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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 40
Chapter Title: Your Turn to Dream
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Now on the cusp of thirty, Lee Su-bin had lived a much harder life than her peers.
Having lost her parents at a young age, she’d had to adapt to reality without even a moment to grieve.
‘Sis, I’m hungry…’
It was because of her little brother, who at the time barely came up to her waist.
She had to survive.
Thanks to him, it was no exaggeration to say her teenage years were filled with a desperate struggle for survival.
‘If you just hire me, I promise I’ll work harder than anyone…’
Not long after she started high school, their parents’ life insurance money ran out.
That very day, Lee Su-bin got a job at a nearby fast-food restaurant and worked part-time from right after school until late at night.
She wanted to run away.
She wanted to be like other kids her age—to focus on her studies without a care in the world, to attend after-school academies, and to hang out with friends downtown.
Deep down, she longed to chat for hours in a pretty café, take sticker photos, get hair extensions, or even dye her hair.
‘Sis, you’re home?’
What kept her from running was the lonely sight of her brother’s back, huddled in front of the TV in their dark, single-room home.
He would never fall asleep before she got home, often waiting up for her while watching cartoons with a blank expression on his face.
‘Kang-jun, you must have been starving, huh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I brought you a hamburger, so eat up.’
She would save the hamburger she was given for her staff meal, and whenever she brought it home, her brother would always cut it in half and share it with her.
‘It’s good, so let’s share.’
The time she’d spent tenaciously enduring had formed calluses on her heart.
Twenty-nine.
Now, pushed along by life, she had become a down-to-earth and frugal person, yet strong and resilient.
She always added water to empty shampoo bottles to use every last drop, and she would squeeze the toothpaste tube relentlessly to get everything out.
When grocery shopping, she was always busy calculating costs in her head, living her life as if she were constantly being chased.
It was because the world had relentlessly and cruelly forced her to live that way.
Poke, poke, pokepoke…
And now, that same woman was aimlessly poking at the rice in her bowl with her chopsticks, as if she were completely lost in a daze.
Ever since she found out that the lottery ticket her brother had bought for fun was a ‘first-prize’ winner…
Lee Su-bin couldn’t stop the chain of thoughts, one leading to the next, and found herself sinking deeper and deeper into contemplation.
‘The prize money is one and a half billion won…’
Even after paying the 33% in taxes and fees, she would still receive a little over one billion won.
It was a staggering amount of money, the kind an ordinary person like her thought she could never even dream of seeing, not even if she died and was reborn multiple times.
Assuming she saved one million won every single month, it would still take her 83 years and 3 months to save up one billion won.
“Excuse me, Your Highness…?”
Seeing Lee Su-bin staring blankly while poking at the innocent rice with her chopsticks, Crabslie spoke cautiously.
However…
As if she hadn’t heard Crabslie at all, Lee Su-bin didn’t answer and instead pinched her own cheek hard.
“Ouch…”
“It hurts…”
Then, Lee Su-bin whipped her head around to look at Kang-jun, who was busy diligently spooning stew into his mouth, and spoke.
“Kang-jun, wait a second.”
“Hm?”
“We need to talk.”
Lee Su-bin grabbed Kang-jun’s wrist, dragged him all the way to her room, and firmly locked the door behind them before speaking.
“Kang-jun, about that lottery ticket you bought.”
“I think… it won first prize.”
To that, Kang-jun casually asked, “Oh, really?” before nodding a few times and replying.
“That’s great.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Her eyes wide, Lee Su-bin began to ramble.
“I mean, it beat the incredible odds of 1 in 8,145,060 to win, and your reaction is so lukewarm…”
“Guess I got lucky.”
“And the estimated prize money is over a billion won! With my current salary, I could never have saved that much, not even if I’d started back in the Joseon Dynasty—”
Just as Lee Su-bin was rattling off the results of her mental calculations.
“You can have the money, Sis.”
“What?”
“I have no use for it…”
A moment of silence followed his words.
“You once told me that if you just had one billion won, you could live the life you’ve always dreamed of.”
“Kang-jun…”
“To be honest, I’m already living the life I dreamed of. So now it’s your turn to live yours…”
His sentiment was so endearing and precious that Lee Su-bin was at a loss for words, able only to bite her lip.
‘If I really came into that much money, I think the most urgent thing would be to move to a safer neighborhood first…’
‘And then?’
‘Hmm? Well, first I’d quit my job at the factory, and until I find a decent new one, I’d want to just focus on raising Seol-i.’
It had just been a few words exchanged casually, without much thought, not long after her brother had returned home.
Lee Su-bin then dredged up the rest of the conversation from the depths of her memory, where it had settled like sediment.
‘I’ll figure something out.’
‘Huh?’
‘The one billion won.’
