My lovely girlfriend Sia had died a year ago.
And yet.
Some suspicious woman, not even a monster, had suddenly appeared from a Gate and was insisting out of nowhere that she was that dead girlfriend.
I doubted many people in the world could take that woman at her word in a situation like this.
I, for one, certainly couldn't.
If anything, the thought of being deceived on Sia's death anniversary made my blood boil.
This was an insult to the late Sia, and to me.
I put some distance between myself and the woman who claimed to be Sia and was trying to throw her arms around me.
Part of me wanted to curse out this woman for impersonating the dead Sia and tell her to vanish from my sight that very instant.
But she had come out of a Gate, after all, so I judged it best not to provoke her carelessly.
For now, the priority was to try talking calmly.
"Who exactly are you, that you know me, and know the woman I love?"
Suppressing my personal feelings as best I could, I asked the woman.
But the moment she heard my flat, dry question, the woman...... began to sniffle.
'She's crying?'
This was a development I hadn't expected at all.
At least it was a relief that she hadn't taken a hostile stance toward me yet, but things were taking a strange turn.
An unidentified being that had come out of a Gate.
On top of that, no fighting force whatsoever apart from me.
'Calm down. I have to stay calm.'
First I had to find out why the woman knew my name and Sia's, and why she was pretending to be the dead Sia.
While I was calmly sorting out in my head what to say next.
"I guess I've changed a lot, so of course you'd think that, oppa. Still, I was worried you might've forgotten me, but thank goodness. I'm sorry. I was stupid to doubt you. You even brought tteokbokki and gimbap because you were thinking of me. Right, there's no way you'd have forgotten me. Of course you wouldn't have left me behind and met another woman. That's right. It was my fault. I'm an idiot for doubting someone like you."
After muttering all that to herself, the woman caught her breath for a moment and swept her gaze over the surroundings.
Then she soon raised her hand high toward the sky and began to murmur in a language I couldn't understand.
[Silence.]
No sooner had her murmuring ended than an enormous amount of mana began to envelop the area.
"There's nobody around here, but just in case."
'Magic?'
And she had cast it with nothing but an incantation, without any formula calculation?
In that instant, I knew by instinct.
That no matter how desperately I threw myself at her, this woman was a tremendous monster who could subdue me without lifting a finger.
My legs were shaking so badly I felt I might collapse on the spot, and my heart was pounding like mad, as if it might burst at any second.
"Oppa, oppa, what's wrong all of a sudden? Are you not feeling well? You're not sick, are you? Right? Pull yourself together, oppa!"
"Y-You, just what are you......."
The overwhelming gap in power left me short of breath.
But she, on the contrary, seemed quite flustered at the sight of me gasping for air.
"What's wrong, oppa? Or is it because you're scared of me? Oppa, calm down. Breathe in deep, then breathe out. I'm your girlfriend. There's no way I'd hurt you. Calm down. No, wait, I'll make you feel better."
Then the woman murmured something once more and cast a spell on me.
I didn't catch exactly what she murmured, but once again she incanted the spell in one go, without any formula calculation.
"How's that, feeling better now?"
"......I am feeling better."
"Phew, thank goodness."
Only a few seconds earlier my heart had been pounding hard enough to burst, but my heart rate went back to normal as if by magic.
But that only frightened me more.
Magic that calms the mind. I had never even heard of such a spell.
"Okay, I get that you can't believe I'm Sia, oppa, and I'll admit there's no way you could in this situation. Fine, so all I have to do is prove I'm your girlfriend, right?"
After steadying her breathing, the woman calmly began to talk.
How Sia and I first met, what Sia said to me when she confessed, where we had our first kiss, the first birthday present Sia ever gave me, the favorite songs I always sang whenever Sia and I went to karaoke together.......
Every one of them was something no one but Sia herself could know.
Then, is that woman really Sia......?
It was an absurd situation, but just in case, I decided to ask one more question.
"Then what's my favorite drink?"
"It's kind of a stretch to call it a drink, but you love coffee milk, oppa. That's why I was always asking you if you were addicted to coffee milk."
That answer settled it.
Though I didn't know why she had appeared from a Gate, or why she looked completely different from the Sia I knew.
The woman in front of me was, without a doubt, my beloved girlfriend Sia.
"So then you said that sure, you were addicted to coffee milk, but what you were even more addicted to was me, Sia...... So I told you it gave me goosebumps and to never say stuff like that again. When was that? I was twenty-one then, so—."
"Sia."
Before Sia could finish, I pulled her into a tight hug.
"Sia. Sia. Sia."
Things like how this couldn't be a dream, how badly I had missed her, how much I loved her, all rose to mind, but I didn't have a chance to say anything else; I just kept calling Sia's name.
Only once I called her name did she seem to feel at ease, and Sia smiled brightly and called mine in return.
"Min-jun oppa."
"Yeah, Sia."
Instead of asking how the other had been all this time, we held each other for a long while without a word.
