The Wrong Body

“My… my younger brother.”

“What? Yo-your brother?”

“My brother… must be worried sick… Where am I right now? I have to go. Without me, that kid…”

Tae-eon’s mind was a chaotic mess. By now, Tae-hoon would be panicking. He couldn’t afford to waste time and money staying in a place like this. Tae-eon tried to stand up in a hurry, but the moment his feet touched the floor, his strength gave out and he collapsed. As he tried to push himself up from the ground, a voice trembled nearby.

“Ch-Cheong-hyun… Are you still not… in your right mind…?”

A man holding a fruit knife stood there, his face completely pale and his lips shaking violently. Tae-eon didn’t even have the energy to process the unpleasant vibe radiating from him. His stomach churned, and his vision blurred. Everything melting before his eyes felt incredibly unfamiliar and deeply unsettling.

“Why… why are you acting like you don’t know me? Of all people, why you…! Didn’t you finally come back to normal?”

The man’s knuckles turned white as he gripped the knife, his hand trembling. Tae-eon could sense a faint note of resentment in his demanding tone.

“What do you mean… back to normal? Who on earth is this Cheong-hyun person anyway?”

Then, it suddenly hit him. The deep sense of wrongness that had been clinging to his entire body wasn’t going away. The shaggy hair blocking his view, the unnaturally thin wrists, and the IV needles that had been pierced into his skin.

Tae-eon mercilessly ripped out all the needles stabbing his flesh. He then marched blindly toward the pitch-black opening of the bathroom at the edge of his vision. After stumbling several times, he dragged his feet forward and managed to grip the edge of the sink, standing right in front of the mirror.

“…”

His wide eyes trembled helplessly. Standing in the mirror was a man so gaunt he barely looked human. His hollow face was ghostly pale, and his dry lips were cracked and bleeding.

It was him.

“What in the world…”

It was the exact same man from his dream—the one who had been weeping miserably, spitting out desperate pleas while staring right at him.

…How could this happen? Tae-eon took a slow step backward. Not only was the voice coming out of his throat dry and cracked, but his field of vision was also a full head shorter than usual. The face staring back through the tangled mess of hair belonged to a complete stranger.

“The soul inside has changed, the soul. It’s not your own body, so of course it hurts like hell, tsk.”

As his lost gaze darted around, the words of the old shaman woman flashed through his mind, and he froze in place as if paralyzed. A faint, wheezing breath leaked through his lips. Tae-eon moved only his eyes, looking back into the mirror.

Eyes, nose, and lips were carved into a deathly pale complexion. The dark, hollow shadows made his expression look gloomy and terribly grim. Yet, there was a strange, lingering aura about the man that pulled his attention in.

Tae-eon scanned the thin neck and sharp shoulders. When his eyes locked with the person in the mirror, he clenched his jaw. There was one thing different from the man in the dream. The pitch-black eyes reflecting the light belonged entirely to Tae-eon.

Suddenly, unorganized memories that had been buried deep inside began to surge up. Within those tangled threads of memory, an onslaught of emotions hit him: strangeness, terror, longing, resentment, fury, and heartbreak.

Unable to tell whether these feelings belonged to him or to someone else, Tae-eon gripped the sink so hard his knuckles threatened to break.

“Ch-Cheong-hyun… Are you okay?”

The gloomy man’s voice echoed from behind. The moment Tae-eon heard it, he reeled. The derailed tracks of his memories began to tangle and twist like frantic ants, eventually devouring one another. The thoughts flashed so violently that he could no longer tell whose mind they belonged to.

After the accident, I lived in the slums for ten years. I had a troublemaking younger brother. There was a shaman grandmother who clicked her tongue… And then, and then…

“Ugh…”

Through his throbbing vision, his gaunt hands gripping the sink came into focus. As he lifted his arm, he noticed a faint scar on the inside of his wrist.

His brow furrowed at the sight of the old scar. Someone else’s memories gouged through his brain like a sharp awl. His thoughts could no longer move forward.

He couldn’t understand why his emotions were flaring so wildly, why anxiety was choking his breath, or how to calm himself down. Then, out of nowhere, a voice loudly echoed in his mind.

【Now, this is strictly my own guess… but looking at the situation so far… it seems their spiritual body was swapped with someone else’s due to an accident. Hunters actually experience similar symptoms during Gate collapses, but…】

【Swapped? Haha, Dr. Lee. You’re a man of medicine, so you should back it up with medical facts. How can you just spout nonsense because you have a mouth?】

It was a heavy, dignified male voice. His heart thudded in terror, a primitive instinct remembered right down to his cells. It was a voice he had heard for so long that his body reacted to it automatically.

