Return To The Building Owner [EN]: Chapter 12

But I couldn’t give up like this. I couldn’t possibly give up on an opportunity I’d finally gotten.

“Is there really no way…?”

Hyun-sung’s brow furrowed deeper.

About 30 minutes passed.

Hyun-sung jumped up from his seat.

No matter how much he thought about it, giving up like this was out of the question.

Of course, he understood his parents’ worries. But even so, no was no.

“That’s it!”

As if making a decision, Hyun-sung got out of bed and sat at his desk.

Swish, swish.

Then, he began to write something diligently in his notebook.

And a moment later.

Rip.

He tore the page he had just written on from the notebook and placed it on the desk.

“Running away from home after regressing…”

Hyun-sung couldn’t help but find it absurd.

He was sorry to his parents, but it was Hyun-sung’s only choice.

And it wouldn’t take long anyway. He could be back as early as today. Even if it was a little late, Hyun-sung figured it would only be a day or two.

There was something Hyun-sung didn’t know.

That people’s memories are not to be trusted.

***

That afternoon.

The two returned after finishing their work in the fields.

The mother called out to Hyun-sung.

“Hyun-sung.”

“……”

“Is our Hyun-sung asleep?”

“……”

Creak.

When there was no answer, the mother opened Hyun-sung’s door.

“Huh? Where did this kid go?”

Hyun-sung, who should have been home, was nowhere to be seen.

She was about to close the door again when.

“What’s that?”

A piece of paper was on the desk. The mother quickly went into the room and grabbed the paper on the desk.

Flutter.

The mother’s hand, which was reading the contents of the paper, slowly began to tremble.

“H, honey!”

A moment later.

“What? He’s going to dig up wild ginseng…?”

The father was dumbfounded.

He had tried so hard to stop him, but Hyun-sung had disappeared, leaving only a piece of paper.

“What should we do? Our Hyun-sung.”

Sigh!

Instead of answering the mother, the father only let out a long sigh.

He felt even more pathetic. The thought of how desperate the young boy must have been to go into the mountains to find wild ginseng made his heart ache.

***

Huff, huff!

He was completely out of breath.

Looking at his watch, it was already past 4 PM. It had been seven hours since he came up the mountain.

“Ah! This is driving me crazy.”

Not this way, not that way….

“I’m sure it’s around here somewhere….”

Hyun-sung retraced his past memories and searched several places, but he couldn’t find the place in his memory.

And now, the last place he arrived at was here.

When he left home, he was full of confidence.

He had no choice but to choose an extreme method because his parents were stopping him. It was a decision he made because he was so confident.

Of course, he thought they would be worried at first, but he thought it would only be for a short time. He was sure that if he found the wild ginseng, it would all end as a simple incident.

But the problem was that he couldn’t find it.

Wild ginseng doesn’t move around, and the place definitely wouldn’t change. Then, 100% of the problem was Hyun-sung’s memory….

Grumble.

He had been hearing the sound for a while now. He was greedy. He skipped lunch because he wanted to find it quickly.

Just a little more, a little more, and he came all the way here.

But that was Hyun-sung’s mistake.

His stamina dropped sharply.

“Hoo….”

What was with a young man’s stamina being like this? His stamina was so low that it was this bad just from skipping one meal. The more he thought about it, the more pathetic his low stamina was.

Hyun-sung plopped down on the spot.

He forgot again that greed brings disaster. It seems that even as you get older, it’s not easy to get rid of that greed.

“Let’s eat first.”

He took out a rice ball from his backpack. It was a rice ball that he had hastily made with only sesame salt because he was in a hurry.

Crunch.

He took a big bite of the rice ball.

“Huh?”

Maybe it was because he was hungry, but it was pretty good.

As they say, hunger is the best sauce.

Crunch, crunch.

Hyun-sung started eating the rice ball like crazy.

Gulp.

“I feel like I’m going to live now.”

Snort.

He couldn’t help but laugh at himself for struggling so much just from skipping one meal, feeling pathetic and a little dumbfounded at the same time.

Once he came to his senses, he began to retrace his past memories.

There was definitely a cliff on the left and a precipice on the right.

“I’m sure of it….”

No matter how he looked at it, that was the right place.

“But why isn’t there any wild ginseng?”

Even if he conceded that the number of wild ginseng could be different, there was no way that the wild ginseng itself could be gone. It wasn’t just one or two roots, but as many as eight. In other words, it was a colony.

