Our Hotel Is Open for Business as Usual

Kwon Do-heon's story began in the earliest childhood he could remember.

***

Kwon Do-heon had a talent for visually seizing the essence and weak points of things.

"Dad, watch this? I'm a real good shot."

He shot a toy with a cheap BB pistol bought at a toy store. It was because he could see where to hit for the thing to topple. When he smiled after striking the weakest joint, his father did not praise his son.

No—far from praising him, he stiffened like a man whose breath had caught.

"Don't do that."

"Dad…?"

"I said don't do that."

"When I say don't, then don't. Understand?"

Only belatedly did Kwon Do-heon learn that one of the things his father feared was tied to 'shooting.'

His father never wondered by what principle Kwon Do-heon's talent worked, or how it might be defined. He simply behaved, whenever Kwon Do-heon displayed his 'talent,' like a man who'd come face to face with some vast catastrophe or conspiracy.

"…Dad, I…."

All of a sudden, Kwon Do-heon wanted to say this.

"……."

I'm your son, right?

The young Kwon Do-heon couldn't understand why he wanted to say such a thing. But he felt it instinctively—that his father was looking at him like a monster born through the borrowed womb of his wife.

The nineteen-year-old Kwon Do-heon could even tell what his father had been thinking back then.

'When will this bastard monster bare its sharp teeth and try to hunt at my throat?'

It was an absurd suspicion, but one the young Kwon Do-heon hadn't been able to read.

To him, Kwon Do-heon was defined not as a child but as a time bomb that might go off at any moment. His father hemmed him in and controlled him, 'quarantining' himself and society against the contamination named 'Kwon Do-heon.'

To Kwon Do-heon, free by nature and firm in his own intuition, that quarantine felt like violence at every turn.

"Father."

And this tragedy finally reached its critical point after Kwon Do-heon became a high schooler.

"I keep telling you I don't want to do that stuff."

"You're still young and don't understand—listen to your father."

"Even if I go to college, I don't even know what I'm supposed to study…."

"Kwon Do-heon."

His school grades hovered between the 3rd and 5th tier—an utterly ordinary level. But to his father, a mysophobe, that vague drifting was a sign of contamination: proof that the monster called Kwon Do-heon had strayed from the rules.

"Then what in the world are you going to do when you grow up?"

"That's what I'm saying, just listen to—"

"Do you really mean to end up like your uncle? Do you really?"

The fine-sounding pretexts of career and grades gradually turned into verbal violence that chipped away at each other's souls. And in the end, one night as they both went mad, his father screamed.

"Listen to me!! You're a monster bastard who might hunt people any moment! If you want to live like a decent human, you have to listen to me!! Only by staying before my eyes and doing exactly as I say can you remain my 'son'!!"

No matter how deeply he looked into it, his father was in earnest. It was only that, ordinarily, he'd stayed watchful for fear Kwon Do-heon might get hurt—or that this time-bomb of an existence might finally explode, cracking its shell and bursting out.

"……."

His one and only family, whom he'd leaned on his whole life.

Yet that man had never once looked at him as a human being. The cruel truth—that he'd been treated all his life as a filthy monster to be surveilled and controlled—drove Kwon Do-heon into quite some despair.

"…What did I… even do… for you to…."

"It's because you know nothing, that's why. I know. I know everything."

"Why do you have to be so… just…."

In that instant, Kwon Do-heon saw it. The place where the carotid artery throbbed. The thin part of the laryngeal cartilage, or the vulnerable point of the vocal cords trembling faintly with each shout.

Kwon Do-heon had gone blank. The huge man who poured abuse on him every day looked, within that field of vision, like a helpless creature who couldn't so much as control his own trembling breath.

"……."

A calculator began to whir in his head.

'I can see everything—that man's essence and his weak points.'

He was nothing but a creature far more fragile, more powerless, more feeble than me. An instinct that had forced its way up past reason and will whispered to him.

'If I just set my mind to it, couldn't I take him out, quite easily…?'

Why do I have to live crushed under so feeble a human?

This was not an impulse. It was the judgment of an artist who had seen through the true form of the being that oppressed him, and when he faced that horrifying conclusion, Kwon Do-heon knew by instinct that he'd reached his limit.

