Stepping through the wavering portal and into Namhyeon’s subspace, Jia stood with her mouth agape, overwhelmed by the majesty of the enormous, old-fashioned mansion spread out before her. It was a space that completely ignored the laws of physics in reality—literally a place of another dimension.
“Come in.”
Namhyeon’s command was as cold as ice, almost an order to leave rather than an invitation. As if possessed, Jia staggered into the mansion.
In the mansion’s living room were Tiara and Cherina, who had remained after helping him prepare to go out. Since Namhyeon had permitted them to relax, saying the inside of the subspace was safe, the two maids had shed their human shells and comfortably revealed the horns on either side of their heads and the dragon tails extending from beneath their skirts.
“Wh-what are those...?”
The sight of other races wearing maid uniforms. Jia’s eyes widened in disbelief and shock. But Namhyeon had no intention whatsoever of accommodating her confusion.
“Hatsune, take her to a guest room for now.”
“Yes, Master.”
Receiving the order, Hatsune perfectly suppressed the rage and murderous intent boiling inside her.
With only the mechanical attitude of a maid attending to her “master’s guest,” she guided Jia to an isolated guest room on the first floor. As Hatsune set down steaming black tea in an elegant teacup, there was not the slightest tremor in her hands, nor any ripple of emotion.
A moment later, Namhyeon opened the firmly shut door and came in.
“Leave us.”
At Namhyeon’s brief instruction, Hatsune bowed her head, quietly closed the door, and left. Only the two of them remained in the room, along with a suffocating silence.
“Haa... Hey, Lee Jia. Seriously, what the hell goes through your head when you live your life?”
Namhyeon rubbed his face with his hands and let out a deep sigh.
He had clearly given her a month’s grace, an opportunity to reflect on herself, and yet this insane woman had brazenly staged an attempted murder in broad daylight. To prevent a horrific disaster, he had no choice but to drag her here, into his only sanctuary and refuge—but that fact itself was horribly unpleasant and chilling to Namhyeon.
“W-wait, Hyeon. What on earth is this? What is this house in the first place, and those horned women...”
“That’s not something you need to know right now.”
Namhyeon sharply cut Jia off.
“Answer me. Why did you do something like that in the middle of the street?”
At the icy interrogation, Jia’s shoulders flinched. But soon, a grotesque sense of grievance and jealousy filled her empty eyes.
“Because the one who should be by your side... is me.”
The photo at the amusement park that the informant had sent her. That scene of Namhyeon smiling with the happiest expression in the world beside those unidentified women clawed through Jia’s mind once again.
Over the past few years, Namhyeon had never once smiled that brightly beside Jia. It was a place she had protected with her entire life, and the sense of loss from having that seat next to him stolen by some insect-like things had completely paralyzed Jia’s reason.
“Seriously... Lee Jia! Lee Jia!!”
Bang—!!!
Losing his composure, veins bulging, Namhyeon slammed the floor hard.
In that instant, the entire subspace mansion, reacting to Namhyeon’s explosive mana, began to shake and lurch madly as if an earthquake had struck. The teacup on the table rolled to the floor and shattered to pieces.
“Hey! I clearly gave you a chance. I gave you time to think properly on your own! But instead of waiting for me to contact you, you laid hands on one of my people?!”
“Th-that’s... because you abandoned me and those bitches...”
“Shut up!!”
Namhyeon’s furious lion’s roar tore through the room.
“Please, just act with some common sense! Why the hell are you like this?! Why do you have to suffocate people this much?!”
It was the first time Namhyeon, who had always been indifferent and composed, had lost control and become this angry. Jia’s blind violence and obsession, utterly beyond common sense, had not only scraped Namhyeon’s patience down to the bottom, but smashed it apart entirely.
The “clear disgust and hatred” dwelling in Namhyeon’s eyes as he looked at her.
Facing it head-on, Jia’s heart dropped. Only then did the reality that she was utterly hated by the man she considered her entire world touch her skin like a blade.
“Hic... sob...”
Large tears began to fall from Jia’s big eyes.
