Chapter 2: Chapter 2

– Into the Manuscript (2) –

“H-huh?! Ahhhhh!”

He began to flail helplessly against the current of the Han River. It was his first time going into the water after a long time. He had sunk so low that he couldn’t swim up no matter how much he tried. His life hadn’t been a good one to live, but he couldn’t stand dying this pointlessly. With his luck, he was sure that he would die – he didn’t want to die!

His mother, his younger sibling, and even his classmate Minsun, whom he had an unrequited crush on in college, flashed before his eyes. Was this what they call the illusions people saw before they die?

‘No. I don’t want to die. Somehow…’

“[Save me!]”

When he mouthed the soundless words, light exploded from Kim Jungjin’s left hand. A golden semicircle surrounded him, pushing out the dark water. Jungjin, who had lost consciousness, was dragged by the circle of light out of the water. A thin figure rushed over after discovering the light, snatching Jungjin’s body rising from the riverside and dragged him to shore. The unidentifiable gold light was pulled into the graduation ring on Jungjin’s left hand and vanished.

“Get ahold of yourself, Kleio Asel!”

Jungjin opened his eyes. Red hair, deep green eyes; a girl with incredibly good looks shook his collar.

“Hk, kahk!”

It felt like a long time before he spat out the water. His eyes, nose, mouth, and ears all felt swollen with water.

“Kleio–!”

“…Let, go… a bit.”

Maybe he had swallowed too much water while submerged, as his voice came out weird. Jungjin closed and opened his eyes several times as he tried to focus. The person glaring at him was a slender and tall foreigner girl with big eyes and refreshing features. It was also someone Jungjin didn’t know at all.

“What were you doing in the middle of the night in a place like this?!”

“Kleio or whatever, why are you suddenly…”

Jungjin, who had just fallen from Dongjak Bridge, didn’t know why a foreign stranger was grabbing his collar.

“You’re Kleio Asel from Year 1! Don’t play innocent; I definitely saw the flash from Magic Circle you cast!”

The girl, trembling fiercely, didn’t let go of Jungjin at all. The words coming out of her mouth didn’t sound like Korean, but he could understand them. Though just because he understood the words themselves didn’t mean he knew what she was talking about.

“What are you saying… Who are you that you’re acting like this? Let go.”

His head began to ring as the girl shook him around. Jungjin flailed his arms but to no avail. How long had he been in the water that he couldn’t even shake off this one small girl? Jungjin collapsed limply just like that, the loud interrogation continuing for a bit before quieting down. It felt like his body was wrapped in some warm and nice scent, and he felt like he was being lifted up, but he couldn’t figure out much else.

***

When he opened his eyes again, it was around dawn. Strangely, it simultaneously felt like he had slept for dozens of hours but like he had just taken a short nap. A cool breeze blew in from the half-open window, even though it should be a hot July.

‘Where exactly is this?’

He raised his body up slowly. It felt listless and heavy like he had been sick for a long time. He had no energy. Rubbing his dry eyes with the back of his hand after sitting up, Jungjin immediately felt something was out of place. He stared closely at both his hands. His hands had thick knuckles from doing all sorts of part-time jobs during his campus life, and the tips of his fingers had rough callouses. Yet these hands were thin and smooth.

The injury that required twelve stitches after cutting his hand with a grinder in the Navy wasn’t there either. There was a rectangle of whitish lines on the back of his right hand instead of the scar. The lines were so faint that he had to bring his hand right next to his face to see it.

‘What is this? These aren’t my hands.’

Jungjin urgently examined the room, noticing a decorative mirror next to the door. A boy skinny enough to look half-starved was reflected on the mirror surface, with droopy eyes that seemed to hold no strength. He shook his head as if that would clear his vision, but as he did, the boy in the mirror also shook his rough brown hair.

‘Is that me? What weird dream is this?’

Did he fall somewhere because he was drunk? Lost his footing? Stroke? Coma? It could be a hallucination while he was lying on a sickbed.

‘So what if I become a different person inside a dream? My ring is here.’

He had become an unfamiliar boy, but on his hand still was the college graduation ring. It was the only thing he had any attachment to, so that might have been why it appeared in his dream too. Excluding this graduation ring, Jungjin didn’t possess anything he would feel sorry about losing. When they had heard around graduation time that their major would disappear as the departments merged, Minsun and several other students decided to get graduation rings as a memento. Following her suggestion had caused him to end up with that ring. He liked the idea of wearing the same ring as his one-sided crush, Minsun, so he had worn it up to now, like a loser.

‘Not being able to forget her at all, not even at twenty-two, but at thirty-two. What nonsense is this? And even inside a dream at that.’

It was as Jungjin was clenched his hair in his fists, swept up by self-disgust…

Ring– ring– ring–

He heard an unfamiliar bell-like sound that rang out clear and wide. A dense forest and antique buildings could be seen outside the window that had been growing brighter. Jungjin’s mouth dropped open. This place wasn’t Seoul. What is this place?

Dreams were merely the rearrangement of one’s memories and experiences. It should scatter when the consciousness woke up, yet Jungjin’s consciousness wasn’t hazy at all. All his senses felt vivid, and they included a headache and an ache from lying down for too long, as well as intense thirst.

He couldn’t escape by thinking that it was a dream anymore. He had never dreamt of a movie-like scene such as this before. He was always tired, so he always fell asleep as soon as he laid down and always woke up to the sound of his alarm. The scene of a foreign country he had never seen before was something that went beyond his imagination. While he was lost in thought, his fingers occasionally trembled as they rested on the windowsill. The white gold ring that originally fit perfectly around his index finger seemed like it would fall off. Jungjin unconsciously clutched at it.

“Ugh.”

