SPRFG 08

Chapter 8

Koreatown of the Ilgentavita Empire (1)

The day Jua-iye first opened her eyes was a winter day one year ago.

Sometimes, when you can feel the soft, thick texture of the mattress between your fingers, and the weight of the cotton blanket pressing pleasantly against your shoulders, you burrow deeper into the bed while feeling the cold winter air against your cheek, only to suddenly realize that sunlight is shining straight down.

At times like that, regardless of the body that had already surrendered to the comfort, her heart would beat quickly, and there was only one thought that passed through her mind.

‘Ah, I’m screwed.’

There was no need to think about why she was screwed or what exactly had gone wrong.

Because if she could still think about such things, it meant that nothing had really gone wrong yet.

With that one thought, the woman gathered all her worries into the words I’m screwed and comfortably turned over.

If someone fell on the street, whether they rolled once or twice after falling, the fact that they had fallen did not disappear.

Since she had already messed things up, she wanted to enjoy the state of ‘not having to do anything’ just a little longer.

So she intended to delay everything for as long as she could.

That day, the blanket felt especially soft and heavy.

She had used the only all-season blanket she owned since childhood, and it still had cartoon characters printed on it. It had been faded for a long time.

It was hot in summer and cold in winter.

Cotton kept coming out through the holes and tickling her nose.

She felt particularly lucky that day because she did not have to start the day by sneezing.

The bed was unusually soft, and even when she changed positions or rolled over a couple of times, she did not fall off.

She smiled with her eyes closed.

She thought she had been worried about something before falling asleep, but she could not remember what it was.

There was something she had to do when she woke up, but she could not remember that either.

She simply felt good.

When she tried to remember the last time she had felt this happy, nothing came to mind.

Then a sense of uneasiness suddenly came over her.

She carefully opened her eyes.

She let out a sigh of relief.

She was definitely still dreaming.

Otherwise, there was no way to explain the sight spread out before her eyes.

The first thing she noticed was the canopy of the bed.

The decorative tassels woven with gold thread were so elaborate that, without even realizing it, she reached out and touched one.

The knot was firm and cold.

It was vivid for a dream.

She thought she could only feel the texture, but somewhere she heard a quiet crackling sound.

It was the sound of firewood burning in the fireplace.

When she realized that the bed she was lying on was as enormous as the room she used to sleep in, she became curious enough to look around more carefully.

Even if she woke up soon, she wanted to remember everything well.

That way, she could brag to people about having such a dream.

She realized that she had been in a room like this before and began thinking.

It had been when she went to a conference in Paris, France, with her professor.

Since she had to pay the expenses for attending the conference herself, all the money she had painstakingly saved from her graduate assistant salary disappeared.

She thought it would be too unfair to attend only the conference and immediately go home, so she went sightseeing during the half-day holiday she had.

Her professor and classmates were going to Versailles, so she went alone by train to the Château de Fontainebleau.

The large windows in the room she was in now, the walls decorated with intricate patterns, the stern-looking portraits hanging on the walls, and the ceiling paintings were all surprisingly similar to such a castle.

The reason she could only think of it as an imitation was because everything around her was such a strange mixture.

For example, the man in the portrait hanging on the wall was wearing seventeenth- or eighteenth-century clothing, with a vest reaching down to his thighs.

Yet the style in which the portrait had been painted looked like Impressionism from the 1840s or later, no matter how quickly she tried to date it.

The bed was the same.

Even if European nobles before the modern era decorated their rooms beautifully, they did not make their beds particularly large.

The belief that one should lie down with one’s entire body was something reserved for after death was widespread, so they deliberately made their beds small and slept with their legs folded.

It seemed that the scene had been created from pieces of the image of a wealthy and beautiful European upper-class society that existed only in her head.

She slowly began to recover her memories.

Heo Hwanhee.

Her name was Heo Hwanhee.

She was a graduate student in a master’s program living in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, and her major was history.

The various things she knew about modern Western history came from that very reason.

She put her feet down from the bed.

The sharp coldness traveling up through the soles of her feet made her shiver for a moment.

When she looked down, there was a pair of cloth slippers for indoor use.

She put them on, climbed down from the bed, and turned around.

The room was larger than she had expected.

A wooden desk made her gasp in delight.

It was a round, cylindrical desk with a lid that could be opened upward and downward.

More than the mahogany chair with its soft cushion, and even more than the marble statue without a single speck of dust on it, it was the desk that captured Hwanhee’s heart.

Hwanhee fiddled with the lid and was about to sit down, but stopped.

She felt that she would wake up from the dream soon anyway.

If she sat down in front of such a magnificent desk and woke up without getting to write anything, she thought it would be too disappointing.

Then she realized that there was someone in the room.

She felt sorry for walking around so freely without even realizing that the owner of the room was there.

She was about to give an awkward smile when she realized that the girl was quite beautiful.

The girl was staring straight at her.

The two stood there for a long time, looking directly into each other’s eyes.

The girl’s hair was a pale pink.

If she had to find the most accurate thing to compare it to, it was the cherry blossoms of April.