Sitting collapsed on the floor, she desperately clutched the hem of Namhyeon’s pants with trembling hands.
“I’m sorry... I’m so sorry, Hyeon... I was wrong...”
Her voice was filled with desperate sobs. But the words that followed those tears were still trapped within a terrible sickness.
“But still, I... I want to be with you... Please don’t abandon me, Hyeon... Huaaah...”
She did not understand at all the “fundamental reason” for Namhyeon’s anger—her lack of respect for others and desire for control. It was simply a selfish, blind plea poured out in terror that he might abandon her.
Looking down at Jia, who was sitting on the floor shedding tears, Namhyeon’s thoughts tangled in complicated knots.
If he drove her out without conversation or left her alone like this, it was obvious this twisted obsession would erupt again someday and create a terrible bloodbath. Namhyeon suppressed his boiling anger and pulled up his cold reason.
“You want to be by my side. Fine, I understand that much of your sincerity.”
“......”
“Is it really just that you want to be by my side?”
It was a calm, dry question, stripped of as much emotion as possible. Jia looked up at Namhyeon with reddened eyes and hurriedly nodded.
“Y-yes. I want us to be together like before. We were always together for four years. I... I liked that time the best.”
At those words, Namhyeon was so dumbfounded he fell silent.
Those four years Jia remembered as “the best.”
For Namhyeon, that time had been nothing more than a period of being thoroughly controlled and suppressed, a “living doll” trapped inside Jia’s display case. The hell where Namhyeon himself had felt so suffocated he thought he would go insane—Jia remembered it as the most perfect paradise in the world. From the very beginning, the frequencies of their emotions had been aimed in completely different directions.
“Phew. Fine. I understand what your true feelings are, but your methods are completely wrong.”
“Then what am I supposed to do...?”
“Can’t you think about that yourself?”
“I don’t know... I really don’t know.”
Jia wore a confused expression, as if she truly could not understand. A deformed way of thinking, entirely off track from that of an ordinary person, never having learned how to respect others. Namhyeon had no choice but to spell it out for her one by one, as if spoon-feeding the correct answer to a child.
“What you want is simply to be with me, that one thing?”
“Y-yes.”
“And it absolutely has to be ‘only you’ there?”
At Namhyeon’s sharp question, Jia’s shoulders flinched.
“Another woman... being there? That’s a bit...”
As if the very thought was horrifying, Jia’s face twisted with instinctive disgust and rejection. As expected, it was a suffocating possessiveness that could not compromise with anything.
“I more or less understand what kind of existence you think I am, and what those heavy emotions are. I do, but...”
Namhyeon trailed off. To give a clear black-and-white answer here and now, Jia’s blind obsession and his own rejection clashed far too sharply. It was not a problem that could be solved all at once.
“Phew... Fine. Let’s shift the topic a little for now.”
Namhyeon pulled over a chair from one corner of the ruined room and sat down. The flow of the conversation, like a bowstring pulled taut, needed to be aired out at least once.
“I’ll start by telling you why I changed, and who the kids outside are.”
Toward Jia, who was staring at him in surprise, Namhyeon began to reveal the true time and truth he had never told anyone.
Not long ago, at the moment when he had suffered a terrible accident in a dungeon, lost consciousness, and lain in a hospital bed. Though his body had been wandering on the threshold of death, his soul had strangely crossed over into an unknown “other world.”
The story of how he had desperately broken through his limits and grown stronger to survive there, and how he had finally met six dragons and become their master and sole savior.
And after spending countless long years in that other world, he had miraculously broken through the dimensional wall and returned—only to open his eyes in the hospital room at precisely “the very moment the accident had happened.”
Namhyeon’s voice was calm, but the weight of the story contained within it was vast and unreal enough to overturn all of the common sense about reality that Jia knew.
An other world he had crossed into at the threshold of death. There, he had rolled through decades of time, reached the pinnacle of illusion arts, taken in young dragons including Hatsune, protected them, and become their “real family”—a long and heavy tale.
By ordinary common sense, it was nonsense that could not possibly be accepted, but Jia had no choice but to believe it. The overwhelming gap in power she had experienced in the alley moments ago, and the subspace mansion beyond dimensions spread out before her eyes, proved that all of it was true.
