Chapter 2

Myeong-joo drew in a ragged breath.

His lungs convulsed, and blood surged violently up his throat. The sphincter at the top of his stomach gave way, and fluid coughed into his airway, sending him into a fit of retching, choking gasps.

“Doctor! Doctor!” a child’s voice cried. “My brother opened his eyes!”

The voice reached him with crystalline clarity—a little girl, no older than ten. Myeong-joo blinked against the blur until an acoustic-tiled ceiling swam into view. The solemn cadence of the Holberg Suite that had echoed in his ears only moments ago was gone. In its place came the steady thud of a pulse, the sharp electronic chime of monitoring equipment, and an indistinct hum filling the white air.

“Doctor, please hurry!”

Footsteps stamped the floor in frantic urgency. Myeong-joo slipped under once more. A dark passage unrolled before him like a tunnel without end. With the Fang of the Temporal Demonic Fiend driven deep into his chest, the road to the underworld felt impossibly long.

—Instructor.

A faint call reached him. Myeong-joo’s parched lips parted, a sliver of light slipping through his lashes. The underworld is surprisingly modern, he thought through the fog. Acoustic tiles, even a lost child… Her parents must be frantic. A child ought to run home instead of wandering the afterlife.

—Instructor… never… never again…

Where had the little girl gone? Now another voice was whispering over and over—a low timbre thick with simmering grief. Myeong-joo’s brow furrowed. The emissary from the Yellow Springs sounded uncannily like someone he knew.

—Instructor, my heart is breaking… It is tearing to pieces… I hate you so much I cannot bear it.

The man was weeping—or on the verge of breaking down entirely. Myeong-joo tried to ask why, but his throat was glued shut with dry heat. A surge of helpless frustration gripped him. Why are you crying? You have nothing left to do but live in peace with your wife. He wanted desperately to say it aloud, but his lips refused to move.

Only then did reason cut through the haze: Lee Yi-tan had no business standing on the road guiding Cha Myeong-joo to the netherworld. This had to be a reaper’s trick. The emissary knew that if it called his name three times in the voice of the man he loved, Myeong-joo would follow like a stray dog without looking back.

Listen here, Grim Reaper. There is no need for such cheap tricks. I will walk into the underworld on my own two feet. And once I reach the shores of the River of Three Crossings[1], I will plant myself at the ferry and ensure Myeong-in does not cross until she is at least ninety.

“Mr. Cha Myeong-joo,” an impassive voice called out.

Perhaps his silent defiance had sounded insolent even to the dead, for the reaper addressed him once more in that same even tone. Myeong-joo felt absurdly touched. Even while dragging him to the grave, the creature had the courtesy to use a proper honorific.

“Mr. Cha Myeong-joo, please regain your senses.”

“Oppa, please open your eyes. Please…” Myeong-in sobbed.

The instant he caught her voice, indignation surged through him like wildfire. What in the world is that girl doing here? Does she have any idea what I did to stand sentry at the gates of death and keep her out? The fury to give his foolish sister a blistering earful and drive her straight back to the land of the living snapped his consciousness awake.

“…Huh?”

He forced his eyes open to reprimand her, only for blinding white light to flood his vision. He blinked frantically, fighting to see, when a sudden cramp seized his chest and he retched up another mouthful of dark blood.

Hands began patting his back in a fluster, only for that same level voice to intervene, warning that one should not thump the back of a patient who had barely regained consciousness.

A patient? Shouldn’t I be called an errant ghost of the Yellow Springs, or something of the sort? He was still turning the mundane word over in his dazed mind when another shrill shout pierced the air.

“Stupid oppa! Wake up already!”

At Myeong-hui’s screech, his heavy eyelids tore fully open. Myeong-in was one thing, but the horrific thought that ten-year-old Myeong-hui had followed him into death made his heart plummet. She must have tumbled into a well while running wild, or been buried in a mudslide while playing by the creek—some senseless, idiotic accident. He whipped his head toward his youngest sister.

“Cha Myeong-hui, you wretched little rascal,” Myeong-joo croaked. “Where on earth do you think you are…?”

He was still grumbling under his breath when the girl shrieked again.

“Oh! His eyes are open! This time they’re really open, Doctor!”

“Oh, oppa…!”

“Mr. Cha Myeong-joo, can you hear me?” the physician asked, leaning in.

Voices converged on him from all directions before Myeong-joo could untangle a single thought, tumbling over one another in a chaotic din.

