Honbul: Flame of the Soul

“My own self was my real enemy, huh...”

Turning it over in his mind, Yoon Taehee asked in an offhand voice,

“Do you regret killing your teacher?”

Maybe he used to, once. But now...

“No. I don’t.”

“Then that’s enough.”

When Jaegyeom answered shortly, Yoon Taehee smiled. He seemed to like the answer. With the hint of a dimple in his cheek, he added,

“There’s no point wasting emotion regretting something that’s already over.”

Their eyes met clearly.

Jaegyeom had been sitting there with an indifferent face the entire time, but at some point his brow furrowed. Why am I even sitting here talking to him about this? The thought struck him belatedly. At once, his mood twisted sour. Before he knew it, he had gotten swept along and ended up following this unpleasant subject Yoon Taehee had led him into.

“Hey.”

Jaegyeom snapped, lifting his eyes.

“What are you so shamelessly proud of?”

Even if it was true, hearing it from Yoon Taehee made it infuriating. He had never expected an apology, but Taehee acting calm as if nothing had happened got under his skin. There was not the slightest sign that he felt sorry or remorseful about the past.

“Shouldn’t you be the one regretting something?”

Resting his chin on his hand, Yoon Taehee replied,

“Regret is what you feel when you think you did something wrong.”

“Yeah. And?”

“I don’t think I did anything wrong.”

Jaegyeom knitted his brows hard.

“What?”

“Even if I turned back time and went back a week, I’d do the exact same thing to you. So I don’t regret it. My choices are always the best ones.”

“......”

Jaegyeom’s face turned even darker.

“You lied to me and threatened me. And you still think you did nothing wrong?”

“Right. Like I said, even if I went back, I’d do the same thing.”

Yoon Taehee leaned his upper body over the table and crossed his arms. His broad, solid shoulders tightened, stretching his shirt taut as if it might split. By now every trace of a smile had vanished from his eyes. They were sharp and cold.

In a low voice, Yoon Taehee said,

“What if I’d told you the truth from the start, that I was a Naja who had infiltrated the school as a librarian? [N O V E L I G H T] When I went to see you at the bookstore, what if I’d just turned around and walked back out, leaving you alone when you hated even speaking to me and rejected me outright? If I had, would you be sitting here across from me like this right now?”

His clear eyes fixed straight on Jaegyeom across from him. Yoon Taehee knew very well there was still bitterness between them. Even so, the only reason Jaegyeom had agreed to sit here and talk was probably because Taehee had helped little master.

“That’s right. I lied to you and threatened you. And yet you’re sitting in front of me right now, looking at me, listening to me, talking to me like this. That’s what matters to me.”

Yoon Taehee hated clinging to what was already over. If you believed you could use the mistakes of the past as a stepping stone and move forward, that was a trap. You were lucky if they didn’t become shackles around your ankles instead. Follow the pointless trail of if I hadn’t done that back then, and all waiting for you at the end was self-pity and self-loathing. That was what the swamp of the past was.

“You said it yourself. ‘What you did won’t disappear.’ You were right. Which is exactly why I shouldn’t regret it. Want to know why regret and reflection are such bullshit? Because all they do is make you think you’ve become a better person just because you regretted the past a little and reflected on it. You’ve done nothing but sit there and turn things over in your head, and suddenly your guilt gets lighter and you start going easy on yourself.”

Spilled water could not be gathered back up. The past did not disappear, and it did not change. So there was no need to look back. Every sin was not something left behind. It was already living alongside him. It would be a problem if he just abandoned it in the past wherever he pleased. So he did not regret. He did not reflect. He simply carried it willingly. Yoon Taehee had resolved that a very long time ago.

“So if I apologized for what’s already done and told you it was my fault, would you accept me? Or change your mind and become a Naja? No, right?”

What would change if you kept clinging to what could not be undone, let it cling to you, kept looking back? Rather than floundering in the swamp of the past, it was better to prepare for what was coming and work out a response. That was far more useful. Far more worthwhile.

“And even if I regretted it and apologized, how would that help you? At best, it’d be like digging into frozen ground. Even if it went well, all I’d get is breaking even. So I’d rather give you something real instead. That’s much more productive.”

Yoon Taehee finished speaking and looked at the boy in front of him.

“You...”

Jaegyeom spoke, one eye tightening.

“You really are a completely irredeemable bastard.”

