Chapter 104

Kwon Haeju vehemently refused to eat. Whenever he managed to force anything down, he restricted himself entirely to clear broths or the nutrient-dense liquid rations explicitly designed for rapid energy recovery inside dungeons.

Seated at the dining table, Nam Shin-hoo bit into a piece of potato from the braised jjimdak. The perfectly cooked root vegetable practically melted against the roof of his mouth.

“This is actually incredible for your first try,” Nam Shin-hoo praised.

“I am glad to hear that,” Kwon Haeju replied smoothly.

“Why don’t you join me? Just a little bit.” Extending his spoon, Nam Shin-hoo offered him the remaining half of the potato.

Kwon Haeju stared blankly at the gesture for a long moment before giving a dismissive shrug. “…I actually have an unavoidable engagement this afternoon. It is a dinner appointment, so eating beforehand would be quite inconvenient.”

It was an impossibly transparent lie. Nam Shin-hoo tilted his head, listening to a flimsy excuse that wouldn’t have fooled a toddler.

“An engagement? Will it take long?”

“No. I will return before it gets too late,” Kwon Haeju promised.

Frowning deeply, the younger man looked entirely reluctant to leave his self-imposed confinement; ever since their reunion, he had refused to step a single foot outside, relying strictly on delivery services for essential supplies and managing all guild affairs over the phone. However, an exceptionally urgent voice had bled through the receiver yesterday—it seemed a genuinely unavoidable crisis had finally dragged him out.

“Should I just wait here, then?” Nam Shin-hoo asked.

Silence stretched between them. Kwon Haeju’s expression plummeted, the artificial brightness in his eyes immediately clouding over. He looked ready to violently snap at any given second.

“Don’t worry about me and go,” Nam Shin-hoo offered casually. “I’ll just draw a bath and get some rest.”

“…I will be back very soon.”

The current Kwon Haeju was a live hand grenade with the pin already pulled. It was entirely impossible to predict what microscopic trigger would set off the inevitable explosion. Feigning complete ignorance of the man’s terrifying instability, Nam Shin-hoo calmly continued his meal. He couldn’t even taste whether the braised chicken was spicy or salty, his entire focus remaining firmly fixed on Kwon Haeju as the younger man donned his coat with a grimly darkened face.

The moment Kwon Haeju dragged his reluctant feet out the front door, Nam Shin-hoo was left utterly alone in the suffocatingly quiet house.

It was his first taste of freedom in days. Unburdened by the suffocating weight of obsessive observation and unspoken restrictions, he finally had room to think. He could easily exploit Kwon Haeju’s absence to scour the news broadcasts for crucial intelligence, or bypass the man entirely and contact Choi Kanghyeon immediately.

Gripping the television remote, he debated his options for a long moment before tossing the plastic device back onto the sofa.

Let’s just take a bath.

He decided to spend his time soaking in the hot water, exactly as he had promised. A mere three days was nowhere near enough time to soothe Kwon Haeju’s catastrophic paranoia.

I’ll wait exactly one week. If he hasn’t improved by then, I’ll find another way. Nam Shin-hoo mentally cemented the deadline. Compared to the four agonizing years Kwon Haeju had spent waiting for him, a single week was less than a blink of an eye.

***

The separate bathhouse annex remained exactly as impeccably preserved as the main house. Its elegant, traditional hanok-style wooden windows and the massive stone tub hadn’t changed a single fraction since the day he left.

A cascading waterfall of steaming water rapidly filled the enormous basin, while warm, golden sunlight filtered softly through the frosted glass, bathing the interior in a cozy glow. Letting the thick, rolling steam melt the accumulated tension from his weary muscles, Nam Shin-hoo peeled off his pajamas and folded them neatly. Since he wasn’t allowed outside anyway, he had spent the last few days constantly rotating through different sets of sleepwear. The set he had just removed was the exact same pair he had woken up in upon arriving at this gilded cage.

Nam Shin-hoo paused.

On the day of their reunion, Kwon Haeju had freely admitted to dressing him while he was completely unconscious from the paralytic sedatives. He had even stripped and changed his underwear. Upon waking, Nam Shin-hoo hadn’t felt a single speck of dried salt or grime clinging to his skin, despite having plunged into the freezing ocean and braved the harsh coastal winds.

