"Five is perfect."
Victor pressed his thumbs into her shoulders.
—CRACK!
Seo Baek Hyang's entire body went rigid.
So did Victor.
"...Did I just break a seventy-thousand-year-old woman?"
A profound silence settled over the cavern. The only sound was the gentle trickle of the waterfall in the background.
"That," Hyang said slowly, "was a knot."
"That was a fossil," Victor corrected.
He didn't remove his hands.
Surprisingly, her shoulders weren't stiff like a warrior's muscles. They were stiff like a dam that had held back a river for far too long. It wasn't strength. It was the pain of someone who had spent her entire life preparing for a blow that could come at any moment.
Victor did the calculations without even realizing it.
Seventy thousand years.
Even if she'd only been truly tense for ten percent of that time, that still amounted to seven thousand years of stress trapped beneath his fingers.
No wonder it cracked like a dry branch.
"Breathe," he said.
