By Zephyria 
But soon, he was brought back to reality.
……No. That wasn’t it. It had just been a delusion. He could never quite get used to the aching pain that surged every time he stayed by the man’s side.
The man remained utterly still. The image of his face—the way he would have listened to Jiha’s whining with a smiling expression and played along—flickered before his eyes, making his eyelids sting with tears again.
Yoo Jiha rubbed his eyes harshly with his sleeve. He couldn’t afford to waste even a single second of the time he spent taking him in just because of something like tears. In his heart, he wanted to enter the temporary isolation room directly rather than using a screen and a microphone, but the interior was an environment where an ordinary human could not survive.
Jeil Heon’s face on the display remained unchanged, as if completely unresponsive to external stimuli. Nevertheless, Yoo Jiha visited him every single day. The researchers he encountered were clearly pitying him for clinging to a hopeless cause, but he didn’t care.
Even in Jeil Heon’s absence, traces of him were embedded throughout Pilgyeongdang. When he stood alone in the middle of the quiet annex, a gentle voice calling “Jiha” would drift in. Knowing it was an illusion, he would turn around with joy, only to be met by empty air.
“……I wish you’d at least come out as a living spirit. I heard people in comas sometimes do that.”
Even as he murmured these nonsensical complaints aloud, the hollow silence pressing down on his surroundings did not vanish. If not for Gong Ran-sa, he truly would not have been able to endure this stillness where only silence settled.
Yoo Jiha turned up the volume of the TV, feeling a depressing sense of solitude he had never experienced while waiting alone for the man to return from an outing. Even with the loud noise of the TV echoing, Pilgyeongdang remained infinitely quiet.
To manage the anxiety that surged like a tidal wave whenever he was alone, Yoo Jiha leafed through Lee Yeo-jin’s photos and belongings. Those letters were tucked behind a book with long-faded pages.
To my dear friend Suk-ja.
The beginning of the letter he pulled from the envelope started like that. It seemed Kang Suk-young had accidentally handed it to him by mistake. He intended to organize the letters and return them tomorrow, but words that were too significant to ignore caught his eye.
I know well what you are worried about. But wouldn’t a Bearer like me and Hyeon-woo, who might be half-human, half-anomaly, make a good pair? Perhaps we, who are not perfect as humans alone, can only be whole humans when together. Besides, Hyeon-woo has very good eyes. Since there isn’t a single name he cannot read, wouldn’t he be helpful to the company someday?
Names.
Kang Suk-young seemed to have dismissed this as trivial, as there was no mention of it in the following letters, but the sentence ‘Nam Hyeon-woo read the names’ clung stubbornly to Yoo Jiha’s mind. Because he, too, had been able to read names for a brief moment.
……Could that power have been inherited from Nam Hyeon-woo?
If he could see the names once more, just as he had before, perhaps he could bring him back. The fact that a serial killer’s blood flowed through his veins still made his spine shiver, but as long as he could recover Jeil Heon, he was willing to take anything—not just the power derived from Nam Hyeon-woo, but something even worse.
He repeatedly recalled the sensation of reading the Aberration’s name in the Great Blazing Hell Painting of the Olle Trail. He stepped out into the inner house and looked at Gong Ran-sa while talking to her, but her name did not come to him. ……Was the method wrong?
He searched for information regarding names in the database and sounded out Kang Suk-young and other Agents, but he found no special meaning in the word ‘name.’
It was a day like any other, returning from a fruitless trip to the peak of Bukhansan. He had fallen while descending, bruising his knee, and his phone had died because he forgot to bring a power bank. It was a day of terrible luck, making his mood even lower.
There were truly only a few days left until the date of enshrinement. With each passing day, it felt as agonizing as having strips of flesh torn away.
“I’m home…….”
Crossing the main gate with trudging steps, Yoo Jiha rubbed his eyes repeatedly, wondering if he was seeing things. He saw a beautiful man sitting side-by-side with Gong Ran-sa on the wooden veranda, eating Shine Muscat grapes.
“Mae, Mae-gu!”
「I kept trying to contact you, why was your phone off……!」
“The battery died—no, you really are Mae-gu!”
「Have you come, little brother?」
“Hyung!”
