A chilling sense of dread crept up from the soles of his feet, as if a ghost with its neck twisted backward might crawl down the hallway on all fours and pounce on him at any moment. Cold sweat trickled down his back. Scenes from horror movies he’d seen before flooded his mind.
“……What are you doing right now?”
“Uh……”
Lee Haru snapped out of his thoughts at the sound of Hong Seong-jun’s voice, laced with a dry laugh. Meeting Hong Seong-jun’s gaze, Lee Haru instinctively followed it. He saw his own hand clutching his shirt cuff so tightly that it was crumpled. His fingertips had turned ghostly pale from the pressure.
“My hand moved on its own, haha. What the hell, man.”
Letting go of the cuff, Lee Haru gave a sheepish laugh and lightly slapped his left hand with his right. His knuckles reddened, but the sharp look in Hong Seong-jun’s eyes drilling into his face made him forget the pain.
So what if he was scared and grabbed someone’s sleeve? Geez. Was there some kind of heartless energy coursing through the foundation of this mansion? By now, Hong Seong-jun could’ve at least softened his expression, but he continued to stare down at Lee Haru as if devoid of emotion.
His clothes were now damp with cold sweat. Just when it felt like the tension was unbearable, Hong Seong-jun suddenly flashed a bright smile, as if the stern expression had never been there. The slight upward curve of his eyes softened his features, and Lee Haru’s trembling fingertips instinctively curled inward.
‘…What the hell, that’s terrifying.’
The change in expression was straight out of Jekyll and Hyde. Objectively speaking, the sight of a handsome man smiling gently should have been a delight—but in this setting, that smile was wildly out of place.
“Why are you coming closer…?”
On top of that, Hong Seong-jun, who had been walking a full step away using the hallway’s width, suddenly closed the distance between them. In the dim light, his shadow loomed over Lee Haru’s head. Realizing the height difference for the first time, Haru’s nape flushed faintly red.
Click—
A door creaked open behind him. When he turned his head, the murky interior of a room came into view. It looked even more oppressive than the hallway. Lee Haru swallowed dryly.
“Get in. I need to receive guiding.”
Hong Seong-jun gave a light push to Lee Haru’s back. It may have been gentle to him, but to Haru’s much slimmer frame, it felt like a shove. He nearly stumbled forward but managed to steady himself.
He switches between banmal and formal speech like it’s nothing. That alone was irritating. Lee Haru shot him a glare, his eyes narrowing like a cranky bulldog.
Hong Seong-jun was as hard to read as his ever-shifting expressions. Add to that, his attitude toward Haru was downright awful. Ignoring Lee Haru’s expression entirely, Hong Seong-jun shut the door and turned on the light.
Under the harsh lighting, the dust-caked room was laid bare.
‘This is basically a storage room.’
It barely qualified as a room. There was only a single bed with a mattress still wrapped in plastic and a small wardrobe. It was a far cry from the mansion’s grand exterior.
Lee Haru already knew he wasn’t welcome here, but he’d thought Kang Min, who at least seemed polite at a glance, might not be so bad. Now he wasn’t so sure.
“Guide Lee Haru, you’re really acting weird today. Did you forget why you came here?”
“Ugh.”
This bastard.
While Lee Haru was scanning the room, he was suddenly nudged and ended up sitting down on the bed. Even someone with a good temperament would start to lose their patience at this point. Hong Seong-jun’s behavior was skirting dangerously close to outright abuse. His back and shoulders ached from where he’d been touched.
Despite the sharp glare, Hong Seong-jun carried on with what he wanted to say.
When his hand moved toward his belt buckle, Lee Haru’s eyes widened.
“You heard what the Team Leader said earlier, right? That my berserk risk level has to drop below 30.”
The voice falling over the crown of his head was chilling.
Bits and pieces from novels he’d read started surfacing in his mind. Guiding typically involved physical contact. That was the case when the guide’s rank was lower than the Esper’s or when their matching rate was low.
But Lee Haru was an S-rank guide.
He didn’t know his matching rate with Hong Seong-jun, but even if contact were necessary, a handhold or a light embrace should have sufficed. What Hong Seong-jun was doing now clearly carried a much more explicit undertone.
As the thick outline beneath his unbuckled pants came into view, Lee Haru’s face turned pale.
‘I don’t have any experience!’
