Side Story 7, Swamp (7-2)

His grandfather laughed as if perplexed.

"Ho ho, this is something. To think my grandson has been getting beaten up outside."

After thinking for a long while, he gave the boy the answer he wanted.

"At that age, what you need is physical strength. If your physical strength is superior, most guys won't mess with you."

So from the next day, the boy, Jin Yu-wan, began mastering various sports. While he was immersed in exercise, he heard that the guys who had been beating him were transferring schools or moving away one after another, but he didn't particularly care.

Exercise was fascinating. Though moving his body vigorously felt tiring at first, after adapting, he realized it had a strange enjoyment similar to mathematics.

But what made exercise different from mathematics was that while mathematics was like a game enjoying the process of finding definite answers that were set, exercise had no set answers but allowed one to become the victor through effort alone.

However, there was also a commonality between the two. Like mathematics, which gave him the feeling of temporarily returning to that pleasant quiet swamp of his childhood when he lost himself in continuous calculations, exercise could also give him that feeling when he strongly focused on moving his body. He also came to realize that once you reached a certain level in exercise, there came a stage where you couldn't advance further by training just the body.

Those brief moments in the swamp, which felt so good he wished he could swim there forever, were worth more than the meaningless hours he usually spent.

Exercise, which had started merely as a means of training his body, gradually shifted toward learning formal martial arts. Before long, those who had looked down on Jin Yu-wan became too intimidated to approach him after seeing him grow remarkably tall with the aura of a trained fighter emanating from him. Indeed, it was just as his grandfather had said.

However, Jin Yu-wan never stuck to learning one sport or martial art for long, always moving on to learn something new once he felt he had learned enough. Many people assumed this was because he got bored quickly, but in reality, he simply thought of them not as separate disciplines but as parts under the single name of moving the body. In other words, he simply enjoyed moving his body and didn't particularly care what means he used to do so, but others didn't see it that way.

Around that time, having progressed beyond his earlier interest in just mathematics, Jin Yu-wan encountered computers and became tremendously interested in the infinite world implemented through numbers he had never seen before.

And shortly after he began tinkering with computers, he also developed great interest in virtual reality programming implementation, which was still being used at a beginner level at that time.

His maternal grandfather, noticing Yu-wan's talent for programming, would occasionally assign him to inspect computer programs made by his company, and each time Yu-wan would show amazing results that astounded those who knew of his existence.

For things he took interest in, he could become a person overflowing with more persistence and tenacity than anyone else.

After several years, when Jin Yu-wan became a high school student, many departments requested him as a substitute for competitions and sought his help as a sparring partner, having mastered various sports and martial arts. Though Yu-wan didn't accept all of them, he would occasionally agree when he had time, treating it as a hobby.

Perhaps because of his face that many called handsome, he received strong interest from girls his age to mature women he passed by, but until then he showed no interest in anything besides numbers and physical training.

Around Yu-wan, there were countless people who tried to get close but gave up and left, and those who approached trying to date him but ran away crying. His image at school had somehow changed for the worse, but only he was unaware of this.

Around that time, Yu-wan's mother, who had been ailing for a long time, finally closed her eyes. It was a lonely death for the mother who had given Yu-wan a new name and told him never to meet his father until she died. The woman who had loved her husband but had to run away due to overwhelming feelings of betrayal spent her lifetime just longingly looking at her son's face that resembled her husband's.

However, the remaining Yu-wan faced a major problem. He didn't know how to react even when seeing his mother's pale face with closed eyes. While people who knew his mother were wiping away tears beside him, no similar liquid would come from his eyes no matter how hard he tried.

People pointed fingers at Yu-wan as he held the funeral portrait wearing black mourning clothes with a face that seemed to feel no emotion. For the first time, he thought that maybe others were right about him being somehow strange.

The day they cremated his mother, the weather was very clear. When the coffin went in beyond what seemed like a transparent wall separating them from the world, and the announcement asking to pay final respects to the deceased played, sounds of crying erupted from here and there as people couldn't contain their sadness. His grandmother stood beside him, quietly dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief while patting Yu-wan's back.

"Poor thing, can't even cry."

Can't even cry. Though she said that, Yu-wan thought those words weren't true. Because he wasn't holding back wanting to cry.

His mother thus became a handful of ashes contained in an urn, eternally sleeping with her photo in her spot in the columbarium that wasn't even a pyeong in size. However, Yu-wan stood there until everyone left, continuously staring at his mother's framed photo behind the glass.

It felt so strange. Though she had been a mother who had stayed bedridden for over ten years and never really had a proper conversation with him, it felt rather unreal that she was now cremated and placed in here.