Ex returned to the Imperial Palace and began preparing something.
There was something about Elia’s funeral that had struck a nerve.
He felt as though he would never find peace unless he did this before any more time slipped away.
Darius received two sheets of paper covered in writing. After studying their contents with a puzzled expression, he looked back at Ex.
“These numbers… and these letters I’ve never seen before. What are they?”
“They’re from the language of my homeland. I’d like to use what’s written here to make two gravestones and two graves.”
They were memorial inscriptions for his wife and daughter.
* * *
A few days later, on Friday, at the Imperial National Cemetery.
Darius had arranged for two graves to be built inside the national cemetery, where the heroes who had given their lives to defend the Empire were laid to rest.
Ex had tried to stop him, saying it was far too much, but once Darius realized these were no ordinary graves, he refused to change his mind.
In the end, the two graves were placed in a quiet corner of the cemetery where few people ever came, a secluded spot that received plenty of sunlight. That particular location had been Ex’s request.
‘Darius really did a good job. He couldn’t have had any idea what these letters even meant.’
Words no one in this world could read had been carved into the gravestones.
They were written in Korean.
Grave of 「Wife」, Age 38
Born September 12, 1985
Died February 21, 2022
You were always a good person
who put your family before yourself.
Grave of 「Daughter」, Age 17
Born April 1, 2005
Died February 21, 2022
I’m so sorry I never took you
to the amusement park more often.
‘I didn’t know how to write an epitaph, so I ended up keeping them pretty simple.’
Even so, the craftsman who had made the gravestones had done an incredible job.
Ex had carefully written out every Korean character, and the craftsman had carved them exactly as they appeared on the page.
Standing before graves covered in Korean writing somehow made Ex feel as though he had returned to Korea.
It was strange.
He had never realized until now that mere letters could carry such an inexplicable power.
“Ex, you were already here.”
“Sir Ex, I’m here too.”
As he stood there silently, Darius and Beatrice approached from the distance.
They had come despite how busy they had to be with all the affairs of state piling up around them.
“Lord Darius, Lady Beatrice. You came after all. I told you that you didn’t have to.”
“Leaving my little brother to stand before these graves all alone would be disrespectful to the dead as well.”
“I was a Saintess Candidate, remember? I can’t exactly stay away when there are people to bless and mourn.”
It was painfully obvious that both of them had come because they were worried about Ex.
All Ex could do was smile.
Darius and Beatrice looked back and forth between the two graves, then each offered a brief gesture of respect.
Afterward, Darius asked Ex casually.
“So you still won’t tell us who these two people were.”
“Ah… well, it’s complicated. Even if I told you, it would be the kind of story you’d have trouble believing. It’s also tied to some of my secrets.”
“Does it have something to do with that curse?”
“No, it’s not that… I just haven’t fully sorted out my feelings yet. That’s really all there is to it.”
“I understand. Then I’ll wait until you’re ready.”
“So will I, Sir Ex.”
Beatrice recited a short prayer, then sent a soft radiance of divine power toward the graves.
There was little practical meaning in blessing coffins that contained no bodies, but this had never been about practicality in the first place.
It was about how it felt.
And in that sense, it wasn’t a bad thing at all.
Once the blessing was complete, Beatrice spoke carefully.
“Sir Ex, we’ll head back now. I hope you’re able to sort through everything in your heart. Brother, we should leave him be.”
“We’ll go on ahead.”
With that, Beatrice and Darius turned and left.
They must have realized that Ex still had things he needed to work through on his own.
‘I wonder how shocked they’d be if they found out I’m actually forty.’
Ex gave a quiet, humorless chuckle before turning his eyes back to the graves.
His heart felt a little lighter than it had before.
For a long time, Ex simply stared at them.
The wind tugged at his clothes again and again, but he remained where he was.
Still.
Silent.
“Yeah…”
For the first time in a very long while, Ex spoke in Korean.
Looking at his wife’s grave, the words began coming out on their own.
“When was it that we met again? I was a junior in college, wasn’t I? You joined the book club as a freshman, and it all started because we kept recommending novels to each other. Right? We fell for each other so hard back then. We were each other’s first love, and our personalities matched, our hobbies matched… everything just clicked.”
Speaking Korean aloud again felt strange.
Then again, when he thought about it, there would have been no point speaking the Empire’s common language to his wife.
She never would have understood it.
So Korean was the only language that made sense.
“And then we went and screwed up not long after we started dating… and that’s how we had our daughter. Before we even graduated. My parents and your parents beat the hell out of me back then… Looking back on it now, I’m amazed I somehow survived all the way to forty.”
He could call her a child born from a mistake all he wanted, but they had poured everything they had into raising her.
