Entangled Souls

“Contact the management team! Tell them the Guide is awake, hurry!”

“How could something like this happen… This is im, impossible. How could a person who was in a coma for two years suddenly…!”

“What are you doing over there? Hold him down tightly!”

Beneath the people pinning down his limbs, Tae-eon ground his teeth, his breath rattling violently.

Guide.

That word looped in his ears like tinnitus.

Guide…

The glow of the fluorescent lights blurred and scattered away.

Tae-eon hung limp as if heavily drugged, his eyes blinking sluggishly.

He felt a sharp prick in his arm; something was invading his blood vessels.

Staring at the fluid being injected into him, Tae-eon staggered and rolled his neck.

Where his gaze finally landed, he spotted a door flooded with light.

Right there, a heavily backlit silhouette abruptly materialized.

It was a man of immense girth.

His build was bloated, looking like two ordinary adults combined into one, and his sagging cheeks and lips peeking beneath a bucket hat exuded a stubborn nature.

The man stood frozen in sheer shock before frantically rummaging through his clothes to find his phone.

“B-Boss! That bastard Cheong-hyun…!”

Hovering right above the man’s head was a pitch-black shadow.

Its form was terrifyingly distinct.

The thing, embedded with blood-red eyeballs, resembled a beast turned inside out.

An illusion of a stale, damp cave odor seemed to brush past the tip of Tae-eon’s nose.

Tae-eon blinked slowly and muttered with a metallic rattle in his voice.

A bat… why.

A black bat as large as a human torso hung above the man’s head, radiating a dark, gloomy aura.

A shiver ran down his spine the moment he realized it.

Every single cell in his body stood on end, and a biting chill surged all the way to the crown of his head.

He had no idea… why he was suddenly seeing such things.

“No, Boss! Cheong-hyun, that bastard is awake! Yes, I’m looking at him with my own eyes right now! It’s true!”

Tae-eon’s fingertips scraped against the floor.

The bat glared down at him with its crimson eyes.

At that moment, the man on the phone slowly lifted his head.

The chilling eyes pooled beneath his fat-buried eyelids clashed in midair with Tae-eon’s unfocused pupils.

The man grinned, baring his uneven teeth.

His eyes were drenched in sheer ecstasy.

It was a snickering expression, like someone who had just discovered a prize they had been hunting for a very long time.

…Who on earth. Who are you to look at a person with those kinds of eyes…

Within the cracks of his fading, dizzy consciousness, Tae-eon experienced a phenomenon akin to waves crashing over him repeatedly.

Disordered memories tangled randomly and began to stack up ruthlessly.

After being indiscriminately swept and battered by these crudely piled memories, Tae-eon eventually blacked out entirely.

It was a winter day from his childhood, a time when his memories were already faint.

“The soul has been swapped, the soul. It’s not his own body, so of course he’s bound to be that sickly, tsk.”

Those were the very first words a shaman settled in the shantytown spat out the moment she laid eyes on Tae-eon.

She was an old woman whose sharply upturned brows and fierce eyes reminded him of the Guardian Kings protecting a temple pillar.

Tae-eon was only 13 years old back then.

The way she glared down at him with her hands clasped behind her hunched back was so terrifying to him at the time that his body trembled, unable to even meet her gaze properly.

Just as the old shaman said, Tae-eon was a child whose body was so weak that merely moving around was a struggle.

Minor illnesses were a daily occurrence, and the days he hovered on the brink of death were countless.

He would pour nosebleeds if he lacked even a bit of sleep, and if someone so much as nudged him, he would collapse face-first.

On days it snowed or rained, he would spend them battling pneumonia, seizing violently between life and death.

It was all the aftereffects of being caught in that seven-vehicle pileup caused by a ‘Gate Break’ in the city center that summer.

Because of that accident, Tae-eon lost both his parents, and holding his only remaining sibling’s hand, he had to seek out the shantytown where his grandmother—their last living relative—resided during an exceptionally bitter winter.

Since his grandmother herself didn’t have much time left to live, she lacked the strength to properly raise two children, forcing the young Tae-eon to grow up in conditions far worse than others.

It was by no means a smooth life.

“Good work, Hunter Lee. Looks like today’s earnings will be pretty decent?”

That impoverished life was what dragged Tae-eon into this industry where massive amounts of money flowed.

All to escape the rough, bottom tier of existence.

“Captain, how about a drink after we’re done today? We’ve got some new kids around, you should treat us.”

Someone packing away their firearm shouted toward the captain, prompting bursts of hearty laughter from all around.

“Just because the earnings were good today, don’t think you can push it. Book a cheap place. Big brother is buying tonight.”

“The captain must be in a good mood today. Hunter Lee, you’re coming tonight too, right?”

Seeing the hand patting his shoulder, Tae-eon replied while packing his magazines.

“My younger brother is waiting for me… so I don’t think I can make it.”

