Projection Novel (Completed) - Chapter 53

A week ago, when Sejin opened his eyes, the spot beside him was empty. He sat up, searching for Cheon Sejoo’s warmth, and quietly scoured the house.

“Cheon Sejoo, where are you?”

His feeble voice echoed through the house. Walking through the house, which felt not just spacious but enormous, Sejin searched for Cheon Sejoo. But he was nowhere to be found. After finally checking the bathroom, Sejin realized that Cheon Sejoo was not in the house anywhere and stopped dead in his tracks, his expression hardening.

His downcast gaze swept the surroundings. There were no wet traces left on the bathroom floor where he stood. This meant Cheon Sejoo had left the house without even washing. Hurriedly, or perhaps lightly. As his mind churned, Sejin soon recalled the empty refrigerator and guessed he had gone to buy food. A sigh of relief escaped him.

Wearily, Sejin stumbled out of the bathroom and huddled on the sofa. It seemed a long time had passed since he’d eaten, but he wasn’t hungry. He simply couldn’t think of anything. Sejin remained in that state, burying his face in his knees, when he suddenly turned his head.

His eyes fell on the unoccupied sofa. Cheon Sejoo’s favorite sofa looked particularly empty today, somehow forlorn. Sejin stared at the spot for a moment, then at some point, he got up. Carefully, he climbed onto the sofa and lay down in the same position Cheon Sejoo would, mimicking him.

He closed his eyes and then with effort, lifted his eyelids to see the TV, the hallway, and a part of the window all at once. He finally understood why Cheon Sejoo always lay here. With so many things in his line of sight, he felt no sense of stuffiness at all.

The only regrettable thing was that his own spot was not visible from there. Before the study room was created, the seat beside the table where Sejin always sat could only be seen if one lay on the sofa, lifted their head, and looked down. He didn’t know whether he should be relieved that Cheon Sejoo hadn’t caught him peeking whenever he studied on the floor, or whether he should feel disappointed that he hadn’t existed in Cheon Sejoo’s field of vision. Feeling suddenly drained, Sejin silently gazed at the view Cheon Sejoo always looked at, then closed his eyes.

Cheon Sejoo would be back soon; the supermarket wasn’t far… But as he thought that, he dozed off, and when he woke up again, it was late at night.

The sky outside the window was dark. The TV, with its power off, still displayed a black screen, and silence permeated everywhere. Sejin abruptly sat up.

“Cheon Sejoo.”

Sejin called his name, his voice hoarse. But again, there was no answer. It seemed he hadn’t gone to the supermarket but had left for work.

He often left the house abruptly, so Sejin wasn’t flustered. However, just as he always did when Cheon Sejoo suddenly left, he instinctively knew that he wouldn’t be returning home today and moved to Cheon Sejoo’s room.

The blanket was still disheveled. Sejin climbed onto the spot where Cheon Sejoo had been lying, buried his face in his pillow, and hugged the blanket he had used. It seemed Cheon Sejoo’s scent still lingered. A sweet, yet cool fragrance…

And so, Sejin fell asleep again.

When he woke up again, it was dawn. Perhaps because his stomach was empty, he couldn’t sleep deeply. Sejin weakly got up and looked down at his lower abdomen with gloomy eyes. The moment he realized he was hungry with a rumbling sound, Sejin felt a profound self-loathing. His mother was dead. His mother couldn’t eat anything now, and yet he wanted to eat something in this situation; it felt strange. He felt like he had become a bad person who couldn’t even feel sorrow for her death.

This profound self-loathing was something Sejin had never felt before in his life. Something in his stomach stung. He felt utterly miserable and sad.

Despite his deep melancholy, Sejin recalled Cheon Sejoo’s voice echoing in his ears and got up. He had to live. The words Cheon Sejoo had left him at the funeral parlor spurred him on. There was no good in starving himself. His mother would be angry if she knew, and Cheon Sejoo would be upset too. Thinking this, Sejin headed to the kitchen.

He put his drained phone on the charger and opened the refrigerator to prepare a simple meal. As he reached for some dried side dishes that likely hadn’t gone bad yet, he paused, discovering the marinated ribs he had prepared for his mother.

Kim Hyunkyung had difficulty digesting, so he had marinated the meat in a generous amount of kiwi sauce to tenderize it. Having missed the timing, the meat would have already disintegrated into mush. Or perhaps it had already gone bad.

“……”

But Sejin didn’t want to throw away the ribs. Discarding something he had prepared for her felt like erasing his mother’s trace. He wasn’t immune to such things yet. Choked with emotion, Sejin put the rib container deep into the freezer and took out a few dried side dishes that hadn’t spoiled yet, placing them on the table.