"……."

"Where are you going."

"…I'm going to take a walk."

"Don't go hurting people because you're angry, and don't hurt animals either…."

"I said I'm just taking a walk."

In the end, on a certain rainy day at eighteen, Kwon Do-heon bolted out of the house almost out of his mind. He had no thought of going back. If he saw that face again, he felt sure he'd kill his own father.

When, alone in that downpour, he'd reached the very brink of self-destruction—

"Well now, my dear nephew. What're you doing out here?"

"Ah…."

A thick, rough hand, hard with calluses, took hold of him.

When Kwon Do-heon, gripped by the shoulder, turned his head, there stood a man grinning easily with a cigarette in his mouth, in the rain.

None other than his uncle, Kwon Seung-jae.

"……."

"……."

Abruptly, he said this.

"You know what an Artist is?"

"…Out of nowhere?"

"It's something like an Esper, well, for starters."

"What do you mean—"

"They say Artists have pretty much wrecked characters, most of 'em."

He went on in his particular tone.

"Some are born to it, and some the world shoves into it. You look like the latter to me, Do-heon. Right in the middle of getting crushed, too."

At that, Kwon Do-heon asked,

"And what changes if I know that?"

"At the very least you ought to know you're going mad, you little punk."

Kwon Seung-jae meant to take in this kid who'd surely been ground down under his own brother. To the nineteen-year-old Kwon Do-heon's mind, he'd probably acted that way because he plainly knew his own share of responsibility in this whole chain of events.

"Follow your uncle before your eyes roll back and you send your old man to the grave. I can at least teach you how to go mad gracefully."

"And then what changes."

"Breathing'll get a little easier than it is now."

Kwon Seung-jae said it, unusually, with an unsmiling face.

"Because over there, it's nothing but madmen."

Like me.

"……."

"……."

"…Let's go together."

And so Kwon Do-heon became an Artist.

***

"After that, um…."

Sprawled on the pure-white floor, Kwon Do-heon spoke to Seome.

"I learned this and that, then left my uncle's side a bit early. It wasn't that he neglected me or that I ran away. I just hated the whole process of being taught and tuned under someone."

"You felt like you'd go mad again if you were meddled with any more."

"Right. So I came out into the Gaps only half-taught."

And, on top of that.

"……."

Kwon Do-heon slowly went on.

"…Now that I've heard the whole of what happened, there's nothing left to hold back over."

It was probably the most ordinary form of confession a man like Kwon Seung-jae could make.

A tale about the fear an ordinary human comes to feel when a 'certain world'—one that scoffs at the norms of human society and the limits of the justice system—seeps into the cracks of daily life.

***

There was a man by the name of Kwon Sang-jae.

"Quit just goofing off and study a bit—Ma's worried about you."

"Worrying's a hobby for you, big brother~ I'll handle it myself."

"You punk, all mouth and no sense—when're you ever going to wise up?"

"Say, the weather's nice—want to go skip stones with me, big brother?"

"Skipping stones my foot. You trying to watch me keel over from the stress you give me?"

He had a younger brother by the name of Kwon Seung-jae.

Their father had passed early, and their mother was always busy raising two sons. Kwon Sang-jae wished for both himself and his brother to become proper people even in such circumstances.

"Ma, when I'm grown, I'll take care of you."

"Listen to him go on. Enough, drop it. Just stay healthy and that's plenty."

"No, really—why won't you believe a word I say?"

Kwon Sang-jae raised his younger brother practically on his own back, taking it upon himself to play both caretaker and guardian.

"Something came up, I'll be late. Take Ma and eat first."

"Aigo, is the big brother the only one who works around here? Fine, I'll set the table."

"Do it right, right. I'll ask Ma about every bit of it."

"Rest easy. Who am I? Your little brother, aren't I."

"Little brother, my eye. A menace, is what you are. This punk."

Their mother was often ill, the world jeered at them as fatherless boys, and money was always short. This situation planted in the elder brother an excessive sense of duty to control and protect the younger.

And the younger, Kwon Seung-jae,

"…Honestly now…."

lived under his brother's control and expectations, suppressing that free-spirited self of his.

