The Best of Tomorrow [ 내일의 으뜸]

Chapter 5

"So what is this? It's called the implementation of the Daedong Act. This is something you can figure out if you understand the tax system in Joseon, so what's the keyword here?"

......It's crazy. This is like being back in high school.

Class, break, class, break, class, break. It was just this alternating timetable. I was stuck in that timetable, which means I was living in the here and now. Every minute, every second.

I grabbed my bangs and pulled them out, but I felt a gaze on me and turned my head. Eunhee was looking at me strangely.

"What's wrong with you? You've been acting weird since yesterday."

Eunhee leans in and whispers. You're right, it's weird to you. It's weird to me too. I let go of the bangs I was holding and sat down in the chair next to Eunhee.

"Hey, I woke up and suddenly I'm six years in the past, but I can't wake up. What do you call this?"

Eunhee squints and blinks, then speaks in a small voice.

"A time slip?"

"Time slip? What is that?"

Eunhee scribbles in the blank space of my textbook. time leap.

"Literally. Jumping through time. Time travel."

As Eunhee finished her sentence, the chalk fell onto the desk. I looked up, and Mr. Guk-sa was staring at me, his eyes twinkling. Eunhee coughed and looked back at her textbook.

"Let's not make small talk."

"Okay......."

I lowered my head, my eyes scanning the scribbled words on the textbook. Time...... slip.

□ ■ □

It's eighth period, and you've been given study hall instead of make-up class. I searched the portal site for Time Leaf. The following related search terms came up: time travel, time slip, and time machine. I clicked on each one in turn to read what came up.

Time travel is the act of stepping out of the normal flow of time and traveling to the past or future.

A time slip is when a person or group of people defy or outpace time for unknown reasons and fall into the past or future).

A time machine is a fictional machine that purports to allow time travel to the past or future.)

"What did she say......."

I flipped my cell phone open and placed it on my desk, crossed my arms, and thought back to the night of December 31st. I drank packaged soju, got a little tipsy, not a lot, but a little, and cried thinking about Sunjae, and listened to the sound of a bell. That was it. Suddenly, at the beginning of the new year, I was back six years ago. No matter how I thought about it, I couldn't call it a dream. It was just a normal day, a very normal day. Except that I knew the next six years were going to happen.