Park Taehan was left completely speechless. His face was the face of someone who had missed the moment to laugh it off. Cha Inhu’s expression was different from anything he had seen until now. The look of someone tired and put-upon had vanished, replaced by an oddly grave intensity.
But then, right in the very next moment —
“Do you know there are separate blankets for winter?”
Words came out with absolutely no connection to what had just been said.
“…What?”
“Do you know how many days you can go without washing before it starts to smell?”
“What are you even talking about.”
“Glasses, you know. Even if your vision hasn’t changed, you need to get a new size as you grow.”
Cha Inhu continued without giving him a moment to breathe.
Taken one by one, they were genuinely trivial things. Fragments of everyday life — the kind you might have heard somewhere once, the kind you had never thought to consider important.
But the more those words accumulated, the more tightly Park Taehan’s mouth pressed shut.
He hadn’t known. Not all of it. But most of it — he was genuinely hearing for the first time.
He had received the minimum amount of care at the orphanage. He hadn’t gone hungry, and he hadn’t missed school. He knew the capital of South Korea was Seoul, and that King Sejong had created Hangul.
So he had never thought of himself as someone who was deprived.
But in front of the things Cha Inhu was tossing out so casually, the fact that his common sense was leaking from all kinds of places became vividly apparent. Like cracks that had been invisible in a bowl he had believed to be perfectly fine, surfacing one by one.
“I didn’t find out any of it until I was an adult.”
At that, Cha Inhu said it plainly.
“My parents didn’t swap out the blankets when winter came, didn’t say a word even if I went days without washing, and didn’t buy me new glasses even as I grew. And even so, I thought that was normal.”
“…….”
“When I realized that the only thing my parents had taught me was deprivation… that was the first time I ever felt anger toward the parents who had neglected me.”
“…….”
“So I understand. How you’re feeling right now.”
The moment Cha Inhu’s last words fell, Park Taehan drew a deep breath before he even realized it.
His breathing suddenly became easier. It felt as if the nameless emotion that had been blocking the center of his chest had come loose like an old stopper and slipped free. His breath traveled all the way down deep into his lungs, and only then did it feel like air was actually getting in properly.
“…Is it strange that I don’t miss my parents?”
“Not at all.”
“Is it… okay to want distance from them?”
“Of course.”
“But they’re my parents.”
“They’re people who gave up on being your parents. So what’s to say you can’t give up on being their child?”
Park Taehan couldn’t say anything. He just looked at Cha Inhu. Like someone who had been flailing in the water and was finally seeing the last rope thrown to pull them out.
Cha Inhu didn’t look away from that gaze.
“Parents are strangers too.”
The sentence was short. But it lodged itself strangely deep. The phrase that had been constricting Park Taehan for so long — but they’re still your parents — lost its hold and crumbled at that single line.
What followed moved faster than he had expected.
Park Taehan joined the Hunter Association under the condition that he would only receive training from Cha Inhu. It was an official procedure, and on the surface an unproblematic contract. Only Park Taehan knew what it meant underneath.
And the people who had claimed to be his parents were sent to a psychiatric facility in a distant province. The label attached to it was “protective custody,” and measures were taken to ensure they could never appear in front of Park Taehan again.
“I could have actually killed them.”
“…It’s fine. As long as they never show up in front of me again.”
After that conversation, Cha Inhu never mentioned Park Taehan’s parents again. Instead, when spring ended and winter came, he left a thick padded blanket at Park Taehan’s place.
Park Taehan came to a complete stop and cut off the memory of the past in one clean stroke. What mattered right now wasn’t the first time he had met Cha Inhu, nor the choice he had made back then.
His gaze lifted naturally.
A short distance away, a faint shadow wavered at the second-floor window of the pension. A form dimly visible through the curtain. The moment he thought of the person it belonged to, the irritation that had settled came surging back.
“Damn it.”
A short curse slipped out low.
Cha Inhu had always been like that. A face indifferent to everything, an expression perpetually weighed down with exhaustion. There were moments he looked as if he were always rushing, chased by something — and then in other moments, he looked hollow, like someone who had already set down everything in the world.
Park Taehan pushed his hair back roughly. The strands scattered through his fingers and fell out of place almost immediately. A sigh caught in his throat but never made it out.
In the end, his feet turned back toward where Cha Inhu was. Right now, he didn’t want to be even a little distance away from him.
But the closer he got to the pension, the more off the air felt. It wasn’t the wind, it wasn’t the rustle of leaves — it was the layered collision of human voices, a noise that carried the texture of a commotion. Under ordinary circumstances he would have ignored it and walked on, but not now.
His heart reacted first.
Could something have happened to Cha Inhu.