But they always got along well. Their mother passed not long after, yet as if to fill that empty seat Kwon Sang-jae earned money and studied doggedly. The younger brother, Kwon Seung-jae, asked,

"What're you working so hard for, big brother?"

"I'm going to be a prosecutor."

Even in the short answer, an unfamiliar accent and manner of speech came through. It was the Seoul speech he'd learned so as not to stand out in society. Though rather put off, the younger brother forced an easy laugh and asked,

"Big dreams for our big brother. So does that mean more allowance for me, too?"

"If you just do things right, you think I couldn't give you at least that much?"

"Ooh, snazzy. Maybe I should follow your example?"

"And do what?"

"For starters I'd have to do my military service, no?"

From the time Kwon Seung-jae began his military service, the situation started to change drastically.

***

In the army, Kwon Seung-jae was thrown into criminal-grade abuse that trampled human dignity. Kwon Seung-jae's free spirit couldn't endure a closed space ruled by hierarchy and violence.

The elder brother, Kwon Sang-jae, couldn't help but notice his brother's worsening condition each time he visited.

"Is it hard on you in there?"

"No idea what you're on about…."

"Right. Never mind, forget I said it."

By the nature of the army as an institution, under the name of 'security,' he couldn't even appeal the unjust treatment he suffered. Kwon Sang-jae, having served in the army himself, knew that.

Knowing it wasn't a situation he could change, he didn't dig any deeper.

"Want to take some good food with you? I'll buy."

"Nah, nah. I'll just go empty-handed."

"Take some cigarettes at least."

"Take 'em and I'm the only one smoking anyway—what's the use."

"You little bastard, understanding everything and still…."

So there was nothing else Kwon Sang-jae could do. He merely hoped his free-spirited brother would settle into the army well, and gave him some financial support on the rare occasions he came out on leave.

But precisely because of that, there was something Kwon Sang-jae missed. That the abuse his brother suffered was worse than he imagined, that Kwon Seung-jae had already felt pressure under him all along, and that the kid was—

[Brother.]

too 'free-spirited.'

"What is it, what's wrong."

[Brother, I've gone and made a mess.]

"What… at this ungodly hour, what's going on. I'll come to you. Just stay put, all right? Your brother's coming."

Whatever had happened, the brother who'd called from an unfamiliar number was out of his mind.

[I killed people.]

"What?"

[Killed quite a few. One, two, three… bagged three of 'em, I did.]

"What in the world are you saying right now."

[Were those things even human whelps? Beast whelps, more like. Bastards no better than the boars coming down off the mountain, tramping around on our land—I couldn't keep my hands still. Somebody had to bag 'em, no?]

"Kwon Seung-jae."

[They were carrying on like hell, begging me to shoot—how was I supposed to hold back, huh?]

The rambling voice was dreadfully unfamiliar.

[But you know, it was pretty doable. Big brother, you know what? You know what sound bullets make when they smack into each other?]

"……."

[You know what light sparks off when a bullet ricochets off a wall? Answer me, would you. When you held a gun, big brother, did your eyes go like this too? Did the way out show itself, and did your chest go pound, pound?]

"……."

[Brother.]

Kwon Sang-jae couldn't answer.

[Stop me. Even if you have to beat me half to death, please stop me….]

"Seung-jae."

[What do I do now.]

Within the sob, there was a chest full of laughter.

[It's so damn fun.]

Click.

The call cut off.

"……."

Kwon Sang-jae was so dumbfounded that for a while he could do nothing.

***

Later, to his nephew Kwon Do-heon, Kwon Seung-jae said that what he'd felt drawn to wasn't the vigilante justice, but the act of shooting itself. That was when, he said, he'd manifested as an 'Artist.'

Kwon Do-heon knew well what that felt like.

"This is something I felt while learning the trade at my uncle's side, but—isn't that just what Artists are, as a breed. Saying it now, it seems it's no accident that Artists end up in the Gaps, where there's no concept of human rights."

That too, Kwon Do-heon said with a laugh, might be a kind of 'quarantine.'

***

This incident was not handled under criminal law. It was because a big shot of the Gaps, coveting Kwon Seung-jae's shooting talent and his vessel as an Artist, intervened at once.

"What—what the… where's my brother. Seung-jae, Kwon Seung-jae."

