Stand Down
A year ago, an S-Rank Gate had opened in Busan.
Ju Ji-hye had entered it alongside her teammates, and in the course of taking down the boss, she had suffered a grievous wound to her back. Intensive treatment and surgery had barely pulled her through, but the real problem was what it left behind in her mind.
The very thing she'd assumed would never touch her in her lifetime—a death sentence for any hunter.
The moment she learned it was a precursor of Awakener Psychosis, anxiety sank its teeth into her. The insomnia that appeared seemingly out of nowhere made it worse: the longer she lay unable to sleep, the more the symptoms seemed to deepen, and the deeper they ran, the more the dread consumed her.
Ju Ji-hye, who had walked away unscathed from battlefields spattered with blood, would feel her guts twist into knots the moment night fell. At some point, her mind had begun to fill with static. She could still think clearly, still function day to day, yet it felt as though something hazy had wedged itself into her head and refused to leave.
The noise only ever grew, and she could feel herself becoming more and more irritable because of it. But what frightened her most of all was this: she felt no guilt whatsoever about treating people carelessly, about bullying and threatening them. As if the static were smothering her emotions outright.
"Hah...!"
And yet—for whatever reason—right now, her head was clear.
Nothing remained except vivid, crystalline pain etched across every inch of her body. The sound of her muscles begging her to stop, of her lungs screaming for oxygen.
"Heuh...! Heaah...!"
Collapsed in a heap, Ju Ji-hye lay flat on her back and stared up at the sky. She was caked head to toe in filthy dirt, but even a woman as fastidious as she had no spare thought for it. Tears streamed from her eyes, sweat poured from her body.
"Good work. It's your first day, so we'll stop here. The real training starts tomorrow, so the sooner you adapt, the better off you'll be."
"Th-that can't be..."
Teeth gritted, Ju Ji-hye looked up at Oh Hyeon-seong. These were the very tears that had made countless male viewers swoon in her dramas.
Oh Hyeon-seong didn't spare them so much as a glance. He simply walked off into the house without a backward look.
"Lying there is fine, but if you don't go rest properly soon, tomorrow will be even worse."
"You... terrible... hek..."
Trembling from head to toe, Ju Ji-hye pushed herself up off the ground. Standing at last, she dragged her rubbery legs toward the house. The moment she stepped into her room in the annex, she crumpled to the floor without so much as thinking about washing off the dust that coated her.
"...Coooold."
And there she passed out, right as she was.
A basket piled high with roasted sweet potatoes and potatoes.
Han Su-yeon, once again, picked out only the potatoes. Oh Hyeon-seong was left to grab a sweet potato for the sake of balance, and he didn't regret the choice one bit.
"...Incredible."
"Shouldn't you be used to it by now, Sunbae?"
"If I were ever going to get used to this flavor, I figure it'd take a lifetime. Maybe not even then."
Gulp!
Oh Hyeon-seong swallowed the rest of the sweet potato in one manly bite, and Han Su-yeon spread the documents she'd brought across the table in front of him.
Time had slipped by faster than any of them realized. Laid out before him was a compilation of all the data gathered over seven days of rehabilitation and training.
"Her insomnia is definitively gone. Her average time to fall asleep over the past week was a mere 3.18 seconds. At this point, that's not treatment—it's torture."
"The most effective and excellent form of rehabilitation, then. What about the other data?"
Insomnia was, after all, only a single symptom. Because she'd been forcibly knocked out by sheer exhaustion, the numbers weren't entirely trustworthy either. That said, falling asleep the instant her head hit the pillow meant the bedtime anxiety that had been gnawing at her had vanished, which could only have helped her recovery. Sleeping properly would have improved her condition, too.
Either way, what mattered now were the other metrics. Han Su-yeon pulled out the self-assessment report Ju Ji-hye had submitted.
"Since she's been sleeping on schedule every night, she says she barely feels any fatigue. The hand tremors have disappeared, and her self-reported anxiety has dropped considerably. She never once lost focus or showed aggressive behavior even during that brutal training, so overall, I'd judge her psychological state to be stabilizing."
In the week she'd spent here, every symptom had improved dramatically.
There was one caveat, though: anxiety symptoms ultimately lived in the realm of the subjective. Because it was a matter of the mind, judging and diagnosing it from the outside was never easy.
But that didn't mean there was no way. Mana turning turbulent, the body growing weaker—these were the common signs that appeared in hunters on the road to psychosis.
Which was exactly why Oh Hyeon-seong had spent the past seven days disguising measurement and quantification as rehabilitation.
"Every metric improved by a wide margin during training. A person whose psychosis is actively progressing cannot post gains like these. It's simply impossible."
"In other words, you've struck the root cause."
The early symptoms of psychosis—the ones eating away at body and mind—were receding. For Ju Ji-hye, who had been on a steady downhill slide ever since her injury a year ago, this was a complete reversal.
And that allowed them to be certain. Not merely that the deterioration had stopped, but that her psychological damage had visibly healed.
"A hunter's mind, falling apart... and it recovered."
By all existing knowledge, it was impossible. And yet it had worked. Training alone could never have done this—Oh Hyeon-seong's hypothesis that the spirits' crops carried a healing effect had proven true.
"Hard to believe. That something like this is even possible."
"Thank you for helping with it."
Of course, the training they'd put her through was anything but a sham. Ju Ji-hye had been lucky: the two hunters assigned to her happened to be none other than two living legends of the first generation.