Her eyes were a shade of purple that made Hwanhee wonder if such a color could really exist in human eyes.

Rather than being beautiful, she had a cute and adorable impression.

Her short, straight bangs revealed her light eyebrows.

She had clear, prominent double eyelids, and her sharp nose was straight yet small and delicate.

She was tall, but because she still had some baby fat in her cheeks, the word girl seemed more suitable than woman.

Just as Hwanhee hesitantly raised her hand, the girl also hesitantly raised her opposite hand.

Hwanhee opened her mouth.

The girl opened her mouth too.

Then there was only one voice.

It was a mirror.

Hwanhee felt disappointed when she realized that she had never needed permission from the owner of the room in the first place.

She found it fascinating that the cute girl moved exactly as she did, so she backed away while looking at the mirror.

But eventually, she returned to the bed and quietly sat down.

She intended to wait for the dream to end.

‘Maybe this is because I worked hard all this time, and I’m being allowed to rest like this.’

As soon as she had that thought, the corners of her eyes suddenly became hot.

Tears streamed down before they could even gather.

She felt sad, but it was closer to the emotions and worries she had felt before falling asleep coming back to her.

She could not remember why she had become sad.

The emotion that dominated Hwanhee was a sense of unfamiliarity.

She was the one who wanted to cry, yet the girl with pink hair and purple eyes was crying.

Hwanhee was amazed that this girl, whom she would never see again after waking from the dream, was crying for her.

So she simply let the tears flow down her cheeks.

The tears were so hot and painful that the fact that she could not remember the reason made her feel anxious.

The girl’s memories came back to Hwanhee.

She remembered visiting a friend’s house and having a wonderful time drinking tea and playing.

That friend had magnificent golden-blond hair.

The girl had a dollhouse, and all the furniture inside it actually worked like real furniture.

Even the tiny drawers, no bigger than her fist, could be opened and closed.

This cute girl had gone to sleep after having a somewhat serious conversation with her older brother the night before.

She felt that if she waited a little longer, she would remember exactly what they had talked about.

For a moment, Hwanhee deliberately ignored the memory that came to mind.

It felt like looking at someone else’s naked body without permission.

If this really was a dream, why was she remembering things that she had never experienced?

And it frightened her a little that she could not remember how she had suddenly ended up in such an unfamiliar place.

If something had happened that could make her cry on its own even without remembering anything, it must have been something very serious.

She decided that after waking up, she should visit the counseling center on campus and get some psychological counseling.

Then the door opened.

A woman carrying a bucket filled with firewood, apparently intending to put it into the fireplace, entered the room.

When she saw Hwanhee, she spoke.

“Miss, you’re awake? Why didn’t you call for me…….”

At that moment, the reason Hwanhee was confused was not the content of her words, but the fact that they were not Korean.

It was a language she had never heard in her life.

Even if someone gave her paper and a pencil, she did not think she could write down the pronunciation of those words in Hangul.

It was a language where she did not even know where one word ended and another began.

Yet, somehow, she could understand it immediately.

Rather than being happy about this unexpected good fortune, goosebumps rose all over her body.

Something was wrong.

And at that moment, she realized that the language she had been thinking in and using until then was not Korean either.

“Ah, ah…… Hello? Hel-lo? Hello?”

The words that came out of her mouth now were not Korean either.

They were not any language she knew.

And yet, she could understand her own words.

A sudden thought struck her.

As long as she could interpret this language, she would never be able to speak Korean again.

What was the Korean greeting?

What was ‘hello’ in Korean again?

Once the habits that had been familiar to her lips and tongue disappeared, all that remained was the knowledge stored in her head.

She desperately searched through her memories.

“anɲjʌ̹ŋɦa̠sʰe̞jo̞?”

‘Annyeonghaseyo.’

She was certain that was how it was pronounced, but her tongue did not move properly.

The woman who had entered the room stood still and stared at her.

Her frozen expression looked almost eerie.

If this was a dream, she would have expected a familiar face to appear.

But this was a person she had never seen before.

She was white, and she was wearing plain clothes that did not suit such a magnificent house at all.

The woman spoke again, this time slowly.

“Miss, you woke up early. What did you just say?”

By this point, Hwanhee should have realized, ‘Ah, I’ve finally been reincarnated into a romance-fantasy novel.’

But although Heo Hwanhee had read many web novels, she was terrible at picking up hints.

She crawled back under the blanket, poked only her head out, and spoke.

“I’m sorry, but could you let me sleep a little longer? I haven’t been sleeping well lately. This bed is nice! I’ll sleep just a little longer and then go to work. Please. Just five more minutes.”

The woman put down the bucket of firewood and backed out of the room with a frightened expression.

She shouted,

“My lady! Mistress! The young lady is…… The young lady is……!”

Whether she heard her or not, Heo Hwanhee closed her eyes and immediately fell asleep again.

For someone who had always slept with her head on her office desk or leaning against a subway seat pole, Aiolia’s bed was an irresistible temptation.

The soft silk blanket seemed to swallow her whole body.