Chapter 168
Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office.
Number of prosecutors: 234.
It is the largest district prosecutors' office in the country, and all politically and economically important cases fall under the jurisdiction of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office.
People often describe the prosecution as a quiet battlefield.
Despite the cases that come and go while shaking South Korea, the inside of the office is as quiet as a mouse.
In reality, there is little occasion for people to exchange raised voices, but upon closer inspection, it was because highly purified mana circulated along the walls throughout the building, providing near-perfect soundproofing.
“Why is it so noisy? Is there some event today?”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t receive any notice about one.”
The other prosecutors following the fourth deputy chief prosecutor’s question merely tilted their heads.
Around fifteen security guards were waiting in front of the elevator.
The fourth deputy chief prosecutor pressed the button for the thirteenth floor without knowing what was going on, but they were all headed to the same place.
“You young men shouldn’t have any business on the thirteenth floor.”
Ordinarily, there was no reason to visit the thirteenth floor, where the chief prosecutor’s and deputy chief prosecutors’ offices were located, unless one worked in the General Affairs Division.
“Ah...! The chief prosecutor called for us.”
“Really? Why?”
After taking concentrated fire from so many media outlets for so long, he wondered if the man had finally lost his mind.
[Thirteenth floor.]
When the elevator doors opened to the announcement, dozens of security guards were already lined up in neat rows on both sides.
It was such an incongruous sight that one might wonder whether someone had died.
‘Is this a prosecutors’ office or a gangster hideout?’
Out of curiosity, he went as far as the chief prosecutor’s office, then widened his eyes and turned around.
“Whew...! Someone’s definitely going to die today...! What’s that man doing here?”
* * *
“Uuugh...!”
Prosecutor Cheon Jeong-ho struggled as he moved the piles of documents one by one.
This was top-secret—secret among secrets. He wasn’t even sure whether it was all right to let an outsider look through them so freely, but what else could he do?
He simply disliked people with extraterritorial privileges, like Professor Cheon.
“You look dissatisfied.”
“No, not at all! I’m just happy to see you after so long. Happy, that’s all...!”
“Are these all the materials?”
“Huff... huff... Yes. This is everything I’m allowed to access. Is it enough?”
“You went through all that trouble. Why don’t you come sit down?”
‘When was it that you worked me like a dog?’
Prosecutor Cheon glared with his eyes wide, but this was a time for patience.
“We have Bacchus and sikhye. Which would you like?”
“I’d appreciate it if you could close the door outside first and come back.”
The words carried aura along with them. Feeling that the man’s voice was closer to a full-fledged threat than a request, his body moved on its own.
Click-
The younger brother sat down across from Professor Cheon Gyu-jin again and cast an anxious glance around.
Even his older brother, whom he was meeting again after so long, had been unable to escape the passage of time; there was more gray hair than black.
From a distance, he almost looked gray. And he still insisted on wearing suits.
“Ah, what is it now! It’s better to take a beating sooner rather than later...! Why is a man who hasn’t contacted me once in twenty years suddenly bringing up an incident from seven years ago? Have you gone senile?”
It was Cheon Jeong-ho’s desperate struggle from the edge of a cliff.
Cheon Gyu-jin put down the file he had been reading, interlaced his fingers, and spoke.
“The survivor of the Walpurgis incident. You knew about her, didn’t you?”
The low, heavy voice left Prosecutor Cheon flustered.
“How did you find out about that...?”
“Sigh... Jeong-ho.”
“Why are you getting up when it’s difficult? I can explain everything, hyung! And do you know how many eyes are watching outside?”
Prosecutor Cheon clenched his teeth and stopped his brother from standing. That was why he had stationed the security guards outside.
Even if they couldn’t protect him, he had calculated that they could at least serve as human CCTV cameras.
“Cheon Semin is looking after my daughter at our house. I need to go home again soon, so let’s finish this as early as possible today. Please.”
“Semin? That brat isn’t studying like he’s supposed to...! Wait, what did you say? Daughter?”
‘I must have heard that wrong.’
It was a sentence combining two words—or rather, three words—that should never be put together, like mint chocolate pizza.
Cheon Jeong-ho questioned him again, doubting his own ears.
“Name. That’s the name of the spirited girl who became our daughter a few months ago.”
“...”
It was an unusual name that could never be forgotten once heard.
There was no doubt about it.
“Where were you and what were you doing last year?”
Professor Cheon took a simple magic-circle drafting device from his sleeve and gripped it in his hand.
