WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: LilGuyBlastoise
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◈ The Economics of an Alchemist ◈
Chapter 5
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Ping!
A dizzy spell swept over Jaeha. At the same time, blood began streaming from his nose.
“Urgh…”
His legs suddenly gave out. He hurriedly braced himself against the edge of the desk, barely managing not to collapse.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
His heart began racing abnormally fast. Jaeha immediately realized that his blood sugar had crashed again.
‘Why again?’
He had just eaten a fistful of candy. This was the first time his blood sugar had dropped so quickly.
Before his symptoms worsened, he quickly pulled more candy from his bag and dumped it into his mouth.
After resting for a while, he felt a little better. Only then did Jaeha pick up the diamond ring he had dropped, put it back in its case, and return it to its original place.
“Phew…”
He looked terrible in the mirror. The hastily wiped blood had stained his face and clothes. He carefully opened his bedroom door and checked the living room.
Fortunately, Jaeseong, the youngest, seemed to have gone into his room. There was no one in the living room. Jaeha went straight to the bathroom.
He turned on the tap, washed his face with the cold running water, then took off his T-shirt and scrubbed away the bloodstains.
After leaving the bathroom, he put his clothes and towel in the laundry basket, grabbed a can of cola from the fridge, and returned to his room.
“Phew…”
Sitting in his desk chair, Jaeha let out a quiet sigh. His thoughts were a mess.
It had been an unreal experience, like being thrown into the middle of space. To borrow the dream’s expression, it was the diamond’s microcosm.
He understood the phrase. It had truly felt as though he had been cast into outer space. The sight etched into his mind vividly rose before him again.
After staring blankly into space for a moment, Jaeha suddenly turned on his laptop.
Tap, tap-tap.
When he typed “diamond” into the search bar, a flood of information appeared. His eyes remained fixed on one black-and-white image.
A three-dimensional structure in which carbon atoms were tightly linked together like a hexagonal net.
The motionless black-and-white dots in the picture began to overlap in his mind with the orbits of red and blue stars he had seen through the All-Seeing Eye.
‘…They’re the same.’
The only difference was dimension and scale.
Modern microscopes showed the position of a dead cross-section, while the All-Seeing Eye had merely shown the endlessly moving flow of energy as an enormous three-dimensional universe.
‘Could it have been a hallucination?’
The rational part of his mind could not let go of its doubts. It was reasonable to wonder whether it had been caused by his condition or the side effects of chemotherapy.
Jaeha soon shook his head.
If he denied even the phenomenon he had experienced himself, only one conclusion remained. That he had gone mad. For his own mental health, it was better to accept it as an unknown phenomenon.
He was not insane. He was experiencing something humanity had yet to prove.
Just as he reached that conclusion, he faintly heard the sound of the door lock.
Beep beep beep.
“I’m home! Oppa! Jaeseong! Pork belly was on sale at the supermarket, so I bought some on the way back!”
It was Seo-yun, the second sibling.
Jaeha closed his laptop. He decided to put aside his troubling thoughts for now. It was time for the three siblings to gather around the table and grill meat together for the first time in a while.
Before leaving his room, he quickly reviewed the fake travel route he had planned to perfectly cover up his time in the hospital.
Unlike Jaeseong, sharp-eyed Seo-yun would not fall for a flimsy lie.
‘Busan on the first day, then I walked along the southern coast…’
It was a punishing enough itinerary to explain why he had become so gaunt.
In case Seo-yun grilled him about local restaurants or scenery, he reviewed the information he had looked up online once more.
‘Good. Perfect.’
Before leaving his room, Jaeha lightly patted his cheeks and composed his expression.
* * *
H University Hospital.
“I’m truly surprised.”
Professor Park adjusted their glasses as they looked over the test results on the monitor.
“The tumor has shrunk significantly compared to a month ago. There are no signs that it has developed resistance to the medication, either.”
“That’s a relief.”
Jaeha calmly nodded.
“…However, I cannot guarantee how long this response will continue. It is important to maintain your current condition. Ah, have you had any difficulties in your daily life recently?”
At Professor Park’s question, the corner of Jaeha’s eye twitched.
“…No. Nothing in particular.”
That was what he said, but it was not true. That damned dream was especially troubling.
After exchanging a few more words with the doctor, Jaeha made his next outpatient appointment and left the examination room. Before catching the bus, he headed straight to the café on the hospital’s first floor.
“One slice of chocolate cake and a caramel macchiato. Ah, please add whipped cream to the caramel macchiato.”
Coming to the hospital was exhausting. If he did not replenish his sugar in time, that damned hypoglycemia would come for him without fail.
His order came out quickly. Jaeha carried his tray to a window seat.
He took a large forkful of the dense chocolate cake and shoved it into his mouth, then took a sip of the macchiato, ice clinking inside it.
As the sweetness rushed through his veins, his tense muscles seemed to loosen pleasantly.
Jaeha looked out the window.
The May sunlight, racing toward early summer, looked fairly harsh.
The street trees that had been bare when he first came to the hospital were now thick with green leaves. Back then, he had not even noticed things like that. He was still alive and well.
Having regained his composure, Jaeha began calmly looking back over the strange events he had experienced during the past month.
The world of Edwin that he glimpsed through dreams resembled Earth during the Industrial Revolution, yet felt strangely unfamiliar. It was fairly interesting, but Jaeha was disappointed.
There had been nothing related to alchemy, which was what he most wanted to know about. All he had seen were ordinary moments, like Edwin dozing off while organizing documents or taking machines apart.
‘The dreams have no consistent cycle.’
On the day he awakened the All-Seeing Eye in reality, he had two dreams in a row. But it took a full two weeks before he dreamed of Edwin again.
