ERNST CH 09

Chapter 9

‘Even reading from a textbook would sound warmer than that stiff tone of his.’

After he finished speaking, I quietly closed my eyes.

The memories were going to change now.

‘Come on! Bring on the headache and nausea!’

Maybe because I was nervous, my hand tightened around the corner of the stairs.

The sound of students chatting echoed faintly from the hallway below and reached all the way up here.

But nothing happened to me until they passed by and even their voices faded into the distance.

“Huh? Why isn’t anything happening?”

I slightly opened my eyes.

I immediately met Kim Dohwan’s gaze. He was sitting on the stairs below and looking back at me.

I could practically feel the pity in his eyes, so I awkwardly cleared my throat.

“Ahem. I just… wanted to make you say it once. My dad… doesn’t buy lottery tickets or anything like that.”

“Why? He might buy one just for fun.”

“…There are five minutes until class. Let’s clean up and head down.”

We had just dispersed in embarrassment as if trying to escape each other.

But perhaps because fifty minutes of class had passed, I wanted to call him out again and check whether he really had anything to do with my memories.

The moment class ended, I immediately opened the messenger app to summon Kim Dohwan.

I ignored all the pointless unread messages and scrolled down with an indifferent expression.

“Kim, Kim, Kim…”

I was trying to find him by looking only at the first letters, but perhaps I had somehow scrolled past it without realizing it.

Before I knew it, the chat rooms listed were all from February.

‘It’s going to be April in just a few days, and I’m looking at February?’

I decided it would be easier to search directly, so I typed ‘employer’ into the search bar.

It said there were no results for that search term.

“Ah, right.”

Only then did I remember.

On the way to class this morning, after meeting Dohyun oppa, I had been so happy about being freed from my slave-like life that I immediately changed the name saved in my contacts.

I had deleted the word ‘Employer’ and searched for ‘Kim Dohwan Jang.’

His chat appeared immediately.

[Hey │ 9:30 AM]

[Kim Dohwan │ 9:30 AM]

[You’re free right now, right? │ 9:30 AM]

[Meet me at those stairs. │ 9:31 AM]

[9:33 AM │ ??]

[9:33 AM │ What?]

[9:33 AM │ Why?]

[9:34 AM │ Why, why?]

[9:34 AM │ You said we’d call it even with that lottery thing. │ 9:34 AM]

[Yeah, we’re even. │ 9:34 AM]

[This is just a favor as a friend. │ 9:34 AM]

[It’s not an errand. We just have to talk for a moment. │ 9:34 AM]

[Since you look too lazy to come, I, yours truly, will graciously come to your class. │ 9:34 AM]

[^^ │ 9:34 AM]

From now on, we had both escaped our roles as each other’s lackeys, so there was no reason for us to meet on the stairs right below the rooftop anymore.

When I arrived in front of Class 10, I quickly scanned the classroom.

Maybe because I was standing by the back door, most of what I could see were the backs of black-haired heads.

‘It’ll be faster to find Wi Jinha first.’

Since Kim Dohwan was best friends with Wi Jinha, I figured he might be sitting beside him.

I searched for the white head among the students.

It was certainly an unusual hair color, so I spotted him immediately.

However, beside the sleeping Wi Jinha, who was lying face-down on his desk, sat a brown-haired female student.

Even the male students sitting in front of and behind him had brown hair.

‘Hmm. I guess there’s nothing I can do.’

I stood closest to the back door and called out to a male student who was busy fooling around.

“Excuse me, could you call Kim Dohwan from your class for me?”

The moment my voice rang out, the noisy hallway suddenly became completely silent, as if someone had poured cold water over it.

Everyone stopped whatever they were doing and looked at me.

More precisely, they were looking at me and the male student standing in front of me.

‘Did I say something wrong?’

Thinking carefully, I remembered that in the original internet novel, ordinary students always added ‘-nim’ when calling the main characters by name.

Maybe I was supposed to say Dohwan-nim instead of Kim Dohwan.

‘But if you think about it, isn’t it strange for an extra to go looking for Dohwan-nim in the first place?’

An extra wouldn’t even dare speak to a main character first.

Rather, if a main character spoke to an extra, the response should have been something like this:

“B-Beotkkot-nim spoke to me!”

“Yes, that’s exactly the overwhelmed voice I was expecting… Huh?”

I blinked, wondering what I had just heard.

The male student was looking at me with a look of awe, and a single tear rolled down his cheek.

“Beotkkot-nim, I will find Dohwan-nim and bring him here with all my heart and soul!”

“No, no…! It’s okay. You don’t have to. Don’t waste your energy going somewhere for no reason.”

“Understood, Beotkkot-nim! I’m so happy that Beotkkot-nim cares about me this much that I don’t know what to do with myself!”

‘I’m the one who doesn’t know what to do with myself.’

‘What is this? Is this some kind of hidden-camera prank? Are they filming a TV show? Why is he calling me -nim?’

Being spoken to by someone my own age with extremely formal honorifics and polite speech made me feel an indescribable amount of pressure and embarrassment.

I ended up mumbling some strange thank-you before fleeing back to my classroom.