The object had somehow lengthened to the size of a cane. When he slammed it against the floor, mana spread throughout the chief prosecutor’s office as though resonating from that point.
In an instant, a gigantic magic circle spread across the floor like a carpet.
[Cast: Localized Crystallization]
[Unique Magic: Ice Flower]
A bone-chilling cold bloomed.
Every breath Prosecutor Cheon exhaled turned to ice and dropped helplessly to the floor.
Cheon Jeong-ho turned his head to check the magic circle, and his face went deathly pale.
Thousands of ice spikes were already floating in the air, all aimed at his neck.
“Haha...”
Prosecutor Cheon gave a bitter smile and looked at his brother with terrified eyes.
Regardless, Cheon Gyu-jin pointed his cane at his brother’s mouth and pressed him for an answer.
“You’d better answer properly.”
The mage’s eyes, fixed on the chief prosecutor, still glowed ominously blue.
* * *
Time turned back to June of the previous year.
“Are you the guardian?”
“I’m not her guardian, exactly. Something like that. Where is the child?”
“I’ll show you.”
On the day Name was rescued, Prosecutor Cheon hurried to Asan Hospital to confirm her identity.
Then, when he saw the girl in the hospital room, her appearance was so different from what he had expected that he had to ask the doctor again.
At first glance, she looked no more than five years old. She seemed far too young to be a survivor of the Walpurgis incident.
“How old is this child?”
“Are you really her guardian?”
“I’m Prosecutor Cheon Jeong-ho from the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office. As this concerns the case, I ask for your cooperation.”
“Ah... yes...”
Exactly seven years old by international age, she was 103 centimeters tall and weighed 15.8 kilograms.
There was nothing left on her arms and legs but bones, while her abdomen was slightly swollen.
Prosecutor Cheon, who occasionally donated to UNICEF, knew that these were symptoms of extreme starvation.
Detective Ma Beom-il had told him that mana had continuously leaked from the capsule for some unknown reason, allowing her to survive until then.
The news that she had survived should have been cause for celebration, but with the child’s condition so precarious, he fell into deep thought.
“Is the child’s condition very serious?”
“We won’t know until she regains consciousness and undergoes a thorough examination.”
“What does it look like to you right now, Doctor?”
“Hmm... Going only by the AI diagnosis, it could be Lennox–Gastaut syndrome, and, though I’m not very familiar with it, some kind of muscular dystrophy... This is merely my opinion, but it looks like either EDMD or CMD, and she also seems to have developed Restakaya syndrome in combination... Honestly, yes... it’s very serious. It would be a miracle if she lived for more than another month, and even if a miracle did occur, she wouldn’t survive for more than a year.”
“Exactly what is wrong with her?”
“She seems to have difficulty holding her body upright for any length of time, but the biggest problem is probably her Aura Heart. If she’s exposed to a high-mana environment for too long, her Aura Heart will adapt to it, making it difficult for her to survive in an environment like this. To put it simply, it’s like someone who has lived only in a clean river suddenly flowing into a lake covered in algae.”
“She’ll die because she can’t breathe the air?”
“That depends on how well the patient adapts.”
Would things have become this bad if she had been rescued just a little earlier—say, a year earlier?
Prosecutor Cheon couldn’t hide his troubled feelings.
He wandered around the lobby of Asan Hospital, thinking it over again and again.
Prosecutor Cheon Jeong-ho had earned a promotion to third deputy chief prosecutor at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office by uncovering every charge against the Walpurgis agents at the Jeju District Prosecutors’ Office.
After that, he served as chief prosecutor in several regions, including Cheongju and Suwon, ultimately taking the position at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office.
Having earned the ruling party’s favor by extending the unstable administration’s time in power by another five years, he was now in a position to set his sights on becoming the next Prosecutor General.
‘If I reveal right now that the child is a survivor of Walpurgis, that alone could earn me an enormous amount of credit.’
The government had always been haunted by its failure to rescue the hostages.
In other words, he had been given an opportunity to erase even the ruling party’s sole blemish.
‘Is this really the right thing to do...?’
She was the sole survivor of the incident.
In other words, she was also prey that every politician, whether from the ruling or opposition party, would rush to seize.
The ruling party would put the child forward to justify the military operation carried out at the time under the pretext that it had rescued a hostage.
The opposition party would instead use the horrific suffering the child had endured as a pretext for reinvestigating the incident.
Especially in the current political climate, with approval ratings split down the middle, it was obvious that both sides would come rushing at her with their eyes ablaze.
