“Ah…”

Dazed. That must be the word people use for a moment like this.

Sweat ran down my whole body.

And along with it, a sour, filthy broth seeped out of me.

“It wasn’t a lie. Wow. Seriously…”

I had nothing to say.

I had actually learned the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Mind Art.

Illegal tutoring from the director of Immortal Healthcare had popped open the pressure points down my back and across my front.

I thought I was going to die.

I got to taste, through my pressure points, what it feels like to have a fat roll of gimbap forced into a small mouth.

My blood vessels swelled up like they would burst, but Divine Lord Cheollyong didn’t stop.

When the tears and snot from the pain were blinding me, he spoke.

The more it hurts, he said, the faster you grow.

He wasn’t the director of a healthcare clinic. He was the director of a back-alley operation, no question about it.

He pinched my mute point so I couldn’t even speak, and I spent days on end up there.

But the effect was maxed out.

Yellow fluid poured out of every part of me.

Every time the Lesser Circulation went around, my blood vessels grew firmer and wider.

My frame was good, but I’d been living in such a rotten world that my body had rotted right along with it, in the spirit of shared growth.

The moment that agonizing Lesser Circulation finished, I opened my eyes.

And there was the inside of my room.

I had clearly watched the sun rise and set several times over, and yet no time had passed at all.

“Does this make sense? It doesn’t, right?”

I let out a sigh of emptiness in a room with nobody in it.

Nobody answered.

What I did have, as the result of the Lesser Circulation, was a faint inner core sitting low in my belly.

The cotton T-shirt I had on was soaked through with yellow fluid.

Dream and reality were one and the same.

The method for running the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Mind Art was branded into my head.

On top of that, he had thrown in a martial art called the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Fist, on the house.

Only someone running the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Mind Art could use it, he said.

Train it, he said, and I would be able to use not just my fists but any weapon that came into my hands, freely.

None of it was ordinary, so I asked.

Where was he from?

At that, Divine Lord Cheollyong grinned and asked me a question back.

Didn’t anything come to mind when I heard taegeuk?

When all I did was blink at him, he struck a ridiculous pose and told me, quietly.

“Former Sect Master of the Wudang Sect, and Lord of the Murim Alliance, who fought the Master of the Demonic Cult for four days and three nights and put him in the ground, and on top of that took the grand prize at the 3,233rd Jade Emperor Cup for Ascension to Immortality? Oh, come on…”

It was a résumé that sounded like a lie, and not one line of it had been verified.

But his skill was real.

High-priced illegal tutoring worked outstandingly well.

This must be why the expensive tutors go over so big in Gangnam.

“Ugh. Is this all the accumulated filth that was inside me?”

I frowned at the reeking fluid smeared over my white T-shirt and sweatpants.

Even washed in bleach they’d never be more than rags.

I got up.

This world was riddled with nonsense, but it felt one hundred percent real.

Even if it was a dream, I’d take it.

Just the fact that I had regressed felt like owning the whole world.

“Poverty really is papered right over these walls.”

It was the outer room, the last word in shabbiness, that the family had assigned me the day I started middle school.

This room under a rusted tin roof, boiling in summer and growing icicles in winter.

One old computer, and the four-meg KT internet line my father had installed so I could watch lectures online, came into view.

This was farm country, not the city, so the internet came in over the phone line.

And it had only been put in a month earlier.

“A Celeron 500, 64 megs of RAM, 4 megs of graphics, a 10-gig hard drive, and a pirated copy of Windows 98 and Hangul 97… Haa. A relic out of the Gojoseon era…”

The stored memory data came up on its own.

The monitor was a bulging seventeen-inch.

It was the most valuable thing I owned.

Looking at the computer made it feel real again.

As the morning sun climbed, the room started to heat up.

School was out for the summer, and there were no supplementary classes.

The union teachers on the staff had pushed back, and that year, for the first time, vacation supplementary classes were abolished.

“First things first. Wash up, then start.”

The grime on me was getting worse.

A rank smell filled the room.

I gathered up clothes and took hold of the door.

“Tae-san! Come eat your breakfast!”

And there was Mom’s voice from outside.

Mom…

It was a voice that warmed the chest no matter how long you had been hearing it, and hearing it again after dying and coming back was as welcome as anything could ever be.

She was the one who never gave up on me, even when I failed the bar exam and was drifting through Seoul.

Mom, who texted me morning and night to be sure I ate.

Mom, who said thank you just for letting her hear my voice.

Back when I was a kid on vacation, Mom’s voice had sounded like nagging.

When I had been up late with a novel or a game, mornings were a nuisance.

Not anymore.

“Yes, Mother. I’ll wash up and come.”

The outer quarters had a small bathroom of their own.

My twin sisters were in the main house and going through puberty, so my father had put it in.

“Food! Food! Mom’s food!”

Not the cup rice I’d made do with in Seoul, and not the meal-ticket food with its bottom-grade ingredients.

Mom-brand love-food, grown with care in the kitchen garden, was calling me.

The memory pooled saliva in my mouth.

I went into the shabby bathroom.

“Did I get taller? In that time?”

It was hard to believe, but I had come out of that illegal tutoring in the dream a little taller.

Maybe from the Great Circulation, my shoulders had broadened too.

The reflection in the bathroom window looked slightly unfamiliar.

“Ha! Look at that skin, tight as anything.”

Completely different from the thick, stale layer of flesh I had carried before I died.

Unlike back then, you poked it and the flesh sprang right back.

