Chapter 171
“Oh my, young man. You came. It’s been a while since I saw your face, ohoho.”
When he parked his bike and entered the officetel entrance, the landlady he hadn't seen in a while greeted him.
A middle-aged woman who had been nearly reduced to a shell by ghosts. Until a few months ago, she had been in such bad shape that even a proper conversation was impossible, but she seemed to have improved a lot lately. Since he had purged almost all the ghosts in the officetel, that wasn't strange.
“Ah, madam. You look much better. I’m glad. I was very worried.”
“Hoho, madam? Don’t call me by such a stiff title; just call me Auntie.”
The landlady patted Ian on the shoulder and handed him the bundle she had been holding.
“This is a gift. I originally meant to give it to my son, but I decided to give it to our lucky charm instead.”
“A lucky charm?”
“Thanks to you, all the ghosts in our building vanished, didn’t they? That makes you a lucky charm! I asked a shaman about it, and she said it was because your qi is incredibly strong. I can’t tell you how glad I am that you came here!”
The way she subtly mixed honorifics and casual speech was a bit odd. If the other person had been someone connected to the supernatural, Ian would have found it unpleasant too, but the landlady was ordinary through and through. There was no need to bristle at someone like that.
He smiled bitterly and accepted the bundle the landlady handed him.
“Haha... I’ll gratefully accept this.”
“Good, good. I put in homemade food and a few other things, so eat well. If it’s not enough, just say so.”
“Understood. I’ll bring the dishes back after I finish eating.”
“No, no. Don’t do that, just keep them. It’s not like they cost much.”
The landlady laughed and slapped Ian on the back. The rather forceful blow made his body bend slightly.
“And the shaman said that if you bring other people into the building, your qi weakens, so if possible, don’t let anyone in. So for the time being, you’ll keep using this place alone. You aren’t bored without neighbors, are you?”
“Ah, no. I’m fine. I actually prefer being alone.”
Given that he was babbling about strong qi, he did seem like a scammer, but at least the part about not letting other people in was a relief. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, after all. Scammers do have their uses.
After chatting a bit more with the landlady, he got on the elevator and tapped the wall. The elevator ghost appeared and quickly pressed the button.
Whirr...
The elevator rose smoothly, then stopped at the floor where the workshop was. Ian got off without thinking, opened the workshop door, and went inside.
The workshop, after so long, was still pitch-dark. Only the pale blue glow inside the fish tank softly lit the surroundings; there was no other light.
The fish inside the tank were still alive. As they swam, the currents they stirred made the blue light shimmer and scatter watery shadows everywhere. Ian glanced at the light illuminating his face, then sat in the chair in front of the table and turned on the lamp.
Click. A small light bloomed over the table. He set the bag he was carrying aside, put on his glasses after finding them, and summoned the grimoire. The pure white [Touch of Re-Creation] settled into his hand and rumbled.
‘First, let’s mass-produce the dying eyeballs. I already have plenty of materials secured, so I can use those.’
Ian pulled a bag from his pack.
A bag packed with clean human eyeballs. They were all materials scavenged from the mirror-world cultists.
Whether the humans of the mirror world should even be considered real humans was a question that would take a very long time to debate, but whether their ‘eyeballs’ functioned as ‘eyeballs’ was a simple enough question that didn’t require much thought.
Eyes are, after all, organs whose only job is to let you see. In that sense, the cultists’ eyes fully performed the role of eyes. Even if they were separated from the body, that fact didn’t change.
It was an alchemy item that could even use fish eyes bought at the market. No matter how poor the quality of the mirror-world residents’ eyeballs was, they had to be better than fish eyes.
Ian set the grimoire on his lap and racked his brain.
The item made with fish eyes had shattered one vampire’s eye, and the item made with a mage’s eye had shattered the eye of a priest with regenerative abilities. Then what would happen if he used human eyes?
Even with the same alchemy item, the effects changed depending on the ingredients. However, since he’d never made a proper control group until now, comparing them was a little awkward. Fish eyeballs and a mage’s eye were probably too different.
So he was planning to take this chance to test the performance differences by material as well. Fish eyeballs and human eyeballs would make a good comparison set.
Thinking that, Ian took the eyeballs out one by one and set them out, then laid out the rest of the materials needed for alchemy.
Since he had already done alchemy a few times, there was no trouble. Ian first made about five for the experiment, then extracted the fish eyes from the fish he’d bought on the way here and made about three control samples.
