The Genius Decided To Live An Ordinary Life [EN]: Chapter 123

< Healer (4) >

***

Janggun is a Confucian dog.

I don’t know what it means, but her owner calls her that.

Grrr-.

Anyway, a Confucian dog believes in a hierarchical society.

Rejecting the subversive idea that all dogs are equal, Janggun operates under the principle that all dogs beneath her are insignificant.

Woof-!

When Janggun barked with authority, the three other dogs sat quietly.

One was Janggun’s daughter, Hongsi, and the other two were newcomers who had arrived a few days ago.

They were said to be a German Shepherd and a Doberman, but their breeds were strange, like some mutts I’d never seen before. Look at that black one. It doesn’t even have a tail; where did they get it? How can it be called a dog if it doesn’t have a tail to wag when it eats?

They say one was a bomb-sniffing dog in the military, and the other was a guard dog for a rich family in Seoul, but I don’t understand what that means. Why sniff out bombs and why guard a house? As a free spirit, Janggun found their way of thinking incomprehensible.

Grrr-.

Anyway, Queen Janggun has no business interfering in the affairs of her insignificant underlings.

No matter where they came from, if they want to pee in this neighborhood, they have to follow Janggun’s barks.

Woof!

Got it?

Squeak-.

They answered that they understood.

Maybe because they were used to organizational life, they were quite good at understanding.

Janggun felt rewarded for having endured until now.

She had been living alone, but now she had a daughter and several subordinates, so she wouldn’t be bored in the future. She had been very lonely when the child went to school. Her subordinate, Son Aeng-aeng, wasn’t as active as Son Wang-wang.

There’s another good thing.

The Dosa dog [a type of Korean Mastiff] Jjampeu from Mr. Lee Kkaeng-kkaeng’s house still stubbornly challenges Janggun with his head held high. Of course, if they were to fight one-on-one, Janggun would inevitably lose in terms of strength and size. But they had never fought, so there was no winner or loser.

Janggun was pleased.

Sniff sniff-. If she was with these guys, Jjampeu would soon have soybean paste smeared on his head.

If he gets soybean paste on his head, she can just go and lick it off.

Nothing works as well as dog saliva.

If she treats him like that, Jjampeu will be moved by the Queen’s grace and lower his tail.

Hehehe-.

It’s a truly amazing plan.

Now it’s time to give the newcomers OJT [On-the-Job Training].

Even though she’s a Confucian dog, Janggun is a kind dog.

She started by teaching them the location of the bathroom.

If they pee anywhere, Son Wang-wang, the child of this house, will shake their heads.

It’s a place called the compost pile, and one day, when they were piling up bricks and collecting fallen leaves, she started doing her business there. Then the child gave her two mudskippers, saying she did a good job.

It is the nature of a dog to repeat an action when praised.

These guys will also get two mudskippers each if they do their business in the compost pile.

Let’s see, if she just steals one from each of them, Janggun will get mudskippers…

The number isn’t important. Anyway, she’ll be able to eat a lot.

Janggun is a smart dog, so she knows that too.

Next, it’s time to teach them the patrol area.

Squeak-.

The Dober-something asked.

Why patrol if they don’t guard the house?

Grrr- Woof! You stupid dog! You have to protect your territory!

She patrols because it’s Janggun’s territory, not because of loyalty or anything like that!

It’s so hard to teach these rootless guys.

They start from the owner’s house, go towards the direction where the sun rises, and then check the house that looks like a tomb as if the sun is circling the sky. It’s good to mark the territory as if they’re clocking in for work.

Splat-. Oh, nothing’s coming out. Hey, someone pee for me.

After going around once and arriving back at the owner’s yard, the patrol is over. Then they eat until their bellies are full, and then they repeat the process until their bellies are empty again.

Squeak squeak-.

The Shepherd asked if it wasn’t too hard.

Those rootless guys just don’t have any perseverance.

Steel-like muscles don’t just appear out of nowhere!

Grrr-.

I’m going to bite off your balls.

“Mommy-!”

Woof!

Quiet! When you hear a sound from the owner’s house, you have to prick up your ears and concentrate.

