Chapter 9

His mind was hazy, like someone who had just jolted awake from sleep. Drenched in cold sweat, his entire body felt as though he had suffered through a vicious nightmare.

Frantically groping his body, his hands met limbs attached intact, as if they had never crumbled. His heart, which had ceased functioning properly at some forgotten point, thudded heavily against his ribs in violent beats.

He was alive.

A shudder ran through Eui-rim the moment he registered the fact. If this was not an extension of a dream, if it was not some hallucination conjured by the Shadow… then he had finally succeeded in crossing the timeline.

The breath bursting from his lips sounded like an exclamation. Breathing raggedly as if he had sprinted at full tilt, his chest heaved up and down.

Suppressing his gasps, Eui-rim looked around at the items on the desk. Touching a mug of coffee, he let out a bitter smile. The cute mug—far from his personal tastes—and the ballpoint pen he had received as a gift stirred an unusually tender fondness in him. Ordinary things. He had forgotten what ordinary things looked like.

“Huh? Eui-rim-ssi, you haven’t left yet?”

Then, the door burst open and a familiar figure appeared. Approaching the desk in an instant, the female colleague greeted him with a bright, beaming face.

“I checked and saw you hadn’t logged your field dispatch, so I dropped by just in case,” she said. “Were you slacking off because you didn’t want to go?”

When he lifted his head, Kang Yura’s familiar face came into focus. Behind angular silver frames, her large eyes blinked with their usual playfulness. Alive. Whole. Standing close enough to touch.

“Hmm? What’s this? Don’t tell me you’re sleeping with your eyes open?” Yura teased, leaning forward.

“…Yura-ssi,” Eui-rim murmured, his voice trembling faintly.

“What? Guess not,” the female healer replied. “But why were you zoning out without even answering me?”

“Is it really you, Yura-ssi?” The question came out quieter, and more raw, than he intended.

“Pardon? Of course I’m the real Kang Yura,” she said, planting a hand on her hip. “Is there a fake Kang Yura out there?”

Her question was openly mischievous. Clearly pleased with her own joke, the woman burst into hearty laughter—hahaha—and the ordinary sound of it landed on him strangely, like sunlight after a long underground dark.

“Snap out of it, Eui-rim-ssi,” Yura chided gently. “You said you had a meeting with White Noise today.”

Glancing around the desk, Kang Yura pointed to the desk calendar. Following her gesture, Eui-rim’s eyes widened at the bright red note in the March 13 box.

[3:00 PM Isolation Ward Raid Meeting – HN]

For the name of the dungeon he had once been dispatched to support was written right there.

Eui-rim sprang up from his seat; the hand pointing at the desk calendar flinched and retreated. He verified the schedule on the calendar again, then checked the numbers printed in the corner.

March 20xx.

Today was three years before the Shadow appeared in the world.

***

Sensing that his condition was unusual, Kang Yura’s worries did not cease until they left the examination room. Rapid-fire questions poured forth—was he truly alright, wouldn’t it be better to postpone the meeting, his complexion was ghostly pale, what if something went wrong while meeting a hothead like Kim Si-hoon?

Eui-rim forced a bright expression to reassure Kang Yura. “Don’t worry too much, Yura-ssi. I was just disoriented from a strange dream.”

It was a lie, of course. Too many memories remained like scars to be dismissed as a mere nightmare.

The seven years he had lived as a public health civil servant. The omen of doom that had appeared out of nowhere one day. The cyclopean Shadow. The dying people. The rooted Seed of the Shadow. The place the Seed had conquered. And Seo Hae-gun, whom he had met there…

And the fragments left of his flesh.

He quickly shook his head before the horrific afterimages could resurface. Replaying past events right now would do no good. Once his condition stabilized a bit more and he gained the strength to assess the situation clearly, sorting out his thoughts then would be more than enough.

“I’m just worried you’ll get pushed around by Kim Si-hoon in a daze,” Kang Yura said, unconvinced. “Especially when I can’t even go with you.”

“I’ll keep my wits about me. Thank you for looking out for me, Yura-ssi.” He meant it more than she could know.

Kang Yura still seemed worried, but a message informing her that a reserved patient was waiting forced the female healer to turn back. Seeing off the reluctant woman, Eui-rim swallowed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t that he disliked her bright energy or caring nature, but for now, the younger man wanted to minimize contact with others.

Stepping through the hallway into the lobby, the smell of an old building greeted him. Although the examination and recovery rooms had been remodeled last year, other areas had been left untouched for a long time, showing distinct signs of age.

