IDSEGI Chapter 58

Chapter 58

My mother was a beautiful woman. Honestly, her face is blurry in my memory—it’s been twenty years since I last saw her—but the impression of her beauty remains. I still remember that her smile was lovely and innocent.

“Yeoul! My boy!”

She would hug me tight and beam at me. There was always a strange scent clinging to her when she came home in the morning after going out late at night. Every time I was in her arms, that smell pricked my nose. But I didn’t mind—her embrace was always warm.

It wasn’t until I grew up that I realized it had been the smell of alcohol. And I came to understand what she had been doing every day. But back then, as a child, I didn’t know anything.

When she smiled, I would smile along with her. Those were happy days.

The neighborhood kids would laugh and call me filthy whenever they saw me. I would try harder to wash up and clumsily launder my clothes.

But no matter how often I washed them, the sharp scent lingered because she hugged me every morning. The teasing never stopped.

“I love you, my boy.”

As long as she said those words, nothing else mattered. Let them laugh.

I kept my back straight. A six-year-old man’s pride wouldn’t allow him to shrink over something so small.

“You don’t even have a dad!”

“My mom said your mom doesn’t even know who your dad is!”

That part stung a little—because it was true.

“Mom, where’s my dad? Can you at least tell me his name?”

“Oh? Uh… well. Ah! Yeoul, why don’t we watch TV? Let’s watch your favorite cartoon together.”

Whenever I asked about my father, she would dodge the question or change the subject. Even at that age, I could tell—she really didn’t know who he was. The other kids were right.

Still, life with her was happy. Whatever anyone said, her love for me had been real.

But sincerity can crumble before reality.

She stopped smiling as much. Yellow slips of paper with numbers on them piled up on the table, and someone kept pounding on the door.

“Mom, I’m scared.”

When the banging grew loud enough to shake the door, she would hold me tight and pat my back. By the time it was quiet again, my hair would be drenched.

One day, without a word, she changed my clothes and smiled.

“Want to go get pork cutlets?”

“Really? Wow! Yay!”

On my seventh birthday, she took me for pork cutlets. For a boy who had lived on nothing but instant noodles, nothing tasted better. I stuffed my cheeks until they were about to burst.

“Is it good?”

“Yeah! I love anything made from pork. The lady next door gave me grilled pork belly once, and that was great too.”

“Was it? Eat up, Yeoul.”

She sat across from me, cutting the pork cutlet and feeding me with care.

With my full belly, we left the restaurant and went to a department store. Dazzling displays, the scent of perfume, smiling salesclerks—

The unfamiliar sights made me nervous. She smiled at me and held out her pinky.

“Yeoul, promise me you’ll stay here quietly and wait for me.”

“Until when?”

“Count to one hundred ten times, and I’ll be back.”

I wasn’t keen on it, but her smile looked so sad that I nodded.

If I listen well, maybe she’ll smile happily again.

“If you wait here without crying, I’ll take you for pork cutlets again. Got it?”

“Okay!”

She patted my head several times, then turned and walked away. She didn’t look back even once.

I counted to one hundred ten times, then a hundred times again, then a thousand—but she never came back.

The rest is predictable. I was sent to an orphanage.

It wasn’t like the movies—no abuse, no bullying. The older boys there were strict about seniority, but I didn’t mind.

As long as I followed their rules, I got along fine. But District 12 was on the outskirts, so we were always short on supplies.

That was when I learned to live with hunger. I became “efficient,” able to fill my stomach with just a glass of milk. It wasn’t long before I was adopted.

“Yeoul, say hello. These will be your parents from now on.”

My first foster parents had been unable to have children, so they adopted me when I was eight. It wasn’t my mother, and that made me a little sad, but I was glad to have a family again.

The next year, they had a baby, and I was sent back to the orphanage.

At eleven, I was adopted a second time—into a family that, oddly enough, already had two children. A year later, after winning a housing lottery and moving to a new place in District 4, they gave me up.

At thirteen, too old now to expect adoption, I thought it was over for me—until an elderly couple reached out.