The rice left in the rice cooker had long since dried up. Sejin hadn’t known this because he and Cheon Sejoo had eaten delivery food on the 31st and New Year’s Day when they were home. He heated up the only instant rice remaining in the cupboard and placed it on the table. He ate it with the slightly less tasty stir-fried anchovies and nuts, and dried shredded squid. Even in that state, as the sweet and salty food entered his mouth, his mouth watered. Sejin let out a hollow laugh in disbelief and finished his meal.

Afterward, he sent a message to Cheon Sejoo.

6:21 When are you coming home?

There was no reply. Instead of waiting for his message, Sejin did the dishes and tidied up the house. Even without anyone there, after a few days, the dust was immense. He only finished cleaning the house after using almost half a roll of disposable cleaning wipes for the wet mop robot.

Then he checked the time, and it was past 12. It was because he had cleaned meticulously for the first time in a long while, and the house was large. It was hard, but Sejin worked diligently, thinking he couldn’t leave Cheon Sejoo’s house covered in dust. After that, he was hungry again.

This time, it wasn’t a hunger that could be easily appeased, so Sejin went to the kitchen to prepare a meal. He washed the rice and cooked a fresh batch, then took out frozen shrimp and seafood medley from the freezer and stir-fried them spicy with cabbage. Then, a thought suddenly struck him, and he soaked seaweed, added perilla powder, and boiled seaweed soup.

Cheon Sejoo’s birthday was January 1st. Last year, he had missed it because he didn’t remember in time, but this time… he had slept through it. He felt not just sorry but even guilty towards Cheon Sejoo. Sejin blamed himself for being foolish and put the meticulously prepared seaweed soup entirely into the refrigerator. He planned to eat it with Cheon Sejoo when he returned.

Later, he would go out for a moment to buy a cake too. It was late, but he should at least blow out the candles. He had received so much from Cheon Sejoo, and the fact that he could only do such small things made him feel apologetic, so Sejin thought he would go to the department store with him to buy a gift when he returned. It would be wonderful if Cheon Sejoo happily accepted it.

After resolving lunch, Sejin sat blankly in the re-energized house, looking down at the flowing Han River. It was almost the first time he had been alone since the funeral, and long-deferred worries flooded in.

The college entrance exam was long over. He regretted not having studied a little less diligently if it was going to pass without him even taking the exam. He wished he had gone to see his mother instead. He wished he had told her “I love you” more, had he apologized for getting annoyed with her?

Sejin continued to think about her for a moment, then shook his head, feeling his mood constantly sinking. He didn’t want to think about his mother when he was alone. It was hard to sink into sadness when Cheon Sejoo wasn’t there.

Now, what about the house? That was the next thought that arose. Originally, Sejin’s plan was to enlist in the military as soon as he turned twenty. After that, he would save his salary there to build up a lump sum, and after his discharge, he would find a room with Kim Hyunkyung, who had left Ihwagak, and start anew. That was Sejin’s goal.

However, after he started studying with Cheon Sejoo, that plan fizzled out. What if he got into university? Such questions intervened, causing his imagined future to constantly change. Whenever that happened, Sejin would tell himself to think about it after the college entrance exam, and he would put off revising his plans. But since he hadn’t taken the exam, there was nothing strange about going back to his original plan, yet Sejin hesitated.

He didn’t want to leave Cheon Sejoo’s side.

If he went to the military right away like this, he worried about Cheon Sejoo being left alone in this house. It was strange. Sejin was the one who had lost his family, but he worried more about Cheon Sejoo than himself.

‘That’s how it is. Dying, it’s like that….’

Suddenly, he recalled what Cheon Sejoo had said to him when he was consumed by resentment. It had only been a few days ago, but at the time, he hated Cheon Sejoo. He hated that anyone, let alone Cheon Sejoo, would say such a thing to him. But there was nothing wrong with his words.

Of course, that didn’t mean he had no resentment left for them. Sejin still hated the loan sharks who had dragged his mother to Ihwagak, and he abhorred Kwon Yongbeom, the source of all their misfortune. Nevertheless, he no longer felt his stomach churn and anger surge as he had on the day of the funeral.

As Cheon Sejoo had said, Sejin didn’t want to be bound by the past. He didn’t want to waste his life hating and resenting all the causes that led to his mother’s death. Because Kim Hyunkyung had wanted that.

The day before she died, those were her last words to Sejin. Before losing consciousness from the intense pain, she whispered, without recognizing Sejin holding her hand beside her, ‘Please, tell Sejin, tell my son. Tell him that it was my wish to die before I turned 50, so I have no regrets at all. Don’t cry feeling sorry for me, but live happily, enjoying what you want to do, what you want to eat, what you want to have, what you love.’

