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Solo Leveling Week 2024, Day 2: Winter / Awakening / Monarchs
It was cold the day their lives changed forever. Still winter, the last day of February. Juhee stands under the cherry blossoms now, looking at a man much taller than she remembers, slim but no longer scrawny, with a sharper jawline and even sharper eyes.
The cherry blossoms flutter and sway lazily around them. It’s the mark of a new season, a rebirth, a new beginning.
Yet the coldness from that day lingers in her bones. In her mind, it’s still winter. Spring feels so far away as she recalls the stickiness of Jinwoo’s blood on her hands, flames going out one by one—
“You’ve changed, Jinwoo,” she begins, with a hint of melancholy.
Perhaps she has no right to say such a thing. Perhaps she never really knew him at all.
“We’ve… been through a lot,” says Jinwoo.
“Yes, we have.” She leans back slowly, tenderly, against the bench to which Jinwoo had previously guided her; bones aching from mana exhaustion. She’d just barely managed to pull a bloody Kim Sangshik from the clutches of death, and then gave two buffs to her other teammates as they fought for their lives. Her body pays the price now, but it doesn’t feel nearly enough. “Although… should I even say that? Maybe… I don’t know you as I thought I did.”
Before that fateful day in the double dungeon, it had been easier to accept that Jinwoo wasn’t ready to share with her the details of his private life. The nature of their relationship had been different—and he still trusted her to heal him time and time again, to place his life in her hands. She didn’t know what kind of life he had outside of hunting, but that was okay. Back then, what they had was enough. Sometimes it hurt, but she knew why he hid the truth, especially when people whispered about Jinwoo’s reputation. Especially when so many people never bothered to learn him by name but by his ‘title.’
Weakest hunter, she thinks in dismay. They call him ‘weakest’ but he’s survived more raids than any E-rank I’ve ever known.
“I could’ve gone on higher-ranking raids,” she continues, banishing the previous thought from her mind. “C-rank at the minimum. But I stuck with lower-ranking ones… when I met you, and kept seeing you, I thought that was the reason why I kept picking the weaker dungeons. Someone had to heal the E-rank guy who threw himself headfirst into gate after gate.
“But you’ve got incredible survival skills. You solve so many puzzles faster than anyone I’ve met. You proved it in that… in that double dungeon, didn’t you? You didn’t need me.”
“That’s not true,” Jinwoo cuts in, shaking his head in disbelief. Bless his heart. “You… you healed me, countless times. You’ve saved my life countless times.”
She turns her head to meet his eyes, filled with a sense of sadness that makes her chest physically ache. “Not when it truly mattered. I’m the reason you were left behind on the altar. Yet…” She pauses, a stray tear falling as she gazes skyward, studies the stars. “You survived that, too. Of course you did. You’ve got the eyes of someone who could survive a place like that. I don’t have those kind of eyes, Jinwoo. I only survived because of you and Mister Song.”
A few more tears cascade down her cheeks as she finally finds the courage to see why he’s so silent, and her heart cracks a little more when she sees the helpless, stricken expression on his face. His hand hovers, outstretched, as if to touch her, but doesn’t quite reach.
Ah. That’s how it’s always been. Maybe… maybe this is how it will always be. Maybe they weren’t meant to stray outside the line of professionalism. Maybe she’s the only one who ever wanted more.
“I’m… going to retire,” she confesses eventually, finally, and draws in a deep breath, smiling despite her tears. “I’ll move back to Busan and be with my family.”
She offers the essence stone he’d given her on that cold winter day, waiting for him to take it. It feels fundamentally wrong, like things will end here should he accept it, but she has to give him this choice. She has to learn to let some things go.
He looks down at the essence stone and then back up at her teary eyes. “Will… will I see you again?”
“I don’t know,” Juhee admits, and her smile turns brittle. “I don’t even know your phone number, Jinwoo.”
I don’t know anything about you, she doesn’t say, because it’s a lie. She knows he’s clever, and reckless, and determined. She knows he’s persistent. She knows his will to live is stronger than anyone she’s ever met.
She knows he stared death in the face, and she knows he survived, because he’s in front of her now, reawakened and no longer in need of her abilities as a Healer.
“You could.”
