Idol of the Heavenly One - vanish into fiction

“Are you hungry?”

“Waaah.”

“Did you just answer Mommy?”

“Waaah.”

“Our Myeong-hyeon really seems to understand everything!”

The baby’s round eyes followed the gaze of the graceful woman with fine features. When she said it felt like the baby was actually responding to her words, she smiled. And the baby really was understanding everything.

The man who had died at the age of fifty, Ji Myeong-hyeon, after slipping on an icy road, had opened the white door in Heaven, and been reborn.

“Waaah.”

As a baby who could only cry.

Wait a second, don’t people usually reincarnate as adults? Or is that called possession? At the very least, aren’t we supposed to lose all our memories of our past life? What’s the point of being reborn with all your memories intact if you have to go through being a helpless newborn? How am I supposed to endure this boredom?

For the first several months of life, all he could do was cry. He didn’t even cry much, crying from hunger felt far too undignified for someone who had lived fifty years—so he only let out a short cry when the diaper was unbearably uncomfortable. Otherwise, he just stared blankly, waiting impatiently for this tedious infancy to be over.

“Who does our Myeong-hyeon take after to be this smart and pretty?”

“He looks just like you. I’d believe it if someone said you had him all on your own.”

“Oh come on, there are plenty of features from you too.”

“Nope, not a single one looks like me. That’s why he’s so pretty. He’s too cute, our son.”

“Oh, honey.”

Still, there was one undeniable benefit to being a baby.

He now had parents. And those parents loved him.

In his previous life, he had no parents.

He’d been raised in an orphanage from birth, passed the civil service exam before the age of twenty, and had been able to live independently in safety.

He had never really wondered about the existence of parents. Since he had never had any to begin with, there was nothing to miss. Still, he had been envious. When he graduated elementary school, when he graduated middle school. By high school, even that envy had faded into indifference.

Maybe the fact that he had never married by the time he turned fifty had a lot to do with not having parents. His colleagues were always being nagged by their parents to settle down and marry, but he had no one to nag him like that.

People around him often asked if not having a family made him dream of having one of his own. But unfortunately, he had no such dreams. Having never received unconditional love, giving it freely felt too difficult.

When he was twenty-three, he had been assigned to his second school. An older administrative officer there had once tried to set him up with a young teacher. But how could someone like him dare to reach for someone so lovely, who had grown up loved in an ordinary household? He turned the offer down. That was both the first and last chance at romance in his life. Well, since it never even began, you could hardly call it a love life.

And so he lived on as a lifelong bachelor, spending his life with Moongbaek and his friends. He never spent a single day completely alone, so he never felt truly lonely.

But now, after being born again, he had parents.

They watched him all day, showering him with loving looks even when he had done nothing at all, checking constantly whether he was too cold or too hot. It was strange, burdensome, even awkward.

But he didn’t dislike those feelings. In fact, he liked them. It felt like his heart was warm. Was this what Hong Gil-dong meant when he said his reincarnation would be exactly what he wished for? Was this what he had wished for—to have parents?

“Our Myeong-hyeon, grow up just a little more slowly, okay?”

Then he was already more than satisfied with this reincarnated life.

“Waaah.”

Even if this boring babyhood was suffocating.

“Congratulations on graduating, son! You’re already a middle schooler!”

Thankfully, time passed quickly. The boy named Ji Myeong-hyeon grew up without causing his parents a single moment of trouble.

“Congratulations on graduating, Myeong-hyeon! You’re a high schooler now!”

He passed through elementary school, filled with snotty-nosed kids, survived middle school with its posturing and swearing, and entered a fiercely competitive high school where the intensity was unlike anything he had ever seen in his previous life.

He had thought reincarnation meant he would be born sometime after the year he died—but that wasn’t the case. He had been reborn into a time that overlapped with his previous life, right during the era when college entrance competition was at its fiercest.

When he had been a high schooler in his past life, studying had meant simple memorization more than anything. But now that he was in his final year of high school in this life, it was unbelievable how much students had to study just to prepare for the college entrance exams. He was barely managing to keep himself together under the avalanche of work.

“I’m home.”

Once again, he had studied until 11 p.m. at the study hall before coming back. In truth, because he had already worked as a civil servant in his previous life, he once told his parents he wanted to skip college and just take the civil service exam. But they had immediately shut that idea down, insisting he had to go to college.

“You worked hard today, son~”

“Oppa, did you bring ice cream?”

“Yeah. Here.”

He had been a little upset about that rejection. He’d heard from Lee Ji-eun in his previous life that tuition was expensive. She had told him she was still paying off her student loans. The thought of placing such a burden on his parents made him feel guilty.

He hadn’t lived a luxurious life even when he was supporting only himself. And now, watching his parents raise not only him but also his little sister, nine years younger, while giving them everything they could without holding back, he desperately wanted to repay that love and responsibility one day.