This World is too Cruel to Men

I wasn’t sure why, but there were several things bothering me.

The suddenly shortened distance between us, the gazes that kept flying towards my face since earlier… I pretended not to notice, placing my hand on the envelope.

The envelope, which should have been flat, was thicker than it looked.

Bora was often bright and articulate for her age, but even so, filling a letter with the vocabulary of a seven-year-old couldn’t have been easy.

Did she have that much to say to me?

‘Really…’

Should I find this admirable or disheartening?

Briefly recalling Bora’s sullen, sad face from her last day at Kindergarten, I chuckled wryly to myself before slipping my finger between the sealed edges of the envelope.

‘Rip…!’

The dry glue tore along with the paper, revealing stationery adorned with Bora’s favorite Rabbit character.

Was she too embarrassed to reveal the contents immediately upon opening?

Carefully, I pulled out the letter, neatly folded in half.

And the moment I unfolded it, the first thing that caught my eye wasn’t a greeting, but… dried tear stains, undoubtedly from tears.

Was she that upset about suddenly parting ways with me, Yun-Seo, and our other friends?

‘Well…’

It was understandable.

I didn’t know what had happened in just half a day to prompt such a quick move, but until then, Bora would have been thinking about how we’d play together tomorrow.

Being suddenly transferred to another Kindergarten like this, due to circumstances entirely beyond her control, it would be stranger if she ‘wasn’t’ upset.

As I stared at the marks on the letter, ruminating on the bittersweet feeling, my gaze shifted to the words written within.

-To Dokgun

Hi, Dokgun. It’s Bora.

The beginning of the letter was ordinary.

The handwriting was… quite crooked, but considering the writer was seven years old, it was perfectly acceptable.

‘She must have been very confused…’

Her feelings were clearly reflected in what was written after the greeting.

The tear stains next to the greeting must have appeared while she was writing this.

While I was slowly reading Bora’s letter, Yun-Seo was… staring at the letter in my hand with an unreadable expression, rare for a seven-year-old.

‘She must be feeling left out…’

I needed to comfort her, but how?

I couldn’t figure it out, so I just silently concentrated on the letter.

The tone of the letter, which had been expressing Bora’s feelings of sadness and anxiety in crooked handwriting, suddenly shifted.

And what made that happen was—

-And Oh Yun-Seo! You! Are you reading this?

This sentence.

To be honest, I couldn’t help but flinch when I saw it.

It was as if she had predicted this would happen.

Is this what they call women’s intuition?

Still, despite my momentary flinch, I was relieved.

Seeing how she had filled the letter with words clearly targeting Yun-Seo, it seemed that her behavior at Kindergarten was just a sulk, and she hadn’t actually intended to exclude Yun-Seo.

In any case, they were both high-maintenance.

It was a good thing I had offered to let Yun-Seo read the letter together with me, seeing how dejected she was.

Otherwise, Yun-Seo’s wide-eyed reaction to finding her name in Bora’s letter would have been delayed by a day.

If that had happened, would the letter’s content have had the same immediate effect?

Honestly, I wasn’t sure.

As I’d mentioned several times before, Yun-Seo tended to hold grudges.

Anyway, as I pointed out and read aloud the parts Bora had written to Yun-Seo, her sullenness and resentment gradually dissipated.

‘Looking at her like this, she doesn’t seem to hold grudges at all…’

As I read aloud the rest of the letter to Yun-Seo, a thought suddenly occurred to me.

It was… the feeling that something was off.

Recalling the Teacher’s words when Bora stood beside her to say goodbye, Bora’s Awakened talent must have been related to drawing.

Otherwise, there was no reason for the Teacher to mention her becoming a great Painter specifically.

‘She certainly had remarkable skills for a seven-year-old…’

So, it wasn’t surprising that Bora Awakened a talent related to art.

As the saying goes, the twig is bent by the tree’s incline.

Perhaps Bora’s dormant, unawakened talent had subtly revealed itself.

So, that part wasn’t strange.

But other parts were.

‘The whole thing was handled way too hastily…’

Even if it seemed like a simple matter of transferring to another Kindergarten, it couldn’t be that simple in reality.

If it were, Bora wouldn’t have acted as if we were parting forever.

They couldn’t just send a seven-year-old kid who still didn’t understand the world to a completely unfamiliar place alone.

One of her parents must have moved with her, but for such a decision to be made in just half a day?

I knew education was important, but this was too rushed, even by those standards.

