Chapter 3
Fine, light-brown hair. Eyes so vividly blue they looked like colored contacts. Elegant, head-turning features that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Hollywood A-lister, the kind that pulled gasps from anyone who caught sight of him. And with a face like that, using a Korean name and speaking flawless Korean, standing out wasn’t a choice. It was inevitable.
—“Meanwhile, the Ability User Association, which has spared no effort in actively backing CEO Seo Won’s ventures…”
Figures.
Hangyeom’s brow creased, and he turned away without a second thought.
That damn Association. Always got its nose in everything.
His face pinched like he’d bitten into something sour as he tugged his thin black jacket closed against the cool wind slipping through it. He stretched out his long legs and strode off, as if walking could outrun the news he didn’t want to hear.
The whole time he walked, only a single taxi passed—and this on a weekday afternoon. That was how dead this shabby stretch on the outskirts of Seoul was.
He followed the two-lane road, one with nowhere to park, then ducked into a small side alley. Without hesitating, he wound into a passage so narrow two people couldn’t have walked it shoulder to shoulder. Past the multi-family houses crammed along the twisting lane, he pushed deeper. Old stone walls with peeling paint hemmed the alley on either side until, before long, he reached a gloomy path where the sun barely touched the ground.
Just as he reached out to shove open the rusted iron gate at the end—
The faint crunch of a pebble underfoot came from right behind him. A chill of tension shot straight down his spine. Out of habit, his hand went to the small knife tucked at the small of his back, hidden beneath his jacket, and he whipped around.
“Hangyeom.”
The man who’d materialized behind him grinned as he said the name. A thin, eerie black current bled from his eyes. Short, emaciated, middle-aged—so gaunt he looked half a step from a terminal diagnosis. But Hangyeom’s first instinct wasn’t the man’s alarming state; it was to sweep the surroundings.
This neighborhood had no security cameras, and hardly anyone actually lived in the crumbling place. Unless someone saw them with their own eyes, there was no way to know the man was here.
“I registered you as a client so you could just wait inside. That was the whole point,” Hangyeom said, still scanning every corner as he seized the man’s arm and pulled.
“Get inside, old man. And keep your eyes down.”
“O-okay.”
The man nodded dimly and obediently dropped his gaze. The black current pouring so plainly from his eyes drifted downward with it and scattered. Half-shoving the man through the rusted gate, Hangyeom followed only once he was certain no one was watching.
His place looked like someone had ripped a rotting one-room shack straight out of some backwater village and dropped it here. The faded yellow linoleum underfoot carried that particular gloom of a run-down neighborhood. The wallpaper was so hideously decayed it looked like a ghost might crawl out of it, and the mold creeping into every corner snagged the eye in the worst way.
If not for the shabby desk with its ashtray, the single bed barely wide enough to lie down on, and the chair planted for no clear reason in the middle of the room, the whole thing would’ve passed for a ruin. Hangyeom waved the man toward the room’s only chair, where he stood hovering uncertainly, and shrugged off his jacket.
The crisp white shirt beneath stood out—as pale as his skin, which looked like it would radiate cold to the touch. Long-limbed and lean, he’d clearly bought the shirt a size too big, like he was trying to swallow his own frame in fabric. He tossed the jacket carelessly onto the bed and rolled his sleeves to the elbow.
“You gonna keep spacing out over there?”
“Huh?”
The man answered sluggishly, then a beat later let out a small “Ah,” looking sheepish. He dug through his pants pocket with a bony hand and pulled out a crumpled fifty-dollar bill, holding it out.
“This is all I’ve got right now…”
“You know urgent runs are an extra twenty dollars, right?”
“Yeah… just—just thirty dollars’ worth, then. Please.”
Hangyeom took the bill and shoved it into his jeans pocket. Then he fished out an ancient feature phone—good for nothing but calls and texts—and thumbed the buttons hard to set a timer. Without a word, he caught the man’s hand where it hovered awkwardly in the air.
