“Found you, you little bastard…….”
His breathing was ragged, harsh with fury.
A man who looked intimidating from any angle stood over me, staring down.
His pitch-black eyes, shadowed by the light behind him, gleamed like those of a beast, and the slight curl of his upper lip exposed his teeth, adding another stroke to his savage impression.
The man glared at me as I sat collapsed on the floor.
His darkened gaze swept over me thoroughly, examining me from head to toe, before he let out a heavy sigh.
A few curses seemed to slip through his neatly twisted lips as well.
He clearly didn’t like the sight of me sitting here pathetically, but it wasn’t like I was doing this because I wanted to either—I had plenty to say about that.
No, actually, there was something far more important than that.
“Who are you?”
I didn’t know who this man was.
I didn’t know his name, his age, where he lived, or what he did.
Let alone how he knew me, what I should call him, or what kind of relationship we had.
Silence fell.
The man in the gaudy leopard-print shirt stared at me as if he’d just heard a terrible joke, then ran a hand through his hair that had fallen in strands across his forehead, casting shadows over his eyes.
The corners of his lips lifted, but there wasn’t a trace of amusement in it.
Not even a little.
He spoke to me in a voice that sounded like he was barely holding his anger in check.
“I tore through the whole damn country looking for your tiny ass, and now you’re playing dumb?”
“…….”
“Sowon.
Are you messing with your hyung right now?”
“Well…….”
Blinking, I looked up at him and forced a smile.
They say you can’t spit on a smiling face.
Though honestly, this guy looked like the type to throw a punch regardless of what my face looked like—but still.
“Is that… my name?”
“Jesus, f*ck.
Did I get hit by the sea wind so long my eardrums blew out?
I’m hearing some insane shit right now.”
A low buzzing sound filled my ears.
It couldn’t be the sea wind he kept mentioning reaching all the way into this shabby warehouse.
The door had been tightly shut ever since he came in, and the only light source was a single lamp someone had brought in.
Then what the hell was this noise drilling endlessly into my ears?
Even when I tried to ignore it, it only grew louder, making my head ache.
The throbbing pain spread to my eyelids, and my vision began to blur.
“So… who are you, exactly?”
If my ears had been even a little normal, I might have heard something snap just then.
The man strode toward me and spat out his words.
“Who the hell do you think—I’m the father of the kid in your belly.
What about it?”
At those words, my gaze dropped to my hands.
My hands, a complete mess of scars, blood, dirt, and dust, weakly brushed over my flat stomach.
A kid?
Who?
Me?
And the father is… who?
The absurdity of it all was about to slip out one ear—
When suddenly, a cold hand shot forward and grabbed my chin tightly.
“I didn’t think you’d run off while carrying my kid too, huh?
Guess I underestimated you big time.
Yoo Sowon.
You forgot what I hate the most, didn’t you?
Completely forgot—so now you’ve got the guts to pull this shit?”
If emotions could be measured in temperature, then right now, he was boiling through and through.
Blinking, I picked out the useful words from what he said.
Yoo Sowon.
Hyung.
Running away.
And… father of the child.
Not exactly the kind of words you’d want to write at the very beginning of a blank, snow-white memory—but what choice did I have?
I didn’t have the luxury of choosing.
Still, as I accepted his words at face value, I arrived at one very reasonable question.
“Excuse me.”
Looking into his pitch-black eyes, I asked—
“Are you really the father?”
I was lying on a beach.
Salty seawater washed over me with the waves, then receded again and again, leaving a chill across my face and body, while an unpleasant sloshing sound lingered in my ears before slowly fading.
That was my first memory.
Funny, in a way.
With my mind wiped completely blank, knowing nothing at all, I forced myself to get up.
Because even then—I wanted to live.
Instinct is a terrifying thing.
Without any deliberate thought, my body moved on its own.
I crawled across the sandy shore with my entire body.
I didn’t even have the strength to support myself with my arms, let alone move my legs.
My vision kept blurring with something I couldn’t even tell was water, my focus slipping—but strangely, it didn’t hurt.