After Kim Hyunkyung died, Sejin was consumed by objectless rage. But after hearing Cheon Sejoo speak, the knots in his heart loosened, and his mother’s words came back to him.

As he said, if he lived resenting the things he had missed, he couldn’t live happily as his mother wished. Sejin realized this early through Cheon Sejoo’s words. That was why, even while feeling self-loathing for being hungry in this situation, he could diligently prepare and eat his meals.

As she said, Sejin wanted to live enjoying what he loved. He wanted to live better than anyone so that she wouldn’t regret leaving a young child behind when she looked down on him from heaven.

To do that, he needed Cheon Sejoo. Sejin wanted to be with Cheon Sejoo, wanted to share delicious food with him, and wanted to be someone he needed. He wanted to have Cheon Sejoo and love him without reservation. So Sejin silently waited for him to return.

However, he did not return home for a week.

“I can’t go in for a while.” After that message, Cheon Sejoo didn’t contact him. He was someone who always checked messages, no matter how busy he was, so at first, Sejin was suddenly afraid. What if something had happened to him too?

And so, three days, four days, finally a week. The longer the days Cheon Sejoo didn’t return stretched, the more Sejin’s mood began to plummet into despair.

After Kim Hyunkyung’s death, Sejin’s unsettled heart had trapped him in immense anxiety. Because of this, he somehow felt abandoned by him. Old memories, like a trauma, resurfaced. Like Kwon Yongbeom, who had hit him and his mother and left home never to return, what if Cheon Sejoo also left like this and never came back? Sejin was engulfed in endless insecurity.

Sejin knew what kind of person Cheon Sejoo was, and he also knew that he wouldn’t act so irresponsibly, but he couldn’t help it. Having been abandoned by his father, his uncle, his homeroom teacher, and countless other irresponsible men, it was a scenario Sejin couldn’t help but imagine out of habit.

You brought me here. You can’t do this now. You can’t leave me so irresponsibly. You shouldn’t…

Silently shedding tears, Sejin got up after a long time. He planned to leave the house and search for Cheon Sejoo. He went into the room, put on Cheon Sejoo’s coat, and came out. But just as he was about to head to the entrance, grabbing his phone from the sofa, something bumped his foot. He looked down and belatedly found a box placed beside the table, his expression hardening.

It was a box containing the items his mother had used at the hospital. He had cleaned the entire house, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch that box, so he had just moved it aside. Now, as it was kicked by Sejin’s foot, an envelope slipped out.

On the yellow envelope, he saw the words “Shinsa Capital.” Realizing it was the loan document that had pushed his mother into Ihwagak, Sejin reached out as if possessed. Questions that had faintly lingered in his mind suddenly manifested strongly, and he tore open the sealed document.

The document was quite thick, with several pages. At the very top was the loan agreement where Kwon Yongbeom had used Kim Hyunkyung as a guarantor. Seeing Kwon Yongbeom’s name on the first page, Sejin gritted his teeth and swallowed the rising indignation. He didn’t want to encounter even a trace of a man who deserved to be torn to shreds.

Past the tiny print of the loan terms, there was a section for signatures. Kwon Yongbeom had put his thumbprint, and in the guarantor section, Kim Hyunkyung’s official seal, stolen by Kwon Yongbeom, was stamped. The address written on the document was not Sejin’s home address. Kwon Yongbeom had written a different address, considering that Kim Hyunkyung might discover the loan. Since he had secretly returned her seal to its original place after using it, she hadn’t known about the loan until the maturity date passed and foreclosure began.

Sejin felt his blood boil and tore the loan document to shreds. The remaining debt was no longer his concern.

The document behind it was the repayment history. Sejin examined the contents with a cold, hardened face. Kim Hyunkyung’s salary details and repayment history from the month she entered Ihwagak were neatly organized in a table. It seemed true that she could save money upon leaving, as part of her monthly salary was being deducted for a retirement savings plan.

It was proof that Kim Hyunkyung was alive, and proof that she had endured more diligently than anyone else. Sejin swallowed his surging emotions and scanned the details. Then, at some point, he felt a sense of incongruity and furrowed his brow.

There was no separate deduction from Kim Hyunkyung’s salary. That is, the amount she had spent using his card for clothes and transportation before receiving her salary from Cheon Sejoo in the autumn of the year before last was not charged. He had clearly said he would charge it…

Sejin wondered if it had perhaps been added to the loan amount, so he pieced together a torn part of the document and compared the figures. However, there was no increase in the principal or interest. It simply hadn’t been charged at all.