There was nothing to say.
It started with Hangyeom’s black eyes flushing red in an instant.
“Ah…”
The man shuddered as warmth poured through their joined hands. The gentle current crossed over and wandered along his veins, spreading through his whole body in seconds. Rather than getting straight to work, the red energy that flooded the man’s body made one soft pass through him first.
Been throwing his powers around, clearly.
The pathways were so rough and uneven that fifteen minutes of hand guiding wasn’t going to straighten all of it out. To ease the pathways open, starting from this hand and following every branch all the way to the heart where they converged, would take at least a few days of guiding.
If I could do deep guiding, I’d clear the whole thing in one go.
Press enough bare skin together, let physical and emotional connection soften the pathways…
No. No need to go that far. Shouldn’t, either.
He shot a glance at the man, already completely gone—lost in the ticklish rush of a single pass through his pathways. He wasn’t the only guiding peddler out there selling guiding for cash. A little extra service was one thing, but doling out the kind of generosity that clearly warranted more money? That was a slap in the face to every other peddler working the same trade.
Who was it that said—
Keep doing people favors and they start thinking they’re owed.
True enough.
Give someone a freebie once or twice and they stop seeing it as a favor and start seeing it as their due. Then they’d take that attitude to the next guide, grumbling for the same treatment. That other guide went deeper without me even asking—what, you don’t know what customer service is?
Give exactly what I was paid for. Not a scrap more.
With that resolve locked in again, he got down to the real work. He drew the fractured pathways back into one, coaxed the twisted stretches straight. The jagged, uneven parts he smoothed level with delicate care; the stiff, tense channels he stroked warm until they went slack.
It looked complicated, but guiding was actually dead simple. The source of power—the black current people called ESP—just needed to flow cleanly, and guiding was about tending the pathways inside the body so it could. Nothing catching, nothing blocking, nothing left to wander. Guiding was, quite literally, doing the work of a guide.
While the pathways were smoothed out like this, espers tended to lose themselves in the pleasant sensation of it sweeping through their bodies. Endorphins released naturally during guiding, too—the heaviness and dull ache that came with a disrupted ESP flow melted away fast, arriving instead as pleasure. Since that pleasure scaled with both the quality and quantity of guiding, it was only natural that any esper would want as much as possible from the highest-rank guide they could find.
To espers, guiding was a kind of drug. At first they reached for it out of the fear of rampaging, the fear of dying. But even after they stabilized, they craved it out of habit, again and again. Fall deep enough and they hit a maddening point where they couldn’t even use their abilities without a guide—the anxiety alone was too much.
It was bad enough that the Association forced every esper through a monthly guiding addiction test. Espers were people handed formidable power, then left to wage a lonely war against an alien energy that could swallow them whole at any moment. There was no chance they’d stay sober against the extreme high of guiding—something that cradled them so warmly, so tenderly, like it would always be on their side. Which was exactly why most espers ended up fixated on their guides like addicts.
So Hangyeom stuck to hand guiding whenever he possibly could. Anything to keep clients from getting hooked on his work and turning into a problem.
BEEP, BEEP, BEEP—
“Time.”
The man had been floating in bliss, and Hangyeom—cold as ever—ripped his hand away the second the alarm sounded. Just like that, the warmth that had flowed through their hands and wrapped around the man’s body guttered out. His color noticeably better than when they’d first met, the man snapped his eyes wide open.
“Th-that was way too short!”
The guiding had been so brief it left a hollow ache, and before he knew it, he’d raised his voice. Hangyeom’s eyes—indifferent past the point of cold this whole time—flinched.
“Come on, at least throw in three extra minutes as a—!”
“Hey. Old man.”
Hangyeom stretched out a hand and tapped his index finger against the middle of the man’s forehead. Those eyes, black again the instant the guiding ended, had already flooded red once more.
“I’m pretty sure I—”
“—told you not to raise your voice,” a young man’s voice finished as the door flew open.