While he was changing my clothes… he must have bathed me as well.

A delayed flush of heat rushed to his cheeks. He had been so utterly horrified by Kwon Haeju’s shattered mental state that the sheer intimacy of that realization had completely bypassed him.

Stepping before the vanity, Nam Shin-hoo scrutinized his naked reflection. Having skipped across four entire years, his physique hadn’t aged a single day; he possessed the exact same twenty-eight-year-old body he had died in. In stark contrast, Kwon Haeju had transformed drastically. It wasn’t just the shattered mentality and suffocatingly dark aura—his physical frame had completely matured. His shoulders had broadened into thick slabs of solid muscle, and he had sprouted even taller. Stripped of all remaining boyishness, his sharp, hardened features commanded a distinctly imposing, adult presence.

Placing his neatly folded clothes on a dry shelf out of the splash zone, Nam Shin-hoo slid the silver artifact off his finger and set it carefully on top of the fabric.

Come to think of it, he hadn’t felt a single spark of Kwon Haeju’s emotions transmit through the ring since his return. He could only gauge the man’s state by the artifact’s shifting colors. Furthermore, the secondary ability bound to Nam Shin-hoo’s ring was entirely dormant. The matched rings shared two core functions: displaying the partner’s status via color shifts and establishing an empathetic emotional link. However, they possessed distinct unique abilities. Kwon Haeju’s ring granted the user spatial teleportation to their partner’s exact coordinates, while Nam Shin-hoo’s ring actively allowed him to share his partner’s physical senses.

Kwon Haeju had clearly utilized his ring to tear open a spatial portal and teleport directly to the beach, yet Nam Shin-hoo hadn’t experienced a single flash of the younger man’s sensory input.

Is there a hidden activation requirement I missed? 

Considering it was an EX-Rank artifact, it likely harbored obscure restrictions or deeply hidden mechanisms he had yet to unravel.

Stripped bare of even his magical artifacts, Nam Shin-hoo slipped his lightened body into the scalding water. The brutal chill of the encroaching winter melted out of his bones. Goosebumps prickled across his exposed nape as thick, white steam billowed around him, suffocating the spacious room in a comforting fog, while his submerged fingertips flushed a bright, throbbing pink.

His chaotic thoughts, however, refused to quiet. Crushed beneath the weight of his chronic anxieties and a timeline he no longer understood, his heart remained unbearably heavy. Yet, for a few fleeting seconds, as the rippling, scalding water embraced his weary muscles, his mind finally went blessedly blank.

It felt as though he had retreated to an entirely different dimension.

“Haa…” A deep, thoroughly satisfied sigh slipped past his lips.

Massaging the knots from his tight shoulders, he rolled his stiff neck. As he surveyed the massive stone basin—easily large enough to comfortably accommodate half a dozen people—his gaze snagged on a specific corner. It was the exact spot Kwon Haeju used to claim. It was also the very spot where they had shared a profoundly flustering encounter, back when the younger man had sat there wrapped in nothing but a damp towel.

Thinking back on it, Kwon Haeju’s most drastic transformation lay elsewhere.

In the past, Kwon Haeju’s aggressively affectionate behavior had clearly been fueled by a potent, undeniable sexual desire for Nam Shin-hoo. But ever since his return, Kwon Haeju merely clung to him with the desperate, suffocating panic of a dying fish violently thrashing for water. Even when they shared the same bed, pressing their bodies together and holding deeply intimate conversations, that underlying carnal desire was completely absent. Kwon Haeju obsessed over him not as a lover, but as a literal lifeline—as if he had surrendered his very ability to breathe into Nam Shin-hoo’s lungs.

…This is incredibly bad.

It would have been infinitely better if he had merely remained an object of lust. If Kwon Haeju possessed even a fraction of his former stability, Nam Shin-hoo could have playfully brought up the ‘wish’ he had promised back in the dungeon to alleviate the crushing tension. Back then, the bright pink aura radiating through the empathetic ring had practically screamed the younger man’s deeply impure intentions regarding that granted wish. It had been a perfectly normal, healthy reaction for a hot-blooded young man, providing a brief sliver of desperately needed levity in an otherwise horrific situation.