It was not difficult to understand what that meant. Sejin slowly turned the paper with trembling hands. With wide eyes, he examined the records of ten months he didn’t know about. Kim Hyunkyung’s salary always came in and was spent in similar amounts. Principal repayment, interest repayment, four major insurances, retirement savings. And… full repayment.

Looking down at those words, Sejin blinked blankly, unable to fully grasp their meaning. Full loan repayment, full interest repayment, early repayment fee paid. All three items were recorded on the same day. Realizing that it was August, the day his mother collapsed, Sejin bit his lip.

While Kim Hyunkyung was receiving treatment, the hospital bills had been partially settled several times, but that was after August, the month she was hospitalized. Sejin had understood that the treatment and hospitalization costs came from Ihwagak.

However, if the phrase “full loan repayment” was correct, Kim Hyunkyung would no longer have been an employee of Ihwagak after the day she collapsed, so it didn’t make sense for them to support her hospital bills. Even Sejin, who was ignorant of worldly affairs, knew that no company would ever pay for a retired employee’s hospital bills.

Something must be wrong. This didn’t make sense.

Sejin suddenly erased the face that flashed before his eyes and turned around, holding the document. He needed confirmation. He picked up the phone on the island bar and dialed the number written at the bottom of the document.

After a few rings, the other party answered. “Yes, this is the Shinsa Capital Repayment Support Team. How can I help you?” To the mechanical tone, Sejin opened his mouth with a trembling voice.

“I just… wanted to ask something.”

“Yes, please tell me.”

“My mother… she had a debt here, and someone… paid it off.”

“Excuse me? Are you saying you repaid it yourself?”

The employee didn’t understand Sejin’s words at once and asked again. Even Sejin couldn’t comprehend what had happened, so he stammered an explanation of the situation.

“No. In the table that says repayment history… it says full loan repayment, but something seems wrong…”

“Hmm… Could you tell me the borrower’s name and date of birth? I’ll check for you.”

“My mother wasn’t the borrower, but the guarantor…”

“Yes, yes, just a moment. Then please tell me the guarantor’s name.”

Sejin stammered Kim Hyunkyung’s name and date of birth. The employee muttered something like there shouldn’t be such a thing but that she would check anyway, then put the phone down, telling him to wait a moment. The distant sound of keyboard clicks echoed. Sejin waited, standing blankly. And a moment later, the counselor spoke in a bright voice.

“Ah, you’re right? It’s not in Kim Hyunkyung’s name, but the full amount was repaid in August under Cheon Sejoo’s name. …You know him, right? Just in case it was a wrong transfer.”

The moment he heard that name, he couldn’t think of anything. Sejin froze, holding the phone. Cheon Sejoo, why. Why did you… A hot sensation seemed to spread through his chest. Sejin couldn’t possibly define this emotion. He just stared blankly into space, his mouth shut in disbelief.

The counselor called Sejin several times. “Hello, hello, customer.” After checking several times, she seemed to think the call had been disconnected and sighed softly, about to hang up. Sejin belatedly opened his mouth.

“…Then, perhaps?”

“Yes, do you have any more questions?”

“My mother worked at Ihwagak after she incurred the debt… Do they, by any chance… pay the hospital bills for retired employees?”

That couldn’t be. Even while thinking that, Sejin asked for confirmation. The employee couldn’t answer immediately. She mumbled, “I don’t know about that,” then asked him to wait a moment and posed the question to someone else. Low voices exchanged in conversation. Soon, she picked up the receiver again and spoke. Her clearer voice drove the wedge of certainty into Sejin’s suspicions.

“No, they said there’s no such policy. Do you have any more questions?”

The phone slipped from his hand. The powerless machine slid and crashed somewhere on the floor.

His heart pounded. Heat rose through his entire body, and his eyes welled up. The fact that he had received everything from Cheon Sejoo, from the very beginning until now, deeply permeated his heart. Sejin realized it far too late.

Cheon Sejoo’s cold voice echoed in his mind.

‘How dare you use a term like “a person like you” when you don’t know what I might do to your mother.’

What kind of person had Sejin thought Cheon Sejoo was when he heard those words? Sejin had thought he was the worst kind of trash in the world. But now that he thought about it, Cheon Sejoo had never once acted for himself.

Threatening him fiercely, mentioning his mother, almost coercing him into his house when he threatened to sleep on the streets, forcing him to buy and wear clothes saying he would charge for them, giving him money and making him study while talking about a housekeeper when Sejin tried to do a part-time job—all of it… all of it was for him…

“Ah…”

With a gasp, Sejin buried his face in his hands.