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Warm sunlight was coming in through the window. A nice 3 o’clock in the afternoon to lean on a comfortable sofa with a properly cooled tea in front of you.
In this golden hour, I was receiving a gaze from a friend as if she was seeing all the strangest things.
“But you said he’s your husband, not your lover?”
“That’s right.”
“Then you’re married, right?”
“Yep.”
“But you don’t know your husband’s job?”
I rolled my eyes.
“It’s surely possible that I don’t know.”
“You didn’t even ask what kind of work your husband does? No, just what the hell you… No, forget it. The nagging is enough here.”
I’ve been nagged for 3 hours, and now I’m finally getting a voice saying, “let’s stop here.”
“I had said that it’s because I could’ve known even without asking him, right. He draws a magic circle on the wall, uses magic all the time to create something, and all the books he sees have strange characters, so I roughly thought he was a magician. But, um, I didn’t know he was the Master of the Magic Tower.”
“It’s surprising if it’s to the extent saying that you guys are really in a married relationship. The grass in my front yard and the next door Amy’s frog might know each other better than you couple.”
“It’s a bit strange as I’m actually talking about it.”
That friend gave me a look of confusion. It’s the 10th expression she has made since she started talking to me.
“Alright, then… Finally, let me ask you just one last question. Your husband, that crazy Master of the Magic Tower, does he know that you don’t die? What I mean is that even if you die, you’ll revive.”
At those words, I sighed.
“He goes crazy because he doesn’t know, you know.”
Don’t make that face again. I’m going crazy too.
***
A very long time ago, if I had to count, um, about 200 years ago, I crossed the dimension.
Let’s skip the trivial things like how old I was when I crossed over and how I got over it. It’s not because I don’t remember it as it was too long ago.
Anyway, after crossing the dimension like that, I survived alone in an unfamiliar place with no family or friends. I continued living with the feeling as if I were living because I didn’t die, and then one day, about 10 years after I had crossed the dimension, I unintentionally realized it.
I haven’t aged even a single moment since I came here.
For several years immediately after the dimension shift, I was so busy adapting that I didn’t notice. When I came to my senses, here and there, I heard strange words saying it’s amazing that I don’t seem to age. It was mostly a joke about what the secret of anti-aging was, yet I couldn’t help but laugh at that.
Even if I roughly count the dates, I can feel that 10 years have passed. But for those 10 years, while all the people in this village I live in were growing old, I was living without any change. It’s as if I’m the only one whose time has stopped.
When I realized that, I was a little shocked. No, was it a lot of shocks? It was so long ago I can’t remember.
Whether it was a bit of a shock or a lot of shocks, it seems that I was so shocked and started to save myself from then on.
Hey, if you say you don’t age, people around you will look at you strangely. I need to get out of the way as soon as possible so that they have no doubts. If they have any, my safety will be threatened.
After all, safety is the most important thing…
And then I was stabbed to death by a robber that night.
***
If ‘death’ is a word that symbolizes the eternal end, my death may be a little silly. Because I was stabbed and survived two days later.
I woke up in a corner of the attic, maybe the robber robbed my house and threw me in the attic. In the peaceful sunlight and floating dust, only my clothes with dried blood proved that I was dead.
The wounds from the fight with the robber the day before, as well as the stab wounds, had disappeared. As if all wounds had healed in the meantime.
I haven’t aged and died since. Occasionally, even if I suffered an accident or died for some reason, I returned to a body without any wounds after a while, but the time it took for me to come back to life was slightly different depending on how I died.
It’s not that I only died once or twice, but my memories are hazy… I remember that I came back to life after half a year when I drowned. Some took longer, but those stories can be brutal, so let’s cut them out for a while.
I’ll just say that I have had so many different experiences, from a relatively quiet and docile death to a death that I didn’t want to remember because it was painful. If it stopped after a few times reviving, I might have left this world long ago. Of course, I’m still alive despite those countless short-lived lives.
For more than 200 years like that, without dying, I just kept on surviving. For a long time, while deceiving others that I was just young, while others discovered that I was someone with eternal youth and immortality), and sometimes being called a monster. It wasn’t normal, but it wasn’t bad either, I survived.
And I believed that unless there was a big change, I would continue to live like this in the future.
