Chapter 31

“Ah, Second Lieutenant Lee…” Yi-ho stammered.

Yi-tan’s voice sliced through the room. “Did you hear everything I said earlier?”

Even though Lee Yi-ho greeted him with a fawning, uneasy smile as if his conscience prickled, Lee Yi-tan did not spare him a glance. Instead, he drove his combat boot straight into the back of the captain’s knee.

“Urgh—!”

The captain, who had spent the entire time sneering at Myeong-joo, buckled instantly like a stalk of corn severed by an axe. Without missing a beat, Yi-tan seized the captain by the hair and slammed his forehead hard into the iron railing of the infirmary bed where Myeong-joo sat.

“Aargh!” the captain shrieked in agony.

With a violent clang, the captain crashed to the floor, rolling in torment. Startled by the abrupt brutality, Myeong-joo stared blankly up at Yi-tan. Sensing the gaze, Yi-tan turned and offered a sheepish grin. That bashful smile resting on his handsome face brought a jarringly fresh air that felt entirely mismatched with the violence.

Turning back with an easy smile, Yi-tan noted, “It only sounded loud; it won’t hurt as much as it looked.”

No… it looks excruciating… Myeong-joo glanced between the captain writhing on the floor and the slight dent in the railing. The man was a captain; beating him so openly seemed bound to cause trouble.

Meanwhile, Lee Yi-tan turned back to Lee Yi-ho. “I asked if you were leaving for the day,” he said, his tone flat.

“Uh… no… of course, I should be off.”

The elder brother flinched visibly. Two years older than Myeong-joo, he stood nine full years senior to Lee Yi-tan. Yet before his younger brother, he seemed strangely cowed, unable to muster any authority. Before the time reversal, Lee Yi-tan had been fully grown and possessed immense power, so Lee Yi-ho had found his half-brother intimidating back then as well; but Myeong-joo could not recall how things had stood around this time. Even so, Lee Yi-ho was hardly the timid sort to shrink before a brother who had barely come of age while he himself was thirty.

Yi-tan fixed his gaze on the stunned major, nudging the fallen captain’s hip with the tip of his boot. “You can gather this up and take your leave, Major.”

“No, regardless of the circumstances, Second Lieutenant Lee, doing this to a superior officer…” Regaining his wits at last, Yi-ho attempted a semblance of defiance as he reached down to help the groaning captain.

“A superior officer?” Yi-tan asked with cold disdain.

The younger man moved faster. Right before Lee Yi-ho’s bent waist, he brought his boot down firmly onto the captain’s temple just above the ear, pressing down as though he might crush it beneath his weight.

Startled, even Myeong-joo rose from the bed to peer downward, unsure whether he ought to intervene. Looking at Yi-tan’s face, it did not seem particularly angry, yet the sheer pressure rolling off him was suffocating enough to make the skin tighten.

Yi-tan cast his gaze downward. “A superior officer mocks the Harmonizer paired to a subordinate who just entered the danger threshold? Answer me. I asked if you are my superior.”

“N-no, sir…” the captain stammered in a trembling voice.

Yi-tan gave a faint smile and turned back to Lee Yi-ho. “Since you say you are not, you may go now.”

The major stood struck dumb. His face drained pale, then flushed a furious crimson, the whites of his eyes reddening as he struggled to contain his rage. Yi-tan nudged the captain once more to get him up, and the man struggled to his feet, trembling like a newborn fawn.

“And, Major,” Yi-tan added with a serene smile, “when I enter the danger threshold, do not force your people into the suppression team. Hee-wan had a terrible time yesterday. Since they were sent by her commander’s brother, she said she spent quite some time wondering if she could crush them like bugs. Hee-wan has a rough temper, you see. Even I often find her difficult to handle.”

“You ill-bred bastard…” Lee Yi-ho hissed under his breath.

Lee Yi-tan pointed toward the door with impeccable politeness. “For such a well-bred gentleman, the door is that way.”

Lee Yi-ho’s face was so dark with fury that it seemed ready to burst. Leaving the limping captain behind, he stormed out into the corridor. The moment the door swung shut, an oath and a sharp crack echoed through the hallway; he had clearly struck the captain.

Myeong-joo shook his head. What a vicious temper.

Having been pampered by his father far more than the legitimate children despite being born to a maidservant, Lee Yi-ho had always carried himself like a king. But in the world of Aberrants, rank was decided solely by strength; the inferiority and frustration he felt toward his younger half-brother—the military’s supreme power—must have been immense. That was why he could not utter a word to Yi-tan’s face, only taking out his humiliation on a wounded subordinate outside.

“How are you feeling?” Yi-tan asked softly.

Moving with cautious restraint, Yi-tan slowly settled onto the edge of the infirmary bed where Myeong-joo sat. With his towering frame and physical mass, his weight caused the mattress to dip noticeably.

Myeong-joo studied him for a quiet moment before speaking, meeting his gaze with a faint, wry smile. “You have grown quite rough, haven’t you…?”

The words had slipped out on their own, prompted by sheer bewilderment. He simply did not seem like the Yi-tan Myeong-joo had once known. Even before the time reversal, Yi-tan had always carried himself with gentlemanly grace. If there were anyone in this world truly worthy of respect, it had been Lee Yi-tan alone. Though younger in years, he had been mature, tender, and unfailingly judicious—qualities Myeong-joo had deeply revered. Yet what he had just witnessed was behavior no different from a common thug lurking in the back alleys behind a train station. The difference was dizzying.

