Chapter 97

Chapter 97

Chapter 97 A Belated Vacation (4)

It had been a while since I'd driven such a long distance.

The car was already underpowered, and with a roof box mounted and the luggage packed to the limit, I had no choice but to stay in the second lane, but compared to my usual speed of 40 km/h to 60 km/h, it felt practically like a high-speed train.

“Ooooooh! The trees are whipping past!”

“It’s super fast! Right?”

“It’s about as fast as me when I run down a mountainside.”

“If your boasting gets any worse, you’ll be fit to sit on the throne.”

“It’s not boasting! When I run, the trees whip past like this too!”

“If that’s so, why don’t you get out and run after us?”

“This isn’t a mountainside, so I can’t.”

“Tsk, if only you couldn’t talk.”

“Right! We brought snacks!”

“That’s right! Snacks!”

With Sani and Lia around, even a trip a little over two hours long wasn’t particularly boring.

The two children’s chatter was sometimes completely without context, and there were plenty of topics whose deeper meaning I couldn’t understand without thinking about them for quite a while.

You could call it a comedy routine that forced you to pay attention even if you didn’t want to.

And among that comedy, there were occasionally some surprisingly pointed questions.

“I’m curious about something.”

“What?”

“Why am I the only one sitting in the back?”

“Lia’s sitting in the back too.”

“Now that I think about it, Lia is sitting in the middle, so she can see all around. But I’m stuck in the corner, so all I can see is trees whipping past, and that’s bad.”

Sharp little brat.

To be precise, I’d arranged the seats in order of safety in case of an accident.

The middle rear seat where Lia was sitting was the safest, followed by the driver’s seat with an airbag, then the front passenger seat.

It was an arrangement made in case the worst happened.

After all, the two divine beasts wouldn’t be injured by something like a traffic accident.

But saying directly, ‘Because that’s the seat where you’d get hurt the most if we crashed,’ was far from easy.

“Jinseong, answer me.”

Persistent little bastard.

_____________

A slightly awkward silence filled Dohyeok’s van, which was traveling a little ahead of Jinseong’s car.

That was because there wasn’t much to talk about with King Yama, who was completely absorbed in using videos to recover the memories she had forgotten.

(Unni, you fell onto a deserted island again!)

(Aww, why does this keep happening?)

“Ahem, is it fun?”

“Yeah.”

“...”

Silence returned.

‘Damn it, we at least exchanged greetings at the coffeehouse, but now that she doesn’t remember, I’ve got nothing to say.’

Normally, he would’ve just talked about himself regardless of whether the other person listened or not, but strangely, he couldn’t bring himself to speak.

It wasn’t because the being sitting beside him wasn’t human, but King Yama, ruler of the underworld.

Wasn’t he someone whose self-esteem soared high enough that ‘I’m Joo Dohyeok’ had practically become his catchphrase?

What bothered him was simply her unfortunate situation of having her memories erased every time.

“I wonder if I show up in those videos too.”

“Don’t know. I have to keep watching.”

It was impossible to tell whether he was muttering to himself or speaking to her.

And this time, a slightly longer answer came from King Yama.

“Hypothetically speaking.”

“Yeah?”

“What happens if you keep your memories of the mortal world?”

“Watching the evil karma of different souls over and over would gradually break down your sense of self. The energy of evil karma is easily contagious.”

“If it’s that bad for you, couldn’t you just take turns with someone else?”

“The other judges go insane after seeing it only once...”

King Yama’s voice sank as she simply refuted Dohyeok’s crude, straightforward solution in a way that was somehow very much like him.

‘Damn it, I opened my mouth for nothing and just made the mood weird.’

“If you keep watching it like that, the battery won’t last long. Give it here for a second and I’ll charge it.”

“Huh? You can charge it here?”

“Ha! Did you really think this Joo Dohyeok would buy a car that wasn’t fully loaded?”

Dohyeok grinned and pulled into a drowsy-driving rest area.

“Actually, holding this gets tiring on the wrists too. We’ve still got another hour to go, so it’d be better to mirror it onto the navigation screen.”

“Navigation? Mirroring?”

“Just wait.”

He boasted that it was possible, but since he had little interest in electronics, connecting King Yama’s tablet to the car’s navigation screen proved anything but easy.

‘Let’s see. The dealer definitely said something about mirroring back then. Is it this button? No? This one?’

How much time passed like that?

Just as King Yama, growing bored, was considering asking for the tablet back.

“Got it!”

“Really?”

“See, it comes up right here, doesn’t it? Device name: King Yama! Now press connect here, then switch screens!”

(Unni has to take one Golden Key card. This card is really good!)

(This one? It says Half-Price Mega Sale?)

(Ah.)

After a full fifteen-minute struggle, the tablet video finally played on the navigation screen.

“Wow! It shows up on this glass plate too! That’s amazing!”

“I work in IT, you know. This much is basic.”

He had barely managed it after fumbling around, but fortunately, no one around him was there to diminish his achievement.

That included King Yama, who ignored Dohyeok’s bragging and kept her eyes fixed on the navigation screen.

And for some reason, Dohyeok’s face looked a little redder than before as he watched her.

_____________

“What? You’re still in Seorak? You haven’t even reached Suncheon yet. Yeah, got it. Drive safely.”

