Chapter 2 : Dreams and Reality
Chapter 2: Dreams and Reality
Baek Woohyun, standing in the middle of the laboratory, suddenly tilted his head.
Having undergone so many experiments, he couldn’t quite remember which number this experiment was.
It was probably around the sixty-second time.
Or maybe the one hundred thirty-seventh.
‘Well—does it even matter?’
Soon, Baek Woohyun gave up trying to count the number of experiments.
It wasn’t particularly important anyway.
No one wants to know how many times they writhed in agony, and he was no exception.
It was around that time when someone called out to him as he stood there blankly.
“……Woohyun?”
When he turned around, there was a woman with a familiar face.
A woman with pale complexion and short hair.
She looked somewhat haggard, but recognizing who she was wasn’t particularly difficult.
Because.
“You really are Woohyun.”
She was the first connection Baek Woohyun had built in that world.
And also… perhaps someone he might have loved.
“Sua.”
Shin Sua.
Their connection had started in the laboratory.
As Test Subjects died one by one from experiments close to torture, the two tenaciously survived, eventually building enough rapport to even exchange names.
At best, it was conversations through the scraps of time left between experiments, so it wasn’t very long, but in that place, that had been enough.
“It’s been a while.”
Baek Woohyun smiled faintly at the welcome face.
He reached out and gently brushed Shin Sua’s hair.
Softly, like caressing beautiful porcelain.
Exactly the way she had liked before she died.
“Woohyun. It hurts.”
Shin Sua spoke while looking at Baek Woohyun.
No, actually, she wasn’t looking at him.
More precisely, it was closer to her being unable to see anything.
After all, nothing could be seen with eyes that were empty holes.
Was it during the two hundred fourteenth experiment?
Her eyes, which had sparkled beautifully even in pain, had burst open, scattering blood everywhere.
Baek Woohyun still vividly remembered the scream she let out then.
Even the sight of her writhing on the floor as she died.
“Help me. Woohyun. Save me. I don’t want to die.”
A bitter smile spread across Baek Woohyun’s lips.
Before he knew it, many people besides Shin Sua had appeared around him. They were the connections he ‘had built’ in that world.
They all looked at him with tears of blood flowing from their empty pupils.
Baek Woohyun, Cheon Hojin, Lee Daehyun, Kim Semi, Jeong Daeyoung…
Baek Woohyun recalled their names one by one as he looked at their faces.
Though they were faces miserably distorted by pain, it wasn’t particularly difficult.
He had sworn in blood never to forget the connections he’d lost, and had engraved their names entirely into his soul.
—”You, at least, must live…”
—”You have to kill those bastards.”
—”Kill them! Don’t leave a single one alive!”
—”Revenge! Terrible revenge!”
Those who died in agony cried out.
Their cries echoed in the pitch-black darkness.
As if boiling over with hatred, fury, and despair.
Baek Woohyun looked at them with murky, clouded eyes. At those who had left him with inescapable, curse-like bonds.
Soon the specters rushed at him with shrieks—
And finally, he woke from the dream.
“……”
Baek Woohyun came to his senses and sat up.
First, the sight of the room, which felt both familiar and unfamiliar, entered his vision.
It was his room.
His room in the original world.
‘Ah, right. I came back.’
Eventually, Baek Woohyun recalled that he had returned to the original world last night.
And also that, returning to his original body and overwhelmed by the fatigue that poured over him, he had collapsed into sleep without even thinking to do anything.
The content of the nightmare-like dream also passed through his mind, but he merely chuckled it off.
It wasn’t the first time he’d had such a dream anyway.
‘By the way.’
Baek Woohyun quickly checked the head of the bed.
It was to find something that should definitely be there.
He didn’t remember well since it had been almost ten years, but he would surely have left it somewhere around here.
Fortunately, his guess wasn’t off, and he easily succeeded in finding the item he’d targeted—a smartphone.
Despite the profoundly unfamiliar feeling, having continuously used similar devices in that world, unlocking it through fingerprint recognition was quite natural.
‘May 20, 2041.’
Baek Woohyun, who had checked the time first, narrowed his eyes.
As he remembered, the date he had suddenly been dragged into the game world was May 19, 2041.
Considering that he’d collapsed right after returning from there and was only now waking up, it meant that essentially, the time spent in the other world hadn’t been applied.
He thought it was fortunate.
It would have been very bewildering if ten years had already passed when he’d barely returned.
‘Though the possibility of that was extremely low given that my room was intact.’
Still, he looked around more to see if anything had changed, but everything else remained the same.
His family, his friends, and everything else hadn’t changed one bit from what Baek Woohyun remembered.
It also meant that this place wasn’t a fake constructed by a mental-type ability user.
Generally, a fake world was composed only of his surface consciousness, so if he investigated this much, it would inevitably reveal cracks somewhere.
For example, in a way where his family’s faces weren’t from ‘reality’ but people from that world appeared instead.
“……”
Eventually, Baek Woohyun put down the smartphone on the bed and stared blankly into space.
Now that he’d returned to the ‘original world’ he’d so desperately desired, the emotion that filled his heart was ridiculously not joy or elation.
Only something that couldn’t be clearly identified as any particular emotion, something of unclear identity, pooled there murkily.
‘Why.’
Why couldn’t he be purely happy?
He’d returned to the ‘real’ world he’d craved for ten years—shouldn’t he just rejoice?
