Chapter 3: I Found You Again

“Kill you, Lee Do-kyung.”

…You’re wrong.

I’m already dead.

If this was the afterlife, then why was Hwang Un-jae, who was very much alive, here?

Lee Do-kyung massaged his throbbing temples with one hand, pressing firmly.

Since he was dead anyway, shouldn’t he be having a passionate reunion with Seon Woo-min?

What kind of cruel joke was this?

Wait.

Did I actually die?

Or maybe I’m not dead…

Even as he tried not to, his gaze kept drifting to Seon Woo-min.

It was strange, unbelievable—the person who had definitely been cold on a hospital bed was now alive and moving.

More than anything, Seon Woo-min didn’t recognize him at all.

He looked at him like someone he’d never met before.

Which meant—

“Aha!

I got it.

It’s virtual reality, right?”

“…….”

Hwang Un-jae, who had been sitting with his eyes closed, got up, pulled a high-performance laptop from Lee Do-kyung’s backpack, flipped the screen wide open, and pressed it down on the back of his head.

The message was clear: stop talking and work.

“…Hey, wait.

This isn’t some kind of hidden camera prank, is it?”

“You really want to get hit, don’t you?

Who’d go through the trouble of filming a prank for someone like you?

Who, and why?”

Do-kyung, craning his neck restlessly and looking around, gazed at Hwang Un-jae across from him with half-lidded eyes instead of at the laptop screen.

“Ah, what now!”

Hwang Un-jae, who was fuming, was a guy Do-kyung had originally gotten close to when they worked together on the same project at a domestic game company called ‘Watters.’

He was in the game planning team, while Do-kyung was a developer in the game art team.

“Hwang Un-jae.

First, let me see your employee ID.”

“What?

What employee ID?”

“Oh come on, Watters!

Just give it to me.

I’m seriously going out of my mind here.”

“Ah, what the hell are you talking about!

I’m losing my mind too.

Why would I have that!

Are you actually insane?”

Hwang Un-jae wasn’t affiliated with Watters.

He said he’d never even worked there.

What differed from before was that they had met in an online game and become best friends; currently, they were teaming up with the shared goal of ‘Let’s make a fun game ourselves!’

So, the people around him were the same, but their credentials and circumstances had changed.

Lee Do-kyung tapped on the laptop keyboard, making notes.

It was a desperate attempt to make sense of the current situation, where nothing was certain and only confusion mounted.

Whether he had returned alive, returned dead, or wasn’t returning at all but had ended up in some new parallel universe, he didn’t know, but regardless, he had met Seon Woo-min today, and Woo-min was alive.

For now, that was all that mattered.

Yeah.

Honestly, nothing else is really that important, is it.

“Hmm… Still, I am curious.

How did this situation come about?”

“Enough.

I’m starting to get angry.”

Ignoring Hwang Un-jae’s warning, Lee Do-kyung rested his chin on his hand, lost in thought, then suddenly slammed the table.

I want to hold you.

I want to touch you.

If only I could start over with you from the beginning…

Could it be that wish actually came true?

As his desperate prayer from just before death surfaced, his breathing became labored, as if he were submerged in water.

His heart pounded violently, thumping hard.

Before he knew it, he was clenching his fists, about to jump up, when Hwang Un-jae barely managed to push him back down.

Un-jae’s nagging about calming down faded from his ears, and only the beat of his own heart hammered through his body, vivid as the echo of a drum.

Lee Do-kyung stared at the calendar date on the tablet screen as if etching it into his memory.

Then, with a gaze as intense as a crashing wave, he fixed his eyes on Seon Woo-min.

I see, Woo-min.

Today is the day we first met.

***

As they left the national highway, a tranquil countryside landscape appeared outside the car window.

Lee Do-kyung was driving toward the ancestral burial ground.

Arriving at the destination, he braked abruptly, got out without looking back, driven by a single-minded need to verify something immediately.

He strode forward through the dirt path, trampling dry leaves.

The soil crumbling under his sneakers was bothersome, quickening his pace.

The late summer wind, carrying lingering warmth, brushed against his gaunt cheek.

After walking for a while, Lee Do-kyung stopped abruptly, as if his feet had caught.

“…Ha.”

He had personally scattered soil over Seon Woo-min’s coffin.

Unable to bear watching the workers pack the earth, he had stood with his back turned.

