—Don’t you think that we deserve to rest today? It’s the last day of the holiday, you know? Your body may keep up but if you keep training like this, you’ll start losing hair and start balding. Do you even know how scary that is?’1

—‘Balding…?’3

—‘That’s right. If you exercise too intensively, your hair starts to fall out. You have to realize that your hair roots are much more important than your life. Now, come with me and get some rest before you regret it later.’1

—‘Are you balding?’1

—‘No way! Definitely not! I’ve never balded in my life! I’m just telling you this because it’s better to be careful now, when you’re still young. You’ll thank me later!’2

After finishing up morning training on Sunday, I dragged Ellen out to Main Street without much of a plan. She didn’t seem to believe my nonsense theory about hair loss but seemed to resign herself to going along with me due to my nagging.0

Still, she would have flatly refused it in the past, and the fact that she was reluctantly following along now made it feel like we had grown much closer. Anyway, one needs a change of scenery every now and then.0

No matter how you looked at it, I was a person with many faces.1

If we turned back the clock a week, I was involved in planning a terrorist attack on the imperial city. After successfully carrying out the attack, I had then returned to the Temple, where I was now whining and nagging at my classmates to go out and have fun on the weekend.0

What was I doing?0

“What do you want to eat? It’s on me.”0

Since we skipped lunch at the Temple kitchen, we planned to eat first. Going outside the Temple was forbidden, but roaming around inside the Temple grounds was always allowed.0

“Anything but cheonggukjang,” Ellen stated decisively, knowing that if she said ‘anything’, I might choose something horrible for her to eat.0

‘What a shame!’0

“… I thought you liked cheonggukjang.”0

“I only ate it because I was hungry.”0

“No way…”0

She clearly did not want to eat it. Strange, I would have thought she might have...0