Chapter 40: The Fragmented Vector

“Anyone watching would think I’m about to devour you.”

“Ah…… n-no, that’s not it.”

“It better not be. Because I have absolutely no intention of doing such a thing to you.”

Yeo Jae-won let out a brief, self-deprecating scoff, as if amused by the absurdity of his own words.

It was infuriating. He was the one who had taken those aggressive, giant strides to close the distance, yet he pulled back just as rapidly. Yeo Jae-won likely had no earthly gauge of how effortlessly he could lift Anok up and shatter his composure, nor how desperately Anok was straining every fiber of his being to resist slipping under his absolute control.

The sheer weight of it bloomed into a sudden, bitter resentment.

“Your Highness…… I genuinely cannot comprehend your intentions.”

“……?”

“You openly declare your intense aversion to Omegas, yet you refused to discard me on our bridal night when my heat cycle violently manifested. Now you claim you materialized here purely out of curiosity. I simply cannot decipher the metric of your calculations.”

In truth, this had been the most torturous puzzle consuming him since the moment he woke up.

Why on earth is he keeping me by his side? The erratic nature of the Prince’s conduct was muddying the waters, offering just enough false data to let a microscopic, treacherous shred of hope take root.

Between handling Court Lady Cho’s conspiracy and meticulously managing the imperial return gifts—a variable he had completely overlooked in his past life that had ultimately triggered a wave of ruinous court gossip—Anok had deliberately compartmentalized this question. But Yeo Jae-won’s clinical, boundary-crossing behavior had finally ruptured the dam holding back his suppressed interior.

“A passing spark of interest…… is that truly the solitary variable driving you?”

Anok instantly wished he could reach out and physically clamp his own mouth shut. Yet, this dense mass of unresolved questions—which had been stagnating in the corner of his mind ever since he marched into the estate to demand an annulment—behaved exactly like a desperate prisoner who had discovered a hairline fracture in a stone cell. Even the smallest crack was enough for it to forcefully violently wedge its way into the open.

The faint vestige of a smile, self-mocking though it was, completely vanished from Yeo Jae-won’s face. His features locked back into that precise, ruthlessly unbothered expression that had been permanently branded into Anok’s trauma across an entire lifetime.

“It appears you harbor a truly profound detestation for me.”

“……?”

“Conveniently, there was something I had been meaning to ask you as well.”

“Regarding…… what matter, Your Highness?”

As Yeo Jae-won took a slow step forward, Anok’s body reflexively executed a panicked step backward.

The Prince’s gait wasn’t hurried. But that exact pacing—the slow, calculated, methodical manner in which his massive shadow crept forward to gradually consume the light around Anok—felt utterly suffocating.

Suddenly, the back of Anok’s thighs struck the hard edge of a low table. A vivid flash of deja vu seized his consciousness; a near-identical tactical layout was scorched into his mind, preserved through the haze of a high fever from his past life. This setup mirrored their disastrous bridal night with terrifying precision.

With both hands gripping the edges of the table at his sides, Anok instinctively pulled his shoulders in, forcing himself to look straight up into the towering frame of the man leaning over him before his eyes frantically darted away to break the connection.

“Those words you uttered…… begging me to finally release you. Was that your absolute unvarnished truth?”

Dry saliva caught in his throat like a jagged thorn, making it agonizingly difficult to swallow. The tension locking his neck muscles was so severe that he could actively feel his own pulse hammering against his skin.

To avoid betraying the hot tears threatening to blur his vision, Anok forcefully widened his eyes. His tightly strained eyelids trembled violently.

“You must deliver an answer, Anok.”

His cadence carried zero trace of a furious roar or an administrative threat. Paradoxically, it was a soft, terrifyingly gentle pressure. Defeated by the proximity, Anok slowly cast his eyelids downward.

