Episode 232
Jaeheon Lee woke up from a late night sleep and blinked his eyes slowly.
“… … .”
Perhaps because he was curled up while sleeping, his vision was not focused on the ceiling but on the side table next to him. A dried and withered rose flower entered Jaeheon Lee’s eyes.
“…water….”
You didn’t change it.
‘… Even though I didn’t change the water, it dried up like that.’
Maybe the room was dry.
Boosu, Lee Jae-heon got up from his seat and headed to the kitchen with a vase. He threw away the cloudy water that looked like it had green algae in it, washed the dirty vase, and placed it on the drying rack. He thought about throwing away the withered flowers, but decided not to because the colors were still pretty. He could use them as decoration.
I used scissors to cut off the stems that seemed too long, and threw away the flowers that were too tattered and unsightly. I took out the ribbons that were left over from unwrapping the bouquet and tied the dried flowers together, and it turned out to be a pretty nice decoration.
“Where should I put it?”
In the end, the flowers that had become dried flowers by accident ended up decorating the center of the table. They looked quite presentable when placed in a nice little vase.
Jaeheon Lee, who had finished a simple task, looked at his watch.
“… I slept a little too long.”
The current time is 3:17 p.m. Lee Jae-heon decided to take it easy since he had taken sick leave, even though he had never slept in so late. He always needed more sleep, and now that there was no one to criticize him for sleeping in late, he thought it was okay.
Should I eat? I had no appetite. Should I put on a movie? I had no interest. Should I clean up the house? I had no energy. It’s not that there was nothing I had to do, but there wasn’t anything I had to do right away, and there was no one urging me to go outside and take a walk.
Lee Jae-heon put one leg up on the dining chair, hugged it, and rested his chin on it.
“… … .”
After ten minutes, Jaeheon Lee, who had been quiet for a while, muttered softly in a voice that still had some sleepiness left.
“… Let’s wash.”
It was almost like a desperate attempt to do something.
Lee Jae-heon washed himself in the shower booth in a corner of the spacious bathroom and went into the bathtub that was filled with water in advance. The bathtub, which was made too big for vanity, had plenty of room left even after Lee Jae-heon completely got into it. The water was as cold as ice, but he actually liked it that way.
The water in the bathtub turned red.
“…It’s cool.”
More than the hot sensation of the wounds all over my body, as if they were on fire, a pleasant coolness enveloped my entire body. However, the pain and pleasure only lasted for a moment, and soon I became numb again.
I felt dull, as if my limbs and brain had been anesthetized.
“… … .”
My head is buzzing.
Cold sweat flowed down his calm face, and his forehead felt hot. The red blood that slowly spread through the water seemed to dye the pure white bathtub. He had a feeling that his physical condition was not normal, but the problem was that he didn’t care much.
I feel dizzy… .
“… It’s funny.”
With a face devoid of a smile, he muttered in the cold water.
“What was the first murder?”
Lee Jae-heon made an objective judgment. In his previous life, he killed people as easily as eating, but in his current life, he has never done so, so he is acting so dull because of his soft mind. He said that his body, which has never been in so much pain in reality, is suffering.
Suddenly, it became funny and I let out a low laugh.
“Oh, if it was a company, it would have been a mess….”
Lee Jae-heon, the old-fashioned manager, is a bit of a jokester. And strictly speaking, he was more like trying to joke around because he liked seeing other employees getting annoyed by his behavior, and he liked the fact that his boss was trying to take care of him in that way.
‘Lack of affection.’
Maybe that was true.
Before recalling his past life, Lee Jae-heon definitely enjoyed someone’s attention. He disliked people, but he enjoyed the gaze and touch of people. Although he didn’t realize it himself, Lee Jae-hyung’s assessment may have been right.
That’s why in the Lee family, where there was no one to listen to their cries, they would get angry and not joke around. Why would they do that when there was no one to worry about them, even if they had to force themselves to?
“…under….”
Slap.
Lee Jae-heon exhaled as he came out of the bathtub.
