Chapter 2
Chapter 2. Oppa, We’ll Never Be Apart Again
My precious girlfriend, Sia, passed away exactly one year ago.
And yet, this unfamiliar woman had stepped directly out of a portal—clearly not a beast of any kind—and brazenly announced that she was the lover I had buried.
Under such bizarre circumstances, what sane person would accept those claims without suspicion? I, for one, certainly could not bring myself to do so.
Rather, an intense surge of indignation rushed to my head at the notion that some stranger was mocking me on the very day marking Sia’s death. It felt like a direct insult to Sia’s memory, as well as a cruel mockery of my grief.
As the woman insisting on being Sia attempted to wrap her arms around me, I instinctively took a step back. A part of me burned with the urge to scream at this imposter and demand that she vanish from my sight this instant. Even so, considering she had just emerged from a gate, I reasoned that needlessly antagonizing her would be reckless and dangerous.
The wisest move right now was to maintain my composure and test the waters through conversation.
“Who are you supposed to be? How do you recognize me, and how could you possibly know about the woman I loved?”
Pushing down my internal turmoil as much as I could, I questioned her in an even, detached tone. Yet, the moment the words left my mouth, her eyes grew wet and she began to weep softly.
‘Wait, is she actually crying?’
That was a reaction I never would have anticipated. While it was reassuring that she harbored no visible hostility toward me, the atmosphere was developing in an extraordinarily strange direction.
An enigmatic entity had crossed over from an unknown dimensional rift, and I was the only person capable of fighting anywhere in this vicinity.
‘Keep it together. I have to stay levelheaded.’
My immediate objective was to uncover why she recognized my name alongside Sia’s, and why she felt compelled to assume my deceased girlfriend’s identity. As I mentally organized my thoughts to formulate the next inquiry, she began muttering in a low, trembling voice.
“It makes sense… I look so completely different right now that you couldn’t possibly recognize me, oppa. I was terrified you might have forgotten who I was, but what a relief. I’m so sorry. I’m such a fool for even suspecting you. You even bought tteokbokki and gimbap because you were remembering me. Of course, there’s no way oppa could ever push me out of his heart. There’s no way you would ever have moved on to another woman during my absence. It’s true. The fault is entirely mine. What an idiot I was to harbor doubts about a man like you, oppa.”
After whispering that frantic monologue to herself, the woman drew a steadying breath and scanned our surroundings. Raising an arm toward the open sky, she uttered a chant in a language I had never encountered before.
[Silence.]
The second her chant ceased, an overwhelming torrent of magical energy surged outward, blanketing the entire perimeter in an invisible dome.
“No one seems to be around, but it never hurts to be careful.”
‘Is that… spellcasting?’
She had invoked high-tier magic with just a vocal command, bypassing complex mathematical formulas entirely?
At that very moment, a primal instinct warned me that regardless of how desperately I fought back, this woman could utterly overpower me without needing to move an inch. She was, in every conceivable meaning of the word, an incomprehensibly monstrous existence.
A violent tremor took hold of my legs, threatening to bring me to my knees, while my heart pounded against my ribs so frantically it felt like it might tear through my chest.
“Oppa, what’s happening to you? Do you feel ill? You aren’t hurt or sick, are you? Please tell me you aren’t! Oppa, snap out of it!”
“W-Who in the world… are you…?”
The staggering disparity between our strengths choked the breath right out of my lungs. Yet, rather than pressing her advantage, she looked entirely beside herself with worry seeing me gasp for air.
“Where does it hurt, oppa? Wait… are you terrified of me? Oppa, please, breathe. Take a deep, slow breath, and release it. It’s me, your girlfriend. Why on earth would I ever bring harm to you? Try to relax. Hold on, let me ease the pressure for you.”
Once more, she muttered a series of words, weaving another enchantment over my body. Her phrase was unintelligible to my ears, but she accomplished the entire spell in a mere instant, skipping formula calculations entirely once again.
“There. Does that make you feel a bit more at ease?”
“…It does.”
“Phew. Thank goodness.”
Merely moments before, my pulse had been racing as though it might burst, yet now it settled into a calm, steady rhythm as if nothing unusual had transpired. Curiously, that unnatural tranquility only deepened my dread.
A spell capable of pacifying an individual’s emotional state was a phenomenon I had never once encountered in all my life.