After trembling in the shade for what felt like hours, a loud, frantic scream pierced my muffled hearing.
Rough hands grabbed me and pulled me up.
“Kid, how old are you? Why are you like this here?
Oh my god.
What the hell happened to you—no, wait. This isn’t it, I should call the police!
No! An ambulance!
Where’s my phone? Damn it, I left it on the boat.
Wait here!”
Yeah.
Call whatever you want—but first, what’s your name?
Why are you here like this?
I stared at the man rambling in panic with unfocused eyes and slowly opened my mouth.
‘Yeah… good question… but I’m fine.
It doesn’t hurt….’
I had a feeling I shouldn’t go with him.
He didn’t seem like a bad person, but I couldn’t trust anyone.
I decided that without knowing anything at all.
Or maybe… it wasn’t a decision, but instinct.
The moment he left, saying he’d go back to the boat for a moment, I ran.
Clinging to the single thought that I had to escape somehow, I staggered forward.
Even as I kept falling and collapsing onto the ground, I forced myself back up and kept running.
All the while, I dug through my completely empty head like an idiot.
Where is this? Who am I? My name? My age?
I don’t know.
I don’t know anything.
Where this world is.
How I ended up like this.
Where I’m supposed to go.
I felt like the biggest idiot of the century.
No—
I was the biggest idiot of the century.
There wasn’t a single person in the world who knew less than I did right now.
My head throbbed.
It felt like my brain was being roasted on a grill, turned over and over.
Letting out a small sob, I dragged my feet.
I wanted to organize my thoughts…What little thoughts I even had.
By the time I hid myself inside a dark warehouse, that thought came to me.
Ah.
This is inside a novel.
I must have possessed a character in some trashy novel.
The moment I thought that, it was like a lightbulb flicked on in my head.
Finding an answer brought me an odd sense of peace.
It felt like a novel I had read before.
Because in the very next moment, this thought came to me—
“I… was running away…….”
Right.
I was running.
And there was a man who would come to catch me.
He wasn’t someone who would harm me—
But he would be more persistent than anyone else.
In his life, he had never known what it meant to give up.
This was a contest of endurance—who would outlast the other.
Was I insane for thinking this?
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wonder.
But I believed it.
That baseless certainty took shape, growing firmer as time passed, settling deep inside me.
And because of that, the nausea churning in my stomach finally eased.
If there was one problem—
It was that I had no way to prove it.
Possessed into a novel, sure—but I didn’t know the title, the author, or even the story.
At the very least, it would’ve helped to know what kind of person was chasing me.
Even just his appearance.
A bitter taste filled my mouth.
If I didn’t know who was looking for me, then I had no choice but to suspect everyone.
Thinking that way…
I could at least timidly praise myself for not following that fisherman earlier.
What if he had handed me over to the one chasing me?
Shivering in the darkness, I counted time.
I rummaged through my mind, searching for anything that could prove my thoughts.
Anything at all.
Just one thing.
After a while, the seawater soaking my body dried.
My whole body felt sticky and uncomfortable, but it still didn’t hurt.
I was in terrible shape—yet somehow, no pain.
Strange.
But I couldn’t do anything about the cold.
My body began to tremble even more violently than before.
How long had it been like that?
As I struggled to swallow the darkness surrounding me, again and again—
Proof appeared.
The moment our eyes met—those pitch-black eyes—I knew.
He was the one at the very bottom of my fragmented, drifting consciousness.
It was strange.
He hadn’t said anything.
I had only looked at the man standing against the light—
And yet, I knew.
A man accustomed to a violent world.
But someone who wouldn’t recklessly harm me.
A man who had sharpened thousands of unrefined ferocities into blades and worn them like armor.
Hot-tempered, impulsive, and strong.
A man who had never once given up in his life—
So once he decided to bite down on something, he wouldn’t let go even if his jaw shattered.
A man who came looking for me—
Someone whose identity and relationship to me I didn’t even know.
Someone who had run all the way here, chasing after me.
The one who ultimately seized victory in this exhausting, drawn-out struggle.
“Found you, you little bastard…….”
That was… you.