The Protagonist Doesn't Want to Leave the First Floor - Chapter 1

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: DereKimchi

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ The Protagonist Doesn't Want to Leave the First Floor ◈

Chapter 1

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Everyone has defense mechanisms.

Seo Hajin was no exception.

His first appeared when he was eight years old.

His father had grabbed his mother by the hair right in front of him.

Behind him, his little sister, not even five years old, clung tightly to the hem of his clothes and held her breath.

Then came the screams and shouting.

It had been a common part of their everyday life.

But that time was different.

His senses suddenly went numb.

The sounds in his ears. The chill of the floor beneath his feet. His sister's sniffling breaths behind him.

Every sensation dulled.

It was as if he were not part of the scene, but observing it through someone else's eyes.

That strange sensation began like that.

As time passed, it grew stronger.

There were times when it made him feel strange or afraid. But once he realized it helped him endure those situations, he accepted it completely.

Then one day, he came home after elementary school.

The house was a mess. His mother and sister were nowhere to be seen. There were more empty liquor bottles than usual.

No one explained what had happened, but he understood the moment he saw it.

His mother had left. She had taken his sister with her and left him behind.

Then it happened.

His father was shouting as usual.

A liquor bottle flew toward him.

“...”

Just before it hit him, Hajin felt that familiar sensation return.

But this time was different.

His senses did not merely go numb. It felt as though his point of view shot upward, as if his soul had left his body.

He had not lost consciousness.

Below his gaze, which had stopped near the ceiling, was a boy struck in the head by a liquor bottle, blood pouring down his face.

It was like a carefully staged puppet show.

The pain in his head was no worse than a light tap from someone else.

‘This is bad.’

Other thoughts followed.

It had hit a bad spot. The upper part of his forehead was split open. If he left it alone, the bleeding would not stop easily.

So he quietly left.

He had no money, but he went to a nearby pharmacy. It was a place he had often visited with his mother.

Without needing much explanation, the pharmacist rushed over and disinfected his wound.

“Still, I can't stitch you up here.”

That was how he ended up at a hospital.

Fortunately, there was no damage inside his head.

They put in a few stitches and covered the wound with gauze.

His injury was taken care of that way.

His father was not.

Naturally, the police arrived.

After this and that was sorted out, Hajin was sent to a temporary protective facility.

* * *

Three days after arriving at the facility, his mother came to see him.

She held his sister's hand tightly.

Her face was a mess. Tears streamed over bruises that were still swollen after several days.

His mother pulled Hajin into her arms and cried.

“I'm sorry. I was so... so scared that I couldn't think.”

That was how he learned what had happened.

His father had become far worse than usual. His mother had feared for her life.

In her panic, she had only taken his sister and left the house. She had intended to pick Hajin up after school, but the house had been empty.

“...”

Hajin's eyes were unfocused as he stood in her embrace.

He was not looking at his mother's shoulder, nor at the facility worker watching them sympathetically from beyond her.

In truth, he was looking down on all of them from higher up.

‘Hmm.’

He thought of what he had overheard the police saying at the hospital.

They had contacted both his parents.

But his mother had only come several days later.

He also remembered that, for someone who had supposedly fled in a hurry, his mother and sister's belongings had been completely cleared out.

Only Hajin's few clothes and schoolbag remained in the wrecked house.

“Your mother will come for you soon.”

“What are the chances she abandoned me?”

“Chances? That's impossible.”

He remembered his conversation with the facility worker.

Hajin looked down at his mother.

Maybe this lie was the best option for her.

It was better to say she had merely been late than to admit that she had abandoned him, then been unable to go through with it.

“...”

He felt like he understood, just a little, why his mother had made that choice.

The way she looked at the child in her arms resembled the way she had looked at his father.

‘Is this just my imagination?’

It wasn’t something he saw directly with his own eyes.

He had recently learned the term defense mechanism. Maybe that was all this was.

Still, Hajin simply accepted it.

He could not stay at the facility forever, and nothing good would come of digging into his mother's lie.

That was how a family of four became a family of three.

No. Maybe they were really a family of two.

He heard that his father went to prison. Though, he would not be there long.

They said cases like this usually did not result in an actual prison sentence. However, there was a recent case where a parent had abused their child, which seemed to have affected the outcome.

