Chapter 3: The Forgotten War
Seung-Jin was no stranger to history's weight. As a student, he had studied the Korean War with the same clinical detachment he approached all things—facts, dates, events. But now, in the midst of it, standing on the precipice of a war-torn world, he was no longer an observer. He was a participant.
The battlefield was chaos incarnate. The acrid scent of smoke burned his lungs, thick and cloying. He stumbled forward on uneven ground, where the earth was cracked and soaked with the blood of the fallen. The air was a cacophony of agony—the relentless percussion of gunfire, the hollow booms of distant artillery, and the desperate cries of men caught in the jaws of war.
He had read about this. He had studied it. But no words could encapsulate the visceral horror—the way death clung to the very air, thick and inescapable.
And then, amid the carnage, he saw him.
His father.
Seung-Jin's chest constricted, his breath stuttering. There he was—not the distant, disciplined academic Seung-Jin had known, but a hardened soldier, caked in dirt and blood, his uniform torn yet still standing unbowed. His eyes, always filled with that sharp intensity Seung-Jin had admired, now held something else. Something fractured. Something dangerous.
His father was not just a scholar of history here. He was a soldier of war. A man stripped of all pretense, reduced to survival. And in this world, in this moment, he did not know his son.
Seung-Jin took a step forward, heart pounding. He wanted to call out, to reach for him, but something primal, something wrong, clawed at his mind. This wasn't right. He shouldn't be here. His father shouldn't be here.
Then the gunfire erupted again—closer. Too close.
A bullet whizzed past his ear, and Seung-Jin barely had time to duck as the dirt at his feet exploded. His instincts took over. He scrambled behind a charred piece of debris, hands trembling. A soldier fell nearby, clutching his throat as blood gushed between his fingers. Seung-Jin's stomach churned. He had never seen death this close. Never felt its breath on the back of his neck.
A hand clamped onto his shoulder.
Seung-Jin jerked around, expecting an enemy, but instead, he found himself staring into a face eerily familiar—his own.
An older version of himself. Weathered. Cold. Unrecognizable.
"You don't belong here," the older Seung-Jin hissed, his grip like iron. "But you knew that already, didn't you?"
Seung-Jin swallowed hard. "Who—what are you?"
The older him scoffed. "You think you can change this? That you can rewrite history and make things right?" His voice was edged with something—resentment? Regret?
Seung-Jin shook his head, trying to suppress the nausea rising within him. "I don't understand—"
"No, you don't." The older Seung-Jin's gaze hardened. "And that's exactly why you're going to fail."
A scream tore through the battlefield. Seung-Jin whipped his head around, his heart seizing in his chest. His father—
A bullet struck him.
Seung-Jin's world splintered. He lunged forward, screaming, but the older Seung-Jin held him back with an impossible strength.
"Let me go!" Seung-Jin fought, thrashed, desperate to reach him, but his future self's grip was unyielding.
"You don't get it, do you?" The older Seung-Jin's voice was a whisper of anguish. "This moment… this war… it was always meant to happen. Your father was always meant to die here."
Seung-Jin's mind fractured under the weight of those words. "No—"
"You think you can outrun it? Undo it?" The older Seung-Jin's voice cracked. "I thought the same thing once."
The battlefield warped around them. The sounds of war stretched, distorted, like echoes lost in time. Seung-Jin's vision blurred, the edges of his world breaking apart.
Then, the cold pulse of the Gyeonggi-do Mirror gripped him.
His body lurched, the battlefield dissolving into nothingness. The last thing he saw was his father, fallen, lifeless. And the last thing he heard was his own voice—his future self—whispering:
"You can't save him."
And then
Darkness.
An abyss of silence swallowed him whole.