Chapter 131: Tagger.apk (5)

[5. As long as you have not reached the seventh location, there is always another chance. Stop the game, stop the mission, delete the app, forget everything, and go to sleep. You still have not entered the ghost story. In reality, simply stopping is enough.]

There was one fact the people of the Governance occasionally forgot.

Su-myeon, when it had nothing to do with ghost stories, was actually just an ordinary.

Extremely, exceedingly ordinary man, common enough to be found anywhere.

“Ugh...!”

Su-myeon, who had crashed hard into someone and fallen to the ground, hurriedly pushed himself back up.

But his vision was blurry.

His glasses, which had somehow held up perfectly well through all the times he had entered ghost stories, had gone flying absurdly far away.

Come to think of it, the stranger thing was that his glasses had remained intact until now.

Su-myeon reflexively scanned his surroundings.

First, his glasses....

Ah, right.

Because of a long-standing habit, he had assumed he needed to find his glasses first before he could identify the person, but things were different now.

Su-myeon corrected himself, covered his naturally poor-sighted right eye, and looked around through the Cyclops Contact Lens.

“Gasp, b-bro...!”

And then he identified the guy who had collided with him.

“Im Ha-min?!”

“Why are you guys here!”

Ju-hee, who had hurriedly followed after him, stopped in front of Su-myeon, found his glasses, and handed them over.

Su-myeon took them and put them on, only to immediately pull them back off again.

Damn it. They were broken.

“W-Well....”

“It was... Lady Dokkaebi....”

At the hesitant voices of Ha-min and I-an, Su-myeon turned his head.

Just hearing the word dokkaebi was enough for him to roughly guess what had happened.

To begin with, a dokkaebi's standards of judgment were not the same as a human's.

Just as she had told them this location, Ryang had probably given Ha-min the exact same answer when he asked her.

Well, forget these brats for now.

“Catch that bastard first!”

Meanwhile, Jae-min was scampering down the mountain like some kind of mountain squirrel.

Han-su and Cheshire were still chasing after Jae-min, who had not managed to get very far.

It was too dark to see them clearly, but the beams from their flashlights gave away their locations.

“Be careful!”

Leaving Su-myeon behind, the rest of the group eventually started running after Jae-min as well.

With such a severe difference in visual acuity between his two eyes, Su-myeon could not comfortably run along an already dark mountain trail.

He thought the chase that had begun halfway up the mountain in the middle of summer would end soon.

Once they caught up, there was no way Han-su or Cheshire would lose an ordinary civilian.

The problem was that the guy running away was unexpectedly far too fast.

In the end, after making it from halfway up the mountain to a section where the hiking trail turned into a paved road, the group came to a hollow stop.

By then, even the beam of Jae-min's flashlight that had been visible ahead of them was gone.

They had completely lost him.

“.......”

By the time Su-myeon arrived, Han-su was catching his breath with a grim expression, as though his pride had been badly wounded.

Su-myeon had been the last of the group to arrive, but after running along the mountain trail, even the soles of his feet hurt.

Inside ghost stories, items had kept him from even noticing that his feet hurt.

When had he gotten so used to things like that?

While wiping the sweat that had gathered along her chin, Ju-hee spoke.

“Team Leader Lee says she saw where the sixth location was right before the stream got cut off.”

The place she showed them on her phone was not very far from where they had stopped.

“And the shaman Baek Sa-rin also noticed the abnormal phenomenon and is already on her way there. We should move quickly too.”

The map marked an awkward location that was neither completely outside the mountain nor actually on the road.

If they lost him again, it really would be over this time.

Without even a moment to hesitate, they immediately started moving toward the location again, and Su-myeon finally could not hold back any longer.

“What the hell were you two thinking, coming here?”

There was no need for a long explanation.

If they had blindly jumped into this because they wanted to get involved one step further.

When Su-myeon pressed Ha-min with a cold glare, the dejected Ha-min answered as though feeling unfairly accused.

“If there are more people, it's easier to find him! We could be chasing him right now instead of wasting time on this.”

At Ha-min's somewhat rebellious response, Su-myeon waved a hand as if to say forget it.

Part of him wondered whether this was puberty, but he was also starting to get tired of it.

Thinking about it, the kid himself was insisting that he wanted to help.

At this point, hadn't Su-myeon done enough, as an adult, to try to dissuade him?

“.......”

Besides, there was no such thing as a person who could simply be rescued from a ghost story and then return perfectly cleanly to their ordinary life.

Everyone changed somehow because of something they had experienced inside.

Hadn't he already known that much?

It probably was not much different for young Ha-min or I-an.

Maybe Ju-hee and those kids all felt something similar.

There was no longer any need for them to become involved with ghost stories, and yet they could no longer stop.

'...Will I end up like that too?'

Su-myeon still had not found even a clue about his parents.

Thinking that even worrying about something like this was a luxury right now, Su-myeon continued after Jae-min again.

***

The stream was going so well!

Jae-min blindly thought that as he rapidly made his way down the mountain and ran toward the sixth tagged location.

The reason he had fled the moment he saw Su-myeon was almost instinctive, the result of his body moving before he himself had even become aware of it.

It had felt artificial, as though someone else had been controlling his body, and yet Jae-min still thought.

'Of course. It'd be such a waste to give up here...!'

Yeah, how could he possibly stop content that had the potential to blow up like this?

Besides, if he ran into those agents, they might confiscate all his footage again like last time.

'Yeah, that's why I ran.'

Even as he rationalized that his escape had been justified, Jae-min's thoughts were focused on nothing but his stream.