“I understand why you can’t bring yourself to believe that I’m Sia right now. Given how strange all of this looks, it’s only natural you’d doubt me. It’s fine. In that case, I simply have to provide undeniable proof that I’m truly your girlfriend, right?”
Regulating her breathing, the woman began sharing details in a gentle, deliberate voice. She brought up the exact day we first crossed paths, the word-for-word confession Sia had spoken to me, the location where we experienced our very first kiss, the initial birthday gift Sia had ever picked out for me, and the specific playlist of songs I always belted out whenever we visited karaoke lounges together…
Every single memory she recounted was an intimate secret that absolutely nobody besides Sia could ever possess.
‘Could it be… that she really is Sia?’
The whole notion was utterly preposterous, yet grasping onto that fragile sliver of hope, I decided to put her to one final test.
“If that’s true, what’s my absolute favorite thing to drink?”
“It sounds funny to label it as an ordinary drink, but you’re obsessed with coffee milk, oppa. That’s why I always teased you about being completely hooked on it.”
That single sentence shattered my remaining doubts. I couldn’t comprehend how she had stepped out from a gate, nor could I fathom why her appearance had changed entirely from the Sia I remembered, but the person standing before me was undeniably my cherished girlfriend, Sia.
“And back then, you always replied that while you were definitely addicted to coffee milk, you were a thousand times more addicted to me. I used to tell you that hearing that made my skin crawl and that you should cut it out. When was that again? Ah, I was twenty-one back then, which means—”
“Sia.”
Before another word could escape her lips, I pulled her tightly against my chest.
“Sia. Sia… Sia.”
Countless phrases like this can’t possibly be real, I missed you until it broke me, and I love you surged through my consciousness, but my throat locked up, preventing me from uttering anything else. All I could manage was repeating her name like a prayer.
Hearing her name spill from my lips appeared to wash away all her remaining anxiety. A radiant smile broke across her face as she addressed me in kind.
“Minjun oppa.”
“I’m here, Sia.”
Instead of trading questions about the days we spent apart, we remained wrapped in each other’s warmth in absolute silence for an eternity. Her facial features, the timbre of her voice, and even her stature were entirely unfamiliar, yet the moment she was in my arms, every instinct confirmed she was indeed Sia.
No other person in this world had ever melted into my embrace with such pure devotion.
After holding one another for what felt like hours, I wiped the dampness from my face and finally voiced the burning question lingering in my mind.
“Sia, what on earth happened to you all this time?”
Even as the raging inferno inside the gate devoured her body, consuming her flesh in blazes far too ferocious to withstand, Jung Sia never allowed herself to abandon the will to live.
‘I refuse to die. I will not perish like this. For my own life, and for the Minjun oppa I treasure so deeply, I will survive this ordeal by any means necessary.’
Regrettably, her desperate vow was granted only in part. She managed to awaken once more, but her consciousness opened its eyes in a foreign reality far removed from Earth—reborn in the form of a dragon, the supreme predator reigning over that world’s lands.
Right after opening her eyes in that new form, she could scarcely comprehend the reality of her rebirth. Step by step, however, she grew accustomed to life as a dragon, gradually finding contentment in her majestic new form.
Yet, that peace proved fleeting.
‘Everything feels so hollow.’
As a dragon, there was nothing beyond her grasp, and no desire she could not fulfill. Her gentle dragon parents showered her with unreserved care and tenderness. Nevertheless, a lingering void remained within her heart.
‘Minjun oppa isn’t here with me.’
She possessed absolute dominance over her surroundings, yet the partner she adored was missing from her side. She had cherished Minjun to the point of viewing him as her second half, and the yearning for that missing piece left an unbearable ache within her.
Eventually, after enduring countless days of torment born from that bottomless yearning for Minjun, she made a firm resolution: she would journey back to find him with her own two hands.
Only a single path lay before her: devise a Dimensional Travel Magic formula potent enough to cross the boundaries of time and space, and cast it.
Starting from that very moment, Sia mapped out the path to turn that dream into reality. Long before reaching the maturation of a dragon, she trained relentlessly day and night until her strength far surpassed that of any young dragon of her generation. During every spare moment, she took tomes from her father’s great library, constructing an unshakeable mastery over arcane arts.