All he needed to do was state the absolute truth—to articulate clearly that he desperately wanted the Prince to cut the ties and let him go. Yet, an inexplicable tightness seized his throat. It was a strategy he had rehearsed a thousand times over, a simple script to read aloud, but forcing his own vocal cords to officially validate the permanent severance felt like an entirely different caliber of execution.

The voice that had functioned so fluidly while crushing Court Lady Cho and demanding answers from the Prince suddenly rotted away into a choked, stagnant silence deep inside his throat.

“Anok.”

Hearing his name articulated by that specific baritone, Anok chose to completely surrender his failing vision to the darkness, shutting his eyes tightly. Fortunately, no humiliating moisture spilled past his lashes.

A firm, surprisingly non-aggressive touch carefully caught his jaw, slowly but deliberately tilting his face back toward the light. His trembling lips parted slightly as Anok forced his eyes open once more. Yeo Jae-won was hovering so close their noses almost brushed.

“Do you truly, honestly wish for me to let you go?”

“…….”

“Answer me.”

“……Yes.”

Though the Prince’s tone possessed a strange weight—almost as if he were silently daring him to say the exact opposite—Anok forced the heavy, definitive syllable out into the open.

Regardless of the turbulent, unmapped chaos remaining in his heart, his desire to permanently escape Yeo Jae-won’s orbit was an absolute, unvarnished reality. That specific metric was entirely true.

“If an official imperial divorce cannot be executed immediately, I desire to utilize whatever administrative pretext necessary to remove myself to a distant province. Whether you choose to coldly cast me away after a sufficient interlude, or formally execute the legal protocols to erase this arrangement from the imperial register as if it never occurred, I will register zero objection.”

“…….”

“Therefore, I beg of you, Your Highness…… simply throw me away.”

Once, in a lifetime lost to time, he had spent every waking breath praying that Yeo Jae-won would reach out and hold him. He had yearned for it with such a pathetic intensity that even when the Prince offered no anchor, Anok had willingly chained his own soul to the steps of this estate.

When I desperately craved a single glance, you remained a ruthlessly indifferent statue. Why, then, do you refuse to cut the threads now that I am actively begging to depart? Anok felt a wave of profound resentment, an emotion bordering on raw, unadulterated fury toward the man.

No human being is wired to actively petition to be discarded as worthless trash. Furthermore, no sane individual could look at the person who had once constituted the absolute parameters of their universe and calmly beg to be thrown away without their psyche fracturing in the process.

At this exact coordinate in time, Anok felt his newly reconstructed internal walls systematically collapse. He wanted to abandon the entire board, violently shove Yeo Jae-won away, and flee to a forgotten corner of the empire where no one could ever track his existence.

He wanted to completely blind himself to the impending historical timeline, even if it meant taking a blade to his own throat right this second to permanently conclude his existence. The sheer, unmapped terror of an unpredictable future was actively strangling his lungs.

The fleeting moment of optimistic luxury he had harbored—the belief that he could methodically recalibrate this timeline one small piece at a time—evaporated from his consciousness without leaving a trace. The moment that fragile shield dissolved, his chronic, deeply ingrained depression, paralyzing anxiety, and deep-seated coping mechanism of pure avoidance effortlessly surged back to reclaim their familiar territory, seizing absolute domain over his consciousness as if they had never left.

“Every time I look at you, a specific individual continuously flashes through my mind.”

“……?”

“It feels like someone I possessed an incredibly intimate, profound knowledge of—and yet, I cannot grasp their identity. Not their name, nor their exact countenance…… absolutely nothing. However, one single variable remains an absolute certainty to my core. I lost that person.”

Anok’s eyes shook violently as he scanned the Prince’s face, utterly paralyzed by the sudden, incomprehensible direction of the dialogue.

The reflection pinned inside the Prince’s pupils was undeniably his own face—the face of his twenty-year-old self. Yet, processing the weight of those words, a chilling sensation crept over him; it felt as though Yeo Jae-won was looking straight through his physical shell to trace the silhouette of someone else entirely.

