Prologue: An Old Diary, and the Final Regret

Fifty-three-year-old Kim Min-jun was sorting through old boxes in his study. Thanks to his wife’s successful private academy business, they had stretched their finances a few years ago to afford this house. His study was the nicest room in the home, yet ironically, it was where he felt the most pathetic. He had been pressured into early retirement from the company he had dedicated his life to, and beside his brilliantly successful wife, his presence as a husband was steadily fading.

The box was filled with long-forgotten items. Then, his hand brushed against an old, faded diary. It was the diary he had written in 1996 during his senior year of high school. As he opened the first page, the awkward handwriting of a nineteen-year-old greeted him.

August 12. Weather hot. Supplementary classes are exhausting. They say there are 100 days left until the college entrance exam, but my mind is blank. I just hope I can get into any national university so Mom and Dad don’t have to suffer.

The moment he read that short entry, all the regrets of his fifty-three years of life slammed into his heart. That nineteen-year-old who wrote his mind was “blank.” Back then, in that very moment, if only someone had awakened him to his potential and told him there was a wider world out there… If only he had grabbed hold of the time he had let slip away in complacency and laziness, and studied like crazy…

His life would have been entirely different. He wouldn’t have become this pathetic, middle-aged man harboring constant guilt and inadequacy toward his wife.

Just once. If only I could go back just once…

Clutching the old diary to his chest, he muttered without realizing it. His eyes closed under the crushing weight of exhaustion and regret. Leaning back in his study chair, he sank into a deep, heavy sleep. The few glasses of wine he had drunk to celebrate his wife’s success were his final waking memory.

And then…

“Kim Min-jun, you punk, wake up!”

A thunderous roar shattered my eardrums, followed by a piece of chalk smacking squarely into my back. Startled awake, my eyes flew open to the furiously glaring face of my math teacher and the giggling faces of my friends. I stared blankly at my surroundings. The old wooden desk, the class motto hanging on the wall, the dirt schoolyard out the window.

With trembling hands, I groped the inside of my desk drawer. There it was—the very same old diary that fifty-three-year-old me had been clutching before falling asleep. I opened the diary and checked the date on the very last page.

August 12, 1996.

Exactly 100 days before the College Scholastic Ability Test.

I had… returned. To the exact moment where I was given one single chance to change everything in my life.