The Regressor's Ice Is Golden - Chapter 61

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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061.

The next day: Free Skate.
“Heavens.”
I let out a soft sigh watching Cha Seo-hee fall on the Triple Axel.
Still, she was at that age where her body was changing rapidly.
Even so, Cha Seo-hee managed to land every other jump cleanly.
She was always fearless, even back then.
And so the final results of this competition came down to this.
First place: Cha Seo-hee. Second place: me.
Even though she’d fallen on the Triple Axel, its Base Value was simply too high.
So despite my cleaner layout, I came up short.
The medal ceremony began, and federation officials distributed the medals one by one from their trays.
“Thank you.”
“Congratulations.”
I smiled softly and glanced down at the Silver Medal around my neck.
Then I glanced up at Cha Seo-hee standing slightly higher beside me, receiving her Gold Medal…….
‘……?’
Why was she looking at me?
Caught off guard by our eyes meeting, she quickly looked away.
So I turned my attention back to the rest of the proceedings.
Looking back on it later, I should have just not looked at Cha Seo-hee in the first place.

“I’m going to use the restroom for a moment.”
“Sure. Just come back out the same way.”
After changing clothes completely, I headed to the Ice Rink restroom.
While I was there, I washed off all my makeup and splashed cold water on my face.
‘Which way did she say to come out again?’
The moment I opened my eyes to check if my makeup was clean——
Bang!
“!”
I locked eyes with Cha Seo-hee, who had just burst out of the restroom door.
Apparently she hadn’t realized I was the one who’d come in.
‘Well, I didn’t make any sound either.’
While I finished washing my hands, Cha Seo-hee quietly made her way to the sink beside mine and turned on the water.
“……Congratulations on the Gold Medal.”
“Oh, yeah. Congratulations on the Silver Medal.”
An awkwardly tense silence hung between us as we washed our hands.
I needed to grab my things and leave quickly.
I turned off the faucet and reached for my pouch when Cha Seo-hee suddenly spoke.
“Congratulations on the Silver Medal. I was disappointed at the Open Trophy, but you made a good call lowering your layout.”
“Ah-huh.”
Why did she say that so smugly?
The way she said it only sounded like ‘So you bombed at the international meet but scraped by today, huh?’
“……Thanks. Let’s see each other at the Winter Sports Championship. I hope you land the Triple Axel then.”
Yeah, next time: another Triple Axel fall.
I grabbed my pouch flatly and turned to leave the restroom.
“You’re awfully calm about it.”
That’s only if she hadn’t suddenly grabbed me by the words.
I slowly turned back to face Cha Seo-hee.
“What about me?”
“I mean, no matter how much you lowered your layout, I still——”
“So what about me?”
I narrowed my eyes.
“This tournament is a Winter Sports Championship qualifier. You only came because of the placement requirements for the finals in late February.”
“That——! No, hey. You know you’ve been pretty pathetic lately?”
Oh, so she knows that word too.
But separate from that, Cha Seo-hee was looking at me with an expression I’d seen from her once before.
The kind of face where she’s trying to look down on someone, but the anxiety underneath can’t quite stay hidden.
“I mean, you act like you’ve seen it all just because you made it to the Grand Prix Final. Or maybe you should’ve learned your place at the Open Trophy and been satisfied with the Silver Medal.”
“Why are you like this?”
“!”
Her hand froze mid-wash.
Only the sound of running water filled the bathroom’s silence.
“The more I listen, the less I understand what you’re trying to say. Are you looking down on me, or lifting me up? I can’t tell, and that’s what bothers me.”
“That—!”
“Be honest.”
I met Cha Seo-hee’s eyes quietly.
“You’re saying I should’ve won the Gold Medal instead of you.”
“What are you talking about? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Then why are you so anxious?”
If I’d crashed and burned, just say it with a sneer. If you pity me, just say it plainly.
This half-measure means nothing.
Cha Seo-hee’s face twisted, and the words came out slowly, wrung from her like water from a stone.
“…Honestly, you’re really annoying. Lowering your program layout this time makes you look pathetic. You ran away because you were scared, and now you strut around like you’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Hey.”
The best move was clearly to walk away fast.
“You fell on the Triple Axel and you’re criticizing someone else’s layout? You barely scraped into the Grand Prix Final on luck.”
And with that, I slipped out of the bathroom and left.
The outside air was cruelly cold and dry.

