Chapter 259 - Episode 32. The World After the Fall (9)
Chapter 259: Episode 32. The World After the Fall (9)
──────
“What do you mean, you took a whole week off work?”
The first person to greet Jaehwan when he returned to work after a week away was Manager Hwang Inchan. Hwang nagged him all day, and Jaehwan kept silent without talking back once.
When it was nearly time to leave, Hwang dragged Jaehwan to a company dinner.
“I’m sorry about your mother.”
Hwang set down his glass with a satisfied sigh and repeatedly patted Jaehwan’s back.
“Everyone loses their mother someday. Sooner or later, everybody becomes an orphan. It happens to all of us. It’s like military service, you know? It’ll pass before you know it, so don’t worry. Military service was like that too, wasn’t it?”
Hwang Inchan’s face was flushed. The heavy smell of alcohol hung in the air.
The messy atmosphere of the drinking party was slowly making Jaehwan nauseous.
“Come on, drink! Let’s drink for Jaehwan-ssi today!”
Regardless of what Jaehwan wanted, the mood kept building.
“Back in my day...”
Once the drinks began flowing, Hwang Inchan predictably started boasting about himself.
Jaehwan quietly watched him.
Come to think of it, Hwang had always talked about the past. It was as though his real self existed only back then. He went on and on about those days.
It was not just Hwang, either. Deputy Manager Yoon and Assistant Manager Jang were the same whenever they were alone. Maybe people had simply been made that way from the start.
“Come on, look at this guy’s face. Your mother passing away doesn’t mean the whole world has ended! You still have people who matter, don’t you? You have us too. Aren’t we all family? Producer Yoon, isn’t that right?”
“Huh? Yes, of course.”
“Exactly! You think about your family and live another day. Keep doing that, and good things will happen eventually. Who knows what tomorrow holds? Here, have another drink!”
After pouring Jaehwan a beer, Hwang shook his empty glass and gave Seoyul, seated beside him, a meaningful look. Seoyul flinched and drew in her shoulders.
“Ms. Seoyul, don’t sit there holding back. Come pour us a drink. Jaehwan-ssi would rather have a drink poured by you than one poured by me, wouldn’t he?”
Seoyul hesitantly picked up the bottle, but Jaehwan shook his head as if he did not need one. Hwang immediately held out his own glass instead.
“Come on.”
After hesitating, Seoyul poured him a drink. Hwang grinned.
“Ms. Seoyul, you’ve been working hard lately. You know our company is getting acquired soon, right? If you listen to me, you might get to go to headquarters with me after the merger. I’m close with their Representative, you know?”
Hwang casually put an arm around Seoyul’s shoulders and laughed loudly. Seoyul tried to free herself, but Hwang smoothly avoided her hands and even asked with an innocent expression.
“Hm? Ms. Seoyul, are you uncomfortable?”
“My shoulder hurts a little...”
“Aw, our Ms. Seoyul must be exhausted from work. I’ll loosen it up for you. I studied a bit of manual therapy, you know.”
“I’m fine...”
Hwang mixed beer and soju without asking, then shoved the large beer glass into Seoyul’s hands. With both hands occupied, Hwang’s hands naturally began kneading her shoulders.
“Oh my, you’re really tense.”
He seemed to be massaging her trapezius muscles, but his hands began brushing other places as well. Seoyul’s expression darkened further.
“Ms. Seoyul, haven’t you gained weight lately? You need to take care of your health while you’re still young. Keep neglecting yourself like this and you’ll really go downhill, you know? Look at me. I could eat anything when I was young and never gain weight, but I let my guard down for a moment and ended up like this. You can’t get complacent just because you’re young.”
Then his hand casually touched her stomach.
Under normal circumstances, it would have been impossible. Yet the mood in that room made it possible.
Seoyul bit down hard on her lip and looked around for help. There were so many eyes in the room, but not one person looked back at her.
Producer Yoon, who was always especially sensitive about leaving work on time. Producer Jang, who guarded every single vacation day as though by instinct. The employees from other departments who usually went on about workers’ rights. None of them were anywhere to be seen. They were pretending to be drunk, or perhaps they truly were drunk.
The last person Seoyul met eyes with was Jaehwan.
Their gazes only met for an instant, but in that instant, Jaehwan understood everything that had happened in Seoyul’s heart, and everything that would happen next.
Seeing his expression, Seoyul shook her head with anxious eyes.
