028 – When I Returned to My Changed Hometown #2
I was the pride of our home.
Well, my mom even hung a banner in the neighborhood for me.
But that time has passed.
While the buildings in Machan kept rising higher, I had crawled to the ground.
The fact that I hadn’t returned to my hometown in several years was part of the reason.
Since I didn’t keep in touch, my parents also ceased to contact me, occasionally just confirming that we were both still alive.
Now, I was headed back to my hometown house again.
The house was located in a rundown area of the city, where the buildings of Machan were visible. Nearby, there were countless construction sites where buildings were half-finished, and the walls were filled with graffiti.
“Did the redevelopment skip just our house?”
As I walked, I spotted streets that felt somewhat familiar. It was the street where I used to play as an elementary school student.
Back then, there were kids all over that playground.
But due to low birth rates, these days, there are hardly any kids in the playground….
“Hey! Arwen! Catch Min-Soo!”
“Kim Elfrad is it now!”
There are a lot of kids?
That was quite unexpected.
And it was also surprising to see that many of the kids had long ears.
Are they elf hybrids?
It had been said that in the underdeveloped countryside or old city districts, elf hybrids were plentiful to the point where one elementary school had a ratio of native Koreans to elf hybrids of 1:9.
I had contemplated how to solve Korea’s plummeting birth rate that had once dipped below zero, and suddenly the cracks appeared, revealing elves that seemed to have provided the solution.
Is the birth rate around 1.7 now?
As I recalled that ‘Arwen’ was the most popular name among newly born kids, Inoi let out a sound of distress.
“Inoi, what’s wrong?”
“The number of long-eared fairies is increasing rapidly! At this rate… the native Koreans, like the owners of the house, will surely disappear! It’s dangerous!”
Inoi had always disliked elves.
The reason is probably some sort of conflict between nymphs and elves.
Anyway.
As I was thinking about this, I had already arrived in front of the house.
An old iron gate.
It seemed that some things remained unchanged even in this 21st-century cyberpunk age.
“Mom, Dad, I’m back.”
I unlocked the front gate with the key from my milk delivery pouch and knocked on the door. I had forgotten the door lock password.
I then heard movement from inside, and a rather elderly woman opened the door.
“Who is this? Ildo! What a surprise to see you without any contact!”
“Mom. You look well. I heard you broke your leg.”
“You’re bringing up a story from three years ago! Come inside! And next to you….”
“Inoi is Inoi! Inoi is a nymph born in summer! This bright honey-colored hair, like the summer sun, is proof!”
As Inoi saw my mom, it raised its hand high and greeted her. Of course, my mother looked a bit tense as she regarded this peculiar guest.
“Come on in for now. Your dad is home too.”
# # #
The house, after such a long time, had changed in various ways.
There was a massage chair in the living room that I had never seen before, and the TV was larger and mounted on the wall.
The fridge in the kitchen was new, and everything seemed to have changed.
The only thing that hadn’t changed was the sofa.
The leather hole I made while playing with a kitchen kn*fe was still there, which felt quite nostalgic.
Home.
Even though I was worried about returning after a long time, home was still home, and my heart felt at ease.
“Have you not come home yet? You entered college this year, right? Which university was it again?”
I peeked into my younger sister Haildo’s room.
For some reason, it was empty.
“Haildo, so what have you been up to? Are you doing well? Who is Inoi? Are you eating well?”
My mom, peeling fruits and bringing them to a plate, asked me this and that.
Dad, who was sitting on the sofa, also seemed curious, shifting his posture without saying a word.
I calmly replied.
“I’m doing well. This is Inoi, a nymph I’m temporarily taking care of. You know about elves, right? It’s a fairy like them.”
“This Inoi wants to play with a computer! Because this Inoi is currently interested in a magical game called Minesweeper!”
Inoi dashed towards the computer room like a niece or cousin visiting during the holidays. When Inoi vanished from view, Dad cleared his throat, “Ahem.”
“Ahem.”
When Dad clears his throat, it signals that he’s about to say something serious.
“Ildo, are you still working as an Awakened or whatever? Dangerous and low-paying work. Shouldn’t you quit that and switch to something safer and more profitable?”
I knew this conversation would come up.
Dad had been asking me if I was considering another job every time he saw me.
He thought the work of an Awakened was extremely dangerous.
There had been cases, after all.
Among the first batch of students who started working with me, only about half are still active.
Soon, Dad added to his words.
“Why don’t you just come home and find a job? I talked to the boss over there, and they said they’d hire you instantly as a team leader if you had D-class Awakened skills. It’s labor-intensive but pays well, and it’s not life-threatening.”
“Hmm….”
“Ildo, you’re already twenty-seven. I was a father by your age—I had you when I was twenty-five. Don’t you think you should get married? You know the guy, Seongsik?”
Seongsik.
Park Seongsik?
He was notorious for being ugly in the neighborhood. Every time he passed by, the girls would say, “Hey, your husband is walking by,” while fighting with each other.