With every ragged breath he took, a man’s face piece together like particles before scattering again. Drooping eyebrows and fierce, piercing eyes. A tall, healthy man dressed in a fine suit. But he was—

“Ah…!”

A stabbing pain shot through his head, causing Tae-eon’s hand to slip. He fell heavily to the floor with a loud crash. Toiletries rolled across the tiles, making a sharp, clattering noise.

“Cheong-hyun!”

Someone rushed over from behind and urgently pulled Tae-eon up. He didn’t even notice how tightly the man was grabbing his arm, because fragmented memories were playing right before his eyes like a lingering afterimage.

【Sigh… Manager Kim. No, Byeong-ho.】

【…Yes, Boss.】

【Is it hard? Is bringing back a single kid really that hard? I asked if it’s hard, you bastard. I need a deadline to wait, but you went to grab a kid and vanished for months without a word. Do you think I’m anxious or not?】

【I’m sorry, Boss. I am doing my absolute best. We just need to find out where he lives now. We are almost there, I swear. Please trust me! We don’t even know whose body he swapped with, so you know how hard it is to track down someone with no connections!】

【The hospital bill I pay every month is a whopping thirty million won. I trusted you to find him and dumped that money into a living corpse for two whole years. Do you even realize how much that is, Byeong-ho…? If Lee Cheong-hyun is ruined, you’re ruined too. I never forgive anyone who wastes even ten won of my money.】

They had shared secrets and conversed right in front of a silently breathing patient. The man had a habit of putting heavy emphasis on certain words, and that force became even stronger when he spoke of numbers. That was why it echoed so clearly.

The statement that he had been in the hospital for two years. Did that mean Tae-eon had just entered this body, which had been asleep for two whole years?

“Cheong-hyun. Let’s… let’s go to the bed. Okay? You’re still sick…”

Dragged by the rough grip, Tae-eon left the bathroom and headed back toward the bed. Light filtered into his slowly blinking eyes. If that was true, was this place a hospital? However, he couldn’t keep that thought for long.

Without warning, the hospital room door swung open, and the sharp clicking of leather shoes filled the room.

Step—

Two people walked in. The moment Tae-eon saw one of them, the back of his neck went completely stiff. A stubborn set of lips beneath sagging cheeks flashed vividly through his mind.

Before his brain could even process it, his body moved on instinct. With a sharp jolt, Tae-eon backed away, completely unbothered by his elbow slamming into the headboard.

The man still carried a massive bat on his shoulder, its blood-red eyes rolling around wildly. Yet, everyone else acted as if they couldn’t see it at all.

“Just give them a plausible answer! Why are you standing there like an idiot?! Do you have nothing in your brain? Don’t you get it after being pushed this far?!”

A memory forced its way into his throbbing head. It was a voice demanding answers, scolding, and trying to coax him by any means. Yet, despite sobbing, the child utterly failed to answer.

“I can’t… see it, so how am I supposed to say anything…?”

A man who aggressively demanded that the child speak of something invisible. That man’s face overlapped perfectly with the person standing right in front of Tae-eon. The fierce-eyed man always had a mouth full of verbal abuse.

Kim Byeong-ho. The manager of the center that mutates Guides, and the center director’s right-hand man.

Tae-eon muttered the name slowly under his breath. His gaze lowered to his pale arm, which was completely covered in needle marks.

A hand with protruding bones. A body that had been in a coma for two years.

If… assuming the absolute worst-case scenario, it was true that Tae-eon had swapped bodies with someone else.

Then where was the person who used to be inside this body? Where was he right now?

Footsteps approached Tae-eon as he sat there dazed. A dark shadow loomed over him, and a large hand abruptly grabbed his jaw, forcing his head up.

“Explain why the kid is in this state.”

“That… it’s probably because he hasn’t been awake for very long, Boss.”

The man blocking the light possessed a massive frame rarely seen in ordinary people. Standing nearly two meters tall, he snapped a gold-patterned Zippo lighter open and shut with one hand, looking down at Tae-eon from beneath his fiercely slanting eyebrows.

As Tae-eon stared back up at the man, his body froze rigid, as if struck by rigor mortis. There was something hovering right behind the man.

“He’s finally back in his own body after almost ten years… so it’s bound to feel strange to him.”

Nobody noticed that Tae-eon’s breath had completely hitched. A massive, towering silhouette was reflected clearly in his pitch-black eyes.

“…”

Behind the man clicking the Zippo lighter, ‘something’ was squirming. A mutant? A monster?

Without even knowing what it was, Tae-eon instinctively reached for his waist out of habit. When his hand found nothing there, the color drained from his face and his mind ground to a halt. It was a creature massive enough to swallow a human whole. Even though it took up enough space to fill this entire wide room, nobody else seemed to find it strange.