Chapter 2

2

[2] Babe, We’ll Never Have to Part Again.

My beloved girlfriend, Sia, died a year ago.

And yet…

Some suspicious woman had suddenly emerged from a gate instead of a monster, then declared out of nowhere that she was my dead girlfriend.

How many people in the world could take her at her word in a situation like this?

Well, I certainly couldn’t.

If anything, the thought that someone was toying with me on the anniversary of Sia’s death made my blood boil.

This was an insult to both Sia’s memory and me.

I backed away from the woman as she tried to embrace me, insisting she was Sia.

I wanted to swear at her for impersonating my dead girlfriend and tell her to get the hell out of my sight.

But since she had emerged from a gate, I decided it would be best not to provoke her.

For now, I needed to try talking to her calmly.

“Who exactly are you? How do you know me—and the woman I love?”

I asked her while keeping my emotions in check as best I could.

But upon hearing my cold, detached question… the woman began to sniffle.

‘She’s crying?’

That was the last thing I had expected.

It was a relief that she hadn’t shown any hostility toward me yet, but this situation was taking a strange turn.

An unidentified being had emerged from a gate.

And I was the only person here capable of fighting.

‘Stay calm. I have to stay calm.’

First, I needed to find out why she knew my name and Sia’s, and why she was pretending to be my dead girlfriend.

As I calmly worked out what to say next—

“Well, I look so different now. Of course you’d react like that. Still, I was worried you might have forgotten me, so this is a relief. I’m sorry. I was an idiot for doubting you. You even bought tteokbokki and gimbap because you were thinking of me. Right, there’s no way you could’ve forgotten me. I knew you wouldn’t leave me for another woman. That’s right. This was my fault. I was an idiot for doubting someone like you.”

After muttering to herself, she took a moment to steady her breathing and looked around.

Then she raised her hand high toward the sky and began murmuring in an unfamiliar language.

[Silence.]

The instant she finished, an enormous amount of mana enveloped the surrounding area.

“There’s no one nearby, but just in case.”

‘Magic?’

And she had activated it with a simple incantation, without calculating any formulas?

At that moment, I instinctively understood.

No matter how desperately I fought, this woman was a monster who could subdue me without lifting a finger.

My legs trembled so badly I thought they would give way, and my heart pounded as though it might burst at any second.

“Babe, what’s wrong? Are you feeling sick? You’re not sick, are you? Are you? Talk to me!”

“Wh-who are you…?”

The overwhelming gap in our strength left me struggling for breath.

Yet she seemed deeply flustered by the sight of me hyperventilating.

“What’s wrong, babe? Or… are you scared of me? Calm down. Take a deep breath in, then let it out. I’m your girlfriend. Why would I hurt you? Just relax. No, wait. I’ll help you feel better.”

She murmured something again and cast a spell on me.

I couldn’t make out exactly what she said, but once again, she cast the spell instantly, without calculating any formulas.

“How do you feel? A little better now?”

“…Yes. I feel better.”

“Whew. Thank goodness.”

Only seconds ago, my heart had been pounding hard enough to burst, yet now it had miraculously returned to normal.

But that only frightened me more.

A spell that calmed the mind? I had never even heard of such a thing.

“Okay, I understand that you don’t believe I’m Sia, and I admit you have every reason to feel that way. Fine. Then I just have to prove I’m your girlfriend, right?”

After steadying her breathing, she began speaking calmly.

How Sia and I first met. What she said when she confessed her feelings. Where we shared our first kiss. The first birthday present she gave me. The songs I always sang whenever we went to karaoke together…

They were all things only Sia herself could have known.

Then… was this woman really Sia?

It was impossible, but with a flicker of hope, I decided to ask one more question.

“Then what’s my favorite drink?”

“I’m not sure whether it counts as that kind of drink, but you love coffee milk. That’s why I was always asking if you were addicted to it.”

That answer convinced me.

I didn’t know why she had appeared through a gate, or why she looked nothing like the Sia I remembered.

But the woman standing before me was unmistakably my beloved girlfriend.

“And then you said, ‘Sure, I’m addicted to coffee milk, but I’m even more addicted to you, Sia.’ So I told you never to say anything that cheesy again. When was that? I was twenty-one, so—”

“Sia.”

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

“Sia. Sia. Sia.”

This isn’t a dream, is it? I missed you so much. I love you.

So many things came to mind, but I couldn’t get any of them out. I just kept repeating her name.

Only then did she seem reassured. She smiled brightly and called my name in return.

“Minjun.”

“Yeah, Sia.”