“That’s what happened. Do you understand the situation a little now?”
When Namhyeon asked calmly, Jia’s empty eyes trembled faintly.
Not a single bit of Namhyeon’s suffering in the other world or the process of his awakening entered her mind. Only one fact boiled within Jia’s brain as if devouring it.
‘Those horned women... spent more time with Hyeon than I did?’
Decades. Beings who had monopolized Namhyeon’s side for an endlessly distant span of time that she could not dare approach or even glimpse. At that horrific fact, black jealousy and murderous intent squirmed once more inside Jia.
“Lee Jia.”
“Y-yes... I understand.”
At Namhyeon’s call, Jia barely suppressed her true feelings and answered.
“Phew. So they aren’t simply maids to me. They’re ‘family.’”
The word “family” fell once again like a wedge being driven in. Jia felt as if her head would burst, but she bit her lip until it bled and endured. Then, with the feeling of standing at the edge of a cliff, she asked.
“Then... what am I to you?”
If not family, then a lover? A childhood friend? Or at least the most special person?
To Jia, who was ready to cling to any answer, Namhyeon threw out a merciless reply without the slightest hesitation.
“Well, just an acquaintance.”
She heard the sound of her heart plummeting to the floor.
Four years. All that time when she had believed she loved him, locking Namhyeon in her cage and perfectly controlling him away from every danger in the world, was trampled underfoot by Namhyeon with the simple words “an acquaintance.” Jia turned deathly pale from a shock so great she could barely breathe.
“Now that you roughly understand, I’ll say just one last thing.”
Namhyeon’s gaze sank coldly, as if he were looking at an insect.
“If you ever touch so much as a hair on one of my family again, know that your head won’t remain properly attached to your body.”
“......!”
Terrified, Jia could only tremble her lips, unable to say anything.
“My position is clear. This place is the most important thing to me, and the family inside it is my entire world. The moment someone touches my family, that bastard becomes my enemy through and through. In other words,”
Namhyeon raised a finger and pointed directly at Lee Jia, who was sitting collapsed on the floor.
“You are my enemy.”
Crack.
The last thread of reason that had barely been supporting Jia’s mentality collapsed completely with that sentence.
“N-no... I, I don’t want to be your enemy, Hyeon...! Why would I ever stand against you...!”
“Then what should you do?”
“I-I don’t know... I really don’t know...!”
Jia, her face a mess of tears and snot, tore at her hair and screamed. She was sincere. She only had the pure desire—at the same time the most violent desire—to be by Namhyeon’s side, but Jia had never learned how to stay beside him without controlling him.
“Go sort out your thoughts. And until I contact you first, don’t come anywhere near me, and don’t contact me.”
Namhyeon rose from his seat.
“I’m changing my phone number immediately. And don’t say a word about this place to anyone. Understood?”
“Hyeon...? Wait, Hyeon...!”
Namhyeon ruthlessly ignored her plea and turned his head toward the door.
“Hatsune. The guest is leaving.”
No sooner had those words fallen than the tightly shut door opened and Hatsune entered. She roughly grabbed Jia’s arm like a piece of luggage as Jia lay crumpled on the floor.
“Wait! Let go, let go of me! Hyeon?! Hyeoooon!!!”
Jia thrashed and tried to shake off Hatsune’s arm, but human strength could not undo the grip of a dragon. Dragged out through the mansion’s entrance, Jia saw a wavering subspace gate open before her eyes, leading back to the alley in reality.
“It is Master’s order. Get lost.”
With an icy voice, Hatsune roughly threw Jia through the gate.
Jia, ruthlessly hurled onto the asphalt, hurriedly got up and tried to leap back into the door of light.
But the subspace door floating in the air vanished without a trace like a mirage just before she could touch it.
“No! Please! Hyeon! Please open the door! Hyeon!! Hyeooooon!!!”
As she struck the cold concrete wall where nothing remained until her fists tore open, Lee Jia’s desperate, horrific screams echoed emptily through the alley.