Tae-hoon let out a small, hollow laugh at the pathetic thought he himself had come up with. Come to think of it, his heart seemed to be beating a little faster too.
But in hindsight, the time when he could at least force himself to pretend to be composed was the better part. Tae-hoon, who had been frowning slightly, slowly widened his eyes the moment the woman occupying the spot in front of him turned sideways and moved.
“……”
“……”
Just get the autograph as quickly and casually as possible, then leave.
The instant the man sitting beyond the table entered his vision, Tae-hoon’s goal blurred completely. Not a single sentence came out of his tightly shut mouth, and all he could do was swallow the dry saliva that had unknowingly pooled in his mouth.
But Choi Tae-hoon was not the only one who fell silent.
The top star, who had been showing off his smooth eloquence the entire time, perhaps surprised that an unexpected young man had stood in line, also fell silent for a moment just like Tae-hoon. At that, the bodyguard standing beside the man—beside Ji Gwan-young—looked at his employer with puzzled eyes.
Ji Gwan-young was a professional.
He was the kind of man with such a flawlessly crafted image that people said he felt almost inhuman, with not even a minor scandal or a single bad rumor to his name.
But the Ji Gwan-young right now was a little strange. And Ji Gwan-young himself seemed slightly unsure why he was acting strange.
As the man known in the entertainment industry for being the most gentle, the most perfect, and the most relaxed showed an oddly shaken side of himself, the eyes in the venue gathered on him.
The one who spoke first, as awkwardly as a cheap doll with batteries suddenly inserted, was Ji Gwan-young. Choi Tae-hoon, the person standing opposite him, had no way of knowing it, but that was an extremely uncharacteristic action for Ji Gwan-young. However, Tae-hoon had no room right now to realize such a thing.
The elegant smile he always wore and the considerate voice that flowed out as if one beat slower trembled slightly.
“Ah, yes. Uh…… hello. Thank you for coming. Your name?”
“Choi Tae-hoon…… No, no. Please make the autograph out to Choi Jihyun.”
“Yes.”
Strength entered his hand until the white outline of the bones showed through the back of it. He could also feel his own heartbeat, which had somehow sped up like mad. Thanks to that, for a moment he wondered if he had gone insane.
Tae-hoon soothed his strange reaction by telling himself that he must have been secretly nervous because his sister had been singing Ji Gwan-young’s praises beside him. Even so, he did not have the confidence to directly meet the man’s gaze, which refused to easily leave him, so his eyes rolled away strangely to avoid it.
Ji Gwan-young slowly moved his pen over the autograph paper.
Then, quickly looking back at Choi Tae-hoon standing in front of him again, he held out the paper with a strange hesitation only the person receiving it would be able to notice.
“Thank you.”
The voice of the top star whom anyone would love sounded slightly hoarse.
Ji Gwan-young had somehow become fully the man Choi Tae-hoon knew, and the man everyone else at the signing venue knew. Tae-hoon clumsily answered, “Yes,” and took the autograph paper Ji Gwan-young held out.
But that was not the end. Ji Gwan-young’s hand was stretched out toward Choi Tae-hoon.
“May I shake your hand just once?”
It was such a polite request that, to anyone listening, Tae-hoon would have sounded like the star of the signing event. Slightly embarrassed, Tae-hoon grabbed the man’s hand in a bit of a hurry. He intended to roughly say goodbye and leave.
But even that was not allowed to this poor Guide.
The moment he touched the man’s large hand, Choi Tae-hoon reflexively swallowed a small moan at the sensation that his entire back, starting from his right shoulder blade, was burning. It was a very small sound, but the man whose hand he held could certainly have heard it.
Only then did Choi Tae-hoon properly look at Ji Gwan-young standing before him for the first time.
“Please get back safely.”
His pitch-black eyes, with a gaze that seemed to be observing him, narrowed slightly. Tae-hoon barely received that affectionate farewell and nodded frantically.
His throat burned as if he had swallowed a ball of fire, and his entire back was hot and flushed. At that moment, his head was filled with only one thought: Run away. Tae-hoon instinctively and faithfully obeyed it.
Ji Gwan-young took in the sight of Choi Tae-hoon’s back as he moved away before his eyes. While leisurely smiling at the people approaching him with goodwill filling their entire bodies, his mind was thinking something completely different. It was every piece of information about the man he had seen—and touched.
The man with the languid smile already knew many things about Choi Tae-hoon.
Height around 180 cm. Skin that looked slightly tanned. Eyes with inner double eyelids and dark brown irises. Black hair lightly styled with wax. A small mole near his chin. A faint scar beneath his eye. The faded scent of toner. The body temperature felt when he held his hand, his heart rate, the upright habits revealed by his gait, even the company name written on his employee ID.
Found him.
Ji Gwan-young was certain.
Until now, Esper Ji Gwan-young’s certainty had never once been wrong.
***
Whether it was unfortunate or fortunate, Ji Gwan-young awakened as an Esper at twenty-one, barely past the age when he would have been required to undergo Esper-Guide testing.
Perhaps it was because that timing was so late.
Ji Gwan-young paid a harsh price: an awakening fever that usually ended in a day or two lasted nearly a week. Having lost both of his parents in a helicopter accident and living alone in a large mansion, he barely endured that time under the care of the elderly butler who had looked after him since childhood.
The day he opened his eyes after suffering for so long, with a body structure different from before, remained a rather fresh memory even for Ji Gwan-young, who found most things boring.
Mistaking the flood of information that turned his vision white for dazzling brightness, Gwan-young barely opened his mouth and said, “Mister, please close the curtains.”
