Kill Your X Chapter 52

“Oh, no… no…”

While I was denying reality, time flowed on. I wanted to see him sleeping soundly just once, but as if to meet my expectations, Seo Seunghan fell into an eternal sleep. Far from being a pleasant sight, it was terribly miserable. The area around my heart tightened like it was being forcibly torn apart.

Could this be my fault too? Did he get into such a terrible state while trying to leave the organization for my sake? Or, could I have saved him, but I opened the door too late because I hesitated…

If he had the strength to come all this way, he should have gone to the hospital first. I didn’t even have the energy to guess what his intention was in visiting me for the last time.

“Hic, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you like that. It was something that could have been solved if I had just given up cleanly…”

Whether you deceived me or not, in the end, none of that mattered. I hugged his body, which had lost its warmth, and confessed my late feelings. Uncontrollable emotions boiled inside me. But it was a regret that came too late.

I staggered to my feet, my body lacking strength. I couldn’t just leave a dead person on the cold floor like this. His death would surely cause a huge stir when it became known, but there was nothing I could do in this situation other than report it. Explaining the situation to my father was something to do then.

Just as I was about to take a step that wouldn’t move, an unbelievable sight began to unfold before my eyes.

“Huh?”

Did I see it wrong? It seemed like his limp finger moved slightly. I had cried so much that my vision was blurry, so it was plausible that I was seeing things.

I need to get a grip. As I wiped my tears with a piece of clothing that was relatively less stained with blood, a more distinct movement caught my eye again. I forgot to even blink and focused on him.

“What, what in the world is…”

Blood began to circulate again in the body whose breath had stopped. A wound so deep that you could see his organs healed on its own. Though not completely, the torn flesh stuck back together, and blood, which shouldn’t have been left after bleeding so much, gushed out and stitched life back together.

Why, aren’t there rare cases where someone in cardiac arrest’s heart starts beating again and they come back to life? If I hadn’t seen it myself, I definitely would have thought that.

But Seo Seunghan’s case was completely different. A dead person was literally coming back to life. As if his life had a rewind function, or as if he had multiple lives.

His eyes were still tightly closed. I brought my trembling hand to Seo Seunghan’s chest. Thump, thump, thump. I felt a powerful beat, distinctly different from a moment ago. His body temperature was also hot, making it impossible to mistake it for anything else. Just as I was thinking that the warmth, far exceeding the average for a human, was bizarre.

“Heok!”

Seo Seunghan’s eyes shot open. I almost stopped breathing when I met his completely red eyes. The large pupils, with almost no whites visible, and the unique light within them were, by all accounts, far from human.

A hand slowly rose and landed on my cheek. He gave a faint smile to me, who was gasping for breath.

“That’s a relief.”

My heart almost stopped at his rough voice, as if it had been scraped with sandpaper. When I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them, his eyes had returned to how I knew them, as if by magic. The whites were a bit bloodshot, but they were unmistakably human eyes.

“You, you, how…”

“I’m so glad that Sunbae didn’t die.”

Seo Seunghan hugged me tightly. My breathing quickly went beyond a controllable range. My eyes rolled back, and the strength drained from my body. The low voice that reached my ear crackled and disintegrated.

“I was confused all this time, but now I think I know the answer I’ve been pondering for ten years.”

The shocking scene that crossed life and death pulled the trigger of my memory. Familiar yet strange scenes poured out like crazy from that point on. All the memories that had sunk deep into my subconscious rose to the surface. I finally held the last missing puzzle piece in my hand.

The fact that I had already died ten years ago. And the fact that, although I don’t know how he did it, Seo Seunghan brought me back to life then.

“I really, really wanted to save Sunbae in this life too,”

said the owner of my life, just before everything went black.

✽✽✽

I came to understand why Seo Seunghan had used the expression ‘base’ instead of ‘home’ before. He literally had at least one place in each region where he could stay at any time. It gave me a rough idea of what kind of life he had been living.

Right after experiencing the nightmarish miracle, someone came to the house, and with his help, we moved to another base. Even though he had come back to life, his physical injuries were still severe, but the helper chose to call a doctor to the house instead of taking Seo Seunghan to a normal hospital. I wasn’t even sure if that person was a real medical professional since he wasn’t wearing a gown.