He would just explain that the live stream had suddenly shut off because of a broadcast error.

Thinking that, he kept running until he reached the location marked on the map.

[You have arrived at the sixth tagged location!]

[This is your sixth mission.]

[After pressing the Perform Mission button, cut off some of your hair once again and burn it.]

The place he had arrived at looked like an abandoned air-raid shelter beneath Inwangsan.

He was not even sure how he knew how to open the door to this place, but at some point, he found himself already inside.

Had he filmed the process properly?

The thought briefly crossed his mind, but he soon concluded that it did not matter.

Cobwebs and dust were tangled together everywhere, and the stale air, old enough to make breathing difficult, felt suffocating.

“......So, it wants me to burn my hair?”

The instruction to cut his hair again and burn it was unbelievably strange, but maybe because he had already sprinted at full speed?

He did not really feel scared anymore.

Anyway, once he reached the final location, it would all be over.

After setting the camera up properly, Jae-min cut off the rest of his ponytail without hesitation this time and burned it with the lighter he had on him.

Click―

The cheap convenience-store lighter produced a large flame and burned the hair.

The nauseating smell of burning hair filled the air.

“Ah, hot!”

The hair was not very long, so it flared up and vanished almost immediately.

When a spark fell to the floor and nearly caught on a clump of dust, he hurriedly stomped it out.

[Mission successful! Tagging the seventh location.]

All he had done was press the Perform Mission button. This time, he had not taken a picture or done anything else. How did it know?

The suspicion briefly occurred to him, but by now, Jae-min did not care anymore.

None of it mattered anymore.

Only the final location remained.

Only the final location remained.

Only the final location remained.

“Excuse me.”

“Agh!”

With his mind filled by a single thought, Jae-min screamed and jumped in surprise at the voice that suddenly came from behind him.

When he spun around, it was not Su-myeon who had appeared this time.

A pretty young woman was standing firmly in the entrance, breathing hard.

***

Fortunately, Sa-rin's shrine was not far from here.

Sa-rin, who had barely managed to reach the location Hwi-yeon had shared with her ahead of everyone else, stared at Jae-min in disbelief.

Jae-min had been rummaging through places that should never have been disturbed.

Things many shamans had prayed over in order to protect the spiritual energy of Seoul had all been ruined.

Because of one lunatic!

“Do you even know what you've been doing?!”

Sa-rin was not the only shaman who had noticed the abnormal phenomenon.

Naturally, many shamans had realized that something strange was happening to this land.

Sa-rin had simply happened to encounter the Governance and learn the truth.

The problems caused by ghost stories were something any genuinely spiritually gifted shaman could sense.

In their own ways, they had established various protections throughout Seoul to prevent dangerous incidents from occurring.

And this guy had gone around tearing all of them apart just to squeeze out a few more views?

When Sa-rin confronted him, Jae-min immediately spoke in a shamelessly smooth tone.

“Aw, why is such a pretty miss getting angry with me right away?”

“What are you talking about, mister? Who are you calling miss?”

Is he insane!?

Sa-rin got goosebumps all over when a man who looked considerably older than her started acting coy like that.

On top of that, he seemed to be subtly approaching Sa-rin, who was blocking the entrance, in an attempt to get outside.

Not caring whether it had any spiritual effect or not.

Putting her personal feelings into it, Sa-rin grabbed the mouth of the salt bottle she carried against her chest and flung its contents straight at Jae-min.

The coarse grains of salt sprayed out with sharp pattering sounds.

“Ah! Ow, that stings!”

“Stay back. Don't move an inch from inside there!”

After getting smacked in the cheek with a spray of salt, Jae-min reflexively stepped back.

If he tried to force his way past her with brute strength, Sa-rin would not be able to hold him.

She had been thinking she only needed to last until Su-myeon arrived.

“Song Jae-min!”

Fortunately, Su-myeon was not late and immediately came running down into the air-raid shelter.

He seemed slightly surprised to see Sa-rin had arrived first.

Han-su came in behind Su-myeon and effortlessly seized Jae-min.

“H-Huh? Bro?! Wait. You can't do that...!”

While Han-su restrained the struggling Jae-min, Cheshire, who had followed them inside, snatched the phone from his arms.

Finally, they had caught him.

Even Cheshire, who had been running around without complaint simply because Su-myeon ordered him to, let out a tired sigh.

“Whew....”

Then he handed Jae-min's phone to Su-myeon.

On the phone Su-myeon checked, the seventh and final destination had already been tagged.

“All right, tag is finally over.”

Cheshire dusted off both hands and stretched his body out.

“Come on, seriously! I told you, you can't do this! Are government agents really allowed to treat people like this? An innocent citizen like me.... Ow, ow!”

When Han-su tightened his grip on Jae-min's babbling arm, Jae-min started making a dramatic fuss.

“People who work for the government don't know they should fear the people! Ow, you're killing me!”

Ignoring Jae-min's ridiculous whining as though he could not even hear it.

Su-myeon swept the flashlight he was holding across the inside of the shelter.

The underground space that looked like an air-raid shelter was extremely dark, so an ordinary flashlight could illuminate only the immediate surroundings.

Everyone had been shining their lights at the floor beneath their feet, at the person beside them, and so on.

But when Su-myeon slowly swept the beam all the way toward the walls and looked through the interior, something unexpected came into view.

“......What is all this?”

The underground interior, which had looked like an air-raid shelter, had its walls completely covered with incomprehensible murals and writing in a bizarre hand.