Branded Into a Name

He has spent his whole life running — from the voices pouring in from every direction, from the hands reaching out of the dark, from a world that has never once felt safe. Gong Ian sees things others cannot. He always has, from the very first day. And it has never stopped. On the day he moved into his grandmother's old house seeking only silence, he found something hidden deep inside a wardrobe. A cold, heavy, dark red cylinder. And a name that left his lips before he could stop it. Cheonghyeon. From that moment on, everything changed. Shin Cheonghyeon had been waiting. For centuries, sealed inside that cylinder by his own choice. Bound by the name given to him by the one person he had ever chosen to protect — waiting for the day that name would be spoken again. The face was no longer the one he remembered. The voice had changed too. But the pulse beneath his fingertips, and the scent of that soul, remained exactly as they had always been. "I hope you'll find it to your liking this time." Gong Ian remembers nothing. Not the name he carried in another life, not the life itself, not the price someone else paid on his behalf. All he knows is this: that the ghost now sharing his crumbling old house is beautiful in a way that unsettles him. That the cold in the places where Cheonghyeon stands feels unlike any cold he has known before. And that his body has begun to remember something his mind has not yet caught up to. But something else is moving in the dark. An enemy that has spent just as many centuries in pursuit has already begun to reach for what Gong Ian carries within him. What remains between the two of them: an indelible mark. A name stronger than any single lifetime. And a love that chose, every time, to protect rather than to possess — — believing that even disappearing without a word was still a way of keeping him safe. That obsession and devotion could come from the same place — he never says it out loud.