“…Uh… the test results are in.”
Nabin felt as though his mind had gone utterly blank, swallowed in darkness. He remembered—he had walked alone toward death in that empty mansion. Calmly, step by step, as if carrying out a ritual already prepared.
The last sight he had was droplets falling from a white ceiling. A cold touch brushed against the corner of his eye, and then his breath had stopped completely. As the darkness consumed him, he heard muffled voices and sobs—but they were meaningless echoes by then.
He had believed that, just as he once met his father in a dream, there might be happiness waiting after death. A happiness he could never hold in life. So, clutching his broken heart, he had closed his eyes.
He hoped to see again the father whose face was already fading from memory, and the mother who had struggled for breath before leaving first. Even if he returned to childhood and stayed in that moment forever, he would have felt only gratitude.
But the afterlife wasn’t what Nabin imagined. He hadn’t gone back to his childhood, but to the very moment when his nightmare began—drifting once again into a past he wanted to erase. It wasn’t a happy past. It was the place where his life had first been dragged into the mud.
Everything was the same. When his eyes met those of the startled staff member, Nabin could only curse God. His wide-open gaze quivered in shock, his face drying out in bleak despair as he realized he was being cast into the same hell all over again.
Was this punishment? Nabin had driven both his father and Kim Su-hyun to their deaths. He had pushed his last remaining family into the grave. In the end, he had even severed his own life. The blood on his hands could never be washed away.
But he had no strength left to endure. If this endless repetition of life was punishment… then Nabin wanted to return to nothingness instead. Even if it meant vanishing without leaving behind a soul, he would welcome it.
He was nothing but a curse on the world. Everyone tied to him had ended in misery. Perhaps he was fated to drag even himself into despair. In the end, he had chosen to close that weary book with his own hand.
And yet, the book he had forced shut was opening again. He had no illusions the story would play out any differently. Before meeting Kim Minsu outside the examination room, he had already decided to end this cruel life once more.
If he opened his eyes again after dying, then until the cycle ended, he swore he’d keep cutting it short. Whether what came after death could be called life, he didn’t know—but whatever it was, he no longer wanted any part of it.
Unless… unless it meant returning to the time before his father’s death.
Ever since being branded a D-rank Guide, Nabin’s life had been unbearable. Day after day, new wounds layered over ones that hadn’t even dried of blood yet. Browned scars beneath, new marks carved atop, until he couldn’t remember a single moment free of pain.
He had met good people, but they either left too soon or remained only as memories to ache for. It wasn’t that he didn’t long to see someone alive again—but for their sake, it would be better if they never met him at all.
Kim Minsu, waiting outside the door. The countless people who would straddle him in the illegal guiding dens. The S-rank Espers whose expressions he could never read. Nabin didn’t want to see any of them again.
Resolute, he scanned the room. His eyes landed on a pen with a sharp nib—the staffer held it, but it was close enough. It might not work in one strike, but if he stabbed his neck again and again, he could end his breath.
Slowly, carefully, he began moving his hand so the staffer wouldn’t notice. It was almost time for him to speak. “You’re a D-rank Guide.” The moment he heard those words, he would drive the nib in. His trembling hand tensed, ready to strike.
“…Measurement impossible.”
Nabin’s fingers froze at the unexpected words. That wasn’t what he remembered hearing.
Could it be that the afterlife flowed differently?
His dull brown eyes wavered, unfocused like the staffer’s own. Measurement impossible? Maybe the machine was broken.
But why… When he opened his eyes in this familiar scene, he had been certain the same life would repeat. If this was punishment, he had long resolved not to bow in submission, but to flee endlessly toward death.
“P-please wait just a moment!”
The flustered staffer shouted, eyes darting between Nabin and the tablet showing the results, before rushing out of the room. The heavy door slammed shut behind him, its echo rolling through the silence of the chamber.
Nabin stared blankly at the hand he had placed on the machine. Just like the altered result, there was something wrong with his body. His pale wrist bore scars—scars that shouldn’t exist at this point in time.
The raised, uneven marks were exactly where he had once drawn a blade across his skin in the bathtub. The cut traced across his veins, vivid under the fluorescent light, undeniable.
Back when he lived in the mansion, no matter how grievous his wounds, they always healed without leaving a mark. Even now, apart from skin cracked by the winter wind, his body was otherwise whole.
This was before Kim Minsu had dragged him into the guiding dens. Before that, he’d only picked up scratches working as a Miner—never the kind of scars that screamed of sexual violence.
Most of the wounds on his body hadn’t been self-inflicted. True, there were times he couldn’t endure and lashed out at himself, but most had been carved by others, wielding their violence like brushes against the blank canvas of his body.
But the slit across his wrist—that wound, at least, was his own. And now, it remained, stark and undeniable.
Tracing the scar with his fingertip, Nabin drew in a deep breath. Then he lifted his gaze, taking in the room around him.
At the time, the pressure of this place had crushed him so completely he hadn’t even looked around. Even after being rescued from the dens and returning to the Center for regular Guiding mana tests, the examinations had never taken place here.
Moments ago, when searching for something to end himself with, he had only looked nearby. Now he studied it properly. The stark white space resembled a hospital ward. With the staffer gone, only his own breath spread to fill the silence.
…And suddenly, a strange certainty gripped him. Perhaps this wasn’t the afterlife at all. Perhaps he had truly returned to that day, when everything had collapsed. The eerie conviction seeped through him.
Bang!
“There he is!”
Startled, Nabin’s head snapped toward the door that had burst open. The staffer who had tested him pointed at him, panting heavily. And he wasn’t alone. Beside him stood a face Nabin knew well.
“Pleasure to meet you. I’m Han Chul-yong, Director of the K Ability User Center.”
The man’s broad smile radiated warmth, but Nabin remembered too well the look in his eyes when they had first met.
It hadn’t been the gaze of an equal. From childhood, Nabin had grown under nothing but abuse, with no one to rely on. He had been forced to hone a survival instinct—whether someone’s hand reached out in true kindness, or only to use him.
The Director’s eyes were the same as ever. He didn’t see Nabin as a person, but as a useful tool. The only difference was that now, his demeanor was overly polite.
In his gaze and voice lingered a cheap hunger to win Nabin’s favor. Rather than take the proffered hand, Nabin lowered his eyes, withdrawing even his gaze from him.
In the past, the Director’s natural pressure had crushed Nabin’s chest like a weight. But now, he felt nothing. Even sensing the subtle coercion in the air, he remained unmoved.
Back then, he might have cowered before that force, trembling, clasping the Director’s hand with both of his own in submission. But now, all he felt was weary disgust at the cheapness of that stare.
“…Well, that’s awkward.”
At Nabin’s refusal, the Director gave a forced cough and withdrew his hand, which had hovered awkwardly in the air. The staffer beside him had gone pale. At the Center, only another S-rank Esper or Guide would dare treat the Director this way.
