# Chapter 65
“Huugh!”
His breath burst out as if he’d been pulled from the deep sea. Lee Hwan exhaled in shallow breaths while trying to calm his pounding heart.
Even after regaining consciousness, he couldn’t move for quite a while. He just lay there stupidly with his eyes closed. A dense lingering sensation was weighing his body down.
‘Anchovy cake…’
As he slowly chewed over the dream, he nearly burst into tears. Taking a deep breath, Lee Hwan vaguely recalled what had happened before he passed out.
His side had worsened since dawn, he got hurt, left during the meeting, and collapsed on the landing. Then Taesung came and confirmed his wound before removing his mask.
‘He must have seen my face.’
Naturally, there was no mask when he felt his face. So he’d been discovered after all. Lee Hwan was already getting a headache thinking about the vast ocean of troubles he would face.
When he applied strength to his upper body to sit up, he felt something tugging from his arm. Opening his eyes and turning his head, he saw an IV needle connected to his arm.
Simultaneously, he felt a dull pain throughout his body. He thought about how long it had been since he’d experienced such crazy muscle soreness.
Still, his overall condition was incomparably better than before he collapsed. The wound area wasn’t throbbing, and he didn’t feel feverish or nauseous. Somehow his clothes had been changed to more comfortable attire.
‘The size is a bit large though.’
Where was this place? It clearly wasn’t a hospital. It looked like someone’s home, but he’d never been in a room like this before. Whose house could this be?
The last person he’d seen before losing consciousness was Taesung. However, Lee Hwan thought there was no way he would have carried him to his own home.
After all, on the first day after his regression, he’d barged into the penthouse without knowing better and ended up coughing blood. Now that his face was exposed, he’d become a fusion of traitor-mask and crazy stalker. If it were Taesung, he should have pushed him away in disgust. Unlike in the dream.
What about the wound? How was it now? Lee Hwan suppressed his repeatedly surging breath at the thought of the dream and lifted his white t-shirt. Under the clothes, his abdomen was tightly wrapped in bandages. As he absently examined the wound area, he gently pressed the edge of the bandage.
“Ah, that hurts…”
It seemed not much time had passed since he’d received treatment. At most half a day? That was fortunate, if anything. At least he hadn’t woken up to find his hair had grown a bucketful.
The problem was that even a day or two could be an incredibly long time for someone else.
‘…Kang Dongha.’
If this wasn’t Kang Dongha’s house, that bastard would surely be going crazy. Lee Hwan had suddenly disappeared without any contact, and Taesung had followed him.
But this clearly wasn’t his place. Dongha wasn’t the type to bring potential threats to his own home.
“Haah…”
In that case, first he should let someone know he was alive before they start foaming at the mouth.
After a deep sigh, Lee Hwan decided to look around for his phone. Since he was tethered to the IV, he thoroughly searched with his eyes from the corner of the room to the foot of the bed to the table.
But his belongings were nowhere to be seen. No mask, no clothes, and…
‘They took it.’
The watch that had been on his wrist was gone too.
Instead, there was medicine on the bedside table. Lee Hwan figured it must be his since he was the only patient here, and he quickly grabbed it.
The IV bag connected to his line was nearly empty and flattened. It meant he was being cared for but had been alone for about an hour, and also that someone would return soon.
After pondering for a moment, Lee Hwan pressed his arm firmly and pulled out the needle. Blood welled up but was firmly stopped by his thumb.
‘I’ll just look for my phone, and if I can’t find it, I’ll bolt.’
The phone wasn’t under the bed, nor was it in the headboard or under the pillow when he felt around just in case. This wasn’t some room escape game, which meant he probably wouldn’t find it in this room.
In that case, there was no time to waste. Let’s first go out and figure out where this place is. Just as Lee Hwan quickly decided to escape even without his belongings and was about to leave the bed—
Thunk!
“…telling you. Anyway, worrying about everything… Oh, you’re awake?”
He ended up making eye contact with the person who entered holding a small medicine bottle.
“Uh… uhh.”
“What? Get back in.”
“Uh… uhh.”
Flustered by the unexpected situation, Lee Hwan fumbled before sitting back on the bed as instructed. A middle-aged man wearing sunglasses even indoors firmly closed the door and strode in.
‘Am I… done for?’
There was no time for attack or defense. Jade, whom he’d only heard about in experiment discussions, had walked in looking perfectly fine, and even if he used his abilities here, he’d be quickly subdued and berated in this condition.
Jade glanced at Lee Hwan once and then skillfully tore open a disposable syringe and stuck it into the medicine bottle cap.