Instead of asking how the other had been, we simply held each other in silence for a long while.

Her face, her voice, even her height were different, but once I held her, I knew it was her.

Only Sia loved being in my arms this much.

After we had spent a long time holding each other, I wiped away my tears and asked,

“Sia, what on earth happened to you?”

Even as the impossibly powerful flames inside the gate engulfed her and burned her entire body, Jeong Sia never gave up hope of survival.

I won’t die. I absolutely won’t die. For my own sake, and for the sake of my beloved Minjun, I’ll survive somehow. Right to the end.

Sadly, her wish was only half fulfilled.

She lived again.

But in a dimension entirely different from Earth.

As a dragon, the mightiest creature in the world.

At first, she couldn’t believe what had happened to her. But as she gradually adjusted to being a dragon, she found herself enjoying her new life.

That happiness, however, didn’t last long.

‘Something’s missing.’

After being reincarnated as a dragon, she could have anything she wanted and do anything she pleased.

Her kind new parents showered her with love, too.

And yet, she couldn’t be content.

‘I can’t see Minjun.’

She had everything, but the boyfriend she loved wasn’t beside her.

Minjun, whom she loved so deeply that she considered him the other half of her soul.

Sia missed that other half with an aching intensity.

Then one day, while suffering from the emptiness her longing for him left behind, she finally decided to go to him herself.

There was only one way: develop and cast an interdimensional travel spell that transcended time and space.

From that moment on, she began making plans to achieve it.

Until she became an adult dragon, she trained relentlessly, gaining far greater power than other hatchlings her age.

Whenever she had a spare moment, she also read magic books from her father’s study, building a solid foundation of magical knowledge.

Once she reached adulthood, she threw herself into researching interdimensional travel magic with an almost maddening intensity.

Even other dragons tried to tempt her away, saying, “Interdimensional travel magic is theoretically impossible. Come out and have some fun with us instead.” But she never wavered, devoting herself entirely to developing the spell.

Creating a new form of magic all alone, with no guarantee of success, was anything but easy.

At first, she had told herself she didn’t care if it took thousands of years, as long as she could see Minjun again.

But the more time passed, the more she felt she was losing her mind. Thoughts of abandoning everything kept circling through her head.

Whenever that happened, she carved Minjun’s face into a stone and renewed her resolve.

‘Get a grip, you stupid bitch. You’re going to give up here? When Minjun is waiting for you? You pathetic, weak-willed bitch.’

He must miss me just as much as I miss him.

There’s nothing he can do right now, so at least I have to keep trying to reach him.

Minjun. Minjun. Minjun. Minjun.

‘Just wait. I promise I’ll come to you.’

A hundred years passed. Then two hundred…

Then a thousand.

And a little over two thousand years later…

Her efforts finally bore fruit.

Existing interdimensional travel magic offered no way to specify the destination’s dimensional or temporal coordinates, and using it meant gambling with one’s life.

Her groundbreaking spell, however, could take her to the dimension and time of her choosing.

There was still the possibility of a slight error when setting the temporal coordinates.

And because it consumed an enormous amount of mana, the potential side effects remained unknown. Even so, she was confident she could bear them all.

Seeing Minjun again was more than worth those risks.

“The day has finally come.”

The moment she finished checking her calculations, she cast the interdimensional travel spell without hesitation.

“Just wait a little longer, babe.”

“I originally meant to arrive the day after I died, but after I cast the spell, I remembered making a small mistake in the final calculation.”

Sia admitted she had belatedly realized she had set the time offset 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, taken on its own, the whole thing sounded impossible.

Various monsters had been discovered in the decades since gates first appeared, but a dragon had never been sighted.

Above all, I had thought reincarnation was something that existed only in novels.

But Sia had miraculously returned to me alive. After that, was anything really too unbelievable?

Dragon or otherwise, all that mattered was that she had come back.

“Sia, you must’ve been through so much. Two thousand years is easy to say, but that’s such an incredibly long—”

Before I could finish, she threw her arms around me.

Just as I had done to her earlier.

“Babe.”

Then, without warning, she pressed her cherry-red lips against mine in a deep kiss.

“I’m so late, aren’t I? I’m sorry. I wanted to come sooner, but no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t.”

“Sia.”

“We’ll never have to part again. Never.”

Her lips were so sweet they sent shivers through me.

She must have missed me terribly, because she showed no intention of pulling away.

Only when I started coughing and gasping for breath did she finally release me.

“Are you okay…?”

“Y-yeah. You just surprised me.”

At the time, I had absolutely no idea.

No idea what my reunion with Sia would mean for my life.