***

Cha Seo-hee’s condition lately had been far from good.
The incident traced back roughly three weeks.
During land training, Cha Seo-hee collapsed without warning from stomach pain and had to rest from practice for about four days.
By the second day after the source of the pain was identified, her coach still wouldn’t let her train.
“Can’t I just take pain relief medication and do it?”
“Listen, your joints need extra care as it is.”
All the coach did was hand her Iron Supplements and other necessary items.
In the end, Cha Seo-hee couldn’t take the pain relief medication.
Doping Regulations meant even basic over-the-counter drugs couldn’t be used carelessly.
“Skip the Challenger Series for now. Let’s prioritize the Winter Sports Championship preliminaries and manage from there. Understand?”
The coach spoke, and Cha Seo-hee followed along.
She didn’t know her parents had threatened the coach with dismantling her if her joints got ruined.
And on the fourth evening, after the bleeding had mostly stopped, she returned to the Ice Rink for training.
Most of her jumps came back quickly, but one did not.
The Triple Axel.
Whatever curse had been placed on it, she fell every single time she attempted it.
“Straighten your back. Don’t tense your neck.”
She received feedback throughout, but by the end of practice, she still hadn’t landed it.
Xs were filling pages that used to be more than half Os.
‘This can’t be happening.’
It had never been like this before.
Her coach consoled her by saying it was normal during a growth phase and unavoidable, but Cha Seo-hee couldn’t settle down easily.
On top of canceling nearly all her Challenger events, she couldn’t even land the Triple Axel.
Her anxious mind eased only when she heard that Kim Ha-seol had bombed at the Asian Open Trophy.
Falling on even the easier Double Axel and Triple Salchow—how could that happen.
‘After all that showing off.’
When she went to school expecting to see Kim Ha-seol whining about it, instead there she was, calmly doing homework with her sister and sprawled asleep at the next desk, and the irritation flared hot.
She needed an outlet for her spite.
But the lie about the missing practice notebook didn’t fly, and she only got humiliated, so she’d planned to get even at the Winter Sports Championship preliminaries.
Cha Seo-hee did beat Kim Ha-seol and took the Silver Medal, but still.
“Congratulations.”
Seeing Kim Ha-seol smile calmly from a lower podium made her blood boil.
So she genuinely wanted to ask.
‘What could possibly make you so calm?’
She’d planned to cry a little before heading home, but running into Kim Ha-seol in the bathroom just then might have been inevitable.
“You fell on the Triple Axel and you’re criticizing someone else’s layout? You barely scraped into the Grand Prix Final on luck.”
I never thought you’d go out of your way to give me such a convenient excuse to complain.

The next day, Cha Seo-hee went straight to School and looked for Kim Ha-seol. But.
“Oh, her? She said she was going to the bathroom. She hasn’t come back yet.”
“Didn’t she go to the Library?”
“Maybe the faculty office?”
How could they not know where their own classmate was?
Cha Seo-hee couldn’t track down Kim Ha-seol, who’d been deliberately avoiding everyone during breaks.
Not even at lunch.
It was the freshmen’s lunch period, yet Kim Ha-seol was nowhere to be found.
“Ugh, seriously!”
Where on earth was she wandering around?
Cha Seo-hee, who didn’t realize she’d ended up eating with Park Ji-ho and Cha Jin-hee in the second-year line, had to trudge back to the classroom in a foul mood.
So it wasn’t until the walk home that she finally found Kim Ha-seol.
“Hey, Kim Ha-seol.”
A gaze so utterly exhausted by the world’s trivialities stared back at her.
“What.”
“If you’re not busy, let’s talk.”