"Like I keep telling you, there's no such person."

"A person fucking died here!!"

"No, what's this madman on about…."

"Why are you all playing dumb!!"

Both the dead and the killer in the incident vanished.

"Where's my brother, you sons of bitches!!"

The army's very record of the death was erased. The memories of the soldiers who had witnessed and known of the incident were wiped. The military brass held to the preposterous line that the shooting had never even existed.

If it had been a mere cover-up, he could at least have made sense of it, feelings aside—but it wasn't even that. A person named 'Kwon Seung-jae' disappeared from the army, and the only ones who remembered him were the Kwon family and a few of his friends.

"……."

"Has that Seung-jae still not come home?"

"…I don't know."

"That boy was always so pig-headed, doing whatever he pleased."

Free, they meant.

"Leave him be, he'll come back when he's good and ready."

"When… will he come back?"

"Won't he show up once he's wandered every corner of the land and tired of it?"

Whether it was because he 'tired of the land' as they said, no one could know—but Kwon Seung-jae really did come back. It was a certain holiday, quite some time later.

"Aigo, big brother. Been keeping well?"

His speech, mixed with dialects and accents from here and there rather than his hometown's, was unfamiliar.

"…How did you get here…."

"Figured I'd have a look at our dear Prosecutor's face~."

"You."

Kwon Sang-jae could tell, being his brother.

"Clear off, quick."

The kid standing before him, grinning easily, was not the Kwon Seung-jae he'd known.

"You did kill people. Didn't you."

"Aw, as if all that was some tall tale."

"That was no great cause and no justice."

"Didn't I tell you."

That familiar smile made his skin crawl.

"It's a hoot."

What stood before him was simply a monster who'd handed over his soul to the plaything called shooting. The brother who, that day over the phone, had wept and laughed and begged to be beaten to a stop—was already gone.

"……."

"Big brother?"

"Get out."

"Whoops."

"I said get out. Are you clearing off or not."

"First time seeing me in ages, big brother."

"When did I ever have a brother like you!!"

Kwon Sang-jae crumbled before this grotesque reality.

"I said get out!!!"

The fact that his brother had come back a mere murderer, out of some vast and impious world he knew nothing of—brought a dreadful terror to Kwon Sang-jae, who'd wanted so badly to grow up into a 'proper person.'

After that, Kwon Sang-jae came to know that a world he didn't know of existed somewhere on this earth. He also began, instinctively and vaguely, to sense the supernatural beings that dwelled there.

"……."

"Prosecutor Kwon, are you all right?"

"…No problem."

"Well, that's a relief."

"I'm fine, get on with your work."

There's no telling how much that shattered Kwon Sang-jae's 'daily life.'

"I was only lost in thought a moment."

From then on, Kwon Sang-jae began, in a way, to break.

He tried by any means to catch word of his brother. Though their relationship was near estrangement, he wrung a contact out of Kwon Seung-jae, asked after him, controlled the range of his movements, and taught him as if brainwashing.

"Seung-jae, you seem to think what I'm saying is some kind of joke right now."

Kwon Sang-jae couldn't even perceive that his own behavior had crossed the bounds of common sense.

"Did you really think I wouldn't know what you're up to?"

"Ugh, so creepy."

A visiting room out in the suburbs, evoking a dark interrogation room. Kwon Sang-jae sat across from his brother in a crisply squared-off suit. His two eyes glittered.

"You still going to play dumb even now?"

Strewn before him were the forged ID Kwon Seung-jae had used and reports on gun-smuggling. It was possible only because of a prosecutor's power, connections, and private obsession.

"The evidence of the things you've done is right here in plain sight."

"You only lick the surface and you scold me so~"

"Is that a confession there's more than just this?"

"Anyone listening would think you'd switched careers to detective."

Kwon Seung-jae, cigarette in his mouth, looked up at his brother with that particular easy face. That indifferent, inhuman gaze provoked Kwon Sang-jae's neurotic arrogance.

"You know full well I'm a busy man, and yet how industrious of you. Doesn't the Prosecutor have better things to do for the nation than run background checks on a nobody like me?"

"Shut up."

Kwon Sang-jae slammed the table hard. With a bang, the documents scattered.