She had never imagined that her brother had been holding onto that passing conversation in his heart all this time.
“Kang-jun, even so…”
Kang-jun replied in a deliberately blunt tone.
“If you’re not going to take it, then just give me the ticket back. I’ll rip it to shreds and throw it on the street.”
Then, he added in a much more serious tone.
“I’m telling you again, I don’t need that piece of paper for my dream.”
“Kang-jun…”
“This life, right now, is the one I’ve been dreaming of for a long time.”
At his words, Lee Su-bin’s eyes wavered.
“So, now it’s your turn.”
Countless people say that you can’t buy happiness with something as trivial as ‘money.’
Kang-jun was of the opinion that the cliché was half right and half wrong.
While money might not be able to buy happiness, it could easily prevent most forms of unhappiness.
Therefore.
Kang-jun was willing to pay any price to reduce his family’s unhappiness.
“Sis, do you remember your dream?”
Lee Su-bin couldn’t answer right away, her lips merely parting and closing before she managed to reply.
“Well, I don’t know if I ever really had something you could call a dream…”
Kang-jun shook his head and said.
“See? This is what I mean.”
When they were young, his sister’s dream was to become a ‘writer.’
Back when they were living in that single room, going through a time that felt like a long, dark tunnel.
He had found the manuscript of a practice novel she had written, hidden in the closet.
- *Lovers on the Seine*.
He could still vividly picture the tiny, millet-sized characters meticulously embroidered across dozens of manuscript pages.
The image of her blushing face when he started reading the manuscript aloud was still fresh in his mind.
He also remembered how she had stopped holding a pen after she started her part-time job, and how she used the money she would have spent on manuscript paper to buy him snacks instead.
Back then, his sister’s dream had felt vaguely embarrassing, but at some point, it became unbearably sad.
The girl who wrote a romance novel, imagining a Seine River she had never seen, had grown up in the blink of an eye.
And she had grown up harshly, crushed by the weight of reality and intimidated by poverty, so much so that she had even forgotten her own dream.
And yet, the sight of his sister, who had grown up to be so kind and good despite it all, just felt heartbreaking.
“You’ve never once put yourself first in your life, so I think it’s okay to be a little selfish now.”
He planned to silently support her no matter what dream she pursued, but he earnestly hoped that, at the very least, ‘she’ would be at the center of that dream.
He hoped that from now on, when he thought of the word ‘sacrifice,’ his sister’s face would no longer come to mind.
He just wanted her to be able to live like other people her age, without worries or cares—to cry sometimes, but to smile as much as possible.
“I guess I overstepped.”
Kang-jun said quietly, giving Lee Su-bin’s shoulder a light pat. As he started to leave the room, he added one last thing.
“Anyway, let’s be happy.”
At his words, Lee Su-bin’s head finally dropped.
Her slender shoulders began to tremble slightly…
Kang-jun pretended not to notice, giving her space as he closed the door.
“*Hic…*”
The sobs escaping through her clenched lips were filled with sorrow.
A whirlwind of emotions was raging inside her.
Funnily enough, the clearest emotion among them was guilt.
‘Kang-jun, no matter how hard it gets, let’s just endure. Let’s never hide, never run away. No matter how tough it is, let’s just get through it…’
She remembered how those words, which she had spoken to her little brother one day as if to comfort him, had actually been words she was telling herself.
The memory of wanting to run away and leave her young brother behind resurfaced, tormenting her with unbearable pain.
And so, Lee Su-bin, on the verge of thirty, finally broke down and wailed like a child.
It was all truly the world’s fault.
Just then, heavy snowflakes began to fall outside the window.
Oblivious.
***
It was late at night, and the rest of the family was fast asleep.
*Tick, tock—.*
The sound of the second hand was the only noise in the house.
“Hmm.”
Kang-jun carefully opened the closed bedroom door and peeked inside at his sister and daughter, sleeping soundly while holding each other tight.
Seol-i had declared she would stay up all night to meet Santa Claus, but it seemed her resolve had crumbled all too easily before the Sandman.
As for his sister, she must have cried her heart out after he left, as her eyes were swollen shut while she slept peacefully.
“I greet you, my Lord…”
Just then, Crabslie approached Kang-jun from behind, knelt on one knee, and began to speak.
“With Lady Iriel, we have succeeded in locating the base of ‘Aldebaran’ and his followers.”
At those words, Kang-jun’s gaze shifted back to the sleeping faces of his sister and daughter.
He liked this moment.
The simple, ordinary days spent with the people who made his heart flutter just by looking at them…
He was deeply satisfied with his current life, a life that felt like it would only get happier from here on out.
If anyone tried to interfere with this life, he was prepared to kill them without a moment’s hesitation, no matter who they were.
In the most vicious way possible.