***

Why does she always have to hunt me down just to start complaining?
‘I need to get to training.’
But seeing her like this, blowing her off now would clearly spell disaster.
“We can’t really talk here. Should we move somewhere?”
So Cha Seo-hee huffed indignantly and took the lead.
I grimaced and followed halfheartedly, pulling out my phone.
[Coach, I think I’ll be a bit late today. I need to talk to Cha Seo-hee.]
We hadn’t even started talking, yet I was already desperate to leave.
Cha Seo-hee brought me to the most remote cafe in the Shopping District.
An unmanned cafe with no staff on duty.
We each got an iced tea and sat down.
I texted the cafe’s address to my coach, then slowly crossed my legs and leaned back against the chair.
“What did you want to say?”
“Apologize.”
Ah, I must’ve really gotten under her skin yesterday.
And that prediction hit the mark.
“Apologize for what you said in the bathroom yesterday. How could you say something like that?”
No, no—don’t grab the cup like you’re about to splash it in my face.
“Okay, first just calm down—”
“Do I look calm right now? You always act like that when you deal with me, don’t you? Acting all detached from the world, making people feel stupid!”
Good grief.
Cha Seo-hee’s face had flushed red, her voice trembling, tears glistening at the corners of her eyes.
Frustration welled up in me, so I downed the cold drink in one go, lowered my gaze, and bowed my head.
“I’m sorry. No matter what, I shouldn’t have said that back then. I won’t do it next time. I promise.”
But when I looked up at Cha Seo-hee, she was still trembling—no, why did she look even angrier?
“Do it properly! Is that all?”
“Hey, what else do you want me to do? If you’re going to nitpick like that, you’ve got things to apologize for too.”
Setting aside the apology, there had to be a reason she was so exasperating.
“I’m owed an apology too. It’s not right to just take your frustration out on some innocent person and complain. Not just when you moved into the Athlete’s Village—it’s happened more than once.”
“What?”
“Honestly, even now. Whatever I apologize for, you’re not going to stop being angry anyway.”
To sum up her current state in one line: she was in a sensitive period and just needed someone to vent to.
‘And that someone is me.’
After all, I’d made a bet and won, easily securing both a Silver Medal in the sixth Junior Grand Prix competition and a slot in the Grand Prix Final.
Meanwhile, Cha Seo-hee had barely scraped by with sixth place overall and only just earned her Grand Prix Final entry, so it was understandable she’d be frustrated.
Especially given my consistently indifferent attitude.
I’d tried to be as detached as possible to avoid thinking of old times, but I never expected it to backfire like this.
But here’s the thing.
“Every athlete going through this period gets sensitive. If I’m being honest, I’d love to grab someone like you and scream too. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to take it out on some innocent person and throw a fit.”
There was no answer back.
I assumed that a middle schooler would understand at least that much.
I stood up, got a Strawberry Macaron from the vending machine, and held it out to her.
“So, eat this and let’s get to practice—!”
Smack!
The sudden impact to my face sent a jolt of pain through me, and my eyes flew wide open.
Inside the still-unopened bag, the shattered Macaron crumbled into powder and rolled around.
And the person who’d thrown it was already bolting out of the cafe!
“Hey!”
Was she seriously out of her mind?
I shoved the Macaron into my pocket and took off after her at full speed.
An unexpected afternoon chase—déjà vu washed over me.
The Returner’s Golden Ice 61
E-book Publication Date | 2026.06.05

Author | Korcarolli
Publisher | Heo Heung-beom, Park Geon-won
Publishing House | Potent

Address | [04783] 10F, 11-gil 8 Yeonmujang, Seongdong-gu, Seoul
Phone | 02-6320-8500
Fax | 02-6320-8585

UCI | G720:N+A101-20260514092.0061
Price | 100 won

ⓒ Korcarolli 2026

This e-book is protected by copyright law.
This e-book is published by agreement with the author, and unauthorized reproduction, copying, distribution, or sharing without written consent from both parties is prohibited.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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