CEL 13

Hamin checked and saw that it was exactly the fifteenth call ringing. In the end he sighed and moved his steps toward the company dinner place.

They had rented out an entire big room. It was not only noisy but painful to the ears. The crackling sound of meat grilling, the loud voices of people sharing joy, the thumping sound of someone putting his feet up on the table and drinking beer like water. In the middle of that racket Hamin slipped into the farthest corner and quietly flipped the meat. It was not for him to eat, it was for the drunkard sitting next to him.

“Eat while you drink.”

He looked at the meat that piled up diligently on his small plate and offered a silly grin. Even with his face reddened from alcohol, the new hire kept chattering without stopping. It was a little ridiculous, and also a little funny. Maybe because he had just joined and had not yet heard about Hamin’s bad reputation, he used every chance to stick to him.

“Uhmm… why did you come to E&Ha?”

Hamin looked at the half-closed drunken eyes and held back a laugh. Why else, he must have come because it was the most famous law firm. While thinking that, he calmly asked,

“Why did you come?”

“Why?! because I heard there is an amaaazing lawyer here.”

“…….”

“That lawyer never had any expensive tutoring but graduated top of class at Korea University, then graduated top of law school too, and even after entering the number one law firm in Korea he kept making achievements one after another. I was a Daechi kid (a neighborhood in Gangnam, Seoul, that is famous for its cram schools ) and I can’t even do that, so how can there be someone like that? Isn’t it really cool? Right? How can there be someone like that? They call it a hero in troubled times or whatever.”

Strictly speaking, these were not troubled times, and Hamin was not a hero either, but he kept his mouth shut and listened as the drunk man’s words got shorter and shorter. Those eyes talking about heroes looked a bit like someone from his childhood, which made him feel unsettled.

Did he not think there was a reason people always avoided him? Hamin found it curious that the junior, who widened his eyes and blushed every time they met, kept acting like this. That was why he quietly listened to his nonsense, poured him water, and handed him wet towels.

“In my humble opinion… I argue that this meat qualifies as Korean beef.”

Even though Hamin had already taken away his glass, he didn’t sober up. The junior kept mumbling disconnected words for a long while. In the middle of it he threw his arms up and flapped them, then suddenly started singing. He really did all sorts of things.

Just then the people around them quietly slipped away, leaving only the two of them. Hamin thought maybe it was time to leave, when the junior suddenly asked in a voice that no longer sounded drunk.

“Sunbae, are you happy right now?”

The eyes looking at the sizzling grill finally turned to the owner of the voice. It had been a very long time since anyone asked him something like this. Or maybe no one had ever asked before.

He blinked slowly. Even after turning the question over in his head many times, he could not figure out how to answer. Saying he was happy would be a lie. Saying he was not happy made him sound too pitiful.

In the end neither “yes” nor “no” came out. He just moved his lips blankly and then lowered his gaze again.

He hollowly laughed. The impact of a clueless new colleague’s question was not small.

He will probably be a good lawyer later.

Out of all the questions he had ever received in his life, this was the hardest one.

At three in the morning, Seoul, even if it was the city center, had more dark spots than bright ones. No, to be exact, even at three in the afternoon it was like that. The world of warm sunlight and sparkle was only a very small part of the city.

Why did I come here?

Hamin found it ridiculous that he climbed up into this poor neighborhood in clothes that reeked of grilled meat.

He looked blankly at the orphanage site, now turned into a culture center after its closure. He thought this was pathetic and was about to turn back, but his feet would not move, as if glue had stuck to the soles of his shoes.

Although he had been raised here, the orphanage he had shut with his own hands could not be called his home, nor did he have great memories of it. Yet strangely, right after hearing that question, the first thing that came to mind was the orphanage.

The question had been whether he was happy now, but the truth was that Hamin had never once thought of himself as happy. He felt pitiful and pathetic, he was almost forty without ever having been happy once in his life. As he retraced his thoughts, he realized he had ended up here.

