Chapter 2 - We'll Never Have to Be Apart Again

My beloved girlfriend Sia died a year ago.

And yet.

Out of a gate came a suspicious woman instead of a monster, suddenly claiming to be my dead girlfriend. How many people in the world would take her at her word? I certainly wouldn't. If anything, the thought that I was being deceived on the anniversary of Sia's death made my blood boil. It was an insult to Sia's memory, and to me.

I stepped away from the woman as she tried to wrap her arms around me, still claiming to be Sia. I wanted to curse her out for impersonating my dead girlfriend and tell her to get out of my sight. But she had come out of a gate, and I decided it would be best not to provoke her recklessly. First, I needed to try talking to her calmly.

"Who exactly are you? How do you know me, and how do you know the woman I love?" I asked, suppressing my feelings as best I could.

But at my flat words, the woman... began sniffling the moment she heard my question.

'She's crying?'

I hadn't expected that at all. At least she hadn't shown any hostility toward me, but the situation was taking a strange turn. An unidentified being from a gate. And no one but me here who could fight.

'Stay calm. I have to stay calm.'

First I needed to find out how she knew my name and Sia's, and why she was pretending to be her. I was calmly gathering my next words when she spoke.

"Well, I do look very different now. Of course you'd think that. I was worried you might have forgotten me, though, so I'm glad. I'm sorry. I was stupid to doubt you. You even brought tteokbokki and gimbap because you were thinking of me. Right, there's no way you could have forgotten me. And there's no way you started seeing another woman while I was gone. You're right. I was wrong. I was stupid to doubt someone like you."

After muttering all that to herself, she paused to catch her breath and looked around. Then she raised a hand high toward the sky and began murmuring in a language I couldn't understand.

[Silence.]

No sooner had she finished murmuring than an immense amount of mana began to envelop the area.

"There aren't any people nearby, but just in case."

'Magic?'

She'd cast a spell by chanting alone, without calculating a formula? In that instant, I knew: no matter how desperately I charged at her, this woman was a monster powerful enough to subdue me without lifting a finger. My legs trembled so badly I felt I might collapse, and my heart pounded as though it might burst.

"What's wrong all of a sudden? Are you feeling sick? You're not sick, are you? Come on, Minjun, snap out of it!"

"W-who are you...?"

The overwhelming difference in our power left me short of breath. She, on the other hand, seemed deeply flustered by the sight of me struggling to breathe.

"Are you feeling unwell? Or... are you scared of me? Minjun, calm down. Breathe in deep, then breathe out. I'm your girlfriend. Why would I hurt you? Calm down. No, wait. I'll help you relax."

She murmured something again and cast a spell on me. I couldn't make out the words, but once more she cast it immediately, without calculating a formula.

"How is it? Feeling a little better now?"

"... I am."

"Phew. Thank goodness."

Only seconds earlier, my heart had felt ready to burst. Now my pulse was back to normal, as if by magic. But that only frightened me more. A spell that calmed the mind? I'd never even heard of one.

"All right, I understand you don't believe I'm Sia, and I admit you have every reason not to. Fine. I just have to prove I'm your girlfriend, right?"

After steadying her breathing, she began to speak calmly. She told me about the first time we met, what Sia had said when she confessed her feelings, where we first kissed, the first birthday present she'd given me, the songs I always sang whenever we went to karaoke together... All things no one but Sia herself could know.

Could this woman really be Sia...? It was impossible to believe, but I decided to ask one more question, just in case.

"Then what's my favorite drink?"

"It's a bit of a stretch to call it a drink, but you love coffee milk. I used to ask you all the time if you were addicted to it."

That answer convinced me. I didn't know why she'd appeared from a gate, or why she looked nothing like the Sia I remembered. But the woman before me was undoubtedly Sia, my beloved girlfriend.

"And then you said you were addicted to coffee milk, sure, but you were even more addicted to me, Sia... I told you not to say things like that because they gave me goose bumps. When was that? I was twenty-one, so—"

"Sia."

Before she could finish, I pulled her into a tight embrace.

"Sia. Sia. Sia."

I wanted to ask if this was a dream, tell her how much I'd missed her, tell her I loved her. But I couldn't get another word out. I just kept saying her name. Perhaps hearing me say it finally reassured her, because she smiled brightly and said mine.

"Minjun."

"Yes, Sia."

Instead of asking how we'd been all this time, we held each other in silence for a long while. Her face, her voice, even her height were different, but the moment I held her, I knew she was Sia. No one else loved being in my arms quite like she did.

