It was ridiculous, imagining years ahead. So I forced myself to stop and focus on other things. I watched the traffic rush by. I watched pedestrians pass behind me. Sometimes I even tried flirting with women walking down the street. But right when I was about to actually ask someone out, I'd lose interest and sink back onto the footpath again.
After a long time, I finally saw a beautiful woman and decided to spend the night with her. But as I kept staring at her, something in the distance caught my eye.
Far behind her, a small family was approaching. A young man carried a little boy on his shoulders, and beside him walked a pregnant woman, her hands resting on her belly. Without realizing it, my attention drifted from the woman to them.
When the family came a few meters away, the man lifted his son down. The boy immediately stared at his mother's belly, fascinated. I heard their conversation without meaning to.
The father asked if he wanted a sister or a brother. The boy answered instantly, "A sister." His parents chuckled, and the mother asked why.
The boy said his friend's sister always played with him and gives him gifts.
Listening to him talk, my mind went straight to Sophia.
I don't know why, but I suddenly wanted to see her face again, to kiss her back the way she had kissed me that morning. I found myself smiling just imagining her. And then the memories came in waves: her crying when she tripped while following me, her tears when I fainted, the way she cuddled beside me in the hospital when our parents died. My escape from the jeep to return to her. Her first bright smile as she looked at Ind, without knowing he would become her first love. Us playing in the truck. Her fainting outside the shop. Our time with Goodman. The day she cut her classmate's hair. Her terrifying glare when I took Ind to a brothel. The moment she kissed him. The necklace I fastened around her neck. Her stepping through the door in a white gown, looking like 'The Lady'.
While I was drowning in those memories, someone tugged my sleeve. I turned, expecting maybe a child, but an old man stood behind me.
He held out a handkerchief, motioning for me to take it. I didn't understand, but I accepted it. "A man's tears are precious," he said gently. "Do not waste them for no reason."
Confused, I touched my cheeks, and only then did I feel the tears running down them. He sat beside me as if he had been planning to all along.
His face didn't look happy, but it held a calmness, a peaceful kind of gravity. He looked like someone who had lived long enough to stop pretending he knew everything, yet he still seemed curious, as though something about me caught his interest.
He turned to me. "How much did you study?"
I told him I had quit before high school. His eyebrows rose. "Why?"
Maybe because he seemed wise, or maybe because I was tired of holding things in, I told him the real reason, the one I had never shared with Sophia or Ind.
He smiled warmly, but it faded quickly into something more serious. "What do you think of education?"
I knew my answer by heart. "It is an expensive luxury, yet needed for everyone equally."
After I said that, I hoped he would leave so I could go back to Sophia, but instead he smiled again, faint and knowing. A moment later he asked, "What would you change in the education system if you had the chance?"
I honestly didn't want to deal with him anymore. I was tired, hungry without feeling hungry, and my mind was still full of Sophia. But something in his expression, calm yet quietly pitiful, made me stop. I took a breath, steadied myself, and thought about it.
"I would make it practical," I finally said. "Instead of children studying only to earn, I would make them study to explore. I wouldn't give them a road and tell them to walk on the ground. I would help them grow wings so they could see the world from above."
He listened closely, eyes soft but sharp. Then he asked, "Can you do it?"
And without a second of doubt, I replied, "Try me."
He smiled, almost proudly, and introduced himself as the owner and director of the Wisdom Educational Society. I had no idea what that even meant. I could not remember the name of his institute, not even a few seconds after he said it.
While I was still trying to recall it, he asked, "Would you like to inherit my realm?"
I didn't know what he meant by realm, or anything about him, yet I heard myself say, "Yes." To this day I do not understand why.
The moment the word left my mouth, he pulled out his phone and made a call with the calm precision of someone who had rehearsed this moment for years. A heartbeat later two black luxury cars slid to a stop in front of us, their polished bodies gleaming under the streetlights. One of the doors swung open.
It was my first time seeing a car that expensive, let alone two. I stood frozen in shock until the old man gestured for me to get inside.
In the back seat sat another elderly man, a typewriter balanced on his lap. He asked me for my full name and the instant I said it, he began typing a bond as if he had been waiting for it. A third old man introduced himself as the first man's attorney, saying he would take care of me from now on.
Maybe they noticed how utterly lost I looked, because the attorney explained everything in simple words. The old man had chosen me as the heir to his entire realm, and they were preparing the documents required for me to inherit it legally.
I felt dizzy. This was something I had never imagined, never dreamed, not even in my most ridiculous fantasies. And because it was so impossible, I convinced myself it had to be a scam. I told them I didn't have any money.
They laughed softly. They said they did not need money. They kept trying to reassure me, their voices steady and strangely sincere. As a last attempt to escape, I told them I would only inherit it if I could afford it with my own money.
I expected them to back down, leave me alone, and let me go back to Sophia. Honestly, it was the smartest thing I had ever tried. Maybe staying with Ind had rubbed off on me.
But the attorney was far smarter than I was. He leaned forward and asked, "How much money do you have right now?"
I checked my pockets and found two silver coins. I showed him only one, not wanting to give him any chance to twist things further.
He took that coin, handed it to the old man, then told the man with the typewriter to stop and write a new bond. A bond stating that I had purchased the entire realm, including all the old man's assets, for that single coin.
Hearing that, I stopped resisting. There was no point anymore.
They finished typing the bond. The old man sealed it and placed the coin in his pocket before handing the document to me.
I could not tell if I was dreaming or going insane. While I tried to grasp what was happening, he glanced at his watch and said, "I have thirty more minutes."
I didn't know what he meant. The attorney opened the car door and asked me to follow. I did. I hadn't even noticed the car moving, but by the time I stepped out, we were inside a park.
I followed the old man as he spoke about his life. I don't remember everything, but I remember the pieces: he was born in a small house that he later rebuilt into the park we stood in. He moved here in when he was teenager and opened a tiny school, which eventually grew into the entire educational society over the decades. His wife and children died in an accident twenty years ago.
He told me he had Cell-rock syndrome, an incurable disease. Many doctors had tried. None had succeeded.
He even talked about his clothes, saying they were specially made by his most trusted doctors. I didn't understand why doctors are making clothes instead of tailors, but I kept quiet and listened.
Finally, he said he was scheduled to die that night.