Kwon Jae-jin had accepted his own death a long time ago.
Truly, sincerely.
He had simply accepted life along with it.
That was why he had lived each moment with purpose.
Even in his final breaths, he couldn’t afford to let anything pass by carelessly.
“I’m sorry for leaving you alone. Don’t fall apart just because I’m gone… Right now, I may feel like your whole world, but…”
“…….”
“I don’t want that to be true forever.”
“…….”
“You’re still young. You’re barely twenty. One day, you’ll meet another guide… another lover… someone else will come along.”
“…….”
“And… that favor I asked of you.”
Jae-jin’s voice grew fainter.
It hurt to speak, but he didn’t let it show.
“Forget it.”
“Seo Eui-woo. Let me ask one thing.”
“If I really don’t make it—whether it’s in four years or whenever the point of no return comes…”
“Before I take my last breath… return them to me. Let me remember my family.”
“It’s fine. Forget… it. Now, just having you…”
“…….”
“Is enough.”
The words barely carried.
Jae-jin’s arm went slack.
His hand slipped away, his body tilting as he lost all strength.
Seo Eui-woo sat there in a daze, kneeling, cradling Jae-jin against him.
His own hands, his uniform, his skin—everything was drenched in crimson.
Dark stains spread up his throat.
The warmth faded from his eyes.
At the very end, Jae-jin had wanted to smile at Seo Eui-woo.
But his lips, cold and motionless, wouldn’t move.
Instead, with what little voice he had left, he forced out a confession.
It wasn’t even anything special.
He should have said it more.
Should have been more reckless, more honest—just like Seo Eui-woo.
Maybe he should have been reckless.
Maybe he should have thrown himself in headfirst, like a foolish, desperate kid who didn’t know any better.
Why had Kwon Jae-jin always been so cautious, so afraid?
Why had there been so many things weighing on his mind?
And why had he been so unbearably stubborn?
Seo Eui-woo had told him he hated seeing him guide anyone else. He had told him it made him jealous. He had told him he wanted it to be just the two of them.
And yet, all Jae-jin had done was make him suffer.
If he had known it would turn out like this…
The first timeline. The second timeline.
Everything.
“I loved you… Always…”
His core shattered.
Time stopped.
His consciousness was thrown into a vast, black void.
The stars welcomed him.
***
Darkness.
Above Kwon Jae-jin’s head, the rings of Saturn hovered in place.
And in front of him, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, stood Seo Eui-woo.
Twenty-four years old.
The Seo Eui-woo from the first timeline.
He approached at a slow, deliberate pace.
Then, side by side, they began to walk—starting a journey toward an unknown destination.
The path beneath them was deep, empty.
Jae-jin frowned and glanced back over his shoulder.
Black, decayed things—resembling the corpses of creatures—were sinking into the ground, vanishing beneath them.
“…What is this?”
He muttered the question quietly, and Seo Eui-woo answered.
“What do you mean?”
“This place. What the hell is this?”
“It’s your dream.”
“No, it’s not.”
Jae-jin was dead.
How could he still be dreaming after death?
“Hm. Well, technically, it’s not a dream.”
Jae-jin let out a breathless laugh.
Just moments ago, he hadn’t even been able to move his fingers. And yet here, he could walk freely. He felt no pain, no trace of his shattered core.
“This is just a passageway. A space where we’re connected.”
“…….”
“A path I created—one that links you and me.”
“…You made this?”
“Yes. I did.”
Seo Eui-woo flicked his fingertips, and at the farthest reaches of the darkness, a faint light began to form.
That light burrowed into Kwon Jae-jin—no, more precisely, into the center of his forehead.
Jae-jin had felt this sensation before.
It was a psychic ability.
The same feeling as when Seo Eui-woo had entered his mind, when Jae-jin had allowed him in. That deep, overwhelming force that had flooded into him back then—it was the exact same.
A powerful, untainted surge of energy enveloped him, reaching into the farthest edges of his memories.
“That time… When the gate opened in my backyard, and you got caught in it—when you died.”
“…….”
“You were hurt badly. Even a healing factor couldn’t save you. Your core had already shattered.”
“…Yeah. That’s right.”
“I had to undo it.”
Seo Eui-woo spoke evenly, his tone unnervingly calm.
His expression was cold.
Tightly pressed lips, sharp eyes—a face carved from the memory of that pain.
He had stopped at the same fragment of time as Jae-jin.
Kwon Jae-jin’s death.
And the end of the first timeline.
“I had to make it so it never happened. Because you dying—that was something I could never accept.”
“You… What the hell did you do?”
“What you see. I turned everything back. To the past.”
“…….”
“To the very beginning, where you and I first met.”
