By Zephyria 
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‘The meaning of the handkerchief… a parting gift? A symbol of resistance?’
He tried searching for information related to handkerchiefs, starting with the basics, but nothing significant came up.
The only change was that the advertisements appearing when he connected to Goryeo City’s communication network had switched to handkerchiefs.
He tried closing and opening his eyes, and staring intently through narrowed slits, wondering if something was hidden within the patterns.
Still, nothing special overlapped in his vision. In the end, the only gain he made by the time he got off the train was the useless observation that the handkerchief was made of a fairly dense fabric.
“Do you see anything?”
“A handkerchief.”
“I mean, do you see anything inside the handkerchief?”
“It’s soft.”
“Let’s just stop talking.”
Joo-oh, whose senses were exceptionally keen, had also found nothing. All he did was try to rub it against his own cheek, and Mu-hae had quickly snatched it away.
Tsk. With the clicking tongue beside him, Mu-hae returned to Starlight Road. As expected, the steel frame he had left far from the house had vanished completely.
“Someone farmed it.”
“I left it there for them to take. It couldn’t even be used as a bed.”
Inevitably, he was relegated to the mattress for the time being. Sleeping close to Joo-oh wasn’t unfamiliar, but lying in the study gave him a rather strange feeling.
He couldn’t help but think of his father. Even though the man had passed away long ago and they had never formed any particular attachment, it felt as if he were still under his father’s influence, simply because he was his parent.
Once his thoughts reached that point, he naturally began to chew over his fragmented memories. For example, the mother who had been completely erased from his mind.
If he had lived with her until the age of five, why hadn’t he been able to return after the kidnapping?
Especially if she hadn’t forgotten her child and had come looking for him after his father’s death, he couldn’t understand her intentions.
Damn it. He had tried to push these thoughts far away.
“It’s late, so wash up and get ready for bed immediately.”
“Mmm. I don’t need to wash.”
“Wash up so you don’t dirty the blankets.”
Joo-oh, who wore an expression as if human diseases and germs meant nothing to him, finally nodded and headed toward the bathroom.
As he became more accustomed to society, he was starting to act more ‘human.’ Things that Mu-hae would have dismissed as just being a weirdo in the past now looked like the adaptation process of a wild monster to the human world.
And he, who had been so entangled with such a creature, was certainly not sane either. Even now, while harboring those thoughts, his first instinct was to reach out and stroke the other’s hair.
‘The person Olga is looking for…’
He quickly shifted his attention back to the handkerchief. Looking back, the clue in his hand wasn’t the only important thing.
Olga, who lived without interacting with others, had begun searching for an unidentified person. Just as she had searched alone for the belongings of her former lover, she had entrusted this task to Mu-hae again without telling anyone.
If she had experienced a change of heart after decades or found a new purpose, the recording obtained through the bracelet must have influenced her.
Perhaps because it was an unfamiliar language, only a vague sense of the content remained in his head, despite having listened to it together that day.
—Olga, my love. I once made a promise to you. That I would always wear this bracelet, except when bathing.
A low voice, with affection clinging to every syllable…
“Haa. Jin Mu-hae. I’m done washing.”
Right on cue, Joo-oh came leaping out of the bathroom, wearing someone else’s clothes again. As water dripped from his half-dried hair, Mu-hae forgot his contemplation and quickly grabbed a towel.
As if he had been waiting, Joo-oh thrust his head forward. He shouldn’t get used to being taken care of like this.
Suppressing the suspicion that Joo-oh was being annoying on purpose, Mu-hae spoke calmly.
“You. You said you have a good memory, right?”
“Of course!”
“Do you happen to remember when we first met Olga? The voice that came from that bracelet…”
“Mmm… I know it.”
Joo-oh rolled his red eyes and a faint smile played on his lips.
Then, he made a show of clearing his throat—though it wasn’t cracked or hoarse—and began to recite the last will of someone he had likely heard only once in his life, fluently.
“Olga, my love. I once made a promise to you. That I would always wear this bracelet, except when bathing…”
Even though he had anticipated this, Mu-hae couldn’t hide his surprise. The language used in Solar City flowed out of Joo-oh as if it were his own.
Hearing the message, a mixture of love and guilt for a lover, felt like being transported back to the moment they were lingering around the Garam District.
“The situation hasn’t been good for the past few years. I always had to move assuming the worst of the worst. Did you say it? That humanity is currently riding on the back of a dangerous sea turtle called Crystal Blue. That we must learn to float on our own before it sinks, drowns us, and bites us. Thinking about it now, there were no wiser words. You were always right.”
Finally, the content that had only existed as a vague shape in his mind was etched clearly into his ears, without a single syllable missing.
‘Learning to float on our own.’ That brief and implicit expression lit up a corner of his mind like a flash of light.
Without realizing it, Mu-hae gripped Joo-oh’s shoulder tightly. Joo-oh managed to take that as a signal to stop and shut his mouth.
“Stop talking?”
“Yeah. That’s enough.”
“Was I helpful?”
“Quite.”
Joo-oh basked in the warm petting of his head and cheeks, then walked toward the sofa with a silly grin.