But he was quite kind in character.
Though he wasn’t eloquent, he was diligent, and surprisingly the adults liked him more than his peers.
As I thought of Seongsik, who said he would work at a construction site after graduating high school, Dad surprised me with shocking news.
“He recently married an elf woman named Aileina and already has two kids. His wife is very nice. You know Seongsik’s parents are a bit uncomfortable, right? His wife treats her in-laws very well.”
Is this for real?
Seongsik married an elf?
And it seemed he wasn’t alone.
Dad kept emphasizing that my friends Yongmin and Hyunjoon also married elves, had kids, and were living well. I felt like I was slipping into a panic in many ways.
“Why are elves marrying so many of my friends?”
I had occasionally seen on Mituube videos featuring Korean men marrying elf women, where the men didn’t have good looks or stable jobs but seemed to live happily with beautiful elf women and flaunted their happiness.
I had thought of it as someone else’s affair.
But it turned out elves and Koreans were marrying like crazy—how unusual.
“So, Ildo, do you have anyone you’re seeing?”
No, I didn’t.
And currently, I wanted to focus more on what I wanted to do than on a relationship.
But I couldn’t easily say that.
In many ways, I was an unfilial son who worried my parents.
Having not stepped into the house for several years, I hesitated to bring this up when Dad spoke again.
“I have someone in mind for you. The daughter of the moving company boss I mentioned earlier. She is very strong-willed, smart, and kind. I’ve even talked about marrying our kids. The boss said he would be glad to have you as his son.”
What the, ugh.
How did such conversations happen without me even knowing?
But between our parents, saying things like, “Let’s marry our kids later,” was just a common kind of talk.
It was like saying, “We should have lunch some time,” to someone I hadn’t seen in a long while. But Dad’s expression was very serious.
“Do you have a picture of that boss’s daughter?”
“Huh? Well, I do have one.”
Swish.
Mom handed me her phone.
Honestly, I wasn’t completely uninterested, so the moment I saw the picture, I froze up like a meerkat that had met an eagle.
“Bling…!”
The woman frowning in the phone was none other than the girl who had ripped off my culture gift certificates when I was in middle school!
She had black hair and dressed decently, but I recognized her at first glance from the envy of my 10,000 won gift certificate!
I felt dizzy in many ways.
At that moment, Dad spoke.
“Hey, that’s the eldest daughter. The one we promised to marry Ildo to is actually the younger daughter. Show us the picture of the younger daughter. I quite like her personality. She might look a bit flashy but…”
Swish.
Mom tapped on her phone’s screen.
Soon, the face of the younger daughter of the moving company boss appeared on Mom’s phone. And the moment I saw that face, I was shocked for various reasons.
It was a face I recognized.
Hair dyed bright yellow down to the roots.
An indifferent expression.
“Lee Jin-A?”
The boss’s daughter Dad was talking about was none other than Lee Jin-A, the C-class hunter with whom I had teamed up to quell C-class cracks a few times! How could this be?
Now that I think about it, it seemed Jin-A was knowledgeable about my parents.
In fact, I had come back home because that delinquent girl had poked my conscience by saying, “It’s been a long time since you went home, hasn’t it?”
“Do you two know each other?”
Dad’s face brightened.
He looked pleased, as if everything was going well.
“That’s great! She’ll be delivering the rice we ordered soon, so you two should meet up and chat!”
Honk honk.
Soon, I heard the sound of a car horn from outside.
Dad patted my back and said, “I think the delivery has arrived! Go out and help carry it!”
When I stepped outside, a woman wearing a leather jacket got out of the driver’s seat of a one-ton truck.
The woman, holding a can of coffee, frowned slightly upon seeing me.
“You are—. Whatever. There’s a lot of laundry machines and rice, so just take it.”
Jin-A skillfully unloaded the washing machine and rice from the truck.
I unleashed my mana to its fullest to get the new washing machine into the house.
Jin-A expertly aligned the washing machine and finished the installation, and I felt quite amazed by it.
It didn’t seem like a skill she had learned just once or twice.
So, she really is the daughter of the moving company boss.
“Are you working part-time? Isn’t the pay enough just from working as a C-class Awakened?”
“Hey, come here for a second.”
Swish.
Jin-A grabbed my arm.
When I was helplessly pulled out by her surprisingly strong grip, Dad said, “Great! You two should have a good conversation!”
I sensed that it probably wasn’t that kind of talk.
Jin-A came to a stop in an alley a little distance from the house.
I saw walls painted haphazardly like murals, something I didn’t remember before.
Was someone trying to imitate a mural village or something?
It was a common occurrence in sparsely populated neighborhoods.
Swish.
Soon, Jin-A, with her hands stuffed in her pockets like a rambunctious delinquent, frowned and looked around.
That pose revived the nightmare of when I had my culture gift certificate stolen to buy game items.
Fortunately, I didn’t have any gift certificates in my wallet, and I summoned my courage to ask.
“What did you want to say?”
