My breath catches. The space is tiny. A few square meters, no more.

Whoo. Whoo.

Cold wind shoves its way in through the gaps around the window. A rooftop room. Three million won down, three hundred thousand a month.

Even in Gangnam you could find one this cheap.

I’d picked it for how close it was to school.

My parents had moved out to Sokcho when Dad’s work transferred him.

Left alone in Seoul, I’d chosen to keep my own place. Sunlight comes through the window and the room is bright with it.

One desk, a small fridge, old clothes hanging on a rack……

“…… Wh-what?”

I can’t believe what I’m looking at.

I came home drunk last night, and home was a semi-basement room.

But I’ve opened my eyes here. In the rooftop room.

I bit down on my lip.

“……!!”

It really hurts. Sharp, and completely real.

“…….”

My head is empty.

Why am I lying here in this rooftop room? It makes no sense.

The space in front of me is strange and familiar at the same time.

Everything sits exactly where it sat when I lived here.

“Regression?”

One impossible word goes through my head. Side effect of reading too many fantasy novels?

Or the backfire from picturing film plots too often?

I never believed for a second that a thing like this could happen.

I’m the man who dismissed every regression story out of hand.

Every time I came across one I laughed at how ridiculous it was.

Anybody can picture the moment of regression.

And that unbelievable thing has happened to me?

“This is……”

Yesterday was a rotten day I’d have given anything to overturn.

And the very next morning I wake into something else entirely.

“Granny??”

Sleep deep and something good will happen.

The strange granny’s last words came back all at once.

Nothing else explains it.

She said it plainly. Sleep deep, and something good would happen.

But the passbook isn’t in my hand.

And neither the place nor the time connects to yesterday at all.

“But…… is this real?”

It does seem I’ve come back to my high school days.

I look down at this scrawny body, all height and no muscle……

Everything I can feel says it’s alive.

The small rooftop room. The dingy smell that soaked into my high school years. The shabbiness of it.

Smack!

I hit my own cheek with my palm again.

“……Ow.”

That settles it.

I swung hard enough to leave a handprint. The spot burns and stings.

“Seriously……. This?”

There’s no putting what I feel into words. I want to shout.

Good or bad — I can’t form a thought either way.

It’s like a dream I can’t believe.

“Hoooooo……”

I drew a deep breath first and steadied myself.

A few measured breaths, and the heart hammering out of all control began to settle.

“Not a dream…… this is real, then?”

I grabbed my phone and checked the date.

The phone is the old thing I carried around in high school. That very one.

May 5, 2022. 5:05 p.m.

The time is not ordinary.

“This is insane.”

The fact of it frightens me, and a chill goes through.

Every sensation in me is proof this is real.

The regressor story. A stock premise in every kind of fiction there is.

I never knew it was possible in reality. And I never dreamed I’d be the one it happened to.

Those protagonists in the stories. They regress and adapt to it immediately——

I’m not quite there.

“They say a life is one night’s dream, but this is far too vivid……”

The memories up to yesterday are still there, still filling my head, still sharp.

It is absolutely not a dream.

Even what those traitors did is alive and whole, lodged in my chest like a blade.

And every one of those memories is the future.

“Dad……”

The word came out before I knew I was saying it.

Dad had died a few days before my high school graduation.

He’d been driving home from a business trip when a dump truck ran a light. He died at the scene.

I hadn’t been able to say the word easily since.

I’d had no power at all back then. The police pushed it through as a straightforward accident.

The driver said he’d fallen asleep at the wheel, and they took him into custody.

But something about it had never smelled right, and I could never get clear of that.

There is something in Dad’s death the family doesn’t know.

I was never able to shake it.

Clang, clang.

A loud knock, right then.

And then the sound of the rooftop room’s steel door swinging open.

“……??”

There’s nobody who would come here.

May 5, 2022. Children’s Day.

“Is Ha Tae-ung-nim at home?”

A man’s voice. Middle-aged, on the older side.

Ha Tae-ung-nim?

That isn’t the landlord, who never stood on ceremony in his life.

“Who is it?”

I went out. The school tracksuit I’d been lounging in feels familiar and strange at the same time.

Clunk.

I opened the steel door.

A man is standing there in a crisp dark grey suit, mid-fifties by the look of him.

Grey runs through his hair, and a stubborn square jaw gives him a hard face.

He’s leaning on a cane. One leg is giving him trouble.

This is a rooftop room on the fourth floor. The climb had clearly cost him.

“Ha Tae-ung-ssi?”

“Yes. I’m Ha Tae-ung.”

Shff.

The man holds out a business card.

Jeongryul Law Firm. Managing Attorney, Kim Jeongryul.

A lawyer? What does he want with me?

If this really is regression, I’m a high schooler right now.

I search back through the old timeline. No lawyer at this point. Not one.

“My apologies for the delay.”

He bowed, courteous about it. Out of nowhere?

“……??”

Caught off guard, I bowed back. I can’t follow any of this.

“I’ve come to execute the will of the late Madam Han Okja.”

What? The late Han Okja?

“What? Attorney Kim went to see him?”

“Yes, Director.”

“…… Was the warning too soft? Heh heh.”

A forty-story building in Samseong-dong.

The top floor of it.

A cold-faced man in his early fifties, a director by title, bit down on a sneer.

“Serious injury. Twenty-four weeks to heal.”

“That’s exactly my point. Man nearly dies, survives it, and he ought to be keeping his head down. Why is he making noise?”

“Shall I handle it?”

“Leave it. Once he’s met the kid, it’s finished. Attorney Kim came out of the prosecution service. He isn’t stupid.”

“Shall we collect it?”

“How much did you say it was?”

“A billion won.”

“…… My mother and her generosity. Leaving an inheritance to a grandson whose face she never once saw. Heh heh.”

He was laughing, but his eyes had gone past cold. There was killing in them.

Tap, tap.

His gaze drifted, thinking. He kept striking the desk with the middle finger of his right hand, beating out a rhythm on it.

The secretary standing in front of the desk kept his mouth shut and made no sound at all. One word from the man, right now, and a life would be disposed of.

“Mother. I’ll grant you this one. You came to me in a dream last night, after all.”

He was speaking of a mother years dead.

The dream had come the previous night. Not once since she died had she appeared to him.

In it she thundered at him that if he put his filthy hands on the youngest grandson even one time, she would bring fire down on his head.

She hadn’t trusted him in life either. She’d nagged at him every day there was.

So he’d hurried a man onto it.

It was his mother’s refusal to believe in him that had bent him crooked from childhood.

Toward the youngest she had been fiercely devoted. Though he’d been tangled up in one thing and another, and hadn’t been there when she died.

“Then……”

“Watch him. That kind of pocket change, in a kid’s hands — what’s it going to amount to?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Right — what did you say that one’s doing?”

“Living quietly in Sokcho.”

“Suspicious. He isn’t the type to live that quietly……”

“Sir? But there’s nothing at all——”

“He is not a stupid man.”

Tap, tap.

He beat at the desk again.

“Keep a close watch. That one……. He’s going to cause trouble. I know it.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Anyway. Tonight’s business — everything’s arranged?”

“CEO Kang says he’s arranged exactly the person you asked for.”

“He’d better have. The advertising money isn’t small. Heh heh heh.”

Something dark moved through the cold eyes. He looked like a wildcat with prey set down in front of it.

“Clear my afternoon. I’m going to the sauna.”

“Yes, sir!”

Small matters, and important ones, roughly settled. He never gave much thought to business once it was finished.

There was one thing he didn’t know.

How completely this decision was going to change the future.

(End of Chapter 3)