Chapter 3

Even as Myeong-joo walked home with his sisters—both so heartbreakingly younger than he remembered—to the single rented room they shared in the capital of Seowon, some stubborn core within him continued to reject reality.

“Where are you going before dawn?” Myeong-in murmured, stirring from her quilt.

“Mm… don’t worry. Go back to sleep,” Myeong-joo whispered gently. “I’ll be back shortly.”

“You haven’t even gathered your strength, and already you’re making a fuss…” she grumbled, half asleep.

The three siblings had migrated to the capital solely to scratch out a living, and a single cramped room was all their meager coins could secure in Seowon. Myeong-joo had never felt shame sharing quarters with his grown sisters, but at moments like this the lack of privacy proved agonizingly inconvenient. Myeong-in was an exceptionally light sleeper; the instant she sat up and tilted her head in suspicion, he found himself without an excuse.

He knew full well how reckless he appeared—a patient barely hours out of a hospital bed—yet he mumbled a vague reassurance to Myeong-in and slipped into the alley before sunrise. She had watched him go with a troubled shadow across her face, plainly blaming herself that they could not afford to keep him admitted for even one more day. Myeong-joo, however, was chasing a slender thread of hope discovered during his discharge consultation.

“As you are likely aware, Harmonizers can fall grievously ill if harmonization substance accumulates in the body without release,” the physician had explained in a hushed tone. “It is an affliction requiring the utmost vigilance… termed ‘Harmonization Saturation’.”

The doctor had sent Myeong-in and little Myeong-hui out into the corridor before broaching the subject; with the soft roundness of youth still clinging to her cheeks, Myeong-in had hardly looked old enough to stand as anyone’s guardian. The instant the words Harmonization Saturation left the man’s mouth, Myeong-joo had sucked in a terrified breath. In his previous life, that was the very disease that had stolen Myeong-in.

Back then, utterly blind to his sister’s failing health, Cha Myeong-joo had run himself ragged, using his brother-in-law’s prestigious name as leverage while he chased the foolish dream of restoring his fallen clan. Armed with nothing more than a middle-school education and zero worldly cunning, he had squandered years pursuing men who proved to be phantoms and con artists. He had come to understand that bitter truth only long after every scrap of effort had turned to dust.

That particular summer had been blisteringly hot. Drained by his own uselessness and the suffocating heat, Cha Myeong-joo had collapsed onto the polished wooden veranda. Myeong-in, dressed with the quiet grace expected of a noble lady, had greeted him with a radiant smile.

Until shortly before that day, Myeong-joo had lived in his sister and brother-in-law’s marital residence while scouring the city. At long last, despairing of ever reviving their house—and sickened by his shame at sponging off them—he had packed his bags and moved out. Yet Myeong-in had welcomed her older brother as though his arrival were the greatest blessing. The residence was so terribly lonely without him, she had remarked with a soft smile; even her husband seemed to find the vast halls strangely hollow in his absence.

He had found no words to answer that gentle plea to return. He had blamed his departure on his pride, but the true poison had been her husband. He could hardly confess to Myeong-in that her husband possessed his thoughts so relentlessly that breathing the air beneath the same roof had become unbearable torture.

Instead, he had taken the bowl of chilled punch she offered and forced a bitter smile. It is delicious, he had told her. Myeong-in had brightened instantly. She had steeped the omija syrup herself, she told him proudly; the next time he visited, she would float toasted pine nuts across the crimson surface. Then, recalling that her brother had likely skipped breakfast, she turned toward the kitchen to fetch sorghum cakes.

She had collapsed midway across the courtyard floor and never opened her eyes again.

Barely six months had elapsed from the first symptom to her demise. The affliction had consumed her with terrifying speed.

The attending physician later revealed that Myeong-in had received her diagnosis half a year prior. Her doctor had pleaded with her repeatedly to begin therapeutic treatment, yet she had breathed not a word to anyone, bearing the agony in utter solitude. The illness was incurable, but diligent care might have bought her several more years of life. Instead, she had departed in a manner none of those left behind could comprehend.