It’s not about loyalty. It’s just an action to become an enlightened dog by listening to the news of the world and broadening her horizons.

The four dogs sat side by side, pricking up their ears towards the living room.

“Whyyy-?”

When Son Yu-jin made a fuss, Han Yu-young, who was in the bathroom, ran out.

“Mommy-! Mommy! Jung-won flipped over!”

“Yu-jin, it can be dangerous to put the baby on her stomach when Mommy’s not around.”

“Yes. Ehehe-.”

Who did she take after to be lying already? Jin-hyuk, who firmly believed that horns would grow on his butt if he lied, found his younger sister amazing. She was lying to the scariest person in the world, his mom, while laughing.

He chuckled and turned his gaze back to the newspaper he was reading.

‘It’s not there. It’s not there.’

It was August, but there was no news of the passenger plane crash anywhere in the newspaper.

There were only articles suspecting North Korea as the mastermind behind the terrorist attack, columns criticizing North Korea and urging them to wake up, and speculative reports that the closure of Mokpo Airport would likely be extended.

‘Why is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty being mentioned here?’

Jin-hyuk tilted his head as he looked at the column. The mental world of the people who write columns is incomprehensible, now as it was then.

He liked the column that said the airport’s safety should be re-examined due to the frequent fog in the area. It said that the presence of the mountains near the airport could cause accidents due to thick fog and other bad weather. It was an accurate point.

Until last week, there were constant articles complaining about the inconvenience of not being able to use the airport, but as the airport closure dragged on, articles interviewing passengers disappeared. It seems that humans are animals of adaptation.

‘It seems to have passed by well.’

The small middle schooler Jin-hyuk of the past bit his lip as he looked at the newspaper. There were no tears or sobs coming from his dry heart, but he could at least empathize with the sadness of others.

It would have been the story of a girl who lost her parents and older brother in a passenger plane crash and was left alone. He didn’t feel like pitying her. It was just that, because it was like his own story, he empathized with the pain of being left alone.

‘You can live happily with your family now, too.’

He sent a presumptuous consolation to someone he didn’t know.

Maybe this was the reason he started this whole thing, just to say this one thing. Maybe he felt sorry for living happily alone, so he wanted to help others find their daily lives as well.

If they had the same past life and had wounds in places that couldn’t be touched, he hoped that Jin-hyuk’s actions would heal them.

That’s why he plans to continue.

At least for the events he remembers, he wanted to influence them somehow. Not as the main character of the story, but as an extra.

In the past, Jin-hyuk considered himself an extra.

A quiet and ordinary bystander who didn’t belong anywhere, whose existence was not even known to the world, who lived quietly and disappeared quietly. Even after being reborn, his thoughts hadn’t changed.

Jin-hyuk himself thought he didn’t have any attractive points to claim to be the main character. He was not the kind of person who could act as a focal point connecting people, because he lacked things like humanity. Besides, his personality wasn’t very cool either.

The cool charm of shouting was far superior in the past Son Jin-hyuk. He was direct and didn’t hold back on his harsh words. But now, he uses a frustrating way of speaking like a Zen master, like Grandpa Cheon Gil-ryong.

He was a soul that was gradually getting younger and younger, but he couldn’t ignore the gap between his soul and body. Would it get better when he was around thirty?

He smiled faintly as he turned the last page of the newspaper.

‘I can sleep comfortably for a while.’

Well, Jin-hyuk always passes out so hard that he thinks he would get a sleep score of 100 if he had a smartwatch, but that’s what he meant in his heart.

He flipped through the newspaper he had finished reading again from the beginning.

Even though he didn’t intentionally extract any specific letters, the newspaper was dominated by the word ‘Sein’. The articles about the Daejeon World Expo, which was to be held from August 7th, looked pathetic.

He noticed the content that Sein Electronics announced its ambition to start construction of a semiconductor factory and would take the lead in localizing advanced semiconductor technology products and developing DRAM [Dynamic Random-Access Memory] that no other company could imitate.

The business news section was mainly filled with small articles about Sein Electronics’ computer software contest, Sein Shopping’s summer product sale, Sein Cosmetics’ technology partnership with Japan, and the development of Sein Investment Trust’s equity-type securities. It made him wonder what would be in the newspaper if it weren’t for Sein.

