By Zephyria 
“Are you going to go on another blind date with another woman? If you do, I’ll find out somehow just like this time and come looking for you… I’ll peek at you throughout the whole date… and I’ll be sad, imagining you looking at some cute grandson…”
“Alright. I won’t.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I’m the cutest, right?”
Kim Si-baek tried his best to pretend he didn’t hear Pi Min-hyeong, who was forced to listen to the conversation, mutter a curse: “Oh, fuck. This is driving me crazy.” In the past, when Tae-un acted like this in front of him, Pi Min-hyeong would have ignored it with familiarity, but since all his memories were gone, he seemed unable to adjust.
Kim Si-baek forgot the objective fact that even if Pi Min-hyeong remembered the past, a 5-to-14-year-old clinging to someone and a 35-year-old clinging to someone would never look the same.
Instead, as he agonized over how to boost Tae-un’s self-esteem by appealing to his cuteness…
“You looked cool in the suit, but you suit casual clothes well, too. With your hair down, you look like a college student. If we walk together, won’t people think you’re younger than me?”
…he threw out such a desperate remark, and Yang Eun-ho, unable to bear it any longer, sent a text to the person next to him.
[I thought Tae-un hyung was the problem when I only heard about it, but seeing it in person, I think that person is the bigger problem.]
Pi Min-hyeong expressed the essence of the situation clearly: that Tae-un was only rubbing off on him because there was someone willing to accept it.
Pi Min-hyeong:
[Yup]
Having recovered from the shock of the blind date, Tae-un more or less returned to his original self. Even so, Yang Eun-ho would have bet this month’s salary that eyewitness accounts had already been posted on the internet. He considered whether they should move to another location, but since Tae-un would be Tae-un wherever they went, he decided to just thicken his skin and push through.
After barely managing the surroundings, he exchanged greetings with Kim Si-baek.
〈Hyung. This problem is hard; can you help me with it?〉
Back in their school days, Kim Si-baek had been part of the athletic department and barely attended classes, let alone studied, so Tae-un was the child who would bring him high school math and make him break into a cold sweat. He wore glasses just as he had back then. He wondered if he still liked studying, but when he looked, Yang Eun-ho subtly avoided his gaze.
“….”
Having made him witness that side of Tae-un, he had nothing to say. Kim Si-baek groaned and pressed his hand to his head.
“Does your head hurt? Want me to blow on it to make it better?”
“It probably hurts because of you.”
“Shut up.”
Tae-un glared at Pi Min-hyeong and crunched the ice in his mouth, but the moment Kim Si-baek looked at him, he immediately played innocent. As Kim Si-baek looked around, trying to salvage the atmosphere and move on, something that had been bothering him for a while caught his eye.
“That black thing here, is it a tattoo?”
“Where?”
On the left side of Tae-un’s neck, there was a black tattoo that looked like spreading veins. Since he wore a shirt with the buttons fastened tightly to the neck, it wasn’t very visible normally, but now, wearing a round t-shirt under a baseball jacket, it stood out clearly.
As a human of Earth, Tae-un’s consciousness remained in the early 2000s. Since a tattoo had suddenly appeared on the body of a younger brother who was like family, it was only natural for various thoughts to cross his mind.
At first, he couldn’t even ask, worrying alone if there had been a period of rebellion and wandering. However, after hearing Director Noh’s trusting testimony, that didn’t seem to be the case.
Then, what was the boy thinking when he got this tattoo? Curious, he pressed his index finger firmly onto the tattoo.
“This tattoo.”
“Ah…♡”
“…?!”
A moan escaped. A moan, a moan, a moan. Not a moan of pain, but a sweet moan containing a certain erotic energy.
As Kim Si-baek’s face turned pale, Pi Min-hyeong’s mouth—which had been holding a candy instead of a cigarette—gaped open, Yang Eun-ho, who had been getting up to go to the restroom, flopped back down, and even Biyendwe, who had been completely turned away from Tae-un, turned back in horror, Tae-un’s neck flushed a light crimson.
“That’s my erogenous zone… Hyung, that’s too erotic… haa.”
At that moment, the system window updated.
[Quest 01. CLEAR]
[Congratulations on completing your first quest! Keep up this momentum moving forward. The reward for the quest is the joyful time spent with your younger brothers ^^]
…Joyful time? This?
