UNFED

That day, Gong had someone arriving and someone leaving, both at once.

* * *

Park Jeong-su came looking for Hoon. It was early. Hoon had just woken up.

Park Jeong-su said.

"I'll do it."

Hoon looked at him.

"72 hours."

Hoon looked at Park Jeong-su for a moment.

"Why?"

Park Jeong-su said.

"I thought about it last night. What it means to fight for a nation. For thirty years, that was everything. But listening to you, I started thinking. What happens if the nation collapses? If the nation loses to AI? Then what was I fighting for, all that time?"

Hoon listened.

"Fighting for humanity sounds grand. But it's bigger than a nation."

Hoon said.

"That's right."

"Then it makes more sense to fight for the bigger thing."

That was Park Jeong-su's logic. It wasn't emotion. It was calculation. The calculation that, as a soldier, fighting for something larger was simply correct.

Hoon looked at Park Jeong-su.

"One thing."

"What?"

"Once the 72 hours are over, you can go back to the military. No obligation. Awakening doesn't mean you have to stay here."

Park Jeong-su looked at Hoon.

"I know."

"I'm doing it anyway."

"You're doing it anyway?"

It was a short exchange. But the decision was in it.

Hoon said.

"Let's start this afternoon."

Park Jeong-su nodded.

Then he said,

"After we eat."

Hoon smiled.

"Right. After we eat."

Park Jeong-su said as he walked away,

"Last meal, then."

Whether it was a joke or not was hard to tell. That was simply who Park Jeong-su was. Hoon knew that about him.

* * *

That same afternoon, Armando Baldo came up to the basin.

He didn't ride a motorcycle. He walked the mountain path, the same way he had the first time. He was an old man, but his pace was still fast. It was the walk of someone who had grown up in these mountains.

Hoon and Lee Jae-in met him at the entrance.

Armando looked slowly around the basin. The mud-walled buildings. The shared workspace. The sound of the hydroelectric facility, faint in the distance. Where there had once been an empty basin, a small village now stood.

"It's changed a lot."

"Because of you."

Armando shook his head.

"All we did was show you the way. You built it."

He sat down on a low rock that served as a bench. Hoon and Lee Jae-in sat beside him.

"There's a reason I came today. Our people. We won't be coming up here anymore."

Hoon heard those words. He paused for a moment.

"Did something happen?"

"No. Nothing happened. That's why I'm coming to say this now. The way Loro taught you to choose wood—your own carpenters do it better now.

The trail through the valley our children taught you—you know it better than we do now. You needed us at first. Not anymore."

"You could still stay with us. We could coexist."

Lee Jae-in said.

Armando looked at Lee Jae-in for a long moment. It was the same look he'd had the first time they met. Eyes that didn't hurry.

"I told you I knew what you were building from the very start. Because of the old stories. There's another part to that story. I didn't tell you that part."

Hoon and Lee Jae-in looked at Armando.

"People who train in the mountains. People who don't eat. There's a story about what happens to them."

"What happens?"

Armando looked up at the sky for a moment.

"They don't stay long. In the end, they leave. In the old story, it says: to the stars."

A long silence fell.

"No one knew what that meant, in the old days. We thought it was just a way of talking about death. But watching you, I started to think differently."

Armando looked at Lee Jae-in.

"That's why I won't be joining. And I won't send our people either. We belong to this land. We're born here, we die here. That's our way. But you—"

Armando pointed past the basin, toward the ridgeline of the Caraballo Mountains. Beyond it, toward the sky.

"You're meant to go far into space before long. That's what our old story says. So if I joined now, I'd just be staying here while you left. And then I'd grieve more, later. Better to feel this now."

Lee Jae-in couldn't say anything.

Hoon asked slowly.

"Do you believe it? The story."

Armando smiled. It was the same unhurried smile from the day they'd first met.

"I didn't. Not until I met you."

He stood up.

"If our children want to come, don't stop them. That was the first promise."

"That won't change."

Hoon said.

Armando nodded. He looked at the basin one more time.

"It's a good village."

That was all. He turned and began walking down the mountain path. He was an old man, but his pace was fast.

* * *

Morning and evening lived inside the same day, in the Caraballo Mountains.

In the morning, as the fog lifted, an old friend had arrived. In the evening, as the fog settled back in, someone who had stood beside them for a long time had left.

Hoon wrote a short line in his notebook.

〈Today, one person joined and one person left. The one who left said we're meant to go far into space.〉

He wrote nothing else beneath it.

An old friend had come.

That was enough.