With a sharp movement, Cha Eui-sung pushed back his chair and stood up. The legs scraped lightly against the floor with a creaking sound. Jeong Mi-hyeon—now that was a familiar name.
“Well now, Cha Eui-sung, was it? Your proposal is certainly intriguing, but the real question is—what is it you actually want?”
“Mm. No, Assemblywoman. What matters is that if you want a shot at winning a third term, you’ll need a new lifeline—someone to replace those connections that have already turned their backs on you. And the hand I’m offering is the only rope left. You knew that. That’s why you agreed to this meeting at such a late hour, isn’t it?”
Before letting himself think too much, Cha Eui-sung asked the first thing he needed to confirm.
“Do you have the list of reporters?”
Kim Jeong-baek’s expression shifted uneasily, as if something about his tone felt off.
“N-No, I’d have to dig it up again, but messing with that guy is…”
“Just give me the names you remember. Even roughly.”
“Park… Park… Jae?”
“Park Hee-jae.”
“Yeah! That’s it.”
“Lee Seong-yeon. Kim Ji-yoo. Kim Jang-hyo. Jeong Min-seong. Jang Ha-na.”
“Uh… some of those I don’t recognize, but a few sound familiar. How do you even know that…?”
Suddenly, the noise around him seemed to fade. Cha Eui-sung blinked slowly, regaining his focus. Thankfully, the momentary haze passed quickly—but it also dragged something else back with it: the inner voice that had been silent for some time, now rearing its head again.
“I told you—it’s Oh Se-dan. The man who barely made it through even with every precaution in place… You really thought you could block him with just some backwater countryside routine?”
That voice in his head, always picking fights. The one that dissected and criticized him, point by point—lashing out relentlessly. A warning from the part of himself that clung to survival with desperate resolve.
His mind, which had been slack, grew taut again. The memories from his Second Life passed before his eyes like a vivid panorama.
“Whoa. Did he just nail the on-site situation from his chair? Dude, you sure he doesn’t have some kind of skill for that?”
“He’s always been like that. Like a damn ghost. Team Hwang used to say that all the time. Oh Se-dan Season Two.”
“Ugh, I swear I can still hear that guy’s lines. Took a total blank slate who couldn’t even write reports and slapped him with Oh Se-dan! What a combo. Has it been two years since he left?”
After his first regression, Cha Eui-sung had been filled with fiery passion and grit—but when it came to knowledge, he’d had barely any. Of course he hadn’t. He’d barely graduated high school and had thrown himself into whatever job he could find just to survive. No ordinary entry-level salary was going to touch his debt. He’d had to work two, sometimes three part-time jobs, cutting into sleep just to keep the lights on.
Even after Awakening, all he’d ever known was the life of a Porter. He had no experience with office work, let alone the workings of the Association. Yeah. He’d been a blank slate—literally. So raw, he didn’t just need to fill the page, he had to draw the lines from scratch.
And yet, somehow, he was S-rank. And so Oh Se-dan had taken him under his wing.
Cha Eui-sung had received a mentor far beyond what he deserved—and he absorbed everything he could from him. Not just the tasks at hand, but his attitude toward work, his lines of reasoning, how he handled every kind of situation. Even the things Oh Se-dan never meant to teach—Eui-sung soaked them all up.
Eventually, once he’d built up enough experience, he started tossing out what didn’t fit and adding in what worked better for him. But the foundation was still Oh Se-dan.
Just as he could now predict Oh Se-dan’s actions, Oh Se-dan had once looked into him—however vaguely.
Never thought it’d still click even after becoming total strangers.
After Oh Se-dan’s departure, that style had become uniquely his own. He’d stopped being aware of it. But thinking back, to the original, it must’ve been deja vu—his methods eerily similar.
“Kim Jeong-baek. How do you think I know?”
“……”
“Come on. Assemblywoman Jeong knows too, doesn’t she? Let’s not play dumb when we all know what’s what.”
All of them—every last one of them—had fed him bits of intel. He’d used those to calibrate the power struggle between the Association and the Bureau of Regulation, and to steer Hunter affairs down a different path than in the past. Some of those sources had come through the Assemblywoman’s side.
Honestly, the moment he saw her name on that list of contributors, he’d already started to suspect.
That came from Oh Se-dan’s records. Traced through me.
And since Kim Jeong-baek was the one who’d handed over that intel, he must have already known—exactly who stood at the center of that data.
Cha Eui-sung slowly let out a breath and sat back down. The chair gave a precarious creak, but thankfully the legs didn’t give out, and he didn’t end up sprawled on the floor.
His head buzzed with noise. Calm down. Don’t panic—not yet. You still haven’t asked the most important question.
“So… when you say you used me as a bridge to get that information—what exactly does that mean?”
“It’s… hard to explain. My ability doesn’t always work the same way every time.”
“Are you saying Oh Se-dan was consciously aware of me when he compiled that data?”
“That’s one possibility. Or maybe he just sensed… someone. It’s hard to say for sure. Honestly, it usually doesn’t work like this…”
“Just yesterday it was different?”
“Ugh, man… I really didn’t wanna explain this.”
Eventually, Kim Jeong-baek made no effort to hide his discomfort. But the fact that he still mumbled his way through meant he could tell something serious was going on.
He’d beaten around the bush, but the summary was simple: Even when probing the same subject with the same approach, the results often vary.
The reason was straightforward. The world itself changed with time, so the idea of “same conditions” was a myth from the start.
Still, the fact that such hard-to-access information had surfaced out of nowhere—especially when it usually wouldn’t—meant something had changed. Drastically. Either with Oh Se-dan himself, or the Hunter Association, or something closely tied to both.
Traces…
The tags the Outer Gods were said to have planted all over the world—was that just wild speculation suddenly flaring up in his mind?
