Chapter Text
The soulmate phenomenon, as scientists liked to call it, was as mysterious as the appearance of the gates they came with.
The unusual connection between two people—often hunters, people with supernatural abilities that came into existence at the same time as everything else—that led them to, in effect, sharing dreams was unfounded before the world turned upside down ten years ago. When the ranking system was put into effect worldwide, so was the soulmate phenomenon finally officially accepted by scientific communities internationally.
But where many young-adult novelists in times kinder depicted dreamsharing as one delving into the dreams of another, the truth that the chosen of the present day some experienced was a bit odder: some people reported a hotpot of sceneries combined together—an amusement park under the sea, an artist's studio thirty-thousand feet in the air, just to name a few. Others found places comfortable to them but with some things odd: a childhood home missing its roof to display the starry sky, or an artist's studio found in the deep woods.
For Sung Jinwoo, E-Rank hunter of twenty, it was an endless field of flowers under a cloudless sky.
He didn't recognize the flowers, but he recognized the scenery he was in—a hill full of flowers that stretched as far as the eye could see, with a lone green-leafed tree standing guard and casting its long shadow. Whereas Jinwoo remembered a rainbow's sea of colors from the trip he'd gone on—before Jinah was born, before the gates broke loose, before he became the last shaky leg of the Sung household—only maiden wedding white blossomed back at him.
"Moonflowers," his soulmate had breathed when they "met" for the first time, two days after Jinwoo awoke as a hunter. The aching voice left Jinwoo just as breathless as his soulmate sounded. "My mother… loved these flowers."
"They're pretty," Jinwoo murmured. He was alone in the field of white, and yet he knew: his soulmate was right behind him. They couldn't see each other—no soulmates could until they shared their names with each other—but Jinwoo could feel his presence all the same. A solid, steadfast presence, invisible yet there all the same. He wasn't sure if it was a new byproduct of his awakening or if all soulmates felt this way; his father had disappeared into the gates not soon after they appeared, and the chances of non-hunters being soulmates were so astronomically low it was laughable.
Jinwoo, sitting on the ground—a warm blanket even through his jeans where fuzzy petals should've greeted him—with bandages around his forearms and one against his cheek, pulled his bruised and battered legs to his chest; they complained about the movement, sending fire up his nerves and muscles filled with acid, but he ignored them all the same. "…Uhm, I know we just met, but…"
(He couldn't tell him. How, growing up, his friends continuously rejected him time and time again—too weird, too odd, too this or that. At some point, he'd given up trying to really build those connections; superficial ones were good enough, just a smile and a wave and a laugh or two with people around him.
At some point, he stopped being capable of trusting people altogether.)
"…Would you like to use codenames?" His soulmate offered. His voice was sturdy yet smooth; it reminded Jinwoo of the walls of the subway station he walked through every day. "I don't mind either way."
Jinwoo looked away guiltily, as if the other could see him. He didn't want his soulmate to know who he was; he was very clearly a high-ranking hunter from the echoes of mana that seemed to be the only thing capable of breaking the unknown barrier between soulmates who hadn't shared names. The ugly truth of who he was—an E-Rank, "the weakest I've ever seen," his evaluator had sneered—call him weak or a hopeless romantic or whatever, but he didn't want to hold his soulmate back.
(It was a disgrace. He was a disgrace.)
The silence spoke volumes enough. "Then, I'll go first. You can call me…" his soulmate tapered off for a long while. "'Chief.'"
Jinwoo blinked, letting the name settle in his mind. "Chief." Belonging to a man who was a pillar of stone just by his voice and demeanor alone. A name he surely lived up to, Jinwoo thought.
"…Sorry, I'm not the best with names," his soulmate muttered. Jinwoo cracked a small smile.
"It's alright. You can call me 'Crow.' My sister always says I keep bringing home weird, shiny things."
"You have a sister?" Chief hummed.
"Yeah," Jinwoo replied—and like that, the floodgates opened. They spent their week of back-to-back dreams learning about each other: both hunters, as they had both expected. Jinwoo a new Hunter, while Chief had been Hunting since the gates appeared. Both without their parents, although Jinwoo had Jinah and Chief was fairly sure his boss saw him as his son or something.
("He took me under his wing a couple of years after the gates opened. I wasn't… always the best man," Chief confessed. "Got into a lot of ugly situations, wrapped up with a lot of unpleasant people. He dragged me out of there—I went kicking and screaming, mind you.")
Every time Jinwoo stumbled on his words with answers he was afraid to give, the syllables getting caught in his throat and choking him up, Chief never pushed. If nothing came out, the topic shifted easily. If half-spoken phrases did manage to tumble out, Chief held them carefully and never seemed fed up when Jinwoo never offered more.
(Jinwoo didn't deserve him as his soulmate, he already knew.)
Four years had passed since the day Jinwoo met his soulmate. Four years had passed, full of stable support from the man whose name he didn't truly know, who he knew all about yet knew nothing of. Four years had passed, and Sung Jinwoo still had not found the courage to share his name with Chief.
(Maybe he never would.
But, a tiny part of him, was beginning to hope that maybe he wasn't incapable of trusting people like he had thought he wasn't after all.)
Four years had passed, and then Jinwoo's life changed forever with a single dungeon.