The silk sheets felt like a strange, cooling liquid against my skin. I lay there in the silence of a room that was too large and far too quiet. My mind was a chaotic whirlpool. One half of me was still Arya—the boy who bled under the sun, laughing with Rahul and Sameer, bowing before Guru ji ( Teacher )in the soil of the Kalari( Soil of training arena ). The other half was now Choyun.
I sat up and closed my eyes, seeking the only anchor I had left: the meditation Guru ji had taught me. I focused on the Nadi Shodhana, the alternate nostril breathing that served as the foundation of Kalaripayattu's internal discipline. As the air moved through me, I tried to stitch together the frayed edges of my consciousness. I missed the smell of the Kalari—the damp earth and the medicinal oils. I wondered if Guru ji was sitting in his shop right now, wondering why his most disciplined student hadn't shown up. The thought of Rahul and Sameer finding out about my death felt like a lead weight in my chest.
But I couldn't stay in the past. This new reality was too pressing.
I tapped the air, and the royal purple screen flickered to life. I was in a timeline I recognized from the webtoons I'd read, yet everything felt warped. In the original plot of Questism, Choyun—or Yun Jo—was a cold, calculating antagonist who eventually sought to conquer all of Gangbuk and Seoul. But this version of him had died in a hallway. Why? And then there was the biggest anomaly of all: the Grandfather.
In the stories I remembered, Choyun's family was barely mentioned. He eventually became so heartless that he even treated his mother like an annoyance. Yet here I was, in a literal estate, supported by a man who was a high-ranking Minister in the opposing political party. I spent the next few hours on a high-end laptop, my fingers flying over the keys. My grandfather, Kim Rak-hun, was a powerhouse—a man with deep ties to the old guard and a reputation for being as cold as a glacier. It became clear that the relationship between my mother, Kim Ji-won, and him had been severed for years.
She had swallowed every ounce of her pride and crawled back to him only because her only son was dying.
The original Choyun was a monster for how he treated her. She had invited a titan back into her life just to save a boy who wouldn't even smile at her.
The deeper I dug into the family history, the stranger it became. I searched for anything on Choyun's father. There was nothing. No marriage records, no social media footprints, no photographs in this massive house. It felt like someone had taken a surgical knife to both the digital and physical world and cut the man out entirely. It was a total erasure.
"Someone went to great lengths to hide you," I whispered, the purple light of the screen reflecting in my eyes.
I shifted my focus to the System. The "Main Quest" was hovering there, mocking me:
[Main Quest: Defeat Myeonghoo Jin]
"Tomorrow," I muttered. "I'll take the revenge the original was too weak to claim."
I looked at the inventory. Two cards were hovering there, rewards for the "Kiss Quest" the original Choyun had completed before his heart gave out. I viewed them with a mixture of disgust for the previous owner's methods and relief that the power was available.
[CONSUMABLE CARD: I CAN SEE IT]
Effect: Your vision will be set to 2.0 for each eye.
Note: This card will disappear once used!
[ATTACK CARD: TAEKWONDO - REVERSE ROUNDHOUSE KICK]
Effect: You can perform a reverse roundhouse kick.
I selected the attack card first. Instantly, a violent jolt of information slammed into my brain. It wasn't just a mental image; it was a physical sensation. My hamstrings twitched, my hips rotated in a ghost-movement, and my brain was suddenly flooded with the exact weight distribution, the snap of the knee, and the pivot of the foot required for a perfect strike.
In my previous life, it took me six months just to master the basic balance of a high kick in the Kalari. I had to fix my posture thousand times under Guru ji's watchful eye. Now, in a single heartbeat, I possessed the muscle memory of a black belt.
"This is the advantage of a System," I realized. It felt like a shortcut that was almost a sin to a traditional martial artist, but in a world of monsters, I couldn't afford to be a purist.
I activated the vision card as well. The world suddenly sharpened. I could see the individual threads in the silk curtains across the room; I could see the dust motes dancing in the moonlight with crystalline clarity. My vision was now a perfect 2.0 in each eye.
I lay back down, the "Reverse Roundhouse Kick" pulsing in my legs like a coiled spring. Tomorrow, Myeonghoo would learn that the "nerd" he killed had been replaced by a warrior.