Tae-hoon only barely started to come back to his senses after arriving home and noticing someone wandering around him with sparkling eyes while he sat slumped on the sofa.
It wasn’t until his eyes met his younger sister’s that he was finally dragged back to reality enough to manage a faint smile. The moment he pulled out the stiff autograph paper he had carefully tucked into one side of his briefcase, an astonished shriek burst out immediately.
“Waaah! Hyung! You really went to Ji Gwan-young’s fan signing?!”
“Yeah.”
“Ah! oppa! Seriously, you’re the best! Want me to give you a massage?”
Normally, that sweet offer would’ve earned an instant “deal.”
But today had been an unusually exhausting day. Tae-hoon only asked her to take care of the recycling instead before greeting his parents, who had already fallen asleep early in the evening. Even half-asleep, Choi Tae-hoon’s parents still murmured, “Our son’s home? You worked hard.”
Polite and impeccably mannered, Choi Tae-hoon was also a meticulous and caring hyung and oppa. Among the six siblings, he alone had a room of his own. It was a small act of consideration from the younger siblings toward the dependable eldest who had never once refused to clean up after them.
Tae-hoon stepped into the bathroom and stared at his reflection in the mirror. The dark shadows under his eyes were far worse than usual, plainly showing the hardship of the day. A sigh he hadn’t been able to let out in front of his family finally escaped heavily from his lips. For some reason, he’d spent the entire day dazed. It had truly been a strange day.
Whenever it felt like the whole day had gone wrong like this, Choi Tae-hoon usually soothed himself with a hot shower. Today was no different. The moment he entered the bathroom, he turned the water temperature all the way up, only to suddenly remember the heat that had scorched from his shoulders down his entire back.
It had definitely burned with the painful sting of a severe scald, yet at the same time his spine had gone cold—the complete opposite sensation. It was such a horrifying experience that he never wanted to feel it a second time.
Forget drying his hair or anything else today. He was going straight to bed the second he finished showering. The more he washed, the more exhausted he became instead of refreshed.
But while hurriedly showering, Tae-hoon belatedly noticed something beyond the mirror fogged with steam.
Something enormous and dark red, like a giant serpent.
“What the……. is this?”
The words slipped out unconsciously like a groan.
Tae-hoon hurriedly wiped the mirror with his hand and turned to look at his back. The mirror fogged over again almost instantly, but it didn’t stop him from seeing the enormous tattoo-like mark stretching from his right shoulder across his entire back.
More than surprise, Tae-hoon felt dumbfounded. Because he knew exactly what this was.
A “Name.”
This phenomenon—where the name of some unknown person suddenly appeared engraved onto someone’s body—belonged to a realm neither science nor religion had yet explained. About twenty out of every hundred people developed a Name. It wasn’t rare, but at the same time, the absolute majority of people still didn’t have one.
Maybe because of that, romantic fantasies surrounding this phenomenon—where a single stranger’s name appeared in the exact same handwriting, color, and position on two people—were surprisingly widespread.
Of course, Choi Tae-hoon didn’t possess even the slightest trace of those fantasies. If anything, he was the type to scoff at them cynically.
A Name at twenty-eight.
For a moment, Tae-hoon even wondered if this was a dream. To him, Names had always been nothing more or less than youthful little incidents that appeared before adulthood.
Just when he thought he’d finally escaped the Esper-Guide matching tests, now a Name had blindsided him instead. At least Names weren’t legally required to be reported to the government, nor was there any reason to report them.
Now, Ji Gwan-young and the strange blazing heat that had floated around in Tae-hoon’s mind all day were completely gone. No—the burning, terrifying heat from lunchtime had actually been the moment the Name engraved itself onto him? At this point, it was almost absurd enough to be laughable.
It wasn’t like a tiny mark either. This massive thing had appeared across his back, yet he hadn’t even once thought to check in the company restroom. If anything, that proved just how completely out of it he’d been all day.