Seo Eui-woo pulled more of Jae-jin’s memories to the surface.
And as their thoughts intertwined, something hazy began to emerge.
A connection between the first timeline and the second.
A journey through a rewinding clock.
“Coordinate teleportation. It’s still being studied in this time, but in four years, there’s a theory that movement isn’t limited to spatial coordinates—that it could extend to temporal coordinates as well. It was an unproven hypothesis, but…”
“Then… you… You’re saying you…”
“Yes. I did it. I did.”
Within the fragmented, buried memories, Seo Eui-woo and Kwon Jae-jin walked together through the endless void.
An empty, black space.
Side by side, moving backward against time itself—returning to the beginning.
Walking.
And walking.
For a long, long time.
Because I had to turn back four years…
“Do you remember now? You and I—we made a promise.”
“…….”
“When we started over, we agreed to do things right this time.”
“…….”
“I admitted I had made mistakes, that there were things I never told you. And you—you said it was the same for you. That there were things you hadn’t told me, either. That we both had things we kept from each other.”
“…….”
“So this time, we swore we’d do better. That since this was a new life, it would be different. That it would be better.”
“…….”
“But it didn’t go the way we planned.”
The light that had burrowed into Kwon Jae-jin’s mind flared brighter, expanding into a massive axis of time.
Just like coordinate teleportation, rippling bubbles of light formed around them.
It was brilliant, overwhelming—and devastatingly bittersweet.
A result of Seo Eui-woo’s power bursting at its very limits.
“You made it back safely—four years into the past. That part worked. But the problem was me.”
“…….”
“My past self—four years ago—was unstable. My abilities were overloaded, my body on the brink of collapse. If I had traveled back in time as I was, my abilities would have surged out of control the moment I arrived.”
“Ah…”
“So I had to wait. Here. Alone.”
“Ah… ah…”
“You had to go first. You needed to guide me. I had to be stable enough, had to outgrow the imbalance—only then would I be able to withstand the time shift.”
“Only then… could I return.”
“Only then… could I start over with you.”
But—
Jae-jin had forgotten.
Just like with coordinate teleportation, time travel occurred in a single instant.
The moment he left the passageway, his memories of it had compressed, shrinking into nothing.
Like a long dream that fades the second you wake up.
Everything that had happened in the passageway had slipped into the depths of his unconscious, wiped away as if it had never existed.
He had forgotten that he had come with the Seo Eui-woo from the first timeline.
And he had forgotten that the first timeline’s Seo Eui-woo was going to return.
“You didn’t start over with me,” Seo Eui-woo murmured, his voice quiet, distant.
“You started a new life… with the me from four years ago.”
His unwavering voice cut deep, carving straight into Jae-jin’s chest.
“I should have been the one to tell you everything I did wrong… but that idiot, that bastard who doesn’t know a damn thing, ended up saying it all in my place.”
“…Eui-woo.”
“It was supposed to be me. I was supposed to be the one dating you, counting anniversaries, wearing matching rings. That was supposed to be us.”
“Eui-woo…”
“You were supposed to love me, Jae-jin.”
“…….”
“But instead, you—”
Seo Eui-woo’s breath hitched.
“You ran away with that clueless past version of me.”
“…That’s not true.”
“At some point, I realized. Even if I came back… you wouldn’t be happy to see me.”
His voice was cold.
“That bastard is my past. But to you… I’m the past. You resent me. You hate me. And in the end, you were going to forget me completely.”
“But I’m still here.”
The black void around them warped and twisted.
The passageway, constructed from Seo Eui-woo’s ability, responded to his subconscious, shifting chaotically with his emotions.
The vastness of space spread open.
Saturn hovered in the distance.
The wails of creatures echoed from all directions, swarming like an incoming tide.
“I was waiting alone.”
“Waiting for the moment my past self’s abilities would stabilize.”
“Waiting for the day I could return to you.”
“That was all I was holding on for.”
A storm howled through the space, winds sharp as blades.
Kwon Jae-jin couldn’t even blink.
He could only stare at the Seo Eui-woo standing before him—the twenty-four-year-old Seo Eui-woo.
The realization that he had left him behind struck with an impact so overwhelming, it felt like his very mind was shattering.
“And when I finally came back… you already loved him.”
“…….”
“You wouldn’t welcome me anymore.”
“…….”
“I thought… maybe it would be better if I just disappeared quietly. If I let you stay with him.”
“…….”
“But I couldn’t. I can’t.”
“I wanted to see you again, too.”
“You and me… we were supposed to—”
Seo Eui-woo’s voice cracked, unraveling at the seams.
“We were supposed to start over together.”
“We promised first…”