But despite his words, the butler did not move the blackout curtains.
It was only natural.
The butler was in the living hall one floor away from Ji Gwan-young’s room, silencing the servants, so there was no way he could have heard his young master’s words.
But Ji Gwan-young could see the butler just by lowering his gaze to the floor, and even his slightly low voice sounded vivid, as if being whispered right beside his ear.
After waking from that terrible high fever, his world had changed.
Everything was far too visible, and far too audible.
Gwan-young waved his hand and lifted the vase on the table far away. Then he turned it upside down. The water tried to spill according to an extremely natural principle, but now he could instead make it float in midair.
Next came splitting that transparent liquid.
Into masses. Into tiny particles. Into molecules. Into atoms.
And then, at last, he made that water disappear completely. No—it would have been more accurate to say that it certainly existed somewhere in this world, but he had cut it down to a unit no one could see.
When the butler belatedly entered Ji Gwan-young’s room, there was nothing inside except the bed where Ji Gwan-young sat. Not even light.
That was the first time in his life the butler saw such “perfect darkness.”
Watching the butler freeze, unable to understand the situation for a moment, Gwan-young combined the light he had split apart again. Light returned to the room. The things that had flowed into a different time axis as the space became one of perfect nothingness returned to their original state.
In truth, thinking back on it now, that had been no different from having just gained power and wielding it excessively without knowing the proper limit. Breaking things down by cutting them into tiny units was an extremely draining task.
Slightly damp with cold sweat, Ji Gwan-young shrugged as he looked at the butler staring at him with wide eyes and said, “It seems I’ve become an Esper!”
The butler had cared for him for a long time, but Gwan-young did not trust him completely. Secrets were secrets because they could not be kept. Sharing them with others was impossible. With a kind smile that was almost comforting as his final gesture, Gwan-young separated the middle-aged man with the clouded face, then combined him again.
The butler died just like that, without leaving behind any sign.
Ji Gwan-young personally carried the butler’s funeral portrait on the day of his funeral.
He also shed tears. Although the butler had been steadily siphoning off what little inheritance his parents had left him after his relatives’ dogfight and had been cooperating in gradually erasing Gwan-young’s footing, he was also the only person to whom Ji Gwan-young had revealed the truth.
Gwan-young paid the butler, who had been moderately loyal to him, what respect he felt was due. It was for the sake of dignity, one of the values that elegant monster considered important.
Afterward, Ji Gwan-young, left completely alone, took a leave of absence from the university he had been attending and headed straight for the “bottom,” where in a way he would have to willingly discard his own dignity.
The reason was simple.
“Gwan-young-ssi, here’s some water.”
“Yees. Thank you.”
He needed the most dazzling and noisy skin.
A skin that could hide his crooked and ferocious insides while erasing the suspicion of Guides spread throughout all levels of society and allowing him to approach them. As that shell, the profession of actor suited him rather well.
Ji Gwan-young deliberately approached those whom his instincts identified as Guides, and whenever his overly sharpened senses occasionally brought him close to his limit, he rolled around with them. For an Esper whose five senses were developed to the extreme, contact with a Guide was a better stabilizer than any expensive drug.
He had no intention of walking into the Center on his own two feet.
The monster knew the value of his power. It was impossible for him not to know how strong he was. Whenever he happened to encounter Espers, he could only snort. He refused to wear the same label as those half-baked people and become the Center’s lab rat.
In the end, without ever undergoing a proper matching test, Ji Gwan-young had emergency-treatment-like sex with people he instinctively identified as Guides.
It was a clumsy act, like barely wetting his throat at the end of a terrible thirst.
Thanks to that endless deprivation, Ji Gwan-young’s senses were sharpened day by day without him intending it. He could see, hear, separate, combine, and explode.
He grew more violent, like a time bomb gradually swelling in size. Sometimes, when power left to stagnate for too long made his fingertips tingle, he would relieve his boredom by splitting water with languid eyes.
Ji Gwan-young steadily became a monster day by day. The public loved the monster standing among them. Ji Gwan-young found that amusing.
Then one day, a scar like a tattoo appeared on the monster.
Gwan-young let out a hollow laugh as he looked at the dark red pattern engraved broadly across his entire back, starting from his right shoulder blade.
It was a “Name.”
Even with his nearly perfect brain, he had not expected that someone’s name would be engraved on his body. And for the Name to be this large—it was truly nothing but a nuisance.
Gwan-young, languidly soaking himself in hot water, moved the steam clinging to the mirror and drew the Name that had already become one piece of countless information in his mind he would never forget.
Names appeared in such complex symbolism that there were even professional analysts for them, but an Esper’s brain decomposed the dark red pattern resting on his back almost laughably easily.
Choi, Tae, Hoon.
It was an extremely common name.
The fact that the person whose name was engraved on his back was a man like him was not particularly welcome either. Same-sex Name sharers were all too likely to become eye-catching material for those who babbled about Names being fated partners and whatnot.
Ji Gwan-young clicked his tongue softly.
People commonly grew desperate to find the person whose name had appeared on them, but he had no intention of stirring up trouble for no reason. In his information circuits, the name Choi Tae-hoon was classified as useless, disposable data.
But that was the monster’s arrogance.
***
Choi Tae-hoon was out of it all day.
The creepy heat that had wrapped around him from his shoulder to his back had all subsided by evening, but the fact that his heart seemed to be sprinting created a strange anxiety. In the end, his superior even scolded him, saying, “Tae-hoon-ssi, you seem unable to focus today.”
Even on his way home, he kept spacing out inside the car several times and eventually got cursed at by other drivers.