Running a rough hand through his wet hair, Tae-hoon let out a long sigh. The idea of a destined partner connected through a Name was far too sudden for him. It didn’t feel real at all.
The bizarre tangle of consonants and vowels looked less like a name and more like some incomprehensible pictograph. He would need the help of a Name analyst to decipher it.
Today was Ji Gwan-young’s fan signing. Tomorrow, he’d have to take a half-day off work.
Choi Tae-hoon swallowed the groan-like sigh threatening to escape him.
***
“Wow. That size is really…….”
“……Huge, right? Haha.”
As expected, the Name analyst clicked his tongue the moment he saw the Name sprawled across Choi Tae-hoon’s shoulders and entire back like something violently scribbled there. Even so, he didn’t forget to take photographs of the snake-like letters using a special machine. After snapping four or five pictures, the analyst told Tae-hoon he could put his clothes back on.
Even now, Tae-hoon still hadn’t fully processed the fact that a Name had appeared on his back. Perhaps sensing that, the analyst grinned and handed him a printed photograph of the Name.
It was the first moment he truly looked directly at the “Name” that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
Faced with the weight of another person’s name carved into his body, Tae-hoon unconsciously swallowed dryly. Thinking that somewhere out there, someone unknown carried his own name in the exact same place and handwriting—and in such an absurd size—felt a little overwhelming, and also a little…
Yeah. Just a little exciting.
“This Name’s especially huge and complicated, so deciphering it’ll take about two or three days. Just relax and wait.”
“Yes.”
“If you want us to find out who it belongs to, let us know. We do searches too. Can’t make money off Name analysis alone, after all.”
Who could it be? Who had his name?
As his head nodded vaguely, his gaze unconsciously drifted toward the photograph in his hand. Choi Tae-hoon had stayed up half the night searching information about Connecting Names. He’d even joined Name communities he’d once thought he’d never have any reason to visit and read every post he could find.
People said a Name could activate with someone living on the opposite side of the planet, or with someone nearby in the same country—even in the same room. Because of that, some people were lucky enough to find their counterpart quickly.
But there were also many cases where someone never met the person connected to their Name for their entire life.
That was exactly why Name communities were far more active than Tae-hoon had expected—absurdly active, really. People who couldn’t find the person connected to them domestically would upload pictures of their Names online while searching for their counterpart, causing the communities to grow naturally.
Connecting Names still hadn’t been completely analyzed medically either. It hadn’t even been a full century since they’d started being acknowledged as a kind of unusual phenomenon related to mental illness.
Still, Tae-hoon thought this had to be some sort of disorder, even if it wasn’t exactly mental illness.
A stranger’s name suddenly branding itself onto your body like a tattoo, and then instinctively wandering around searching for that person?
Without even knowing who they are?
Dragging his feet, Choi Tae-hoon left the Name analysis office and climbed into his car.
Now that it had come to this, awkward or not, he had to tell his family. Just imagining his parents—and all his siblings—making a huge noisy fuss gave him a headache already.
And, as expected, Choi Tae-hoon’s prediction wasn’t wrong at all.
“Whaaaaaaat?!”
“Thaaaat’s craaazy! Hyung! Hyung! Take your shirt off!”
“Yesterday? It appeared yesterday? That’s insane, seriously!”
Instead of speaking properly at all, second-born Woojin immediately threw aside his brother’s necktie and started rapidly undoing the buttons of his shirt.
Powerlessly swept up in that aggressive enthusiasm, Tae-hoon could only mumble, “Well, I mean, even I don’t know what the hell this is—” his voice breaking apart naturally as his body got jostled around.
Every sibling except eldest brother Choi Tae-hoon was in a complete frenzy. Even Jungmin, usually the calmest and quietest of them all, was losing his mind while clutching the photo of Tae-hoon’s back.
“Whoa…! Whose name is this supposed to be?!”
“They said it’ll be out in a couple days—how many times do I have to sa—hey, hey, slow down! You’re stretching my clothes!”