On the screen, a face more familiar than most public figures appeared in archive footage.

The person known to have been the first among Cheongho Guild members to fall to the Shadow: Cheongho Guild’s Vice Guild Master, Hunter Lee Seonha.

On the broadcast screen, Seo Hae-gun was smiling faintly. The subtle curve of his lips and the slight crinkle of his eyes formed fluid lines that softened his sharp, strikingly sculpted features.

When Eui-rim had last looked into them, the S-rank hunter’s irises had burned with a singular, luminous blue-gray.

Now, as deep navy eyes reminiscent of a calm midnight sea gazed out from the camera, the reality that he had truly crossed into the past crashed over the healer anew. Instead of a mutilated vessel devoured by the Shadow, a vibrant face—looking noticeably younger and unburdened by ruin—commanded the screen.

Transfixed by the broadcast, Eui-rim narrowed his eyes, mentally calculating when the archive footage had been recorded.

Is it footage from last year? Probably. Following the International Hunter Association Championship the previous October, the Cheongho Guild Master had retreated from the public eye. Only when making his decisive move to conquer the Tower of Time had the S-rank hunter finally broken his hiatus.

While Eui-rim was lost in thought, the broadcast segued into the next segment. Tearing his gaze away, he crossed the lobby and exited the municipal health center without hesitation. Perhaps due to the relief of seeing an unscarred, living Seo Hae-gun, his racing heart beat with a newfound composure.

The throaty roar of an engine rumbled the moment he stepped out into the courtyard. Frowning against a brisk March gust, the young man watched a sleek black sedan glide to a halt near the staff parking lot.

“Hm?”

The figure emerging from the driver’s side was someone he never anticipated seeing here. Stopping in his tracks, Eui-rim could hardly conceal his shock as an imposing giant of a man—broad-shouldered and easily twice his own physical mass—straightened up beside the car.

“Hunter Yoo Tae-geun?” The name slipped past Eui-rim’s lips before he could catch himself.

At the sound of his name, Yoo Tae-geun turned, spotting the civil servant and offering a stoic, respectful nod. His rugged face—unmarred by the brutal scars of the Shadow’s assault—bore the same youthful vigor that had marked Hae-gun on the broadcast.

What is he doing here? I don’t recall crossing paths with Hunter Yoo around this time.

Lowering his gaze, Eui-rim noticed the lanyard dangling from Yoo Tae-geun’s neck. Beneath a crisp identification portrait, the bold lettering of an all-too-familiar bureaucratic institution stood out:

[International Hunter Association Korea Branch]

It was the name of the monolithic agency that had collapsed into utter irrelevance the moment the Shadow tore the heavens apart.

“Are you heading out on field dispatch, Healer Kang?” Yoo Tae-geun asked, his deep voice carrying a quiet cadence.

“Yes, I have a coordination meeting scheduled,” Eui-rim replied. He was about to inquire what had brought him so far from headquarters when the sharp, coppery stench of fresh blood reached his nostrils. Cutting his pleasantries short, Eui-rim followed the scent with his eyes—and noticed Yoo Tae-geun’s left arm dangling unnaturally limp. “Hunter Yoo… are you injured?” he asked, professional instincts overriding his confusion.

Only then did Eui-rim see that the hunter’s combat jacket was badly shredded. Blood had saturated the sleeve entirely, dark droplets pattering steadily onto the asphalt like rain. Frowning with grave concern, he met Tae-geun’s eyes. A-rank combatants possessed formidable baseline vitality and cellular regeneration; their wounds rarely bled with such uncontrolled persistence. Where on earth Yoo Tae-geun had sustained an injury that defied high-rank clotting was deeply troubling.

“I was grazed while restraining several hunters afflicted by a severe hallucination debuff,” Yoo Tae-geun explained calmly.

“A hallucination debuff?” Eui-rim asked, unable to conceal his bewilderment.

“Yes. It seems an independent strike team attempted an unverified raid without an accompanying healer, and the entire party was compromised.”

Though concise, the summary was enough for the civil servant to piece together the incident. Reckless freelancers had charged into an unstable dungeon without medical support, succumbed to mental contamination, and failed to check in—prompting Association enforcers to deploy on an emergency containment mission.

“Did you deploy without an accompanying healer as well, Hunter Yoo?” Eui-rim inquired.

“No. We had two healers assigned to the squad,” Tae-geun answered, shifting his weight as his damaged arm hung rigid. “However, both expended their entire mana reserves purging mental debuffs from the berserk hunters… so I drove over to the municipal health center myself.”