The culture center, built in a hurry with a limited budget, was not very clean, just like an old building. The exterior walls had stains where the paint had not been reapplied, and cracks were visible in places. That sight felt like himself, awkwardly forced into a place where he did not belong, and it made him feel gloomy.

Even at this moment, the heavy stack of documents filled his bag, and the meeting with a client just a few hours later weighed on him. Maybe the life goals he had lost long ago were fluttering faintly.

“…Fire Man was a hard role.” Right now he was closer to someone who should be burned at the stake than a hero.

Hamin sighed. Complaining to the empty air changed nothing.

I should go down.

The idea of going back down that steep road in the middle of the night felt daunting, but it could not be helped. He turned his body to retrace his steps, but there was someone standing in the middle of the road who had not been there before.

“F-f-found you.”

Dirty clothes, unfocused pupils, legs trembling. Anyone could see he was not in his right mind.

Hamin saw the man’s eyes fixed directly on him and quickly thought. Was this someone he knew? But he could not remember anything.

“Do you know how l-l-long I w-w-waited?”

Instead of looking away, he calmly reviewed the scenery he had already taken in. Houses with lights out, streetlights that were off in patches, alleys with no CCTV. The chance that someone would notice and come to help was nearly zero.

Once the situation was sorted in his head, he tried to put on an act of calm and moved his hand to his pants pocket. He meant to reach for his phone. At the same time, the man who noticed it shouted.

“R-raise your hands!”

“…I raised them.”

There was no benefit in provoking him, so Hamin obeyed quietly. The man came closer with a creepy giggle. In an instant he closed the distance. He bent his head at a grotesque angle and asked,

“Seo, Seo Haminnn. Aren’t you, you a lawyer?”

So many drawn-out words tonight.

Hamin tried not to frown at the stench coming from the man’s breath, but suddenly the man exploded and furiously shouted.

“Because of y-you! You fucking bastard! You… son of a bitch! Bastard with no father! You suck the assholes of the rich to make money and then you stab the poor in the back, is that fun for you?”

So he really came here looking for me?

Hamin’s face showed confusion. He had won dirty cases more than once, but he could not remember ever taking a case bad enough for someone to stalk him like this.

The man noticed that expression and his own face stiffened.

“You… you don’t know…who I am?”

“……”

“You didn’t even know the name of the man whose life you ruined?”

The man’s eyes rolled wildly. His gaze looked like it would chew him up. With clumsy hands he fumbled inside his clothes.

Most of the time, when a suspicious man reached inside his clothes, there was only one reason. Nine times out of ten it was a knife or a stun gun.

Hamin tried to step back, but a shiny silver blade pressed right against his body.

“Guess who I am.”

When the kitchen knife touched his waist, it made him dizzy. Because the man trembled so badly, the knife could stab him even without intention.

“I’ll, I’ll give you a hint. My surname is Kim.”

In the end, it was at a moment, when Hamin, driven into a corner, tried to turn his body to escape the man even if he had to take some risk.

“Ah.”

Blue suit fabric was stained with red.

Both men’s eyes turned to the side of the body at the same time. The stabbed one and the one who stabbed both showed faces of complete surprise.

The thin body collapsed instantly.

Blink, blink.

Every time he closed and opened his eyes, his vision blurred.

He had not expected his end to be like this. It felt a little empty, yet also peaceful.

Cough, he vomited red blood. Instinct told Hamin he had very little time left. He opened his lips, but a foul-smelling hand quickly covered them.

“Y-you, you were trying to leave last words? No way. A, a piece of trash like you has no words to leave behind in this world. Y-you have to die miserably.”

But what Hamin had been about to say was not a will. Looking at the two hands tightly covering his mouth, he laughed.

He had planned to do one good thing before dying. But if the man smeared his fingerprints all over like this, it lost all meaning.

With no CCTV here, the man might have been able to avoid ending up as a murderer.

Hamin had tried to show him how to erase the evidence as his last good deed, but since that failed, he just quietly closed his eyes. In the end, this was all part of his fate too.