“Oh, you’re here? Our puppy’s lover.”

I was on my way back after just submitting my leave of absence at the library. The person who had stayed by Seo Seunghan’s side while I was away was CEO Kang of KNT Entertainment. He was the man with a gangster-like impression whom I had accidentally seen when I went for a health check-up before.

No, he really is a gangster. The fortunate thing was that he seemed to be on Seo Seunghan’s side for now.

“Don’t call me that. I’m not even his lover right now.”

“If you’re not his lover, then what, family? Have you already registered your marriage and everything? Anyway, our puppy is more impatient than he looks.”

CEO Kang smiled slyly and threw a joke that didn’t fit the situation. When I didn’t respond, his gaze followed mine and landed on Seo Seunghan. The sight of him sleeping soundly in bed felt quite unfamiliar.

“How is Seunghan’s condition?”

“The doctor was here just a moment ago. He had surgery to suture his flesh under anesthesia, so he’s out of it right now. But why are you staring at him like that?”

“I’m fascinated. I’ve never seen Seunghan sleeping soundly before.”

He has an unapproachable impression when his eyes are open, but when he’s like this, he looks purely gentle. If he were wearing ordinary clothes, he would have looked like a late-blooming college student.

“Our puppy isn’t much of a sleeper. Even when he does fall asleep, he’s such a light sleeper. I was scared sometimes too, the way he’d just flutter his eyes open whenever I called him at any time in the wee hours.”

“CEO. But why do you keep calling Seunghan a puppy?”

Unable to bear it any longer, an aggressive tone came out. No matter how much he seemed to be an ally at present, I didn’t like his composed demeanor seeing a subordinate who had just overcome a life-and-death crisis.

I knew this man was also a gangster, but after experiencing a series of abnormal events one after another, my guts had spilled out.

CEO Kang made the inside of his cheek bulge with his tongue before answering.

“It’s a term of endearment on my part, is our young master dissatisfied with it? That someone else is using a ‘term of endearment’ for his lover?”

“I told you I’m not his lover.”

“You look nice but you keep playing hard to get, that’s sexy. So this is our puppy’s type. Is the young master like this in bed too?”

CEO Kang acted as if my hostile attitude didn’t faze him in the slightest. In a way, it was natural. As an active gangster, he must have been through a much rougher world than me, a civilian. The same goes for Seo Seunghan.

“It’ll probably be another thirty minutes before he wakes up from the anesthesia, why don’t you sit down if you’re not going to keep standing.”

At CEO Kang’s suggestion, I pulled a chair from nearby and sat down. If it weren’t for the moisture regularly filling the oxygen respirator, I would have checked his pulse again to confirm if he was alive. It seemed that witnessing someone die right before my eyes had left me with trauma. And what happened after that… even when I mulled it over, it didn’t feel real.

“Our young master seems to have a lot on his mind.”

It was now a bother to point out the annoying nickname every time. Since he didn’t seem like the type to listen to me even if I spoke nicely, I changed the subject.

“By the way, CEO, aren’t you busy? KNT Entertainment is in an uproar right now. I heard on the radio on my way here that Ma Yubin, as well as other actors in the company, are suspected of drug use.”

“Well, my title is just CEO. Originally, my underlings do all this practical work.”

“Is Seo Seunghan one of those underlings?”

“Why, does it break your heart that your lover is working too hard? I’m telling you this so the young master doesn’t misunderstand, but it’s not my fault that Seunghan works overtime. He does it all on his own.”

He was raised that way since he was a child.

I was about to correct him for the third time that I wasn’t his lover now, but I paused.

“CEO, have you known Seunghan since he was young? From what you’re saying, you two seem quite close.”

At my question, CEO Kang leaned back deeply in his chair and spoke. In his action of crossing his legs and tapping his toes, I felt an indescribable gangster-like quality.

“We’re close, of course. How many years have we rolled around in this business together? In this line of work, Seunghan is actually much more of a Sunbae than me. Did he say he first joined the organization when he was seven, no, eight? Anyway, when I first started as a loan shark, he had already killed someone.”