When had it started?
At some point, Cha-hyeon began to find himself in unfamiliar locations whenever he snapped back to awareness. It happened more than once. According to others, he had behaved completely normally during those times—but he couldn’t remember a single moment of them. His mind had simply gone blank.
A doctor had cautiously proposed a theory: it might be the result of chronic guiding deficiency—something he’d suffered from ever since he Awakened. The human brain, being fragile, sometimes took drastic measures to protect itself. It wasn’t uncommon for it to suppress, delete, or even rewrite memories to guard against trauma.
Perhaps Cha-hyeon’s brain had started registering the symptoms of guiding deficiency as actual pain—and in response, created memory gaps to cope. There was even a paper that cited mild amnesia as one of the early warning signs in Awakened who had endured long-term guiding deficiency and eventually went into rampage.
The doctor had recommended that he try receiving proper guiding. Just once.
But the path Cha-hyeon chose… was to keep living the way he always had.
If no one noticed the gaps in his memory, why bother fixing it? His body had long grown used to the effects of guiding deficiency. The symptoms didn’t scare him anymore.
No one knew his condition better than he did. He was managing just fine—nowhere near the point of rampage. Through years of experimentation, he’d found a stable balance using booster ampoules and radial guiding. He wasn’t about to let a few isolated incidents shake his resolve.
And besides, no one had ever called him out on it. No one tried to strike up friendly conversations at the site anyway, and when he acted like his usual self, people instinctively kept their distance. There was rarely a need for him to think on his feet.
Even so, finding himself face-to-face with Se-min at a cleared Gate site the moment he came to… that had caught him completely off guard.
“Baby. Why are you here? You need to go. Now. When the hell did he get here? Somewhere… in between?”
He’d tried to act natural, but for the first time, Cha-hyeon was hit with the realization that his condition could be a serious vulnerability.
Why had Se-min shown up at the site? Had he asked to be summoned? Had Cha-hyeon, in the middle of a blackout, thrown a tantrum demanding immediate guiding with his baby?
Shit. The thought that he might’ve behaved like that during one of his memory lapses was mortifying.
While he spiraled in his own doubts, something shifted in the air. His baby brother suddenly burst into tears and started speaking in a voice thick with emotion.
“You remember everything now, right? I was so worried. How much do you remember? Do you remember going into the Gate alone? When the Gate’s grade suddenly changed—I really thought you were going to die….”
“…But Hyung, do you know why you’re here? What happened while you were blacked out? No, wait—do you even remember what happened after you cleared that Special-Type Gate?”
A Special-Type Gate with a grade shift. A clear. Memory loss.
It all sounded too surreal to be true. And understandably so—his last memory, my last memory, had been…
“Do you remember what’s happened since then?”
And in that instant, everything he’d forgotten came rushing back with punishing force.
13:57:58.22.
Clear.
…A pitch-black void…
Clear Reward.
A Gate exit that opened not with its usual glow, but in solid black. And then—
“…Fucking lunatic. What the hell were you thinking, you asshole….”
Confronted with the flood of forgotten, shame-drenched memories, Cha-hyeon did the only thing he could—he ran. Maybe it wasn’t like him, but he ran.
Whether it was a blessing or a curse, those memories—possibly complete, possibly fragmented—had been buried deep like a clean cut.
…Time passed. Quite a bit of it. A lot had happened. Yet, true to his conviction, he never once went into rampage, not even without close-contact guiding.
And now, once again, Sung Cha-hyeon stood before the same situation.
All because of some Unclaimed Reward? Maybe. Maybe not. It might’ve been the truth, or a total lie—but…
It didn’t really matter anymore. His instincts told him that, in the end…
Either way.
**
“Hyung….”
For what had to be the umpteenth time, Se-min called out to him. “Hyung.” Again. But Cha-hyeon, entirely unfazed by Se-min’s anxious fidgeting behind him, simply hummed to himself and continued prepping ingredients. The sharp, steady rhythm of him slicing radish into neat slivers was cheerful, almost jaunty—but Se-min couldn’t stop muttering under his breath.
“Careful… please, just be careful….”
He knew his hyung could cook. But something about seeing him holding a knife sent chills down his spine—like watching a toddler teetering too close to the edge of a cliff.
Why had Cha-hyeon started cooking so suddenly, anyway? The answer was absurdly simple: just because. When Se-min asked how he’d been, Cha-hyeon had stared off in silence for a long moment, then said he felt like cooking. What was Se-min supposed to say to that?
At this point, he’d nearly given up trying to make sense of how his hyung’s brain worked. Being around him meant constantly hearing things that made no sense—and before long, it messed with your own head too.