If anything, having that child was what had forced Ilyong to grow up sooner.
She was the reason he gritted his teeth and fought so desperately to survive.
There was, however, a small problem with Ex’s nature.
With Ilyong’s nature.
“My dream was to become a novelist, remember? But what kind of father with a kid has time to sit around writing novels? So I started looking for a regular job right away. One of my professors introduced me to a place. The pay was barely minimum wage, so we never had much money, but at least the job was stable. Back then, I thought our little family was doing pretty well.”
Ilyong lied whenever he believed he needed to.
To other people.
To himself.
Even when he was exhausted, even when he was barely holding himself together and desperately needed help,
he would simply say he was fine and keep his mouth shut.
Even in front of the only family he had in the world.
“Back then, I thought that was just the weight a father had to carry.”
But it wasn’t.
By the time he realized that,
as always,
he was already far too late.
“You were young back then too, but you always acted strong in front of our daughter. You never let her see you cry. Even though there were so many times when things got so hard you could barely stand it. Whenever that happened, you opened up to me. You told me what you were really feeling. And I liked that. It made me happy. I thought, hey, I’m actually helping someone. So I just listened. Like an idiot.”
He shouldn’t have done that.
“…Because the truth was, I was exhausted too. So exhausted I could barely take it anymore. I was struggling, worn down, miserable… but I thought that if I ever said any of those weak things out loud, I wouldn’t deserve to call myself the man of the house anymore. I had a wife. I had a daughter. So I thought enduring it was just what I was supposed to do.”
That was where it began.
The moment the smallest cracks first appeared.
“Then I got incredibly lucky and moved to a brand-new publishing company, and what do you know? Apparently I was one of the founding employees. My employee number was nine, so that tells you everything. Luckily, the company took off. I thought I’d finally found the job I could keep for the rest of my life. And that was where the worst part of my personality finally came back to bite me.”
The cracks slowly widened until they reached every part of Ilyong’s life.
“Most of the novels I handled before that did okay. Nothing special. Then one novel I was in charge of suddenly became a massive hit. After that, I convinced myself the concept we’d used was some kind of magic formula for success, so I started forcing it into everything I could get my hands on. And, well… you can see where that got me.”
It was the doomsday concept.
The kind of novel built around a world hurtling toward destruction.
At a time when Ilyong had already been pushed to his emotional limit, that concept had seized his attention and refused to let go.
The truth was simple.
The author he had worked with back then had just been extraordinarily talented.
Ilyong hadn’t wanted to admit that.
So he kept forcing the same concept onto the other writers he managed.
Ironically enough, lying and deception had always been his specialties.
He had a talent for killing his true feelings and showing people whatever emotion the situation demanded.
And after that one massive success, he never produced another hit.
Forget a hit.
One novel after another failed to even reach average numbers.
Lies always came apart eventually.
“The writers I used to manage probably celebrated when they heard what happened to me. Bet they threw a party and said I deserved to die. Ah, though I wonder if time even passes at the same rate over there? Either way… I really did wrong by those people. I’d like them to forgive me someday.”
Ex fell silent for a moment.
Then, carefully, he reached into the deepest part of his heart and pulled out a thought that had long since hardened there like stone.
“I thought you hated me. I thought you saw me as nothing but a machine that brought home money. I thought you didn’t even see me as a person anymore. I thought you saw me as a slave instead of family. But…”
Thanks to Seongtae barging into his life and helping him whether he wanted it or not, Ex had finally realized the truth.
“That wasn’t it. I realized it the day we were going to the amusement park.”
And that was the day his wife died.
“…I realized it too late.”
Turn back time.
Just one day.
That kind of regression exists in novels, doesn’t it?
People can get possessed by characters inside novels, so why the hell can’t I go back in time?
Send me back there!
I’ll stop the apocalypse, the end of the world, whatever the hell you want!
Just send me back to that day! FUUUCK!!
“…”
The cracks and wounds had never been properly closed.
They had simply scarred over.
And eventually, the consequences born from those wounds came for him.
Ex knew that everything that had happened was the consequence of his own choices.
So he did not cry.
“I don’t have the right.”
That was everything he had wanted to say to his wife.
Now he turned toward his daughter’s gravestone.
“…I’m sorry. I forgot your name.”
He tried to think of every name he possibly could.
What kind of name would he have chosen for her?
It was pointless.
Because his wife had been the one who named their daughter.
“I was so happy when you were born. That tiny little red thing was my daughter. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never even imagined I’d have a child of my own. I always thought I’d spend my whole life alone and die alone somewhere with no one around.”
The child had grown at a frightening speed.
She looked so much like her mother that merely seeing her made him happy.
