Chapter Text
Long before Sung Jinwoo understood words like mana, gate, or hunter, he understood only one unshakable truth:
His body never stayed where he left it.
He was a wandering child—tiny feet padding across creaking floorboards, drifting from bed to bed through the quiet nights of their small apartment. Most babies cried themselves awake. Jinwoo simply roamed. Sometimes he crawled. Sometimes he toddled. Sometimes he rolled like a sleepy, confused log, bumping into walls with soft little thuds. But no matter how he moved, no matter where he started…
…he always ended up in the same place.
His parents’ bed.
His mother used to laugh about it.
“He’s a heat-seeking missile,” she would murmur fondly as she found him again—wedged between her and Il-Hwan, tiny fists curled around her shirt. “He just follows warmth.”
His father would rumble a laugh deep in his chest, the sound vibrating through Jinwoo’s entire little body as he gently lifted him.
“Let’s get you back before your mother gets kicked off the bed,” Il-Hwan would whisper.
Jinwoo never stirred during these transfers. His head would slump against his father’s shoulder, breath soft, skin warm, trusting without knowing why. Il-Hwan always carried him as though he were holding something fragile. Maybe he was—something small and soft, something that needed protection from a world neither parent yet knew would turn brutal.
Once tucked in, Jinwoo would curl into a familiar dent in his mattress, scrunching his face like he knew he wasn’t where he wanted to be. Sometimes he stayed. Sometimes he didn’t.
His mother teased that if they locked the bedroom door, Jinwoo would try to ooze under it like water.
“You can’t stop a boy who wanders,” she’d sigh, brushing his hair away from his cheek.
Those were warmer times.
Jinwoo didn’t remember the day his father went missing—but he remembered the night vividly, in the way children remember feelings instead of events.
He remembered wandering.
Bare feet touched cool floorboards, carrying him along the familiar path: down the hall, left toward his parents’ room. The apartment was dim, the only light a thin strip that escaped through the cracked door ahead.
Inside, his father was awake.
Il-Hwan stood beside the bed, tying his boots with slow, methodical movements—the kind adults made when they were thinking too hard. His coat hung from a chair, half-zipped, sleeves drooping. The air felt different that night, tense and strangely hollow, as though the room itself was holding its breath.
Jinwoo’s small form bumped against Il-Hwan’s shin. The man startled, then exhaled once he recognized the sleepy little presence.
“Oh… buddy.” He knelt, brushing unruly hair away from Jinwoo’s forehead. “Did you wander again?”
Jinwoo didn’t answer. He was too young to speak clearly, too drowsy to think. He simply leaned forward, reaching for warmth.
His father scooped him up, balancing him with the ease of someone who’d done it a hundred times. He pressed a kiss to Jinwoo’s forehead—lingering, almost hesitant.
“Go back to sleep, hm?” His voice was soft.
Too soft.
Soft like farewell.
Jinwoo wouldn’t remember the words later. But he remembered the tone—warm, sad, stretched thin like thread about to snap.
Il-Hwan tucked him beside his mother, who mumbled something reassuring in her sleep. Jinwoo curled into the leftover warmth of his father’s pillow and drifted off again, unaware that history was shifting around him.
He woke with sunlight on his face and a cold, empty space where his father should’ve been.
His father’s boots were gone.
His coat never returned.
That morning, Jinwoo watched his mother sit at the edge of the bed, shoulders trembling, hand pressed over her mouth as if it could contain all the fear and grief threatening to spill out.
He didn’t understand words like missing or lost in a gate. But he understood this:
He had wandered into a room that used to hold three people…
…and now held only two.
Life changed quickly after that. Too quickly.
His mother, trapped between searching and despair, worked herself to exhaustion. Bills piled up. Hope frayed. Smiles were stretched too thin, held together only for the children’s sake.
And then—on a quiet afternoon years after Il-Hwan vanished—Jinwoo watched her collapse on the kitchen floor between a fallen stack of dishes.
