Honbul: Flame of the Soul

“I think I’m going to quit.”

Seok Juryeon paused and looked up at Yoon Taehee.

“...”

The declaration was abrupt — completely unexpected. Silence settled between them for a moment. Seok Juryeon stared at him without much visible reaction. Her expression remained composed, but even so, Yoon Taehee could tell she had been genuinely caught off guard.

“What are you talking about all of a sudden?”

“Exactly what I said.”

Yoon Taehee blinked lazily, deliberately dragging out the moment before speaking again.

“I’m thinking of quitting being a Naja.”

His fingertips tapped idly against the sofa’s armrest.

“...”

After a brief silence, Seok Juryeon slowly removed her glasses and let out a quiet breath. Setting them down on top of the documents in front of her, she asked in a dry voice,

“You’re quitting the Office?”

“Yes.”

His answer came clean and immediate.

Seok Juryeon lowered her voice.

“Why?”

“You said it yourself before, Unit Head. That you were sick of ghosts. Sick of all of this.”

“...”

“I feel the same way.”

Yoon Taehee leaned back against the sofa and tipped his head up, staring absently at the ceiling as he muttered the words. Then, after a moment, he tilted his head sideways and looked back at Seok Juryeon.

“I wonder how much longer I can keep living like this.”

His tone remained casual, almost detached. He relaxed further into the sofa, slumping carelessly. Sitting sprawled across it in a position somewhere between lying down and sitting upright, he idly toyed with the end of the tie draped across his stomach.

For someone talking about abandoning the Office, his posture was absurdly carefree.

“What suddenly made you think that?”

After silently studying him for a while, Seok Juryeon finally asked the question.

“Well...”

Curled loosely against the sofa cushions, Yoon Taehee smirked faintly before casually propping his feet up on the coffee table.

It was rude enough that anyone else would have been reprimanded immediately.

Seok Juryeon said nothing.

“They say nearly dying changes people. Maybe it changed me too.”

He answered indifferently, as though discussing somebody else’s life.

Stretching out his legs, he crossed one ankle over the other and rested his fist lightly against his temple.

“So? If I submit a resignation letter, will you accept it?”

Though he spoke lightly, even teasingly, Yoon Taehee’s gaze remained fixed carefully on Seok Juryeon’s reaction.

She couldn’t answer immediately.

She couldn’t tell whether he was being sincere or merely testing her.

Either way, it was not an easy question.

In the ten years Yoon Taehee had spent at the Office of Narye, he had never once joked about quitting.

“...”

Seok Juryeon lowered her gaze to the paperwork before her, expression unreadable.

A long silence stretched between them.

Finally, after what felt suffocatingly long, she picked up her fountain pen and spoke.

“Fine. Do whatever you want.”

The answer was unexpected enough that Yoon Taehee’s fingers — still lazily rolling the end of his tie — came to a stop.

“You’d really accept my resignation if I submitted one?”

“Yes.”

Seok Juryeon made no attempt to stop him.

“...”

For the first time, genuine surprise flickered across Yoon Taehee’s face.

Then, slowly, he smirked and brushed a finger against the end of his eyebrow.

“You’re not usually the type to let me go quietly. I thought you’d chase me to the ends of the earth if I tried to quit.”

“Why would I chase someone who’s going to leave anyway, no matter how far I follow?”

Yoon Taehee gave a low laugh.

“That’s true, but I didn’t expect you to give up on me this easily.”

Seok Juryeon lifted the stack of documents she had been reviewing.

“It’s your life.”

The curt reply caused Yoon Taehee’s eyes to narrow slightly.

“Forget the Office. Forget ghosts. Live the rest of your life with nothing to do with any of it.”

At those indifferent words, the expression on his face froze strangely.

“...”

Silence fell again.

Seok Juryeon was serious.

She genuinely wanted Yoon Taehee to live an ordinary life.

Calmly expressionless, she slid her glasses back on and resumed signing documents. In the stillness, only the scratch of the fountain pen against paper could be heard.

Forget everything and live with no connection to any of it.

The words she had spoken so casually sounded strangely heavy to Yoon Taehee.