For a moment, Juhee’s too surprised to speak. It’s the first time he’s offered to share something from his personal life, and despite everything, she’s always felt it would be selfish to pry for more. After several heartbeats—several long moments, with the essence stone held out for him to take—she allows herself to have hope. She withdraws her hand, withdraws the essence stone, and wipes her eyes.
“Yeah,” she murmurs, voice cracking slightly despite herself. “Y…yes, I’d… I’d like that.”
“I have a little sister,” Jinwoo tells her hastily. “She’s fifteen. Our parents are…” He pauses, and his throat bobs. “...it’s complicated. I’ve been hunting all these years to… to support her. And myself.”
Her eyes blow wide. “Oh.”
She doesn’t ask for more of an explanation. Maybe because she already knew. Instead, she falls silent, absorbing this new information.
A little sister. Didn’t Jinwoo only recently turn twenty-two? It’d been sometime in February, a few weeks before the double dungeon incident. Seven years older than her… and he’s been a hunter longer than Juhee. Four years, at least; versus Juhee’s year and a half.
“That must be really hard,” she says finally, mentally shaking herself. “Are you sure you don’t…?”
She lifts the essence stone again, but Jinwoo shakes his head. “No. Keep it. Things… things are okay now. Better now.”
“...I suppose you have grown quite powerful, huh?”
Her mind flashes back to the way Jinwoo fought against Kang Taeshik. He hadn’t struggled with the goblins, either; and he’d had a weapon, too. A dagger.
Jinwoo stuffs his hands in his pockets. “It’s… not enough. Not yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are people stronger than Kang Taeshik. Monsters stronger than him.”
“What he said, back in the dungeon,” Juhee says, meeting his gaze again. “You’ve reawakened. That’s true, right?”
There’s really no point in asking; Juhee already knows the answer. Maybe not the full one, but she knows part of it.
“If I told you I leveled up with each fight… how much stronger do you think I could get?”
He’d said the words to Kang Taeshik. The question had been meant for him. Juhee heard it anyway.
“Not… the way others have in the past,” Jinwoo confesses finally. Quietly. “I still measured as an E-rank when I woke up in the hospital after the double dungeon.”
“But you’re not an E-rank now.”
It’s a statement. Not a question. Jinwoo nods nonetheless. “No. I’m not.” And then, quieter: “I think retiring would be good for you. But if you ever get called into an emergency raid…” He smiles: a tiny, subtle quirk of the lips. “...nothing bad will happen to you.”
Something in the way he says it—a promise, a threat, but not directed toward her—feels different from something Jinwoo would usually say, the Jinwoo she used to know. No, this feels… possessive, but not in a toxic, scary kind of way. More like the way a crow would protect one of its flock.
Juhee isn’t scared. She understands, in her own way. She’s grown protective of him, too, over the years; has mother-henned him, in every single raid.
So she returns the gesture with a smile of her own, this one more genuine than the last. “If you’re ever in Busan, I’ll treat you to Sashimi.”
Hope, her heart whispers, with each beat. The promise of his protection pleases her more than she’d like to admit out loud. There’s hope after all.
“...it’s really not too much to ask for your number, Jinwoo?” Juhee adds suddenly. Shyly. “It’d… be nice to keep in touch, this time.”
“Not too much at all,” Jinwoo says, right before a notepad and pen appear from thin air.
Juhee blinks, stunned. A startled laugh bubbles up in her throat. “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”
“I… I guess so,” Jinwoo says, with a sheepish laugh of his own.
It’s not a real laugh, she can tell. She wonders how heavy the blood feels on his hands, after what he was forced to do so they could leave the dungeon alive. It stains his shirt and jacket. Mister Kim’s apology sits uncomfortable and cumbersome on her own shoulders—and it hadn’t even been directed at her. She doubts Jinwoo’s forgiven him. She doubts Mister Kim even forgives himself.
And keeping all these secrets… the secret of his reawakening, the secret of growing stronger, the secrets surrounding his family. She wonders how suffocating it must feel. Or does he find comfort in privacy? She can’t tell for certain.
But she can tell from that false laugh, from that tiny smile, that the fateful raid in the Cartenon Temple affects him, just as it affects her. The wounds from such a traumatic experience are very much still fresh. Raw.