After we'd held each other for what felt like ages, I wiped away my tears and asked, "Sia, what happened to you all this time?"

* * *

Even as irresistible flames engulfed her inside the gate and burned her body, Jeong Sia never lost hope of surviving.

'I won't die. I absolutely won't die. For my sake, and for Minjun's, I'll survive somehow, right to the end.'

Sadly, only half of that vow came true. She lived again—but in a dimension entirely different from Earth, as a dragon, the most powerful creature in the world.

At first, she couldn't believe what had happened to her. Little by little, though, she adjusted to life as a dragon and came to enjoy her new dragon life. But that happiness didn't last long.

'Something's missing.'

Since her reincarnation, she could have anything she wanted and do anything she wished. Her loving new parents showered her with affection, too. Still, she couldn't be satisfied.

'I can't see Minjun.'

She had everything except the boyfriend she loved beside her. She had loved Minjun so much she'd thought of him as the other half of her soul, and she missed that other half terribly.

One day, as she suffered from the emptiness her longing for Minjun had left, she finally decided to go see him herself. There was only one way: develop and use a formula for dimensional travel magic that could transcend space and time. From then on, she began planning how to make it happen.

Before she became an adult dragon, she trained relentlessly, gaining far more power than hatchlings her age. Whenever she had a chance, she took magic books from her father's study and read them, building a foundation of magical knowledge. Once she was grown, she devoted herself obsessively to researching dimensional travel magic.

Even other dragons tried to tempt her away, saying, "Theoretically, dimensional travel magic can't exist in this world. Come have some fun with us instead." She resisted them and focused solely on developing the spell. Creating new magic alone, with no promise of success, was anything but easy.

At first, she'd begun thinking it wouldn't matter if it took thousands of years, as long as she could see Minjun. But as time passed, she began to feel as though she were going mad, and thoughts of giving up everything kept circling in her mind. Whenever that happened, she carved Minjun's face into a stone and steeled herself.

'Get a grip, you stupid bitch. Are you going to give up here? Minjun's waiting for you. You're so damn weak.'

Surely he missed me as much as I missed him. There was nothing he could do right now, so I had to do everything I could to reach him. Minjun, Minjun, Minjun, Minjun.

'Wait for me. I'll come see you, I promise.'

A hundred years passed, then two hundred...

A thousand years passed.

And a little over two thousand years later, her efforts finally bore fruit.

Existing dimensional travel magic couldn't set the coordinates for the destination dimension or time, and using it meant staking one's life. Her groundbreaking new spell, by contrast, could take her to the time and dimension of her choosing. There was still room for a slight error in setting the time coordinate, and because the spell consumed an enormous amount of mana, she didn't know what side effects casting it might have. But she was confident she could bear them all. Seeing Minjun again was worth those risks.

"The day has finally come."

As soon as she finished checking her calculations, she cast the dimensional travel spell without hesitation.

"Just wait a little longer, Minjun."

* * *

"I meant to travel to the day right after I died, but once I'd cast the spell, I remembered I'd made a little mistake in the final calculation."

Sia confessed that she'd realized too late she had set the time value to one year instead of one day.

"As soon as I noticed, I tried to correct the formula, but the spell had already activated. I couldn't change it. If I hadn't made that mistake, you could've seen me a little sooner."

And with that, Sia's long story came to an end. Honestly, the story alone sounded unbelievable. All sorts of monsters had been discovered since gates first appeared decades ago, but no one had ever observed a dragon in one. More than anything, I'd thought reincarnation existed only in novels.

But Sia had miraculously come back to me. Why shouldn't I believe it? Whether she was a dragon or anything else, all that mattered was that she'd returned.

"Sia, you must have been through so much. Two thousand years... I can't imagine how long—"

Before I could finish, Sia pulled me into her arms, just as I'd done to her a moment ago.

"Minjun."

Then she caught me by surprise, pressing her cherry-red lips firmly against mine.

"I took so long to come back. I'm sorry. I wanted to come sooner, but I couldn't, no matter how much I wanted to."

"Sia."

"We'll never have to be apart again. Never."

Sia's lips were so sweet they sent a shiver through me. She must have missed me terribly, because she showed no sign of pulling away. Only when I started gasping for breath did she finally let me go.

"Are you okay...?"

"Y-yeah. You just startled me."

Back then, I had no idea what my reunion with Sia would mean for me.