The second she crossed into adulthood as a dragon, she dedicated her entire existence to researching Dimensional Travel Magic with obsessive fervor.
Even when fellow dragons attempted to coax her away, saying, ‘A spell capable of traversing dimensions is theoretically impossible in our reality, so abandon such foolishness and come enjoy life with us,’ Sia remained completely unmoved by their words. Her focus stayed locked entirely on forging that arcane formula.
Pioneering an unprecedented school of sorcery in absolute isolation, without any certainty of success, was a grueling trial. Initially, she had embarked on this path resolved that even if it required thousands of years, it would all be worth it so long as she could stand before Minjun once more.
Yet as centuries drifted by, the gnawing sensation that she was losing her sanity crept into her mind. The urge to cast everything aside haunted her thoughts time and time again.
Whenever those dark moments took hold, she carved Minjun’s visage into hard stone, forcing her resolve to reignite.
‘Pull yourself together, fool. Are you really going to surrender after coming this far? Minjun oppa is out there waiting for you. Stop being so weak-willed.’
‘If my yearning for oppa hurts this deeply, then oppa must be suffering just as much from missing me. Since he has no way of reaching me right now, the burden falls on me to push forward and bridge the distance.’
Minjun oppa. Minjun oppa. Minjun oppa. Minjun oppa.
‘Just hold on. I will cross every barrier to reach you.’
A century slipped away, followed by another…
A millennium passed, and after a span extending slightly past two thousand years of relentless dedication, her labor finally bore fruit.
Unlike the crude planar shifting magic of that realm—which was incapable of locking onto specific dimensional or temporal coordinates and required a reckless gamble of one’s own life—Sia’s breakthrough spell was an extraordinary marvel of sorcery capable of landing the caster in the precise time period of whichever realm they chose.
Admittedly, a minute margin of temporal error remained within the final calculations, and given the staggering sea of mana required to fuel it, the potential backlash upon casting was entirely unpredictable. Even so, she was completely prepared to brave every consequence.
The chance to be reunited with Minjun made every hazard trivial by comparison.
“At long last, the moment has finally arrived.”
The second she verified the completed magic formula, Sia unleashed the Dimensional Travel Magic without an instant of doubt.
“Hold on just a little longer, oppa.”
“My original plan was to arrive on the exact morning after I was burned alive, but only after releasing the spell did I realize a minor calculation error had slipped into the final equation.”
Sia admitted with a wry look that she had only caught her mistake after setting the temporal value to one year instead of one single day.
“The second I caught the slip-up, I tried desperately to rewrite the matrix, but the energy had already discharged, leaving me powerless to halt it. Had I not made that stupid mistake, we could have been together much sooner, oppa.”
With those words, Sia brought her lengthy tale to a close.
Considered objectively, the narrative was so outlandish that anyone would find it hard not to question its truth. Countless breeds of monsters had emerged across the globe since portals first began materializing decades ago, yet not a single dragon had ever been recorded in history. Above all, I had always considered the concept of transmigration into another realm to be the realm of pure fiction.
Yet, here was Sia, miraculously brought back to life and standing right before my eyes—so what reason did I have to doubt her story? Whether she was a dragon or something even stranger held no importance to me. The only thing that mattered was that she had fought her way back to my side.
“My poor Sia… how much suffering did you have to endure? Two thousand years rolls off the tongue so easily, but living through that kind of eternity…”
Before the sentence could leave my lips, Sia abruptly embraced me, mirroring what I had done to her earlier.
“Oppa.”
Then, without the slightest hesitation, she pressed her crimson lips firmly against my own.
“I took far too long, didn’t I? I’m so sorry. I wanted to return to you so badly, but no matter how hard I struggled, I couldn’t cut the time any shorter.”
“Sia…”
“We are never going to be parted again. Never.”
Her lips were intoxicatingly sweet, sending a shiver through my entire body. Perhaps because she had hungered for this moment across an unimaginable expanse of time, she displayed not the slightest desire to break the kiss.
Only when my breath completely failed and a dry cough forced its way up my throat did Sia finally ease her hold on me.
“Are you… all right?”
“Y-Yeah. I was just caught off guard for a second.”
Back then, I still had no idea what kind of monumental changes my reunion with Sia would bring into my life.
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