I Just Want to Go Home
All it took to subdue the horde of men throwing themselves at me was ten minutes—less, even.
The problem was that the Chinese, then as now, were famous for exactly one thing: their sheer numbers. The moment I felled one group, another would spring up from somewhere, blades already drawn.
What struck me as strange was that the language I'd learned in that other world didn't work here at all.
"Agh, just let me go home already!"
The bad habit of drawing swords on sight was finally cured around the time the number of men I'd put down passed the thirty mark. And that was how I came to be detained in what appeared to be a Chinese government facility.
Voluntarily, of course. After I'd flattened about thirty of them, someone who spoke Korean appeared and talked me down. And I, a man of peace, naturally obliged.
"...And your name was?"
"Lee Jaeseong."
I said this to the Chinese man seated across from me. His Korean was quite fluent, and thanks to that, I could confirm my master hadn't dumped me in some completely off-the-wall location after all.
"And your guild affiliation?"
"What's that? I'm from the Blood Sect, if that helps."
"...Never heard of it. What's your awakening rank?"
I scratched my cheek at the question. It was nice to hear Korean again after so long, but somehow the conversation kept sliding past each other.
"My turn to ask something. What year is it?"
"...If you're asking the current year, it's 2036."
My mouth fell slightly open. When I fell into Murim—or rather, right before I fell—the time on Earth had been 2026. Which meant I was ten years off from the original timeline.
I had spent thirty years in Murim, so exactly one third of the time I'd lived there had passed here. The math checked out, and yet it didn't make it any easier to swallow.
"I've answered your question, so now it's your turn. Your awakening rank?"
"No idea. Never heard of it."
I answered with an annoyed expression, but it got the point across. In the ten years I'd been gone from Earth, quite a lot had changed—and yet this was unmistakably the Earth I'd longed for.
Thank god Son Hongmin and BTX are still famous.
The moment I learned this was still the Earth of the 21st century, restlessness began gnawing at me. Ten years. There was no telling what might have happened to my sister's family in the decade I'd vanished.
From what I could gather through the man, gates had appeared across Earth in 2026 and thrown the world into chaos. Monsters crawling out, Awakened with special abilities—so-called Hunters—a world straight out of a novel.
The Chinese man had apparently mistaken me for one of those Hunters, which was why he kept asking about awakening ranks and guilds. I gave him vague answers while my head spun with nothing but thoughts of my sister and her family. Learning that Earth had been through such turmoil only made me worry for their safety all the more.
I had to see my sister first. That was non-negotiable.
"I think we've covered everything worth covering, so how about you let me go now? I want to go to Korea."
I said it in a chilled voice, looking the man dead in the eye. I was grateful for all the information I'd gathered, but I had no more time to sit here playing twenty questions.
"I'm afraid that's impossible."
"What?"
"The Hunters you defeated include ten A-Ranks and fifteen B-Ranks. You must remain here until the investigation is complete."
I let a thin smile creep across my face as I regarded him. No one in Murim—not a single soul—had ever dared to stand in my path.
"Let's find out just how impossible it really is, shall we?"
With those words, I rose from my seat.
**
Wei Jinsheng was on his way back from delivering his report to his superior. The report had been simple: a man, presumed Korean, had emerged from an unidentified gate unlike anything seen before, and was currently under investigation.
The problem was that the round trip had taken barely thirty minutes—and in that time, all hell had broken loose.
"What happened?"
"It appears he suddenly went on a rampage."
Wei Jinsheng frowned at his subordinate's answer. The man hadn't even been restrained to begin with. The forces he'd already knocked down amounted to the combat strength of a mid-sized foreign guild on their own.
If the man hadn't understood Korean and cooperated, even holding a conversation with him might have proven impossible.
Why now, of all times?
The moment Wei Jinsheng stepped inside the Bureau, his brow creased deeper still. Hunters belonging to the management bureau lay sprawled across the floor. Thankfully, none were dead—every one of them was still breathing. The trouble was that nearly all of them carried injuries serious enough to keep them immobile for the time being.