Jin-hyuk’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction as he turned the page and reread the tiny article he had already checked.

‘Uncle Moon Skill did a good job.’

The article about increasing the number of trips for small passenger ship companies on weekends and the content about suspending the government subsidy were all things that could be seen because Moon Seok-il had done his job properly. Jin-hyuk was also pleased with the article that said that while regulations would be eased and support would be maintained, crackdowns on illegal activities such as overloading would be strengthened.

It was the result of Moon Seok-il meeting not only the navigation permitters but also the higher-ups in the bureaucracy and politicians. He didn’t know what methods he used, but he was a really amazing person.

‘Ah, I want to see it on the internet.’

It is still possible to connect to the internet now. As someone who lived in the future, it was embarrassing to even call it the internet because of its poor quality.

But.

‘Mom scolded me for using the internet.’

If he connected to the internet, he couldn’t use the phone. It was a problem caused by using the phone line instead of a dedicated line. He had connected to the internet a few times at night when his family was asleep, and then he got scolded again because of the phone bill.

Jin-hyuk felt wronged.

As he sighed quietly, he heard a noise that disturbed his concentration.

[Aaa-, this is an announcement from the Dunaeri Village Hall-.]

The broadcast was finally on. It was the day to go fishing.

Jin-hyuk put on shorts, a T-shirt, and slippers.

“Oppa, I want to go toooo-.”

“Yu-jin, you have to just watch from outside. Okay? The waterway is dangerous.”

“Yes!”

The sun was hot. He put a hat and an umbrella on Yu-jin and moved to the old waterway.

Janggun, Hongsi, the German Shepherd Cheonma, and the Doberman Gwangma followed closely behind.

Cheonma’s original name was Max, and Gwangma’s name was Lucky, but Jin-hyuk changed them because their names were difficult. He couldn’t give Hongsi her English name, Tyson, and he didn’t like that the newcomers were using English names. They were smart, so they quickly adapted to their new names, and SSS, who controlled them, liked that the names were easy to say.

“Yu-jin, be careful. Hold Oppa’s hand tightly.”

“Yes.”

The bridge was wide enough for cars to pass, but the waterway filled with water was more than 1 meter deep. It could be dangerous if a child fell in.

Thanks to the water pump working hard for ten days, the new waterway was filled with a lot of water. The water was so clear that the grass, pebbles, and sand on the bottom were clearly visible.

“Oppa, no fishies.”

“Yeah. It’s because it hasn’t been long since we filled it with water. They’ll appear soon.”

It was a festival that should have been exciting, but Jin-hyuk, who was heading to the old waterway across the bridge, couldn’t get out of the topic he was stuck on.

‘Internet, internet.’

For 2,000 won, he could use all kinds of services without limit for two hours at a PC room, and later he lived in an era where he could use almost all content with just one smartphone. Was it really that big of a deal to get scolded for using the phone line for a short time? Of course, the phone bill was huge.

‘Mom only hates me.’

After giving birth to a baby, she treats her eldest son like a nuisance, pushing him away with the back of her foot. That’s how Jin-hyuk perceived it. She had become a bit more sensitive, and she, who always used to smile, was now frowning more often. It was also the time when Jin-hyuk should be just as sensitive.

He clicked his tongue.

‘I think she said she wasn’t producing enough milk.’

She said that Yu-jin was drinking too much milk and that she seemed to have become thin, so she didn’t seem to be producing enough milk even after giving birth to Jung-won.

Anyway.

He was just going to connect to the internet for a short time anyway, since it was too slow and there was nothing to see. He had only learned how to connect from a friend who went to computer school and had done it out of curiosity.

But.

It was fun.

It was frustratingly slow and there was nothing to see, but strangely, he became focused.

‘Aaaah-! High-speed internet, when will LTE [Long-Term Evolution] come out?’

Jin-hyuk wanted to get older quickly, even if it was just to solve the inconvenience.