Harmonization Saturation caused harmonization substance to build up within the body until it violently ruptured the vascular system; miss even a single day of harmonization exchange, and the patient would begin coughing up dark blood. Why on earth had she hidden it from everyone? Concealing it from an estranged husband with whom she shared no intimacy was one thing. But why keep it from her own brother, suffering in silence until she vanished without a parting word?

No. I know why. I was never someone she could lean on. That was the miserable, worthless sort of older brother I was.

“If it is truly Harmonization Saturation… I was told that is an affliction found solely among high-ranking Harmonizers,” Myeong-joo had muttered in the consultation room. “A meager low-grade Harmonizer like myself could never suffer from such an illness…”

Yet here the physician sat, insisting he had contracted it. Before his regression, that disease had unequivocally belonged to Myeong-in. It was precisely because she was an extraordinarily rare high-grade Harmonizer that the prestigious Seoksan Lee clan had exhumed an ancient betrothal contract, swiftly orchestrating her marriage to Lee Yi-tan.

When news of that betrothal had first reached him, Myeong-joo had been utterly dumbfounded. Neither his late grandfather nor his father had ever breathed a single syllable regarding such an alliance. Yet upon the parchment the Lee clan presented, the personal jade seal of his great-great-grandfather was unmistakably stamped.

Even with the seal, the union had defied all reason. While both were venerable head houses, Myeong-joo’s family had collapsed so completely that termites hollowed the crossbeams and sky showed through the ruined eaves. The Seoksan Lee clan, by contrast, wielded wealth and political authority beyond measure. Even the Cha ancestral homestead had long since passed into creditors’ hands, leaving Myeong-in with nothing to her name save a patch of exhausted cotton field. What possible reason could a clan of such immense stature have to stoop so low?

The Seoksan Lee line was royal blood. Though the imperial house had formally relinquished political rule during the founding of Great Han, their social prestige remained peerless, and Lee Yi-tan’s grandfather had been born an imperial prince. Why such a titan would extend an olive branch to a ruined beggar clan remained an impenetrable mystery—until rumors leaked that Lee Yi-tan suffered from Harmonization Deficiency, a rare condition that demanded an extraordinarily compatible Harmonizer bride to keep him alive. Then the truth snapped into focus. They had unearthed an ancient, forgotten pledge from their vaults—one that could have rotted into dust for all they cared—simply because they had need of it.

Yet now, cast back into the past, he was the one diagnosed with Harmonization Saturation.

Myeong-joo furrowed his brow, unable to make sense of the absurdity. A wild, dizzying suspicion refused to be silenced: Could I have somehow absorbed Myeong-in’s illness into my own flesh?

The physician’s voice cut through his whirling thoughts. “We cannot confirm the definitive parameters at our modest clinic. You will need to report to a military hospital for comprehensive evaluation, but in my professional judgment, you possess an exceptionally elevated harmonization rank. While you lay unconscious, our instruments performed a preliminary scan, and the readings were extraordinarily elevated.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Myeong-joo asked, his jaw slack.

Now the man was claiming that Myeong-joo’s innate rank had miraculously skyrocketed as well. With one impossibility heaped upon another, he could only parrot the same baffled inquiries. The doctor glanced nervously at the wall clock, his patience fraying; consultation slots were tightly rationed, and Myeong-joo was holding up the queue.

“Bickering here will change nothing. I will draft a formal referral, so report to a military hospital without delay,” the physician urged. “I cannot explain it either, but the clinical probability of Harmonization Saturation is undeniable. You have been suffering from bouts of vertigo and severe nausea, haven’t you?”

“Well, yes, but…” Myeong-joo murmured, bewildered.

He had, but could that not simply be a mild concussion sustained from tumbling down a rocky ravine? Thanks to whatever reckless stunt his past self had attempted before losing consciousness, they had already saddled him with the bill for those exorbitantly expensive X-ray plates.