Yi-tan flinched, casting a cautious, tentative glance at him. “I must have seemed terribly violent; you were startled, weren’t you?”

Myeong-joo shifted uncomfortably. “I was startled, certainly, but…”

As Myeong-joo’s words faded, Yi-tan closed his eyes briefly, exhaling a quiet breath before opening them again. “Earlier… seeing how they treated you, Instructor, I could hardly bear it,” he murmured, his jaw tightening. “Tied to the restraints and out of my mind, I barely held back from burying every last one of them alive.”

Myeong-joo met his words with uneasy silence. It hardly sounded like a jest, leaving a bitter taste in his mouth.

Yi-tan kept stealing cautious glances at him before his eyes softened into a warm, hesitant smile. “Still, receiving harmonization from you brings me immense joy. It brings back old memories, too.”

“Ah, old memories…” Myeong-joo echoed in a daze.

If Yi-tan meant old memories, he was likely referring to the days before the reversal—the time when Myeong-joo had concealed his unspeakable longing from his young student. A pang of pity stirred in him for Yi-tan, who treasured such pretense and deceit as fond recollections.

Looking away shyly, Yi-tan confessed, “Because the wavelength was identical… I missed it, Instructor…”

He looked bashful, like a boy on the verge of a confession. For such an imposing, handsome man to betray such shyness should have felt incongruous, yet it suited him remarkably well.

“Yes, well… that is fortunate,” Myeong-joo replied indifferently.

Sitting so close, the Aberrant gazed at him with sorrowful, earnest eyes. Facing the deep affection and longing swimming in that gaze, Myeong-joo almost felt an urge to laugh. When he let slip a faint chuckle, Yi-tan leaned his massive frame forward, asking with anxious urgency why he was laughing. Wondering at this sudden shift in demeanor, Myeong-joo arrived at his own conclusion: the harmonization must have suited him remarkably well.

Through his training, he had learned that Aberrants who received complete, untainted harmonization often behaved like wagging hounds before the Harmonizer who bestowed it. At the time, picturing his ever-aloof brother-in-law, he had dismissed such notions as impossible; yet seeing Yi-tan so visibly fretful while reading his expressions, he could only smile. Yi-tan, too, was an Aberrant after all, and perhaps because of his youth, he could not hide it in the slightest.

“It is nothing,” Myeong-joo said with an airy, dismissive tone. “I merely smiled.”

Nor did he confess that he was laughing out of envy for that one-eyed man of the past—the man who, despite harboring such shameful desires, had still commanded Yi-tan’s respect and warm affection. Myeong-joo himself had been nothing but a burden, dying wretchedly in his final years. A quiet question rose within him: how could two lives of the same person be so entirely different?

Yi-tan leaned closer, urging, “You must be famished. We should get some ox-bone soup. Please stand up, Instructor.”

“Ox-bone soup is far too expensive; let us just have a simple bowl of noodles nearby,” Myeong-joo countered.

Yi-tan shook his head with firm resolve. “That won’t do. You need a hearty meal. The medic said using so much harmonization all at once brought on anemia, so ox-blood soup would serve well.”

“…Then let us settle on ox-blood soup,” Myeong-joo agreed.

Still, a single comfort remained. In this life, before the reversal, and even in that forgotten life before it, he had loved only Yi-tan. Realizing this brought an unexpected calm. How should one describe it? Yes, this feeling was surrender.

In the foreign mythologies Myeong-in loved, those who defied their destiny thrice were celebrated as heroes or ascended into constellations among the stars; yet in Myeong-joo’s estimation, he possessed no such grandeur.

All that remained for him was surrender.

And in that surrender meant him loving Yi-tan.

If that was the fate left to Cha Myeong-joo, he realized the wisest path was simply to let it flow without resistance. Because he had never sought to fulfill this love, striving instead to abandon it at every turn, perhaps matters had warped so severely that they crossed lifetimes.

Now Myeong-joo resolved simply to let go. He thought that if he shed a drop of his devotion for Lee Yi-tan with every step he took, then by the ordinary law that all things in this world have a finite measure, his heart might eventually run dry.

“Though I don’t have my wallet on me,” Myeong-joo remarked with a faint chuckle. “You are footing the bill, Second Lieutenant.”

Having found his answer, Myeong-joo felt unburdened. His demeanor grew noticeably more at ease.

Yi-tan beamed with an easy smile. “Naturally, my treat. Let us make a quick call home and head out.”

“Ah, where is my head? We should,” Myeong-joo concurred. “The children will be worried.”

The tension that once made his heart hammer violently whenever he looked at Lee Yi-tan vanished entirely. He felt as light as if he had dumped every scrap of his yearning into the bin. Myeong-joo realized he could now treat Yi-tan with the comfortable ease he showed anyone else.

Rubbing his stomach, Myeong-joo said, “I am truly famished.”

He clutched his empty stomach, laughing with the half-dazed, half-relieved laughter of a man who had reached an epiphany. Perhaps that hollow void was where the resentment and longing had once pooled like an infection, leaving his stomach to feel the emptiness instead. Watching that smile, Yi-tan chuckled softly in return, his face radiant as a boy’s.

***