"After all I did to raise you! In a house with no parents, I raised you on my back and made a human being of you. And what? You kill people? You go around shooting? I won't tolerate a filthy criminal bastard like that in my family!"

"Aigo, a criminal, is it."

Kwon Seung-jae snorted a laugh and blew out cigarette smoke. The brother glimpsed through the smoke looked to him like nothing but a monster. Beyond criminal, beyond murderer—another monster within a world of monsters.

"Big brother. What happened in the army wasn't even indicted under that justice system you love so much. Why work yourself into a lather all alone over something the whole world's forgotten?"

"A record being erased doesn't erase your crime! You can fool the world's eyes, but not mine, your brother's. I know exactly what kind of monster you came back as!"

Kwon Sang-jae seized Kwon Seung-jae by the collar. It was a grip strong enough that the knuckles bulged white beneath the skin.

"You thought I'd let it slide, you doing that kind of thing where I can't see?"

"Not 'can't see'—'aren't able to see,' isn't it? A man who wouldn't last a day on this side."

"I told you to shut that mouth."

He had to cram this brother into 'proper order' somehow. Only then could his own 'common sense' and 'morality' be safely defended.

"From now on you report your entire schedule to me. Don't move one step outside the bounds I allow. So you don't go raving mad, I'll surveil and control you myself. This is my duty and my right as the head of the family."

"……."

Kwon Seung-jae, collar still gripped, looked at his brother.

"You've changed."

"What?"

"It's my fault, sure, but—wow. This one really stings."

He gave a loose, snickering laugh.

"Trying to take a perfectly fine person, control him to your taste, and switch out the pieces with a cane until he's a well-behaved doll."

"What part of you is fine. Watch your mouth, Seung-jae."

"Please, mind your own business and live it up in that world inside the law books you love. I'll just go on living mad my own way, so quit crawling into this line of work and choking the air out of people."

"You little—"

"How do you figure you even found these, big brother? A man who doesn't even live on 'this side.'"

Kwon Seung-jae nudged a fallen document with his foot.

"I'm warning you—don't go peering into this side any further. You could genuinely go and lose your mind."

Kwon Seung-jae roughly threw off his brother's hand and turned his back.

"……."

But Kwon Sang-jae did not give up.

The more his brother pushed him away, the more his obsession and mysophobia amplified into an irrational shape. He tried to intervene in Kwon Seung-jae's life more deeply, more relentlessly.

"I told you to stop coming around!!"

"I told you to listen to me!!"

"Ugh, so damn creepy, really!!"

But the Kwon Sang-jae of that time didn't know.

Just how dangerous the 'this side' his brother spoke of was.

***

"Hm."

Seome tilted his head.

"Neither of them was very wise."

"That's exactly what I'm saying~"

Isn't it laughable.

"If either of them had just given up, it would've ended right there."

Kwon Sang-jae wouldn't let go of his murderer brother, and Kwon Seung-jae hoped his brother wouldn't blunder in over his head and get himself badly hurt. Above all, the most fundamental rift running through this tragedy

sprang from a rite Kwon Seung-jae had carried out.

"A rite?"

"Black magic, I mean."

Well, Kwon Seung-jae hadn't explained black magic to his nephew in detail, but.

"He showed me an example, saying, 'it's this dangerous.'"

"No wonder it felt too immersive to be something you'd merely heard about."

"Thinking about it now, I wonder if it isn't similar to the 'Lover of Dawn'~"

"It is a power specialized in that direction."

That 'inhuman and impious power'—the kind that even taxidermies another's memories at will.

"So what 'rite' did he perform?"

"Turns out my uncle was secretly a hopeless romantic."

Kwon Seung-jae had dabbled in black magic to bring back his departed wife. There was no way a beginner like him could succeed at such an enormous rite, and of course it ended in a wretched failure.

"The trouble was…."

***

"……."

"…Aigo dear…."

that his brother, Kwon Sang-jae, got dragged into it in the process.

"How does one even clean this up~…."

Kwon Seung-jae came face to face with the gaze of the 'Void' lurking within black magic, and as a result his spiritual barrier was destroyed. If it did that even to the Artist Kwon Seung-jae, what of the ordinary Kwon Sang-jae?