“You must go,” the doctor pressed, his voice taut with urgency. “Undergo secondary screening immediately to confirm the diagnosis.”

The man repeated the directive until Myeong-joo finally gave a numb nod. He stumbled from the examination room in a daze, tilting his head in bewilderment as he returned to his sisters. Had that country doctor somehow conflated his chart with Myeong-in’s?

“Testing? Why on earth would they subject a perfectly healthy girl like me to such expensive procedures?” Myeong-in had snapped the moment he tentatively asked if she had undergone an examination. “Stop spouting nonsense and pack your things so you can be discharged!”

In Myeong-joo’s memory, Myeong-in was not slated to discover her true rank until roughly a year from now. She was supposed to collapse with a seasonal cold and visit a municipal clinic, where a mobile harmonization scanner wheeled past her cot would suddenly shriek, registering an off-the-charts measurement. The Seoksan Lee clan would catch wind of that record months later, delivering their formal betrothal proposal right around this very season. Yet Myeong-in currently reacted to the mention of testing as if the notion were utter lunacy. He had opened his mouth to press further, but a single blistering glare from his sister snuffed out the inquiry.

Only moments prior, she had been the very picture of angelic warmth to the other patients in the eight-bed charity ward—beaming sweetly, wishing everyone swift recoveries and long lives. Then, without missing a beat, she had turned that icy, slit-eyed scowl upon her brother. Myeong-joo had promptly swallowed his tongue and hurried to bundle their belongings into a cloth wrap.

Yet the question had haunted his footsteps all the way back to their hovel. What if I truly took upon myself the affliction meant for Myeong-in? What if, despite offering my heart as a sacrifice, I was thrown back into the past for the sole purpose of granting her life?

Once the conviction took root, staying still became impossible. Long before the first pale light of dawn crept over the rooftops, he tucked his sleeping sister snugly beneath the quilts, quietly borrowed the landlord’s son’s bicycle without leaving a note, and pedaled furiously into the freezing dark.

The physician’s parting warning rang relentlessly in his ears: “At present, the pathology is in its earliest stage, so you may feel reasonably sound, but before long you will begin vomiting blood and suffer total physical collapse. You must seek intervention before that point of no return.”

The doctor had been unyielding. He might move about like a healthy man now, but within months the degeneration would become absolute. Myeong-in had succumbed within half a year of her first hemorrhage. If that same executioner’s clock had begun its countdown in his own chest, Myeong-joo had six months at the very most.

In that narrow span, he had to carve out a secure foundation so that Myeong-in and Myeong-hui could live in comfort long after he was gone. What can I do? One thing is certain: I will never barter Myeong-in away to Lee Yi-tan a second time.

“Look at this, oppa!” ten-year-old Myeong-hui had wailed after the funeral in that ruined past, her eyes swollen rabbit-red as her small fists battered his chest. “This is unni’s diary! She wanted to be a scholar—she wanted to study and research! Look what you did to her!”

The tattered journal had tumbled open across the floorboards, and there, rendered in his sister’s neat, upright hand, were the words that would haunt him to his grave:

If ever I am granted another life, I want to live untethered. I want to become a scholar. I want to earn my doctorate and study whatever my heart desires. Perhaps I could even journey to the farthest corners of the earth. How wondrous that would be.

The ink had pierced straight through his soul like an iron spike. Days after the earth was packed over her coffin, Myeong-joo had continued to wail until his throat bled and his innards felt scorched, until a pair of arms finally shattered his solitary madness.

“Please, hyungnim, you cannot break like this…” an anguished voice had pleaded, cracking with unspeakable sorrow. “I cannot lose you as well. Not you…”

Strong arms had pulled him into a desperate, crushing embrace, a voice trembling against his hair, yet Myeong-joo had wept himself into unconsciousness before he could even register who held him. From that terrible dusk until the forty-ninth-day memorial, he had drifted through the world like a hollow corpse.