“Hgh—! Hah… hahh—!”
His eyes snapped open.
The sharp, vivid sensation of a blade slicing through flesh and churning through his insides was still so real that bile rose in his throat and goosebumps crawled across his skin.
He couldn’t exactly claim to have lived a clean life without ever taking a hit, but being stabbed this deep, this many times — that was a first. He had felt the blood welling up from within and instinctively known it was the end of his life, yet somehow, here he was again — still alive.
He flailed his limbs and reached down to feel his side where the last, deepest blow had landed, finding it wrapped thickly in gauze and bandages.
Dripping with sweat, he barely managed to prop himself up and look around. It was a luxurious private room.
Click—
As he awkwardly tried to sit up, a nurse who had entered without knocking, wearing an exhausted expression, caught sight of him and came rushing over with a look of shock.
“You’re awake? Yoo Hee-young! Wait, just a moment — calm down, breathe deeply, I’m going to call your attending physician, so just stay there! Lie down! Calm down!”
The nurse, who seemed to have only stopped by briefly to change the IV bag, rattled off words in a panic, shaking the IV bag still in her hand. Fumbling about like someone who had only just started learning the job, she turned and sprinted out of the room.
Calm down yourself, lady…. And that’s not my name.
He thought about it for a moment, then felt the sting of his wounds and lay back down on the bed.
Well, I’m alive — isn’t that enough.
He raised the hand with the IV needle in it and rubbed roughly at the corner of his eye. It felt unusually soft and tender compared to normal, but what would he know, having just woken up. Must’ve gotten soft lying around after getting stabbed like that.
A pleasant breeze drifted in coolly through the gap in the large window. The weather was magnificent.
Having come back from the brink of death, everything in the world looked good. They say even rolling around in a dung heap is better than the afterlife — so lying in a top-class private hospital room, savoring the sweetness of life, what more was there to say.
He glanced up and stared quietly at the wide-open door and the IV stand. The fluid had already fully drained, the bag shrunken flat, and he could see blood being sucked backward up the tube connected to the back of his hand.
“Hah…….”
Lady… hurry up and get back here…. What are you doing to a patient who’s bled this much….
But he wasn’t angry. He, a man hot-tempered by nature and quick to blow up, being this merciful — quite something. Guess coming back from death’s door really does change a person.
In this mood, he felt like nothing could make him angry no matter what happened. He listened to the sound of hurried footsteps approaching from a distance and closed his eyes, feeling good.
***
People don’t change.
He was too exasperated to even laugh. He held his breath, feeling the anger rising inside him. Whether it was because he was lying down, the rough breaths made the blanket visibly heave.
What kind of useless doctor.
“So, Yoo Hee-young—”
“Damn it all, do you think it’s fine to keep getting the name wrong? That thing over there — go look at the patient chart again before you open your mouth.”
The frustration wrenched the dialect right out of him. He’d worked hard to suppress it, but using refined Seoul speech in the rough world he’d rolled around in was no easy feat, so whenever he got angry, this thick dialect slipped out.
The voice that finally burst out felt strangely thin and young, prompting him to clear his throat. No, honestly — scolding a doctor with a voice this reedy. His pride took a hit. That’s what lying flat does to you.
The doctor flustered, flipping back through the patient chart. After looking it over several times, his expression shifted subtly as he asked:
“Your name is… Yoo Hee-young. Isn’t it?”
“What… It’s Ryu Gwan-tae. What kind of doctor goes around with his head somewhere else?”
“Ah…. I apologize. There seems to have been a mistake on our end….”
The doctor at the front turned his eyes toward the several other doctors trailing behind him. Everyone hastily shuffled through their own papers, and the one standing furthest back ran out of the room.
Watching that, Gwan-tae exhaled loudly through his nose in displeasure, and a strange silence fell over the hospital room.
Haa…. What a state this hospital is in. Where even is this place?
He looked down irritably at the hospital gown he’d been put in. He was scowling, inwardly swearing he’d never set foot in this place again, when the young doctor came back panting and fumbled out:
“Th, that… The patient is confirmed to be Yoo Hee-young….”
“What are you on about.”
The people who heard the young doctor’s words looked flustered. The oldest doctor at the front pushed up his glasses and asked:
“Ahem…. Then, Ryu Gwan-tae. May I ask how old you are?”
“This year… let me think…. I haven’t kept track of my age in so long. Ah, forty—”
“Forty?”
People murmured among themselves.
