Chapter 13
013 – I Am an Army (2)
Businessman Kim Man-chun spent years taking whatever day labor he could find until he was forty.
With the money he’d saved, he opened a restaurant at forty-one—and it became a huge success.
He married his wife, who had been the restaurant manager, when he was forty-three.
“…My daughter was born when I was forty-five. It may sound like something anyone would say, but she was so precious I could’ve put her in my eye… and she was a daughter I could proudly show off to anyone.”
Mr. Kim’s wrinkled gaze swept over the picture frames hanging throughout the vast mansion.
They were filled with photos of a girl beaming in a white ballet outfit.
「Winner」
「Bukyang Cup Youth Ballet Competition」
There were plenty of trophies, too.
“My daughter turned twenty and started dating a boy. She didn’t tell me much about him, but… she started acting strangely after they broke up….”
It seemed that after the breakup, Kim Yeon-seo had shut herself away in her room, as if she were digging a burrow.
She gradually stopped going out, too.
She even stopped joining the family for meals at the table.
“At first… I just thought she was heartbroken. I figured she’d get better with time. That she’d pull herself together and get back on her feet. Everyone goes through a phase like that….”
But that wasn’t what happened.
His daughter Yeon-seo’s condition only got worse.
“My daughter….”
Mr. Kim wiped the sweat running down his forehead with his hand.
His hands were thick and rough, a testament to all those years he’d spent doing day labor.
And now they were trembling.
“My daughter would come out every night before dawn… and rummage through the refrigerator. My wife left meals outside her room, but I thought maybe that wasn’t enough….”
Mr. Kim’s refrigerator was always full of fresh, uncooked ingredients.
“She’d been eating raw meat… my daughter. That’s not all. One night, I woke up because I sensed something strange. Yeon-seo was holding a knife… staring at us while we slept….”
Grin─.
Apparently, she’d bared her white teeth and smiled.
“I can’t get that smile… out of my head. It was like she wasn’t my daughter at all!”
Mr. Kim invited renowned shamans recommended by his acquaintances.
But his daughter’s condition only got worse.
“Every night, my daughter talks to someone. There isn’t even a computer or a TV in her room, let alone a phone! But when I listen closely… I can hear more than just her voice!”
Mr. Kim was terrified.
In the end, he showed the sharp decisiveness typical of a man who’d made it from nothing.
He decided to lock his daughter in the cold basement.
It was where the meat cold-storage room was.
Mr. Kim said he only checked through the thick steel door to see whether Yeon-seo was alive or dead.
And he kept the door securely locked with a padlock.
“But… lately, I feel like my daughter is watching me. She’s locked up tight in there. I don’t know how it’s possible… but if this goes on, even my wife might be in danger….”
Mr. Kim buried his face deep in his hands.
He was deeply worried, and one of his young employees had posted his story online.
And I saw it and came here.
“Well, that’s a textbook case of possession.”
A man in his mid-forties wearing a leather vest snorted.
With sunglasses on, a bandanna tied around his forehead, and gum working between his teeth, he looked like the sort of tough guy who’d tear down a desert highway in an enormous motorcycle in an American movie.
Beside him, a woman in a white dress was patting her face as she touched up her makeup.
Pat, pat, pat─.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah━─!!!”
Just then, another scream rang out from the basement.
It was a scream that sounded like it would tear the person’s throat apart.
I’d never heard anyone scream like that in my life, and a chill ran down my spine in an instant.
Unlike me, the Terminator-looking man in the leather jacket only gave a dismissive snort.
“That little evil spirit’s screaming loud enough to shake the world, thinking it’s finally met its match. So, Kim Man-chun, we’re still talking four large bills for the fee, right?”
The woman, who had finished her makeup, gave a little smirk.
“Does it think you’re the one it’s up against? It’s because of that young master over there. Even a ghost knows who’s sitting here right now─.”
Click, click─.
The woman walked across the marble floor, her heels clicking.
She gently lowered herself onto the sofa in the middle of the living room.