“But I hardly ever got to see you. I was working late or pulling all-nighters every single day, so the only time I ever saw my own daughter was when you were asleep. How long did it take before I finally heard you call me ‘Dad’? Twenty-four months? You said ‘Mom’ after only five months… I’ll admit, that stung a little back then.”
Ilyong’s parents had offered to take care of the baby until the two of them became financially stable, but his wife had adamantly refused.
She insisted that she would raise their daughter herself.
Ilyong had agreed.
“You were unbelievably hard to raise when you were a baby. I was making barely two million a month, and every single thing a baby needed cost so much it felt like it was made of gold. It drove me insane. But what else could we do? At least my parents helped us with some of the childcare expenses. That saved us.”
Trying to support a family of three on less than three million a month was enough to make a man bleed tears.
For ten years, Ilyong never once had money to spend on himself.
“I thought things might get easier once you got older, but then you started elementary school. Suddenly we had to pay for after-school classes, give you an allowance, buy whatever new thing all the kids were obsessed with… But I didn’t mind. By then, I’d finally started doing pretty well for myself.”
At some point, their finances had slowly begun to loosen up.
That was largely because his wife managed their money so meticulously.
They could afford to spend what they needed to spend.
Of course, that stability came at a price.
“That was probably around the time things started getting awkward between you and me. Of course they did. I was barely ever home.”
Once his daughter reached elementary school, she eventually began hiding behind her mother whenever she saw Ilyong.
As though she knew the word dad,
but had no idea what it meant to actually have one.
Around the same time, the conversations between Ilyong and his wife began disappearing as well.
Their relationship slowly became something held together by necessity.
“I missed your elementary school graduation. Your middle school entrance ceremony, your graduation too. I missed all of it. Somehow, there was always something urgent at work every single time. I remember you called me during your middle school graduation. I’ll regret what you said that day for the rest of my life.”
…You’re not coming today either?
…I knew it.
…Forget it. I’m hanging up.
That wasn’t all.
He had missed the family outings that other families took every now and then.
Before he knew it, the family photo albums contained only pictures of his wife and daughter.
And in those pictures,
his daughter was no longer smiling.
“Why did I do that? What was so damn important about work? What was so damn important about money…?”
Even if they had spent their lives bouncing from rental to rental,
even if they had lived with barely enough money to get by,
what his daughter had needed was never money.
She had needed her father.
But his daughter hid what she really felt.
Of all the things she could have inherited from him,
she had inherited Ilyong’s nature.
“Why did you have to inherit that… Of all the things you could’ve gotten from me, why did it have to be the worst one…?”
His daughter was good at lying.
Good at deceiving people.
Sometimes, when his wife told him the things their daughter had done, even Ilyong was left speechless.
The most shocking incident had happened when she was five.
When she was five years old, his daughter killed the family cat with her own hands.
She had accidentally knocked something off a shelf, and it came down squarely on the cat’s head.
The death itself had been an accident.
What happened afterward was the problem.
His daughter lied and said, ‘I guess it died of old age.’
Old age.
The cat had only been three years old.
“That was the first time I ever really yelled at you. I told you never to lie again…, never to do something like that again… I think that was also the first time your mother ever had to stop me.”
Even while she was being scolded, his daughter hadn’t understood what she had done wrong.
She had only cried because Ilyong was angry at her.
Ilyong understood exactly what had been happening inside her head.
Because when he was five,
he had been exactly the same.
Seeing his daughter after she killed that cat had been like looking into a mirror.
‘Always be careful with your words.’
He himself had never learned to be careful enough with his words.
So his daughter had never learned either.
He had failed to do what a father was supposed to do for his child.
“I still regret it. I should’ve talked to you more. I should’ve taken you out to more places. I should’ve eaten more good food with you… It’s ironic, isn’t it? The thing I actually needed was to go back in time, but instead I ended up getting possessed by some character in a novel. What a joke. Seriously.”
Ex let out a long, heavy sigh.
He forced every last breath from his lungs as though he were trying to empty everything inside him along with it.
And at the end of that long lament, he finally said the words he had wanted to say most.
“…I miss you. Both of you.”
Even though he knew no convenient miracle would ever make that wish come true.
“…I’ll come again. Next year, I’ll be here on the anniversary. I promise.”
Ex remained by the graves for a long while.
The grass around them bent and swayed again and again beneath the wind.
The shadows cast by the gravestones slowly shifted across the ground, quietly marking the passage of time.
When one of those shadows finally reached Ex’s feet, he moved.
“I’m going now.”
It was impossible to let go of every regret.
But Ex had finally put down many of the ones he had carried for so long.
He no longer needed to run from his memories.
Now, he could walk forward with them beside him.
Ex left Ilyong here and walked away.
–TL Notes–
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