“Tell him to come to my office.”
“Yes, understood.”
Leaving the bodyguard who bowed respectfully behind, Seo Won strode briskly down the hallway.
He arrived first and waited in the office, and before long, Director Shin appeared.
“I apologize for dropping in so late at night.”
“Not at all. It must be urgent, then.”
Facing Seo Won, Director Shin spoke with a grave expression as he revealed the reason for his visit. “The analysis results of that drug have come in. And I also brought the results from a detailed examination conducted with both biological Espers and medical Espers…”
Director Shin trailed off at the end of his sentence as he sat on the sofa and opened his briefcase. From inside, he pulled out two well-sealed documents and handed them to Seo Won, who was seated across from him.
Speaking in a hushed voice, Director Shin began to explain. As Seo Won listened to the tense yet intrigued tone in his voice, he couldn’t take his eyes off the analysis results of that drug and the detailed examination report on Cha Han-gyeom.
Before long, a deep smile crept across Seo Won’s lips.
‘Even in death, you managed to stay bound to him…’
The original owner of his heart had to be someone with an obsessive, near-pathological sense of possessiveness. Maybe all Espers with an imprint were that way. Including himself.
‘He’s mine.’
A confident madness settled in Seo Won’s blue eyes.
‘The one Cha Han-gyeom belongs to isn’t you anymore—it’s me.’
In Seo Won’s heart, which had long gone cold, the peculiar, abnormal possessiveness that Espers felt toward their imprinted Guides began to swell with intensity.
***
After Seo Won left the room— Han-gyeom forced himself off the bed, his expression strained. As Seo Won had said, no matter how exhausted he was, he couldn’t allow himself to pass out in this pathetic state.
‘My head hurts…’
Was it the sudden surge of stress? A sharp ache throbbed in his head, and his vision blurred. He barely took a few steps before bracing himself against the wall.
As he squeezed his eyes shut to endure the dizziness, something an old doctor had once said came to mind. That doctor was an unregistered Esper who provided treatment to undocumented ability users in back alleys, and Han-gyeom had once been his patient.
“Headaches and dizziness… they’re a type of warning.”
“…A warning?”
Wearing a soot-stained shirt and a worn lab coat, the man habitually pushed his round glasses up his nose as he spoke.
“When stress gets too intense, your body tends to shut down or suffer a severe breakdown, right? But before that happens, your body gives you warning signs—headaches and dizziness. It’s a signal that a seizure is coming.”
Even though it was just the two of them in the cramped examination room, the doctor lowered his voice, glancing around as if wary of eavesdroppers.
“Even if you’re built exceptionally well, there’s still a limit.”
He waved Han-gyeom’s hand-written medical chart with a deliberate flair.
“Especially in your case, trauma, emotional fluctuations, stress… all that hits you way harder. You’re only holding up because of the GP, but if that slips even a little? Everything that was barely keeping its shape will come crashing down like dominoes.”
“You said even a small inhalation can bring it back.”
“Yeah, that’s true, but you also know it’s just a temporary fix.”
The doctor cast a quick glance toward Han-gyeom’s jacket pocket. He knew well that the drug inside wasn’t something that could be mass-produced.
“You’re not an Esper—you’re a Guide. It’s different from an Esper receiving guiding energy into their own body.”
“I know.”
The doctor, wearing a bitter expression, looked at Han-gyeom with a tinge of pity.
“I know it’s hard, but that ‘pathway’ we barely managed to align for circulation—you need to make sure it doesn’t shift even a little. Keep your emotions stable, avoid stress as much as possible, and also, you know, be careful with things like colds. Got it? Your immune system is a mess too, so if you catch something like that, your fever could spike and you might end up in the afterlife.”
“Yeah. I’ll be careful.”
Han-gyeom lowered his gaze and calmly responded, then cautiously asked the doctor,
“How long do you think I have left?”
The doctor didn’t answer right away. He shut his mouth tight, hesitating for a moment before replying with a sigh.
“That depends on how much you’ve got left. The batch you brought last time—it was distributed in a concentration that should get you through for a while… but as you know, it was just a handful. Whether it’ll last a few years, I… can’t say.”
He stopped mid-sentence, a troubled look clouding his face. But Han-gyeom’s own expression didn’t waver in the slightest.
Scratching his cheek, the doctor forced a boisterous laugh.
“Hahaha, man! If you live like me, grinning day and night without a care in the world, you’d have nothing to worry about! Come on now, you smile too. C’mon!”