Swept up in the collapsed rite, the two brothers were completely severed from reality and plummeted into the many dimensions of the Void. In the abyss they suffered the agony of soul and flesh rotting away, and were robbed of decades of time.

"Hahaha…."

Fully conscious the whole while.

***

"Was the uncle in the wrong?"

"The uncle was in the wrong."

Kwon Do-heon didn't deny that fact.

"But my father, who went out of his way to hunt down a man holed up in some back room bent on ruining his own life—he's hard to understand too, honestly."

"He managed to track him down, remarkably."

"There was a location tracker he'd planted…."

"Your uncle—a so-called assassination consultant of the Gaps—didn't even know that, and on top of it performed the rite out in the outer society?"

"He must've been out of his mind after my aunt passed."

That he'd gone deep into his own private land to carry out the rite meant that, mad as he was at the time, Kwon Seung-jae had done his best in his own way—so Kwon Do-heon thought.

"Well, but, honestly speaking…."

"Both of them are creepy."

"I'll grant that."

The greatest victim, Kwon Do-heon cautiously guessed, might have been the aunt who married badly.

"Anyway, he did manage to clean it up somehow afterward."

"How does a mess that big even get cleaned up."

"He's a well-connected consultant in the Gaps, so he borrowed hands here and there, apparently."

"Still, that's some sincerity."

"Right?"

The trouble was that this became an even greater terror for Kwon Sang-jae.

***

Kwon Seung-jae wanted to return his brother to daily life, yet at the same time he refused the cowardly forgetting that would make his own sin and responsibility entirely as if they'd never been.

"…So, what did I… what is this…."

"Think of it as a scar of memory."

A trace of stitching, one might say.

"You won't be able to know exactly what happened. You'll just have a sense of wrongness—that some terrible memory was artificially cut out of your unconscious. Along with a spiritual… deficit."

"What is this. Why, why has the world changed like this… and I…."

"You won't remember, but decades were spent in the Void—there was no help for it. It'll feel as if time suddenly leapt ahead, but nothing about you, big brother, has changed from just before you were swept up."

More precisely, Kwon Seung-jae had used the powerful figures and Artists around him to make it so.

"I mean your biological body and your official status are the same as before."

Even though the world had changed utterly, society and the people around him found nothing strange about Kwon Sang-jae's gap. Kwon Sang-jae was still a serving prosecutor on the fast track to success.

"So why not just live like that? Doing prosecutor work, starting a family, all of it. Hm?"

"…You've truly gone mad…."

"I'm sorry."

He meant it.

"But I've no way to repay it."

That too he meant.

And so Kwon Sang-jae lived on within the fact that every scene of his daily life was an artificially staged play. That his recovery had been so fortunate and miraculous couldn't console him either.

Within this extreme unnaturalness, he lost his sense of self.

'Right now I'm being raised like livestock in a world precisely puppeteered by a vast, invisible monster.'

A dreadful isolation. Mental collapse. To prove to himself that he was still an 'ordinary human' and to anchor himself to reality, he hastily married a woman and started a family.

But worn out by his chronic paranoia and mysophobia, and by the sight of him tormented every night by the aftereffects of vanishing memory, his wife in the end left him, abandoning even the son she'd borne from her own body.

"I'm sorry, but I can't live like this anymore."

"Just hear me out. I know I was a poor excuse of a man. Still, don't leave like this…."

"It's too much for me, Sang-jae."

"……."

In the end, only Kwon Sang-jae and his young son Kwon Do-heon were left in the house.

"……."

"Ah-bwa…."

"Yes, Do-heon."

That was all.

"Now I have no one but you."

***

After a little silence, Kwon Do-heon went on again.

"…To sum up, in the end it was me the stray round landed on, so it did feel unfair, but…."

He gave a sheepish laugh.

"At some point I just stopped thinking much of it."

"Mind if I ask why?"

"Guess I didn't love my father enough to leave my own heart unfree over him."

One day, all of a sudden, it simply became a bother.

"I didn't much want to care about it."

Kwon Do-heon added,

"How to put it—it's like a natural disaster."

"Broadly speaking, people are a part of nature too."

"There are other people whose job it is to duke it out, so why should a shrimp caught between the whales like me think that hard about it. It's not my business anyway."