"Team Leader!"
Just then, one of his men spotted him and came running, sweat streaming down his face.
"What's going on?"
"W-well, you see..."
What came out of the man's mouth was hard to digest. The stranger, who had been chatting amicably with the Bureau's Korean-speaking staff, had abruptly flown into a rampage.
Had someone on the staff made a mistake? Wei Jinsheng couldn't say, but he could sort that out by meeting the man himself. After all, the man had demanded they bring the highest-ranking person available and was waiting quietly.
"Are you the one in charge?"
As Wei Jinsheng entered the interrogation room, the man seated calmly in his chair asked the question without so much as a twitch. It was Korean—no problem there. It wasn't a fact he liked to advertise, but Wei Jinsheng was more than capable of communicating in Korean himself.
"I am."
"Why'd you leave your post? Now people are getting hurt for nothing."
Wei Jinsheng took a short, deep breath. The situation was clear enough. With the forces remaining in the Bureau right now, they could neither stop the man nor subdue him.
"May I ask why you suddenly started all this?"
"Ah, my bad. I just asked for the person in charge, and your boys came at me. I didn't kill anyone, though? So, how about you do me one favor?"
"...A favor?"
"Send me to Korea."
"That's all?"
"Yep. That's it."
Wei Jinsheng regarded the man in silence for a moment.
Is that even possible?
It had been one man. The Bureau's main strike teams were all tied up clearing gates, and in their absence, the entire Bureau had been brought to its knees by a single person. China was undeniably one of the world's premier powers in both the quality and quantity of its Hunters, but it suffered from a chronic weakness: the territory it had to defend, right now, was simply too vast.
Gates erupted in places no one could predict, so it was inevitable that their forces could never be concentrated in one spot. The problem was that even accounting for every Hunter China had, Wei Jinsheng could count on one hand the individuals capable of pulling off something like this alone.
Five, maybe, if I stretch it?
When the man had first appeared, the Hunters who moved to intercept him numbered ten A-Ranks and over thirty B-Ranks. Add in every Hunter roaming the Bureau's halls, and well over a hundred had been taken down by one man.
And yet the man didn't have so much as a scratch on him—not even a bead of sweat.
Estimated rank: S. No—above that.
"May I ask your reason?"
"I have family there."
The man's answer was brief. Wei Jinsheng studied his face in silence. There had been no threat, no intimidation. It was simply a man saying he wanted to go home to his family.
"...I'm afraid regulations don't permit me to authorize departure without an investigation."
"I see. Well, that's a real headache."
The man said it with an expression that suggested he felt no headache whatsoever. If anything, his face read as mild inconvenience.
"But I spent a long time living in Murim, and I learned one thing there."
"...Murim, you say?"
At the man's words, Wei Jinsheng's mind began to race.
A returnee?
It wasn't unheard of—people crossing over from other dimensions, other worlds. The Chinese Hunters whose names graced the rankings included a high proportion of returnees as it was. The problem was that none of the returnees on record had ever appeared through a gate the way this man had.
"Right. My master taught me exactly one thing: settle your debts of kindness and grudges in full, no matter what."
While Wei Jinsheng weighed his words, the man kept talking.
"Me ending up here? An accident. Your Hunters rushing me out of nowhere—call that an accident too, if you like. I mean, it's about the same as me popping up uninvited in the territory of a righteous sect, so I can understand it well enough. But."
The man's eyes narrowed.
"I've held back this far, and if you keep detaining me anyway, that's you piling up a grudge against me. You follow?"
"..."
"All I want is to quietly go home to Korea. And if you help me do that, you're not stacking a grudge—you're stacking a debt of gratitude in your favor."
Wei Jinsheng swallowed hard. There was something breathtakingly arrogant about a man speaking of kindness and grudges as if negotiating with a nation. The trouble was, his instincts told him the man wasn't bluffing.