Until one day, I found a man lying near my house.
***
At that time, I was living in the forest, and there were few people coming and going because I purposely settled in a place where there were few people. There were far more days when I didn’t see people than the days I saw people.
But one day, suddenly, a man of a similar ageㅡof course, it only seems like thatㅡfell down. He was even bleeding.
How did he get here, I wonder, there were no signs of his presence nor sounds of walking. After a moment of doubt, it caught my eye that the man’s condition was serious.
I don’t know where he was injured, but blood was pouring out like water from a faucet. It was amazing that he was still alive until I found him, so I said everything, well. In fact, I even wondered for a moment if that person was already dead.
However, the man was breathing faintly, and as soon as I checked the man’s status of life or death, I had no choice but to contemplate on the spot. Do I have to take this person home?
Nevertheless, my muscular strength was a little weak compared to the general population, and to be honest, I was at the bottom of the floorㅡjust because I was immortal, that didn’t give me the strength I didn’t haveㅡand there was a common sense that it would become more dangerous if I forcefully dragged a bleeding person.
In the end, it was best to bring a bandage or medicine from home and give him a rough treatment on the spot. The man who lost his consciousness only made a sound of pain every time I applied the medicine, yet he didn’t wake up. When I asked if he was okay, I couldn’t get a proper answer.
I remember the wound was severe on the stomach side. It looked as if something like a sharp blade had passed without a break. It wasn’t a very good sight to see as the flesh was ragged.
In fact, there was no grandiose treatment. I’m not a doctor, and all I knew was folk remedies and simple treatments that could be useful in everyday life. In a nutshell, the treatment was completed by simply putting the man’s bag aside, applying a blood-stopping herb to it, and winding bandages a few times.
What did I do after that? What else can I do, surely I left him alone. Again, if you forcefully drag an injured person away, you will get in trouble. However, it seems that it was a bit of a bother to drag him with care.
Perhaps he would have been left there for days if he hadn’t woken up a few hours after the wound was healed. I only checked whether he was alive or dead, and whether his eyes were open or not.
But as a result, the man opened his eyes, and I spoke to the man who had come to his senses.
“So you’re alive?”
Don’t look at me with those eyes. ‘Cause I’m now acknowledging that those words were arrogant.
The man listened to me and frowned, then blinked his hazy eyes, and licked his lips a few times. He was probably in pain and couldn’t even speak.
How did a person who was so sick that he couldn’t even speak fall into a forest like this? I tried to say something to the man who was conscious, but the man just looked at me and took a deep breath.
In fact, rather than looking at me, it was just his eyes trying to see the object in front of him. Why, there’s such a thing, you know. The expression of a person with bad eyes staring at something with a frown on their forehead. That’s exactly what the man’s face looked like back then.
I watched it from afar and said, “Should I get you some water?” The man probably didn’t answer. And while I was getting the water, the man passed out again.
If only he had just fainted all along. I wouldn’t be able to leave someone who fainted after waking up once. I cursed my weakened body and dragged the man into my house.
***
The man slept a whole week. I spent a week giving way to my bed with an open mind and caring for the unconscious person. The man would wake up occasionally, but his eyes would blink hard, and then he would fall asleep again.
We’d been together for a week, but all I knew was that he was annoyingly handsome. What annoyingly handsome means is that he’s damn good-looking. Isn’t that how you say it? Just get it, you know this much.
After a week and a day after taking care of the man, I suddenly felt the need to go grocery shopping. I didn’t need food because I survived starvation, but I thought that if the patient woke up, I would have to give him some food.
I was away for an hour or two at the most.
What greeted me when I returned from shopping was the upside down scenery inside the house.
“…”
I thought he might come to my senses while I was out, but I didn’t expect a mess.
The windows were all smashed and the wind was blowing in, the torn curtains swaying wildly, the sofas were scattered with all the cushions torn, and it was a mess anyway. There was a big crack in the wall, so I said it all.
In such a landscape, only one was fine. Only the bed on which the man was laid.
In the middle of the bed, there was a man sitting with his big eyes, and as soon as I opened the door, he stared at me as if he had been waiting.
I looked at the house’s state and the man once, and then it became so ridiculous.