A Time of Suffering
Five years had already passed since the expedition returned in failure.
It was scarcely any different from the day she had stepped down as guildmaster, and the thought that five full years had gone by since she left the Hwaryong Guild — the place she had spent her entire life — left a bitterness she could not shake.
And today was the day Seon-a had been swallowed by a Gate.
With no way of knowing whether he lived or died, they had made this day his memorial — the anniversary of the day he vanished.
"Heehee… Seon-a…. Our family…."
A woman sat before her, giggling softly, calling Seon-a's name as if he stood right there.
Yura looked at the woman and thought of her own daughter, Yurin.
After developing a mental illness in detention, Yurin had been transferred to a psychiatric treatment facility for care — yet here she was now, a wreck of a human being, living at home.
Judged to have developed a mental disability from psychological trauma, she had been sent to the treatment facility. It had not been Yura's choice as her mother. Before her sentence was even finalized, the warden of the prison where the already-broken Yurin was to be transferred — an Awakened herself — had refused to take in a prisoner who was both Awakened and had a history of mental illness.
Even a prison warden feared the Awakened. With near-superhuman physical abilities, they could kill guards in a single moment of carelessness even when bound in magic-suppressing suits and shackles. Such incidents happened often enough. With mentally ill Awakened, they happened even more frequently — so Yura could understand the warden's position, at least a little.
Once transferred, Yurin's madness only deepened by the day. Deemed unfit for proper punishment, her sentence was drastically reduced at trial. Yurin's term had already been short to begin with, and the further reduction left Yura with complicated feelings.
Of everything Yurin had done to Seon-a, the expedition members' testimony — pieced together from what they had learned through Min-a — had not been enough to expose the full extent of her crimes. Only the footage of the sexual torture inflicted on Seon-a had been submitted as evidence. Yurin had stood trial as a defendant solely on the charges arising from those fifty-four videos.
Judged to have committed crimes of a particularly heinous nature, she had received a ten-year sentence under criminal law — only for six of those years to be cut at the treatment facility. She served four years and was released.
She had been back in this house for only a year.
Even so, Yurin's condition was nothing like the girl Yura had last seen just before she entered the Gate. Yura had watched her daughter slowly lose her mind after returning from that Gate, but setting the wreck before her now against the image of Yurin on the brink of departure made the difference stark and unmistakable.
That confident, self-assured presence was gone. Now she crouched on the sofa, arms wrapped around her knees, eyes unfocused, giggling to herself.
When the expedition had returned and told her the truth, Yura had not been able to believe it. The one who had brought ruin upon Seon-a — the boy she had cherished so deeply — and upon Min-a, her irreplaceable subordinate at work, the architect of all that suffering, had been her own daughter.
She had known some of it from the videos, but hearing the full account had left her genuinely reeling. She had wanted to beat her daughter to death with her own hands while Yurin sat in detention. No — she had resolved to kill her.
But the daughter she first saw in that cell was already half out of her mind. By the time she was transferred to the treatment facility, she had gone completely mad, with nothing of her former self remaining. And Yura had been forced to confront a single truth: her daughter was already gone. What remained was a madwoman, a sinner condemned to replay the price of her crimes for eternity.
The will to kill her with her own hands had vanished. There was no need. Yurin was already paying for what she had done, trapped in a hell of her own making.
Hot tears welled up without warning, and Yura closed her eyes.
Yura herself was living through hellish days in a world where Seon-a — whom she had regarded as a son — had disappeared, and where her own daughter suffered endlessly. Yet she could not even recognize it in herself. She carried the conviction that she deserved this suffering for having raised her daughter so poorly. But every time she looked at Yurin's madness, the pain she had grown numb to would wake again.
In this hell with no end in sight, Yura could only scream silently in her heart every day, wishing someone — anyone — would come and save her.
She drove her car toward the Gate that had swallowed Seon-a.
She would be the only one attending his memorial. Hyuntae and Min-a had no living parents of their own, which meant Yura was the only person left who would remember Seon-a. Perhaps that was why the two of them had poured into their son all the affection they themselves had longed to receive.
Remembering what her daughter Yurin had done to that boy only made her chest tighten further.
As an act of atonement, she came every year on this day — the anniversary of his disappearance, designated as his memorial — to the place where the Gate had opened, and paid her respects to Seon-a's spirit.