Is he sensing the older soul occupying this twenty-year-old vessel? Or is he projecting a ghost that merely shares my features?

The exact millisecond that primal, instinctual terror flashed across his consciousness like a bolt of freezing lightning, Yeo Jae-won’s hand clamped onto his arm in an iron grip.

“Therefore, I possess an absolute inability to let you go.”

“…….”

“A man cannot allow himself to lose the exact same person twice.”

That unwavering cadence was not an opening for negotiation; it was a definitive vow, an absolute imperial command. It was a direct directive ordering Anok to completely abandon any foolish delusions of escape, making it clear the Prince had zero intention of granting his petition.

Who on earth is this person he keeps referencing? And what is the logical explanation for why his memory of them is fractured? He hasn’t broken through the laws of time to live a second life. Unless…… is it statistically possible that my regression dragged Yeo Jae-won into the vortex as well?

But that made zero sense. Anok’s own memories were perfectly intact and highly structured. The reality that Yeo Jae-won only possessed an incomplete, highly corrupted fragment of data regarding the past was a profound logical anomaly.

If Yeo Jae-won has truly traveled backward through time alongside me…… then I must accelerate my flight from this estate by any means necessary. The absolute second his memories fully integrate, he will view me with a brand of disgust and contempt far more lethal than anything I endured before.

Anok frantically shook his head to break the paralyzing train of thought.

“No. I have no data regarding the identity of the individual Your Highness is seeking…… but I can assure you with absolute certainty, I am not that person.”

I cannot be them. For the sake of my own survival, I must never be them.

The hypothesis that Yeo Jae-won had undergone a full regression felt like an absolute, illogical absurdity. It couldn’t be true. If the Prince had truly retained his past consciousness, there was zero baseline for him to harbor a profound sense of grief over losing Anok; therefore, the theory was fundamentally flawed.

Even if, by some twisted miracle, the Prince did harbor that specific sentiment, it would only be because a piece of property under his absolute jurisdiction had dared to commit suicide without his explicit administrative approval. He would view it as a theft of his ownership, making him hold onto Anok with an even more ruthless grip. Therefore, it had to be an illusion.

If Yeo Jae-won hadn’t regressed, then this data anomaly could only be explained by a highly vivid dream or a severe psychological trick of the mind.

The fingertips Anok had slammed against the edge of the table pressed down with such frantic force that the skin turned a stark, bloodless white. He could feel the Prince’s gaze lingering on his face—an intense, hyper-focused, and almost predatory analysis that systematically mapped every single feature.

The gaze eventually came to a dead halt, anchoring securely onto Anok’s lips. That stubborn, suffocatingly intense look remained pinned there, heavy and electric, as if waiting for a spark. Yeo Jae-won opened his mouth to articulate another thought, but catching himself, he offered a sharp shake of his head and aborted the sentence entirely.

In an instant, the hands locking Anok’s arms dropped away, falling limply to his sides. Yeo Jae-won pressed the four fingers of his left hand flat against his forehead, his thumb executing a slow, rhythmic circle over his throbbing temple.

“Never…… let me hear you utter the phrase ‘throw me away’ ever again.”

His voice had dried to a raspy, gravelly whisper—a sound so thoroughly devoid of warmth that it bordered on an overt threat. Turning on his heel, the Prince exited the inner chamber with a noticeably accelerated pace, a stark contrast to his slow entrance.

The moment the tension left the room, the strength keeping Anok’s arms locked against the table completely evaporated. His posture buckled, and his frame slid helplessly down the wood until he collapsed onto the floorboards. Huddling into a tight ball, he buried his forehead deep against his knees, letting out a long, broken sigh into the quiet room.

📚 Also on NHV Novels

Even If You Control My Body, I Will Never Submit to You

Female ProtagonistGender TransformationMarriage

Read Now →
Not interested