Chapter 1. Meteor

A week had passed since New Year's Day.

At around the same time, the entire nation of Korea was bustling with excitement.

This excitement was not only in Korea but across the globe, where everyone was waiting for that one special day.

The meteor scheduled to closely pass earth was the source of the buzz.

While it was true that a meteor detectable by the naked eye was rare, it was unlikely that the whole world would become noisy with just one meteoroid.

It had to be somewhat of a meaningful meteoroid, like Meteoroid Henry that only passes by earth every 76 years or so, to be worthy of some hype. It at least needed to give the people the impression that it was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience that one may not see for the rest of their life.

This time, it was more than enough to be that value.

As many scientists researched its orbit, this upcoming meteor only comes to visit the earth once every thousand years.

Not one century, but ten.

The time it took for countless civilizations to rise and fall was how long it took for one meteor to be spotted again. Expectedly, the whole world leaned in to count the days to the once-in-a-10 century meteor.

And finally, the day to witness the much-anticipated meteor came to Korea.

Thanks to many Korean news stations frequently sending out updated news and information, even schools finished early in response to the anticipation. When the expected sighting time came at night, most grabbed their cameras and searched for the perfect viewing point.

Everywhere was filled with darkness. But, even the troubled woman who spent all day in the corner of an old room, hoarding a mountain of problems, came outside. Maybe this meteor was truly a miracle. It had truly been a while since her last visit outdoors, hence, the chilling night air felt like a stranger against her skin. She had the look of a well-bred, well-domesticated young lady but she walked on anyways, heading towards a small river near her home.

The whole world was bustling with sightseeing a meteor, but not where she was.

With its surroundings stained and tarnished with all sorts of garbage, the riverbed, in the midst of a hot and humid summer, was thoroughly ruined with the weeks of persisting monsoon. It put the mountains of trash into decay and rot.

But, the woman did not care. She plopped down on the ground carelessly and looked up in the sky. As she stared, she regularly gave her stomach a gentle rub. Her stomach, when looked at closely, had a bit of a bump. She was pregnant.

There was no way to know her story or what had happened in her life, but the way she was sprawled out alone on the filthy corner of the riverbed, miserably gazing up into the sky was enough to understand that her life was but an easy one.

Indeed, she often sighed in distress as she kept her eyes fixed in the sky.

When she looked towards the 9 o'clock direction as she was told from the news, there it was. A single speck of red amidst a vast, pitch-black canvas.

It was the meteor that the whole world desperately waited for.

The meteor did not move as if it was stuck in that one place in the sky.

Losing interest, the woman was about to get up in disappointment when one shooting star dashed across the sky diagonally, leaving a long trace of its tail, then disappeared.

"Ah!"

The woman, in the nick of time that the shooting star's tail quickly faded away, could make one last-minute wish.

Even after a while, she continued to stare blankly into the direction that the shooting star vanished to, trying to grasp onto the feeling.

Maybe an hour passed.

The woman came out of the riverbed wrapped in a sense of loneliness.

In the far past, in a different place, there was another who also witnessed the same scene the woman did. The same scene with the meteor in one corner of the sky, and a shooting star passing right before her eyes.

She was wearing a brown robe with an odd pattern stitched onto the back by a silver thread. When the time came for the shooting star to dash across the sky, she slid back the hood of her robe revealing her long black tresses and a skinny porcelain chin. She lifted her head just enough to see the shooting star fall like a teardrop, then immediately lifted her hands. Concurrently, a blue wall rose around her like wildfire, overpowering her surroundings.

The wave of blue wildfire kept its place for a bit, but soon vanished with the night breeze.

Like the pregnant woman, she stood a while, grasping onto the feeling, as if to enjoy the aftertaste.

Then 4 months passed, and a child was born.