The Regressor's Ice Is Golden - Chapter 63

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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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063.

Cha Seo-hee still couldn’t bring herself to eat that piece of macaron.
She simply couldn’t understand it.
Why should she have to listen to such a thing in the first place?
‘I already apologized.’
What was the point of spouting off like some pedantic old fool?
So all the way back to the starting point of her troubles, Cha Seo-hee’s mind remained in turmoil.
Of course, she was already regretting throwing it at Kim Ha-seol’s face.
And running away like that too.
……Now that she thought about it, the whole thing seemed even stranger.
“You’re not mad at me?”
“What?”
“Well, I was just thinking—if you’d thrown a tantrum like that too, I’d probably hate you to death. Actually, part of me still does. But my anger seems to have already faded.”
Kim Ha-seol looked at her with eyes that seemed to say, ‘Has this kid been ignoring everything I just said?’
But with adult restraint, she didn’t voice it aloud. Instead, she simply said something else, calmly.
“I’ve sulked before too. A silver medal—it’s not like you dig it up from the ground. But when you do everything you can and then look back, you naturally start to see the one who won gold too. They probably suffered even more than I did, not less. So you can give even someone you hate an extra piece of cake. It’s nothing. You can do the same.”
She gestured with her chin toward the uneaten piece of macaron.
“That’s all it takes. Try it too.”
Everyone’s circumstances differ, and the total weight of their struggles isn’t the same, but indirect empathy is always possible.
Even if you can’t truly feel it, your mind can come to understand it.
Thanks to that, Cha Seo-hee could understand something too.
This wasn’t some secondhand wisdom she’d picked up somewhere.
It had the particular ring of someone who’d truly lived it and learned from it—whatever you’d call that quality. It sounded like maturity.
“Though honestly, when that hit my face, I was furious. If I’d been even a bit more of a certain kind of person, you’d have gone over the edge down there.”
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
Cha Seo-hee looked away, gazing at the rippling river.
The water flowing toward the sea.
“I mean it. I’m truly sorry.”
Kim Ha-seol clicked her tongue lightly and nodded.

We headed back to the café, splashing along, and cleaned up the iced tea that had long since melted.
We didn’t exchange any formal goodbyes.
We’d already said them before coming down from the bridge.
‘That’s probably the beginning, then.’
I sighed and headed toward the bus stop.
My phone, left untouched for nearly twenty minutes, had accumulated messages—literally mountains of them.
[When are you coming? You’re still doing the ice rental, right?]
I called Coach Park first.
“If I catch the bus now, I should make it in time. Could you grab my gear on your way out? I don’t think I’ll have time to go home first.”
The world above ground darkened quickly once the sun had vanished.
By the time I arrived at the Ice Rink, the streetlamps were all lit.
“You’re here. Why do you look so bedraggled? You said you were just visiting a friend.”
“Something came up. Don’t worry—I didn’t get into a hair-pulling match, at least.”
“Hmm. You should probably shower.”
Coach Park nodded, though he still looked bewildered.
And here was another bewildered person.
“Did something happen?”
“No.”
Cha Seo-hee’s ballet instructor glanced sideways, trying to read her student’s state of mind.
For someone who claimed nothing was wrong, her face told quite a story.
A few strands of hair, still damp from washing, clung to her forehead.
And most notably, the area around her eyes was swollen.
Either way, someone was tying up their skate laces and removing their blade guards, while someone else was changing into a leotard and pinning up their hair.
Same time, different practice, and different reflections.
Crackle-crackle—Kim Ha-seol began her warm-up, checking the ice condition with an unsettled, tingling sensation.
The feeling was strange yet familiar, she thought—one she’d felt before.
It was around the time the Free Skating at the Asian Open Trophy had ended.
Back then, it had felt like untangling just one knot in a ball of yarn tangled and knotted together, but now it felt like she’d loosened about half of it.
It’s not quite enlightenment, but something close to it.
“What are you thinking about?”
“I’ve had a change of heart.”
“What?”
Kim Ha-seol launched into an explanation of what had happened while preparing for Choreography practice.
And Cha Seo-hee barely spoke until the lesson ended.
Unlike her usual habit of subtly bragging about her parents and her things, asking questions about this and that, she was unusually quiet.
“Did something happen?”
“…… I’m fine.”
Of course she wasn’t fine.
She had too much on her mind, and it gave her a headache.
So she deliberately stretched her legs hard and held on a little longer.
It seemed that when her body was suffering, the headache was less noticeable.
That’s how she spent the evening.

