The day my skull got smashed in a traffic accident was a day in July of 2020.

I was thirty-two.

It was the start of that sad age when your male hormones take a slap in the face from stress and female hormones, and you lose even your morning tent.

But now…

“A h-high schooler?”

I could see textbooks and workbooks jammed into the desk.

A beat-up bag and a summer uniform came into view too.

It overlapped with my memories of the past.

The dingy habitat of the adolescent male.

A ruin left over from the hardships I had howled through alone in puberty.

Fragments that had been sprawled out napping in a corner of the room of memories came back to me.

“Whoa… Wh-what the hell is this!”

I shot to my feet.

I saw it and still couldn’t believe it.

But the sensations were far too vivid.

The scratchy bedsheet and the stale reek of male funk soaking the air said my five senses were working fine.

My hand went to my face on its own.

“Ow!”

I pinched my cheek hard and a sharp pain rushed in.

The sting was fierce enough to make a Cheongyang pepper weep.

“Un… real!”

The hands and feet I could see were as firm as they had been back in high school.

Exactly the way I remembered myself as a kid.

High school, 2006, which had survived only in old photographs.

My whole body shook.

My brain tangled itself up over a reality I couldn’t believe.

“So how old am I right now?”

It was a past I’d forgotten, so I counted out my age on trembling fingers.

“Eighteen!”

Eighteen. The legendary age when nothing in the world scares you.

“Th-this isn’t a dream, right?”

A shiver ran through me.

A second wave of shock, more than I could handle, rolled over me.

“So the old man wasn’t full of it?”

Everything was too sharp for this to be some prophetic dream about a future I’d already lived.

Even the misery of getting hammered on my first blind date in college and humiliating myself completely — all of it played back.

The memory of getting hazed by a senior in the army and beaten behind the latrines was just as vivid.

The lonely grief of a man with no job offer at his college graduation came back too.

The joy of my first paycheck at my first job!

Love that made my chest shake!

Thirty-two years of joy and sorrow crossing each other countless times swept through my head.

“What the hell is real!”

And yet, when I tried to believe in this moment, common sense smacked me across the face.

This was the kind of event that only exists in novels and movies.

How could a person die and then regress into the past?

Smack!

“Agh!”

I slapped my cheek again to make sure, and a thick pain rushed in.

Ah. That hurts.

It wasn’t a lie.

“Damn. Did I r-really win the regression lottery?”

My body shook, hard.

Like a magnitude nine earthquake.

I swayed on my feet.

It was a reality I simply could not believe.

“So does that mean I get to go back to school?”

High school surfaced automatically out of my stored memory.

My past life(?) — no, my previous life — vivid as watching a movie!

I had coasted through high school.

“Ughhh…”

My face went hot and red.

Even by my own reckoning, that was the stretch where I walked, faithfully and step by step, the perfectly ordinary loser’s premium-grade dead-end tech tree.

I did everything halfway and let the time go by.

At school I spent most of my time passing novels around with the other kids, or sleeping.

Smartphones hadn’t spread yet back then.

When class let out I ran to the PC room and hammered StarCraft.

At home I used puberty as an excuse and acted out.

Instead of exam prep books I borrowed novels and snickered my way through them.

I wasn’t stupid.

Built on the fundamentals I’d ground out in middle school, I held down exactly the middle of the class at a good local high school.

I sold off every dream and every scrap of foresight about my future for game money and books.

“Seriously… how embarrassing.”

Right now, the embarrassment was mine alone to carry.

With a shabby life like that tamped down as the foundation, the next course was obvious.

“But the entrance exam, again—!”

The moment I thought about the exam, memory summoned everything up.

“Uh! Uh!! Uhhhh!!!”

A scream jumped out of me.

I clapped a hand over my mouth and shut it down.

I-I remember all of it!

What the hell was I supposed to do with this?

Every question on the entrance exam came up in my head.

During my repeat year I had worked through all of those questions out of sheer regret.

The essay questions from each university were in there too.

It was a past full of regret, so I had thrashed against it.

The questions were already behind me, but I solved them with everything I had.

“The b-bar exam too… I remember it!”

While studying for the bar I had memorized the old exam questions endlessly.

Not just the first round — the second round questions too.

Knowing the questions that have already been asked is the foundation of all studying.

If I took the exam next year I could take the top score.

Damn it. This isn’t a dream, right?

I calmed my shaking heart and hands.

It definitely wasn’t a dream.

Questions from every year’s exams floated around inside my head.

I had become a walking bar exam question-setter.

“That’s right! I d-did stocks too!”

When I worked at the securities firm I fell into the world of stocks.