A body packed with premium-grade collagen drew a sound of admiration out of me.

It was my body and it didn’t feel like my body.

“Is all this the sludge from inside me?”

Yellow-black fluid clung thickly to that firm skin.

The efficacy of that illegal tutoring in the dream was off the charts.

Shwaaaaaaaa.

I threw cold water over myself and scrubbed hard with soap.

The stuff was so stubborn I had to soap up several times over.

The water was good and cold.

It came up from a well, cold enough to snap me awake.

And that was how I finished my bath — like a ceremony.

Then I put on a cotton T-shirt and shorts and headed for the main house.

“Ah! This is good.”

It was the head house of the clan, on ground my ancestors had settled ten generations back.

Mountains held the house in a generous embrace, behind it and on both sides.

The old tile-roofed house, easily more than a hundred years old, and the grass yard my mother tended with such care came into view.

Off to one side, the outdoor spigot where I used to duck my back under the water as a kid was waiting for me.

My father’s power tiller, parked beside the front gate, was a fond sight too.

The blazing sun, rippling with heat, said summer was at its peak.

“Haaah.”

I stretched my arms out long and drew in a breath.

This wasn’t the stale Seoul air packed with fine dust.

It felt like my lungs were being rinsed clean.

This is why people live in the country.

Soaked in a charm of my hometown I had never noticed before, I spaced out for a moment.

“Son. Are you sick?”

“Huh? No. The sunlight just feels good.”

“Come inside, quick. The soup’s getting cold.”

“Yes!”

There was Mom.

She looked worn out, as though she had already been to the orchard that morning.

And still she looked at me and smiled.

Mom, the prettiest of all the mothers back in elementary school.

Even now there was a refinement about her that didn’t belong to a country auntie.

“Mom!”

I called out to her, ran over, and hugged her hard.

Mom was startled by affection she never usually got.

“What’s this? A grown boy, acting all gross.”

Mom, shorter than me now, said it teasingly.

“You’re the prettiest woman in the world, Mom.”

My way of talking turned into a child’s all by itself.

“Pfft. So it isn’t only your dad whose eyes are broken.”

Mom, smiling with the lines at her eyes.

Mom, whose looks had once made her name in this village and across the township, had knelt before the years like everyone else.

But in my eyes she was the most beautiful woman alive.

“You’re not strong. Don’t push yourself so hard. However I look at it, Mom, you’re not built for the country.”

She had come out of the painting department at Hongin University, they said — the top art school in the country.

Mom, who they said had never pulled a single weed before she came to the country, was a farmer now.

Hard work put her in bed sick for days.

“Built for it, not built for it. There are farmers, and that’s why everybody gets to eat.”

“Wow! How did Dad get this lucky? You must have sold out the country in a past life, Mom. There’s no way Dad saved the world…” (TL Note: Koreans joke that a person with great fortune must have saved the country in a past life. Tae-san flips it — his mother’s luck in marrying his father must come from having sold it instead.)

“What? Ho ho ho ho. That’s right, I’m the princess of Nangnang who sold out her country.”

Mom broke into a wide, delighted laugh.

It had been a long time since I had heard Mom laugh that big, and it felt good.

Mom. From here on, I’m going to see to it you walk nothing but flower paths.

In the past, this was where I would have whined at my kind mother.

Every day at the table I griped that there wasn’t any meat in the side dishes.

I snapped about how little pocket money there was.

My parents worked, and I used studying as an excuse and never lifted a hand on the farm.

I was filled with regret, and with shame on top of it.

“Son. However much you love your mother, let’s eat now.”

“Ah! I’m sorry. I was holding Mom tight without even asking Dad’s permission.”

“Ho ho. That’s true. Your father’s jealousy is no joke.”

And so Mom and I sat down at the table.

It was the main wooden hall, with a cool breeze coming through from behind.

A bowl of rice heaped like a farmhand’s, a savory snail-and-soybean-paste stew, a clean-tasting bean sprout and kimchi soup, cucumbers picked that morning with red pepper paste, dried anchovies, and young radish kimchi just coming into its own — that was the whole table.

My eyes were enchanted.

How precious is a table like this…

I was a man who had had his skull split and come within a breath of smelling funeral incense.

If I hadn’t caught that sudden lottery of a regression, this care of my mother’s was something I would never have tasted again.

I filled a spoon with the cool bean sprout and kimchi soup and put it in my mouth.

“Whoa! Mom, this is really good! Sharp and clean at the same time — it’d be absolutely killer on a hangover! Mom, forget farming, what about a restaurant? Open one bean sprout soup place and you’d clean up.”

“A hangover? How would a boy who’s never had a drink know that taste?”

“Come on. Your son’s all grown up. Of course I know what liquor tastes like.”

“Son. You get your talent for lying straight from your dad.”

It isn’t a lie, though…

In college I had a certain reputation as a drinker.

The years had been turned back, but I was a man in his thirties who knew what a hangover cure tasted like.

But why is this family so poor?

The kitchen, roughly remodeled inside the old house, and the wooden floor beyond it came into view.

It was barely different from what I had seen on my visits down to the country right up until I died.

The absolute peak of shabbiness.

From the small refrigerator Mom brought when she married in, now going on twenty years old, and the worn-out rice cooker, all the way down to the chopsticks in my hand, there wasn’t one thing that was actually new.

Only now was I taking in the state of the household.

Tears threatened to blur my vision.

I’m going to have to pull in some money…

(End of Chapter 3)