“Don’t worry. It takes time to recover fully. Don’t get impatient—just keep your mind at ease. We’ve already given you every possible treatment; what’s left now is time to heal. Until then, do not expose your eyes directly to light. It’ll be inconvenient, but you must wear the bandages for the time being.”

The world was a blur. During the graduation ceremony, while dodging a falling drone, he’d struck the back of his head, and the mild concussion lingered. At first his vision narrowed sharply, then suddenly burst into flares of light with pain that wouldn’t let up.

One eye had been grazed by a shard, leaving a tiny retinal tear, but the wound was trivial, not severe.

What no one expected was that the untreated concussion had affected his optic nerves.

The doctor had warned of the worst—he could lose his sight—but thankfully things were improving little by little.

Thick bandages wrapped around his eye and the back of his head again and again, pressing into his skin with suffocating tightness. Light was thoroughly blocked, even moving his eyes freely was difficult.

If he opened them carelessly, the pressure could rise and worsen his condition. From a distance, Na Wonchang sniffled.

With a heart that soft, what kind of backup does he think he can provide? Did he imagine a spy’s body would always remain intact?

For those whose profession is to destroy others, having your body beaten to shreds is often proof of experience. This degree of injury didn’t even make Wooshin blink. Growing up seeing limbs torn apart, he had long since grown calloused to wounds.

He lifted his chin and held the blind man’s cane quietly in his hand. The familiar texture made his throat sting unbearably.

“Even walking will be difficult for you at first. Everyday life will be affected. Do you have family who can help you?”

“......”

His hand faltered. He only stroked the cane in silence. He thought of his wife, who had walked step by step toward him in this merciless world, relying only on this cold, hard stick.

He had made the woman with the most beautiful eyes in the world blind. He had wormed into the cracks of the Owl when she was at her weakest and loneliest. She had been his prey. He had smirked coldly in front of that unsuspecting girl, pretending only his hands were warm.

And now he was alone.

Seoryeong. Now I wish you’d laugh at me with all your might. With my vision black as graphite, I see you even clearer. The last face of yours I could not cry before, the one that blamed me, suffocates me.

When I was searching for you right in front of my nose, what were you thinking?

Yuri Solzhenitsyn had returned blind.

The news that the long-missing young heir was alive spread like wildfire through TASS, Kremlin insiders, and numerous high-ranking sources.

News articles and broadcasts leapt across social media, racking up millions of reactions in an instant.

The people who remembered that small, wretched, miserable Solzhenitsyn from back then, now buzzed for weeks over the tale of his survival, clawed back through nearly twenty years.

The blind man’s cane he carried. His massive shoulders, like a blanket stuck with a Post-it. The bandages that had to be crossed over his tall nose bridge. The black hair spilling down naturally over it all.

Countless paparazzi shots, sold at high prices, made him look the spitting image of the late Prime Minister Maxim’s cold, stern aura. In society pages, celebrity sections, everywhere, the sight of Yuri Solzhenitsyn strolling serenely by the estate lake with thick bandages over his eyes thrilled the public.

“The one I want to see doesn’t come.”

Dozens of tenacious paparazzi were thrown out daily. Then and now, they clung like leeches, hounding him, making him feel the wretched familiarity of returning to his grandfather’s homeland. Curses chewed inside his mouth, but still he never removed the bandages.

They hid his face, lulled others into carelessness. Better to be underestimated, even ignored. These bandages would be invaluable for telling friend from foe.

—On your left is the gardener, Oleg Kemerov, male, sixty-five, clean background. There’s a truck parked outside the gate, probably for produce supply. To your right, five meters away, four housekeeping staff are waiting, sneaking glances at you.

The only sound was the steady tap, tap of the cane. As he moved, Na Wonchang’s voice rang out like a gentle navigation system.

He had mounted micro-cameras on his shirt buttons, tie pin, and cane, relying on Na Wonchang and Hur Channa for support.

In truth, Wooshin had trained himself to move without sight in just hours, recalibrating his balance. He could walk convincingly, even run. The problem was the Owl.

If she perched before him, how quickly would he notice?

If she, like him, masked her scent, altered her voice, acted—what were the odds he’d recognize her at once?

He might let the moment slip. Surely he would squander it.

Fearing that instant, Wooshin humbled himself and asked Wonchang and Channa to be his eyes. To keep theirs wide open and catch the true black hair for him.

—The 21-year-old maid Natalia Yegorova is the only one who won’t look [N O V E L I G H T] at you. She holds herself like a model, and her chest is, um, really, really big—! Ah, ow, why’d you hit me—!