“Alright, alright. Just stay for a bit and go. I won’t hold you long, so just grab a few pieces of meat before you leave. I’ll even package some for your brother, okay? When I saw him last time, your brother was taller and broader than you, Hunter Lee. I bet that punk eats plenty.”

Tae-eon watched the people excited for the after-work gathering, his lips parting a few times.

Yet in the end, he simply nodded his head and agreed.

After the world faced the great upheaval, Mutants emerged, and the balance of the world tilted heavily toward gates and Mutants, completing a strict pyramid hierarchy.

People claimed the world before and after the upheaval didn’t change all that much, but the perspective of those living in poverty was entirely different.

Poverty was a pure evil that drove a person to dangerous lands, testing them and making them struggle desperately.

Those who lost their jobs after the upheaval jumped into the hunter industry to make money, and what formed as a result was a civilian mercenary group known as ‘Civilian Hunters.’

And Tae-eon was a civilian hunter who had spent five years clearing combat zones under the status of an ordinary civilian.

Though civilian hunters were treated worse than cattle or dogs in the industry, the reason he silently endured the work was because the income earned was immense compared to other occupations.

“Haa…”

Creak—

He walked up the creaking, steep stairs and opened the rusted iron door that flaked rust powder.

The world visible below the staircase was a winter landscape dyed entirely in white.

Despite the cold that turned his cheeks flushed red, Tae-eon never once bundled up his clothes.

Even in the dead of winter, his clothing consisted entirely of a single, thin windbreaker jacket.

Holding a bag crammed with food packaged by another hunter in one hand, he crossed the courtyard blanketed in white snow.

Lifting his head, he could see faint snow fluttering down.

Beyond it, the looming mountain ridge divided the boundary of the night.

This steep, high shantytown was Tae-eon’s home.

Tae-eon headed straight for the room with the weathered wooden door.

Creak—

As he opened the door, the sight of a room filled with warmth entered his view.

It was a shabby, single-room studio apartment with a small kitchen attached.

The bathroom structure required exiting to the courtyard and walking around to the back, meaning the plumbing frequently froze solid in midwinter.

Though it was a harsh environment, it was better than other houses.

Because they could spend the winter with a boiler instead of coal briquettes.

“You’re back? You’re a bit late today.”

“Ah. An after-work gathering was scheduled.”

Tae-eon took off his shoes, stepped into the room, and began shedding his clothes first.

Inside that tiny single room, a man sat at a folding table, nursing a drink.

Short-cropped brown hair.

Clean-cut facial features.

It was a face that shared many similarities with Tae-eon’s, though Tae-eon’s build was on the slighter side compared to him.

Or rather, it might be that his brother was simply larger than average.

This was his younger brother, Lee Tae-hoon, who had climbed up to this place ten years ago while tightly holding his tiny, fern-like hand, and had lived with him ever since.

Tae-eon hung his jacket on a hanger and rolled up his sleeves.

He masterfully gathered the stacked dishes to wash them, then opened the small refrigerator to check the side dishes.

Then, suddenly.

“Just quit that job already. The time for carelessly throwing your body around has passed.”

He froze in his actions at the voice flying from behind his back.

Tae-eon bit his lip firmly and ignored the words.

He placed the food brought from the restaurant into a bowl and popped it into the outdated microwave to heat it up.

“Look at him ignoring me again, acting like he can’t hear a damn thing. How many times do I have to f*cking tell you before it sinks into your skull?”

“You’ve had too much to drink. Let’s stop.”

“What does me drinking have to do with this? Why do you always think only of yourself? Did I push you to go out there and die? Why the hell do you rush off to dangerous places acting like you want to die when everyone else works normal jobs?”

Words he had heard to the point of absolute exhaustion filled the shabby room today without fail.

Tae-eon merely kept his mouth shut and stared back at him.

Because those words were being spat out by Lee Tae-hoon—the very person who knew better than anyone else why Tae-eon had no choice but to go to dangerous lands to earn money.

“Do you feel wronged? Looking at your face, you look like you’re dying of resentment. What do you have to feel so wronged about? You’re a bastard who’s just going to go anyway.”

“The soul has been swapped, the soul. It’s not his own body, so of course he’s bound to be that sickly, tsk.”

When he first came to this neighborhood holding his younger brother’s tiny hand, those were the words he had heard from an old man sitting on a wooden bench.

While it could easily be dismissed as the nonsense of an old man senile with age, Tae-eon’s brother, Lee Tae-hoon, seemed to have taken it deeply to heart like a child believing a ghost story.

It started from then.

Lee Tae-hoon began to look at Tae-eon as if he were looking at a ghost.

“Get out of my brother’s body! Get out!! I knew it was weird, it was bizarre for him to change this much just because of one accident! Reeking of that strange scent…!”

Lee Tae-hoon believed that Tae-eon was possessed by something.

What could have possessed a child who was a mere ten years old to believe the words of a pitiful-looking old man?