The nanny wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes and hurried toward the kitchen. A short while later, Yihyun found himself facing a steaming meal and picked up his spoon as though he had been waiting for this moment.
“Our young master… It’s so wonderful to see you eating so well.”
“Auntie! Another bowl, please!”
Seeing the bowl of rice emptied in the blink of an eye, the nanny hurriedly refilled it, looking deeply moved.
“Yes, of course. You need to eat like this to regain your strength.”
Sitting at the dining table, Yihyun literally wolfed down the rice and side dishes the nanny had prepared.
Practically drinking down his rice, Yihyun thought to himself. If he was going to deal with the bastards who had sent those messages and then go catch Han Taeyun in this frail Guide body, he first needed to stuff himself with something and build up his stamina. He might not have the muscles he’d had as an Esper, but he could at least build up some spirit, couldn’t he?
After finishing his meal, Yihyun left the penthouse. A luxury sedan arranged by his personal driver was waiting at the building’s main entrance.
Even when Yihyun approached, the driver didn’t spare him a single glance and simply opened the rear door. Just like the attending physician, his attitude blatantly said that he intended to do nothing beyond the bare minimum required of him.
Yihyun lightly brushed off the driver’s disregard and sank deep into the back seat. A low chuckle escaped him.
‘I may not be treated like a person, but I sure have it good.’
True to its staggering price tag, the car glided smoothly along the road without so much as a tremor. The ride was as comfortable as it could possibly be, but an uncomfortable silence hung inside the car, where even the radio remained off.
Cutting through that oppressive silence, the car soon came to a stop in front of the ‘Ability User Management Bureau.’
Seeing the Ability Bureau for the first time in five years, Yihyun found it completely transformed. The old Ability Bureau had been a crude, solid fortress built entirely around practicality, but now it was so bizarrely extravagant that it was almost overwhelming. The cold gleam of the building, completely covered in sleek reinforced glass and chrome. Looking at the unfamiliar high-rise building with no trace of what he remembered sent wave after wave of alienation through him.
‘While that crazy bastard Han Taeyun was raising hell and blowing away half the world, the people on the land that was left sure took their sweet fucking time throwing money around.’
Yihyun couldn’t suppress the derisive laugh that slipped from his lips. Nowhere on those glittering glass walls could he see the desperation of the battlefield or the fear of annihilation. The fact that the world he had gone so far as to detonate his core to protect had been swallowed up by nothing more than this kind of ostentatious display made his insides twist.
When he opened the car door and stepped out into the heavily guarded atmosphere, the gazes of the guards and the people passing through the lobby immediately fixed on Yihyun. Pity, contempt, and blatant mockery mingled in their eyes. Yihyun met every one of those gazes head-on, a cold smile curling across his lips.
‘Baek Yihyun, I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of how they’ve been treating you all this time.’
“Hey, Baek Yihyun! Heard you took a bunch of pills trying to die. You actually managed to survive and crawl out?”
Several burly men in the middle of the lobby spotted Yihyun and approached him with snickering laughs. They looked like an even worse breed of scum than the types who used to watch Seunghyun’s every move and grovel before him.
“Hey, you’re just a Guide. Who the hell do you think you are, putting on a suicide show?”
For news of his suicide attempt to have spread this far in a single day, someone must have gone to great lengths to spread it around.
Yihyun let out a quiet sigh. One of the men gave Yihyun’s shoulder a shove and blocked his path. Because of the height difference between him and Baek Yihyun, the bastard’s jaw looked particularly close. In the old days, he could have sent him flying with one finger.
“Move. Save your barking for when you’re at home.”
The Esper who had been sneering at Yihyun instantly twisted his face at the unexpected response.
“You little bastard… You really wanna fucking die?”
‘Whether it’s guiding or mana, it all depends on how you use it.’
The man reached out to grab Yihyun by the collar. The moment his collar was seized, Yihyun’s body was hauled up into the air. Yihyun sneered coldly and grabbed the bastard’s wrist. Then he recalled the mana circuits he had experienced thousands upon thousands of times before his death—the ones that had burned and thrashed inside him just before his core went into overload.
Without hesitation, he honed his guiding waves into needles and drove them into the most sensitive points of the man’s mana circuits. When the guiding meant to suppress an Esper’s overload instead stabbed backward into his circuits, the man screamed as though he had been electrocuted.
“Aaagh! W-What the hell is this?!”
The man recoiled in shock and released him. Another bastard beside him grabbed Yihyun by the shoulder in bewilderment.
“Hey, what the hell’s wrong with you? Why are you suddenly acting like this?!”
As though he had been waiting for it, Yihyun drove the same guiding needles into that bastard as well. A Guide’s energy was normally supposed to feel sweet to an Esper, but what Yihyun forced into him was closer to the agony of having impurities forcibly injected into his body. The instant the bastard flinched and staggered backward, Yihyun unhesitatingly smashed the toe of his dress shoe into the man’s shin.