Life became ordinary after that.

First, they transferred schools.

His father had never properly known what schools his children attended in the first place, but they said it would be safer that way.

They also said it was best to transfer as early as possible, before adolescence began.

Their home changed, as did the scenery around them.

They were still poor, but the violence that had occupied part of their daily lives was gone.

Once that familiar noise disappeared, Hajin sometimes felt as if the whole world had become quiet.

But once he finally had the space to look around, he began noticing things he had never known before.

He found one possible answer to why his mother had not left his father sooner, if it could have been this easy.

Someone had helped her. Someone a little younger than his father.

His voice was low, but every word was easy to hear. He never got angry and always said kind things.

If the words “good person” took human form, perhaps they would look like him.

That man helped his mother and treated Hajin and his sister very well.

That did not mean he became their new father.

He could not have.

The man had a family. A wife and children.

So perhaps he was his mother's friend. A friend she was grateful for.

The sort people called a male friend.

Still, as his sister grew older, Hajin would sometimes tilt his head at the faint sense of familiarity he began to notice.

Then it suddenly dawned on him.

His sister's father was not the same as his.

Only then could he guess that certain words he had heard long ago amid his father's curse-filled shouting, words he had not understood at the time, had been about that very situation.

His father had probably known.

Was that why he started drinking? But judging by the timing, it did not seem to be the only reason.

Like the old question of the chicken and the egg, it was impossible to tell whether his sister's existence had caused the discord, or had been its result.

But nothing changed.

Even if they had different fathers, she was undeniably his sister.

She had not strayed, and she was quicker on the uptake than he was.

That was probably why.

Before long, she realized that their mother looked at her and her brother differently.

When his sister began feeling sorry for him, Hajin told her it was all right. That he really was okay.

“I'm grateful, if anything.”

“Grateful?”

“Yeah.”

His sister did not understand.

But he wasn’t just saying it. He was grateful for his mother.

At least she hadn't abandoned him twice.

Maybe she had wanted to, but she had not acted on it. And she was working hard for both her children.

That mattered all the more in a world where words like duty and responsibility had become so worthless that some people could only sneer at them.

He was grateful to his mother.

Separate from that, he also wanted to become independent as soon as possible.

Part of it was because as he grew older, he began to resemble his father in his youth.

More fear began to appear in his mother's eyes whenever she looked at him. And with that, his sister began watching their mother's mood more often.

That was likely why he started taking part-time jobs in middle school.

Because he was young, there were times when he was not paid properly. But perhaps because he worked even those jobs without complaint, more and more people began looking for him.

He heard about his father's death while serving in the military.

His father had suffered from severe alcoholism.

But the actual cause of death had been a traffic accident. He had been hit by a vehicle that ran a red light.

Hajin was given leave and saw to the funeral rites.

There were almost no mourners. Most of them were his mother’s acquaintances.

Surprisingly, his mother had kept up his father's life insurance. She had continued paying the premiums even after she fled.

Maybe, considering how much he drank, she had thought it wouldn’t be long before he kicked the bucket.

Though, all things considered, it took a lot longer than expected.

The insurance payout was not much. He heard the bereavement settlement offered by the driver's side had been larger.

He did not know the exact amount, but it seemed to have helped considerably when they moved afterward.

The new house was bigger. But it had the same number of rooms.

Sharing a room with his growing younger sister was bound to become uncomfortable, but there was a reason for it.

He said he wanted to live on his own after being discharged. There was no need to keep an empty room at home for him.

His mother did not object.

She told him to visit often. That she would make side dishes for him.

After that, his ordinary military life resumed.

Around then, he became capable of maintaining that sensation in question whenever he wanted, for as long as he wanted.

At first, it had been more like being unwillingly switched into that state under certain circumstances. But gradually, he made it his own.

He no longer thought of it as a defense mechanism. He decided to think of it as a kind of superpower only he possessed.

And it was quite useful.

He could calmly handle work that others avoided, and it was especially helpful with simple, repetitive tasks.

Dulled senses did not make him any less careful. If anything, each movement became more precise, and he hardly made mistakes.

That was why he could regularly take on cargo loading jobs that others would flee after a day without feeling much burden.

Of course, he had steadily built up the stamina to endure such work. And he had built that stamina by exercising while using that sensation.