Her husband had left her and their mad daughter and returned to his parents' home. Faced with Yurin, a bomb that could detonate at any moment, he had been seized by terror — and she could hardly blame him. When she took her medication, Yurin would sink into her private delusions and remain quiet enough. But when the drugs wore off, she became utterly unmanageable. Watching her call for Seon-a in a voice thick with madness, freely unleashing the power of her Awakening without the slightest restraint — even a parent would find that terrifying.
If that power were turned on a husband who was not Awakened, the outcome was obvious. Overcoming that with nothing but parental pity and compassion was no easy thing, and Yura understood that well enough not to oppose his leaving. Dying at the hands of one's own child would be an unimaginable agony for parent and child alike. If such a thing ever happened and Yurin someday returned to her senses, the suffering would be unbearable.
Thinking that far, she found herself wondering: if Yurin ever did come back to herself, how would she treat her daughter? No matter how long she turned it over, no answer came.
Her mind kept drifting on Seon-a's memorial day, and the car refused to pick up speed. She pushed the thoughts aside and pressed harder on the accelerator. As if she could not bear to dwell on it any longer, Yura forced herself to focus on the road.
But even as her mind cleared, a dull ache lingered in her chest, as if something there had been bruised and would not heal.
The place where the Gate that took Seon-a had appeared was also where the Gate that brought the expedition home had opened. To commemorate humanity's first successful return from the Demon Realm, and to honor the spirits of those who had died on the expedition, a park and a memorial monument had been built beside the highway.
It was the last thing Yura had used the Hwaryong Guild's influence to create before stepping down as guildmaster — a park built around that monument. In truth, she had made the place so that she would never forget Seon-a. If she forgot him, there would be no one left in the world to remember him at all.
Yurin's face rose unbidden in a corner of her mind, as if to contradict that thought — but Seon-a would never have wanted Yurin to remember him.
The shock of the video in which Yurin had nearly broken Seon-a's neck and violated him until the brink of death still lived in her, intact and undiminished.
"Hah… hah…."
The memory made it hard to breathe. A pain that had no physical source throbbed through her head, and the hollow weight in her chest returned again and again.
Seon-a… I'm sorry… Because of Yurin, you keep suffering…
Every time she came here her heart tore open the same way, and she never grew used to it. Her eyes grew wet and the world blurred, but she walked weakly toward the headstone in the corner of the park she had visited so many times before.
It was a grave marker set apart from the expedition members' memorial.
In memory of Seon-a, taken by a Gate accident.
Mother: Lee Min-a | Father: Kim Hyeon-tae
"I love you, Mom and Dad."
On the front of the headstone was the inscription. On the back were the names of his parents, and beneath them — a line meant to call back the memory of a boy who had always been happy at his parents' side — the words I love you, Mom and Dad.
Every letter of it had been written at her request.
At the time, she had still held out hope that Min-a, who had gone as deputy expedition leader, might bring Seon-a home — and so she had never thought to raise a headstone for him. But from the moment Min-a and Seon-a failed to emerge from the Gate, she had used the expedition's homecoming monument as a pretext to establish this park and set Seon-a's grave marker within it.
She set the artificial flowers she had bought on the way into the holder. The first few times she had come, she had resolved to visit often and left fresh flowers. Then one day she had found them withered and twisted, and after that she brought only artificial ones. Looking at those dried, shriveled blooms, she had seen a death she had never witnessed — Seon-a's end — and it had burned her from the inside out.
After placing the flowers, she took out a cigarette — something she had not smoked once since her marriage — and put it between her lips. Nothing settled a wandering mind quite like tobacco. With each slow drag she pictured Seon-a running and playing, happy.
Then, suddenly, the world before her eyes began to cloud over.
It was not her tears. Nor was it the smoke of a long-unsmoked cigarette stinging her eyes. The instinct honed through years as a hunter told her exactly what this was: the omen of a Gate.
For a Gate to open in the same place three times across a span of years was genuinely rare.
A Gate is opening.
The starting point of everything — the root of the misfortune that had befallen Min-a's family and her own.
She saw something leap out from within the Gate. Barely the height of a five-year-old child — smaller even than a goblin, the weakest of monsters and little more than a pack beast. The fog beyond obscured her view, so she turned her steps toward it.
She had no weapon, not a single piece of her old gear — but Yura had the confidence of an A-Rank hunter and the experience that came with it. And the fact that the same Gate that had taken Seon-a and returned the expedition was opening again could not be unrelated to her.
To answer her own questions — to see with her own eyes what had come out of that Gate — Yura's steps grew faster and faster.
And when at last she could see it clearly through the fog, Yura could only freeze in shock.
A child who looked just like Seon-a stood before her eyes.
The impact left her incapable of a single coherent thought.