“Aaaagh! It’s really there! Holy shit, it’s huge!”
Tae-hoon ended up forcibly stripped of his shirt entirely before turning around. He let out a deep sigh. Behind him, the siblings’ gazes stabbed into his back. Among the six siblings, the foulmouthed Seungyu shouted without hiding their shock.
“Holy fuck, it’s fucking huge!”
“Seungyu. Language!”
“It’s fucking massive…….”
The younger siblings had completely lost it now, poking at the Name carved over his well-defined back muscles and leaning so close he could feel their warm breath against his skin as they examined it. Having survived life as the eldest child in a large family, Tae-hoon already knew resistance was pointless. He’d just have to stand there until their curiosity burned itself out.
After staring at his broad back for a long while, Jungmin suddenly spoke as if something had just occurred to him.
“Big hyung, what if the person connected to your Name is a guy?”
“….Hm. I dunno.”
The youngest sibling’s words struck directly at the worry Tae-hoon had secretly been obsessing over, making him flinch slightly. But the other siblings reacted even more dramatically.
“Holy shit! Does that mean hyung’s gonna become gay?!”
“Hey. We don’t even know the name yet!”
“Oppa, what if it really is a guy? Would you date him?”
“We don’t even know who it is! Why are you all getting ahead of yourselves? There’s no law saying people with Names have to date each other.”
Honestly, Tae-hoon was worried too.
What if the person connected to his Name was a man?
He’d thought about it hundreds of times last night alone. According to the community forums, there were actually many cases where people who’d lived their entire lives straight grew close to their same-sex Name counterpart and ended up becoming bisexual.
Of course, there were also plenty who stayed like sworn brothers or sisters instead.
Though those cases were rarer compared to the former.
Without realizing it, Choi Tae-hoon let out a small sigh.
The more he thought about Names, the stranger they seemed. It felt disturbingly similar to the way one corner of his mind had become paralyzed and fixated on the name of a single person in this world who had suddenly appeared on his body.
What if I only want to stay close friends, but the other person says they like me?
Tae-hoon had stopped himself there last night, telling himself he was thinking like a lunatic.
But now his siblings were relentlessly poking at the exact possibility he’d tried so hard to ignore.
Objectively speaking, Names themselves didn’t forcibly bind people together beyond a kind of psychological connection. There was no legal obligation to report them, and it wasn’t unreasonable to dismiss them as a meaningless little incident.
—If not for the one exception added by Choi Tae-hoon’s own “trait,” there’d be no reason for him to be this bothered.
Guide.
The thought lodged in his throat like a fishbone.
An Esper whose wavelength matched mine, yet I haven’t found them in over ten years.
Unless it somehow turned out to be that person—the one Tae-hoon was already certain no longer existed anywhere on Earth—then surely merely sharing a Name couldn’t possibly lead to… that kind of relationship with another man.
Tae-hoon comforted himself with the thought.
***
I want to kill him.
The moment Ji Gwan-young saw Choi Tae-hoon, that was what he thought.
No—more accurately, he mistakenly thought that was what he felt. He assumed the violent surge boiling through all his senses was some kind of hostility or displeasure.
But that, too, was strange.
The man in front of him had an utterly ordinary body compared to his own physical abilities and clearly had never been in a real fight in his life. At most, he had calluses from gripping pens too tightly and muscles built through a little exercise.
No matter how many times he looked, the man was obviously not someone worthy of provoking the agitation Ji Gwan-young had never once experienced since Awakening as an Esper.
In the middle of the fan signing venue, beneath countless eyes fixed on him, Ji Gwan-young suddenly found himself wanting to wrap his hands around the neck of the man standing close enough to touch.
The thought made him unconsciously hesitate.
The slightly startled man looking back at him clearly had no idea such thoughts were crossing Ji Gwan-young’s mind.
But the instant the man opened his mouth and spoke his name, the desire to kill him vanished completely.
More accurately, Ji Gwan-young realized—
Ah.
So this wasn’t the urge to kill him after all.