“I must be on a lucky streak lately. I never thought you’d show up for such a shabby Dusk-class job, Young Master. Could I get a chance to see those famous skills of yours?”
Across from her, a man in a suit sat leisurely drinking tea.
Slurp─.
His face was among the palest I’d ever seen, and his features were handsome, too.
He was tall, with broad shoulders.
Honestly, I thought he was a celebrity.
And in that moment, I figured out the pecking order in the room.
That Terminator-looking man and the woman in the dress were probably magicians.
They didn’t treat Mr. Kim, the owner of the mansion, with much respect.
If anything, they seemed to look down on him.
But they deferred to the handsome young man they called “Young Master.”
‘Young Master… So, like the son of a chaebol family?’
As I wondered about that,
Tap─.
The young man they’d called Young Master set his cup on its saucer.
Then he stood up smoothly.
“I used to visit your restaurant from time to time, Mr. Kim, so of course I should help. And while we’re at it, why don’t we introduce ourselves? I’m Yoo Ga-in. Please, call me Ga-in.”
His bright smile was dazzling.
That handsome bastard!
Why was my heart fluttering, too?!
I wondered how the women felt.
The woman in the white dress arched her brows like a fan watching her favorite singer from the front row.
It was hard to tell if she was laughing or crying.
“Ga-in, that’s a rather short introduction. Don’t you want to say something about your family, or anything like that? For the record, I’m Jo Se-na, a director at Marina Entertainment.”
“I’m Choi Jang-gun, a shaman in Yeonnam-dong. I mainly use mediumistic and ritual magic. I can manage most other kinds, but not as well as those two.”
Magic. Mediumistic magic. Ritual magic.
The unfamiliar words popped up and lodged themselves in my neurons.
Just as I wondered whether magic came in different types, I felt everyone’s eyes turn toward me.
“Ah, I—”
“Kim Man-chun! Let’s see your daughter first. Those stairs lead down to the basement, right?”
“Ah, yes….”
The man who’d introduced himself as Choi Jang-gun headed for the basement.
It almost seemed like he’d deliberately cut me off.
Jo Se-na, the woman who’d introduced herself as a director at Marina Entertainment, sneered.
“Those shamans sure are rude. They go around talking down to everyone.”
That was what she said,
but Jo Se-na didn’t seem interested in hearing my introduction either. She followed Choi Jang-gun toward the basement.
I’d had a vague sense they didn’t think much of me ever since I walked into the mansion.
I’d always been pretty good at picking up on things like that.
But what surprised me next was this.
Yoo Ga-in came over and held out his hand to me.
“You’re a transfer student, right? What’s your name?”
My younger sister once went to an idol’s fan signing. She said her heart had pounded when the idol held out a hand to shake hers.
That was exactly how I felt right now.
Not that I wanted to admit it.
“I’m Ha Yu-seong. But why does everyone think I’m a transfer student?”
“Only transfer students wear cooking foil under their clothes. And those people are second- and third-generation magicians, so they look down on transfer students. That’s just how this line of work is.”
“I thought they were jealous because I’m so handsome.”
“Ha, sure. Could be.”
Yoo Ga-in laughed.
At that moment, I felt a chill run down my spine.
This guy was laughing at my lame joke like that. Was he really that nice?
Did he laugh too easily? Wait, was he gay?
So I quickly pulled my hand away and stepped back.
Yoo Ga-in wiped the corner of his eye, damp with laughter, with his index finger and said,
“Anyway, let’s have a good day working together.”
He didn’t seem to be saying it just to be polite.
This guy was handsome, and he had a good personality, too?
Could it be?
They say handsome men get so much kindness from the world that it looks like one big, happy, welcoming dreamland to them, making them more likely to be kind and decent themselves.
Could that be what he was like?
‘What an unfair world!’
I felt a little resentful.
But what surprised me even more was Bori-bori’s reaction.
Round and round─.