On the surface, they sounded detached, almost cold — words spoken without lingering attachment. Yet to him, they felt more like shackles tightening around his heart.

As though she knew that memories existed only because there were things one wished to forget.

And at the same time, wished for those things to disappear forever.

More than anything else, those words had come from Seok Juryeon.

To him.

As far as Yoon Taehee remembered, Seok Juryeon was not the sort of person who said things like that.

When he once took two months off to search for a successor, she had even sent Lee Youngshin after him to pressure him into returning to work as quickly as possible. Until recently, she had been recommending him for branch head and openly talking about making him the next head of the Exorcism Unit.

And now that same Seok Juryeon was willingly letting him go.

The difference in attitude was too obvious.

Something had felt wrong for a while now.

And little by little, that vague sense of discomfort was beginning to take shape.

Yoon Taehee felt filthy, as though someone had dumped dirty mop water straight over him.

“...”

The smile slowly disappeared from his face.

He stared fixedly at Seok Juryeon.

Meanwhile, she simply continued reviewing documents without looking up once. Even though she must have felt his gaze, she refused to meet it.

“What? Is there something else you want to say?”

she asked flatly as she turned another page.

“Why? Is there something you want to hear?”

Yoon Taehee immediately tossed the question back at her.

“...”

Only then did Seok Juryeon finally look up.

Their eyes locked silently.

Like two people probing for weaknesses. Testing each other. Measuring what remained hidden underneath the conversation.

The dialogue kept stopping and resuming while neither of them truly closed the distance.

In the end, Seok Juryeon was the first to look away.

“We’ll talk again once you’ve decided for certain whether you’re quitting.”

Yoon Taehee, who had been sprawled lazily across the sofa, finally sat upright.

Walking over to the desk, he slowly scanned the mountain of paperwork spread across it before slipping his hands into his pockets.

“Understood.”

He nodded casually, pretending to still be looking at the documents, then added as though the thought had only just occurred to him:

“Oh, and I told Jaegyeom to rest a few more days. Just so you know, what happened that day was mostly my fault for being careless. He probably never intended to hurt anyone, so don’t be too hard on him.”

Deliberately, Yoon Taehee brought up the incident and carefully watched Seok Juryeon’s reaction.

“You met with that child?”

“Yes.”

Seok Juryeon nodded without much interest.

The bait he had thrown out seemed to drift away uselessly.

Then, while glancing back down at the approval documents, she suddenly spoke again.

“By the way... that child...”

Her words trailed off.

For a while, she remained silent, lost in thought.

Then—

“No. Forget it.”

She withdrew the question altogether.

That alone was unusual enough to stand out.

“It’s fine. Go ahead.”

“It’s nothing. You can leave now.”

By then her expression had already returned completely to normal, as though nothing had happened.

“And I had your car moved to the underground parking lot at Jongmyo. You can take it from there.”

She returned her attention to the paperwork again as though the conversation were over.

Yoon Taehee understood immediately {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} that no meaningful answer would come from her anymore.

Still, the hesitation she had shown moments earlier was enough.

“...”

At last, Yoon Taehee’s eyes turned cold.

“So you really did know, Unit Head.”

The statement struck directly at the center of things despite containing neither subject nor object.

“Knew what?”

Anything.

Whatever it was, the important thing was that Seok Juryeon knew something.

Her face remained perfectly calm.

But Yoon Taehee had not missed the brief moment when her fountain pen froze above the paper.

“What else?”

After standing there silently for a moment, Yoon Taehee slowly removed his hands from his pockets and placed them against the edge of the desk.

Then he leaned down toward her.

Seok Juryeon seemed to flinch slightly.

Bracing himself against the desk, Yoon Taehee lowered his face close beside her temple and murmured quietly:

“I’m talking about my car’s license plate number.”

The answer itself was absurdly ordinary.

So ordinary that it rendered the entire preceding exchange meaningless.

And yet—

Seok Juryeon had no choice but to slowly turn her head toward him.

The instant their eyes met, her expression froze strangely.

At the same moment, Yoon Taehee abruptly straightened up.

Without another word, he turned around and walked out of the head of the Exorcism Unit’s office.

Seok Juryeon had just seen a knife in his eyes.