Jaehwan thought about Seoyul.
He thought about the woman who would be left alone after he caused trouble. He thought about her younger brother, who made her shake her head. He thought about the hostages in this world bound to her, and the System that had given her those hostages.
‘System.’
Under the flickering lights, Jaehwan looked up at the ceiling.
As he stared at the rectangular ceiling covered in flashy lights, he imagined the scene beyond it.
He thought of The World After the Fall, which he had forgotten for so long.
He had never been someone who thought about such things.
Jaehwan rose from his seat and grabbed Hwang Inchan by the shoulder.
Hwang looked up at him in irritation.
“Huh? Jaehwan-ssi?”
Without answering, Jaehwan looked down at Hwang.
Under that gaze, like the gaze of a giant eye in the sky, Hwang finally took his hand off Seoyul’s shoulder.
“Do you have something to say?”
Jaehwan grabbed Hwang’s right arm, which hung awkwardly in the air. Hwang’s eyes widened slightly, and he tried to pull free.
“Wait a moment. What are you doing?”
When Jaehwan did not answer, Hwang urgently turned to Seoyul.
“Ms. Seoyul, don’t just stand there. Say something. I think Jaehwan-ssi has misunderstood something.”
The sudden disturbance spread unease through the drinking party. Even the executives at the table across from them were looking over. As one indifferent gaze after another gathered on him, Hwang awkwardly smiled and shouted.
“This guy’s drunk! Understandable. After going through something so sad, anyone would be like this. Drink up. Come on, drink! It’s nothing, everyone, so don’t pay any attention!”
Jaehwan saw Hwang’s pathetic smile. He saw Seoyul, unable to lift her head. He saw the others quickly returning to their indifference.
Having successfully settled the situation, Hwang’s eyes turned sharp.
“Jaehwan-ssi, we’ll discuss this later. Can’t you see the directors are here? Are you in your right mind? Just because your mother passed away doesn’t mean I can overlook everything. What you’re doing right now is...”
Jaehwan slowly exhaled and closed his eyes.
As if by magic, the sensations around him vanished.
Why am I still living like this?
The feelings he had endured in silence exploded within that stillness.
He could not understand why he had not done this sooner.
“Jaehwan-ssi, I’m only giving you a warning this time, but if you do this again... Uh, uh? Uuuhhh? My arm, my arm! Aaaagh!”
Hwang, still gripped by Jaehwan, began screaming in pain.
The people around them shot to their feet at the same moment Jaehwan’s right fist moved.
Every glass on the table overturned. Hwang groaned as he was thrown face-first across the table, his whole body writhing like an insect.
Jaehwan’s fist drove in cleanly, as though landing a Stab. Blood splashed through the shattered liquor bottles.
“Ugh... urgh...”
Hwang’s groans slipped through the others’ screams.
Everyone in the room was overwhelmed by that primal violence, while Jaehwan’s fist kept moving without a word.
Blood sprayed. Flesh was crushed.
A few employees finally came to their senses and cautiously tried to stop Jaehwan, supporting Hwang as they pulled him away. The directors rose from their seats and glared at Jaehwan.
Jaehwan saw one director take out a phone and call someone. He slowly spoke.
“If you’re going to report it, then report it.”
He lightly wiped the blood from his fist as though cleaning a blade, then looked toward the directors’ table. The startled director hurriedly lowered the phone.
Jaehwan looked at them with indifferent eyes and continued.
“But you’ll have to testify exactly what happened here, and what all of you chose to ignore. The acquiring company will hear about it too.”
As though it contained evidence, Jaehwan raised his phone’s camera. The directors’ faces went pale as they looked at one another.
“I don’t need severance pay. Take care of the paperwork yourselves.”
As Jaehwan turned away, Hwang reached toward him and muttered something. He was clearly trying to say something, but his lips had split open so badly that his voice did not come out properly.
Perhaps that was why it sounded like this.
Jaehwan-ssi.
You should think about the people who matter to you.
Jaehwan looked briefly at Seoyul, who was still frozen in place. Seoyul silently looked up at him, let out a quiet sigh, then rose with him.
As they left the restaurant together, Jaehwan thought:
There was nothing precious left to him now.
* * *
Three days later, Jaehwan was in Sakamoto’s laboratory.
“I’m sorry, Professor. You went to the trouble of introducing me to that company...”