Now, however, the very concept of a ‘wish’ was entirely taboo. The moment Kwon Haeju realized Nam Shin-hoo intended to sacrifice himself, that single word had twisted from a beacon of hope into a horrific, traumatic trigger.

Nam Shin-hoo was no longer the object of his desire; he was the sole tether anchoring him to reality.

The chilling image of Kwon Haeju casually threatening his own suicide flashed behind his eyes. The man’s terrifyingly ecstatic expression—rejoicing that he had finally discovered the perfect hostage to keep Nam Shin-hoo imprisoned—seemed to physically manifest in the swirling steam.

I have to break that suicidal resolve first.

It was a flawlessly executed trap. Kwon Haeju’s horrifying ultimatum was the single most effective chain he could have ever forged. It was a suffocating declaration that paralyzed Nam Shin-hoo’s heart with absolute terror. It wasn’t an empty threat. Having lived through his previous regression, Nam Shin-hoo knew exactly how far a broken, exhausted Kwon Haeju was willing to go. He knew precisely how quickly the man could resort to the most extreme choice imaginable.

In his past life, Kwon Haeju had severed his own throat. Nam Shin-hoo hadn’t been the catalyst back then, but in this twisted timeline, he was terrified he might become the sole reason for the man’s suicide.

Wait. Come to think of it… What were the exact circumstances? When Kwon Haeju committed suicide in the previous timeline…

CRASH!

A violent explosion of sound ruptured the silence. The horrific screech of shattering glass was immediately followed by the heavy, sickening thud of a massive object collapsing. Someone had breached the house.

Surging upright, Nam Shin-hoo didn’t even waste a millisecond drying off. He blindly snatched a thick bathrobe from the wall hook, roughly shoving his dripping hair out of his eyes as he yanked the fabric tight across his chest. Bursting out of the annex, the chaotic noise amplified. Someone was desperately tearing the main house apart. Through the windows, he caught a frantic silhouette hurling itself down from the second floor, urgently collapsing in front of the living room sofa.

Recognizing the terrifyingly familiar shape of that broad silhouette, Nam Shin-hoo sprinted across the courtyard, entirely forgetting how to breathe. Ripping the front door open, his worst fears materialized in the center of the living room.

Still clad in his immaculate coat and outdoor shoes, Kwon Haeju was kneeling on the shattered floorboards. Clutched tightly in his trembling hand was Jinmu, its deadly blade glowing with a vicious blue light.

“Kwon Haeju!” he screamed.

Just as the legendary sword violently thrust upward to impale the younger man’s throat, Nam Shin-hoo lunged. His palm ruthlessly struck Kwon Haeju across the head, violently knocking him off balance.

“Hah…! Haa…!”

Nam Shin-hoo violently gasped for air, his lungs burning as if he had sprinted a marathon. His heart hammered furiously against his ribs. The comforting warmth soaked into his bones vanished instantly, replaced by a freezing terror that violently seized his trembling hands.

“…What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Nam Shin-hoo choked out.

Stepping forward, Nam Shin-hoo ruthlessly kicked the fallen Jinmu, sending the lethal blade skidding harmlessly to the far corner of the living room. Sprawled across the floor, Kwon Haeju didn’t even blink. His hollow, completely dead eyes remained entirely fixated on the sliding sword. A thin, terrifying line of crimson wept down his neck where the blade had narrowly grazed him.

“Kwon Haeju,” Nam Shin-hoo demanded.

No response.

The man was entirely dissociated. Like a broken puppet, his hands blindly clawed at the floorboards, desperately attempting to crawl toward the distant weapon. Nam Shin-hoo violently yanked him backward. The massive body offered zero resistance, yet immediately resumed its mindless crawling. His unfocused gaze was completely devoid of Nam Shin-hoo’s reflection.

“…Dammit,” Nam Shin-hoo swore.

Gripping the man by his blood-soaked collar, Nam Shin-hoo hauled him upward. Pressing a desperate hand flush against Kwon Haeju’s violently erratic heart, he crashed their lips together in a forceful kiss.

“…!”

No, he attempted to kiss him.

The very millisecond their lips collided, shock violently contorted Kwon Haeju’s features as he brutally shoved Nam Shin-hoo away.