I was in the IT department, so after the market closed I looked at charts more times than I could count.

A systems error at a brokerage could decide whether the company lived or died.

Even so, I handled stocks and a range of other products.

To get hired on permanently I studied for the three financial licenses — securities, funds, and derivatives investment adviser.

I prepped on KOSPI and KOSDAQ listings, foreign equities, index futures, interest-rate futures, currency futures and commodity futures, and on top of that options derivatives and FX margin trading.

In my own way I was diligent about it, or at least I called it studying, all so I could make permanent staff.

Back home in my rooftop room I dug into charts of every kind, day after countless day.

Whatever else you say about the job, the foundation of a securities man is the chart.

I even printed price charts and used them as wallpaper on my walls.

It was small money, but I tried the stocks the firm’s people recommended.

I made a decent amount, then got caught in a pump-and-dump and blew up completely.

It was the hardest I ever worked in my life.

“Why me, of all people…”

This wasn’t a lottery ticket. This was about ten rollovers of the jackpot stacked on top of each other.

I believed every word the old man had said about rubbing away at the Mirror of Heaven’s Reversal.

I had thought regression into the past was invented fiction, possible only in novels. It had turned real.

I lifted my head and looked around my room again.

“And what’s this present the old man threw in as a bonus?”

Fwip!

The words were barely out of my mouth when a fierce light burst in midair.

Agh! Too bright!

An act of eyeball terrorism had occurred.

And then…

“Sit in the lotus position. I will now transmit to you the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Mind Art (太極五行兩意心法).” (TL Note: a mind art is the internal-energy discipline underneath a martial style; taegeuk is the yin-yang absolute of the Korean flag, and the five elements are the classical Eastern set — wood, fire, earth, metal, water.)

Wh-what?

My vision went milky, and then all at once an adept with a fluttering white beard was sitting in front of me.

Hwooooosh.

Wind swirled, and in an instant I was on top of an enormous rock mountain.

The sun was just coming up.

Pure white clouds hung below the peak, pouring off mystery.

It looked like a world where immortals ran around playing.

“Who are you? Where is this?”

The scenery had changed fast enough to make a ghost feel slow.

On top of the absurdity of a regression, now I was being moved through space.

“Me? Director of Immortal Healthcare. Divine Lord Cheollyong.”

“What? D-Director of Immortal Healthcare?”

My mind went blank.

Immortal Healthcare was a line of work I had never heard of.

“Let’s make this quick. This is illegal tutoring — if I get caught they’ll suspend my business!”

“Kuh!”

I had no idea what kind of game this was.

Immortal Healthcare, illegal tutoring, Divine Lord Cheollyong — every one of those words was foreign to me.

“Your frame is top grade… so why is your body this soaked in turbid energy?”

Divine Lord Cheollyong looked me over and scowled.

“What? My frame is good?”

It was the first I’d heard of it.

“Quit the porn. It rots your bones.”

“…”

Well, damn. He went straight for the core, right from the start.

My face burned.

“Go easy on the ramen. It rots your blood.”

That was nonsense.

In a harsh world with no money in it, what exactly is a jobless man supposed to live on?

“Close your eyes. Let’s get this over with, all right?”

The healthcare director glanced around him.

We were on a mountaintop with nothing in sight, and he was still being careful.

“Isn’t it dangerous, doing this kind of thing in a rush?”

I didn’t want to blow a life I had died and been reborn into all in one shot.

“You don’t know the three elements of cram tutoring? Speed! Accuracy! The essentials!”

“Ah!”

What was that? Why did that piece of nonsense make sense to me?

Without meaning to, I settled into the lotus position.

“So you’ve seen a thing or two?”

Divine Lord Cheollyong put on a look that said he found me laughable.

“It shows up in martial arts movies and novels.”

“Use a knockoff and you’ll wreck yourself for good.”

Ah! Knockoffs!

For a second I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

If he was the director of Immortal Healthcare, he was the genuine line, no question about it.

“Beginning now.”

With the word, I felt the palm of the self-styled Divine Lord Cheollyong against my back.

“I’ll run you one good clean circuit — start at the Gate of Life, up through the Hundred Convergences and the Fore-Crown, and around to the Conception Vessel. After the Great Circulation, you feed yourself.” (TL Note: these are points and channels on the body’s energy map as Korean and Chinese medicine chart it; the Great Circulation is the complete loop through them, the milestone that opens internal training.)

“How?”

“Punk! There’s a way. All right, here we go.”

Rrrrrrrumble.

What is this? Why am I hearing waves coming off my own back!!!

(End of Chapter 2)