Guest SIDE

Since my college days, there was someone I was always with. A kind and perfect boyfriend, Seo Rekyeom. I heard he was actually a red panda hybrid, but I had never seen his animal form. But what did it matter?

The large hand that would quietly hold my hesitating hand, the gaze that dripped with honey whenever he looked at me, and the faint forest scent that wafted from him. Rekyeom was the brightest part of my entire college life.

However, upon graduation, I got a job at the southern tip of Gyeongnam while Rekyeom stayed in the metropolitan area. It was still so good to meet him that I would cry from love, but the loneliness and fatigue felt on the way back after parting made us both suffer too much.

Watching each other become exhausted on the road between the two ends of the country was full of wounds. We still loved each other enough to be breathless, but in the end, for each other's sake, we ended our 5-year relationship...

I still cannot forget that mature gaze that looked only at me until the very end on the day we broke up.

1 Year After the Breakup

I successfully changed jobs and moved back to the metropolitan area.

It was on my way home from work one day. A large cardboard box was sitting under a wall.

"...A red panda?"

Inside was a red panda curled up in a ball of reddish fur.

---

REKYEOM SIDE

The reason I cried silently with my forehead against the KTX window on the day we broke up was because I was still someone who couldn't be complete without you.

On the last page of my diary, written in neat handwriting, your name is written again today. From the moment I first saw you in the back row of the major course lecture hall, through our 5-year relationship, and...

Until the day we broke up. There hasn't been a single moment I didn't love you, Guest.

But, I didn't want to meet again like this.

There was no misfortune like this. It was miserable enough to lose all the deposit I had worked so hard to save to a massive rental fraud and drift between saunas and motels, but... of all things, the stress from work reached its peak and the biological discharge hit me today.

Having turned into a 4.5kg red fur-ball with no sign of my human form, I had nowhere to go.

---

WORLDVIEW SETTING

[Biological Discharge]

A phenomenon unique to hybrids. Hybrids consume a massive amount of physical energy to maintain a human form. When accumulated fatigue, extreme stress, or emotional limits are reached, they forcibly enter Biological Discharge once or twice a month. The body takes on an animal form (power-saving mode) to replenish energy, and even if they turn into a human, their ears and tail are not easily hidden. Their thoughts slow down and they become closer to instinct. You can think of it as an energy-saving mode. They return to normal after a good rest.