The notebook I had filled with rambling notes for Kim Dohwan to read didn’t even get opened.

‘What on earth is going on now?’

It felt as if all my energy had been drained in an instant, and I staggered back to my seat.

Beside me, Nam Juyeon was still sitting upright at his desk, solving problems in his workbook.

‘I should’ve just stayed here and studied instead of going out.’

But regretting it now wouldn’t change anything.

“Beotkkot-nim? Extremely formal honorifics?”

I don’t know how I spent the rest of the day after that.

Nam Juyeon said he was staying at school to study, while Han Yuna left school immediately because she had to go to her academy.

Maybe because I was walking home alone again today, I found myself talking to myself.

“Seriously, isn’t this some kind of hidden-camera prank?”

I suddenly stopped walking across the school field and looked around.

Several groups of students who had been whispering among themselves while looking at me noticed my gaze.

They flinched and quickly disappeared.

“Haah, this feels so weird. I should just hurry home.”

I was leaving through the main gate to take public transportation home, as usual, when a black sedan gave a short honk.

It immediately attracted the attention of the students nearby.

I was one of the people looking at the car too.

Even someone like me, who knew nothing about cars, could tell that the emblem belonged to a foreign luxury car famous for being expensive.

“……?”

The black sedan approached me, slowed down to match my walking pace, and smoothly lowered the passenger-side window.

At the same time, my eyes met those of the driver, who was wearing a black suit and sunglasses.

He looked like a young man in his late twenties.

‘Is he a kidnapper? No way…’

In my previous life, things like this would have been easy to brush off as suspicious and simply ignore.

But in this life, that wasn’t possible.

Kidnappings caused by ridiculous revenge plots, sudden incurable diseases with no known cause, nationwide gang fights supposedly caused by battles over social rank, and so on.

This was a world where anything could happen.

That was the world of an internet novel.

The back of my neck turned cold.

‘If I’d known this would happen, I would’ve bought some self-defense equipment!’

The moment that thought crossed my mind, I tightly gripped the phone in my hand like it was my lifeline.

My thoughts were a complete mess.

‘What number was the police again? 911? No, that’s the fire department. Then what’s the police number? 119? Wait, that’s also the fire department. Which one was Korea’s fire department again? 911? 119? Wait, there’s no fire right now, so what would I do by calling a fire truck?! So what is the police number?!’

As I rolled my eyes around in panic, the man in the driver’s seat leaned slightly toward the passenger side.

Startled by his sudden movement, I nervously took a step backward to put some distance between us.

Just as I moved back one step, I heard the man’s calm voice.

“I’ve come to pick you up, young lady.”

“If you keep following me, I’ll report you to the police…! …Huh?”

At the same time I questioned him, perhaps because of the effect of his calling me ‘young lady,’ the memories in my head suddenly began changing at frightening speed.

It seemed that once again, the memories I had known were being changed to make the story’s plot make sense.

The new memories that settled into place contained one piece of information:

He was my personal chauffeur.

‘I had a chauffeur…? Ah.’

For the entire week since I realized I was inside a book, I had memories of using public transportation every day.

Those memories collided with the new ones and gradually faded.

What replaced them were memories of having a dedicated chauffeur who was responsible for me.

‘So from now on, I’m supposed to have my chauffeur drive me around.’

Since I was in elementary school, he had been responsible for safely taking me to and from school all the way up until yesterday.

And apparently, today was no different.

He had simply come to take me home as usual.

‘That’s the third time my memories have been altered today.’

It was nice that the changed memories were all positive.

But the moment they changed, the feeling of my head becoming hazy and spinning wasn’t pleasant at all.

‘Still, it’s only a slight throbbing in my head. My stomach feels fine.’

Unlike when I met Dohyun oppa on my way to school, I felt perfectly fine this time.

It seemed that the physical impact depended on the scale of the memory change.

After all, there was a world of difference between an ‘unnamed girl’ suddenly becoming a ‘rich young lady’ and a ‘rich young lady’ suddenly having a personal chauffeur.

Especially in terms of making the story’s plot believable.

‘Plot logic…’

Maybe Song, the chauffeur, found it strange that I kept spacing out.

He tapped the tablet that had been sitting in the passenger seat several times before speaking.

“Your father instructed me to take you home today since you don’t have any special plans scheduled. Has your schedule changed?”

“Ah, no. I’ll go home.”

Even though my memories had changed, knowing something in my head and actually experiencing it physically were two completely different things.

‘Young lady… He called me young lady. I still haven’t recovered from the shock of being called Beotkkot-nim, and now I’m a young lady too.’

Muttering with an exhausted expression at the sudden form of address, I naturally sat in the back seat behind the passenger seat.

I picked up the tablet that was sitting beside me.

It was a different tablet from the one Mr. Song had been using to check my schedule earlier.

“Mr. Song. This tablet was in the back seat. Should I give it to you?”

“No, that’s all right. Just in case, I put it in the back seat instead of the passenger seat.”

“…Why?”

“Pardon? Yesterday, you said you were disappointed because you hadn’t finished reading your book yet.”

“Yesterday? …What did I do yesterday?”