Even in that short span, the stability of her mana had improved noticeably, and her physique—which had done nothing but decline since her injury—showed a sharp, dramatic improvement. By around the third or fourth day, it was plain to see that she was keeping up with the training with a little room to spare.
Oh Hyeon-seong knew better than anyone how to drive high-grade hunters to their absolute limits and squeeze out their maximum growth.
Of course, whether this is a temporary improvement or a genuine cure is something we'll need to keep watching. But one thing is certain... the kid is better.
Ju Ji-hye sat curled up alone in her room. The old her would have been on the verge of tears, thinking only of escape—but instead, she was gazing vacantly out the window.
"...It's beautiful."
Clouds drifting lazily across the sky. The landscape of blue-green mountains and forests. In the blur of those relentless training days, things she hadn't noticed before had somehow come into view.
Screech!
The door slid open, and Oh Hyeon-seong stepped inside. Ju Ji-hye snapped into proper posture, spine ramrod straight.
"Sleep well?"
"Yes, sir! Slept great!"
"Good. Pack your things and come outside."
"...Pack my things, sir?"
"That's right. Training's over."
"Sir? But... why?"
Flustered, Ju Ji-hye blurted the question out before she could stop herself. It wasn't that she wasn't glad that hellish training was finished. But the days had swept past in such a whirlwind that she hadn't properly registered how many had gone by. And in a corner of her heart, she still felt she had so much left to learn.
"The promised time is up. And Jeong-il called—your schedule says you have to head back up."
Thump.
She received back the phone that had been confiscated. A whole week had already passed? Ju Ji-hye wore a dazed expression.
But her body was already moving, gathering her belongings exactly as Oh Hyeon-seong had instructed, and when she stepped outside, he and Han Su-yeon were standing at the front gate.
"Ji-hye, you did well."
"You handled everything without a single complaint—more than I expected. You should be proud of yourself. The promised time is over. You're dismissed."
"Instructors..."
"Training's done, I told you. Stop calling me instructor."
"B-but is it really all right for me to leave? What if the insomnia comes back?"
Ju Ji-hye said, hesitating. It had been a genuinely grueling time for her—but it had also been a time when she'd felt at peace.
In the midst of a relentless downward spiral that had pushed her to her psychological breaking point, this had been the one place where she could exist without worrying about anything.
Oh Hyeon-seong then held out a large box to her, still standing there frozen. When she peeked inside, she found it packed full of fresh strawberries.
"If you get anxious, eat one at a time."
Ju Ji-hye's startled gaze lifted to his face, and Oh Hyeon-seong smiled.
"It was short, but you went through my training program. The ones who've been through my hands don't die easily, no matter where they go. So don't you dare cower before some illness."
Rattle, rattle, rattle.
Her legs trembled noisily and showed no sign of stopping. Inside the waiting room of a drama set, Ju Ji-hye was biting her nails, her face taut with tension.
She had no reason to be anxious, no reason to be afraid—but it was never as easy as saying so. Since leaving Oh Hyeon-seong's place and returning to familiar surroundings, the anxiety that had seemed to vanish was slowly, quietly raising its head again.
"Hey, don't tell me she's going to botch today's shoot too?"
"We're lucky if she doesn't talk back at us. Why on earth did they bring in a woman who tanked the last drama so spectacularly?"
"You're telling me."
Outside the waiting room, the murmurs of the staff drifted in. They thought they were keeping their voices down, but to Ju Ji-hye's ears, every word came through loud and clear.
"If you're going to badmouth me, at least do it where I can't hear."
Ju Ji-hye muttered, her brow furrowing. If this had been a few days ago, she would have kicked the door open on the spot and blown every one of those idiots to pieces. The whole set would have been torn apart in a single rampage.
But Ju Ji-hye only shook her head. She couldn't dismiss their words as mere nonsense. The truth was, she'd taken that enormous paycheck for her last drama, only to wreck it with the worst acting of her career since her debut.
Already with her gate performance languishing, she was hearing whispers that as an actress she was completely finished—a has-been. For all the popularity and expectations she'd once commanded, the fall had been mercilessly steep.
"Whew..."
Ju Ji-hye looked down at her hands, trembling all over again. Her heart refused to settle. And seeing herself so anxious only deepened her fear—was her condition worsening all over again?
"Oh."
Then something caught her eye: a single strawberry in a small wrapper.
Come to think of it... he did say to eat one when I get anxious.
After a moment's hesitation, Ju Ji-hye reached out carefully. When she bit into the strawberry, a fantastical sweetness exploded across her tongue, just as she remembered. But it wasn't simply the taste.
A single strawberry eaten after training that had nearly killed her. That moment—the time, the place, the sensations when it had tasted better than anything in her life—came flooding back.
The memory spread outward from there. The cool night air, the sky glittering with embroidered stars, the quiet scenery. The city lights she had always craved had done nothing but blot out the stars in the heavens, and the chirping of grass insects that had disturbed her sleep on the first night had ended up carrying her tune as she hummed along.
Somehow, thinking back on those days, the restlessness in her chest settled like still water.
"Let's begin."
Ju Ji-hye rose to her feet and strode out of the waiting room. Standing proudly before the crowd of staff and cameras, she answered the director's cue—and in an instant, the look in her eyes transformed. As though she had become someone else entirely. No—she captured in a single frame that shining moment only the actress Ju Ji-hye could create.
Caught up in that deep, resonant brilliance everyone had long since forgotten, the entire set stood transfixed, unable to take their eyes off her.