It Turned Out She Wasn't a Favored Concubine - Episode 107

Clutching the diary tightly, I stepped out of the walking trail. Beyond the park, high-rise buildings stood densely packed. I had to shield my eyes with my hand and look up to barely see their tops—they were towering.

Unlike the past, when most buildings were uniformly rectangular, now they were so varied it felt almost liberating. Beneath those buildings, people hurried along in a rush.

I slowly joined the crowd. Occasionally, I was startled by holographic advertisements popping out in 3D, but otherwise, I walked along the roadside without drawing attention.

Like an ordinary person without any strange experience of having visited another world.

After walking for a while, I sat on a tiered bench to catch my breath. The number of people passing by had dwindled. Groups of people had entered buildings somewhere. It was midday. Had it just been lunchtime?

Come to think of it, I didn’t know the exact date, day of the week, or time. I took out the black card she had given me. The thin card, completely black and gleaming, gave no clue as to where to press or how to use it. Maybe I should’ve asked for a manual. I shook the card absentmindedly. Then, a faint light spread from the card, forming a transparent display in the air.

Startled by the scene—like something out of a movie—I nearly dropped the card. On the display, numbers presumed to be today’s date and time appeared briefly. It looked like a smartphone’s home screen. Tuesday, 1:30 PM. I couldn’t tell if the five-day workweek was still in effect in this era, but my guess didn’t seem too far off.

I fiddled with the display for a while, learning how to use it. The basic screen had general instructions, so I picked it up quickly.

From the instructions, I learned that this black card was something she had recently prepared. As if she had gotten it ready just to lend it to me.

Sitting there, I browsed through the events of the past fifty years.

The day I touched the transparent stone shard my grandmother had left behind was in the summer of 2020.

Looking back, that meant roughly the time from 1970 to 2020. Still stuck in the mindset of 2020, 1970 felt impossibly distant.

The 1970s brought to mind young people with acoustic guitars, crackdowns on long hair and miniskirts. The Miracle on the Han River, the Yushin regime—things I remembered studying in modern history textbooks.

It was literally a page from history. If a young man from 1970 appeared before me, I wouldn’t believe it. I’d just think of him as someone from an old era I learned about in school. People today would probably think the same if they knew my secret.

Fifty years was truly a long time. Even just the major global events were hard to believe.

There was a time when a pandemic spread worldwide and everyone wore masks. Tensions between nuclear powers nearly led to a world war before a dramatic compromise was reached. A manned spacecraft landed on Mars, and life was discovered on one of Saturn’s moons. These monumental events were laid out like a grand, realistic sci-fi novel.

Still holding onto my 2020 mindset, I couldn’t believe any of it. But calling it all lies was hard—after all, the fact that I had crossed into another world and returned was the most unbelievable of all.

Apparently, even in this future world, teleportation hadn’t been realized. I couldn’t take my eyes off the transparent display for a long time.

Until the sun slowly set behind the skyscrapers and the people on the streets disappeared again.

It wasn’t just fascination with the future that kept me glued to the display. The events of the past fifty years were astonishing, but what I truly needed to know was something else. The future and present of those I had never forgotten, even for a moment, in the other world. I was stalling, delaying facing it.

I sat for another couple of hours before finally standing up. The sun had completely set, and the dark night sky was slowly descending below the buildings.

I raised the card by the roadside. A vehicle stopped in front of me. It had a new design, unlike the ones I remembered, and no driver. I did as I had seen others do—scanned the card and stated my destination. It was the first location listed on the last page of the diary.

The driverless taxi quickly carried me out of the city.

The first destination was the house where she had lived. It was even located in the neighborhood where I used to live. As we neared the destination, I looked out the window, hoping to see something familiar.

But all I saw were unfamiliar high-rise buildings. I felt a bit disappointed as I entered her home.

The interior hadn’t changed much compared to the past. As I looked around the neatly arranged house, I thought of Arne’s Arlin Palace, which had been dazzlingly extravagant. This house was modest, even frugal—there was no hint of luxury.

It took time to adjust to the overly automated bathroom system, but I managed to shower and change clothes. She had said I could use anything freely, but I couldn’t treat it like my own home. I carefully chose clothes and tidied up. Slowly, deliberately. Again, stalling for time.

I cleaned the bathroom even though it didn’t need it, reorganized the already tidy closet… There was hardly anything to clean or organize.

When even those tasks ran out, I sighed softly and opened the last page of the diary again.

Next to the address of the house I was in, small letters indicated a specific location inside.

Bottom right shelf of the bookcase in the small room.

Her thorough preparation amazed me again.

She couldn’t have known when I’d arrive in this world, yet she had prepared all this just based on a feeling.

It was something the image I had of her in the other world would never have done. Had she changed after coming to this world?

I swallowed hard and crouched in front of the bottom shelf. There was an old-looking photo album.

Photos of me aging after my soul had crossed into the other world, and of the people around me who had aged alongside me.

Friends, colleagues, and family. Their aged appearances, shaped by time I didn’t know, were likely captured in that album.

I took a deep breath and pulled out the first album. The old album bore the year clearly marked.

Even though it was the first album, it wasn’t from right after I had crossed over—it was three years later. I opened it with a bit of curiosity. The moment I saw the first photo, tears burst out.

“Mom…”

It was a photo of my mother hugging me from behind—me, slightly older and expressionless.

Even through tear-blurred eyes, I traced her face with my finger. Her face had far more wrinkles than I remembered, and I couldn’t stop crying.

“Mom, Mom, Mom…”

Like a child, I kept calling out to her. As if she might answer from the photo. Like the everyday life I once knew.

“Mom…”

But the smiling, tearful face in the photo didn’t respond.

I hugged the album and cried loudly. No one was listening anyway. Honestly, I didn’t care if anyone heard. The mother who would smile and answer my call was no longer in this world.

I felt no shame or embarrassment. Only sorrow and loss from never seeing her again made me cry harder and longer.

Cold night air seeped in through the open window. I stretched my curled-up body and wiped away my tears.

The second photo was a family portrait. It looked professionally taken at a studio.

Me, Mom, Dad, and my younger sibling. Their faces were slightly stiff, probably because of the studio setting. I almost cried again. Dad’s hair had turned white, and my sibling looked much more mature. Looking at my sibling, now the age I once was, I worried whether they had properly cared for Mom and Dad.

I kept flipping through the album. Some years had many photos, others only a few. At first, just three or four per year. But over time, the number grew—ten, twenty, thirty, sixty… Each year, more photos were printed and added.

Was this also prepared just for me…? Probably not.

As the years passed, I focused more on my parents’ faces. Their increasing wrinkles and white hair pained me.

The passage of time shown in photos felt different from living through it together.

It was too fast.

It took less than thirty minutes for my parents in the photos to reach the age of my grandmother.

Then, at some point, Dad stopped appearing in the photos. Dozens of pages later, Mom disappeared too. The meaning hit me hard, and I bit my lip.

But the photos continued. I watched myself age, flipping through the album mechanically.

My appearance became increasingly unfamiliar. Not just visually—my physical body no longer felt like mine.

It wasn’t my body anymore. It was hers. I was aging in her body. Toward the end, the number of photos dwindled.

I stared at the last photo in the album. For a moment, I mistook it for my grandmother. But it wasn’t her. Nor was it me. It was her. Lying on a bed behind white curtains.

Now I understood why she hadn’t drawn the curtain back that day. They say meetings require preparation. I thought she needed time to prepare. But no—it was me who needed it.

I hugged the photo album and slowly closed my eyes.

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