The Broken Link
The same conversation they had once before now continued once more.
Following the King and the Saintess, Kang Tae-sung stood before the device that would send him back to his homeland.
But the words that came from the Saintess this time were different from the past.
“It’s a beautiful place.”
“……?”
Kang Tae-sung, who had been quietly watching her from behind as she gazed into the crystal orb, tilted his head at the sudden remark. He stepped forward a little and looked at the orb together with her.
“…….”
The scene reflected within it was certainly different from the Earth of the past.
Yet… the expanded view of the world seemed closer to stability than chaos.
There were no collapsed cities. Monsters were not roaming the streets.
Cities were protected by tall barriers or translucent veils that safeguarded their roads and territories. Monsters surely existed beyond those walls, but inside the cities, no damage could be seen.
“Is this… the present?”
Kang Tae-sung asked, and the Saintess gave a faint, almost imperceptible nod.
‘The present….’
It was different.
The present-day Earth he had seen in the past and the present-day Earth he was seeing now were both the same Earth.
But they were not the same. What had happened?
Had some change occurred a hundred years ago?
Judging by the results before him, it seemed to be a positive change.
Even so, his questions remained unanswered.
In fact, only more unanswered questions piled up.
“Are you all right?”
The Saintess looked at him with slightly widened eyes, as if asking whether he had more questions. But Kang Tae-sung could not bring himself to tell her what he was thinking.
It was confusing. Something had definitely changed.
Yet he could not ask. Even the Saintess… he could not trust her right now.
He looked back into the crystal orb.
The Earth reflected there was clearly different from the one he had lived in before being summoned. However, when the Saintess enlarged the view at his request, the scene still leaned far closer to stability than chaos.
“I will do my best, but…”
She spoke of the margin of error in time, just as she had before.
If things went wrong, he might return to a point before his summoning and be pulled back into this world once again. But to the current Kang Tae-sung, those words barely registered.
‘They said it was rolled back.’
They had casually announced a rollback and data overwrite as if discussing some computer program or online game, claiming a serious error had occurred.
‘The world I was in…’
The world where he had reunited with his family—did it no longer exist?
What had happened to the family there?
The margin of error.
Kang Tae-sung recalled the exact time from back then.
If he could arrive at an appropriate moment, it would be ideal to return to the exact point when he had jumped into the Rift. But the margin of error was not that precise.
‘This time, don’t lose them.’
The voice he had heard in the darkness suddenly came back to him.
Thinking about it now, it seemed like he had been speaking to himself.
‘What?’
“This time” implied that he had lost something before.
What had he lost? The only thing he could lose was himself and…
‘Family.’
Yes.
He was once again painfully realizing that he had lost the family he had met and spent time with, however briefly, before jumping into the Rift.
Even if he went back and experienced the same meetings and the same conversations, the family in that place would not be the same family he had met. They would simply be another family from another universe.
‘Damn it.’
Only now did it occur to him that the sight of the universe shattering he had witnessed might have been the universe he belonged to disappearing.
So casually. So absurdly. So emptily. The universe he had desperately wanted to return to had vanished…
‘No. That’s not it.’
There was something he had forgotten.
The universe—the Earth—he had wanted to return to had never looked like this. It was a place without monsters, without tectonic plates suddenly stopping and reversing to raise new land. It was simply a world of ordinary people living ordinary lives, bickering over trivial things.
The place he had returned to last time had clearly not been the world he once lived in. Perhaps something had gone wrong from the very first step.
Kang Tae-sung’s gaze slowly shifted sideways toward the Saintess standing there.
When his closed lips finally parted, the Saintess’s eyes trembled faintly.
“The thing called a world… there can be many of them, can’t there?”
“……Yes.”
She looked like someone who had just heard something she never wanted to hear. After a brief silence, she closed her eyes and answered in a voice so soft it was barely audible. Then she turned to Kang Tae-sung with eyes full of questioning—did he know something?
“Can I return exactly to the world I originally lived in?”
“…….”
From that moment on, an unknowable sorrow filled her gaze.
With a face that clearly knew something, the Saintess simply stared at Kang Tae-sung with an expression that looked as if tears might fall at any moment.
And after a short while, she slowly shook her head.
“That place… the link with you was severed. On that very day.”
“……?”
Though his face remained expressionless, the Saintess saw intense confusion, disbelief, and a faint murderous intent flickering in Kang Tae-sung’s eyes as he stared at her. Unable to meet that gaze, she lowered her head and looked away.
Behind her, the King, who seemed to know nothing, looked back and forth between the Saintess and Kang Tae-sung with a slightly puzzled expression.
“Severed? What do you mean by that?”
“I need an answer.”
When Kang Tae-sung spoke, the Saintess answered while still keeping her head bowed.
“On the day this person was summoned to our world, the order of that world… perhaps to prevent communication with other worlds, it unilaterally severed the connected passage. So…”
The Saintess’s voice pierced clearly into Kang Tae-sung’s ears as he stared with clenched teeth.