“Forty… seven or eight, I think. Could be nine.”
Internally, he was wondering whether the doctor was even ten years older than him, yet he spoke to him without a shred of courtesy.
But since there hadn’t been many times in his life when he’d been particularly proper and polite, Gwan-tae looked at the murmuring people with an indifferent expression.
What, info got entered wrong somewhere? Honestly, kids these days, always cutting corners. Back in my day….
While Gwan-tae was mentally going through his worn-out old stories, the doctor took off his glasses under the pretense of cleaning them, rubbed them vigorously on his clothing, then turned to the side and murmured quietly:
“For now, everyone out — and put in a request for a psych consult.”
“Yes, yes. Professor.”
Even as the crowd shuffled out, Gwan-tae just nodded his head with an indifferent expression.
The doctor took one last long look at the fair, young, pretty face — someone who barely looked twenty — then left a remark that he’d return after confirming things, and closed the door.
After that, how much time passed. With the medication making him drowsy, he drifted in and out of sleep, until it was well past the afternoon.
Knock knock—
A polite knocking sound came, the door opened, and a group of people filed in — and among them, someone who didn’t look like a doctor but more like a corporate employee, which made Gwan-tae narrow his eyes.
Must be some massive error in their computer system…. Why are people in suits coming in here. He thought, but the abdomen that had been stabbed through throbbed painfully so he made no particular reaction and just lay still. The doctors hurriedly raised the bed to a slight incline.
“So, you said Ryu Gwan-tae?”
“Yeah.”
A different doctor from before flipped through the chart and asked. Then, seeming to quickly jot something down on paper, he started firing off questions.
“Your age… late forties, you said.”
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
“You have a bit of a regional dialect — but you were born in Seoul, correct?”
“Born in Seoul? I’m from Naju, South Jeolla Province. Grew up there until I was past twenty. More importantly, can’t you just look me up in the system? I’ll give you my ID number.”
He answered irritably, and the doctor flipped through the information on Hee-young that had been forwarded from the Center. Seoul, Yeonnam-dong. Born there. He circled it and asked:
“My apologies, but could you give me your ID number?”
Though he snapped at the question, he rattled off the ID number without hesitation, and the doctor hurriedly wrote it down and asked again:
“What is your occupation?”
“Ah, well…. Did some rough work.”
“Rough work, meaning….”
“Hard to say out loud. I’ve left it all behind now, so drop it.”
“I’d appreciate a precise answer…. The information you provide is protected by medical confidentiality, so you don’t need to worry about it being disclosed.”
The doctor kept prying and prying, and Gwan-tae, whose patience had finally worn through, let out a sharp, frustrated sigh.
“Hey, listen up! Come closer, I can barely hear you! Damn it, it’s not like I’ve got some infectious disease.”
“Ah…. I apologize.”
The doctor who had been standing at the foot of the bed meekly apologized and stepped closer — and the moment he did, Gwan-tae swiftly reached out, snatched the ballpoint pen from the doctor’s hand, grabbed him by the collar, and made a jabbing motion as if driving the pen into his neck. People let out screams of horror.
Ignoring the pain of his own wound, Gwan-tae jabbed a few more times playfully, lightly poking the soft skin with the pen, and gave a slight smirk.
“Yeah, did stuff like this. Didn’t anyone teach the good doctor not to mess with gang guys?”
Hee-young roughly let go of the doctor’s white coat and flicked the pen — thwack — onto the hospital room floor. The doctor, face drained of color, stumbled and fumbled to pick up the pen, then backed up far away and scrawled something urgently in the chart.
The Center employees who witnessed Gwan-tae — no, Hee-young’s — behavior went even paler than the doctor.
A gangster. A gang member — that’s what he was saying? They exchanged strange glances among themselves. What do we do? they mouthed wordlessly at each other. I don’t know, damn it…. came the silent reply.
A gangster — would anyone ever hear that word in their lifetime? They’d been told it existed a very long time ago, but the gangs that appeared only in old films and the like had been wiped out once Espers emerged and strong public authority was established. And that was decades ago. The appearance of a word nearly extinct to people left the employees feeling dizzy.
A long-awaited S-rank Guide. And what’s more — the news that a Guide with an exceptionally high matching rate to the Center’s resident problem S-rank Esper, Han Shin-yul, had appeared sent the entire Center into a frenzy.
Though he had been brought in unconscious from an unfortunate accident involving a stabbing and had remained unresponsive for a while, all the staff had been eagerly waiting for him to wake up.