Mu-hae followed him, brow furrowed, tallying all the records he had collected so far.
Come to think of it, the video found in Takla also belonged to a Solar City researcher. A message from a short-haired man who was presumed to have died the day the city was destroyed, and whose current status—alive or dead—was unknown.
—Actually, I have partially disclosed your data to the people of the city. Since the research to control Crystal Blue shifted its direction toward ‘extinction’ from that point on, I hope you will not be too angry.
Solar City, and Olga’s former lover, had tried to eliminate the Crystal Zone that would form near the city.
If that was the task the man failed to achieve… perhaps Olga was trying to carry on his will.
She wasn’t a researcher, nor did she possess related knowledge, but in exchange, she had plenty of money and time.
‘Then.’
The person Olga is looking for is someone associated with the Return flight. Whether she had noticed the existence of the Return flight or not, she needed someone who shared a similar goal.
Another reformer, whom he had failed to find, who might still be alive somewhere in this city…
“This is unexpected.”
“What is?”
“It might be quite helpful for me too.”
“Me?”
Ignoring the meaningless question, Mu-hae kneaded the edges of Joo-oh’s ears a few times. Joo-oh, lounging on the sofa, made a sound of happiness.
It was truly strange. He had clearly intended to avoid the matters of the Return flight for a while, yet even without searching, it seemed as if things were orchestrated to find him.
Looking at the smiling face of the burden beside him, he felt uncomfortable with the goals the Return flight harbored, yet he also felt an urgency to check for any possible variables, as there was still a long way to go before the final choice.
“…Tomorrow after work, I’m going to wander around the central area.”
As he always did, he notified him of the schedule, expecting to see him get excited.
“….”
For some reason, instead of jumping up and asking if they would eat there, Joo-oh remained frozen, staring blankly into space.
His pupils moved slowly as if reading something, and then, uncharacteristically, his eyebrows knit together sharply.
“What. You don’t like it?”
“No. It’s not that, um.”
Without explaining the reason, he just fidgeted with his legs before finally speaking as if he had made a decision.
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“What do you think? I’m going to take the handkerchief and look for clues.”
“Is it the Return flight?”
He wondered if Joo-oh could actually read minds. He had asked with sharp precision, though it was unclear from what context he had deduced it.
Jin Mu-hae looked at him blankly and let out a small sigh.
“Yeah. It seems the person Olga is looking for is related to the Return flight.”
“…There’s another person like that?”
If he knew, wouldn’t they have made contact already? Without answering, Mu-hae turned on the TV, and Joo-oh tilted his head as if he didn’t understand.
Still, he didn’t pester him with more questions or babble uselessly. He simply turned his head silently to watch a noisy TV show.
Somehow, it felt as if his eyes were wandering vaguely elsewhere.
* * *
Throughout the time he spent training the members, Jin Mu-hae couldn’t concentrate properly.
Fortunately, it seemed no one noticed that the instructor’s mind had flown elsewhere, but since he took pride in his multitasking, he couldn’t stay in this state.
‘To think there was still a member of the Return flight left who could be joined…’
After all, Gu-reum and Kang were people who came from the temporary contact network of just one person, so there might be others waiting who still dreamed of the past.
But if they were someone helpful, Director Gil, Teacher Jung, or even Gu-reum would have had a reason to seek them out; how could they have been completely unaware until now?
Perhaps another group with goals similar to the Return flight was operating in the shadows. The thought made him restless, and as soon as he finished work, he took a taxi to the heart of the central area.
“Damn it.”
When he calculated the coordinates based on the forest of skyscrapers that served as landmarks, as expected, he ended up at a meaningless location in a completely different direction, let alone the west.
Just in case, he circled a park densely packed with valuable plants several times. There were no notable anomalies; it only served to make Joo-oh hungrier.
Since the crazy guy was salivating at the sight of a passing child’s snacks, Mu-hae eventually went to a cafe with outdoor tables and ordered a few desserts.
Putting a cream-filled baby choux in his mouth, Joo-oh closed his eyes in delight, savoring the taste.
“I really love this kind of thing.”
“I thought you said you liked meat.”
“I like meat too, but, um. Cream is tastier than raw meat.”
Praying that the ‘raw meat’ Joo-oh mentioned wasn’t human, Mu-hae wiped the crumbs off his hand with a tissue.
“Haha. Heart.”
He wondered what he was talking about when he suddenly burst out laughing, but the store’s logo on the crumpled tissue had folded in a way that resembled a heart.
Just as he was about to ignore it, thinking he was happy over the smallest things, something suddenly struck Mu-hae like a bolt of lightning.
“….”
What he pulled from his pocket was the handkerchief he had scanned and stared at until his eyes hurt the previous day.
The geometric patterns drawn randomly on it gave him a tingling feeling, as if he were on the verge of understanding.
Mu-hae spread the handkerchief and stared at it as if possessed, crumpling and folding the parts where the patterns twisted.
And at one point, he discovered a line that, while crooked, stretched straight through.
“Hey.”
“Mmm?”
“You’re good at puzzles, right?”
As a serious gaze locked onto him, Joo-oh swallowed the cream in his mouth and nodded.
198 – I Became an Anomaly in a Dead Game