***

“Well, you live long enough to see everything—these two sisters finally getting along.”
“Is that really something to joke about now?”
I stared flatly at Park Ji-ho, who’d been sitting with us frequently lately and was now bickering back and forth with Cha Jin-hee across the table.
When I laid out the whole story from yesterday, he’d gotten so fascinated by it.
But the actual people involved—their friend and family—couldn’t possibly feel the same way.
“Look, I’m really sorry. Let me make it up to you. I mean, how could she have such awful manners—!”
“Relax, relax.”
I picked up a piece of chicken from my tray and set it on her plate.
Cha Jin-hee seemed hesitant about whether to eat the chicken, but the moment she swallowed it, she started getting angry all over again, bit by bit.
“I mean, I never thought Mom and Dad would be that way only to me. When I was younger, maybe, but I figured they had their reasons too. But this girl—she’s known everything all this time and just kept her mouth shut about it, and now—!”
“Oh, our Ji-ni was like that, huh? Here, have some of this too.”
“Why are you making me even more upset!”
Cha Jin-hee calmed down only after accepting the chicken that Park Ji-ho offered as well.
‘They get along well.’
Well, Cha Jin-hee had lived alongside Cha Seo-hee for years.
Especially given the circumstances where Cha Seo-hee was partly blamed for taking away her dream, and now she’d been acting out around the people close to her—it must have been incredibly frustrating.
In the meantime, Park Ji-ho glanced sidelong and changed the subject.
“So, when’s the next competition?”
“Oh, there’s still a few weeks. Late November.”
“The Chairman’s Cup Ranking tournament, right?”
“Yep.”
The official name is the National Men’s and Women’s Figure Skating Chairman’s Cup Ranking Tournament.
It’s the competition where national representatives for the next season are selected, along with the national championships.
For senior skaters, the results from this competition determine who goes to the Four Continents Championships.
“Where’s it being held? Can we come watch?”
“This year it’s in Asan.”
“Ah, I’ll have to buy tickets again. You’re working hard.”
“Not at all.”
I quietly accepted the chicken that Park Ji-ho placed on my tray.
Cha Jin-hee, who’d finished eating unusually quickly, puckered her lips and declared:
“Anyway, I’m going to say something firm. No matter how I think about it, our mom was way too lenient raising her.”
“Don’t go tell her that yourself. Just avoid her.”
I waved my hand dismissively and picked up another piece of chicken.
There was no need for a second round of conflict with Cha Seo-hee.
“But how is she at school? I didn’t hear much from Mom yesterday.”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to be acting up. It seemed like she didn’t have friends at school in the first place. She seems pretty awkward about it.”
In fact, I hadn’t run into her at school today either.
Even with the rotating classroom system causing a mass migration every break period.
Though I’ve tried to avoid people too, and if you know the tricks, it’s not impossible.
“Wherever she is, she’s probably sulking about something.”
“Yeah, don’t worry about either of them. Oh, is your costume okay? If any of the rhinestones fell off, we’d need to fix them.”
“It’s still fine.”
“Good! I did make it pretty well, didn’t I?”
“There she goes again.”

For the next few weeks, there was no sign of Cha Seo-hee at school.
She’d probably dashed off to Canada or Japan under the pretense of a training camp.
Figure skaters rarely show up at school anyway.
“All right, then. We have work to do.”
Coach Park set down the iPad with solemn ceremony.
“Didn’t you say before that you’d need to bring at least a Triple Axel and a Trutz Loop if you wanted any shot at competing?”
“Did I really say that?”
“Whether you did or not, I’m saying it now.”
Honestly.
Here I was, back for joint ice time with Cha Jin-hee after all this while, and we were holding some kind of strategy session.
“We made it through the whole Grand Prix series putting two Lutz and two Flip in the Free, but truthfully, the layout needs another overhaul.”
“It does seem that way. At least the opening salvo is solid enough.”
“And since the jump combination turned out the way it did, we might have to drop one of them anyway.”
Even by current Status Window standards based on the sixth round of Junior Grand Prix in Japan, it was a physically demanding combination.
I’d only managed to execute it without fatigue because I’d ground my soul into ground training all this time.
Let me compare.
This was the jump layout I used at the Asian Open Trophy Free Skating.

3Lz-3T, 3F, 3Lo, 3S
3Lz-2T-2Lo, 2A-3T, 2A

And this was the layout from the first round of Junior Grand Prix.

3Lz-3Lo, 3F, 3S, 3T
3Lz-1Eu-3F, 2A-2T, 2A

Cha Jin-hee tapped her fingertip at the triple combination.
“I think we’d be better off dropping the Euler Flip, honestly. Since only the base value of the first jump in a combination carries over anyway, the bonus points won’t change.”
“Right. And it’s less stable than the Euler Salchow. Should we reshuffle?”
“But that creates another problem. We’d end up with two solo Flips.”
If a jump appears twice, one of them has to be part of a combination.
Cha Jin-hee twisted a strand of her hair around her finger, thinking hard.
“What if we do a Triple Axel-Double Toe instead of the Double Axel-Double Toe?”
“Don’t do that. Instead, let’s make the first jump of the Euler into a Flip. Then we’d have one solo Lutz left.”
“And we have another Triple Axel in inventory anyway.”
I pointed to the solo Triple Toe Loop.
“Ideally I’d want to fill everything with triple jumps, but it feels like a waste to use it as a standalone.”
“But if we put it in a combination, the remaining solo becomes awkward. We’re not putting in three Double Axels. We need to manage stamina in the second half.”
So this was the best we could do right now.

3Lz-3Lo, 3F, 3Lz, 3T
3F-1Eu-3S, 2A-2T, 2A

“But testing this at the Chairman’s Cup Ranking seems off, doesn’t it? It’s still the national team selection trials.”
“Of course we’ll test it in practice. The Flip has a pre-rotation, so we need to check if it fits the choreography.”
“Oh, I went through the broadcast footage, and I don’t think we need to touch much.”
“Hm, really?”
Coach Park folded his arms and nodded.
“Good. We’ll go with this then. Everyone’s had your say, so let’s run it.”
“Let’s do it.”
I cracked my neck and headed down toward the rink side.
I left my guards and began warming up as usual.
‘And one more thing.’
For this grand operation hurtling toward year-end to succeed, there was exactly one more thing to prepare and check.
I called up my Status Window as I traced steps and turns across the ice.
The Returner’s Ice Rink: Episode 63
E-book publication date | 2026.06.05

Author | Korcalorri
Publishers | Heo Heung-beom, Park Geon-won
Published by | Potente

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

UCI | G720:N+A101-20260514092.0063
List Price | 100 won

© Korcalorri 2026

This e-book is protected under copyright law.
This e-book is published under contract 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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