Wind moved through the canopy in soft, patient waves, as if the forest were breathing.
Hyun Joo woke on his side with a cheek pressed into damp leaves. For a moment he didn't
understand why his bed felt wrong—too cold, too uneven, and smelling of soil instead of
detergent. He blinked, expecting the familiar blur of his nearsightedness.
The world snapped into focus.
Every vein of a leaf overhead was crisp. Tiny insects moved like little black commas along
bark. The sunlight filtering through branches had edges, not haze. He pushed himself up
too quickly, and his stomach rolled; his palm met moss, springy and wet.
"Where…?" His voice came out hoarse, as if he'd been sleeping with his mouth open.
He patted at his face, then the ground around him, searching by habit. Glasses. He couldn't
be seeing like this without—
Nothing. No frame. No cold plastic near his fingers.
Hyun Joo sat back against the nearest tree, breathing hard. The trunk was wide and rough,
the texture biting lightly through his shirt. His hands—his hands—looked wrong. Not in the
sense of injury, but in the sense of time reversed. The skin was smoother. The spots he'd
gotten used to in recent years weren't there. The veins weren't as raised.
He brought his hand closer to his face, turning it left and right like he was examining
someone else's body. His nails were shorter than he remembered, clean and unbitten.
A patch of panic tried to bloom in his chest. He held it down with the stubborn control of
someone who'd spent decades swallowing reactions at work, on crowded trains, in rooms
where a man was supposed to be steady. He forced his breathing to slow.
Okay. Assess first. Panic later.
He looked around.
Forest, yes, but not the tidy kind of park that could be mistaken for wilderness by someone
who never left a city. This was dense. Old. The trees were thick, their branches tangled high
above him. Ferns and broad-leaf plants crowded the ground. He couldn't see any trail, any
discarded plastic, any sign of people. The air itself felt different—clean in a way that didn't
match memory, full of damp green and something mineral.
He tried to remember falling asleep. A bed. A screen. Something about—
A flicker of a bright, animated advertisement swam up from the edge of his mind. Fantasy
characters. Magic. A warning sentence that had sounded like a dramatic joke. His finger
tapping the screen in a half-awake daze.
Hyun Joo's throat tightened.
"No," he muttered. "That's ridiculous."
But there was no better explanation for trees he didn't recognize and a body that didn't feel
like it belonged to the man who'd gone to bed.
He stared straight ahead and said, with an embarrassed kind of hope, "Status."
Nothing happened.
He waited, then tried again, sharper. "Status!"
Still nothing. The forest answered with a distant birdcall and the gentle creak of branches.
He exhaled, almost angry at himself. This wasn't a comic. He wasn't a teenager. He was—
He stopped. He didn't feel fifty-five. He didn't feel stiff. His back didn't ache in the familiar
places. His knees didn't complain as he shifted.
Hyun Joo frowned, then tried once more, quieter, as if the forest might respond better to
modesty. "Status."
No response.
Heat climbed into his face. He swallowed, then decided to indulge the last possibility he
could think of. He didn't speak this time. He simply thought the word, pictured it like a
button.
A translucent window unfolded in the air in front of him as if it had always been there,
merely waiting for permission to be seen.
Hyun Joo froze.
The panel was clean and bright, floating at chest height. Letters formed in a crisp font he
could read as easily as if they were printed on paper.
Kim Hyun Joo: Human. 21 Years Old.
Str: 1
Agi: 1
Int: 1
Dex: 1
Chr: 1
Vit: 1
Mag: 5
Available points to use: 30
His mouth went dry.
Twenty-one.
He lifted his hand again, more urgently now, flexing his fingers. His shoulders rolled without
protest. His lungs filled deep without wheezing. The heaviness that usually sat in his body
like a second job wasn't there.
"Twenty-one," he whispered, and the sound was half disbelief, half grief for a life that had
just been… erased? Returned? Replaced?
He stared at the numbers. Most of them were ones. Ones like the start of a new game file.
Ones like a blank page. Then Mag: 5—higher, standing out like an awkward compliment.
Thirty points waiting.
Hyun Joo had read enough stories to know what these meant in a general sense. Strength,
agility, intelligence, dexterity, charisma, vitality, magic. The template was familiar. Too
familiar. The kind of familiar that made the hair on his arms rise.
But familiarity didn't equal understanding. These weren't numbers on a screen anymore.
They were him.
If Str was 1, did that mean he was weak? Weak compared to what? A normal adult? A
trained fighter? A child? If he dumped points into Vit, would he become hardier
immediately, like flipping a switch? If he put everything into Mag, would he be able to throw
fire?
Or would he simply become a healthier man who still couldn't survive a night alone in a
forest?
He reached a tentative finger toward the panel. The surface didn't resist; his fingertip
passed through the light like mist. When he focused on "Available points," the number
shimmered faintly, as if inviting him to spend them. When he focused on any stat, it did the
same.
Hyun Joo pulled his hand back as though it might bite.
In the stories, reckless point allocation always came with regret. There was always a
hidden rule, a balance issue, a future requirement. And this wasn't a controlled
environment. If he was truly somewhere else—some world where a status screen was
normal—then the consequences weren't a reset away.
"No," he said aloud, firming his voice. "Not yet."
He needed context. Benchmarks. He needed to know what "1" felt like before he decided
what "5" or "10" should be.
First priority: survival.
