The light was wrong.
Not dim, not dark—just wrong. The kind of summer brightness that made everything too sharp, too real. Chipped paint on wooden walls. Chalk dust suspended in slanted rays. The smell of boiled seaweed from someone's lunchbox mixing with pencil shavings and child-sweat.
"Joon-ya, wake up."
A whisper. Then giggling.
Chair legs scraped linoleum.
My eyelids felt glued together. I forced them open.
Children. Dozens of them, crammed into desks too small for comfort, wearing uniforms that hadn't existed in my closet for twenty-three years. Their voices overlapped into white noise—complaints about homework, negotiations over Pokémon cards, the particular chaos of seven-year-olds convinced their problems mattered.
The clock above the blackboard showed 12:00.
Noon.
But that's impossible.
Seconds ago—and I meant seconds, not minutes, not the fluid dream-time where logic dissolved—I'd been sitting at my kitchen counter in Ulsan. Adult counter. Adult hands. The apartment I'd bought after the third sales contract came through. Instant ramyeon cooling beside my laptop while I scrolled through appointment schedules, half-listening to a podcast about market volatility.
I'd leaned back. Closed my eyes.
Just for a moment.
Now I sat at a child's desk, legs dangling above scuffed floor tiles, and my hands—
My hands were small.
Soft skin. Short fingers. No calluses from years of gripping pens during contract negotiations. No scar on my left thumb from that stupid kitchen accident in 2019.
"...what the hell."
The words slipped out. Wrong voice. High. Thin. The voice of a boy who still watched Saturday morning cartoons, not a man who'd spent his morning calculating quarterly projections.
Around me, the classroom hummed with pre-lunch energy. The teacher—Miss Kim, oh god, Miss Kim—stood at the blackboard, sleeves rolled to her elbows, chalking multiplication tables with methodical taps. Her hair was darker than I remembered. No gray yet. No reading glasses perched on her head.
Outside the window, summer shadows stretched across the schoolyard. The single tree—a scraggly zelkova that would be cut down in 2011 for the gym expansion—still stood, leaves rustling in heat-thick air.
Ulsan Elementary School.
First grade.
2003.
I pressed my palms flat against the desk. Wood grain bit into soft skin. The surface was sticky—someone's spilled glue, probably. Real. Solid. There.
My heartbeat stayed calm. Steady. No panic.
That alone told me something was deeply wrong. A seven-year-old waking up in the wrong time should be screaming. Crying. Running to the teacher.
Instead, I sat perfectly still while my adult brain assembled the evidence with disturbing efficiency.
Regression.
The word materialized like a diagnosis. I'd read about this—webtoons, web novels, the entire genre of returnee stories where people got second chances, went back in time, fixed their mistakes.
Fiction.
Escapist fantasy for people who'd made too many wrong turns.
Yet here I was, small hands and all, sitting in a classroom that existed only in memory. Wearing shorts I'd outgrown before I hit puberty. Breathing air that tasted of 2003—before smartphones, before social media saturation, before the world compressed itself into anxiety-inducing notifications.
So it actually happened.
The bell shrieked—lunch break. The sound sliced through my paralysis. Around me, children exploded into motion. Lunchboxes clattered. Shoes squeaked. Someone knocked over a pencil case, plastic clattering like dice.
They rushed for the door, leaving me alone in the sudden quiet.
I stayed seated.
Outside, through the window, I could see the ocean. Just a sliver of blue past school walls and residential rooftops. Ulsan hugged the coast close enough that every breeze carried salt. The kind of town where everyone knew your grandparents' names, where houses stayed in families for generations, where leaving for Seoul meant something between ambition and betrayal.
Seven years old.
Again.
I should have felt something. Terror. Confusion. The desperate need to understand how or why.
Instead, I felt... clarity.
Like someone had wiped fog from glass.
Thirty years. I'd lived thirty years in a body that right now—in this timeline—was still decades from existing. Those years sat in my head, clear and accessible. Every memory, every lesson, every failure.
The 2008 financial crisis that wiped out my parents' restaurant.
The 2015 MERS outbreak that killed my grandmother.
The housing bubble that priced me out of Seoul.
The clinic job that paid well but meant nothing.
The relationships that withered from neglect.
The slow, grinding realization that I'd spent three decades surviving instead of living.
All of it—still there. Catalogued. Indexed. Ready for use.
And beneath that knowledge, something darker: I knew what was coming.
In this timeline, Google wasn't dominant yet. YouTube didn't exist. Smartphones were R&D fantasies. Bitcoin hadn't been conceived. The iPhone was four years from announcement. Facebook was still a college dorm project.
South Korea was finding its footing in the new century, broadband just beginning to spread, the country still digesting the IMF crisis from '97.
Everything that would make the modern world modern—I'd watched it unfold once already.
I know who succeeds. Who fails. Which companies explode. Which collapse.
I know which stocks to buy. Which real estate to hold. Which technologies to bet on.
The thought should have been exhilarating.
Instead, it settled over me like weight.