Wooshin grimaced and turned in the opposite direction.

The Kremlin, eager to mask unending wars, the deaths of dubious high officials, and public fear and distrust of the government, had seized on Yuri Solzhenitsyn’s return as an unexpected blessing. For now, they seemed intent on exploiting him politically as the nation’s hot topic.

The more peaceful the days stretched, the colder Wooshin became. He had learned well enough from his grandfather what the powerful were.

Already, infiltrators disguised as estate staff had trickled in—surely intelligence agents. A cold laugh slipped out.

—Ack! Boss, you understand me, right? In 1968 the British ambassador in Moscow was toppled by a maid, deported home! In 2007, an Estonian army colonel fell the same way! And in 2010, Anna Chapman! Russia has always been famous for its honey traps!

Wooshin only curved his lips crookedly at the indignant voice.

Russian female operatives were notorious for using their Slavic beauty to approach targets, recording sex tapes to blackmail them. More than a few had been humiliated and ousted from high office.

—So you have to be careful too!

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

He scoffed, but Wonchang raised his voice again.

—D-don’t drop your guard! Why else is the Beauty Trap one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems of Sun Tzu? It’s lasted through the ages, East and West! North Korea uses it on the South, Russia uses it on the US—!

“Enough. Switch me to Hur Channa.”

He said it as casually as changing the voice setting on a GPS. Compared to Wonchang’s nervous fussing, he preferred Hur Channa’s curses and dialect.

For a man mad with longing for his wife, nothing was more of a waste than listening to stupid chatter like this.

Hur Channa, who knew plenty of North Korean femme fatales, was blunt from the start.

“One meter ahead, there’s a tall, ugly beauty acting like she ain’t ugly, rolling her eyes. Don’t even look that way, just back up! No matter how shiny a stone rolls over, a stone is just a stone! Step on it and keep going, that’s all!”

Her words spoke the mind of the blind man.

With Channa on comms, it was as reassuring as being ringed by an armored battalion.

But then she’d jab his wound too: “So how come our girl couldn’t step on and move past that South Korean spy, huh?”

Such were the so-called left and right eyes he had to rely on. The stress was endless.

Even so, Wonchang clung on, determined to guard this post to the end.

—I still can’t believe you had dual citizenship, Boss, but Russia must know. That face of yours worked for Blast Corp, didn’t it? And the past few months you were in foreign military academies, irregular training centers. How vulnerable do you think a lonely man in his early thirties looks? Not to mention you’ve lied about being blind!

The bickering still came through the earpiece.

—Surely it’ll be someone warm, maternal, like your mother. What if that Natalia Yegorova ‘accidentally’ smothers your nose with her breasts—wouldn’t you be shaken?

“Fuck off, Wonchang.”

—The FSB’s strategy is obvious! These agents will have mastered every skill: reading weaknesses, catering to whims, seduction. They’ll have backup teams of eight, already charting your hobbies, interests, traumas. Even Natalia Yegorova’s hair is black...!

“Yeah. Same thing we used to do.”

—......!

Silence spread, unfixable. The situation was already veering off his plan, and impatience gnawed at him.

The welcome and the surveillance continued. The Kremlin still hadn’t decided whether Yuri Solzhenitsyn was friend or foe, only watched. Meanwhile, Kiya was silent, Sonia was...

“Haah... fuck...”

Even here in Russia, he felt a wall one step short. The fury of wanting to see her so badly was unbearable. The wait stretched too long, too painful, he felt like hurting himself just to bear it.

“At this rate, your instructor’s going to die...”

He dropped his broad torso forward onto the hand gripping the cane. At such times, the wound was a relief. The sting of torn flesh was far easier to endure than the incurable longing.

He longed to charge through hellfire to reach her, but unless she came of her own will, there was no finding her.

The frustration and despair drained his blood dry day by day. Just once, if only he could see her. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

“......”

In the end, he had to stir Kiya. If pushed, Kiya could expose that Yuri Solzhenitsyn had once operated as an NIS agent. The unusual quiet was unsettling.

Then maybe it was time to prod again. He hadn’t wanted to resort to such a shitty tactic, but... Wooshin felt his way forward into the dark once more.

There was only one reason he’d chosen this mansion: its white, old façade resembled Winter Castle.

“—”

That night, Wooshin flung the gates wide.

He declared to the heirs of the old KGB, in the name of Solzhenitsyn, that he would reopen the “final trial.”

And their new opponent in that trial would be—

A single blind man.