He seemed to need more data before he could identify even a rough pattern.
‘It doesn’t seem to play at random, though…’
On the day he dreamed of Edwin nodding off over family documents related to accounting, Jaeha had been writing in his household ledger before bed, his mind in a mess.
That was not all.
The day all three siblings finally got A-phones after Jaeha gave in to Jaeseong’s pestering.
Jaeha had played with his first smartphone until late at night, marveling at how anyone had thought to make something like it. He had wanted to take it apart immediately.
He had fallen asleep late that night, and in his dream, Edwin had been dismantling a complex machine made of springs and gears.
Looking back, even dreams that had seemed completely random could be linked to what happened in reality before he went to sleep. Sometimes, it did feel like he was forcing prophecy to fit reality somehow.
Sensations and emotions from reality acted like search terms, opening pages from Edwin’s life with some connection to them.
That was Jaeha’s guess.
‘Why am I dreaming of Edwin in particular?’
The first hypothesis that came to mind was reincarnation.
Perhaps he was the reincarnation of Edwin, who had lived on a planet like Earth somewhere in the vast universe.
Maybe his abnormally activated pineal gland was causing his unconscious mind to recall memories from a past life.
There was a reason the philosopher Descartes had claimed that the soul resided in the pineal gland.
He had a few other hypotheses as well. For example, perhaps Edwin from a parallel world was on the same wavelength as him, allowing Jaeha to glimpse his memories.
None of them were remotely realistic.
With a faint chuckle, Jaeha scooped up more chocolate cake. Then he suddenly saw himself in the mirror overlap with Edwin from his dreams.
‘Come to think of it, that guy kept eating sweets in his recent dreams too.’
It was a natural physiological response for the brain to demand glucose after intense thinking. But Jaeha’s case was different.
It felt as if one particular part of his brain was crazily devouring energy. Jaeha scooped up some of the whipped cream piled high on his caramel macchiato to replenish his sugar.
‘…Could it be?’
His pineal gland had become abnormally activated because of the side effects of chemotherapy. Then what about Edwin? And the alchemists in that world?
Maybe their brain structures were fundamentally different from ordinary people’s. If only people like them could awaken the All-Seeing Eye, it explained why Edwin always seemed to have sweet snacks in his mouth.
Even to himself, it seemed like a hypothesis that fit together rather well.
Bzzzt. Bzzzt.
The vibration of the A-phone on the table broke his train of thought. Jaeha picked up the phone and checked his messages.
Withdrawal notices for insurance, utilities, phone bills, and more.
The merciless hammer of capitalism. It felt like he had woken from a dream and returned to reality. A hollow breath escaped Jaeha’s lips.
He immediately opened the banking app he had just installed. After entering the password for his digital certificate, his account information appeared on the small screen.
A balance of a little over 300 million won.
He had enough that he would not starve to death immediately, so he did not intend to push his body as hard as before to earn money. His cancer was not cured, after all.
‘What should I do?’
Since leaving the hospital, that question had tormented Jaeha’s body and mind alongside his dreams of Edwin. For the past few years, he had pushed forward with clear goals: survival and investing in his siblings.
But after miraculously escaping a terminal prognosis and gaining enough money to give him room to breathe, he suddenly felt lost.
How should he live from now on, not as the head of the household, but as Kim Jaeha?
Jaeha drained the rest of his macchiato in one gulp and rose from his seat. The question still had no answer.
* * *
That evening.
At Jaeseong’s relentless insistence that he would die if he did not eat meat, the three siblings went to a reasonably priced all-you-can-eat beef restaurant.
Sizzle.
The beef cooked on the grill with an appetizing sound.
Slurp.
As Jaeseong drooled, his eyes lit up as he picked up his chopsticks, and Seo-yun smacked his hand and glared.
“Where do you think you’re going? Oppa hasn’t eaten yet. And it isn’t even cooked.”
“Ah, don’t you know it’s practically the national rule to eat it when only the outside is lightly cooked?”
Watching the two bicker, Jaeha turned over the meat with the tongs.
“Ah! Right, I need to take a picture of this!”
Jaeseong held his A-phone right over the grill. He wanted to post it on Facewall, the latest popular social network.
Splatter!
Hot oil suddenly splashed onto the back of his hand.
“Ah, hot!”
Jaeseong violently jerked his hand back on reflex. The A-phone he was holding fell to the floor. All three siblings froze at once.
“No!”
Despite Jaeseong’s cry, the A-phone hit the floor with a cheerful Thud! At a glance, the screen was cracked.
“Argh! My A-phone!”
Jaeseong screamed too late.
“You idiot! How long has it even been since you bought it? And you already broke it!”
Smack! Smack!
Seo-yun repeatedly struck Jaeseong on the back. Seemingly unable to feel the pain, Jaeseong could only stare at the broken phone with a pale face.
“The repair bill won’t be cheap! You broke it, so you pay to fix it!”
“My money…”
Jaeseong had been looking forward to getting paid for tutoring soon, but now his eyes turned wistful.
Jaeha clicked his tongue inwardly and picked up the broken phone. Its screen was cracked like a spiderweb from one corner. It had been covered by the case the store gave as a free gift, but it seemed to have offered no protection at all. It was completely useless.
“There’s nothing we can do about it now. Let’s eat first.”
Jaeha placed cooked meat onto his siblings’ plates.
“…Sniff. It’s delicious.”
As Jaeseong put the meat in his mouth, tears gathered in his eyes, whether from joy or sorrow.
And that night.
Jaeha dreamed of Edwin. It was a dream about alchemy, the kind he had been waiting for.
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