The moment he touched the ring, an incredible heat surged out of the thin metal. Even when he tried to pull at it, it refused to come off as if it had melted and fused with him. Shining lines of text suddenly floated up in front of his eyes, not disappearing even when he closed them. They were embedded into his retinas.

[Personal Item: □□□’s Promise

–The level of narrative intervention is low, so the usage of its functions is restricted.

–Promise’s link connects dimensions. You have entered the last world, so the basic function of ‘Promise’ is open. Limitless ether sensitivity is granted to the user.

–The stage 1 function of Promise, 「Memory」 is open. Every text that you have read during your life will be perfectly recalled due to the 「Memory」 function.]

There were also shining letters reminiscent of augmented reality in his memory.

“That message!”

He had definitely seen it, right after checking an author’s tactless email on Dongjak Bridge. [–The message has been received.] had appeared while the water rushed below him.

“I had thought I been hallucinating, so what is this?”

With suspicion clear on his face, Jungjin scanned the words in front of his eyes.

‘What? …Entered a world, so the item’s function is open… and I can completely remember any text that I’ve read in my whole life? Does that mean I can recall all the books I’ve read so far?’

He was dumbfounded as a scoff came out.

‘This seems too much like a delusion I had in 3rd year of high school. Back when I did not understand math, so I forced myself to memorize the formulas instead.’

No matter if it were his own dream or a delusion, could that really manifest? A hallucination couldn’t have something that was beyond the viewer’s intelligence, right? The memory of someone in their thirties suffering from overwork couldn’t handle that kind of setup.

‘It’s excessive.’

Whether Jungjin accepted it or not, more words appeared in the air.

[–With the operation of Promise’s 「Memory」, you can reread -Albion Kingdom’s Prince-.]

‘Ah…’

At this point, there was at least one thing that he could infer to.

‘So, is this inside the manuscript?’

It was something that often appeared in the web novels he read on the way to and from work. They were often stories of protagonists who went inside the books they were reading, books they liked, or books they coincidentally picked up.

‘Isn’t something like going into a book too stale? And those were books that were published. This is an incomplete novel that the author was making a fuss about fixing.’

In addition, if his soul had entered a character inside the manuscript, it was weird that his graduation ring was still on his hand. Jungjin rubbed the outside of the ring that had changed to fit his finger, as was his habit.

‘-Albion Kingdom’s Prince-… Then, whose body is this?’

The moment Jungjin focused in order to remember the hazy contents of the manuscript, he cringed away at the peculiar sensation that followed.

‘Is this the operation of 「Memory」?!’

The inside of his forehead felt hot as a scroll of paper clearly came up in his mind. When the scroll opened, the text he had already read became clear, looking like he had just reread it a second prior. Jungjin laid down again. Using Promise, rereading -Albion Kingdom’s Prince- had taken only an instant.

‘The name Kleio Asel doesn’t come up in the manuscript.’

The red-haired girl at the riverside had definitely called him ‘Kleio Asel.’

‘That girl said that this guy is a Year 1 student. Seeing how she knows that she should be a student in the same school.’

There was just one thing that he could make a guess at: Isiel Kision’s short mentions of a student in the same year who had lost footing in a river and died. It was when an unidentifiable magic formula had been discovered inside the school, and Isiel was telling Arthur that she had pulled a dead kid out from the river while she was on the night patrol.

‘That’s right! So that girl was Isiel Kision, huh. Now that I think of it, she did interrogate me about what some magic. So that’s why… She was pretty in addition to being really strong. With that bright red hair.’

Isiel Kision was an important character in -Albion Kingdom’s Prince-, right after the protagonist, Arthur Riognan. Arthur’s first knight – a swordswoman, and his loyal vassal. During their school years, everyone had thought that the top newly enrolled student, Isiel, had become in charge of collecting problematic students in order to protect the 3rd Prince Arthur while he was in training.

If this was the time when both Isiel and Arthur were students, then there were more than five years left before the war. The magic formula incident was an episode that occurred on merely the second page of the manuscript, and Kleio Asel was a supporting character who disappeared without even having his name revealed.

Regardless of whether he read the manuscript, it was obvious that he would get no answers from it since the author didn’t write much about him. He was a low-level unimportant character in -Albion Kingdom’s Prince-, with Arthur being the protagonist.

Jungjin didn’t know what kind of life Kleio Asel lived or how he came to die.

‘But I’ll think of that later.’

He became tired again after thinking so much.

‘I can insist I lost my memory as everyone does. I fell into a river, so it would be a perfect excuse.’

The Royal Capital Defense Corps School in the capital Rudein of the Albion Kingdom was described as the most elite in the country. It was a setting where only kids of notable abilities, family names, or wealth could enter.

‘If so, then this Kleio kid probably has one of those things, too.’

Whatever it was, would it be worse than Jungjin’s original life?

‘That’s right. Well, whether it’s my dream or a creation of the author, there’s no difference in that they’re imaginary.’

After becoming an adult, he couldn’t rest properly for even three days in a row. During breaks and holidays, he was worked hard doing freelancing in order to get a bit more money. He had never even gone on an overseas trip, unlike most others. In the first place, he didn’t even have a passport.

Though he was aware that he could actually be lying in the intensive care unit with a respirator on right now, he decided to enjoy this dream.

‘What do I know? Let’s lie down. I feel like I can sleep for ten more years.’

Jungjin snuggled into the soft blankets again. They were so comfortable that he felt like he was buried within clouds. The Promise that was on his left hand blinked. Jungjin, who had completely fallen asleep, didn’t notice the golden letters that appeared above it.

[–The writing of -Albion Kingdom’s Prince-(Final Manuscript) is starting.]

[–The author has gained the start of a new ending.]

[–A pre-existing character is being rewritten.]