“Oppa, please say something!” Myeong-in pleaded, her hands trembling over his blankets. “It’s me—Myeong-in. Oppa…”

He turned his head. The young woman before him was undeniably his sister, yet everything about her was wrong. Her cheeks were soft, round with youth—not the poised, sorrowful face of the aristocratic lady he remembered, but the fresh features of a girl barely out of her teens.

After marrying into the Seoksan Lee clan, descendants of royal blood, Myeong-in had become the dignified mistress of a great house. She had dusted her pale skin with fine pearl powder and gathered her camellia-oiled hair into an immaculate chignon pinned with coral. Until the illness consumed her, she had carried the serene grace of a white magnolia in May. But the girl leaning over the bed now was unmistakably provincial: a threadbare, oversized knit sweater swallowed her slight shoulders, and her dark hair was parted into two loose, untidy braids.

Why is she dressed like that…? The thought had barely crossed his mind when Myeong-joo gasped, his hands flying down to paw frantically over his chest. Why is Myeong-in here? And where did the demonic fiend’s fang go? I drove it into my heart—I know I did…

His trembling fingers flew up to his face. A demonic fiend’s talon had gouged his left eye, blinding it in a burst of blood. Yet now, the sterile ward was reflected with crystalline clarity through two completely intact, uninjured eyes.

“Oppa! Why aren’t you answering me?!”

He turned toward the petulant whine and found Myeong-hui. She appeared a good seven or eight years younger than the girl etched in his memory. With every passing second, the reality before him unraveled into madness.

The last time Myeong-joo had seen Myeong-hui was that very afternoon, at Myeong-in’s forty-ninth-day memorial. His youngest sister—so much younger she had felt more like a daughter than a sibling—had been nearly twenty then, tall and slender, her features matured into womanhood. Yet throughout the rite, she had stared at Myeong-joo with a bloodless, venomous gaze, looking as though she wished to tear him limb from limb.

Her eyes had leveled an undeniable indictment: the sister who had raised her like a mother after their own mother’s early passing had perished in the prime of her youth entirely because of him. It was a vicious and utterly accurate judgment. Myeong-hui knew full well that her brother had effectively driven Myeong-in to her grave. Myeong-joo had lacked the courage to meet the gaze of the child he had raised from the cradle; every shred of her bitterness had been earned.

“Oppa… what’s wrong?” Myeong-hui sniffled, her chin quivering. “Does it still hurt?”

Yet the child standing beside the cot now, her small face crumpled with tears of worry, could scarcely have been ten years old. She was Myeong-hui—unmistakably Myeong-hui—yet not the sister he had left behind in the rain.

“Who are you?” Myeong-joo demanded, panic turning his voice harsh and shrill. “Where is my Myeong-hui?!”

His eyes flaring with wild terror, Myeong-joo grabbed the little girl by both upper arms and shook her. A demonic fiend? Is there another demonic fiend near me? That monster that bewitched me and exposed my filthy secret to Yi-tan—is it still playing tricks with my mind?

While Myeong-joo fell far short of Myeong-in’s exceptional gifts as a Harmonizer, he was still capable of unfurling harmonization, and no fiendish wavelength brushed against his senses. Demonic fiends, like Aberrants, possessed distinct wavelengths of their own. A Harmonizer as sensitive to resonance as Myeong-joo would have detected a manifestation at this distance in an instant. He had fallen prey to the creature at Myeong-in’s house only because it had been a Phantasm Demonic Fiend—a weaver of illusions whose frequency was notoriously difficult to isolate—and because grief had left him too shattered to guard his mind.

Yet here, within arm’s reach, there was nothing. Absolute stillness.

A profound shock drained the color from Myeong-joo’s face. The little girl trembling in his grip truly was Myeong-hui, the youngest sister he had cherished like his own flesh.

“Oppa, what is the matter with you?!” Myeong-in cried out, yanking the child back into her arms. “You’re terrifying her!”

Her frantic cry only deepened his disarray. Myeong-joo dragged a clammy, sweat-slick palm down his face, his gaze darting between the two girls. His eyes were wide and frantic, like those of a cornered animal that had tumbled into the territory of a beast far beyond its reckoning. Startled by the unhinged ferocity in their brother’s eyes, both sisters instinctively recoiled.

