# Chapter 139
## Clockwork
“Huff, huh…”
When he woke up, he was gasping for breath. Lee Hwan’s hands trembled as he couldn’t even guess the situation, until he realized he was being held by someone.
“Haa… haa…”
His face was completely wet. What was beneath his nose and mouth was certainly blood, but what had soaked his cheeks?
Only after diluted blood dripped onto the clothes in front of him did Lee Hwan realize it was tears.
Perhaps due to his suddenly changed breathing, the arms holding his back gripped his shoulders and slightly pulled him away. Unlike in the hallucination, a face with healthy color carefully examined him.
“…mountain… consciousness… returning?”
His figure appeared to waver under the shattered sunlight.
“How long… have I…”
Buried in the memory shown by the piece of causality, his reason couldn’t easily return. Though his hearing was clearly fine, he couldn’t understand what Taesung was saying.
Lee Hwan tried to ask how long he’d been like this but his head spun, and he ended up burying his face back into Taesung’s chest. The sound of a healthy heartbeat transmitted from where they touched.
Thanks to that, he could barely think.
Just moments ago, Jade had saved Taesung who was about to get hurt. With that, some condition was met and Lee Hwan found a piece of causality. He saw the memory it held, the scene of Taesung dying.
His face stung as if touched by the tears he had shed. The image of Taesung being pierced by long claws was still vivid.
“Huh, hoo…”
Even if everything worked out well and he lived a long time together with Taesung, this memory would haunt him forever. It would come back suddenly on some perfectly peaceful day, bringing anxiety. It was that difficult an experience to accept.
Yet even that future of living with unspoken pain was close to an ideal from his current perspective. Because survival itself had become uncertain.
Lee Hwan could newly realize how much his plan had gone awry.
“Sl… …slowly…”
Taesung’s voice came intermittently to his ears. Lee Hwan tried to listen to what he was saying while wiping away the blood that kept flowing down.
“Khurluk, kugh…!”
But he choked in the middle, spat out a large amount of blood, and then his ears began to ring. Taesung’s voice faded again into the tinnitus.
What was he trying to say? Was he asking why he suddenly collapsed? Regression was always a difficult subject to talk about. He didn’t know how much he could say, and even if he did, Taesung wouldn’t believe him.
How many times had he secretly sworn that once Taesung’s memories returned, he wouldn’t let him off?
‘…!’
In that moment, Lee Hwan realized he had returned after seeing the memory of the final piece.
‘Causality…’
The shattered causality had all gathered in one place.
Belatedly, it was as if a bang sounded in his head. His heart fluttered like a bird. Lee Hwan struggled to gather his hazy consciousness and recalled the description of the skill he had never forgotten even in his dreams.
‘The skill operates using the memory of a co-regressor as components, and is returned after completing the lost causality…’
It meant that after gathering the pieces and completing causality, Taesung’s memory—which he had been waiting for so desperately—would return.
The skill had always treated him like shit, but it had never lied. It had actually regressed him when he was facing death, and had also brought Taesung to the past, albeit in an incomplete state.
Lee Hwan’s body shook violently as if convulsing, and he suddenly pushed Taesung away. Then he pulled his clothes back, looking at his face. He examined the look in his eyes.
Dark, black eyes that didn’t understand what was happening. There was concern and confusion deeply etched in them, but he didn’t seem to remember the time before the regression. It wasn’t that gaze from back then, when he would look at Lee Hwan and sunshine would spread.
‘Why…?’
Only then did Lee Hwan discover several notification windows overlapping at the edge of his vision that he hadn’t checked.
[You have discovered the final piece of causality.]
[A change in the skill has been detected.]
[…]
[…]
[…]
[Causality is being restored.]
[□h 2□m □1s]
[3h □□m □9s]
[3h □7m 08s]
Lee Hwan took a deep breath.
‘3 hours… 27 minutes…?’
There had been a broken image from the moment they were called “pieces,” but he never imagined he would have to actually put them back together. The numbers, seemingly indicating the time left until restoration, appeared and disappeared unstably, gradually decreasing by 1 second at a time.
Still, it was fortunate that there were no strange conditions imposed for restoration. If his understanding was correct, Taesung’s memory would return after about 3 hours had passed.
‘Finally…’
Recalling how Taesung had hidden his injuries until the very end to avoid worrying him, Lee Hwan felt tears welling up again.
His head kept spinning. Only now coming to his senses and feeling something wrong with his condition, Lee Hwan rolled his eyes aimlessly. Not knowing what to do with his wavering vision, he could only bite his lips.
At that moment, Taesung suddenly grabbed his head firmly, fixing his gaze on him.
“…?”
Before the surprised Lee Hwan could respond, he shouted in a loud voice.
“Breathe. Slowly!”
Perhaps because of his decisively cut-off tone, his words, which had been buried all along, were finally heard. Lee Hwan realized with a start. He was currently breathing roughly.