They’re both bleeding, both hurting. But at least they can bleed and hurt together. If he didn’t have at least a little faith in her, if he didn’t trust her at least a little bit, he would’ve taken the essence stone back, right?
The thought of losing him shakes her all the way down to her bone marrow. Juhee thinks of this mysterious sister of his and feels even more grateful for his survival than before. She’s scared to lose him, but how would his younger sister have felt, to—
“My number,” Jinwoo says, handing her a slip of paper. “And… my address. If you need help packing for your move, or just, um. Help with anything, in general? Let me know?”
Juhee’s smile brightens just a little. “Will do.”
“And—” A brief pause. A bottle appears in his hand, and Juhee blinks again because where did the notepad and pen go? “...a parting gift?”
The bottle contains a strange blue liquid she doesn’t recognize.
“It’ll replenish your mana,” Jinwoo explains when she looks at him in confusion. “Enough that you won’t have to go home sore. If… if you want it?”
Whatever this is, he’s trusting her with it. The way he trusted her with the knowledge of his reawakening, with the knowledge of being the sole provider for himself and his younger sister. She responds by accepting the bottle and drinking it without hesitation.
The faint glow that surrounds her is warm. Immediately, the soreness and fatigue in her limbs begin to ebb.
“Wow,” she blurts, in pure shock. “Wow, thank you, Jinwoo, this is—?!”
She downs the rest of the bottle without finishing her sentence. Jinwoo says, “It’s… the very least I can do.”
She doesn’t like that guilty undertone.
“You don’t owe me anything,” Juhee says, her features softening. “You know that, don’t you? Because… because I don’t… I didn’t heal you all those times for… for something in return. You—you know that, right?” And then, when Jinwoo remains quiet: “I did it because… because we’re friends, Jinwoo.”
“...friends,” Jinwoo echoes, and the way he says it—almost like he’s testing it out—makes her chest ache. Has anyone ever told him such a thing? “Yeah. We… we’re friends.”
She very nearly crushes him in a hug right then and there. It’s so painful to hear it, to watch, to realize that she’s probably the first friend Jinwoo’s ever had.
And with that realization comes anger. Anger at herself for not telling him sooner, for leaving him behind on that altar even if she had no choice. Anger at all the hunters who gossipped about him before, who bullied him, who laughed at his rank and his powerlessness. It’s truly a cruel world, but Jinwoo has strength, more than just in a physical sense. He’s emotionally strong, stronger than she’ll ever hope to be, he keeps going and going and going and—
“I’ll text you as soon as I get home,” she vows with a nod, resting a hand over his. “So that you have my number, too. And… and just. If you need anything, you’ll let me know, too?”
You’re not alone, she wants to say. She aches for him to know that, to feel the truth of it. Not anymore.
It takes her a few moments to notice that the bottle—a mana-replenishing elixir of some sort—in the same hand she’d placed upon Jinwoo’s has vanished. She’s more focused on how cold Jinwoo’s skin is.
“Alright,” Jinwoo says, and slowly, oh so slowly, turns his palm so it’s facing up.
She threads their fingers together, hoping to feed some warmth into his hand, and smiles again. “The train’s not far from here. Walk me there?”
“Of course.”
He stands first, tugging her along. Her legs don’t ache as they did before, and the dull throb in her head is gone. She’d been willing to pay the price of using more mana than anticipated—always has, when it came to raiding with Jinwoo—but the relief is nice.
Maybe it's weird. There's blood on his shirt, on his jacket, and it's not his blood. There's blood on her sleeves, and it's not her blood. But she gave up normalcy the day she decided to be a hunter, gave it up the day she met Jinwoo; so they walk together under the cherry blossoms anyway, hand in hand.
“Mister Song, a swordsman,” Juhee starts. “Can you believe it?”
“Sure surprised me.”
“To think he trains an S-rank…”
The conversation continues in that direction, and yes, the icy winter chill from that day lingers. It probably always will—it’s an ugly scar that will always remain, a bitter coldness neither of them will truly forget. But maybe recovery isn’t impossible. Maybe Spring isn’t as far away as she thought. Maybe she can accept that it's already here.
And with it, maybe they’ll begin to thaw.