“Goddamn it,” Cha Eui-sung muttered aloud.
Maybe it was those tags that had drawn Kim Jeong-baek’s ability toward Oh Se-dan. Or maybe, because of them, Oh Se-dan had become aware of Eui-sung and accidentally caught him in the search.
One way or another, it was clear that Oh Se-dan’s hand had been brushing against every single one of his moves since the regression.
“It’s not like… super dangerous or anything, right?”
Startled by the anxious voice, Cha Eui-sung turned his head. Kim Jeong-baek looked like his whole world had just collapsed. Like a man whose dreams of happy parenting had just gone up in flames.
Damn it…
First things first: calm this guy down. He was a valuable info vault—ahem, a business partner. Couldn’t have him going dark in fear.
“No. It’s not that serious. And even if things did get dangerous, it would only extend to me. I promise you that.”
There wasn’t a shred of lie in that statement. With the value of his S-rank status, even if Oh Se-dan or someone ten times worse came after him, they’d let Kim Jeong-baek slip under the radar without batting an eye.
Not that he’d ever let it come to that in the first place. He wasn’t crazy enough to let that kind of scenario unfold.
Even if the sky falls, there’s always a hole to crawl through.
And he’d seen the sky fall. Someone who had lived through that wouldn’t crumble over something like this.
Maybe the trust he’d built so far had been solid after all—because with just that one reassurance, Kim Jeong-baek visibly relaxed.
Shivering as if he’d felt a chill, he downed a glass of cold water in one go, then let out a hearty “Pwah!” like his soul had just been cleansed.
“Whew… seriously, I thought they were gonna stick a chip in my arm this time.”
The tracking chip forced into the arms of every Awakened criminal. So the guy, for all his carefree attitude as an unregistered Awakened, had secretly been sweating bullets over that?
If you were A-rank or above, you could usually dodge the chip by signing a restrictive contract instead—trading some leash-length for freedom. Unless you’d done something truly monstrous, any group with half a brain would treat a Hunter like that as an asset rather than a liability.
Besides, with a skill like Kim Jeong-baek’s, even in his shady past he’d never been tossed in prison. Just commuted to work every day like normal, collecting his paltry paycheck.
“For now… leave that line alone. You’ve helped enough already.”
“This is why I hate S-ranks, I swear…”
He shook his head with a groan, but didn’t ask what this was all about or what kind of mess he’d just been part of.
Even if he looked like that, he was a pro through and through.
Cha Eui-sung quietly decided that once this whole saving-the-world business was behind him, he’d make sure to carve out a bigger slice of the good life for that guy.
***
Finally starting to think straight.
He’d briefly lost his mind, bewitched by the Demon King of Lust with all his twisted charm. But when an opponent even trickier than the Demon King revealed himself, Cha Eui-sung snapped back to his senses, managing—for the first time in a while—to engage in actual, rational thought.
Cool-headed, logical processing. Not spiraling toward Moon Tae-young like usual, but instead beating himself senseless in a neat progression: premise → development → climax → self-punishment.
I mean, this kind of stupidity? No wonder I died twice. I fucking deserved it.
He needed a plan. Being a clueless idiot once or twice was one thing, but if his brain kept melting like this, it’d be a disaster. Fortunately, he had a method he used in moments like these. With a sour look, Cha Eui-sung took a deep breath and quietly closed his eyes.
Sitting alone in the empty house, he forced himself to revisit memories he’d rather keep buried. During his Second Life, he’d gritted his teeth and buried them deep. In this round, he’d tried to kick them away like useless rocks whenever they surfaced. Now, he unpacked them one by one.
That damp, pitch-black dungeon. The moment he realized death was inevitable. The suffocating pain that clamped down every time he struggled to live. The foolish hopes, the bitter resentment toward the world. The monsters who toyed with him like a chew toy… and the nameless figure he’d grown closer to in the very end.
“…Fuck.”
The rising warmth, the giddy feelings that kept getting ahead of him, began to settle down. His once-lazy senses sharpened, his nerves now raw and on edge. A sensation that might’ve felt unpleasant to others—but to Cha Eui-sung, it was comforting.
It was a mood tailored perfectly to him, one he’d worn for ten years. Precise, restrained, cool. Not bad at all. Disgusting as it was, he decided to remind himself of it whenever he was with Moon Tae-young.
Life hadn’t been kind—if he wanted to steer it somewhere worthwhile, he’d need emotional switches, ones that could toggle on and off. Only allow himself to fall for the guy when the Savior Gauge needed filling.
“Ugh—”
His gut, oblivious to the vibe, lurched as if trying to vomit despite having eaten nothing. Still, once he reminded himself it wasn’t a physical issue, the nausea subsided quickly.
The spinning in his vision stopped. Cha Eui-sung stared blankly at the wall with a dry, vacant expression. Even now, just thinking about Moon Tae-young made his chest tighten like he couldn’t breathe—but… this would do.
He wasn’t trying to hate the guy. He just needed to enjoy their relationship without losing himself in it.
So it was fine to want to see him. Fine to wait for that familiar warmth. He just had to keep himself from being swept away. Keep weighing things.
Even if it felt like he was giving too much—it couldn’t be helped. Not with a brain this sharp. Even now, something stirred inside his chest, released by the unshackled restraint.
Cha Eui-sung slumped back on the sofa and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead.
Go Yeong-won can wait. The Demon King bastard going AWOL is taken care of…
The real issue now was how much Oh Se-dan had figured out. That would determine how careful he’d need to be—and how bold he could afford to act.
He was also just… honestly curious. How had he managed to grasp the situation when there were barely any clues? When would he realize who Cha Eui-sung truly was? And when would he confirm it?
Because once, not too long ago, Oh Se-dan had been someone he’d genuinely wanted to become.