Maybe that was why—even after realizing, just the day after the proposal, that Cha-hyeon might’ve lied to him—it didn’t hit him as hard as he expected. He just didn’t have the mental capacity to focus on that with his hyung acting like this right in front of him.
Honestly, the real problem was the Sung Cha-hyeons of the world. They weren’t just walking time bombs—they were worse.
As Se-min grumbled internally, he instinctively reached out when Cha-hyeon moved to turn on the gas stove.
“Hyung! Are you seriously going to use fire?!”
“Baby, why are you so nervous? You think I can’t handle something this basic?”
His voice sounded like the Cha-hyeon before the memory loss—comforting, even protective. But that faint, eerie light in his eyes made it hard to trust him. Se-min’s worry only deepened.
Thankfully, Cha-hyeon kept going like normal. He added the leftover beef and pre-sliced radish from the seaweed soup Se-min had made the day before and began stir-frying. It looked like he was making beef radish soup.
A man who preaches cosmic truths one minute, then boils radish soup the next—that was the future version of Sung Cha-hyeon.
Se-min blinked, eyes conflicted. Honestly, it felt more believable that this was all some elaborate dream.
“We should eat lunch. It’s been a while since we did something like this.”
His hyung smiled faintly and murmured like someone completely ordinary. And with that offhanded remark, something clicked inside Se-min. His dazed eyes suddenly sharpened with focus.
Been a while?
“Been a while? You mean, cooking for me? Or eating together?”
Cha-hyeon didn’t answer right away. He looked up into empty space, still smiling enigmatically, then tilted his head slowly to one side, then the other.
But Se-min had grown used to filtering through his hyung’s cryptic answers by now.
Come to think of it…
“Hi. …Been a while.”
“…Would’ve been nice if I’d realized it was a dream a little later.”
“Take care. It was good seeing your face again.”
At the time, those words hadn’t registered—but now they came back with a heavy thud. Cha-hyeon had spoken like someone seeing him again after a long absence.
Why?
The fog in his head began to clear. Could it be… that this version of his hyung wasn’t the same one from last time? That the Unclaimed Reward had brought him a version from the future—so he could figure out what had changed?
Se-min swallowed dryly and asked, as casually as he could:
“Why ‘been a while’? Did we fight or something?”
He couldn’t bring himself to say Did we break up? Even with everything that had happened, they’d been on the verge of submitting their marriage papers. He was afraid that asking outright would open a box he wasn’t ready to deal with.
“Ah…”
Cha-hyeon’s voice trailed off, his eyes shifting to the side. He seemed to consider his words, then finally shrugged with a small laugh.
“Fight? Us? Nah. That’d never happen.”
“Then why…?”
But Se-min’s next words were drowned out by the sharp sizzle of water hitting the hot pot. Chiiii—! The deafening hiss swallowed up Cha-hyeon’s answer.
Steam billowed up, cloaking his hyung’s face in a pale haze. He stared into the shimmering broth without flinching. Then, as if remembering something trivial, he murmured:
“Should’ve added garlic.”
Without a second glance at Se-min, he walked over to the fridge and began rummaging around. The fridge was nearly empty except for enough ingredients for two, but he still took his time.
And yet, that behavior only made Se-min’s suspicion grow.
If they had fought, he could’ve just said so. Why dodge the question?
As he watched Cha-hyeon rinse the garlic and set it on the cutting board, a dreadful thought slipped out.
“…Or did we break up?”
Clang! The knife, poised to trim the garlic stem, suddenly slipped. The blade clattered against the cutting board with a jarring metallic ring.
“……”
Still gripping the knife, Cha-hyeon stared down at the board in silence. A stunned breath parted Se-min’s lips.
…Seriously?
Did they really break up in the future?
No—hold on.
A terrifying thought suddenly struck him. The Cha-hyeon standing before him—the one summoned by the reward—hadn’t lost a single memory. This was a version of Sung Cha-hyeon with full, intact memories.
And could someone like that have ever truly been with him?
The answer came instantly, brutally clear: No.
He already knew it. If Cha-hyeon had remembered everything about him—everything they’d been through—there would’ve always been a wall they couldn’t cross.
In fact, it was almost ridiculous that he’d forgotten that.
Wasn’t that why he’d turned him down in the first place—because Cha-hyeon had lost all memories of him, and had nothing to regret?
But if Sung Cha-hyeon had never lost his memory—if every part of it remained intact—then he would have undoubtedly regretted ever falling into a relationship with Se-min.
And Sung Cha-hyeon wasn’t the type to do things he’d regret.