Neither side offered a path that was good for the child.
“Sigh... What a shame. What a terrible shame.”
A life spent being dragged around by politicians because she had been sentenced to a limited lifespan would be an unbearably cruel end for a child.
After staying awake all night and agonizing over it, Cheon Jeong-ho finally decided to cover up the incident and hide the child.
In a world like this, lacking Korean citizenship would not pose a major problem for the child’s survival.
“Hello. Is this your first time visiting Merlin Orphanage?”
“Ah, yes. I’m not here to see the children or anything... I’d like to make a donation.”
“May the Lord’s grace be with you! This way, please. Are you interested in sponsoring a child?”
“No. Due to my circumstances, I can’t do that. I’d like to donate toward repairing the facilities and old things here.”
“Ah, yes, yes! Did you have a particular amount in mind?”
“Hmm...”
The man began to take several one-million-won checks from his wallet, then stopped.
His desire to avoid any direct connection to Name ultimately stemmed from concern for his own safety and selfishness.
Annoyed with himself, Prosecutor Cheon put his wallet back in his rear pocket and spoke.
“Two hundred million won. Two hundred million should at least help a little with operating the orphanage for a year, right?”
* * *
Prosecutor Cheon Jeong-ho let out an exclamation of surprise.
“Wow... How can something this tiny be like this...!”
Professor Cheon showed him a photograph he had taken with Name on the day of her academy entrance ceremony.
Her appearance was so completely different from then that his mouth fell open on its own.
Professor Cheon put his phone back in his pocket and conveyed Name’s opinion.
However, Prosecutor Cheon crossed one leg over the other and showed his displeasure.
“So it had all been planned from the beginning? It was revealed ages ago that the radical progressives over there had spread those propaganda leaflets. Do you want to be arrested for conspiracy to insurrection just like me?”
In fact, spies who had infiltrated the country under North Korean orders to drive a wedge between the UN forces and South Korea had existed until recently.
“I trust Name. She isn’t the kind of child who would say something like that without thinking.”
“You’ve gotten soft in your old age, haven’t you? Haven’t you seen those bastards who scream at every memorial ceremony that the incident should be reinvestigated? There isn’t a single bereaved family among them! Well, if you search hard enough, you might find one. In the end, they’re all just people trying to secure a position in politics!”
The case had already been closed, and they couldn’t waste investigative personnel on it.
Blaming the UN forces now would amount to making a statement against the already confusing international situation.
“It’s what our Name wants.”
“Oh, here comes the doting father. Let’s say, though unlikely, that it’s true. Then you know I can’t become Prosecutor General, right? Given my position, I can’t help you. That’s not exactly a reality I welcome.”
That did not mean Cheon Jeong-ho was without ambition.
He had been demoted to the Jeju District Prosecutors’ Office early in his career, but he had clawed his way up from there and was praised within the prosecution as the very embodiment of a success story.
If Name’s words were true, he couldn’t even begin to guess how many of the higher-ups who had brought him this far would be cut down, or where the purge would begin and end.
He himself would obviously be demoted from consideration for Prosecutor General to some research position at the Legal Research and Training Institute.
“You may review the case records only here. They absolutely cannot leave this office. Not even for you, hyung.”
That was the final favor the chief prosecutor could do for his brother.
Ding-
Professor Cheon’s phone rang softly.
It was a text message from Name.
[Professor Cheon, may I take a week off from the academy? A lot of things have suddenly come up that I need to take care of.]
“Who is it? Your daughter, hyung?”
“Yes. She’s throwing a fit because she doesn’t want to go to the academy. What should I do?”
“She’s at that age.”
“Raising a child is really difficult.”
“What, did you think it would be easy? Raising just Semin was such a chore.”
Prosecutor Cheon nodded.
“Jeong-ho.”
“Are you leaving now? Please, go quickly... You show up after years and cause this much trouble. Damn, you’ve ruined all the wood.”
“You did well. So let’s just take one hit today.”
“No, why... why! I did everything you asked!”
“Our Name says she suffered a lot because of you.”
“This is insane... You haven’t changed a bit! Who knew the doctor would turn out to be a quack?”
That evening, Secretary Kim was able to go home feeling refreshed after seeing her boss’s face swollen beyond recognition.
He had to go to the hospital alone. The employees’ workday had already ended.
“These damn Alpha Generation kids... Their boss hasn’t gone home, and they still clock out on time? Kids these days have no sense.”
He wasn’t fond of how quickly the world was changing.