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He was walking. It was a narrow alleyway. The surroundings were dark, almost as if the streetlights were broken.
The day was hot. He exhaled a hot breath, flapping the front of his uniform shirt. It was a humid, tropical night and the heat hadn’t died down even though it was in the middle of the evening.
Whish, a black shadow darted under the low wall. It was a stray cat. His gaze lingered for a moment, but he didn’t stop walking.
He stopped in front of an old two-storey house made of blackish-red bricks. He pushed open the badly fitted iron gate. It made a creaking sound.
At the back of the building, there was a narrow staircase that led down to the basement. The sand crunched underfoot as he walked down the stairs lined with linoleum.
The remodelled house that had been made into a building that was like a subdivided flat had wooden doors that had rotted and fallen off at the corners and were hung irregularly here and there. The worn boards were spray-painted white with circles, triangles, and unrecognizable graffiti over and over again to indicate the changing occupants.
Because it was an illegal extension, there was no address or number to register the move. This place, which didn’t ask for a contract, parental consent, or a large security deposit, was the best place to live as a minor.
He opened the door marked with a big X and a business card slipped through the crack.
<Same day loan OK! Bad credit OK! Undocumented OK!>
Seeing that they were even placed here, he thought that loan sharks were also living diligently. No, this might have been their best goldmine.
It was even more humid and hotter than the sweltering outside, and the air was musty and stale. He took off his shoes at the front door and stepped inside.
“……?”
For a moment, he was confused, wondering if he had walked into the bathroom instead of the room. His socks were damp underneath as if he was wearing a pair of wet bathing shoes. The floor was wet with water.
Originally, the basement room was so humid that running your hand across the flaking wallpaper would leave your palm wet. Every blanket, piece of clothing, and even a piece of paper was drenched in moisture. It was similar to a swamp in that it was wet, sticky, and suffocating, but in all respects, that was only a metaphor. It wasn’t a real swamp, and the rainy season was over, so the floor shouldn’t be this damp.
He groped along the wall, found the switch, and flicked on the light. There was a click, but the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling didn’t turn on for a long time. The bulb that had just been flickering finally lit up with a dim glow.
“Ah…”
He figured out what the problem was. The second-hand fridge he had just bought was unlike a fridge, always being hot on the outside. The problem was that it became a new home for mould.
No matter how much he cleaned it, the frost inside would melt and ooze out, leaving the linoleum soggy and wet. Even the blanket, folded and placed on one side of the small room, was soggy after absorbing the water.
Wondering if the water had flowed the wrong way and gotten inside the fridge too, the sides were swollen big. The door that was not well fitted was left open all on its own, and the inside was as humid as the outside air, leaving no cold energy. At least it was a good thing there wasn’t much inside.
He took out a frozen triangle jeonju bibimbap that had thawed and become mushy from the freezer. It was his dinner tonight, but… He hesitated before peeling off the wrapper. He didn’t want to eat it, but he needed to eat something so that he could last until lunch tomorrow.
He took a bite and tried to swallow it, but instead, he clamped his mouth shut and headed for the bathroom. Perhaps it was because it was a kimbap that had long passed its expiry date and was thoroughly spoiled, but there was a disgusting and sour taste.
“Blergh-!”
The toilet seat was in the highest area of the bathroom, so it was comfortable and he didn’t have to bend down to vomit. Since he hadn’t eaten anything, there was nothing to spit out either.
After vomiting, he crouched down on the bathroom floor to wash up. He turned on the lime-scaled faucet and filled up a blue bowl. He took off his damp socks and took off his sweaty shirt too.
Instead of brushing his teeth, he poured a bucket of cold water over his head.
Before he knew it, he had used up all the toothpaste and the green soap on the soap case was as thin as paper.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
Soap, tissues, toothpaste, toothbrush… His annoyance soared, wondering why he needed so much stuff in such a small space, no bigger than a single stall in a public bathroom. There wasn’t always a spare in the bathroom cupboard. Essentials were more expensive than he thought, and for some reason, they always ran out all at once.
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“Let’s sleep… Let’s clean up and go to sleep…”
He only changed his underwear, grabbed a dry rag, and wiped down the room.
It didn’t take long to get rid of the water in the tiny room, as he wrung out the soaked rag in the bathroom and wiped again, repeating that action several times.
It was just that he was the one drenched in sweat instead after a moonlit exercise session in a windowless room in the middle of summer.
“I should have cleaned up and then washed…”
He couldn’t unfold the soaked blanket, so he lay on the bare floor. The sticky floor stuck to his sweaty bare body and made a funny slimy sound whenever he rolled over. He blankly stared at the mouldy ceiling spotted with black in disbelief.
