“Who are you waiting for?”

Sa-hyeon’s voice softened without thinking. It was a habit he’d picked up from his master. Even with his cold expression and flat, inflectionless tone, the warmth that used to seep from his master’s fingertips had shaped Sa-hyeon’s manner more than he realized.

The white-haired boy looked up at Sa-hyeon and smiled shyly.

“Yes, Hyung. I have someone I’m supposed to meet.”

“Did you agree to meet here?”

“No. It’s somewhere else, but I don’t know where it is.”

“Where is it?”

Is he lost? He seems calm for that.

The boy’s attitude was a little odd, but Sa-hyeon didn’t immediately suspect him. Still smiling as if they were old acquaintances, the child named a place in the exact opposite direction from where they stood.

“Do you know how to get there?”

“Yeah. You came the wrong way. You have to go farther in.”

The advice slipped out naturally. As Cho Yoon’s disciple, it almost felt like an obligation.

“If you don’t know the way, should I take you there?”

“Could you? Thank you.”

“Wait a moment.”

—Oh dear. You shouldn’t trust an adult who asks you to go somewhere together.

Sa-hyeon, who had heard his master’s warnings since he was small, sighed inwardly as he adjusted the snacks in his arms. He even pulled out a skewer that had slipped loose and placed it in the boy’s hand.

Walking together toward the edge of the city felt strangely intimate.

As expected, none of the passersby paid any attention to the boy’s striking appearance; only Sa-hyeon kept stealing glances at the child beside him. The boy, seemingly unaware, focused on his snack, then suddenly turned his head.

It was an ordinary movement, nothing special, but when their light-brown eyes met, Sa-hyeon felt inexplicably caught off guard.

While he fumbled for what to say, the boy spoke first.

“What is it?”

“Huh? Uh, no. It’s just because you resemble someone.”

The words blurted out in his fluster, and they were the truth. At first he’d only been drawn to the white hair, but the longer he looked, the stranger it felt. His master blended into the world as if he were melting into it, his presence faint. This boy, though, seemed as though only Sa-hyeon could see him.

Cho Yoon’s eyes were amber, clear and bright under sunlight. This boy’s pupils looked like the inner bark of a tree, cloudy and filmed over.

The more Sa-hyeon stared, the more the similarities and differences tangled together, until details surfaced that should not have been there unless it was his master. He forced a clumsy smile, telling himself the flutter in his chest and the tremor in his fingers were nothing but curiosity.

The boy beamed back.

“Who?”

“Mm… someone I know.”

“I see.”

The boy answered lightly and faced forward again. Sa-hyeon finally let out a breath and looked away.

That was when a clear voice, unburied by the crowd, slid sharply into his ears.

“I know someone who resembles you too, Hyung.”

“Really? What do they resemble?”

“The smell.”

Smell?

Sa-hyeon turned and sniffed at his own shoulder. The boy laughed, his lusterless eyes crinkling as he did.

“It’s not a weird smell. You know. The smell you catch when you step into a forest.”

“Forest?”

“Yes. It smells like water at a foggy dawn, like cold earth between huge trees, like the raw scent of freshly broken branches, and like the green scent of crushed leaves.”

As the boy spoke, Sa-hyeon’s expression stiffened. Every single detail matched the words Sa-hyeon used for Cho Yoon’s scent. And in nearly ten years away from home, not once had anyone told him he smelled like his master.

As they drew closer to the destination, the crowd thinned. Sa-hyeon’s pace quickened without him noticing, yet the boy stayed at his side as if it were effortless. Still, Sa-hyeon could not sense a shred of trained inner energy from the child, and confusion gnawed at him.

The boy went on happily, piling on descriptions of the scent. Then the content began to turn grotesque.

“It smells like the poisonous herbs my younger brother blindly plucked and ate out of hopeless curiosity, like the spiritual medicine steeped deep into flesh with a promise to live together for a long time, and like the blood that filled the floor until it soaked beneath that child.”

“…What are you saying? You can’t smell things like that in a forest.”

The boy stopped abruptly.

Sa-hyeon turned, and their eyes met.

The boy’s gaze carried a tangible pressure, as though it could pry into Sa-hyeon’s skull through his pupils.

It was not imagination.

Sa-hyeon froze where he stood.

Veins stood out beneath the child’s skin, which Sa-hyeon had thought was only bright. His lips, though, were still curved in a cheerful smile.