He pushed himself to his feet. His balance was better than expected; his legs felt light. Still,
when he took a step, he was cautious, testing the ground. Fallen branches lay half-hidden
under leaves. He scanned the area for anything useful—rocks, a stick, something that
could serve as a weapon or tool.
He found a fallen limb about as long as his arm, the wood dry and pale where it had
snapped. Hyun Joo picked it up. It was lighter than he expected. He swung it gently through
the air once, then twice. The motion was awkward, not because his body resisted, but
because the idea of swinging a stick like a club belonged to a different kind of life than the
one he'd lived.
"Okay," he murmured. "Test."
He walked to a nearby tree—one with a trunk about as thick as his torso—and chose a
lower dead branch jutting from it. He brought the stick down with a quick strike.
The impact jolted his wrists unpleasantly. The dead branch shuddered but didn't break.
Pain sparked in his hands, sharp enough to make him hiss.
So Str: 1 wasn't heroic.
He tried again, this time bracing his stance, tightening his grip. The stick struck with a dull
thud. The branch cracked a little, fibers splitting, but it still held.
Hyun Joo lowered the stick and flexed his fingers, breathing through the sting.
"Not good," he said, then forced himself to be fair. "Not good for chopping wood. But I'm
not helpless."
He looked down at his forearms. They weren't muscular like an athlete's, but they weren't
soft either. More like a young office worker who walked sometimes, maybe did a little
exercise. The body of a man who could become something, if he survived long enough.
He glanced at the status window again. Thirty points. A whole second chance's worth of
potential.
He closed the panel with a thought—more accurately, he looked away and willed it gone,
and it faded like a reflection disrupted.
Next test: speed and coordination.
Hyun Joo picked a small stone from the ground, weighed it in his palm, and tossed it up and
down a few times, watching his hand track it. The catches were clean. He tossed it higher,
forcing himself to react quickly. His fingers closed around it with a confidence that
surprised him.
Dexterity wasn't zero, at least.
He tried jogging a short distance—ten paces, then back. His breathing stayed steady. His
legs moved easily through uneven terrain. But he wasn't fast in any extraordinary way. He
felt like someone untrained, someone who could run if he needed to but wouldn't outrun a
predator for long.
Predator.
That thought made him stop.
The forest wasn't silent. Under the birds and the wind were smaller noises—rustling in
brush, a faint distant crack like something stepping on a twig. It could have been an animal.
It could have been nothing. But the fact he couldn't tell made his skin prickle.
Hyun Joo tightened his grip on the stick and turned slowly, scanning between trunks. His
heart beat harder, and with it came a strange awareness: his senses felt sharper. He could
smell damp earth, crushed leaves, a faint sweetness from some unseen flower. He could
hear, if he focused, the direction of the wind. He didn't know if that was simply what it felt
like to be young and healthy, or if "Mag: 5" was doing something quietly in the background.
Magic. If he had magic, could he use it without spending points?
He held the stick in one hand and lifted the other, palm open. He tried to imagine heat
gathering there, like in the animations from a hundred shows. He pictured a spark.
Nothing happened.
He tried again, concentrating harder, as if squeezing a muscle he'd never used.
Still nothing. No warmth. No glow. No helpful instruction prompt.
Hyun Joo let his hand fall and exhaled through his nose. "Of course."
A bitter laugh almost escaped him, but he swallowed it. Bitterness could wait. It was a
luxury.
He looked up through the branches. The sun's position was hard to gauge through leaves,
but the light suggested morning or late afternoon. Either way, he needed a plan before
night. Shelter. Water. Direction. People, if they existed.
He chose a direction at random—following the slope of the land downward, because water
tended to collect there—and began walking, using the stick to probe the ground ahead and
push aside ferns.
As he moved, he kept checking the forest for patterns, for any sign of a path. Every so often,
he paused and listened. Each time, the same truth settled deeper into him: this was real
enough to kill him.
The thought should have made him spend his points immediately—dump them into
strength, into vitality, into anything that would keep him alive.
But the numbers were a promise and a trap at the same time.
Hyun Joo continued downhill, jaw set, forcing himself into calm. He would not gamble his
thirty points on ignorance. Not when he didn't even know what "1" truly meant in this world.
He walked until the air grew cooler and the plants changed, and then—faint at first, like a
memory—he heard it.
Water.
A stream, somewhere ahead.
Hyun Joo quickened his pace, careful not to run. Each step brought the sound clearer, the
steady, indifferent rush of something that didn't care whether a man had been pulled into
another world or not.
When he finally pushed through a curtain of hanging vines and saw the stream cutting
through rocks, relief hit him so hard his knees softened.
He crouched at the edge, watching the clear current slide over stones. He didn't drink yet.
He'd read enough to know better than to trust a pretty stream without thought. He scanned
upstream and down for animal tracks, for anything dead in the water, for anything that
suggested danger.
Only when he was satisfied it looked clean did he scoop water into his hands and sip
slowly.
Cold. Fresh. Real.
Hyun Joo sat back on his heels, water dripping from his fingers. The forest pressed in
around him, beautiful and merciless.
He swallowed and looked at his wet hands, then at the place in the air where his status
window had been.
"Alright," he said quietly, as if speaking to whatever had brought him here. "If this is a
game…"
His voice tightened on the last word. He corrected himself.
"If this is my life now—then I'm going to learn the rules before I play."
And with the sound of the stream steady at his side, he began to plan what to test next.