Woo-chan’s brow twitched.
What the hell was this about an unregistered guide all of a sudden?
The doppelgängers Seo Won created would often take his place at the company or attend public events on his behalf. For Woo-chan, who couldn’t even begin to suspect that yet another double had been moving covertly, this turn of events was nothing short of baffling.
“Just do what Seo Won says for now. You can report later—watch carefully up close.”
—Got it!
Whether she’d been in the middle of moving under orders or not, Ah-young hung up immediately after her hasty reply. Woo-chan stared down at his phone, his eyes still clouded with confusion.
After the so-called unregistered guide named Cha Han-gyeom was confined to the estate, Woo-chan had begun his own investigation. Unlike with Seo Won, the Kangsan Group, or the Esper Association—targets that the entire team considered their enemies—this time, only a very select group handled it: Jung Ah-young, Woo-chan himself, and a few others.
Having spent his own youth as an unregistered guide, Woo-chan still had access to certain underground connections and informants he had cultivated back then, so the investigation itself wasn’t all that difficult.
Cha Han-gyeom was a rather well-known guide in the underground.
Starting about five years ago, he had used a young Esper as his broker, conducting all his business strictly through hand-guiding—a prickly beauty with a sharp edge.
Despite his cold, stoic demeanor, his guiding was so gentle and meticulous that there were rumors: while there were those who never got the chance to meet him, there were none who saw him only once. Judging from his clientele right before he was confined to the estate—where 80 to 90 percent were repeat customers—it didn’t seem like an exaggeration.
Word on the street was that if he had ever done deep guiding, he’d have become the unrivaled top unregistered guide in the entire underground scene.
Did he get tired of the guides at the estate and decide to wander outside? Considering how many eyes were always watching him, it made sense that he’d move around through doppelgängers.
No matter how he looked at it, Woo-chan still couldn’t figure out the connection between Cha Han-gyeom and Seo Won. That was about as far as his speculation could go.
If there was anything strange worth pointing out, it was the fact that Seo Won had suddenly dismissed all the guides from the estate, only sending out doppelgängers externally while never leaving the mansion himself. Had his heart transplant brought about some internal change?
Thinking about it, maybe it wasn’t so strange after all.
Seo Won had personally endured the family curse and barely survived thanks to a heart transplant. Even after surviving, he might have been gripped by a crushing sense of unease just as intense as the relief of having escaped the curse.
Death brings with it a kind of fear that spares no one—and a desperate craving to survive.
Seo Won was still human, after all. It wasn’t hard to understand.
Even so, keeping a particular guide locked up in the house is still weird.
He must’ve really taken a liking to him.
To Woo-chan, the whole thing was just plain infuriating.
Whether Seo Won had been using his doppelgängers to fool around with unregistered guides or engage in some kind of twisted guiding games—who knew. But what crime had the guide who got suddenly detained by him committed? There had to be a limit to disregarding someone’s basic human rights.
From what Ah-young had said, the two of them had signed some kind of contract laced with special guiding conditions. She hadn’t been able to confirm the exact details, but based on the reports she’d sent Woo-chan from time to time, it seemed like the agreement required the guide to perform his services regardless of location. And not just ordinary guiding either—deep guiding, something Cha Han-gyeom had never offered even in his days as an unregistered guide.
Moved by a sense of pity, Woo-chan pulled up a photo of Cha Han-gyeom that had been secured during the investigation.
In the shot, Han-gyeom was walking through an alley packed with run-down, shabby houses, a cigarette between his lips. Even though the photo had been taken from quite a distance with an unsteady hand, it was obvious—he was strikingly beautiful. But maybe it was the pale complexion, shadowed eyes, or that fragile, slender frame—whatever it was, Woo-chan couldn’t help but look at him with quiet sympathy.
According to Ah-young, Han-gyeom apparently had a chronic illness that caused him to cough up blood. Pitiful as that was, there wasn’t much anyone could do at the moment.
This still isn’t the time for us to intervene.
He genuinely felt sorry for Cha Han-gyeom. Whether the man had been coerced into signing the contract, or had agreed out of sheer financial desperation—it didn’t matter. Right now, there was nothing Woo-chan could do for him, and he had no intention of making any rash moves on his behalf.
Woo-chan had only one goal.
To exact revenge for the children of the Fourth Ability Analysis Research Facility—those they had failed to save.
His enemies were Seo Won, the Kangsan Group, and the Esper Association.
And because that mission took absolute priority, anything related to Cha Han-gyeom—even if they were both guides—had to be pushed to the background.
But then, one day, Jung Ah-young brought him a hell of a piece of intel.
“I think Seo Won might’ve manifested Black Vein.”
At first, he flat-out refused to believe it. But as time passed, it started to make sense.
He had dismissed all the other guides from the estate and kept rotating through unregistered ones. Compared to the structured, consistent guiding he’d received before, the satisfaction must have been drastically lower.
And now he was relying solely on Cha Han-gyeom.
Considering he was an S-rank Esper, constantly overusing his abilities for work, it wasn’t that far-fetched to think that Black Vein might have emerged.
So that’s why he was so obsessed with staying out of public sight.
In that case, this was a golden opportunity.
If they could use Black Vein to push Seo Won into a rampage, then the Kangsan Group and the Association would take a massive blow for having knowingly collaborated with a ticking time bomb of a guide-dependent Esper.