“Fuck… He said he used it for less than two years.”
It was a refrigerator that old man Kim from upstairs had sold to him for 30,000 won while acting all benevolent. But it broke down in less than a month? Old man Kim had slipped in the rain not too long ago and was lying sick, so he couldn’t go and squabble with him over it.
“Is it because I’m an asshole…?”
At this point, he questioned whether or not he really was an asshole. Because the words he heard the most at school these days were fucking asshole.
At the beginning of his school transfer to Busan, he got along with the others in some way or another, even if it wasn’t as much as his previous school. However, he couldn’t go to the academies he really hadn’t wanted to go to or the PC rooms he had really wanted to go to. Maybe it was because he had been making trivial excuses for a day or two, but rather than telling them he couldn’t go because he didn’t have money, he ignored them and shut his mouth.
He didn’t have the time to chat around anyway. He couldn’t study as casually as before. If he didn’t get a full scholarship, he wouldn’t be able to go to any university.
The only time he had to study was when he was at school, so even during breaks, he just stared at his books. He didn’t know if that made him such an asshole, but… It must be since everyone saw it that way.
It didn’t matter whether or not they swore at him behind his back. He shouldn’t be caring. If being a fucking asshole was the way to get out of here, he had no choice but to do it a hundred, a thousand times over.
“I want to quickly graduate…”
He wanted to get away from the word adolescent. He wasn’t green or young, but there were many restrictions. He couldn’t get a part-time job without his legal guardian’s permission, so he couldn’t complain if he was paid less than the minimum wage. He had to put up with unfair treatment, and he couldn’t even go to the hospital.
Nevertheless, the place that hired him the longest was a convenience store. The owner, a self-proclaimed self-made person, would spend hours putting on airs and preaching to him and giving him discarded triangular kimbaps. They said that it wasn’t a sin to be born poor, but it was your fault if you die poor.
His school shirt was hanging on the hook in the bathroom, fluttering. He washed it, but would it be dry by tomorrow? Normally it’d be somewhat dry, but it was especially damp so he wasn’t sure. Suddenly, he remembered his father drying his uniform shirt with a hair dryer when it wasn’t dry by morning.
“…Let’s get some sleep.”
He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. He firmly pressed his palms onto his upper eyelids. If he was going to wake up at dawn, he needed to sleep, not think about useless things.
But even after a while had passed, he couldn’t sleep.
He suddenly sat up and dug through his school bag. He placed his math workbook on top of a ramen box and tightly gripped his mechanical pencil.
He had already solved the teacher’s workbook with small print and explanations written in blue, so he reworked the problems he had solved by changing the way he solved them. Hence, there were often cases where he stayed up all night. But he didn’t know any other way to control the longing, loneliness, anxiety, and nervousness that overwhelmed him late at night when he was alone.
“…What am I doing?” He muttered dazedly rather than drawing the cosine graph, “Is this… a dream?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them, but his vision remained the same. He tried pinching his cheek, but it only hurt.
“What…?”
The temperature, the smell, the feel, and even the emotions from back then were vivid. But this couldn’t be real. It must be some strange concoction.
He didn’t want to wake up from the dream, but not like this. Usually, people would have nightmares about going back to the army… He never thought he’d dream about reliving this period of time.
“Ugh…”
The memories he had forgotten because he made himself forget kept coming back to the surface. Even though he didn’t want to remember them again, the memories that had sunk to the bottom of the ocean rose up like droplets of water blooming from a rupture.
Now he seemed to understand. The reason he wanted to make so much money was because he was anxious.
It was a haphazard mix of regret that he couldn’t die with them, resentment for the difficult situation he was faced with, determination to surmount it somehow, scorn towards himself for being like that, longing for the past, and fear for the future. Each of these emotions had lost its original form and had merged into huge, jet-black anxiety.
He wanted to escape the anxiety weighing down on him. But he couldn’t find a way. Whenever he saved whatever he could, he felt more stable. Starting with money, then emotions. Anyhow, everything he loved had disappeared. He believed that it was better to save love than to love again.
Belief became an obsession. For fear of someone taking what was his, he put up his guard and prepared for danger. He worked twice as hard as others and those who could not do so were seen as pathetic. Receiving dunning letters, the distinction between right and wrong became blurred. If poverty was a sin, what was wrong with trying not to sin?
But was there any difference between now and then, doing his most to survive? After all, there was never a moment when he wasn’t anxious… He ended up dying without even having a refrigerator…
He laughed emptily. He laughed at the ridiculousness of his appearance. He covered his face with his hands. His shoulders shook for a long time, unable to contain the laughter that burst out.