His thoughts were getting slower and his body was getting stiffer, and he thought that maybe he was losing a lot of blood, but it wasn’t a bad feeling, even if it wasn’t good. The dulled mind and the smell of blood that was stinging his nose reminded him of his past life. He felt very comfortable.
I had a place to set foot….
“… … .”
In the mirror that took up one wall of the bathroom, I saw Lee Jae-heon soaking in the bathtub. It was his face and body from his previous life. When I waved my hand once, he completely copied it, and I suddenly had the illusion that I had returned to the world of my previous life.
“Are you going to take medicine?”
As I muttered softly, the face of my past life looked at me and laughed.
When that mean face disappeared, something else appeared. It was something else.
“… … .”
It was like a lump of mud.
If someone were to eat a shadow and vomit it out, would it look like such a slimy thing? The shape that swayed like a mirage was black and transparent, and it was one-dimensional without any sense of three-dimensionality. It had the talent of making people feel uncomfortable just by looking at it.
However, it was in human form.
“… Huh.”
The face is too blurry to be recognized, but Lee Jae-heon knows who it is imitating. No, maybe it’s him.
“Isn’t this too much?”
As he smiled faintly, a woman’s figure approached him.
She walked lightly with her beautiful bare feet, pushed her long hair back, gently bent her knees, entered the bloody bathtub, and stretched out her long, pretty arms… .
“I thought you guys were born a little later.”
Jaeheon Lee grabbed my hand that was pointing at my face.
“Well, now that I think about it, what does the original novel have to do with it?… I guess I had a hard time. It takes 8 hours to get from here to Busan, round trip. How much harder must it have been for me, after all, when I came here bleeding?”
“… … .”
“Were you originally a monster created from the dregs of the minds of the survivors of the other world? I thought you would reflect the characters in the novels, like the large raccoon-like monsters or crustaceans… or ghost stories. Is there a story about a monster that resembles a person so much? Well, it could be something like this. It could be… .”
I thought about it for a moment. Should I be angry at this monster that imitated the person I loved, or… .
“You created all of this too.”
He gently pulled the hand he had been holding and placed it on my cheek.
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“Then I don’t think there’s any need to get angry.”
“… … .”
“Honey, I’m so tired.”
He smiled faintly, his face showing no signs of fatigue at all, and hugged the monster to his arms.
It was true that the setting that no one other than the survivor who created the monster could have any influence on it was true, and even though the translucent monster moved in the water, the only ripples that remained above the water were Lee Jae-heon’s. If it wasn’t for him, this monster was nothing more than an illusion.
Lee Jae-heon smiled faintly.
“I have a question.”
“… … .”
“If I die in reality, will I regress?”
As he muttered, the monster in the shape of a woman grabbed his face with both hands as if stroking it. Lee Jae-heon burst into a rare burst of laughter because the actions were exactly like someone he knew.
It was a laugh that came from genuine joy.
It hurt so much.
“I feel like I’m going to die.”
Lee Jae-heon now admitted that he was not in his right mind. If he had really come to his senses, he would have checked the information he had investigated again right after waking up, he would not have washed himself with cold water while he was feverishly hot, and he would not have gotten into a bathtub full of water with his body dripping with blood.
And I wouldn’t have been so happy about a monster that only resembled my wife from my previous life.
“Seriously, I feel like I’m going to die like this….”
Still, he felt good now.
It was clear that he was going crazy.
* * *
The news that Vice President Lee Jae-heon took sick leave on Monday caused quite a stir.
“… The manager?”
“Is this true? Did you really take sick leave?”
If it were anyone else, it would be understandable, but if it was Manager Lee Jae-heon who took sick leave, it was a different story.
In the first place, wasn’t he the kind of person who would come to work early because he wanted his employees to? Unlike ordinary employees who would shudder and hate going to work, Lee Jae-heon would come to work at dawn even if there was nothing going on. It’s no exaggeration to say that he lives for the pleasure of nagging, but he took sick leave?
Here, the employees’ reactions were largely divided into two.