In the chaos, they could leak just enough of their investigation to fan the flames—then, at the perfect moment, drop the truth about the research facility. It could work.
More importantly, it might just halt the dangerous development projects the Association had in the works—and free Cha Han-gyeom from Seo Won’s grasp in the process.
That’s why they had deliberately set their sights on the product demonstration, one attended not only by Seo Won but by senior members of the Association itself.
From that moment on, Woo-chan had assumed they wouldn’t need to interfere with Cha Han-gyeom’s situation until everything else had been handled, step by step.
But seeing Cha Han-gyeom in person—that was another story entirely.
In the lobby of the exhibition hall, where Seo Won and Yoon Jeong-ho’s companies were jointly hosting the demonstration, Woo-chan couldn’t just walk past the man as he exhaled weak, trembling breaths.
He couldn’t turn a blind eye.
How many people in the world could look so precarious—like a flame on the verge of flickering out—just by sitting alone?
The moment Cha Han-gyeom’s pale eyelids slowly fluttered shut, Woo-chan instinctively panicked, afraid he might collapse right then and there.
Without realizing it, he’d begun to speak, a worried look in his eyes—but just then, Jung Ah-young suddenly jumped out and blocked his path.
“He’s with me. Is there a problem?”
Nervously, she added in quick succession, “Thanks for the concern, but I’ll take care of it.”
The fact that Cha Han-gyeom had even come out to the lobby of the exhibition hall was because of Woo-chan’s suggestion. Sound-based terror attacks only seriously affected Espers; to a guide, it would just register as loud noise.
There had been a prior report that Cha Han-gyeom was sensitive to loud sounds—enough to potentially trigger a seizure.
That’s why Woo-chan had told Jung Ah-young in advance about the planned sound attack and instructed her to bring Han-gyeom out to the lobby beforehand if possible. That way, once the attack began, she could immediately get him outside and away from danger.
That was supposed to be it.
He wasn’t supposed to speak to Han-gyeom, show concern, or draw attention to himself in any way.
And yet, even knowing all that, he couldn’t help but worry—couldn’t stop his gaze from gravitating to Han-gyeom over and over again. He knew there was a risk that, because of this, Han-gyeom might later identify him, or worse, be interrogated by Seo Won. The thought filled him with guilt.
A person who demanded concern. A guide so fragile, he made you want to save him someday, if only it were possible. The first external ability user that Woo-chan ever wanted to protect.
Up until then, that’s how he had seen Cha Han-gyeom. Kang Woo-chan—cold and indifferent to any guide not part of his circle—was somehow incapable of keeping his distance from Han-gyeom. Maybe it was because they were both guides. Or maybe it was because they’d each spent five years scraping by as unregistered guides.
But only later did he realize why, truly, he had never been able to look away.
The sound terror began—and just as Woo-chan had expected, he thought Cha Han-gyeom would’ve been taken out immediately.
Instead, Han-gyeom burst into the exhibition hall without hesitation.
Espers lay collapsed all around the room. The scene was chaos. But Han-gyeom didn’t spare a single glance for anyone else—he charged straight toward Seo Won.
Even from a distance, Seo Won’s condition was clearly abnormal.
The noise, which had been modified for terror purposes, was set to a powerful level—but it wasn’t enough to knock out an S-rank Esper. Not on its own. High-ranked Espers usually had strong mental fortitude and could resist disorienting sounds to some degree.
But in Seo Won’s case, the reason was obvious.
The audio attack had rapidly accelerated the progression of Black Vein in his already destabilized mind. In fact, the sound design had specifically been engineered to subdue Espers experiencing early or active Black Vein manifestation, which made it incredibly effective on Seo Won.
Woo-chan had been thinking: Any moment now, he might lose control completely.
And right then—Cha Han-gyeom suddenly leapt in and began guiding him.
No… that’s impossible. He’s already being completely overtaken by Black Vein. There’s no way guiding could still work…
Before Woo-chan could even finish that thought, his eyes flew wide open.
From a distance, Woo-chan saw the crimson current flickering around Cha Han-gyeom—vivid and unmistakable, etched deep into his vision.
It wasn’t just the heat of the GP radiating from a point of physical contact. No, this was something else entirely—a seething red shimmer erupting continuously from every inch of the guide’s body, as if his entire being were burning.
This wasn’t ordinary guiding.
The trajectory of the energy flow was nothing like the usual red haze that naturally exuded during a session.
It was singular. Majestic. A guiding so refined and overwhelming that it wrapped Seo Won in massive wings of GP—so immense and intricate that even someone like Kang Woo-chan couldn’t hope to replicate it.
Dense. All-encompassing. Intimate.
As he watched, a shiver ran down Woo-chan’s spine. A strange gleam lit up his eyes, and a smile—borderline euphoric—played across his lips.
Only he, who had nearly died multiple times after being force-fed the GP of Cha Min-hyung—an innate S-rank guide—in order to create a mutated GP of his own… only Kang Woo-chan could recognize what he was witnessing without a shred of doubt.
One thought surfaced naturally in his mind—the memory of Subject 00, the vanished guide from the Fourth Ability Analysis Research Facility, the one who had left behind no trace.
“…Looks like I’ve found him.”
The only person who had endured the same agony… the only one who had survived this hellish world the same way he had…
Was alive.