Her face, her voice, even her height were all different, but holding her, I knew it was Sia.
No one but Sia loved being in my arms this much.
After we had held each other like that for a long, long time.
Wiping away my tears, I asked Sia.
"Sia, what on earth happened to you all this time?"
***
Even as her whole body burned, engulfed in irresistibly powerful flames that had broken out inside the Gate, Jeong Sia did not lose hope of survival.
I won't die. I absolutely won't die. For my own sake, and for my beloved Min-jun oppa's sake, I will survive to the very end no matter what.
But sadly, her resolve was only half fulfilled.
She did live again.
Only, in a dimension completely different from Earth.
As the mightiest creature in the world, a dragon.
Right after her reincarnation she couldn't believe what had happened to her, but little by little she adapted to a dragon's way of life and came to enjoy her new dragon life.
However, that enjoyment didn't last long.
'I feel empty.'
After being reborn as a dragon, she could have anything she wanted and do anything she wished.
Her kind new parents lavished her with affection, too.
Even so, she could not be satisfied.
'Because I can't see Min-jun oppa.'
She had everything, yet the boyfriend she loved wasn't by her side.
Min-jun, whom she had loved so much that she thought of him as the other half of her soul.
Sia missed that other half of her soul so much it ached.
Then one day, as she suffered from an emptiness her longing for Min-jun left unfilled.
She finally made up her mind to go and meet Min-jun herself.
There was only one way. To develop and use a dimensional transfer magic formula that transcended time and space.
From then on, she began laying plans to make it a reality.
Until she became an adult dragon, she trained relentlessly and gained power far greater than other hatchlings her age.
And whenever she had a spare moment, she took magic books from her father's study and read them to build a foundation of magical knowledge.
Then, after she became an adult dragon, she threw herself madly into researching dimensional transfer magic.
Even her fellow dragons tempted her, saying, 'In theory, dimensional transfer magic is a spell that cannot exist in this world, so come on a sojourn with us instead,' but she didn't waver and devoted herself solely to developing it.
Creating a new spell alone, with no guarantee of success, was by no means easy.
At first she had started out thinking it wouldn't matter if it took several thousand years, as long as she could see Min-jun again.
But the more time passed, the more she felt as if she were going mad, and the thought of letting go of everything kept circling in her head.
But each time, she steadied herself by carving Min-jun's face into a stone.
'Get a grip, you bitch. You're going to give up here? When Min-jun oppa is waiting for you? You spineless bitch.'
As much as I miss oppa, he must be missing me just as much.
Oppa can't do anything right now, so I have to be the one who works to go and meet him.
Min-jun oppa, Min-jun oppa, Min-jun oppa, Min-jun oppa.
'Wait for me. I'll definitely come to see you.'
And so a hundred years passed, then two hundred.......
A thousand years went by.
Then, when a little more than two thousand years had gone by.
Her efforts finally bore fruit.
Unlike the existing dimensional transfer magic, which couldn't set the coordinates of the destination dimension or time and required the caster to stake their life.
A groundbreaking dimensional transfer spell that could take the caster to any desired time in any desired dimension.
Admittedly, there was some room for error in setting the time coordinates.
And since it consumed a staggering amount of mana, no one knew what side effects casting it might have, but she was confident she could bear all of it.
Going to meet Min-jun was more than worth taking such risks.
"At last, the day has come."
The moment she finished checking the formula, she cast the dimensional transfer magic without hesitation.
"Just wait a little longer, oppa."
***
"I originally meant to go to the very next day after I died, but after I cast the spell, I remembered I'd slipped up in the last calculation."
Sia confessed that she had realized too late that she'd set the time value to 1 year instead of 1 day.
"As soon as I found the mistake I tried to fix the formula, but the spell was already activated, so I couldn't change it. If only I hadn't made that mistake, you could've met me a little sooner, oppa."
And so Sia's long story came to an end.
Honestly, taking the story on its own, I couldn't help thinking it was absurd.
In the decades since Gates first appeared, all kinds of monsters had been discovered, yet not a single dragon had ever been observed among them.
Above all, I had thought reincarnation was a concept that existed only in novels.
But Sia had miraculously come back to me alive, so there was no reason not to believe it.
Dragon or whatever else, the only thing that mattered was that she had come back to me.
"My Sia, you must have been through so much. Two thousand years is easy to say, but how long that must have......."
Before I could finish, Sia threw her arms around me.
Just as I had done a moment ago.
"Oppa."
Then, without warning, Sia pressed her cherry lips deeply against mine.
"I took so long. I'm sorry. I wanted to come sooner, but no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't."
"Sia."
"We'll never be apart again. Never."
Sia's lips were so sweet they gave me chills.
Perhaps because she had missed me so much, Sia showed no sign of pulling her lips away.
Only when I started choking for breath did Sia finally let me go.
"Are you okay......?"
"Uh, yeah. I was just a little surprised."
At that point, I had no idea at all.
What effect my reunion with Sia would have on me.