#3. Is This Life Ruined Too?

"Hah... gasp... hah!"

The bedsheets felt damp, as if they had absorbed the humid moisture of the heavy rain. At the freezing sensation against his skin, Haneul Jang swallowed a groan that was half a scream and bit his lip hard.

Slowly, his trembling vision began to open. As the familiar, monotonous patterns of his studio apartment's ceiling burned into his retinas, he finally realized he had safely returned to his brutal, exhausting reality.

Cold sweat trickled clammily down his spine.

The places where Yuhwan’s raw, burning heat had brushed against him in the dream still felt scalding hot, as if he had suffered actual burns, causing his entire back to stiffen under a tense shudder. That fleeting moment when a coldly drenched face had closed in right before his eyes with a searing breath—the lingering afterimage of the shattered boundary between dream and reality violently clawed through his mind.

Without a doubt, he had been locked in a dangerous, suffocating standoff in the pouring rain inside the bullpen with Yuhwan—the very object of an intense love he had failed to sever even through four reincarnations.

Looking around his quiet room, it was clear that the scene, heavily punctuated by raw, fishy desires, had been nothing more than a dream.

There is no way... There was absolutely no way Yuhwan would expose such an explicit, feral desire toward him. Why would that proud, fiercely arrogant bastard show even a shred of interest in someone whose very name must still feel completely foreign?

Perhaps because he had been indulging in a fantasy that bordered on the strictly forbidden, the dull, throbbing heat in his lower body refused to cool down even after waking, stubbornly anchoring him to the cruel aftertaste of the dream.

He wasn't some adolescent boy experiencing puberty, so why the hell was his body responding with such brutal honesty? Refusing to acknowledge any sense of shame, his desire stood tall and ran completely wild, cutting a thoroughly pathetic and pitiful figure.

"Achoo!"

A sudden sneeze burst from his lips, bringing a strange illusion that the freezing rainwater from the dream was still caught deep inside his throat.

It sounded utterly absurd, but he couldn't simply dismiss this bizarre phenomenon where the rain endured in a dream returned as a real-world cold. After all, this world had already forced countless unreal anomalies upon Haneul Jang.

The memory of yesterday flashed through his mind—the moment they began to get soaked by the drizzling rain while playing catch in the bullpen, Yuhwan had left the area first, leaving behind nothing but a chilling aura. Since his god-given physical vessel was inherently frail, it seemed his pathetic stamina was laid completely bare by the mere shadow of that man passing by.

Regardless, once the acceptance notice from the Magu-Magu baseball club arrived shortly, he would have to face that demon once again.

The tragic hero engraved into the absolute depths of his heart, the object of a dangerous addiction he couldn't let go of for even a single second—Yuhwan.

While the man already ruled with an overwhelming charisma in reality, inside the dream, he wore the face of a far more destructive and perilous tempter.

"Achoo!"

Yet, a cold dread settled in a corner of his chest, whispering that his relationship with Yuhwan would not draw a smooth, peaceful orbit in this lifetime either.

Is this a prophetic dream warning me of an impending catastrophe? Or is it a divine revelation from a god telling me to completely hack away and butcher this twisted affection once and for all?

Even as he hurriedly prepared for school, his mind boiled violently with ominous hypotheses. Perhaps due to the chaotic, unsettling dream, a looming premonition kept relentlessly driving him into a dark, suffocating corner.

In this lifetime, no matter what it takes, I want to save him.

That desperate, burning prayer was the only anchor barely sustaining his worn, exhausted soul.

***

The following day.

In the afternoon, as dazzling sunlight shattered through the lecture hall windows, Haneul Jang stared intently at his vibrating phone screen with trembling hands, trying his best to hold back a relentless barrage of sneezes.

"Achoo—!"

An unpleasant sensation, as if fragments of the dream were crawling up from his tiptoes straight through his spine, had completely drained every ounce of energy from his body. His mind was entirely occupied by that bizarre, highly provocative dream from yesterday, completely paralyzing his logic.

A short, sharp vibration buzzed in his palm.

The exact moment the second hand aligned perfectly with 4:45 PM, the news of his acceptance flashed clearly across the cold liquid crystal screen.

[S National University Baseball Club 'Magu-Magu' Tryout Result: Accepted. Assemble at the College of Education Field by 18:00 today.]

It was a sequence that flawlessly mirrored the trajectory of his past lives. With a quiet, heavy resignation that what was bound to happen had finally arrived, he flipped his phone shut.

The moment the three syllables of Yuhwan’s name flashed through his mind, his temples twitched with a faint spasm. Just imagining his raw, savage protests—how the man would snarl like a cornered beast because his pride had been brutally scraped by Haneul's pitch calls—made his breath grow tight.

Perhaps because of the lingering weight of the dream, his steps toward the field today felt exceptionally heavy, making his restless body fidget constantly in his seat.

Knowing the past, and watching the current reality slowly submerge into that terrifying sense of déjà vu...

Others might look at it with envy, calling it a divine blessing, but to Haneul Jang, it was nothing short of a cruel, agonizing punishment. Above all, the most terrifying truth was that he knew the exact, definitive date on which he would die a premature death and bring this life to an end.

Currently, Haneul Jang was a first-year student in the Department of Business Administration, and Yuhwan was a first-year student in the Department of Physical Education. Having both gone through a gap year to reapply, they shared the common denominator of being twenty years old, born in the same year.

The professor’s monotonous lecture had long since degraded into mere background noise drifting past Haneul’s ears.

His sole purpose for stepping foot into this prestigious S National University was for a destined, inevitable collision with Yuhwan. Any life beyond that—brilliant, shining words like graduation or a future—simply did not exist on his schedule.

Because he was destined to die this year. Specifically, on December 24th, on the exact same day, at the exact same hour as Yuhwan.

Why did God grant me such a thoroughly twisted, ill-natured fate?

A tragic destiny where, throughout his past three lives, he could do nothing but harbor a one-sided love for Yuhwan, burning his heart out from a distance before withering away at a tender, blooming age. Resenting that god had already become a routine in this fourth lifetime. By now, his soul was so heavily eroded that it was bound to grow weary.

Across the four lifetimes he had crossed, a sanctuary called 'parents' had never once existed for him. His very first memory of his first life was the piercing, freezing abuse inside an orphanage, and ever since, he had always been thrown into the world as a thoroughly isolated, solitary entity.

In fact, being entirely alone felt safer. Thanks to the wealth he had cleverly amassed by using the memories of his past lives as a roadmap, he suffered no financial poverty. The repeatedly accumulated knowledge easily guided him to the ivory tower of S National University.

Yuhwan, too, was a man born as a fractured, twisted illegitimate child of a massive chaebol family, a guy who had built his own unyielding, fiercely lonely fortress amidst the cold neglect of a family in all four lifetimes.

During his high school days, his brilliant life as a legendary baseball prodigy had been heavily scarred by an unexpected shoulder injury, followed by a brutal, agonizing year of harsh rehabilitation.

Ultimately, the concentration of their suffocating loneliness was remarkably identical. That was exactly why they shared a baseline that allowed them to recognize one another in their past lives.

Yet, because this current lifetime had become so explicitly, violently entangled right from the very beginning, the path ahead felt utterly blinding and dark.