Thwack-!
“Agh!”
Leaving the screaming bastards behind, Yihyun casually dusted off his clothes and strolled away. In truth, since he had kicked an Esper’s rock-hard leg with the frail body of a Guide, the top of his own foot hurt even more. But there were too many people watching, so he gritted his teeth and walked on as though nothing had happened.
‘The strong are still trampling the weak, and Espers are still arrogant as hell.’
Yihyun grumbled inwardly.
The newly built Ability Bureau was so complicated inside that he had absolutely no idea where anything was. Since everyone’s attention was still focused on him, Yihyun simply marched straight ahead as though he knew exactly where he was going. Once he figured he was sufficiently out of those bastards’ sight, he stopped an employee passing by with an armful of documents.
“Excuse me, where’s the Guide Wing?”
The employee stopped at the sudden question and looked at Yihyun, then widened his eyes as though he recognized his face.
“Oh, aren’t you Guide Baek Yihyun? Are you feeling all right? For the Guide Wing, just keep going down the passage to the left from here and cross over into Building B.”
Yihyun gave a slight nod as he looked at the employee, who explained the way with genuine concern in his eyes. Apparently, not everyone in the Ability Bureau hated the owner of this body.
“Thank you.”
Following the directions he had been given, Yihyun strode toward the new Building B. Illegitimate child or not, he was still the Ability Bureau Director’s blood and an S-Rank Guide. If he went to the Guide Wing, he was bound to have authorization to access the Ability Bureau’s internal network.
‘Baek Yihyun, I don’t know how much of a pushover you’ve been all this time… but starting today, things are going to be different.’
On the way to the Guide Wing, a familiar face appeared on an enormous electronic display that seemed to swallow the entire lobby wall. As though entranced, Yihyun walked toward it. Countless people streamed past behind him, but Yihyun’s world stopped, fixed entirely on Taeyun’s eyes on the screen.
He vividly remembered the day that photograph had been taken. It was the day the new recruits graduated from the Ability User Training Center and officially joined the Ability Bureau. They had hastily pitched a tent in one corner of the training building, called in a photographer, and taken ID photos of every new agent.
Excited at finally becoming official agents, the Espers had lined up still reeking of sweat from training. Nobody cared that the makeshift photo set was pathetic, with a poorly secured backdrop hanging there wrinkled and fluttering.
Seunghyun, who had been supervising the recruits, had burst into an incredulous laugh when he saw Han Taeyun’s result.
“Hey, why the hell did you take an ID photo like you’re shooting a fashion spread?”
All the other bastards had come out looking like sweat-soaked criminals, yet even under that terrible lighting, Taeyun’s photograph looked unreal, like a masterpiece painted on canvas. Back then, instead of answering, Taeyun had simply turned his head and looked impassively at Seunghyun. Those eyes had been far more vivid and chilling than they were in the photograph.
But now, brutally stamped across that handsome face before Yihyun were thick, blood-red letters:
[WANTED / KILL ON SIGHT]
Even though the photograph had been taken seven or eight years ago, there was something strangely oppressive about that gaze, as though it were piercing straight through the person Yihyun was now.
Yihyun stared intently at Taeyun beyond the cold glass wall. Part of him wanted to reach out and erase those red words. Another part wanted to grab Taeyun by the collar and demand to know why the hell he had turned the world into this.
“…Did you get pissed because I made fun of you for shooting a fashion spread, you crazy bastard?”
Yihyun’s low murmur scattered beneath the electronic display. After remaining trapped in Taeyun’s gaze for a long while, Yihyun finally turned away and headed toward the Guide Wing. The display’s cold light stretched across his shoulders.
***
After asking security personnel for directions several times, Yihyun made his way to his private waiting room on the second floor of the Guide Wing.
“Where did you say Room 208 was?”
At Yihyun’s question, the security officer lazily pointed toward the end of the hallway as though he couldn’t be bothered. A mocking gaze stabbed into Yihyun’s back, as if asking whether a bastard who had barely survived trying to kill himself had forgotten even his own room number, but Yihyun easily ignored it. Fortunately, thanks to his status as the Ability Bureau Director’s illegitimate son, even if people bullied him, he had at least been assigned a private space. Yihyun locked the waiting-room door behind him and stepped inside, only to pause.
The room was immaculately organized, almost obsessively clean, without a speck of dust anywhere. And sitting squarely on the desk chair at its center was a white rabbit character cushion that looked completely out of place with the atmosphere of the room.
“…….”
Yihyun swallowed a dry laugh and sank into the chair. The soft, fluffy sensation of the cushion against his back felt unfamiliar. From the strawberry-flavored mana supplement in his inventory to this cushion...