After spending days in anxious anticipation, the news finally came that he had woken up — one employee had even cancelled their afternoon half-day off just to be there for this meeting — only to be immediately followed by word that the Guide’s mental state was abnormal.
Thinking it might be a slight delirium caused by a severe manifestation fever, they had rushed over, but the state of the Guide was worse than expected, and Han Shin-yul’s team members looked utterly miserable.
Oh damn, this is rough as hell…. Why is nothing easy with the Espers and Guides around here…. Even while they were raking their hands through their hair, the doctor’s questioning continued.
“Yes…. I, understand. Please refrain from violent behavior toward medical staff in the future…. So — how did you end up being stabbed?”
“Ah, that’s a long story too. Well, anyway — I was stabbed because I was completely blindsided by a young lord I’d been raising.”
“Young lord?”
“Well, I was picked up from the countryside in Naju and taken in by our Chairman’s youngest son — but his character was thoroughly rotten.”
Hee-young clicked his tongue in displeasure as if he’d completely forgotten what he’d just done with the pen, then glanced around the room as if suddenly remembering something.
“Ah, come to think of it — where’d my phone go? Damn it, Jun-shik’s going to be looking for me like crazy….”
The doctor watching Hee-young muttered internally — violent behavior, memory confusion, identity displacement…. — and scrawled down suspected diagnoses: schizophrenia, Reverse Intermetamorphosis (a type of delusional disorder), suspected, then below that jotted DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) and called out:
“Yoo Hee-young.”
“Oh for— I told you that’s not the name.”
“Do you ever feel as though someone is calling to you from inside your head, or sense another self within you, or feel as though something is speaking to you?”
Hee-young frowned at that. He starts talking about the phone and suddenly this nonsense.
“Why not just ask me if I see ghosts while you’re at it?”
“You don’t?”
“Would I?”
At the flippant answer, the doctor let out a deep sigh. He asked a few more questions just in case, but having confirmed a complete lack of insight, he crossed out the DID he’d written and considered the last remaining possibility, then looked over at the Center employees who were still secretly mouthing things to each other.
It’s possible that because of an unfortunate upbringing, he thinks going to a psychiatric facility would be better for him and is putting on an act.
If it’s an act, he might stop when he finds out his situation has improved — with that thought, he gestured for the Center staff to go ahead and inform him of the Guide manifestation and the treatment that awaited him, then stepped back. The employees hurried and flustered their way in front of Hee-young.
“Yoo Hee-young.”
“Damn it, so there’s another idiot who can’t remember three syllables. What is it, who are you people — you don’t look like doctors.”
“Are you aware that you have manifested as a Guide?”
“What Guide. I told you, I was a gangster.”
“You have manifested at S-rank, and your matched Esper is on standby — pardon?”
The employee’s mouth fell open stupidly wide. Watching that ridiculous expression, Hee-young muttered:
“What’s an Esper. A new drug? They said the surgery went well.”
“You don’t, you don’t know?”
“Would I know?”
No, but he couldn’t possibly not know…. The employee who was dumbly muttering to himself got smacked hard on the back of the head by another employee, who then forced a laugh and stumbled out:
“You might, you might not know! Of course!”
Though everyone was born into a world where it was mandatory to undergo a manifestation test alongside a health check-up every two years without exception — though it had long since become a national competency measured by the number of Espers and Guides — could someone really not know…?
Hee-young paid no mind to whether the employee’s lips were trembling, or whether the one who’d been smacked had faceplanted and wasn’t getting up — he just frowned, having no idea what they were going on about.
The flustered employee fumbled through a basic explanation of Espers and Guides, and Hee-young’s pretty face twisted in a bizarre expression. His usually gentle eyes went sharp and upturned, and an entirely different atmosphere came off him from his usual cocky swagger.
“What are you suddenly going on about?”
“Pardon?”
The employee who had begun with a basic rundown of the Esper-Guide relationship stumbled at Hee-young’s question. Did I, did I say something wrong? I hadn’t even been explaining for five minutes yet.
The two employees looked at each other. Did I say something wrong? I don’t know, damn it…. They mouthed at each other. Hee-young watched that blankly, then looked at the doctor.
“Are those two not insane?”
“Pardon?”
Said by the person who seems the most insane here.
“No, think about it logically.”
“Yes, yes….”
“Two people messing around together suddenly makes someone heal and use superpowers?”
“Pardon?”