This wasn’t right… He didn’t want it to end like this…
Belated regrets rushed in. But it was already too late.
I want to live again… I want to forget everything, erase everything, and start all over again…
His vision blurred as the water rose. He couldn’t see an inch ahead of him.
At some point, he was in an unknown place.
He couldn’t tell the directions of east, west, south or north and couldn’t tell up from down either. Even when he looked up, he couldn’t see the sky, and it all just looked indistinct. When he looked down, he could barely see his feet, let alone the ground, because of the covering of the dense fog.
His head also felt murky, as if covered in fog. He hovered in one spot, not knowing where he was or what he should do, and barely managed to take a step forward. But as if he was drifting in the clouds, he didn’t know where to go.
He just walked, aimlessly and endlessly.
He didn’t know how long he’d been walking for, it seemed like it was both all day and only for a moment.
Swaaaa–.
A stream of cool breeze blew from somewhere. His hair was wet and damp from the fog, and the hem of his clothes blew heavily. The movement of the dewy breeze smelled like grass flowers.
The fog, similar to a prison, slowly lifted in the wind. His surroundings gradually brightened.
At some point, a blue sky was revealed. White sunlight poured through the white clouds.
“Ah…”
He was walking beneath a crepe myrtle tree in full bloom with scarlet flowers. Sunlight peeked through the light green leaves, creating rounded shadows underfoot. Every time the leaves swayed in the wind, the shadows followed and shook.
The grass was full of purple lily turfs blooming. The tiny petals hanging from the long stalks tickled his ankles. As he walked, the number of wildflowers increased. Lily turfs, dandelions, garden cosmos, Siberian chrysanthemums… All sorts of wildflowers bloomed in a mixture.
Small birds flew at low heights and chirped, and he heard the sound of running water coming from somewhere. The flowers bloomed all at once, unfitting for the season, but Lee Juwon didn’t feel that it was strange. He was simply captivated by the beautiful scenery.
A butterfly, perched atop a bellflower, drank honey and flew with a flutter. It was a beautiful butterfly with light pink wings.
“Huh…?”
It wasn’t just one. A swarm of butterflies hovered around him, fluttering out of nowhere as if all the abundance of flowers were sitting butterflies. At some point, his vision was filled with light pink.
The butterflies landed softly on his hair, the back of his hands, his shoulders, the bridge of his nose, and even his lips. He was mesmerized by the fantastical sight of being surrounded by a swarm of butterflies in a garden full of flowers in bloom. His lips tasted of the sweetness that the butterflies must have drunk.
But it felt like… he recognized this butterfly from somewhere…?
He tried to think of where he had seen it, but suddenly his head hurt like it was breaking into pieces. In contrast to the calm and beautiful surroundings, beeeep–, the ringing in his head rang strongly.
He sat down among the wildflowers with a headache that felt like an ice jing hitting against his head. His head felt like it was going to split apart, and he clutched the back of it and squeezed his eyes shut. At some point, the ringing in his ears turned into screams.
“Uwaaak!”
“Kuok, keeek!”
Lee Juwon’s eyes widened in surprise. At the same time, gasp, he sucked in a breath.
The peaceful garden was nowhere to be seen, and in front of him was a ruined clearing that looked as if it had been burnt. A zombie with its head half crushed approached him with lightning speed.
Were there monsters in the form of a zombie too? The sudden appearance of a monster he had never seen before took his breath away for a moment.
“Kuooook!”
Holding up an axe covered in blood, the zombie’s mouth opened wide. Sitting on the floor, Lee Juwon tried to back up on his behind, but he couldn’t even do that. A thick arm grabbed him tightly from behind. It was only then that Lee Juwon realized he was being held down by something huge.
He was so startled that he couldn’t make a sound. The arm holding onto him tightly from behind didn’t move an inch and he felt a hot breath on his ear. Horror and fear paralyzed his thinking. He couldn’t tell if what was in front of him was black or white.
His throat stung. Something that clearly had teeth bit Lee Juwon’s nape. It nibbled at Lee Juwon’s neck as if savouring the taste, burying its nose deep and inhaling. It was so close, its breath stuck to his eardrums. His body trembled and his heart pounded like crazy.
“Are you scared of zombies?”
Not even a scream could escape from his stiffened throat. Badump, badump, in the midst of his heart pounding, the voice he heard was… familiar.
“That’s surprising.”
A low chuckle rang languidly in his ears.
Long fingers with prominent knuckles pushed up the hem of the clothes Lee Juwon was wearing and slipped inside. Goosebumps broke out on his bare skin as the direction of the hand tickled his stomach and sides.