“That’s it. Like that. Slowly.”
Seeing that Lee Hwan had understood his words, Taesung’s voice softened considerably. Only when his fast and irregular breathing gradually subsided did Taesung relax his grip. Lee Hwan stared at the black eyes watching him and regulated his breathing as if entranced.
No wonder he kept feeling dizzy and stuffy. He hadn’t realized he was hyperventilating from the shock. His mouth was completely dry from how long he had been like that.
“Slowly…”
Taesung murmured, watching Lee Hwan’s breathing. Was it because he had just seen the final memory? Taesung’s voice, which had been consistently cold, somehow sounded gentle like before. Lee Hwan’s heaving chest gradually calmed.
Lee Hwan tightly closed his eyes, then opened them and asked in a fairly calm voice.
“Haa… how, how… how long has it been?”
Now that his reason had returned, that was what he was most curious about. What had happened after he was pulled into the causality memory? The scenery around him, which he checked after regaining consciousness, had changed so much. As if they had moved quite a distance while he was collapsed.
He only prayed that he hadn’t been asleep for too long and become a burden. That his brief absence hadn’t brought danger to Taesung and Jade. One tragedy was enough.
Seeing his anxious look, Taesung’s hand brushed Lee Hwan’s damp forehead once. As his large hand grazed his cheek and rested on his shoulder, a hot heat was felt on his body that had grown cold from tension.
“About 30 minutes. Is your mind a bit clearer now?”
“Yes, now, now a little… what?”
He had expected 5 minutes at most, but the time he had been collapsed was not short.
Lee Hwan inhaled in surprise. Until now, whenever he returned from seeing a causality memory, almost no time had passed. Though he hadn’t always checked the time, that was generally the case.
If not, he would have been caught and suffered terribly when he went down to the basement of Building D long ago.
Why had such a long time passed this time? Was it different from other times because it was the final piece? Or had he perhaps fainted again after peeking at all the memories?
‘…’
All sorts of thoughts jumbled his mind. Though he nodded his head for now, conscious of Taesung, his body’s trembling wouldn’t stop. Lee Hwan barely wiped his wet face and asked in succession.
“Then, what happened… haa, during that time? Did we successfully shake off those guys? What about Praxis? And Jade?”
“Slowly. Ask one by one.”
“The situation. I mean the situation.”
The last thing he had seen was, for some reason, the killed kingfisher and Jade saving Taesung. Opening his eyes to find himself alone with Taesung on an unfamiliar mountain path made him uneasy.
“First… you suddenly collapsed, and since it seemed impossible to capture and interrogate a new guy, we evacuated the area first.”
Certainly, right before finding the piece, Taesung had burned all the ambushing enemies at once. So they could have fled immediately without wasting more time.
“But during the escape, you suddenly opened your eyes and then fainted again. You were having a nosebleed, so I wondered if you might have injured your head during the battle…”
“That was…”
His guess was correct. It seemed he had really lost consciousness again after waking up from seeing the past memory. Lee Hwan inwardly expressed condolences to Taesung, who must have struggled quite a bit carrying his limp body over a long distance.
“Jade said there are times like that and to just leave you alone. He said to just make sure the blood didn’t flow back.”
“Ah.”
Come to think of it, there was a time when he had suddenly gotten a nosebleed in front of Jade. When he tried to explain about the monster wave. At that time, Lee Hwan had bled so much that he had mistakenly thought Kang Dongha had been hit by Jade.
Being quick-witted, Jade must have thought it was a similar situation, even if he didn’t know the details.
“Based on the circumstances, I thought Praxis might have betrayed us, but if they were that kind of organization, they wouldn’t have been exposing the injustices committed by major powers.”
“Then indeed…”
“Either information leaked from somewhere in their upper ranks, or it was an individual’s deviation.”
“The new contact who was hastily assigned must be the problem.”
“I think so too. It doesn’t seem like a place so sloppy that secrets leak easily.”
The situation was getting worse and worse. The moment the kingfisher was killed, it was practically the same as losing a safe way to contact them.
If the bridge between Praxis and Lee Hwan had betrayed them, even the fact that the situation here had fallen apart would be reported belatedly.
Lee Hwan suppressed the anger welling up and wiped his face with his sleeve. He thought his face would be covered in blood since he had been bleeding even while collapsed, but unexpectedly, apart from a little blood flowing under his nose and mouth, it was all tears.
“Wipe with this.”
Taesung held out a towel. Judging by the red mark in one corner, it seemed he had wiped him directly while he was unconscious.
“Where is Jade?”
Lee Hwan asked in a nasally, blocked voice as he pressed his nose. Not only because he was worried about him, but also because Jade had now become an indispensable existence for their future plans.
“Since we needed to disperse the pursuit, he’s setting up a diversion.”
Because of this, Lee Hwan felt that things were becoming increasingly tangled with Taesung’s answer.