Who cares if he’s a Hyung. He could even call him Darling.
Gong Ran-sa slapped the arm of Mae-gu, who flinched despite having told him to be called Hyung.
「Didn’t I tell you not to say such frivolous things to a child who is already lacking energy?」
「Aigoo, I get it. Honestly, your hand is really stinging.」
Mae-gu waved his folding fan back and forth with a reluctant expression.
「I heard you were looking for me. Well, you’ve likely already heard that the Aberration mixed into your little brother is actually my sister, right? How can you be so sure that the Aberration is your brother and not my sister, and thus attempt to bring him back?」
Yoo Jiha had heard that Bearers who became Aberrations often had their egos shaken by the Essence of the Aberration mixed within them. In extreme cases, the ego could even collapse.
However, he had never worried about this issue.
“He’ll never lose to an anomaly.”
There was no way Jeil Heon’s ego would waver. Hadn’t he remained whole even while being fused with the Blind Eater for seventeen years?
Some might consider this a childish thought, ignorant of the reality of contamination caused by anomalies. But Yoo Jiha believed in him. He believed in the man who, despite losing twenty-two years of his life for Jiha’s sake and crossing the Critical Point, still wished to be human.
Mae-gu let out a hollow laugh at the vivid conviction.
「It’s a shame for me, but you are right. My sister, who is nothing more than a fragment of a delusion, will not be able to overcome your brother’s ego. The version of her that became a full Aberration may have already scattered.」
“But you still wanted him to become an Aberration?”
「Think of it as something similar to a heart transplant.」
If it was a wish for his sister’s traces to continue in that way, it wasn’t an emotion he couldn’t understand. More importantly, Mae-gu, who must have heard about his situation, was continuing the conversation instead of giving an immediate refusal. His reason told him not to harbor premature expectations, but his heart began to thumping.
「Let me ask one more thing. This happened because of the Ten Thousand Waves Flute; do you not resent the Vengeful Spirits bound to the flute?」
Yoo Jiha went blank for a moment. Knowing he was destined to be a Sealed One, he hadn’t had the leisure to dwell on it due to the events that followed.
But without needing to think deeply, Mae-gu was right. If the Vengeful Spirits of the Ten Thousand Waves Flute hadn’t targeted him, he would be living as an ordinary twenty-six-year-old Nam Jiha by now. Perhaps feeling embarrassed by photos of himself dressed as a girl when he was young.
That his biological mother loved him was a truth no one could deny. Nam Jiha would have been sufficiently happy, Lee Yeo-jin and Nam Soon-ho would not have been murdered in such a manner, and Jeil Heon would have aged normally. ……And he would have never known his current father and mother, his sister, his family, or their love.
Yoo Jiha slowly traced through his inner self and answered Mae-gu.
“My deceased mother and grandmother might have felt differently than I do, but I can’t fully fathom their emotions. It’s hard to express my own feelings accurately, but…… it’s not resentment. Definitely not.”
Life as Yoo Jiha hadn’t been entirely joyful. The cold treatment from his grandmother, which had only recently begun to heal, had been a trauma that oozed bitter fluid until not long ago, and whenever the reality of being an adoptee hit him, he felt a loneliness that chilled him to the bone.
However, Yoo Jiha knew a love greater than that. His father, who had resolutely left home and severed ties with the grandmother; his mother, who did not turn away from a child crying in the market; and his sister, who bickered with him but would roll up her sleeves the moment he had a problem—all of that was love.
Furthermore, as he came to understand his grandmother, he felt he had become a bit more mature as a human. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. But one thing was certain. Yoo Jiha was as happy as Nam Jiha would have been.
The person who made him certain of that love was Jeil Heon. The person who allowed him to understand his grandmother was also Jeil Heon. The relationship Yoo Jiha had forged with Jeil Heon was something Nam Jiha could never have achieved.
“And I promised my grandmother that I would continue to be happy in the future. I don’t want to resent anyone while dwelling on an inevitable past.”
As the small but unwavering voice softly lingered in the front yard of Pilgyeongdang, Mae-gu’s face somehow turned into a sour grimace, while Gong Ran-sa wore a rare, bright smile.