He had not said it in quite a condemning tone. He had only spoken exactly what he felt. He had known from the start that Yoon Taehee was crooked to the core. But after actually laying everything bare like this, he was worse than Jaegyeom had imagined.

Jaegyeom disliked Yoon Taehee. He had no intention of becoming a Naja, and no desire to get along with him like friends. It was not even a matter of sides. As far as Jaegyeom was concerned, Yoon Taehee had nothing to do with him.

And yet today, Jaegyeom had come to school to see Jo Youngwoo.

Even though he had known he would run into Yoon Taehee if he came.

Jaegyeom had not actively avoided meeting him. If he had truly hated the idea that much, he could have shaken him off somehow. He had refused to come when Taehee called him out directly, yet in the end he had come to the library like he could not help it.

Then why?

The question rose in him, but Jaegyeom deliberately looked away from it.

Yoon Taehee had said the backlash had not transferred to him, that he was curious about the reason, and that he had dragged his injured body all the way to the house because of it. And after saying that, he had left the gift he was supposedly going to give him after he collected five stickers at his bedside—

even though Jaegyeom had only collected three.

“When Mesan told him that...”

The memory rose before him of the cabin inside the dome, where snow still raged even in early summer, and suddenly Jaegyeom had thought:

Maybe, just this once, for the first and last time, I could hear him out.

Because.

Because he had helped Mesan.

And because he had left him a gift.

And because, also...

Maybe he had wanted to confirm something.

He did not know exactly what.

“......”

But now it felt like all of it had gone to hell.

Jaegyeom stood up at once. The chair scraped back with a harsh screech. At once Yoon Taehee reached out and seized his wrist, twisting it hard.

“Yeah, that’s right. I’m a bastard.”

Yoon Taehee said it.

“But it’s not like you didn’t know that already. Are you disappointed now?”

With an expressionless face, he added in a low voice,

“A bastard is exactly the kind of person who’d commit treason. Isn’t that right?”

At those words, Jaegyeom narrowed his eyes.

“The Office of Narye is going to fall. Because I’m going to break it.”

“I keep wishing it were you. The one who’d join me in this rebellion.”

Silently, Jaegyeom looked at the hand wrapped around his wrist, the veins standing out across its back.

“......”

The warmth against his skin was hot and heavy.

Jaegyeom looked at Yoon Taehee with slanted eyes. The moment their eyes met, it was as if he could see that blood-soaked face from that day overlapping with the one in front of him.

“Fine. Go ahead and do your best.”

Jaegyeom answered coldly and twisted the wrist Taehee was holding. It meant let go.

But Yoon Taehee did not let go.

Lowering his eyes, he said,

“You lied to me.”

“Stop talking nonsense and get your hand off me.”

“When you said there was nothing you wanted to know about me—that was a lie.”

Frowning, Jaegyeom tried to wrench his wrist free. But instead of shaking Yoon Taehee off, the force only dragged him closer. Yoon Taehee’s upper body, with the table between them, pressed in as if to close the gap entirely. The moment Jaegyeom instinctively tried to pull back from the sudden closeness—

“You got curious about me. That’s why you came here.” 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

“Are you insane? I’m not interested in someone like you at all.”

Jaegyeom shot back coldly, a blade in the corner of his eyes.

“Really? Then I’ll make you interested.”

Yoon Taehee said it while looking down at him with unreadable eyes.

“I’m going to destroy the Office of Narye, and I’m going to take the head of the man who runs it. He’s my enemy. The story’s simple. My family was slaughtered right in front of me. An utterly ordinary revenge story.”

Jaegyeom faltered and looked up at him.

“If you help me with my revenge, I’ll help you with yours.”

Yoon Taehee added,

“...What?”

Jaegyeom’s face hardened. He could not understand what Yoon Taehee was saying. Help him with his revenge? His revenge had ended a long time ago.

Then Yoon Taehee gave his wrist a hard yank.

This time Jaegyeom’s upper body lurched forward, almost falling into him. They were far too close. Without thinking, Jaegyeom braced himself against Yoon Taehee’s shoulder. Beneath the shirt, that shoulder felt broad and hard.

“You said your real enemy was someone else.”

Bowing his head, Yoon Taehee whispered into Jaegyeom’s ear.

“I’ll kill him for you. You.”

A faint aftersound lingered with his breath.