A low grinding sound came from his teeth. Both the King and the Saintess knew exactly where it had come from. Yet even though they understood his rage, they could not soothe him. It was a problem with no solution.
“How… did you know?”
The Saintess asked, barely holding back her tears.
Kang Tae-sung, who had been forcing his ragged breathing to calm, turned toward her.
“Because that place is different from the world I lived in.”
“But… with only those words…”
The Saintess seemed to want to ask more, but eventually shook her head.
Kang Tae-sung did not bother telling her that he had already been there once.
He had once believed he could trust her.
The trust built over long years had shattered in this very spot.
The lost trust also changed the tone he used when speaking to her.
His hardened voice flew at her like a sharp spear and struck home.
“What exactly happened? Did the gods do this?”
“N-no. The gods… even the gods do not know exactly. It seems to be the will of the world itself…”
“Why… didn’t you tell me?”
Though his tone was accusatory, even the King standing nearby did not stop him. The King was also staring at the Saintess with heavily subdued eyes.
“I thought… you would be disappointed, just like now.”
“…….”
At her answer, Kang Tae-sung felt momentarily empty.
He had never imagined it would be such a trivial reason.
‘It already disappeared? I could never have returned in the first place?’
When he had been forcibly summoned to this world, it seemed that rather than simply pulling one person across, some kind of passage had become entangled between the two worlds.
The world Kang Tae-sung had lived in had erased it, and so the link to his homeland was severed.
He did not ask when she had learned of it.
Whenever it had been… seeing her now, it was clear she had known alone and kept it hidden.
‘I cannot return.’
She had said it had not disappeared.
It still existed, but the link between him—who belonged to that place—and that world had been cut along with the connection between worlds, so the path back had vanished.
Instead, the Saintess had sent him to an Earth where the passage between worlds had not been severed.
‘A perfect crime.’
He would have lived on, believing it was his homeland, without knowing anything.
But the other homeland she had sent him to in its place had also disappeared.
And the place the Saintess was showing him now—though he did not know from which branch it had diverged—was likewise an Earth roughly a hundred years after communication with the Otherworld had begun.
Through the Saintess’s words and the evidence before him, Kang Tae-sung clearly understood that he could only return to worlds where the link with other dimensions had not been severed.
A sigh escaped him.
‘Is that place also my homeland?’
It would be one of countless universes.
In a way, there was no real difference.
His family would surely be there too, and if he returned, he would be able to meet them.
But were that family truly his family?
Were they the family who would welcome him back?
After turning the question over and over in his mind for a long time, Kang Tae-sung finally nodded.
‘They are.’
It was not a compromise.
He had simply confirmed what he had already been thinking deep in his heart.
‘The family in that place are also my family. The warning not to lose them this time was probably about my family.’
Having made up his mind, Kang Tae-sung turned to the Saintess with a somewhat calmer expression.
“I ask this of you.”
And so he decided to return to yet another homeland.
Facing his grave expression, the Saintess nodded with effort.
She seemed to have more she wanted to say, but it was not something she could tell Kang Tae-sung now that he had already turned away.
Instead, she poured in her holy power with far more care than before, activating the device. At that moment, Kang Tae-sung lightly caught something the King threw from behind.
“I remembered you saying it was quite poor over there.”
“I will gratefully accept it.”
“Haha. It feels good to see you accept something instead of refusing for once.”
With the sight of the laughing King and the deeply shadowed face of the Saintess sending him off as his last memory, Kang Tae-sung once again crossed the passage between worlds and returned to his homeland.
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“It’s my homeland.”
As if trying to steady his own heart, Kang Tae-sung opened his mouth and spoke the words aloud the moment his vision returned and he confirmed the scenery before him.
He decided not to think anymore that this was not his real homeland.
He knew better than anyone how much dwelling on unsolvable problems ate away at the mind.
After looking around, Kang Tae-sung made a slightly ambiguous expression.
‘The time is probably around morning.’
Morning or evening… the odds were high it was morning.
When he examined the ground and surroundings again, it was indeed the mountain on the outskirts of the city where he had been summoned to the Otherworld the last time he returned.
But the reason Kang Tae-sung’s expression was ambiguous was because there were no signs of overgrown weeds or long absence of human traffic. The ground was flat, and there were almost no weeds, as if people frequently passed through.
Just in case, he looked around, but the training clothes and sneakers that should have been left behind when he disappeared were nowhere to be seen.
‘Did I return to a point even earlier?’
He had seen how hard the Saintess had tried.
Last time the error had been about five years, so he had thought she would reduce it further, but had he instead come back to an even earlier past?
Kang Tae-sung shook his head to clear his thoughts.
It was still too early to be certain. It was only the lack of weeds on the ground. He stopped worrying about useless things. Soon after, he sensed a considerable presence not far away.
He could even hear what sounded like voices, so he did not bother climbing a tree. When he looked more carefully in that direction, he saw people coming up or going down the hiking trail below, one by one.
============== Author’s Note ==============
Thank you.
I uploaded one more chapter today.
Please check it out.