfriend after being discharged, those kinds of expressions of interest completely vanished.

Just when it seemed my friend would remain merely close senior-junior with them, as if his fortune had an unwanted flower of calamity, things got even more entangled right after graduation.

After graduating, those five steadily built their careers in their respective fields, becoming impressive working adults with credentials that an ordinary person might not achieve even after ten years of nonstop work.

And having grown more experienced in romance too—it couldn’t have been easy to coax Yeryeong that much—but they still got closer and more intimate with him, like a snake slithering over a wall. Now, anyone who saw or heard about them together would think they were in a ‘special relationship,’ even without me pointing it out.

And that was the problem. The world they lived in was different from that of ordinary people—overflowing with dangers. So much so that even those considered in ‘special relationships’ weren’t safe from those clutches.

And that clutch reached even me, standing beside Chae Yeryeong, who was special to those bastards.

Kidnapping. In my twenty-seven years of life, I never imagined a grown man would be a target, but surprisingly, Chae Yeryeong and I were kidnapped by the ‘enemy’ forces of those five men’s families. Chae Yeryeong was crying and pleading beside me, but I tried my best to stay calm, believing that those five would come to save us no matter what, given the way they usually acted around him. Stupidly forgetting that I was nothing more than an extra to them.

Well, to cut to the chase, they did come. Opening the pitch-black warehouse door, they appeared with the light behind them like knights—and they rescued him. Their prince.

The truly infuriating part is that I had only gone there that day to pick up some side dishes that bastard’s mother had told me to take, and got caught up in it. The kidnappers must have thought I looked weak, because they only beat me up. And when the rescuers arrived, the only one they demanded back was Chae Yeryeong.

Even the kidnappers found it absurd. They kicked me, who was so beaten I couldn’t even move, and asked if they weren’t taking this bastard too. The five of them finally seemed to notice me and went “Ah—” then told them to toss me over too.

Thrown while battered and bruised, I should have been in pain, but given the urgency of the situation, I didn’t have time to feel anything. I forced myself up with all my might and walked over to where they were. Then, drunk on the relief of being alive, I said thank you and bowed my head—and when I looked back up, I saw their faces stiffen in an instant. Then came a sound like thunder from behind.

A gunshot. Still unable to believe what my own ears were hearing, I blankly turned around—and the kidnapper who had handed me over was standing there holding an actual gun. A gun in the Republic of Korea. It’s not a toy, right? The moment that thought crossed my mind, another thunderous sound rang out, and I felt an indescribable heat in my gut.

“Jinho!” I heard someone shout. My body wouldn’t move, so I could only turn my head. I saw Chae Yeryeong being carried away in someone’s arms, and the others surrounding him as if shielding him. Overwhelmed by the growing pain, I sank to my knees and thought: Wow, you really are some cheap bastards. That was my last memory.

That’s how it was… Yet I woke up to a terribly familiar alarm sound, naturally turned it off, grumbled in the same old pattern as always, and opened my eyes. Then, while brushing my teeth out of habit, I realized something was off.

After screaming loud enough to wake the whole house and swallowing all the toothpaste foam, I finally managed to calm down and organize my thoughts.

First, I considered a few scenarios. One: ‘I miraculously survived and received treatment, and I just woke up.’ But I had no injuries and I woke up at home, so I ruled that out.

Two: The men who rescued me kindly brought me home, treated me, laid me in bed, and left—but that made absolutely no sense.

Three: f*ck. I know this one’s impossible too! I’m well aware this is an absurd thought!

No matter how many times I turned my phone off and on, the year displayed on the calendar app was short by one year. This seemed like the most plausible explanation.

…This is really regression?

It was so absurd that I just lay back down and went to sleep again. When I woke up, it was the dead of night, pitch-black everywhere. I must have thrown a tantrum in my sleep, because my phone was hurled across the room. I crawled over and turned the screen on—the date was still the same, only the time had changed.

What is this? Maybe because I’d already been shocked enough in the morning, I didn’t have any surprise left. I just stared blankly.

Did I really go back to the past? I checked phone apps, the internet, even turned on the TV to confirm, but I just couldn’t accept it. Wait a minute.

“Let me think… Ah!”

I can just call him! Chae Yeryeong! God, I’m so stupid. Why didn’t I think of that earlier?

I opened my call log and scrolled for his name. Creepily enough, the call log showed the number of the employment agency manager I used to take jobs from around a year ago. Ignore. Let’s just ignore that.

After scrolling a bit, I found Chae Yeryeong’s name and tapped it. The dial tone rang immediately. Soon, he picked up.

– Hello?

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