“We’ll take care of you and love you for the rest of your life. Will you come with us?”

At the time, I was about to graduate from elementary school. I was already a bit too old to be taken in as a son, so it felt strange that a couple would want to adopt me.

At first, I was wary, but they turned out to be truly good people. They cherished me like their own child and checked on me every day. They even celebrated my birthday—the first time in my life I’d ever had a birthday cake.

But after my foster father lost his job, the elderly couple took my hands with tears in their eyes.

“I’m sorry, Yeoul. We can’t afford to take care of you anymore… I’m afraid we have to send you back.”

“I’ll quit school. I can get a part-time job. I’ll do better, I promise…”

But there was no place willing to hire someone who had just started middle school. In the end, I was sent back to the orphanage.

What I realized through these experiences at such a young age was that in this world, if you have no money, you can only live miserably. People used others for money, betrayed others for money.

I didn’t cry. Crying never solved anything; it only made me hungrier. Instead, I waited until I was old enough to work and started taking part-time jobs. I wanted to go to college no matter what—so I could escape poverty.

But balancing part-time work with preparing for the college entrance exam was no easy task.

I failed to get into a national university in Seoul and instead barely passed into a private university near Sinchon, infamous for its high tuition.

I had gotten in, but my grades weren’t enough for a scholarship, and my savings weren’t enough to cover moving to the city. I even looked into loans, but every bank turned me down—because I was from District 12, a government-designated neglected zone.

In the end, I couldn’t go to college.

It wasn’t that I wanted to be rich. I just wanted to earn enough not to live miserably. But with only a high school diploma, all I could earn was barely enough to keep myself fed.

By then, poverty and hunger had become normal to me. I quickly got used to mold-stained wallpaper and the weight of labor that wore me down every day.

Still, the image of my mother’s smiling face would sometimes come back to me, leaving a faint ache in my chest. I didn’t know whether the sadness had stained my memories or if my memories had stained the sadness. Every time I thought of her, my heart ached.

But as time passed, it dulled. I told myself it didn’t matter. Even so, there was always a faint bitterness lodged in my throat. I was so used to it that it felt normal.

At twenty-one, I realized my body had changed. There was a faint warmth flowing through my bloodstream. Before long, I learned it was guide energy.

I had become a Guide.

“Hyung! Geon-hyung!”

When I called for Geon-hyung, he turned to look at me. His lips and expression were blunt, but his tone was always gentle.

“Han Yeoul.”

Whenever he called my name softly, I couldn’t help but feel a little proud. I was the only one he called like that. But that warm feeling quickly faded. It wasn’t because I was special.

It was just that I was the only Guide who matched with him.

He needed me. When I was useful, I could be by his side. Thanks to our good compatibility rate, I could be like a younger brother to him.

I was grateful to have this ability. It gave me someone like family, and I no longer had to struggle financially.

Even so, there were times when sadness would wash over me. But isn’t that just life? Everyone’s life is painful, and they live because they lack the courage to die. At least, that was how it was for me.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I wondered if Geon-hyung liked me. He seemed to treat me a bit differently than others, in a way that felt too much to be just familial affection. But was that love?

If I lost my ability, would he still stay? Geon-hyung wasn’t the type to abandon me just for that, but I couldn’t be sure he’d always be there.

If I wasn’t useful, who would love me? I didn’t even love myself.

Whether it was Geon-hyung or Eunha-hyung—whenever I thought they might like me, I’d end up telling myself the same thing, and my heart would grow still again.

Wanting more would be greed. Even now, this was more than I deserved. I didn’t want to ruin it by wanting too much.

No one loves you. It’s all just an illusion.

That was what my reflection in the mirror always told me. And I readily agreed.

My life would always flow this way—depending on someone’s need for me, trying to be useful, doing everything I could not to be thrown away.

Most of the time, it was fine. But sometimes, the pain would well up so strongly I wanted to scream. Each time, I swallowed it down.

But it seemed there was a limit to how much a person could hold.

When I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into that dark, endless sorrow—

I met Yoo Ihan.