Winter Rabbit in Wonderland

Chapter 84

Heart left his house and thought about SoYoon as he walked in long strides.

Wi GaHyun—it was a name he could now never forget.

She stopped walking and pressed her eyelids. All the pain and heartache she had gone through had been because of that girl. It was hard to push down the anger rising inside of her, and she wanted nothing more than to kill her this very moment.

But she shouldn’t do that. She needed to show her that there was something in this world much worse than death.

SoYoon headed back to her house. The moment she entered, Dor woke up and hugged SoYoon around the waist as she asked her, “Where did you go?”

“I just stepped out for a bit. Have you eaten?”

“Yes.”

With Dor still wrapped around her waist, SoYoon sat on the sofa and looked at March and Li. The two of them peered at her with tense expressions. SoYoon carefully examined Li. She had the face of a young teenager.

“Should I be calling you Alice?”

“Oh, no. That name now belongs to that girl. Call me Li.”

“All right, Li. I’m sorry about what happened before.”

SoYoon glanced at Li’s shoulder. Li touched the area and still felt pain.

She was sure SoYoon had bruised it, but Li couldn’t utter a single word about it because SoYoon’s gaze seemed to be burning into her. Li realized that it was her suppressed anger.

“I want to hear the specifics about that girl.”

SoYoon said this calmly, but it was hard to hide the fire that rose inside the deepest corner of her heart. It had already become deeply ingrained in her.

The White Rabbit Li knew was Alice’s most trusted supporter. And so, it was hard for her to understand White Rabbit’s sudden change in emotion.

When White Rabbit first had met Alice, another soul had already taken over. This meant that the Alice who White Rabbit knew was that girl from the beginning. In this situation, it didn’t make sense that she would suddenly get this angry by the mere fact that she found out that their souls had been swapped.

Li stuttered as she explained what had happened to her. She had looked up at the Wonderland sign and passed out. Upon waking up after a long time, she realized that someone had taken over her body. Then she told her what she saw of Wonderland from that girl’s perspective.

SoYoon frowned with her pale lips and called Baby.

“It’s me. I need information about Alice Liddell.”

“I can get it to you now....I wondered when you would ask me for it,” Baby said and hung up.

It seems as if the only person unaware of all this was SoYoon herself. SoYoon looked at Li.

“This was a debt. And you have to pay back a debt.”

“If you want, I can give you the information you desire.”

For example, who was the culprit who killed the Liddell couple? When she told her this, Li shook her head.

“...I already know.”

Hers was a puzzling tone. SoYoon looked down at Li and thought, It is not right to blame the child for the parents’ wrongdoing. But she couldn’t help thinking that this was how Henry Liddell got punished for what he had done.

“Are you going somewhere?” Dor asked SoYoon as she got up from the sofa. She told her that she was going over to Baby’s and left the house.

And not long after, she ran into Mad Hatter.

“Yochanan?”

SoYoon’s voice was slightly lower than usual. Sensing that something was wrong just from that sign, Mad Hatter swept aside her hair. When he did, he saw that her eyes were red with tears. His cool fingers helped reduce the swelling of her eyes.

“Who is it? Heart?”

Uncharacteristically, he seemed to emanate heated anger at the situation. SoYoon hurriedly grabbed his arm.

“No.”

She grabbed firmly onto him so he wouldn’t explode.

“Did you know that there was something strange about Alice?”

“She did this to you?”

No wonder Heart asked him about SoYoon’s home.

Mad Hatter observed her in detail. He silently assigned blame. SoYoon hesitated then pulled away from the finger that was still touching her eyes.

“How much do you know?”

“Well. Without knowing how much you are hiding, it will be hard to tell you...I probably know about half the story.”

His long fingers wrapped around her rough fingers. She stared longingly at the intertwined fingers that were like thread and needle. Mad Hatter squeezed her hand and asked her.

“That girl is from the same world as you, isn’t she?”

Was he a genius, or was she stupid for not realizing it? She suddenly knew how blind she had been regarding Alice.

“You figured out that much, and you said you only know half?”

“Yes. Because I don’t know the most important part—how you and that girl know so much about this world.” He added in a small voice, “How you two know the way this world will unfold.” Even the genius Mad Hatter probably hadn’t thought that this world could be the narrative of a book.

SoYoon removed her gaze from Mad Hatter and looked around her surroundings. Air, light, color, and feel—everything was so real.

After experiencing all this, could she say she was inside a book? But to say that this was a completely different world was too farfetched because it functioned just like Korea: one year, 12 months, 365 days. One day was 24 hours. It started with winter and transitioned to spring, then summer, and finished with autumn. The standard measuring system was in meters and grams, and the native language was Korean.

As if it was built up fueled by the power of magic, this place seemed to be a parallel universe that lay beyond the other side of a mirror.

She looked up at Mad Hatter again. His deep blue eyes didn’t waver once from her face. Seeing this clearly, she justified the existence of this place.

“Where I come from, there is a novel with Wonderland as the setting of the story.”

The last missing piece of the puzzle seemed to have popped out at Mad Hatter from the box. Hearing this unexpected truth caused him to blink confusedly, but not long after, he hugged SoYoon with his entire body.

“It must have been difficult.”

Her affections had already been weakened by Heart previously, and they were getting attacked once again. SoYoon closed her eyes.

“So, do you think of me as a character from this novel?”

“No.”

She felt his cool body on hers. Thump, thump—his heart roared in her ears. How could this be a part of a book, just a scene fabricated by words on paper?

He didn’t ask her any more questions. When she asked him if he was okay, he smiled and answered, “Is there a reason to not be okay? If you had thought of me as merely a character from a book, then I wouldn’t have felt great, though.”

“There was no way I would feel that way.”

Mad Hatter had been able to see SoYoon’s world through what she had told him. When he found out that she knew information about this world, he had assumed that the people of her world had been able to see into his world through advanced technology or even have created it themselves.

“I already assumed that it would be something like that. What’s important is not whether this place is just a part of a novel or not.”

He wrapped her white hair around his finger. He enjoyed the crisp feeling of it and continued. “Your touch feels real, and you don’t see me as a character, so what does that matter?”