Chapter 88

‘I found her!’

At first glance, she appeared unharmed.

‘I used the wind to cushion her fall, but is she still alive?’

Rustle.

I stepped into the flowerbed and carefully lifted the fallen Earthling.

“Hey. Are you all right?”

Fortunately, good news followed almost at once.

The woman frowned several times as she lay there, then suddenly opened her eyes.

‘Oh!’

For a moment, she stared at me in stunned silence.

Then she spoke.

“You...”

You?

“Who are you to interfere in someone else’s business? Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to make that decision? Why did you stop me? Why? Why did you stop me? Aaaah!”

The people of this planet had a remarkably unusual way of treating those who saved their lives.

***

This was the worst.

It had taken every last bit of courage she possessed to make that single attempt, only for it to end in failure.

“Ugh!”

Gu Seohyeong gritted her teeth and glared ahead.

Nothing had gone her way from the very beginning.

She was furious that her attempt had failed.

She was furious because she was hungry.

And, on top of everything else, she had no idea where her glasses had gone.

“Everything went wrong because he interfered!”

Gu Seohyeong turned her anger on the man who had saved her.

“Do you think I’m supposed to thank you just because you took pity on me? Why would you interfere when you don’t know anything about my circumstances? What are you going to do now? Take responsibility!”

The answer came in an infuriatingly calm voice.

“Calm down.”

Without her glasses, Gu Seohyeong could barely see anything. She had no choice but to continue the conversation by relying on the voice in front of her.

“You may still be in shock from the fall, so sit down first. How about over there?”

The blond man pointed somewhere in the distance.

Squinting, she could just make out the outdoor seating area beside a nearby convenience store.

“Whether I’m shocked or not...”

Still grumbling, Gu Seohyeong lowered herself into a chair.

As much as she hated to admit it, the man had been right. Her legs had been trembling the entire time, and she could hardly remain standing.

“Whew...”

The moment she sat down, she dropped her head onto the table.

After a long silence, the convenience store bell rang twice.

Ding, ding.

When she raised her head again, a drink had appeared in front of her.

A café latte.

“You looked cold just sitting there.”

Apparently, he had rushed inside to buy it as a kind of apology.

Gu Seohyeong showed no gratitude whatsoever. If anything, she narrowed her eyes and glared at him.

“Are you really that unhappy that I saved your life?”

She frowned in open disagreement.

After a short pause, the man seated opposite her carefully chose his words.

“But suicide is not a good thing.”

So this was where he would begin spouting the same useless advice as everyone else.

Life was precious.

Things would get better.

She had so much to live for.

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, well...”

Gu Seohyeong turned her head away, already tired of listening.

However...

What he said next was slightly different from what she had expected.

“Even though technology has advanced considerably, this world still has no reliable method of bringing the dead back to life.”

“Mhm?”

“Shouldn’t a person be cautious about making an irreversible decision, at least until such a technique is developed?”

Irreversible?

Technique?

Developed?

He seemed to be saying that life was precious, but...

‘What a strange way of putting it.’

As a vague sense of unease crept over her, the man’s low, clear voice reached her again from across the blur.

“Anyway, allow me to assess your situation objectively.”

“A-Assess it?”

“I mean that we should determine whether dying truly is the better option for you. Let’s examine the matter carefully.”

“...!”

“Perhaps seeing your circumstances through the eyes of a third party will help you discover a reason to live that you have overlooked.”

Gu Seohyeong immediately furrowed her brow.

“And what happens if even you can’t find an answer? What responsibility could you possibly take?”

The man answered without the slightest hesitation.

“Then I’ll push you off the roof again.”

“What?”

“You told me to take responsibility. If you no longer wish to fall, I can make sure to kill you some other way. Is that clear?”

In other words, if they considered the matter together and reached the same conclusion, he was willing to help her die.

A chill ran down Gu Seohyeong’s spine.

‘What?’

How could someone speak so casually about killing another person?

Especially someone whose life he had just gone out of his way to save.

For some inexplicable reason, Gu Seohyeong clenched her teeth.

The man, however, seemed completely unaware of her discomfort and continued in the same indifferent tone.

“Now, would you explain your situation? Why exactly were you trying to die?”

Telling her life story to a complete stranger with dyed blond hair was not something she would ordinarily consider.

But...

‘I’m going to die anyway. I might as well complain one last time.’

With that thought, Gu Seohyeong quietly began to explain why she had been standing on the rooftop.

***

Gu Seohyeong was a South Korean actress.

A former child star, she had entered the entertainment industry sixteen years earlier after being selected as the model for a boiler commercial.

With innocent eyes, fair skin, and respectable acting ability, how could she not have become popular?

The finest child actress of her generation.

That had been society’s unanimous assessment of Gu Seohyeong.

In a sense, however, it had also been the beginning of her misfortune.

Gu Seohyeong had always been deeply uncomfortable with public attention. She had been introverted by nature from the moment she was born.

She hated appearing on television and having strangers recognize her face.