Kwon Seung-jae's sin or Kwon Sang-jae's sin—neither was something Kwon Do-heon had done. In this situation there wasn't a single thing he had to take responsibility for or clean up.

"That said, I don't want to deny my father's existence, or blame my uncle either."

"You've gone mad."

"Isn't that just how all these Artist types are~"

He laughed it off easily.

"I just decided to live as I please, that's all."

In his heart, and in his head, Kwon Sang-jae's share was now down to a very slight thing. He hadn't intended it, but when he came to his senses it had turned out this way. Kwon Sang-jae was simply a person who had 'ended up that way.'

And Kwon Do-heon had merely been born under a person like that.

"Personally, I think my uncle did everything he could in his own way—even introduced me to somewhere relatively safe, like the Haeyeong Intermediary."

"So that's how you met me."

Seome was satisfied.

"No wonder I thought you were quite the bothersome child."

"Sorry for always testing you—I'd had a bit of a relapse of distrust in people ever since back then."

"I understand."

Seome fluttered over and perched at his bedside.

"You've turned out well enough, Rawi."

"I really do prefer that name, I think."

"What—the name Rawi?"

"Yes, that one."

Kwon Do-heon (權道憲). It means a person who lives by making the path one ought to walk as a human being their law.

"Our old man really is a piece of work~ Isn't he?"

He'd essentially made his son's name a tool to ease his own deficiency and fear.

"So I found it hard to trust people. Grown-ups even more so. Even though I'll be an adult myself before too long, I just… you know what I mean, right, Senior? There's that kind of thing."

"I'd be grateful if you'd explain it in more precise words."

"That was precise enough."

"Sadly, I don't have a talent for mind-reading."

"You really are cold-hearted."

"Now that you've got your memory back, you're bothersome again."

"You found me bothersome before, too."

Rawi turned his reclining body onto its side, propped up his head, and grinned.

"Even so, getting eaten by the 'Lover of Dawn' right before my eyes was too much."

"I thought I went too far then, too—my apologies."

After Lee Yeon-woo died, Seome had behaved as if half out of his mind. In the end, after being absorbed by the 'Lover of Dawn,' who then ran rampant ignoring the hotel's rules, Kwon Do-heon too had his memory taken.

About a year's worth.

"I think I collapsed on the rooftop—who moved me to that bed?"

"As far as I know, it was the General Manager."

"That man's got a surprisingly delicate side to him~"

"You were cuter when you'd lost your memory, I think."

"Aw, you like me and you're pretending otherwise."

Rawi laughed, eyes crinkling.

"Senior."

"What?"

"Tell me we'll be able to meet again."

"We'll be able to meet again."

It wouldn't be hard.

"I'll come see you together with Mr. Lee Yeon-woo."

"You promised."

"You can believe it."

Seome vouched for it.

"We'll meet outside the hotel."

"……."

Rising from where he'd lain, Rawi stood and hugged the white owl Seome tight.

"Yes."

I believe you.

Right after that, the pure-white world came crumbling down.

***

"……."

"Do-heon!!"

Flinging aside the red velvet curtain, a ragged Kwon Seung-jae thrust his face in. It was a face with not a trace of a smile, holding only worry and alarm.

"Kwon Do-heon, you punk, where'd you go! You hurt anywhere, huh?"

"…Uncle."

"Well I'll be."

Kwon Seung-jae blinked.

"Your memory came back?"

"Ended up that way somehow~…."

Rawi shrugged with an awkward laugh.

"I'm not hurt anywhere."

"That much is a relief."

"Where's our Mr. Lee Yeon-woo?"

"Get your memory back and your way of addressing him turns real friendly all of a sudden."

Kwon Seung-jae presently answered with a snicker.

"He's in the lobby."

"Looks like checkout time has come."

"Everyone's downstairs. Let's head down now."

"Yeah, sure…."

At that, Kwon Do-heon looked at the stage he stood on, and below it. It was chaos in every direction—enough to tell how much the 'White Crow' had rampaged while he'd been touring the mindscape with Lee Yeon-woo.

But for the first time in a very long while, his chest felt clear.

"Let's go, Uncle."

Only now did it feel like 'Kwon Do-heon's' story had come to an end.

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