The sound grew distant.

Unlike dramas or novels, a panorama of his life did not unfold. Strangely, the very last thing that came to his mind was a single line written in neat handwriting.

“Lawyer Seo, do you know why I only draw in black and white?”

How would I know that?

Well… maybe now I can hear the answer.

What waited beyond death did not seem so bad.

At last he quietly closed his eyes. It felt like sinking into a sleep where no one would disturb him.

[A man was brutally murdered in an alley after being stabbed with a weapon. The suspect, a man in his fifties referred to as A, turned out to be an employee of a former client once represented by the victim, B. The exact motive is still under investigation…]

•••

What comes after death? That was a question many scientists and philosophers had pondered, and still ponder even now. So if I said another life waits after death, maybe they would be overjoyed and rush to write dozens of papers.

Hamin suddenly let out a strange sigh while thinking. When he lowered his gaze, a smaller, pale white hand entered his sight.

He had thought he could finally rest, yet what waited after death was another person’s life.

Fortunately there was a time limit. If not, he would have felt very wronged.

Contrary to his expectation that life would end with his last breath, he had met someone who seemed like a god and received an offer.

If he granted the wish of someone that god cherished, then his own wish would also be granted.

He had no reason to refuse, so he accepted. Without warning he opened his eyes in a new body. He had expected at least some kind of explanation, but the situation was nothing but unkind.

The name was ‘Liriel Wecker,’ with bright silver hair and eyes with stars embedded in them, really, stars that sparkled in his pupils.

The first time he looked in the mirror, Hamin opened his mouth in shock and touched the corners of his eyes over and over. From the start it made no sense, but he had not expected to become someone from another world entirely.

After that, in the flood of memories that poured into him, he soon recalled Liriel’s wish.

“I want to be loved by my family.”

For Hamin, who had never had a family, it was hard and baffling. But fortunately, pleasing them was not difficult.

For people who would commit evil without hesitation for their own profit, who valued themselves above all else, it was easy to capture them. He only had to give them what they wanted.

So for half a year Hamin threw himself into work. He took on lawsuits that benefited the Weckers, while still putting on a show of being just righteous enough not to look too worn down. In the middle of that he spared time to meet them, and the ones who had first been wary slowly began to open their hearts to him.

When he searched Liriel’s memory and gave them gifts they liked, their expressions were so unexpected that he struggled to hide how absurd he felt.

What was family, that even those trash-like people acted like that?

When they sat beside him feeding him apple pie, or wiped the sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief, there were many times he felt disgust.

They were intoxicated with playing family without sincerity.

These were people who, if even a small hangnail dug under his nail, would be the first to throw Liriel Wecker away. Yet they put on a show of being sincere, and it was ridiculous.

Anyway, that was only his thought. By the god’s standard, this much must have been enough. Hamin instinctively realized that the day to return was not far off.

On the last night he spent there, he looked at the round full moon and felt unexpected emotion. After all, he had lived in that body for half a year. To say he had no attachment would be a lie.

Having another’s memories did not mean he ceased to be himself. Rather, by living Liriel’s life, Hamin was able to look back at his own.

Liriel had suffered greatly from being rejected by everyone, but to Hamin’s eyes he was someone who could have been loved anywhere, as long as it was not in this place. Liriel himself did not realize that this world was not all there was. But Hamin had no intention of telling him. That kind of thing was not something one could understand just by being told.

Or maybe… it was only because I have a bad personality.

Well, maybe that was it.

He quietly brushed his finger near the starlit eyes in the mirror.

There were qualities he could never have, even if he were born again. He envied them, and secretly he felt jealous.

He laughed.

Jealousy.

Jealousy.

It was shameful for someone nearly forty to feel that way toward someone in their twenties.

He turned his neck a few times until it cracked, then lay down on the bed. His tired body soon grew heavy.

Maybe now I can finally hear it.

He closed his eyes.

My wish is…

And then, darkness.

I want to know the answer to the question Han Jaeha asked.