Before the thought had even finished forming, Park Taehan picked up speed. The sound of gravel crunching erupted roughly underfoot. At the door he practically threw himself inside.
And the scene that greeted him was nothing like what he’d expected. Cha Inhu wasn’t the center of the commotion. The two people standing face to face in the middle of the living room were Seo Yungyeom and Yu Segwon.
“You realize what you’re saying is insane, right?”
Seo Yungyeom’s voice was pitched noticeably higher than usual. A tone completely unlike him — someone who kept an extreme rein on showing emotion. His brows were drawn hard together, and the hand at his side was trembling faintly, clenched in a fist.
“Inhu is a patient, not a criminal.”
He drew a breath, then pressed out each word one by one.
“Do you genuinely not know what it means to say you’re going to confine a patient?”
The air pulled taut.
Yu Segwon, on the receiving end of that question, was remarkably unruffled.
“I know.”
He nodded without any change in expression. His reaction was as calm as if someone had asked him about the weather. The coffee cup in one hand was already more than half empty. He brought the cup to his lips and slowly took one more sip of what remained.
Even as the cup came back down, his gaze didn’t waver.
“So what.”
Yu Segwon set the cup down and added.
“Is there a problem?”
“The fact that you don’t think there’s a problem is what’s abnormal.”
Seo Yungyeom’s voice had a cold edge to it. Before the last word had even fully landed, the hand holding the sofa arm tightened.
Creak.
The edge of the sofa he was gripping crushed in on itself unattractively. The fabric twisted with a low grinding sound, but Seo Yungyeom didn’t seem to register it at all. If anything, it felt as though the sound was speaking his anger for him.
Yu Segwon watched that for a moment, then slowly shifted his gaze.
His eyes landed on Park Taehan, who had just stepped inside, then fell away again as naturally as if nothing had happened. But the words that followed were clearly directed at Park Taehan.
“I don’t know the reason, but Sensei is refusing treatment right now.”
“…….”
“If we begin treatment in earnest — do you think he’ll stay put here?”
When Yu Segwon’s words ended, a brief silence fell over the living room. The air settled quietly and no one moved to speak first.
Park Taehan almost opened his mouth without thinking. No. But he barely managed to swallow the answer that had risen to the tip of his tongue.
Cha Inhu was absolutely not the kind of person to stay put.
When cornered, he endured. When blocked, he made openings. When the options disappeared, he broke the options themselves. The tighter you held, the further he slipped away, and the more you tried to control him, the more unpredictably he moved.
That was why even the S-ranks gathered here couldn’t beat Cha Inhu when it came to sheer stubbornness alone.
And precisely because of that, they had trusted him and followed him. Because it had always been that way.
Cha Inhu’s stubbornness had always left results behind. The people who had survived at the end of choices that looked reckless, and the world that hadn’t crumbled — they remained as proof of it. Countless battlefields had shown that fact over and over again.
If that stubbornness hadn’t existed, the world as it stood now wouldn’t exist either.
The problem was simply that right now, that same stubbornness was pushing Cha Inhu himself toward the most dangerous place.
“So you’re going to confine a person? Why? Might as well say you’ll shackle him too.”
“If necessary.”
Yu Segwon answered without hesitation. A composed tone. Not stating a possibility, not issuing a threat. The voice of someone who had already reached a conclusion.
At that short answer, a past conversation flickered through Park Taehan’s mind.
Words exchanged with Cha Inhu at his house.
Cutting off choices, sealing escape routes, pushing all the way to the end even knowing the other person would hate it.
Yu Segwon was far too similar to Park Taehan.
As if he already knew that, Yu Segwon’s gaze shifted back to Park Taehan. He didn’t ask, didn’t confirm. It was simply a look that said — what do you think.
Park Taehan didn’t look away. Instead, he took one step toward Yu Segwon.
It was an extremely subtle shift in distance. But that one step was a clear statement of intent. Agreement with Yu Segwon’s judgment. Or at the very least — understanding of it.
“Ha.”
Seo Yungyeom, watching that, let out a hollow laugh. Too rough to really call laughter. It seemed like the feeling of pure disbelief had just spilled straight out of him.
“Neither of you are normal.”
Seo Yungyeom’s words landed in the room. It was a reproach, but at the same time it was close to resignation.
Yu Segwon, without turning his head, shot back evenly.
“Isn’t it more strange to be capable of staying normal right now.”
No rebuttal came. Seo Yungyeom pressed his hand to his forehead as if he had a headache.
“He can barely move as it is.”
“I know.”
“We don’t even know how much longer he’ll be able to move at all.”
“Yeah.”
“And… you want to take away even that little freedom?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re both out of your minds.”