Now all he needed was a test subject...
“Hmm.”
Ian took off his glasses for a moment and flipped through the Cartel requests, looking for one that could be done fairly quickly. Then he found a reasonably doable one and let one corner of his mouth curl up crookedly.
[Bounty Hunt]
[Anastasia Denisov]
[Russian mercenary. Currently on the run after killing her employer. Last seen in Seoul, and according to the intel, she hasn’t left Korea yet.]
[Cartel P.S. – Anastasia is a psychic. She has the ability to instantly identify the weak points of anyone she faces, and her weapon of choice is firearms. She is currently moving with a companion.]
[This request disappears automatically if the target leaves Korea. If it disappears upon acceptance, it means the request was canceled.]
[We have the target’s blood and clothes. If you’d like, you may visit a Cartel branch to pick them up. However, you must pay for them when you do.]
[You may bring the target in as a corpse or alive. If you bring them to a branch, we’ll settle the payment on the spot.]
[Reward – 3,000,000]
[Reward if the target’s companion is also dealt with – 5,000,000]
Objectively speaking, it wasn’t a very good request. There was no need for a mage to take it on, and the reward wasn’t that high.
But it was enough to test the item. Ian accepted the request and looked up the address of the nearest branch, marking it on his map.
He didn’t forget to take the compass he kept in his bag, either.
*
Anastasia was living in Incheon’s Chinatown. She had just woken up and, by habit, fumbled around on the shelf beside her bed to pull out a cigarette. Then, still lying down, she lit it and inhaled.
“Sss... Hoo...”
The acrid smoke warmed her lungs, and the sleepiness seemed to fade little by little. She brushed her oily black hair back with her hand and told the subordinates outside the door.
“All of you, come in.”
No reply came. Instead, three large men entered the room.
They were the mercenaries Anastasia had hired. There was no affection between them, just a relationship bought with money, but that made them all the more reliable. She flicked the cigarette ash onto the floor carelessly and asked them.
“Any weird bastards show up overnight?”
“None. Some Yanbian thugs who’d set up shop around here did come by, but we dealt with them.”
“Those bastards are no concern. The problem is the ones coming after seeing the Cartel’s bounty.”
Anastasia clicked her tongue and picked up the pistol lying nearby.
That fucking employer bastard. She’d hated how he kept changing the pay, so she’d wiped out his entire family, and his company had then filed a request with the Cartel to eliminate her. Thanks to that, she had no choice but to keep living like a hermit. Until she went back home, she had to keep hiding.
‘I’ll have to stay here for at least a month. I hate it, but there’s no other way.’
She clicked her tongue and checked the remaining rounds in the pistol.
Seven shots. More than enough to kill someone. She ground out the cigarette against the wall, then checked the weaknesses of the mercenaries she’d hired.
[Xiao Peng]
[heart, brain, kidney, spine.]
[Kim Cheol-min]
[heart, brain, kidney, spine.]
[Olga]
[heart, brain, kid—]
The weaknesses continued. Anastasia frowned, realizing Olga’s final weakness was somehow odd.
At that very moment.
[Olga.]
[Eye.]
“Eye?”
The moment she muttered it in shock, Olga’s eye burst with a pop!
“……What?”
A dumb little sound escaped Olga’s mouth. Blood poured from the crushed eye, and with her face instantly covered in blood, she screamed in terrible pain. Kim Cheol-min and Xiao Peng panicked, while Anastasia twisted her face and looked toward the window.
An eyeball had been destroyed without warning. Only one kind of being could do something like that.
“Mage...!”
Outside the window Anastasia was looking toward, across the street,
The black-haired man, as if he were naturally at home, was holding something shaped like a human eyeball and adjusting the angle of its pupil. Then he met Anastasia’s gaze.
But he wasn’t flustered. Instead, he smiled faintly and crushed the eyeball in his hand.
Crunch!
With a savage crunch, Xiao Peng and Kim Cheol-min’s eyeballs shattered at the same time. Not only that, he even destroyed the brain structures connected to their optic nerves.
“Aaaagh!”
“Ugh, aaaaagh!! My eyes, my eyes...!”
The two of them, having lost their sight in an instant, screamed. Anastasia pointed the pistol in her hand at the man and immediately activated her ability.
[???]
[How dare a mere insect scrutinize him.]
“……What?”
A phrase she’d never seen before appeared. Before Anastasia could even realize what it was, blood gushed from her nose.
Immediately after that, she lost consciousness and collapsed.