The doctor was laughing as if he were genuinely enjoying himself, trying to lift the mood. But in his eyes, there was still that unmistakable trace of pity that refused to fade.
Recalling that moment, Han-gyeom turned away from the bathroom and instead headed for the drawer where he kept the drug.
As if the warning had hit right on cue, the moment his fingers grasped the medication, the coughing started.
“Khf— cough! Cough!“
Once it began, it wasn’t going to stop easily.
Not long after the coughing started, pain stabbed through his chest and his breathing grew labored. He had to inhale the drug immediately—miss the window, and what followed would be excruciating.
Gripping the vial tightly, Han-gyeom barely managed to stumble back to the bed and collapse onto it. He poured a small amount of the drug onto the edge of the blanket.
Inside the vial, the liquid was a thick, inky black. But strangely, once it touched a surface like this, it turned clear and transparent—like water.
Han-gyeom buried his face into the dampened fabric and inhaled as deeply as he could. Almost instantly, the tickling sensation in his throat vanished, and the pain and pressure throughout his body faded in an instant.
He took several more deep, ragged breaths.
Once his breathing began to steady, Han-gyeom let go of the blanket and collapsed fully onto the bed.
Lying there with a pale face, eyes closed, he held up the vial in his hand. The liquid inside—dark as ink—was now only half full.
‘Only the second seizure since I came to this house…’
The first seizure had come when he was overwhelmed by the shock that that person’s heart was still alive. It hadn’t been the same kind of episode as this one, but a seizure was a seizure.
‘Maybe it’s because I keep coming into contact with him…’
Han-gyeom’s thoughts drifted blankly to Seo Won’s face before he squeezed his eyes shut.
‘I just want it all to be over already!’
If he could just purge all the Black Vein that had spread throughout Seo Won’s body, he could finally rest in peace.
Han-gyeom let out a heavy breath, recalling how widespread the Black Vein still was. He didn’t even know if the drug in his hand would last until then.
‘Hyung…!’
He covered his eyes with the back of his hand as the image of his beloved brother rose in his mind.
‘I miss you…’
It made him sick to know that the only way he could feel close to that person now… was through a man like Seo Won.
He wished he could just finish this quickly and follow without hesitation.
***
Not much had changed since then.
Guiding sessions in Seo Won’s office continued every day like clockwork, and the only parts of his body that were ever touched were from the waist up. It was as if Seo Won had completely forgotten the way he used to toy with Han-gyeom’s body alongside his double in Han-gyeom’s own room.
If anything had changed, it was the atmosphere between them.
Seo Won’s eyes still held their coldness, always filled with disgust. But lately, while they remained icy, the contempt within them had noticeably lessened.
Han-gyeom, on the other hand, had become even more expressionless. He was never one to show much emotion, but now it had diminished so far he almost looked like a lifeless doll. Still, he hadn’t stopped talking back or responding with his usual sharp retorts to Seo Won’s comments. Even when Seo Won handled him roughly during guiding—almost violently—Han-gyeom still reacted with sensitive responses and distinct expressions. So, from Seo Won’s perspective, it didn’t seem to require much concern.
Today was no different. After being forced through another round of guiding—more like having it stolen from him—Han-gyeom sat on the sofa, mechanically buttoning his shirt as the sunset streamed through the window.
His gaze happened to fall on Seo Won’s back.
To this day, Seo Won never took off that black shirt completely in front of him. At most, he would unbutton it all the way, but no matter how aroused he got, he never took it off any further.
Now that he thought about it, even back when Seo Won had dragged him to his own room and forced guiding under the pretense of payment, he had always been meticulously dressed—never once fully undressed.
‘Maybe… he doesn’t want me to see.’
The thought of the Black Vein covering his back made a chill run down Han-gyeom’s spine.
‘When will I be able to erase it all…’
Han-gyeom’s gaze shifted to Seo Won’s arm as he picked up a necktie from the table.
Because Seo Won had rolled up his sleeves to his elbows, the veins snaking along his forearms were clearly visible—even with his back turned.
‘Seven centimeters… no, maybe about nine or ten now.’
The first time Han-gyeom saw it, Seo Won had buttoned his sleeves all the way down, so tightly that only a wristwatch could fully hide the ends of the black tendrils.
Thanks to consistent guiding, the Black Vein on both arms had now receded enough to be completely concealed beneath his cuffs.
But at this rate, it was impossible to tell how many more months it would take to drive it all the way back into the heart.
