《我明白》-[w.jh]

[19: minghao]

Jun stood outside the mansion he had seen in Seoyul's memories. Lucky for him, the mansion stood out in its own way, as if telling others to look at it.

All he had to do was knock on the door, hope that that Minghao guy would open it, tell him that he was Seoyul's...soulmate, he supposed. Was he? Did surviving the potion make him her soulmate?

Just as he was about to knock, the door swung open, and a tall, lean man stood at the doorstep, glaring at Jun.

"Go away," he snarled. "I don't appreciate strangers gawking at my house."

"Minghao?" He asked. The face looked like the man he had seen in the memories, but his hair was a lot different than what he remembered.

"Yeah, I'm Minghao. Who are you? I don't think we've ever met."

"Seoyul..." Jun trailed off. How would he explain that he had come to look for Seoyul to her cousin?

Minghao squinted. "Are you that Junhui by any chance?"

Jun just simply nodded.

"Oh well, come on in. My cousin has been pining for you for absolutely ages." He pulled the door open wider and Jun stepped inside.

"So, as you would probably know, I'm Xu Minghao, age twenty-six, specialist in all this stuff you see here." He gestured towards a large shelf in the living room where various glass vials of different sizes sat, all filled with different coloured liquids. "That's dangerous for human skin, by the way. You had better not touch it," he said when Jun approached one of the vials with bright blue liquid. "It still corrodes my skin a little bit when it spills. Shows how that the human skin is definitely not resistant to this stuff."

"Why would it corrode your skin in the first place? You're not human." Jun tilted his head a little to the side.

"I'm half, actually. Human father, soul-stealer mother. That's putting it simply." Minghao stated it like it was nothing.

"Soul-stealer?" Jun asked again.

Minghao stared at him like he was out of his mind. "Have you really been dating my cousin? Or has it all been sweetie time everyday? Or did that childish cousin of mine get caught up in her lovely kisses that she forgot to tell her boyfriend exactly who she was? Gosh, Yullie. Forgive my cousin, she can get too..." he paused, taking in a breath, "caught up in the moment."

"Oh." Jun didn't know what to say. Technically, it had been his fault too—he had asked her what she was once, but after that, when he didn't get an answer, he never thought to ask again.

"Then how did your parents get together? I mean, Seoyul and I..." he trailed off, expecting he would understand.

Minghao shrugged his shoulders. "It wasn't as common for humans and soul-stealers to meet. Back then, the marriage of my parents was a rare case, and at the time they hadn't enforced the rule yet. But a decade later, more and more of these couples emerged, and more got married. Eventually too many half-humans like me entered the world, and they thought the best way to prevent that was to enforce that rule which prevented Seoyul from being with you from the beginning."

"Half-humans can be dangerous," he looked at Jun straight in the eye. "This kind of child has powers with him the very minute he emerges from the mother's womb. The powers can be dangerous for the human parent, especially if the human is the mother giving birth to it. The humans tend to not survive if the baby gets too powerful for its own good."

"I see." What else could he say? Minghao seemed to be focused, like he was giving him a lecture on a lot of things he shouldn't be associating with.