There is nothing to gain by making an enemy of him.
Even throwing every asset they could muster at the man, he couldn't guarantee they'd stop him. And in that situation, Wei Jinsheng had exactly one conclusion available to him.
"There are things I need to confirm. Would you wait a moment?"
"How long?"
"Thirty minutes."
"Fine. Now that's a person in charge I can talk to."
Satisfied, the man smiled at Wei Jinsheng's firm answer. Wei Jinsheng rose immediately and stepped outside.
"What will you do?"
As he emerged from the interrogation room, the subordinate who'd been waiting asked carefully.
"We let him go."
"Excuse me? Just... send him off?"
Wei Jinsheng scowled. It wasn't as if he wanted to release the man who had wrecked the Bureau out of the goodness of his heart.
"What else can we do? We can't stop him."
"...That may be, but the higher-ups will make an issue of this."
Wei Jinsheng let out a short sigh. An S-Rank Hunter—no, a returnee—would be treated as a national asset. Far from recruiting him, letting him simply walk away was guaranteed to cause an uproar.
But that was the thinking of desk-bound old men, and Wei Jinsheng's instincts, honed in the field, were screaming at him without pause: do not, under any circumstances, antagonize this man.
"We'll clean that up later. Get a private jet arranged. As fast as possible."
"...Understood."
His subordinate bowed and vanished. Wei Jinsheng glanced at his watch and swallowed dryly. If the suits upstairs learned what had happened, there was no telling what they'd pull, so burying the details was the right call.
Besides, considering the current state of Korea, he'd calculated that this connection with the man was far from severed for good.
"Sorry to do this to you, but I can't exactly hand out favors to another country for free."
The youngest team leader in the Chinese Bureau's Emergency Response Division—Wei Jinsheng's eyes gleamed at that moment.
**
"Seriously, you didn't have to go this far."
"I'd like to maintain a good relationship with you going forward, Mr. Lee Jaeseong."
I let out a short laugh at the man's words. Honestly, it exceeded my expectations. I'd figured being released from custody with a plane ticket arranged would be more than enough—but the man had gone and prepared an actual private jet.
"What was your name again?"
"Wei Jinsheng, Team Leader of the Hunter Management Bureau's Emergency Response Division."
The man said this as he handed me his business card. The truth was, I did feel a measure of gratitude toward him. Getting out of the Hunter Management Bureau wouldn't have been all that difficult, but the distance from Chinese soil to Korea was far too long to walk.
Not that lightness arts make that impossible, but still—no.
With a plane available, there was no reason to resort to such measures, no matter how determined I was. And going overland would have meant crossing North Korea, whose situation I had no way of knowing.
I glanced at the business card, then looked up at Wei Jinsheng's face again. Young. And sharp as a tack, too. Choosing to help the man he couldn't stop, and actually following through—those weren't easy things to do. In Murim terms, he'd have made a fine strategist.
"May I ask just one thing?"
"What?"
"When you arrive in Korea, where do you intend to go?"
I studied him for a moment. I had no particular obligation to answer, but a man doesn't hand you a private jet for nothing.
"To see my family."
"...I see. Then a word of advice: Korea is not in good shape right now. Should you ever need my help, contact me at any time. Also, the friend beside you will accompany you to Korea and provide assistance."
I turned to the man standing beside him with an awkward expression—the one they'd originally called in to interpret, whom I'd then taken hostage.
"Sure. Works for me."
I gave Wei Jinsheng a light reply and boarded the plane. The runway stretched out beyond the window.
Thirty years. The three decades I'd spent in Murim flashed past like a lantern show. Gal Junghyeok's face surfaced, then the faces of my subordinates. And then—the faces of my real family, the ones I'd imagined hundreds, no, tens of thousands of times.
I'm really going now. Just wait a little longer, noona.
And the moment I touched down in Korea, I learned that what Wei Jinsheng had told me was no lie at all.