Because knowledge without power was just another form of helplessness. What good was knowing the future if I was trapped in a seven-year-old body with no capital, no credibility, and a mother who still checked if I'd washed behind my ears?
I looked down at my hands again. Flexed the fingers. So small. So useless.
First things first: Don't let them notice.
If this were a dream, it was too coherent. Too detailed. The rough texture of my cotton shorts. The distant sound of cicadas. The faint headache forming behind my eyes from staring at the bright window too long.
If this was real—if the universe had somehow folded time and dropped me back here—then I couldn't waste it by drawing attention.
First-grade classes. Summer homework. Playground games. I'd have to act like a child again, hiding my adult mind behind careful questions and age-appropriate enthusiasm.
The bell rang again—end of lunch. Students flooded back in, faces flushed from running, voices overlapping with complaints and laughter.
I smoothed my expression. Opened my textbook to a random page. Picked up my pencil.
Just another quiet kid.
Nothing unusual here.
No one notices the quiet ones.
School ended at three.
The hallway erupted with the particular chaos of children released into summer afternoon—running feet, echoing shouts, the metallic bang of locker doors. I moved with the crowd, letting it carry me toward the exit.
Outside, heat wrapped around me like a wet towel. The air shimmered over asphalt. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. Closer, the ice cream cart's bell jingled as kids mobbed it with crumpled bills.
I walked alone.
The route home carved itself from muscle memory—ten minutes through narrow streets where family houses stood shoulder-to-shoulder, their walls sun-bleached and familiar. Past the stationery shop where Mr. Park would be restocking shelves. Past the tofu store where ajumma sold fresh dubu every morning. Up the gentle hill where the road curved toward the residential cluster.
Every corner triggered double vision. This is where the bakery used to be—no, will be. In 2007. That empty lot becomes a convenience store in 2008. That house sells for triple its value in 2012.
My seven-year-old legs climbed the hill. My thirty-year-old mind catalogued opportunities.
Then I saw it.
My house.
Our house.
The wooden fence leaned inward, held together more by habit than structural integrity. Roof tiles faded from decades of rain. The front yard—barely large enough to call a yard—grew neat rows of green onions and peppers where Grandma's hands worked soil every morning before school.
I stopped at the gate.
It looked exactly as it should have in 2003. As it did in 2003, my first time through. Nothing had changed—no alterations, no butterfly effects from my presence.
That should have been comforting.
Instead, it felt like looking at a photograph brought to life. Too perfect. Too precise.
Someone took my childhood and rebuilt it from memory.
The wooden gate creaked when I pushed it open. The sound echoed exactly as I remembered. Too exactly.
Inside, the house smelled like home—wood, dust, the faint ghost of mothballs from Grandma's old chest in the hallway. Sunlight filtered through lace curtains, painting the low table where scattered marbles waited for small hands to play.
I stood in the entryway and felt my throat tighten.
I'm back.
Not just in time. Not just in place.
I'm home.
And this time—this second chance I didn't ask for and couldn't explain—I wouldn't waste it drifting.
I clenched my small fists.
This time, I'd build something that lasted.
Evening came soft and slow, the way it always did in summer.
I lay on the thin mattress in my room, staring at ceiling wood that would outlast my childhood. Through the wall, I could hear my mother humming—some trot ballad from a drama she loved. The sound drifted through thin walls like smoke, familiar and aching.
In my first life, I'd found that humming comforting. Background noise. The soundtrack of safety.
Now it felt like prophecy.
In twenty-three years, she'd hum the same melody in a hospice room, hands too weak to fold laundry, voice too thin to carry the tune. And I'd sit beside her bed, thirty years old and useless, wondering when I'd become the kind of son who only visited on weekends.
Not this time.
The promise formed in the dark. Silent. Absolute.
This time, I'd make enough money so she never worked herself to exhaustion. This time, she'd retire early, travel, live. This time, I'd be the son she deserved instead of the one she got.
But that was future tense.
Right now, I was seven, and tomorrow was another day of pretending.
I pulled out a small notebook from my backpack—the cheap kind with cartoon characters on the cover. Opened it to a blank page. In the dim light from my desk lamp, I wrote:
Step 1: Blend in. Act normal. Stay invisible.
Step 2: Gather information. Learn the timeline. Verify memories.
Step 3: Build capital. Start small. Think long-term.
Step 4: Protect them. All of them. No matter what it costs.
My handwriting looked clumsy, too large, the letters uneven. Seven-year-old motor control hadn't caught up to thirty-year-old intention.
But the words carried weight beyond their appearance.
This wasn't a to-do list.
It was a contract with the universe.
I closed the notebook. Turned off the lamp. Settled into the mattress that was too small and too hard and somehow perfect.
Outside, cicadas screamed their endless summer song. A dog barked three houses over. The baby—my little brother—cried briefly before my mother's voice soothed him quiet.
Normal sounds. Ordinary sounds.
The sounds of a life I'd failed once and now had a chance to fix.
Alright.
I closed my eyes.
Let's begin again.
Tomorrow, the work starts.
Tonight, I let myself be seven years old for just a few hours longer.