Like looking at a piece of oriental painting, the sight was truly breathtaking. He still had a vivid image of it in his mind, but he didn’t know what kind of harmony it was.

‘Could it be….’

Hyun-sung tilted his head.

“Is it not here either?”

No matter how he thought about it, that was the only explanation. Otherwise, there was no way that the entire wild ginseng field could have disappeared.

Hyun-sung slowly nodded his head.

In the end, Hyun-sung came to the conclusion that it was not here.

The surroundings were starting to get dark little by little.

He shouldn’t move any further today anyway. Night comes faster than you think in the deep mountains.

Hyun-sung found a flat place and began to make a place to sleep.

He was glad that he had made basic preparations for camping just in case, and he didn’t know that it would be so useful.

When he looked at it this way, he hadn’t wasted his years.

First, he tied a string between the trees, pulled it taut, and fixed it. Then, he covered it with plastic. And when he pulled and fixed the four corners, a basic A-shape frame came out.

“Excellent.”

It looked plausible even to himself.

It was how to set up a personal tent during field training in the army. Only the size was different, but the tips for setting up a platoon tent were similar.

Snort.

A laugh came out on its own. He never imagined that he would use what he learned in the army here.

“Huh!”

This time, a hollow laugh burst out of his mouth.

It was because of the army.

When he thought about it, he realized that he had to go to the army twice.

If he was going to regress, he should have done it after he finished his military service. What was this?

Of course, Hyun-sung was dumbfounded.

Should I immigrate?

That’s not it either. He couldn’t do that, so what could he do?

Should I insist that I’ve already been there?

They’d send me to a mental hospital first.

What should I do?

“I really don’t want to go twice….”

There must be a way.

Let’s find the wild ginseng first, and think about the military service problem later….

“Let’s sleep first.”

When he laid down on the plastic on the floor, he felt like his whole body was being sucked into the ground because he was so tired.

“With this kind of stamina, what on earth….”

Hyun-sung fell asleep as soon as he lay down.

***

“What did they say at the branch office?”

“They just told me to wait. They said that with that level of circumstances, I can’t report him missing.”

“Are you saying they said that even though it’s been half a month?”

“Tell me about it, sigh….”

The father’s sigh stretched out endlessly.

Of course, he did say on the paper that he might be late, but he never thought it would be this late. He thought it would be at most two or three days.

He didn’t know what anything tasted like when he ate, and he had already given up on sleep a long time ago.

There wasn’t a single mountain nearby that he hadn’t searched. He searched all the mountains around every day without fail. Of course, he couldn’t go very deep.

The father grabbed his knees and forced himself to get up again.

“I’ll go look again.”

“I’ll go with you. I can’t be home alone.”

“No. Something bad will happen to you. You have to keep your mind sharp. And I’m going to try going the other way today, so wait at home even if it’s hard.”

“Our Hyun-sung…, sob, sob.”

The mother, who was seeing off her father with tears in her eyes, looked pitiful.

Leaving his mother’s farewell behind, the father headed to the mountain again today, more than ten days later.

At that time, in the middle of a deep mountain.

Swish, swish.

Someone was stirring up the mountain at a rapid pace.

The main character was none other than Hyun-sung.

Swish, swish!

What could have happened in the meantime?

Judging by his appearance, it was definitely Hyun-sung, who had gone to the mountain fifteen days ago, making a big noise that he would dig up wild ginseng and pay off his debts.

But what was surprising was his movements.

The person was definitely the same person, but his appearance was clearly different from when he first came up the mountain. His movements were full of energy. Moreover, he had quite a bit of muscle on his forearms that he didn’t have before.

Swish!

Hyun-sung moved again.

Despite the slope, his movements were unhindered. The way he moved through the trees was as natural as if he had lived in the mountains.

It was then.

“Huh? This scent is….”

Sniff, sniff.

Hyun-sung began to wiggle his nose towards all directions as if an animal was looking for prey.

“It must be somewhere around here….”

After a while.

Hyun-sung bent over at some point.

“Yes!”

When Hyun-sung straightened up, he was holding a deodeok root in his hand.

It was Hyun-sung’s staple food these days.

Because it was a deep mountain, it was on a different level from the deodeok he had seen in the market [bellflower root, a type of edible root vegetable commonly found in Korean cuisine].

The rice balls he had prepared at home ran out in two days. He had expected that it would be late by a day or two at the latest.

Since it was a place he had been to decades ago, he thought it might take that long. So he prepared rice balls for two days.

From the third day, he had no choice but to solve it on his own. That’s when he found this deodeok.