She hated crowded filming locations filled with adults.

She hated repeating emotionally exhausting scenes over and over until the director was satisfied.

In truth, there was almost nothing about acting that she enjoyed.

Yet whenever she told her parents that she wanted to quit, they reacted with shock and desperately tried to stop her.

Everyone would be disappointed, they said.

So she endured the hardship and continued acting.

Even as she grew older and her popularity declined, even as younger performers overtook her one after another, she somehow forced herself to persevere.

Fifteen years passed that way.

“H-Heugh...”

At last, Gu Seohyeong reached her limit.

At the end of the previous year, she had been diagnosed with panic disorder brought on by severe stress.

‘I can’t live like this anymore.’

She decided to retire from the entertainment industry.

Naturally, she had already made plans for the future. After all, she had earned far more than a trivial amount in appearance fees over the years.

‘A shop of my own!’

Gu Seohyeong went to her parents, intending to fulfil her long-held dream of opening an accessories workshop.

‘What?’

But when she spoke to them, she discovered that they had already spent every bit of money she had earned.

—Mom, what did you just say?

—Ahem.

Only then did she realize that she had never once handled the money she had made throughout her entire career.

It was all gone.

Her father had poured it into a reckless cryptocurrency investment.

—I’m sorry. But what could I do? Until last year, it was making a good profit. He kept showing me on the computer how much the ten million won he invested had grown, so I...

The vanished money was bad enough.

Her family’s reaction was worse.

—At least we didn’t end up in debt like some people.

—Oh, honestly. Are you really going to get angry at your family over a little mistake?

—Seohyeong, money comes and goes.

Enraged by their shameless excuses, Gu Seohyeong began to cry and shout.

Then earn it back immediately.

Sell the house if necessary.

Only then would she be able to open her shop and leave acting behind.

—What? The house?

The reply she received was ice-cold.

—How can you say that to the parents who raised you? You expect the whole family to move out? Where are we supposed to go?

They had no intention of returning Gu Seohyeong’s money.

—And why are you suddenly talking about quitting acting?

—...

—Is it because fewer people have been calling you lately?

—Dad, I’m struggling.

—Stop speaking so weakly. Everyone has a hard life.

—I want to die.

—Haven’t I always told you? If you’re truly prepared to die, then you should be capable of anything.

After that day, Gu Seohyeong became completely estranged from her family.

She had lost the only support she had believed she could rely upon.

But that had happened the previous year.

“After that, I left home and took out a loan.”

What came next was the true reason she had reached this point.

“No matter how desperate my situation was, I couldn’t give up on the dream of owning my own workshop.”

Starting a business...

Kiryeo, who had been listening in silence, finally spoke.

“Then shouldn’t you continue working hard for the sake of your shop?”

At those words, Gu Seohyeong suddenly burst into tears.

“Yes! If I still had a shop, I would have kept working hard! But it was destroyed during the massive dungeon break in August. Now it’s really all over!”

She had not wanted to break down like this in front of a stranger.

“And the gate accident insurance I bought in advance turned out to be completely useless...!”

“Heugh...”

“I worked so hard. So why... Why am I the one drowning in debt?”

Once the tears began, her grief poured out like water from a broken dam.

“I understand your situation now. Let me tell you what I think.”

Kiryeo calmly guided the conversation forward without being swept away by her emotions.

As an extraterrestrial soul, he still found it difficult to fully empathize with the emotional expressions of Earthlings.

“In my opinion, it is still too early for you to die.”

“Based on what?”

Tap.

Kiryeo clasped his hands together on top of the plastic table.

“To summarize, your main problem is debt. Correct?”

“So what?”

“Then rather than dying immediately, why not attempt to repay it first?”

The suggestion was not well received.

“My debt is two hundred and forty million won! And some of it is owed to private lenders! Are you going to pay it for me? You make it sound so easy when you have no intention of doing anything!”

Gu Seohyeong wrinkled her nose and narrowed her eyes, warning him not to speak lightly about another person’s life.

“Do you think I don’t want to repay it? Of course I do! But my shop is gone, and going back into the entertainment industry would be worse than death!”

“...!”

“They said I don’t qualify for personal rehabilitation either. Honestly, I...”

Her voice faded as she struggled to hold back another wave of tears.

“What am I supposed to do? I’m exhausted. Not a single good thing has happened to me since the gates appeared.”

Even an extraterrestrial being could not remain entirely unmoved by tears filled with such despair.

And yet...

“The entertainment industry?”

Kiryeo remained silent, his expression cold and unreadable.

“Excuse me. I have a question.”

At last, he asked something brief.

“Is there a particular reason you have avoided the hunter industry?”

“What?”

“You are an Awakened individual, yet you seem never to have considered working as a hunter.”

Gu Seohyeong’s eyes widened in complete confusion.

Only then did Kim Kiryeo realize something about her.

“You truly didn’t know that you had awakened?”

What was more...

This woman was not even an exceptional case like Jung Haseong.