Kim Si-baek felt like crying a little and covered his face with both hands. Due to this commotion, the tattoo on the neck was vaguely forgotten from his mind.
✽ ✽ ✽
It was a joyful time.
He entered the bathroom feeling like he wanted to hum a song. After spending time at the cafe, they had dinner together at a shabu-shabu restaurant that had received a good reaction from others. During that time, he saw him and felt him. Sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste—all five senses were fully filled with him. Because of that, he finally became complete.
Tae-un loved that. There was nothing else.
And he hoped the other felt the same.
Tae-un wanted to carve himself into Kim Si-baek. Whether he stayed on Earth or returned to mak slecht, wherever he was or whatever he did, he wanted him to remember the version of himself carved into him. Just as he had always been imprinted on his soul since the age of five.
For that, Tae-un could do anything.
“A tattoo, huh…”
Tae-un, about to take off his t-shirt, sneered at his reflection in the mirror. If it were a tattoo, I would have ripped it out skin and all, Hyung.
The black thing spreading like veins—the thing that not only Kim Si-baek but everyone who saw it thought was a tattoo—dug deep past the nape of the neck, into the skin hidden inside the collar.
As he stroked the ‘tattoo’ on his neck, he found the sensation displeasing and looked down at his hand. He didn’t want something like this; he wanted to touch, see, lick, and feel Kim Si-baek.
There was nothing else.
Tae-un was enduring everything solely for that.
Apostles, grand warriors, and the gods who protect them can be said to be in a mutually beneficial relationship. A god can spread their divinity through apostles and grand warriors, and apostles and grand warriors cultivate divine power by sharing the faith offered to the god.
Because they are deeply bonded, if the god manifests as an avatar and stays in close proximity, they can read a certain level of surface psychology. Not only that, but they occasionally glimpse the mental landscape that reveals itself unconsciously—that is, parts of dreams.
In the ancient times when light and darkness were open, the lineage of gods began with the creator gods, Heegu and Changje, who defeated chaos and fashioned mak slecht. Among them, Biyendwe, the god of death and beauty, was a fourth-generation god and was young and frail.
Because the previous god of the netherworld had been murdered by chaos, the young gods of the fourth generation had to descend to the netherworld. Since the twin sisters of death and rest, who descended together, ruled the netherworld, Biyendwe had almost no role as a god of the netherworld.
For the young god, whose very name was barely known to humans, Kim Si-baek was the first human he had communed with among those who received his protection. Everything was a new experience, and he was grateful, knowing that if it hadn’t been for Kim Si-baek, he wouldn’t have been able to increase his divinity.
Furthermore, because of that, while it was highly likely that the reason he fell into an unfamiliar world was because of Kim Si-baek, he did not resent him. Even now, weakened by a lack of divinity, he felt an emotion similar to nostalgia, as if he had returned to the version of himself from when he first met him.
In conclusion, Biyendwe liked Kim Si-baek very much.
‘The child Si-baek dreamed of must be his biological brother and that man, Tae-un.’
Biyendwe recalled old memories while preening the feathers of his avatar’s form on the chest of Kim Si-baek, who lay on the bed lost in deep thought.
Through Kim Si-baek, Biyendwe realized that human dreams are truly diverse, colorful, and infinite. Dreams occasionally became mirrors reflecting the past, and the people most frequently reflected in that past were the biological brother who had died and Tae-un.
Today, too, he dreamed of his biological brother. A dream of a small, expressionless child calling out, ‘Hyung-ah.’
The dreams of the biological brother began to occur more frequently after returning to Earth. Kim Si-baek did not reveal his distress and swallowed it alone, but there was no way Biyendwe wouldn’t have noticed. He was deeply worried, but since it wasn’t a wound that could be eased by his consolation, he had no choice but to watch over him.
〈It was all because of me. That child had no one but me, only me, and yet I couldn’t protect him. I let him go.〉
Once, after waking from a nightmare of his biological brother, Kim Si-baek had told a long story while struggling with a pain that felt as if his internal organs were being torn apart alive.
He had said that when he realized he had lost his brother, he had decided to die.
〈…The person who saved me then was Un.〉