When he suddenly burst into laughter, his friends tried to stop him, but he didn’t listen at all, cackling like a madman.

At that burial site, there was nothing.

The spot where Seon Woo-min should have been buried was an empty patch of land without a single blade of grass.

There was no headstone engraved with Woo-min’s birth and death dates, which he had wiped frantically with his jacket, no flower stand where he had last placed a single Cloud Nine cigarette, Woo-min’s favorite brand.

There was nothing there to prove that Seon Woo-min had died.

…Right.

Woo-min was alive and well at the café, so this makes sense.

This is how it should be.

But…

It was quiet all around.

A low stone wall flowed along the ridge, and below the hill, rice paddies and fields stretched out.

The village visible in the distance was silent, as if holding its breath.

Lee Do-kyung’s shoulders rose and fell heavily as he took a deep breath.

He stood there dazed, like someone who didn’t know where to go.

***

Just before his phone alarm went off, Seon Woo-min opened his eyes.

After turning off the alarm, the first thing he checked was the SNS accounts for the Invincible Power Kitty Corps and various fan communities.

Only after looking at what the Kitty friends had been obsessed with overnight and checking the official announcement for the complete edition of the comic book did he finally stretch languidly.

He brushed his teeth, opened the window to air out the room, washed up, and got ready for work.

Taking the subway, he got off at a station in a new city on the outskirts of Seoul, which felt like a self-contained district, and took out the earbuds he’d been wearing while listening to the Invincible Power Kitty Corps OST, stashing them in his crossbody bag.

On the show window of a modest, single-story building with a tiled roof was a poster in the style of folk painting featuring a woman in a hanbok, with the brush-written characters for ‘Baekseok Coffee Rosters’ vertically aligned in the upper right corner.

From the moment he scanned his security card at the entrance reader, Seon Woo-min became thoroughly ordinary.

He became a professional café manager.

In the center of the café hall, which was decorated with antique furniture in a renovated old hanok, stood the café’s symbol and main attraction: an aquarium reaching about the waist height of an adult man.

Following Woo-min’s hand as he scattered grain-like feed evenly, the orange goldfish all fluttered their fins and swarmed toward the surface.

“‘What is seen is made from what is not seen.’”

Woo-min was applying to his opening preparations the Bible verse the proselytizer at the subway entrance on his way to work had grabbed him and recited.

The clean interior and the flavorful coffee that customers would enjoy began with prior preparation—that is, from what was not seen.

Afterwards, in the locker room, Woo-min changed into the navy shirt that served as the transitional-season uniform, put on his apron, and neatly arranged napkins stamped with the café logo.

Around this time, the owner and staff would arrive.

“Good morning, Manager.”

“Good morning.”

This was the routine before the café opened.

“What is this?

Didn’t I tell you not to use this?

How many times do I have to say it?”

The owner’s face was already turning red with anger at the sealed container, its date written in black pen and taped shut.

The owner was stubborn—he never yelled or cursed, but once he started a lecture, ten minutes was the bare minimum.

On top of that, he was cantankerous and easily triggered by his own words, often going off on long tangents, so it was important to cut him off mid-way.

Seon Woo-min silently interrogated the staff member with a look, asking what happened.

When he asked, ‘Did you use these beans?’, she nodded miserably.

After reassuring her, he approached the owner.

“I’m sorry, sir.

I know what you said, but yesterday, there were quite a few customers asking for Yemen beans.”

As the head manager, he wasn’t going to be scolded as harshly as the other staff anyway, and it was ultimately his fault for not properly training them, so Woo-min stepped in.

Wrapping it up here would prevent more troublesome issues later.

“Uh… yeah?”

“Yemen beans have been popular on YouTube lately.

Should we try blending these for small-batch sales?

If the response is good, we can transition to single-origin.”

The owner fiddled with the sealed container, lost in thought.

Brazil, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Kenya, Costa Rica, Colombia… He was probably mentally listing the bean types they were currently blending.

After a moment, the owner said he wanted to talk privately and headed into the roasting room.

Seon Woo-min, following behind, glanced at the staff members who were asking what to do and urging him to hurry up and prepare for customer service.

The owner’s minor frustrations were already factored into his calculations.

“Manager, thank you so much for earlier.”

Seon Woo-min, who had been looking out the window, shifted his detached gaze to fix on the staff member.

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