Bori-bori circled Yoo Ga-in, inspecting him from head to toe as if searching the area around him.
…Was Bori-bori wary of him?
No, that didn’t quite seem right. Bori-bori’s tail was swishing gently from side to side.
That gentle swishing meant Bori-bori was curious and interested.
I could tell the difference by now.
“Why? Did you drop something around there?”
Yoo Ga-in looked around him.
It seemed like he couldn’t see Bori-bori, either.
So I decided to give him a casual answer.
“My charm.”
“Then let’s pick it up quickly. We have to head down to the basement, too.”
# # #
When we opened the basement door, it was like stepping into a snowfield.
Frost lay thick on everything, and it was freezing.
“This used to be the cold-storage room, right?”
Jo Se-na, wearing sunglasses, put a cigarette between her lips and lit it with a hiss.
She exhaled, and the smoke fluttered away in the shape of a butterfly.
‘How the hell did she do that?’
Her strange trick made the back of my head itch.
Choi Jang-gun, the shaman who looked like the Terminator, clicked his tongue as he looked around.
“For a refrigerator, this is more like a freezer. And it’s as big as a house. The temperature’s… around minus two degrees, I’d say. The spirit’s so powerful it’s made the place freeze over. Tsk.”
Swoosh─.
The handsome young master, Yoo Ga-in, took a pair of gold-rimmed glasses with clear lenses from his breast pocket.
They looked like the reading glasses old men wore, but somehow they suited him, which was strange.
“…I can see a few.”
Yoo Ga-in was looking at the floor.
Wondering what he could see, I looked down, too. There were marks that looked like sneaker-sole prints.
Each set had a different pattern.
Yoo Ga-in explained.
“I’m looking for traces of the spirit. You should get yourself a pair of glasses like these while you’re at it. There are things you can see better through lenses.”
“There’s no point explaining it to a greenhorn.”
When Choi Jang-gun snorted, a thorn-sharp determination surged up from deep inside me.
I hadn’t done anything in particular to make that man hate me.
And yet he hated me?
Then I’d give him a reason to hate me.
“I’m young, so I can see just fiiine without using those. This is my own training method for not relying on tools.”
“Really? Then tell me where these footprints lead.”
Choi Jang-gun pointed at an empty patch of floor.
The corner of his mouth was twitching upward, like he was testing me and making fun of me.
“There aren’t any footprints there.”
“Huh─.”
“The footprints start here and go all the way over there.”
I pointed out the path of the footprints closest to me.
Choi the shaman gaped like a startled goldfish.
Just as I was thinking that served him right, Yoo Ga-in took off his glasses.
“You can see them without glasses? That’s impressive. Maybe I should try, too.”
He seemed to be concentrating hard; I heard him suck in a breath.
A bead of sweat trickled down his forehead and gathered at his chin.
To sweat from that much concentration in a cold-storage room close to minus two degrees…
What the hell was this guy? It was a little shocking.
“Ha, this is a lot harder than it looks.”
Even as he let out a heavy breath, Yoo Ga-in’s eyes followed the footprints.
It looked like he’d managed to see them without his glasses.
Yoo Ga-in said,
“The footprints split in two, one to the left and one to the right. If we follow them, we should find Yeon-seo, Mr. Kim’s daughter. One of the two trails could be a trap meant to lure us in.”
“Tsk, then let’s split up. I’ll go this way!”
Choi Jang-gun strode to the left.
Jo Se-na, still holding her cigarette, turned to the right.
“I don’t like that guy, so I’ll go this way. Young Mas—Ga-in, which way are you going? Want to come with me?”
“I’ll go left. I’m a little worried about that man.”
“Ha, then I’m going with this person?”
Jo Se-na frowned as she looked at me.
What’s your problem? I don’t like you either.
More than that, though, I could see…
‘There are three sets of footprints?’
Besides the ones going left and right, there was a trail leading straight down the middle.
They were smaller than the other, larger footprints, and looked like they belonged to a woman.
It seemed no one else had noticed.