The Breaking News Her Husband Doesn't Know
When he opened his eyes, the ceiling was the same as before. The smell of antiseptic, the hum of machines — only the angle of the light coming through the window had changed a little.
Minjun couldn't have said exactly how many days had passed. Painkillers and sleeping pills had erased the border between day and night. He would close his eyes after an injection, and the next scene would be another set of doctor's rounds; where he woke, no date was waiting — only the medication record. Outside the curtained window the sunlight slanted away and came back again, and that was all that ever repeated. Minjun never managed to count the times; his head was fog. Counting the numbers scribbled in a corner of his chart, it came to roughly three days. The medication times were packed tight — painkiller, sleeping pill, painkiller again. By feel alone, it might have been a single night, or a week.
His body had recovered somewhat. He could raise his upper body now. Strength had returned to his arms, and with a hand on the railing he could make it as far as the bathroom. Managing to relieve himself without a nurse was, in itself, a small liberation. The wound pulled tight every time he dragged his legs, but that beat the humiliation.
"You're recovering faster than expected. That's honestly impressive."
The nurses and doctors looked genuinely astonished. Physical Enhancement and his Regeneration Ability were restoring Minjun's body far faster than any ordinary patient's. Even extensive nerve damage — the kind of injury considered all but impossible for a normal human to recover from — was healing as if it were nothing. Low as his rank was, Minjun was, after all, an ability user.
But watching the medical staff marvel stirred no pride in him, no swelling in his chest. Among ordinary people it was a startling gift; among the truly strong it amounted to nothing, and he knew that better than anyone.
Jia had not come in those three days. The visitor log was blank.
"Still no word from your guardian," a nurse said once, passing through, and moved on.
Minjun only made a show of nodding. He papered over it with the sentence she's handling it.
She was probably busy getting the leaked photos taken down. And then there was the insurance, the sale of the magic crystals, the van on top of that. The gear to buy all over again, and beyond it the future of their two-person Couple Hunter Guild. None of that gets finished overnight. Jia had never been one for long explanations when something came up; she was the kind who left only the result behind — handled. This time, he told himself, only the result itself had yet to reach the hospital room. That was as far as he let the thought go before he buried it. He did not check.
The fingers that would dial could move now, but they stopped short of the keypad. Where she went to handle things — who she was meeting. The questions he had swallowed still clung to the ceiling. Because if he ever asked, Jia's silence would sound like refusal.
The hospital room had no color and no smell. Perhaps to spare the patient needless stimulation, the walls and ceiling were flat and the lighting dim. Nothing happened in here. A meal tray came in; a meal tray went out. The curtain opened, the curtain closed.
The men from the corridor kept away from this door for a while, too. Even so, Minjun had no desire to talk with the other patients; even the television in the common lounge reached him only in distant, broken scraps. Because he already knew those eyes. The eyes that had clung to Jia's breasts, her hips, her pussy. As long as those eyes lived on the same floor, even a greeting was an extension of the public property. The mere scrape of slippers was enough to lock his back. The breathing that used to loiter at his door still lived in his ears.
Time crept in slowly. The longer the gaps when the drugs thinned, the wider the ceiling seemed. There was nothing to do. Nothing to read, nothing to check, no promise of Jia's to wait for.
In the end, unable to stomach the frozen hours, Minjun turned the tablet back on. Not because he wanted to see Jia's leaked photos or posts again. Only because when a screen was lit, time at least pretended to move.
He opened the news section of the portal site — and there, stuck to the front of a headline, was a red tag.
Minjun's finger stopped.
The story came from an entertainment outlet that only now and then carried hunter news, and the body of the piece was short. "According to a reliable source secured by this outlet," it read — A-rank hunter Han Jia, until now an independent, had entered discussions over joining Paewang Guild. No official announcement had been made yet, the article noted. But the red letters spelling BREAKING made that reservation look meaningless.
A guild official was quoted. Support for a higher awakening tier was under consideration, along with deployment to large-scale gates. A further line added that a legal response to the leak incident was also being weighed at the guild level.
