* * *
It had been a long time since Haeram visited the central hall.
Befitting a hospital of such massive scale, the vast space was filled with a colorful variety of restaurants and resting areas.
The delicious smell of food stinging his nose made his body want to drift toward it instinctively.
Haeram quickly headed toward the plaza with the fountain, making sure not to even glance toward the restaurants filled with food he couldn’t eat.
This area, designed in a circle around a massive fountain that stretched up to the third floor and lined with sofas and tables, was a frequent spot for various club meetings.
“Haeram! No exercise for you today?”
“Yep. If I do that every day, I’ll die.”
Kim Eundong, the president of ‘Un-Bok-Ja’—a group for those overcoming challenges through exercise—recognized Haeram and greeted him.
“Want a candy?”
The group of unawakened individuals, whose weak Guide factors had little impact on their bodies, generally had bright personalities.
This was because they viewed themselves as ‘unscratched lottery tickets’; if they could draw out their potential and awaken even as a low-rank Guide, it was practically the same as becoming a high-ranking civil servant.
Among them were people like Kim Eundong, who had long passed the age of likely awakening but continued to pay out of pocket to visit the hospital for training.
“I already had today’s portion.”
“Ah, you just came back from Mind Training.”
Kim Eundong grabbed Haeram’s arms and shook them, pulling them as if forcing him to stretch.
“You just finished Mind Training, so why the long face?”
“What’s wrong with my face? I’m fine.”
“Liar. You look like you just lost your country.”
“What? No, I’m—gah!”
As Kim Eundong pressed down on his shoulders for a massage, Haeram let out a yelp.
Hearing the sound, another member of the group, Cho Yunhye, put down her lemonade and slipped into the conversation.
“She’s right. Haeram-oppa is the only person in this whole ward who actually likes Mind Training.”
“I get so sleepy during it that I get scolded every time. I don’t even know if it’s doing anything, and since it’s not covered by insurance, it’s ridiculously expensive.”
“My parents are melting down their life savings for me to take the training course, but I just feel guilty for sleeping through it.”
“But then again, it’s nerve-wracking not to take it. You know that person who awakened last month… who was it? I heard they even hired an Esper privately to do it at home.”
Once Cho Yunhye opened the floodgates, everyone at the table chipped in with their two cents.
Haeram tried to escape the hands touching him, but his ears perked up at their words, making him stay glued to his seat.
‘How do you sleep during Mind Training…?’
The tickling sensation wasn’t the end of it.
Sometimes the back of his neck would turn cold, or a stinging sensation would run through his entire body, making his hair stand on end.
‘They sleep through that?’
Haeram narrowed his eyes, gathering their stories.
Just as he reached the conclusion that it might be different for him because he was a terminal patient, someone spoke up.
“Hyung, you sleep so much, how do you endure it? Are you actually just sleeping through it and that’s why you like it?”
“Seungjoon said you don’t join any clubs because you need to sleep. Maybe your ‘dozing skill’ is just on another level.”
“N-no, it’s not. I don’t doze off. And how can I sleep when we’re holding hands? I’m not that much of a sleepyhead.”
As soon as Haeram made his indignant excuse, everyone around the table stared at him simultaneously.
“…W-what?”
Once again, Cho Yunhye was the first to speak, her expression one of pure bewilderment.
“Why are you holding hands? Does Esper Seo Jungwoo tell you to hold hands when you do Mind Training?”
Haeram’s eyes darted around.
“……Well.”
The man was already someone surrounded by rumors.
Haeram had a sudden, sharp premonition that if he kept talking, he’d be throwing more fuel onto the fire.
He stammered out an excuse.
“No, it’s just because I kept dozing off… so.”
“……”
“So, sometimes, he does that to tell me not to sleep.”
The sharp Cho Yunhye still didn’t lower her gaze of suspicion, but the others seemed to let it slide.
When the flustered Haeram broke into a fit of coughing, they even seemed to change the subject for him.
“Of course, Haeram-hyung does sleep a lot,” they laughed, and Haeram secretly let out a sigh of relief.
The people turned their heads, bringing other topics to the table as if they hadn’t just been staring at him.
Haeram sat alone, lost in thought.
‘Other people don’t hold hands.’
‘Why?’
Seo Jungwoo had told him from the very beginning that they had to hold hands.