“Sit. Think you won’t get caught going out looking like that?”
“What… what is this…”
“Mr. Kim Jeongshik, I heard you lived for weeks with monster tissue in your gut.”
“What… what tissue?”
Though it was quite embarrassing that he deliberately called him by that name mockingly despite now surely knowing it wasn’t his real name, Lee Hwan quickly forgot about it because the statement that followed was even more unexpected.
In response to Lee Hwan’s question, Jade pulled a ziplock bag from his pocket and shook it demonstratively. Inside was a severed tip of a plant monster’s stem that had turned bright red. It looked quite disgusting.
“The doctor said it barely decomposed and was probably alive in there for a while. Anyway, it’s impressive. Youth is good, youth.”
Did those words mean that the tip of a plant monster stem had been embedded in his body and had been alive all this time? As soon as Lee Hwan understood Jade’s sarcasm, he felt a chill run down his spine.
No wonder the wound wouldn’t heal. He’d been complaining about his body for a while, but he should be grateful it didn’t rot. Rather than being due to his youth, surviving with something like that in his side was probably because he was an Awakened.
As Lee Hwan sat with a blank expression, Jade quickly wiped his arm and unceremoniously jabbed the syringe into it. Then he firmly grabbed Lee Hwan, who had startled and tried to pull away.
“It’s an antibiotic. I was going to put it through the IV line that was already in, but you pulled it out.”
As Jade nodded toward the discarded IV needle, Lee Hwan somehow felt subdued and kept his mouth shut. Regardless, after checking his temperature with a laser thermometer on his forehead, Jade handed him an alcohol swab to press against his arm and said:
“You already stole the medicine? Take that as prescribed.”
When had he seen the empty bedside table? As Lee Hwan rustled in his pocket, Jade pulled back the blanket and nodded toward the bed again.
Lee Hwan lay back down, and as the man covered him with the blanket and disappeared, he stared at the ceiling, dumbfounded.
‘What… just happened?’
The last time he’d seen him, he thought Jade had been pointing a gun at his head. Now he was giving him medicine, injecting him, and even putting him in a proper bed.
What had happened during these months he’d been living as the masked man Kim Jeongshik that made Jade treat him so normally?
Moreover, his tone and attitude were so different from when he was in front of Kang Dongha that he seemed like a completely different person.
Come to think of it, when he was attacking him, he seemed similar to now. Even when going through Gates, although it was during combat and he wasn’t crossing his arms, he was watching from behind with exactly that vibe.
His body, which he thought was in decent condition, started to feel limp again once he lay in bed. Lee Hwan tried to understand the situation but couldn’t fight his heavy eyelids and ended up falling asleep.
‘…Is that really an antibiotic?’
Of course, he maintained his suspicion until the end.
When he woke up again, the surroundings were dark, suggesting it was evening. Lee Hwan wiped the sweat that had seeped onto the nape of his neck and got out of bed. The room still looked the same as before, without any of his belongings.
After repeatedly falling asleep and waking up, he felt disoriented. What was a dream and what was real? Had seeing Jade earlier been reality?
Lee Hwan traced the ceiling patterns with half-closed eyes and suddenly realized—if that was the case, then… Taesung must be here too.
‘Could this be Kang Taesung’s house?’
But he’d never seen a room like this in that guy’s house before. Ah, come to think of it, there had been a fire once. Then this room could be what it looked like before the fire.
Lee Hwan got out of bed with a dizzy head from sleeping too much. He was full of unanswered questions—why he was lying in Taesung’s house, whether Taesung had treated him, and more.
As always, the same question arose:
‘Why?’
He might understand if it were the Taesung from his dream, or from the past. He didn’t have many good memories with Taesung after his regression. As a result, he felt more awkward than grateful for the help from someone who had become a stranger. Something still felt uncomfortable, yet at the same time, the edges of his heart seemed to tingle.
Suddenly, Lee Hwan recalled his daydream again. The sadness and regret he felt knowing that his weekend with Taesung wasn’t real. And the fact that he missed Taesung more than he’d realized.
‘How much longer until the causality is complete?’
Lee Hwan still firmly believed that if he gathered all the pieces of causality and saved Taesung’s memories from this vicious skill, they could play around like old times again. That’s why, even in a relationship that could worsen at any time, he always felt disappointed and emotional about Taesung’s coldness.
‘If this really is Kang Taesung’s house… it’s been a long time.’
When he turned the handle, the dark wooden door opened smoothly without a sound from the hinges. Lee Hwan hesitantly stepped over the threshold and moved silently toward the living room.