“Hey… Where did you go to play? What about sick leave? He was in good health until last week…”
“I’m going to mess up my work again. Manager Lee Jae-heon is really a bad person, isn’t he? He already has a lot to do.”
“Don’t we have any paperwork due by this Monday? And the approval?”
First of all, I’m so pissed because it’s obvious that he faked being sick and went out to play alone.
“… You’re really on sick leave? I wonder if you’re really sick.”
“Right? No matter how sick he was, he never went home and just kept joking around in the office….”
“Are you dying from a terminal illness? You’ve been acting so dirty, I knew this day would come someday.”
Second, he was a person who went to work even though he thought he would die soon, so he got a terminal illness.
The common denominator among them was that no one was concerned about the safety of Chief Lee Jae-heon. If it was all karma, then it was karma… but the feelings of the so-called chicks who saw that could not help but be subtle.
“…I feel strange.”
“me too….”
“so do i.”
The survivors of the Ohseong Enterprises gathered together at lunchtime, each munching on lunch boxes or sandwiches delivered from their preferred locations, and recalling the reactions of Manager Lee Jae-heon when he did not show up for work.
“I understand because I’ve actually been through it myself, but I strangely feel aggrieved.”
Kwon Yeon-hee nodded vigorously at what he said while stirring the bulgogi in the lunch box.
“Even if I think, ‘Does he deserve to be cursed at that much?’, I end up agreeing with him and thinking, ‘He did deserve to be cursed at that much.’ But then I think, ‘No matter what, you shouldn’t curse at someone who’s sick.’ Then I understand again… I can’t escape from this cycle of thinking.”
“In the meantime, the manager isn’t answering the phone again.”
Jeong In-ho responded with a smile to Noh Yeon-seok’s words.
“I see, what are you trying to do next?”
When all the survivors gathered together in the past, the survivors of Oseong Corporation, including Jeong In-ho, invited Lee Jae-heon to our group chat. At first, Lee Jae-heon was reluctant, but he seemed to realize his mistake on the first day he escaped from the other world, and he started reporting his survival every morning.
But apart from that, from the weekend until today, Monday, Lee Jae-heon did not receive any contact, including phone calls or text messages.
“… … .”
Jeong In-ho, who briefly recalled Detective Hong Kyung-jun’s phone number, quickly shook his head.
‘It’s a bit strange to be this worried about a man in his forties.’
Unlike the other world, where he had no choice but to cling to people, reality gave Jeong In-ho enough leeway to think calmly as usual. He had no reason not to feel at ease as he gradually became accustomed to the mannequin monsters that suddenly appeared in the mirror. I don’t know about the other survivors, but at least Jeong In-ho was like that.
When he thought about it, no matter how unattractive Lee Jae-heon was, worrying about something like this was not only rude, but also excessive.
‘There’s no guarantee that Detective Hong Kyung-jun knows Lee Jae-heon’s private number.’
At the last survivor meeting, they seemed pretty close, so I thought they had met up separately often, but that didn’t mean they knew his personal number. It was better to just keep quiet than to ask Hong Kyung-joon, who was already awkward with me for some reason, about Lee Jae-heon’s condition.
“… Since we’ll meet again on Tuesday anyway, you can just ask what happened then.”
“Well… I think he’s more likely to be doing something on his own rather than being really sick. He’s been ignoring my calls for more than a day or two.”
“Haha, I bet you’re busy too, sir.”
I didn’t want to be swayed by Lee Jae-heon’s crazy antics even in reality.
He was also starting to get tired of worrying about when he might fall into the other world again. The survivors gradually began to feel like they were dreaming about what had happened in the other world, and each of them was returning to their former selves. As Seo Jang-hwa had said before, all of the memories and achievements they had accumulated were in reality, so Jeong In-ho wanted to maintain the strange peace he had now.
And the next day after thinking that, he was left speechless at the sight of Lee Jae-heon bleeding profusely from his nose.
“… … .”
“… Manager?”
Blood that I’ve been sick of seeing in the other world.
A chill ran down Jeong In-ho’s spine at the unknown ominousness.
