With Jung-sam serving as the notary, the notarized agreement was drafted on the spot in the back room. After reviewing the agreement, now complete with everyone's signatures, the notary said,
“But isn't this overwhelmingly unfavorable to Joo-young?”
“I don't think it's quite that simple. You know the saying, ‘Those who are ready to die survive; those bent on survival die,’ right?”
“I do. If you try desperately to die, you live, and if you try desperately to live, you die.”
“It's not something to take lightly. According to that saying, if Senior Noh desperately tries to stay alive for the next ten years...”
“Huh? So I'm going to die!? Are you saying you're going to kill me?”
“That's not what I mean. I'm saying that if you try too hard to stay alive, you might actually attract more bad luck. So you need to be especially careful about alcohol, cigarettes, car accidents, things like that.”
“Hmm... That makes sense.”
The notary smiled faintly and nodded.
The two of them took a taxi together to the one-room apartment in Gyomun-ri where Senior Noh had been living alone at the time. Senior Noh had kept saying they should go to his place and have another drink ever since they got in the taxi, so Joo-young had wondered if he was sleep-talking. But the moment he stepped into the apartment, he collapsed onto the bed and fell asleep.
Joo-young sat down at the desk and looked for paper and a pen. He had been thinking about it since the taxi ride. Tonight, the Joo-young in his mid-fifties had briefly returned to the past and done all this, but the Joo-young in his early thirties might not know about it—or rather, of course he wouldn't. So he decided to leave a note.
There was no other option but to write down everything exactly as it had happened. It might be hard to believe, but no one could deny that the handwriting was unmistakably his—his atrocious handwriting, at that—and he wouldn't have any reason not to believe it. Using the hands of his early-thirties self, Joo-young wrote that he was Ki Joo-young, now past his mid-fifties, that he had pressed the pendant and returned briefly to this night, and that he had drawn up a notarized agreement in an attempt to save Senior Noh, whose death was scheduled for ten years later. Just the essentials, plain and simple. It sounded a little strange, but the Joo-young in his early thirties was still him, so he trusted that they would understand each other without having to spell out every little detail.
He tucked the note securely into the inside pocket of his jacket, then took the pendant from the outer pocket. All the gems on the pendant were glowing yellow. That meant the time point the Joo-young in his early thirties had registered in Jung-sam's back room was the fifth and final time point. Now there were three time points entered into the pendant that could be used for a time rewind. He didn't know when they were, but one thing was certain: all three time points were from before his early thirties.
Fatigue washed over him. Joo-young switched off the desk lamp and leaned the back of the swivel chair as far back as it would go. Senior Noh was sleeping without making a sound, utterly still, as if he were dead. Joo-young remembered something Senior Noh had said once around this time.
‘Don't become like me when you're my age.’
He had no choice but to admit that he had failed to keep that almost-funereal advice. Now older than even Senior Noh's age at death, Joo-young felt that there was nothing about his own life that was any better.
The apartment was silent. Eerily silent. It felt like a stone chamber inside some ancient tomb. If so, was the person lying there as still as the dead a king? The king had died in another apartment where an even eerier silence than this one had settled, and he had been discovered several days later. Enlightenment or nirvana must be profoundly lonely too, but the king's death had been called a solitary death, not enlightenment or nirvana. If things went well, that was one thing, but if they didn't, this would be a permanent farewell. They would never see each other again. Dawn began to spread through the stone chamber.
Joo-young opened his eyes on the bed in his own apartment and checked the time first. As expected, there was no difference before and after his trip to the past. Of the gems in the pendant clutched in his hand, only three were now glowing green. How had the experiment gone? He was intensely curious, but he couldn't think of any natural way to check the results.
In any case, the ritual was over. Joo-young extinguished the candles he had left burning by his bedside and picked up a piece of yakgwa, as though he were eating ritual offering food. He sat on the edge of the bed and chewed the yakgwa with relish, then suddenly sprang to his feet, looked around the room, and stopped in front of the bookcase that stood taller than he did. Two paper boxes, covered in a pale layer of dust, sat on top of it. They were boxes of letters. One held letters from friends and family, and the other held letters from his first love during college. Joo-young carefully took down one of the two boxes.
The note he had left for his early-thirties self had suddenly come to mind. If he were in that position, he wouldn't throw away such an important note. He would definitely keep it somewhere safe—and if he had, and if that past had led to this reality, then the note probably existed inside this box!
Joo-young's fingertips stopped as he rummaged through the box. Just as he had expected, the Joo-young in his early thirties had filed his mid-fifties self under the friend-or-family category. The note he had written only moments ago appeared before his eyes, carrying more than twenty years of age.
‘The changes made in the past carry over into this reality!’
A cry of exultation burst from within Joo-young. At that very moment—or perhaps, of all moments, precisely then—his phone began ringing too, startling him so badly that he nearly jumped out of his skin. He had set the ringtone to the climax of a rock song he liked, so it was rather loud, but he had never been this startled by it before... Unexplainable emotions churned inside him. Still flustered by the extraordinary upheaval of his feelings, he picked up the phone, and then he thought he understood why he had been so startled. The screen displayed three syllables: Noh, Jun, and Su.