Chapter 1 : Chapter 1
Chapter 001 - Prologue
I was an ordinary engineering geek from South Korea.
I was the kind of man who had followed the classic route to perfection: boys’ middle school, boys’ high school, military service, engineering school. Of course, that did not make me some kind of rare specimen who had never even held a woman’s hand.
Honestly, I should have stopped at undergrad, but for some reason, I brazenly went on to graduate school.
It was not like I had any dream of becoming a professor. My goal was simply to get my degree and land a job at a respectable research institute. As long as the salary was high, that was enough for me.
Anyway, today was a rather special day.
In more ways than one.
It was the day I had to entertain the professors on my thesis committee before my final master’s defense. They called it treating them to dinner, but once we moved on to the second round, things turned into a truly sordid mess.
Everyone except me had drowned themselves in liquor and let go of the last thread of reason. When they scolded me for not spending enough, I opened my wallet even wider. Had they sold off the dignity of being professors somewhere?
And in the process, I had to endure a torrent of harsh words. It started with them saying that if this had not been a master’s thesis, they would never have passed it, and continued with insults about what kind of pathetic hospitality this was supposed to be.
Even so, I endured it.
I was not so foolish that I did not know my place. I was the one without power here, through and through.
I still had not received their seals on my thesis evaluation forms. I had to cater to their every whim until I did.
I had known long ago that this field was filthy. It was not as though I had spent only a day or two listening to my seniors lament about it. Lucky for me, I was a man. If I had been a female student, I might have gone through something even worse.
All those scandals exploding across the news these days were only the tip of the iceberg. What I had seen with my own eyes was already staggering. If anyone ever carried out a proper investigation, there would be quite a few professors getting dragged out and exposed.
It only ended at this because I had stayed on at my alma mater for graduate school. If I had gotten a little greedier and gone to another university, I might have been taken for a complete sucker.
Even so, there was one proper professor among them.
My advisor.
The only man there who had not been fooling around with the hostesses looked pleasantly drunk as he said to me,
“Suhyeon! Get me a taxi. I need to go home.”
“Yes, Professor!”
How brilliantly he shone!
He truly seemed like the only intellectual left in this age.
Being able to serve a professor like this was the greatest blessing of my life. Was this not exactly why people stayed on at their alma mater?
I quickly slipped out of the room and called a taxi. Before long, it arrived, and I helped my advisor outside and practically shoved him into the back seat.
“Get home safely, sir!”
“All right. You worked hard today. Do not worry too much about the evaluation! The professors may say things like that, but they are looking on it favorably. Hahahahaha!”
“Ah, then……”
“Start preparing for doctoral admission. You are not planning to stop with a master’s, are you?”
“Of course not!”
It was the moment I evolved from a slave into an upgraded slave.
A thrilling jolt ran through me. Right. This was why I did research. For the time being, all I had to do was switch into full study mode, get into the doctoral program, and then find a decent job.
Once I landed a fine position, married a pretty wife, and had a couple of adorable little children, my life would finally undergo a Copernican revolution!
The earth was not the only thing that was round.
My life was round too. If it kept turning, the sun was bound to rise on it someday.
After sending the taxi off, I sat down off to one side for a moment to sober up a little. The other professors still in the room were probably too busy groping the hostesses’ asses to notice anything else.
If you were a powerless underling with any sense, the decent thing to do was to quietly make yourself scarce.
But then a chill ran through me.
HOOOOONK!
Headlights flared in from one side.
I turned my head without thinking. A massive truck was charging toward me at a terrifying speed, its horn blaring.
By the time I realized something was wrong, it was already too late.
Something must have gone wrong with it, because the truck was moving erratically. Then it lurched straight toward me. As the horn kept blaring, I froze where I stood.
“Oh, fu…….”
CRASH!
In the most unexpected of places, I came face-to-face with the reincarnation truck I had only ever heard about in rumors.