And at the very bottom, the decision-maker — nothing but a name. Paewang Guild Master, Kang Taehyun. No face. No photograph. No interview. All that existed of him in the article was a title and three syllables. Minjun read the name as mere letters, the first time he had ever done so. He did not try saying it aloud.
The article's photo showed Jia. She was walking toward the building with the Paewang Guild emblem set into it, dressed in neat black — the blouse was different from the one she'd worn into this hospital room. The usual coldness was all there, and yet her head tilted very slightly toward the camera. It was subtly different from the face Minjun had watched in this room. The face of a woman standing in someone else's space. Above her, the guild's mark, forged in metal, loomed huge against the building — as if the photograph itself were captioning her current affiliation.
Nowhere did it say confirmed. In progress. In talks. Under review. And still the sentences read like something already finished. The very shape of a breaking report was pushing the conclusion in ahead of any verification.
The comments caught fire first.
He scrolled through them in a daze, his eyes flicking up and down the screen. Unverified as the article was, people spoke as though it were settled. The question was not whether the transfer was right; the question was why she had waited this long.
Minjun had not heard so much as a syllable about a transfer from Jia. Whether it was real. Whether the signature was already dry. When such talks had even begun. Nothing was confirmed. And yet inside that screen — no, in the world Minjun could now see only through a screen — the world outside the hospital room seemed to have already delivered its verdict: an A-rank belongs in a mega-guild, and the time spent keeping a private team with a C-rank husband was the abnormal part. An injured ex–special-forces man was a reason to disband, not a partner to consult.
To Jia, in their cadet days, Minjun had been a strong senior. Now, in the comments under the article, he was simply a junk-grade hunter. Somewhere in between, Jia had become an A and walked herself all the way to Paewang's front door. Only Minjun was still sitting beneath the same ceiling, having lost the dates.
He couldn't put the tablet down. Handled. That one short word filled in every blank the article left open. Maybe taking the leak down had required money. And if it required money, it required a guild. That the guild was Paewang, and that the decision-maker's name was Kang Taehyun — even that, the article had said on her behalf. Why Jia had not come for three days, Minjun could now only guess. She must have been busy. The counter on the other end must have been a guild. That she hadn't told him first might be because nothing was finalized yet — or because there was no longer any need to tell him. Either way it was guesswork. Not one sentence had yet come out of Jia's own mouth.
He had the means to reach her. Minjun pushed himself up in the bed, reached out, and drew his phone from the bedside locker. A phone his hand knew perfectly — and yet it felt awkward, somehow; he hadn't held it in days.
He opened the call screen. Jia's name floated at the top.
The call log held no missed calls. There had been no attempts at all. For three days, Minjun and Jia had each left the other's number untouched. He selected the contact saved as My Beloved Wife. His thumb came to rest above the green button. He didn't press it. If he asked about the breaking news, it felt as though the asking itself would finalize it. Something that might still be under negotiation — it seemed his voice alone would turn it into a thing already over.
He opened the same article again. The sentences hadn't changed. In progress. In talks. Under review. The words shuttled back and forth between confirmed and unconfirmed. No amount of refreshing conjured Kang Taehyun's face. Only Jia's photo repeated, at the same angle, over and over. The comment count climbed even while he watched. Couple team disbanding. C-rank. Wonder if they talked. The same sentences were being cloned under different IDs.
Whether a conversation had taken place that Minjun knew nothing about — people were already guessing at its very contents.
At some point the hour came around and the dinner tray arrived. Minjun picked up his spoon, but he couldn't hold it for long. The nurse set down the medication pouch and said it was time for his sleeping pill. Three days running, every time he swallowed that pill, the date had been wiped away. Tonight it would be wiped away the same way. By morning, the breaking news might have hardened into the article's settled body.
Without switching off the screen, Minjun looked back up at the ceiling. The breaking news looked like a done deal. The people called it only natural. And Minjun alone — still having never asked his own wife — sat in a hospital room that had lost its dates. Beneath the white ceiling, only the red tag on the screen went on blinking.