The Price of the Miracle

It was so massive that Tae-eon couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it sooner. He watched the creature with a frozen face. The moment the ‘thing’ tilted its head and locked its eyes onto him, he violently shook off the man’s grip and bolted from the room.

Shouts erupted behind him, followed by the heavy, aggressive pounding of footsteps in pursuit. Every time he sprinted past the empty corridors, a flood of memories burst into his mind.

Memories from one year ago, two years ago, five years ago, and even ten years ago flashed at random.

They were so faint and disconnected that he couldn’t tell if they were things he had actually experienced himself, or if someone else had lived through them in his place. Some parts were so severely erased that they were completely unrecognizable. By the time the countless fragments settled like drifting spores, Tae-eon suddenly found himself standing before a large window.

“Haah… gasp…”

Outside, a misty, fog-like winter hovered over a stark blue sky. Skyscrapers of shapes and designs he had never seen before packed his field of vision. In this sharp, piercing panoramic view, Tae-eon felt like the only entity that painted an entirely foreign color.

This was not the world he had spent his life looking at. The city skyline showed no signs of any mountains. The mountains that used to define the borders of his slum neighborhood were completely gone.

And yet, despite the foreignness, the entire view felt sickeningly familiar. Suddenly, someone forcefully grabbed his shoulder from behind.

“Where… where do you think you’re going in that condition? Cheong-hyun, don’t go… Don’t leave, just stay here.”

Tae-eon spun around to find a man with light-colored hair standing there, his eyes rimmed with red. Trembling with anxiety, the man stared at him with a gaze filled with deep, genuine worry. Tae-eon instantly recognized him.

Seo Won-woo. ‘Lee Cheong-hyun’s’ fellow Guide trainee, and a childhood friend of the same age who had grown up holding his hand.

Tae-eon’s gaze naturally drifted down to the clothes Seo Won-woo was wearing. An emblem pinned to his ash-colored uniform caught the light, sending a cold chill through Tae-eon’s chest. The design, featuring a blue leaf, was the unmistakable symbol of a ‘Guide’ belonging to the Center.

A Guide. The only living biological prescription capable of curing Mutants.

“Am I… a Guide?”

Tae-eon asked, his face contorting. Seo Won-woo hesitated, unable to give a straight answer. But as he slowly nodded his head, Tae-eon got his answer.

His gaze dropped to the floor. His bare, pale toes trembled slightly at the edge of his vision. From the chaotic jumble of unfamiliar memories swirling in his head, Tae-eon could only piece together a few undeniable facts.

The fact that ‘Lee Tae-eon’ and ‘Lee Cheong-hyun’ had lived for ten years with their bodies switched. And the fact that Lee Cheong-hyun was a Guide.

And finally, the fact that now, after ten years, they had been thrown back into their original bodies.

Even those ten years he had spent living as ‘Lee Tae-eon’ weren’t actually his own life.

Tae-eon—no, Cheong-hyun—tightly closed his eyes.

“How is the kid?”

“They gave him a sedative a short while ago, so he’s asleep. The primary doctor said his mental state is highly unstable right now, warning that he might resort to self-harm just like the old ‘Lee Cheong-hyun’ did. He suggested keeping him in the ward for a few more days, but…”

“Bring him back within two days. If he has enough energy to cause that much of a scene, he’s perfectly fine.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now that he’s awake, do something about that pathetic look of his. He looks like a walking corpse. The kid is way too gaunt.”

“Yes, Boss.”

Kim Byeong-ho immediately bowed his head in response. Sitting in the chair across from him was a man in his mid-to-late thirties, lazily holding a cigarette between his lips. This was Ki Soo-hyuk, the founder and CEO of the Center that managed the Guides.

He was also the man who had accompanied Kim Byeong-ho to the hospital room earlier to inspect Lee Cheong-hyun’s condition.

Ki Soo-hyuk used to be a notorious loan shark running a legitimate-looking business brand. After a twist of fate led him to establish the Center for training Guides, he instantly skyrocketed to become the owner of a prominent corporation that stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the country’s wealthiest conglomerates.

The United Center for Guide Training.

The Center was an institution that existed nowhere else in the world except South Korea. It served as a specialized medical facility for ‘Mutant’ Hunters. Through an ability known as ‘Detoxification,’ Guides could extract and neutralize the agonizing pain trapped inside the Mutants.

While he now undisputedly sat at the absolute top of this industry, Ki Soo-hyuk had faced relentless mockery and heavy criticism from the entire world when he first built the Center.

People simply didn’t believe in the existence of ‘Guides.’ They dismissed it entirely as a cheap marketing scam. The turning point that made Guides highly sought after was when Ki Soo-hyuk successfully proved their ability to alleviate the agonizing pain Mutants suffered from.

“Now… I can finally quit this stuff too.”

Ki Soo-hyuk muttered with dazed eyes, staring intently at his cigarette. The cigarette between his fingers was laced with a narcotic substance engineered to numb severe pain. It was a specialized painkiller meant strictly for Mutants, manufactured from materials harvested inside the Gates—a substance so potent that an ordinary human inhaling it would instantly drop dead from a heart attack. The rest of the world classified it as an illegal drug.