Everyone else hated getting older, but Jin-hyuk had no regrets about his youth. There were people who said ‘that time was the best’ both in the future and now, but he couldn’t agree at all. Being young was inconvenient because there were many restrictions, and he wasn’t free. He thought that maybe the people who said that were just pigs who had gotten older, with uncomfortable joints and heavy bodies.

‘That’s why I told you to exercise. I was flying around even in my 40s.’

He heard from Min Yong-rak that Sein Telecom would install a dedicated internet line in Hobbit Bunker as a pilot case next year. It wouldn’t be high-speed, but it wouldn’t take up the phone line, and there would be Pentium-class desktops, so it would be quite usable.

It wasn’t just because it was cumbersome to turn the newspaper pages. That was the reason why Jin-hyuk suddenly wanted to use the internet and wanted to get older quickly.

It was a longing for healing.

Of course, it wasn’t bad to smell the scent of the era he hadn’t smelled in the past and to feel the wind of time. That alone could wash away the dregs of his sense of loss.

But the nostalgia for the future ignited Jin-hyuk’s desires without warning. The most representative of these was Executive Director Hong Su-jeong. Jin-hyuk had never forgotten her for a single day.

‘Since I turned back time, is it something that never happened, a person who never existed?’

He could be sure that nothing had happened between them. He didn’t know if that was something to be proud of.

Anyway, she was the only person he thought about at the end of a hard day, and she was the person who always made him smile at the end of his thoughts. He had become happy just by looking at the bright smiling photos she had posted on social media. It was hard to see her smile like that in reality.

There were times when he was confused about why he thought of the little Hong Su-jeong so specially.

Was it because of the scars of the past that remained like scars? After thinking about it carefully, Jin-hyuk thought that was probably the case, and he didn’t try to dismiss it as a strange feeling.

She was a presence that healed Jin-hyuk’s loneliness like a friend.

‘Why am I doing this again? I’m thinking too much.’

He shouldn’t be conflicted, he should be living with his heart in the present world. But was it that easy to control one’s heart? It was just a reed swaying in the wind.

But it wasn’t like he was living in the past. He was just curious and worried.

‘It can’t be helped.’

It was possible to have such thoughts as a luxury because he was alive.

Even as he groped through the muddy water and pulled up a crucian carp, Jin-hyuk continued to think, one thought leading to another. If he hadn’t, he might have cursed at the scorching sun on his back. And the surroundings were too noisy.

Choi Tae-yang and Yang Kang-wook, who were first-year university students on vacation, were neglecting the fishing and wrestling in the mud, wearing only blue shorts.

Those two would grab each other’s waists and roll around whenever they met, and it was worrying that they might fall in love. The women who hadn’t stepped into the drained waterway cheered as they watched the two of them fight.

‘Everyone’s completely crazy.’

It was a world where the only normal person was Son Jin-hyuk.

He stretched his stiff back and sighed, and then Son Yu-jin pointed somewhere.

“Oppa! There, there!”

Where Yu-jin was pointing, the bottom of the waterway was rippling like milk chocolate syrup.

Jin-hyuk gasped.

‘It’s a snakehead.’

It was a huge fish that looked to be about 1 meter long.

Jung Sang-tae, Kang Heon-chang, Kim In-rang, and the other SSS members were all hesitant to jump in and were just staring with wide eyes. No matter how brave they were, everyone’s attitude towards a bizarre creature was similar.

“Yaaa-, this is too scary, you know?”

“Ooooh-, Il-heon, don’t push me- you’ll fall-”

Jo Il-heon and Yuk Seong-chan were also making a fuss.

Choi Tae-yang and Yang Kang-wook, who were wrestling, also quickly called a truce and ran away to both sides.

The men in the waterway became quiet, and only the people on the bank were excited.

“How about we just let it live? Maybe it’s a magical creature?”

It was Jang Jin-nam who said that, covered in mud.

He suggested releasing it into the lower reaches of the waterway, which had water left like a lake.

Then Jo Il-heon shouted.

“That’s better than carp! Even a toothless grandma will produce milk if she eats that!”

At that moment, Jin-hyuk’s eyes flashed.

That’s right, that guy is the one who will solve his mom’s milk drought.