“Hajin, good work today.”

“Yes. You too.”

He had come in as a substitute at a construction-material hauling site.

He could not match the output of experienced workers, but he wasn’t a hindrance either. He was adequate.

His pay was a little lower to match, so the other workers had no particular complaints.

“This site is done now. Want to go get a drink?”

“Sure. Hey, what about you, Hajin?”

Everyone seemed ready to go together.

Hajin politely declined.

“I have somewhere to be.”

“Really? That's too bad. I'll call you if another job comes up. Hope we can work together again.”

“Yes. Please call me.”

After leaving the site, Hajin headed not to the goshiwon where he lived, but to a large hospital downtown that required two bus transfers to reach.

A few days earlier, he had been told that something looked unusual in his regular checkup results and advised to get a thorough examination.

After returning for the tests, he looked at the doctor studying the monitor. More precisely, he looked at the glasses she wore.

“Hmm...”

The doctor seemed to be thinking something over.

It was as though she were searching her mind for the right words.

“Cases like yours are very rare.”

The words she chose were vague and abstract, but Hajin could guess why she had chosen them.

She wanted to tell the patient that the situation was very bad while making the news as little of a shock as possible.

“Is that so?”

“Yes...”

That was considerate of her.

Was it because she was a woman? Or simply her personality?

The scan displayed on the monitor showed a considerable difference between the images taken just days earlier and the ones taken today.

“Cancer cells usually divide quickly in younger patients. But...”

“Mine seem to be faster.”

“Mm. Yes. Very... Cases like this do exist, but they are rare.”

The cancer had effectively metastasized throughout his body.

Surgery was out of the question. The doctor cautiously explained that even chemotherapy might be meaningless.

“I see.”

Seo Hajin nodded.

His expression was calm.

At some point, he had entered that sensation again.

“...”

His view looked down from near the ceiling.

The doctor was like the tragic lead in a play, gently delivering a death sentence.

Meanwhile, he felt like he was hearing this from the audience.

“Can I ask something?”

“Yes. Go ahead.”

“When a cancer spreads to the brain, can it cause things like visual illusions or auditory hallucinations?”

“Well, it isn't impossible. Are you experiencing symptoms like that?”

“No. I was just curious.”

Hajin stood. He had heard everything worth hearing.

The doctor suggested that he be admitted, just in case, and begin with basic chemotherapy.

He shook his head with the same expression.

‘That's strange.’

His body felt light.

Right before he came to the hospital, he had even been doing grueling construction-material hauling work without any trouble.

He was not in any particular pain either. The doctor had said though rare it wasn’t entirely unheard of.

Was it fortunate that it did not hurt?

‘If it were early stage, maybe. But being admitted now...’

If he was going to die anyway, he did not want to close his eyes in a hospital bed.

He pulled his phone from his pocket.

He remembered the insurance one of his mother's acquaintances had practically talked him into buying some time ago.

“The payout should be pretty good…”

He returned to his goshiwon.

Lying on his bed, he looked toward the usual corner of the ceiling.

But unlike usual, both his eyes were fully focused. That was because of the strange thing floating in the air before him.

“I thought it was a hallucination... but there have been similar stories online lately. It doesn't seem like I'm the only one.”

[Provisional Awakener: Seo Hajin]

[Unique Ability: Multiple Viewpoints]

[Forced Transfer Pending]

[Time Remaining: 03:14:22]

The sort of thing people commonly called a status window. If such a thing really existed, it would probably look exactly like this.

It had started appearing some time ago.

Since he already had a sensation no one else possessed, he wondered whether this was something similar. But when he looked it up, he found that many people online had recently reported the same thing.

The details were nearly identical.

It showed the person's name and said they would be forcibly transferred somewhere.

‘The Unique Ability part was different for each person.’

That probably meant not everyone had one.

Seo Hajin thought he knew what the Unique Ability, Multiple Viewpoints, referred to.

‘So my ability really is real.’

No. Maybe this strange thing had turned what had only been a defense mechanism into a superpower.

But if that were true, it should have happened long ago. He could not guess why this window only started appearing before him recently.

‘And cancer, too.’

He was not afraid.

It was only a slightly strange feeling. He kept even that at an appropriate distance, like every other sensation.

“I should prepare what I need.”