The physician stepped firmly between them. “Now, now, young ladies. We mustn’t agitate the patient. Please step back.” He pressed the bell of a stethoscope against Myeong-joo’s bare chest, listening intently to the harsh, violent heave of lungs struggling for oxygen. His expression turned somber before he gave a low, measured hum. “His respiration is erratic, and his pulse is dangerously elevated. We must stabilize him first. Please lower your voices.”

“Yes… but Doctor, is my brother going to be all right?” Myeong-in asked, clutching the tearful Myeong-hui against her hip.

The doctor nodded reassuringly. “He has regained consciousness. The disorientation is merely a lingering aftereffect, so he should mend in time.” Turning back to Myeong-joo, the man offered a stern look. “Your sisters have been worried half to death. Your condition is not fatal, young man, so set your mind on resting and recover quickly.”

Myeong-joo blinked at him in utter stupor. “Recovering…?”

He repeated the syllable like a dead man learning to speak. Recovering? He had not been sick. Nothing in this room adhered to any logic he knew. The chest he had skewered with the beast’s tooth was smooth, unblemished by so much as a scratch, while his sisters watched him with faces stripped of seven years of hardship.

“Then… does that mean…?” Myeong-joo muttered.

“Doctor, something is wrong with my brother!” Myeong-hui wailed, clutching the physician’s coat like a frightened pupil seeking her teacher’s protection.

Looking somewhat helpless, the doctor patted the girl’s shoulder with an awkward smile. “He has only just opened his eyes after a long delirium. Do not fret so, little one.”

With that hasty consolation, the physician slipped out of the ward before the distraught girls could pelt him with further questions.

Left alone with his sisters, Myeong-joo continued to mumble under his breath. “Then I… returned to the past… That fang truly…”

The Fang of the Temporal Demonic Fiend existed for a single purpose: to wind back time. Its catalyst—its absolute toll—was the caster’s beating heart. It was a brutally simple exchange. Drive the fang into one’s own chest, and the river of time would flow backward to the moment the supplicant yearned for; in return, the caster’s life was devoured whole as the sacrifice.

The ancient shamans of Ilyah had wielded sorcery that mirrored the power of the Temporal Demonic Fiend’s tooth with eerie precision. By gouging out their own hearts, they were said to have rolled back the hours for a fallen chieftain, or restored a village to the dawn before calamity struck. In other words, the supplicant had no place within the reclaimed timeline. Once their worth as a bloody tithe was extinguished, their existence was meant to scatter into nothingness.

The scholars of Great Han who investigated demonic fiends had long asserted that the monsters’ genesis was rooted in the dark arts of Ilyah, or in the corrupting blights that infested Ilyah’s soil. If their scholarship held true, Cha Myeong-joo’s soul should have dissolved the very instant the gears of time reversed. Yet here he was, miraculously breathing, anchored firmly within the restored past.

“Oppa, does your head still feel muddled?” Myeong-in asked, her voice brimming with anxious tenderness.

She gently recounted what had transpired: how he had scurried all over the rugged slopes like a flying squirrel, dead set on unearthing wild mountain ginseng because little Myeong-hui caught chills so easily; how he had tumbled down a ravine and remained unconscious for four agonizing days. Did none of it come back to him?

How on earth could this be? Ah, Myeong-in… Only moments ago, this brother of yours plunged a demonic fiend’s fang straight into his heart right before your husband’s eyes. How am I supposed to remember rolling down a hillside chasing roots?

Even as the wry thought drifted through his mind, Myeong-joo slowly raised a trembling hand and traced the curve of Myeong-in’s cheek with his fingertips. With her standing here so radiant and whole, branding this sunlit hospital ward an illusion of the underworld was a cruelty he could not bear to inflict upon himself.

He shook his head faintly. “…No. I am all right. Truly, I am fine.”

“Oppa!” Myeong-hui cried out.

That single murmur of reassurance shattered the little girl’s restraint, sending her hurtling straight into his chest. Myeong-joo wrapped an arm around her shuddering frame, then lifted his face—distorted with overwhelming grief and wonder—and opened his remaining arm toward Myeong-in.

“…”

Myeong-in gazed at him, her lips curling into the wounded, affectionate pout of a younger sister, before folding herself into his embrace. Myeong-joo gathered both girls tightly against his heart.

Their warmth was pulsing.

Undeniable, and—

—real.

The earth his sisters walked upon could never be hell. Faced with that undeniable truth, Cha Myeong-joo had no choice but to surrender to reality: he, too, had been granted a return through time.

There were truths a man could accept without ever truly believing.

***