Sorcery.

The word flashed through Sa-hyeon’s mind. He forced his body to move and snapped his hand to the saber at his waist. In a single motion he drew, aiming for the boy’s unguarded body. He did not doubt his blade could cut through thin cloth and tender flesh.

The street food he had packed so carefully spilled at his feet. Passersby walked past without hesitation, stepping on the dirt-smeared snacks with unfocused eyes.

Sa-hyeon stood in the middle of a perfectly ordinary street, frozen in the posture of a completed draw. His blade had halted, hovering half an inch from the boy’s collar. The only thing he could move was his eyes.

The boy took one step closer.

As the distance closed, cold sweat slid down Sa-hyeon’s temples and gathered at his chin. The boy seized Sa-hyeon by the jaw and spoke, his voice suddenly low and vile.

“Why does Ah-yoon’s smell come from your danjeon?”

A bare hand reached toward Sa-hyeon’s lower abdomen, as if to tear him open.

The world slowed.

In the next instant, Sa-hyeon understood, he would die with his intestines ripped out while he still lived. The approaching hand was small and soft-looking, but the murderous intent behind it was beyond comparison. This boy, no, this thing would peel him apart, dig out his danjeon, and search for that “smell.” The certainty dropped on him like a sentence.

Then another voice cut into that sliver of time, both salvation and a new kind of despair.

“Exalted Emperor?”

Smooth. Polished.

Sa-hyeon lifted the only thing still under his control, his gaze, and turned it toward the newcomer.

The young man who had intervened wore pale blue martial robes. His complexion was so bloodless he looked as if he’d just risen from a sickbed, and his frame was thin. Yet the body beneath the cloth was slender and supple, the bridge of his nose curved like a willow, his lips narrow, his eyes arranged into the careful expression of a good person.

And somehow…

…Familiar.

A memory struck like lightning.

Everything Sa-hyeon had done without thinking, every reflex meant to dodge the taste of violence and spare his younger self from pain, cracked open at once. Scars that had missed their chance to heal, sealed away out of sight, were dragged into the light. The tower he’d built inside himself had been nothing but sand.

“Hyeon-ah, you might not remember, but you once drank Master’s blood. Your body probably changed because of that.”

Why didn’t he remember drinking his master’s blood?

“There was a reason. Don’t think too deeply about it.”

Why had his sister been so reluctant to say any more?

Because he had forgotten.

He had forgotten being caught by the hand of someone with that face, beaten until he hovered on the brink of death, then made to suffer for two full months as the price of yanking back a breath that had already slipped away.

At some point he had simply “woken,” and he was on Mount Dumang.

There was a hut where he could lie down and keep the wind off, a sister who always shielded him, and an adult who kept him from starving. So he chose not to doubt. He told himself it was normal for childhood memories to have gaps, that losing a few months meant nothing.

His unbroken bones began to ache as if they were shattered. Skin without a single bruise screamed as if it had been struck raw. His breathing turned shallow and frantic, as though his lungs were flooding with blood, and his ears dulled as if his eardrums had burst.

The shock, so perfectly buried that even Cho Yoon had never noticed, flooded his body all at once.

It pinned Sa-hyeon harder than the boy’s sorcery, harder than the threat of death itself.

“You wander around noisily. Like a filthy rat.”

The old voice rang in his skull.

Sa-hyeon tried to beg, but no sound would form, no matter how desperately he pushed.

Please save me. I was wrong.

He even forgot that more than ten years had passed since he’d regained his voice.

Then he seemed to crumple with a thud, and the world went dark.

Even as he slipped under, he had no room for anything but one frantic thought.

Noona must be outside. She shouldn’t meet this person. She shouldn’t get hurt.

Noona must be at the Hao Sect. She shouldn’t meet these people. She shouldn’t get hurt…

“Heok…”

Sa-hyeon swallowed a ragged breath, the past finally returned in full. Now that he understood and looked around again, a new fear surged up.

The sound of chains binding his body rattled, clattering, far too loud.

Sa-hyeon clenched his trembling hands into fists and stared at a spot on the wall.

He couldn’t draw up inner energy, but his danjeon was intact.

He couldn’t focus his senses, but the body he had trained remained the same.

That was why he heard it. That was why he knew.

Of all times, right now, someone’s footsteps were coming closer.