However, because it was legally distributed and handled within the industry, these painkillers were a mandatory lifeline that Mutant Hunters had to rely on just to stay alive. Even then, because the price tag was astronomically high, the drug remained a luxury exclusive to the high-ranking upper class.

“Boss, is it getting too hard to bear?”

“It’s hard every single day. But now that Lee Cheong-hyun is finally back, we’ll manage somehow.”

Ki Soo-hyuk gave a weary, exhausted smile. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, his voice slurring slightly as he spoke.

“Being unable to receive detoxification… is truly a miserable curse.”

Both Kim Byeong-ho and Ki Soo-hyuk were what the world called ‘Mutants.’ Fifty years ago, a meteor crashed into Earth, triggering the appearance of the Gates and plunging the world into a massive upheaval. Countless ancient species and terrifying monsters poured out of the Gates like a broken dam, destroying society and slaughtering humans.

That was the exact moment ‘Mutants’ were born.

The exact transmission path of how their DNA was infected through exposure to the monsters remained a mystery. However, their physical capabilities exploded far past the limitations of an ordinary human, making them strong enough to fight back against the monsters.

Yet, roughly a year after awakening as a Mutant, an inexplicable mental and physical agony would inevitably take hold. Not a single person managed to escape this curse.

Some Mutants succumbed to the pain, suffering severe mental breaks that drove them into a wild rampage. Countless others simply couldn’t endure the torture and ended their own lives. Even though decades had passed, humanity failed to find a single clue to resolve the Mutants’ pain.

Then, about thirty years later, a researcher walked into the Hunter Association holding the hand of a five-year-old child. That child was the very first ‘Guide.’ And the man who had provided the financial backing for that researcher’s Guide studies was none other than Ki Soo-hyuk.

“I really did have absurdly good luck. Just when I was planning to seize the ownership rights to a Gate, one popped up right in front of my face.”

The fact that a Gate had materialized on a random plot of land he had bought was a stroke of fortune Ki Soo-hyuk would likely never experience again.

“Come to think of it, if it weren’t for that researcher, I wouldn’t be sitting in this chair today.”

Right around the time Ki Soo-hyuk’s ownership of the Gate was officially registered with the Association, a researcher had come looking for him. Introducing himself as a Gate specialist, the middle-aged man offered a massive sum of money as a gesture of goodwill, begging for permission to study the materials Ki Soo-hyuk had brought out from the Gate.

At the time, the only thing Ki Soo-hyuk had retrieved was a single tree branch covered in a strange parasitic moss. Ki Soo-hyuk often referred to his decision to bring that branch out as a divine choice.

“Who would have guessed that a random branch I mindlessly snapped off inside the Gate would do something this massive?”

One day, the researcher made a strange suggestion, asking Ki Soo-hyuk to plant the branch right next to the Gate it came from. In reality, that was the only thing Ki Soo-hyuk actually did.

Whether it used the Gate itself as fertilizer, the branch took less than two years to grow into a massive, towering tree. He still vividly remembered how absurdly fast that unnatural growth had been. Once it matured into a giant tree, it erupted into full bloom in the dead of winter, scattering thick clouds of pollen everywhere.

However, when that pollen spread so heavily that it practically swallowed entire cities across the nation, even Ki Soo-hyuk grew deeply anxious and couldn’t sleep a wink. To make matters worse, a mysterious, unexplained lung disease broke out nationwide during that exact period, with the pollen heavily suspected as the cause.

Ultimately, following strict emergency directives from the government and the Association, Ki Soo-hyuk had to tear the tree out by its roots and burn it to ashes. It was right around the time the tree was destroyed without a trace that the researcher reappeared, holding the hand of a child who looked to be about five years old.

Perhaps because the child’s large, clear eyes set against a deathly pale face had left such a profound impression on him, Ki Soo-hyuk could never forget how the boy looked that day. That child was Lee Cheong-hyun.

“…I still have no idea where on earth he dug that kid up from.”

“Are you referring to Cheong-hyun, sir?”

“Yeah. That five-year-old kid… He was way too quiet and submissive for someone who might have been kidnapped from somewhere.”

Ki Soo-hyuk pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a long, heavy sigh. Thinking about it now felt completely pointless.

“Right, you said the place where Lee Cheong-hyun was hiding out was some rural slum neighborhood?”

“Yes, sir. By the time our men arrived, he had already been involved in a car accident and was moved to a local hospital.”

“What terrible luck.”

Ki Soo-hyuk clicked his tongue with a deeply exhausted expression.

That mysterious lung disease that had plagued the entire country—the researcher had passionately argued that it was a miracle caused by the giant tree. He had ranted like a madman, claiming that only the chosen few who inhaled that pollen could witness the miracle. Ki Soo-hyuk had dismissed it entirely as the rambling nonsense of a crazy eccentric.

At least, he truly believed it was nonsense—until the day he received Lee Cheong-hyun’s ‘Detoxification’ for the very first time.