He had never doubted it once….
Come to think of it, his own groundless trust was quite strange.
Whenever he looked into Seo Jungwoo’s eyes, everything the man said felt like the truth.
So, for Haeram, Mind Training without holding hands was something he couldn’t even imagine.
Regardless of his relief, his curiosity grew, but since he knew nothing, no answers came to mind.
Because of his personality—not enjoying loud crowds—and his condition, he didn’t interact much with people, which naturally made him slow to get information.
Even being on speaking terms and sharing stories with these people was only possible because Seungjoon was so well-connected, leaving Haeram with the ‘scrap’ connections.
Flutter.
A thick piece of paper was thrust in front of Haeram’s nose, along with a set of colorful water-based pens.
“It’s our activity sheet. Since you’re sitting here, why don’t you do one too?”
“A bucket list….”
The paper, with a large title reading ‘20XX New Year’s Bucket List’, had a drawing of a single tree.
The tree, drawn in a crude yet warm style like a child’s crayon drawing, had several blank fruits hanging from it.
They told him to write his New Year’s wishes there.
When Haeram just stared blankly at the paper, Kim Eundong seemed to realize his mistake and grabbed the edge of the paper again.
“You’re not even a member, I was being too nosy. Sorry.”
The term ‘Bucket List’ was a bit heavy, given it usually means things to do before you die.
Of course, for people who weren’t facing an imminent end, it was used lightly for goals they simply wanted to achieve.
“No, Hyung. I wanted to try writing something like this. Please give it to me.”
Normally, he wouldn’t have given this a second glance, but he suddenly felt like doing it.
Most of all, perhaps it was because the person who had seemed to want him to become a Guide had suddenly said something different; in his dejected mood, he wanted to scribble something down like this.
Lifting his hips to move to a corner of the table, Haeram took the cap off a pen.
“……”
But when he actually tried to write something, nothing came to mind easily.
In a few months, his fate would be sealed, and since he had neither time nor money, he couldn’t even write a single wish freely.
After hesitating for a long time, Haeram finally picked up the pen and filled the first fruit.
“Eat my fill of Tteokbokki.”
This, he could do.
Someone might laugh at it as a trivial wish, but Haeram smiled as he held the pen.
For someone whose physical condition didn’t always cooperate, it was actually quite a big wish.
But at the very, very end, shouldn’t he be allowed to do at least this much?
Besides, Tteokbokki was a wish he could fulfill with his own money once he left the hospital.
‘Ah, I should check my bank balance.’
He thought of the bank account he hadn’t checked once since moving into the hospital.
There wasn’t much time left until May, so if he wanted to make a plan, he’d have to start being diligent.
He was glad he took the paper.
His thoughts even stretched to the idea that maybe Seo Jungwoo had said those things to give him a sense of urgency.
Tomorrow, he would stop by the bank inside the hospital to check his account and balance.
Thanks to this paper, and thanks to Seo Jungwoo, he had a small goal.
After spending quite a while writing down a few more trivial goals and filling the fruits with the twelve colors of pens, Haeram looked up at the sound of a noisy commotion.
The ‘Un-Bok-Ja’ meeting had ended long ago, leaving only Haeram and Cho Yunhye at the table.
She, too, had been looking at her phone while sucking on her drink until it made a gurgling sound against the ice, and now she was looking toward the source of the stir.
“Oh, it’s Guides.”
Haeram thought he was the one who said it.
Cho Yunhye had voiced his exact thought.
A group of Guides dressed in pure white uniforms were standing in front of the fountain.
Guides were even harder to see than Espers.
While tens of thousands of videos of Espers responding to Gate outbreaks appeared if you just searched YouTube, the same wasn’t true for Guides.
Living deep within Centers or in secret private residences to support Espers, their activities were rarely revealed to the outside world.
Cho Yunhye leaned toward Haeram and whispered.
“There was a rumor that an emergency patient at risk of rampaging was brought into the underground bunker of Building D. I guess they came because of that Esper.”
“Really…?”
Haeram couldn’t take his eyes off the Guides as he listened to Cho Yunhye rattle off the rumors.
Supposedly, an Esper had rampaged during a Gate clearance operation near the capital two nights ago, and after receiving emergency Guiding on-site, he had been transported here.
* * *