“Does it tickle?”
“……”
“You won’t get scared now.”
Strangely enough, the voice was too familiar to his ears. Lee Juwon slowly turned his head back.
A shaded face was visible in the dim light. His solid frame made curves, creating a border between light and dark. It was a face Lee Juwon knew, from his black hair and eyes and his tall nose ridge to his slightly curled lips.
When he made eye contact with Lee Juwon, his droopy eyes bent into a smile. It was a smile Lee Juwon had only seen on monitors or over his shoulder. The kind eyes, the arc of his lips, and even the soft voice were all familiar yet unfamiliar.
orcinus comments:
‘study as casually as before’ but wasnt juwon top of the school…? and even in this terrible schedule he has he still got into one of koreas top unis… wish i had that brain. i also left flower images in case anyone else is also a lost cause when it comes to flowers…
ps, realized some people may not realize the chapters have titles so i’ll leave this table of content here 
Prologue – no title
Chapter 1 – Lee Juwon
Chapter 2 – The Spring of After Death
Chapter 3 – The Snake of the Present
Chapter 4 – The Drink of the Past
Chapter 5 – The Illusion’s Honey
chapter 6 and 7
Chapter 6 – December 25th
Chapter 7 – Kang Inheon
Thank you, I really enjoy this Story!
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) “The Illusion’s Honey”
Thank you for the chapter ♥️ I am so exciting to see Lee Juwon y Kang interactions
Gracias corazón, se valora mucho tu trabajo
P.D. me emociona como va la historia y al mismo tiempo no quiero que termine 😖
Jajaja perdón mi comentario lo postee aquí accidentalmente 🤭
JJAJA no hay problema xd
Thank you for the chapter! <3
And here I was thinking that all the things he went through were actually illusions made by Inheon to manipulate Juwon…
Thank your u for translating this. Probably my favourite version of the tales !
And here I was hoping he finally gets to meet the real Kang Inheon, but the Titel of the chap destroyed my wish. 😔
i remember when i first read the novel i was constantly screaming SET MY MAN FREE 😭
Same
Thank you for the chapter!
B Wow, Lee juwon’un davası ne zaman bitecek?😓 İçimden bir ses bu sefer kang inheon’un biraz deli olduğunu söylüyor 😌
Thanks for the chapter ❤️
Can someone tell me how long it’ll take before we get to the actual relationship between Juwon and Inheon ?
It’s a 7 chapters story, we’ve started the 5th and it’s still not going anywhere, and this is boring me to death. Do you guys know if I should even bother continuing ?
I realise the author tried to write something deep about emotions and all that but this is just taking so much time it feels like it’s not going anywhere.
It’s unfortunate because the story seemed really interesting…
Anyways thanks Orcinus for your hard work translating the story 🙂
Haha tbh when I first read chapter 5 I wanted to tear my hair out bc I just wanted him to get out but I loved this chapter so much by the end of it. The review I left on novelupdates a while ago does indicate that the present portion of Juwon and Inheon is very little (also a reminder/warning on the prologue in the notes so that no one comes in with false expectations) tho since it is a christmas carol story, so just treat it as a passing christmas tale you read like the little match girl lol ^^ It’s a character development story, not a full on romance, and we’ve seen so much progress with Juwon’s character.
Thanks for the clarification !
I admit I don’t remember the warnings at all and I probably didn’t really take them seriously either.
It’s a rather interesting story but in the end I suppose it just wasn’t for me ¯_(ツ)_/¯
No problem! I was disappointed at first too but I ended up like those reviewers on ridibooks crying my heart out at the end end in the comment section that was just a sea of I LOVE YOU LEE JUWON lol it rewired my brain about a christmas carol
maybe the reason he was shown his past and future is because he was trapped in his own rythym of living in guilt and a life of anxiety, he himself couldn’t move on from his past, as well as the people and experiences in his life that forced him to be frugal, what I think tipped him to the edge was that he seemingly wasn’t even collecting wealth for himself as he had no desire to use it, but rather it was the wealth he wanted to give to his parents
These illusions are making me doubt if ml appearing is real or not 😂
He looked like someone whose gone through a lot too – rabid animal who finally found his person kek
“Longing for the past, and fear for the future.” —damn, I felt that.
I want to live again… I want to forget everything, erase everything, and start all over again… OMG this…
‘Long fingers with prominent knuckles pushed up the hem of the clothes Lee Juwon was wearing and slipped inside.’
WHAT IS THIS SUDDEN TURN OF EVENTS? I was just listening to a sad music, you know, just feelin’ gloomy and dramatic, and then this— I— not that I’m c-complaining!