And according to the information about talents I had secretly read on my mom’s phone, such hasty arrangements usually meant one of two things.

‘Either a talent that could harm others…’

Or a talent so valuable that countries would line up to recruit the Awakened.

But Bora’s presumed talent was related to drawing.

That’s why things didn’t add up.

‘Art is good.’

But was it a talent that needed to be secured so quickly, with such a sense of urgency? I wasn’t so sure.

Frankly, it was hard to readily agree.

So, in this case, it was probably one of two things.

Either Bora’s Awakening happened right before some deadline, making it ‘appear’ as though things were rushed… or the people in charge of Bora’s well-being had deceived the Teacher and the Kindergarten.

And my gut feeling pointed toward the latter.

I wasn’t particularly intuitive like Bora, but that scenario seemed more realistic.

And if it really was the latter?

It meant that Bora’s Awakened talent wasn’t related to drawing, but something so extraordinary that the country scrambled to whisk her away.

Perhaps that’s why curiosity started to rear its head.

What were the odds? But what if my guess was true?

What kind of talent did Bora Awaken?

What kind of talent did she possess that made the country so desperate to take her, almost in a panic?

‘Maybe she Awakened a talent to foresee the future?’

According to what I had read before, although many different talents had emerged since the First Awakened revealed the existence of ‘talents’ to the world, such a talent had never appeared.

But who knew?

Maybe it just hadn’t appeared yet.

Or… maybe it already existed, but someone had deliberately concealed it.

Perhaps it was because I was racking my little brain so hard, but my head started to ache.

Since I had more or less succeeded in comforting Yun-Seo, I decided to put the matter to rest for now…

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‘What’s wrong with her now?’

It seemed I had been mistaken.

Otherwise, there was no reason for Yun-Seo, whom I thought I had comforted, to show up at Kindergarten with ‘that’ look on her face.

Was she okay at the time, but after going home and thinking it over, she felt more sad and upset about suddenly parting ways with Bora?

‘But her expression seems too serious for that…’

How could I describe that expression?

It was as if she was the only one in the world who knew the apocalypse was coming.

It was as if she was carrying all the worries in the world on her small shoulders, and I couldn’t ignore it even if I tried.

If it were just her expression, I could have overlooked it, but her actions were the same, constantly drawing my attention.

If she were an adult, I could have left her alone, thinking she’d handle it herself.

But she was only seven years old, and she had been like this for days, not just one day. I couldn’t just ignore her.

‘Sigh…’

What was this fate of mine?

I was living my second round, something others couldn’t even dream of, yet here I was, babysitting instead of enjoying my advantage.

It wasn’t that I disliked it, now that we were truly friends… but it felt a bit… regrettable.

Anyway, to try and do something about Yun-Seo’s moping, I invited her over to my house again after a few days.

Then, after my mom brought out snacks and left the living room, I cautiously brought up the topic I had been pondering since Kindergarten.

“Um… Yun-Seo? Is something bothering you?”

Her eyes, fixed downwards with an unusual dejection, flickered slightly right after I spoke.

I didn’t know what was troubling her, but…

Perhaps that was the answer.

There was no verbal response to my cautious question.

Well, the flickering of her eyes was an answer in itself.

Was the weight of her worry too heavy to easily voice?

She kept pursing her lips as if she wanted to speak but couldn’t, so I decided to wait patiently.

Right now, no one was more frustrated than Yun-Seo.

My patience paid off.

Perhaps she felt reassured by my calm demeanor, because after a while, Yun-Seo’s lips slowly parted.

And what emerged from between those lips was—

“Do, Dokgun… Wh-What should I do?”

The nuance of her words would have made me quite bewildered if we were both adults.

What did she mean, what should she do?

Was there some trouble at home?

That didn’t seem likely.

I had seen Yun-Seo’s father twice today, and his face and demeanor seemed no different than usual.

Perhaps he was trying hard not to show it, but… when something bad happens, it usually shows in some way.

That meant it wasn’t a family issue but Yun-Seo’s personal problem. But what could it be?

‘What could it be…’

To make her expression and gestures so serious?

I soon found out.

Saying she couldn’t show me here, she abruptly dragged me to the bathroom and then revealed it to me with her own hands.

And what Yun-Seo showed me—

‘No way… what is this…?’

It was enough to bewilder even me, who had lived over 30 years across my first and second rounds.

“Am, am I going to be taken away like Bora…?”