“What is it?”

“Dohyeok is running a little late. Looks like he stopped at bathrooms a lot along the way.”

“Heh heh, he’s quick enough when it comes to eating. Everything else, he’s hopelessly slow.”

“You’ve got him exactly right.”

As expected of insight accumulated over countless years.

He managed to define Dohyeok perfectly in one sentence.

“Then do we have to wait until Uncle Dohyeok gets here?”

“No. Everyone knows the destination, so we can just keep going.”

It was one of the biggest mistakes people made when traveling with multiple vehicles.

Creating a midway gathering point.

The lead cars stop, the cars behind block the road ahead, and everyone creates their own traffic bottleneck.

Traveling like that delays things by at least twenty minutes, sometimes as much as thirty.

So we just had to rest whenever we wanted and keep going on our own.

Of course, I’d already decided where we would stop.

The Naerincheon Service Area, close to our destination.

Among the people in our car, I was the only one who needed bathroom breaks, so depending on my effort(?), we could theoretically drive all the way to Okgye Beach without stopping.

But for Lia and Sani, this was their first highway trip.

Going on a highway trip without stopping at a service area was practically a sin.

“Kids, look over there. That’s a service area sign.”

“We’ve seen lots of signs already.”

“Not that. This sign is for the place we’re stopping at.”

“Are we there?”

“Hmm, almost?”

And so we briefly left the highway and parked at the Naerincheon Service Area.

“We’re here. Let’s get out.”

“Good grief, my back is screaming.”

The Elder and I had driven nonstop for a full two hours, so we kept twisting our stiff backs and stretching, but Lia and Sani immediately ran out of the parking lot, busy taking in the unfamiliar sight of the service area.

“That building is floating in the air!”

“It really is! Cars are passing underneath it!”

“Cool, right?”

Truthfully, this was my first time at the Naerincheon Service Area too.

The last time I could remember traveling toward Gangneung was for a university retreat, and even then I’d gone by train.

I had searched service areas one by one because I wanted their first highway stop to be somewhere nice, but perhaps the truth was that I was the one who wanted to come here most.

“Mister! Let’s go up there!”

“Want to?”

We rode the escalator up floor by floor and began looking around the inside of the service area.

There was an exhibit about the highway’s construction process, clearly put together through the tearful efforts of whoever was responsible to make something interesting out of very little, followed by floors displaying photographs of natural scenery.

“A road... shared by people... and animals...”

Like ordinary children, Lia and Sani slowly looked through the pictures while reading the writing on the exhibit walls aloud.

The Elder and I leisurely followed behind them, enjoying the relaxed break.

And when we reached the top floor, we were finally greeted by a wide-open observation deck.

Connected to the food court, the observation deck was a perfect place to enjoy the scenery while eating or drinking coffee.

“Kids, you’re hungry, right? Here, take this card and each of you go buy one thing you want.”

“Yes!”

After sending the children off, I bought two hot lattes and sat across from the Elder.

“Human persistence truly is remarkable. I have already watched the forests burn in war and sprout anew dozens of times, yet they have once again raised buildings even this deep in the mountains.”

“You’ve lived so long, Elder, so I suppose you really did see all of it.”

He was truly the being most suited to the phrase living witness of history.

After all, he had personally witnessed the rise and fall of every nation established on the Korean Peninsula.

“Come to think of it, you don’t ask much.”

“About what?”

“About one thing or another. What Damdeok was like, or ridiculous questions like whether turtle ships had two decks or three. You’ve never once asked. Even Mahyeon kept pestering me every hour after I opened his eyes, and I suffered for quite some time.”

“I was worried that those questions might bring up parts of your past that you had buried. Memory can be cruel. The harder you try not to remember something, the more vividly it insists on returning.”

“Heh heh, a brat who won’t even live a hundred years is worrying about things that have nothing to do with his fate. Just drink your coffee.”

-Sip.

Was it because it wasn’t made as strong as the coffeehouse coffee?

It was premium coffee made with real beans and real milk, yet only with the wide-open view and the Elder’s grumbling added did it finally taste decent.

There was a kind of memory in that quiet rest after driving without pause, like the slightly bland coffee itself.

But somehow, mixed into the leisurely calm was a strangely uneasy feeling that didn’t fit.

____________

“That’s too much.”

“No, it isn’t. There are the two of us, Jinseong, and that fox bastard too.”

“He told us to buy just one thing each.”

At that moment, Lia and Sani were locked in a fierce confrontation in front of the food court.

The one trying to buy.

And the one trying to stop him.

Fortunately, the card was in Lia’s hand, but Sani had equal authority when it came to choosing food.

No matter how carefully Lia selected a menu item on the kiosk, one press of Sani’s ‘Add More’ button sent them right back to the beginning.

On top of that, they couldn’t keep arguing with people waiting behind them, so they had already stepped aside several times.

‘At this rate, we’ll never finish.’

“So, Sani, how many things do you want to pick?”

Lia attempted negotiation.

It was the delicate process of gradually steering the other party’s demands in a direction that suited her.

“Hmm, walnut cakes, a hot dog, sausage, baby potatoes... Ah! There’s buttered squid and fried sweet potatoes too!”

“That’s everything on the menu...”

Lia was learning the painful lesson that one must never negotiate with terrorists.