He’d never revealed his sexual orientation to anyone, so of course he had no real-life experience either. Whenever that unfulfilled desire got to him, he’d simply worked it out while reading steamy novels.
So his head was filled with fantasies that didn’t match up to real-life logic, but it had never mattered—he’d never actually faced a situation that forced him to bridge that gap.
Given how men’s restrooms were laid out, he and his friends would sometimes peek at each other’s junk and joke around. But never—never had he outright stared at another guy’s like this.
Lee Haru instinctively recoiled at the weighty silhouette that looked significantly more substantial than his own, even though there didn’t seem to be a full reaction yet.
“What are you doing? This is why you came into the mansion in the first place, isn’t it?”
A shallow furrow appeared between Hong Seong-jun’s brows. His gaze, raking over the frozen Lee Haru, was probing—like a predator scrutinizing its prey. When he tilted his head as if trying to decipher an incomprehensible creature, Lee Haru’s mind raced in desperation.
So far, they only thought he was acting a little weird. They didn’t know someone else had taken over Lee Haru’s body. But that wouldn’t last much longer—Yu Je-hyun had already sarcastically asked if he was on drugs. At this rate, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out he’d been possessed.
‘What usually happens in novels when the main character gets found out?’
In the most recent one he’d read, the possessed person got dragged off by an exorcist and forcefully sent off to the afterlife. That’s why characters who were possessed tried their damnedest to avoid getting exposed.
‘And if I get exorcised here?’
He didn’t even need to think hard. The answer was obvious. He remembered what had happened just before he woke up in this world— The pain of every bone in his body being crushed had been unbearable. Even with a stroke of luck, he would’ve ended up paralyzed. And there was no guarantee he’d return to his original world after being exorcised.
Better to crawl through a dung heap than die and disappear.
Lee Haru quickly made a decision and lifted his trembling gaze. If he had to act crazy like he was really on something, so be it. First and foremost, he needed to escape this situation.
But Hong Seong-jun, now ominously unbuckled, reached out toward him. Lee Haru reflexively leaned his upper body back, but Hong Seong-jun grabbed his hair faster. Pain like his scalp being torn apart twisted his features.
“What’s this supposed to be, huh? Are you saying only the Team Leader is worth your time?”
A sharp gleam flickered across Hong Seong-jun’s dark blue eyes. The fragments of an unknown emotion clung like residue in that gaze, and it made the hairs on Lee Haru’s arms stand on end. He wanted to break free, but the difference in strength was overwhelming. Tears welled up at the corners of his eyes, and his jaw clenched involuntarily.
Then a strange image flashed through his mind—
“You’ve gotta suck it properly. That’s the only way I’ll keep pampering you.”
A man with a completely blacked-out face reached for him. His touch was just as aggressive as Hong Seong-jun’s.
Lee Haru couldn’t tell if the pain at his scalp was real or phantom. The memory was so vivid he couldn’t distinguish what was hallucination anymore.
Unlike the still-clothed Hong Seong-jun, that memory was a cascade of bare flesh. His jaw felt like it might dislocate. Something thick jammed all the way into his throat, cutting off his breath.
“……Ah.”
“Guide Lee Haru.”
Hong Seong-jun lightly tapped his cheek. The black of Lee Haru’s unfocused pupils trembled faintly.
“Khh—cough!”
“What the hell.”
Hong Seong-jun’s brow twitched as he watched Lee Haru suddenly cough up blood. Something was seriously wrong with him today.
That normally corpse-like pale face had been oddly flushed earlier, and now he looked half-insane. And the blood dripping down his chin—it wasn’t just a little.
“Don’t tell me this is a side effect.”
His heavy gaze scanned over the blood-soaked face. Lee Haru’s complexion was deathly pale. He was clearly in no condition to guide anyone.
As Lee Haru collapsed, Hong Seong-jun caught him in his arms, his expression narrowing.
“Fucking hassle.”
He laid the now-unconscious Haru on the bed. Then he pulled out a small vial from his inner pocket.
It was barely the length of two finger joints, filled with a luminous, bluish liquid that shimmered faintly.
Hong Seong-jun poured the liquid into his mouth, held it there, then—without hesitation—supported Lee Haru’s nape and pressed their lips together.
Even unconscious, Lee Haru’s throat moved restlessly, swallowing. A faint smile ghosted across his lips, which had previously been stiff and expressionless.