He did not know whether his warning had worked, but the company did not report him to the police. He had received no contact from Hwang Inchan or the directors, either. The only sign that the company had not forgotten him was the final paycheck deposited into his account with its neat, exact numbers.
Sakamoto, who knew the whole story, sighed.
“No, it’s all right. I heard about it from Seoyul-yang. It sounds like it was more than justified. If anything, I’m the one who should be sorry.”
“...”
“I misjudged him. I had no idea Manager Hwang had changed that much. Really, he was not always like that. I don’t know what to say.”
Jaehwan noticed the stacks of books on parallel universes piled across the laboratory table.
Sakamoto had not changed, then or now. That made Jaehwan feel strangely wistful.
Perhaps sensing his gaze, Professor Sakamoto gave a faint smile.
“Even if not in this universe, I’m sure he is a decent person in another one.”
“Parallel universe theory again.”
“If I don’t think that way, life becomes too harsh.”
Watching Professor Sakamoto laugh, Jaehwan wanted to tell him that Hwang Inchan was probably not a particularly good person in another universe either.
“Apparently it can be split apart... At this size, a great many people could use this item.”
That bastard would still be a stupid fool there.
“Since it could be a lie, I’ll test it myself first and let all of you know.”
He would still be a damned man so blinded by the glory of the past that he would plunge all humanity into a nightmare.
Yet Professor Sakamoto, who knew none of that, only drank his coffee with a kindly smile.
Looking at him, then at the countless scientific theory books piled on his shelves, Jaehwan felt something he could not name.
“Professor, do you truly believe in parallel universes?”
Was it an illusion that Professor Sakamoto’s coffee cup trembled faintly?
Sakamoto hurriedly took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth.
“Parallel universe theory is only a hypothesis.”
“Does that mean you don’t believe in it?”
“Hmm. How should I explain this?”
“There is no such thing as imagination or delusion in this world. That imagination clearly exists as a world in another universe. Those were your words, Professor. Do you really believe that?”
Professor Sakamoto fell silent for a while. It was the silence of someone trying to grasp the intent behind Jaehwan’s question.
The clock mounted high on the wall ticked steadily.
Sakamoto spoke again around the time the second hand completed a full circle.
“Jaehwan-ssi. I cannot answer that question, because it is not a question I can answer. But I can tell you something else.”
Behind his rimless glasses, the professor’s intelligent eyes gleamed.
“Jaehwan-ssi, do you know anything about classical mechanics?”
“A little.”
“Oh? It seems you did listen to some of my lectures after all.”
“I only barely understand that apples fall because of gravity.”
Professor Sakamoto laughed heartily.
“That’s right. For people in Newton’s time, the explanation that gravity acted on a tree and caused an apple to fall was enough to explain the world. It was a very simple world. Everyone believed they could understand the world through numbers and calculations alone.”
“I see. But why bring that up all of a sudden...?”
Professor Sakamoto smiled mysteriously.
“People of that era believed everyone lived in the same absolute, identical time, looking at the same things. Think about it. How simple the world must have seemed to them. Imagine the shock they felt when they one day encountered theories such as relativity and quantum mechanics.”
“Hmm...”
Jaehwan thought about it for a moment.
Perhaps it was similar to the moment Adapters became Awakened Ones.
“People living in the world of classical mechanics did not know that time and the motion of objects were relative to the observer. They never knew there was a possibility that an apple falling due to gravity might, after hundreds of millions or trillions of experiments, pass through the ground or vanish somewhere unknown to us.”
“That... yes, I suppose they didn’t.”
“To them, relativity and quantum mechanics must have looked like profound magical formulas. Arthur C. Clarke said something similar, did he not? Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.”
Jaehwan carefully considered Sakamoto’s words, but he could not figure out what the professor wanted to say.
There was no need to ask. Professor Sakamoto had always hated riddling exchanges.
“How do you think people of that era reacted when they encountered new theories?”
“Well... they must have tried to learn them.”
“Do you really think so?”
Professor Sakamoto fell silent and looked down at the students’ reports spread across his desk. True to the reputation of his notoriously difficult class, reports that earned even a C were rare, let alone a B.
Jaehwan blankly looked down at those reports. Then something suddenly clicked, and he lifted his head.
Professor Sakamoto was smiling and nodding.
“Jaehwan-ssi, we are still living in the age of classical mechanics.”
Footnotes:
Chapter discussion