The hospital smelled like disinfectant and tired dreams. Machines beeped in hollow rhythms, marking time they no longer had. Nurses said things softly, gently, as if loudness could shatter what little strength the siblings had left.
Their mother slept.
And slept.
And never woke again.
Doctors used words like mana exhaustion, rare complication, and coma. Words Jinwoo and Jin-ah were far too young to understand—but understood anyway.
At night, in their small apartment, Jinwoo’s sleepwalking worsened.
He didn’t know how to stop.
Every night, without fail, he ended up in Jin-ah’s room.
By now, Jin-ah had just entered high school. She was taller, sharper, more aware. But she suddenly inherited a responsibility no teenager should have carried: being her brother’s “nighttime supervisor.”
Some nights, Jinwoo woke curled at the foot of her bed. Some nights sprawled across her blankets. Some nights resting his head against her lap while she tried to finish homework.
“Oppa…” she’d whisper, brushing back his hair with the same tenderness their mother once had. “It’s okay. You can sleep here.”
Some nights she cried quietly into his shoulder.
On those nights, Jinwoo felt something ache in his chest. He didn’t understand why. He only knew it felt wrong to be awake when she was sad, wrong to see her carry so much weight alone.
Their mother slept in a bed of machines.
Their father slept in memory.
And Jinwoo walked, seeking warmth that slipped farther away every night.
By the time Jinwoo awakened as an E-Rank hunter, sleepwalking was no longer a childhood quirk.
It was a habit.
A reflex.
A symptom of a life fractured by absence.
But money didn’t wait for grief or sleep disorders.
With their mother indefinitely hospitalized and their income nonexistent, even E-Rank pay was better than nothing. So Jinwoo took the license. Took the tests. Took the jobs.
And paid the price.
Low-rank gates were not glamorous. They were not safe. Hunters joked about “easy money,” but Jinwoo’s hands shook every time he held a blade. His body took more bruises than his wallet ever carried bills. Yet he kept going.
For rent. For food. For Jin-ah. For their mom.
On nights he returned home late—clothes torn, knees scraped, fingers trembling—he wanted nothing more than rest.
But exhaustion only made the sleepwalking worse.
He woke in the kitchen with his cheek pressed to the cold metal of the fridge.
He woke in the bathroom, leaning against the tub like he had tried to crawl inside it.
He woke near the front door with one shoe on, as if preparing to wander out into the city.
And always—always—Jin-ah would find him.
“Oppaaa…” she groaned one night, dragging his limp form back to bed with both hands hooked under his arms. “Why can’t you stay still? I’m too small for this!”
Jinwoo murmured something that was half apology and half unconscious mumbling.
The next morning, she had dark circles under her eyes. She still smiled, but the edges trembled. She never complained—not really. Instead, she guided him back to safety again and again, silently declaring:
I will protect you.
Even if she didn’t know how.
Other hunters weren’t any gentler.
“Yo, Jinwoo! You gonna sleep through today’s gate too?”
“I swear he fights better unconscious. Maybe we should knock him out before raids!”
“Careful—he’ll wander into a C-rank and die before we notice.”
Jinwoo forced a laugh every time. Not because it was funny—but because if he didn’t laugh, something inside him might break.
Whenever someone joked about him dying, Jin-ah’s expression hardened. A cold fury lit behind her eyes, the kind that summoned their mother’s strength for a moment.
But she never told Jinwoo how scared she was.
She didn’t need to.
He knew.
Every time he woke on her bedroom floor, he knew.
Every time he saw her exhaustion, he knew.
Jinwoo never learned how to stop wandering.
Never learned why he did it.
Never learned why the nights felt colder without someone beside him.
He certainly never expected that one morning—one terrible, quiet morning—he would wake exactly where he fell asleep…
…and that would be the biggest warning of all.
The day he didn’t wander—
the day his body stayed where he left it—
the morning he awoke with stillness instead of movement—
—that morning led him straight into the Double Dungeon.
And for the first time in years, Sung Jinwoo walked into danger…
fully awake.