“……”
Suddenly, Baek Woohyun’s eyes fell on a mirror placed in one corner of the room.
The person reflected in the mirror was looking at himself with a dry expression, and that face without a single scar felt somehow extremely unfamiliar to him.
Like the scenery of the room or the smartphone, no… perhaps even more so.
As he stared blankly for a long while at an appearance that was clearly his own yet looked strange.
Kotok!
The smartphone he’d tossed aside made a sound.
On the Kokoatalk notification that appeared on the darkened screen was written the name Jeong Nayeon.
He immediately recalled who the owner of that name was.
A female friend he’d met at university and often hung out with because they got along well.
‘Right, that’s how it was.’
Baek Woohyun picked up the smartphone and checked the Kokoatalk message.
—Jeong Nayeon: Just asking in case
—Jeong Nayeon: You didn’t forget about today’s plans, right?
Baek Woohyun, who saw Jeong Nayeon’s message, narrowed his eyes.
Unlike easily recalling who she was, he couldn’t remember what the plans were.
It was natural since it was a plan from over ten years ago.
So after briefly pondering, rather than forcibly trying to remember plans that wouldn’t come to mind, he decided to just ask Jeong Nayeon directly.
—Baek Woohyun: What plans
—Jeong Nayeon: (Cat raising its claws in anger emoticon)
—Jeong Nayeon: We said we’d have dinner!
—Jeong Nayeon: I messaged because I thought you might have forgotten!
So there were dinner plans.
There was something vaguely emerging beyond the hazy fog created by ten years of lost memories.
It wasn’t certain since it was from the distant past, but anyway.
“……”
Soon Baek Woohyun’s fingers moved quickly across the smartphone.
The sentence ‘Sorry, today will be difficult. Let’s meet later’ was completed in an instant, and when only the send button remained, his smoothly moving finger hesitated.
It was because he’d thought about what he would do if he canceled the plans now.
Hadn’t he already confirmed that this place wasn’t some fake created by a mental-type ability user, but the real ‘reality’?
With nothing he had to do or wanted to do, all he could do was sit around blankly.
‘In that case, rather.’
It would be better to go meet Jeong Nayeon as a way to adapt to the unfamiliar ‘reality.’
Baek Woohyun, who sighed briefly, deleted the entire sentence he’d written. What he sent instead was a very short question.
—Baek Woohyun: What time and where was it?
—Jeong Nayeon: You bastard
—Jeong Nayeon: You really forgot everything
—Jeong Nayeon: (Cat turning its head away with a hmph emoticon)
—Jeong Nayeon: Come to Dwaejimadang at 7
—Baek Woohyun: ok
Baek Woohyun, who replied briefly, checked the time.
The time displayed at the top of the smartphone was 5:10, so roughly two hours remained until the appointment time.
Calculating the time it would take to wash up lightly and get to the meeting place, it wasn’t very generous.
……However, it was more than enough to check one more thing lastly.
It was time to resolve a question he’d set aside for a moment.
‘Reverse Planet.’
Baek Woohyun’s eyes sank murkily.
Just as he had been when living in that world.
With a rigidly hardened expression, he turned on the Hypernet and searched for Reverse Planet.
The results came out as quickly as expected.
Well, it had to be that way.
Because Reverse Planet was a virtual reality game currently in official service. Moreover, it was even enormously popular, called the ‘nation’s god game.’
It wasn’t just Korea’s story. It was the same everywhere in the world.
Reverse Planet ranked first or in the top ranks of game rankings in every country where it was serviced.
That’s how popular a game it was.
“……”
After skimming through the subsequent content, Reverse Planet was indeed the world Baek Woohyun had experienced.
Dimensional gates, invaders, war, supernatural abilities, the Reverse World, the Otherworld Response Alliance, the Otherworld Management Bureau… All of it was the same as what he had directly seen and heard.
As he’d speculated earlier in that world, it was certain that he hadn’t dropped into a world with no connection, but had entered and returned from inside Reverse Planet.
‘The developer is… Planet Earth?’
It was a development company that had released only the game Reverse Planet, gaining worldwide recognition thanks to that single game.
Baek Woohyun, who entered their homepage, checked the location of the headquarters.
San Francisco, USA. The so-called Silicon Valley area.
He quietly looked at the headquarters address, then shook his head.
Of course, he could go if he wanted to.
He had a passport and a decent amount of money.
But what would he do by going there?
‘They won’t meet with me if I just show up without notice.’
Even if things went well and he met them, it would be a problem.
‘If I tell them I fell into the world inside the game they made, I’ll just be treated like a lunatic.’
“Damn it.”
Baek Woohyun cursed briefly and threw the smartphone onto the bed.
If he calmed down and thought carefully, regardless of whether Planet Earth was related to the fact that he’d fallen into the Reverse Planet world, going there was indeed a foolish thing to do.
If they weren’t related, he’d be treated like a lunatic and kicked out, and if they were related, who knows what they might do after capturing him there.
Besides, what would change by confronting Planet Earth at this point?
“……”
The connection device placed in one corner of the room entered Baek Woohyun’s heavily sunken gaze.
The only means to play Reverse Planet.
He stared quietly at the connection device with a gaze that made it impossible to tell what he was thinking.
Continuously until the sun set and the room was engulfed in pitch-black darkness.