Chapter 33: Possibility

Young-cheol sat in a café across from the hospital, his surgeries finished for the day.

"Are you Mr. Kim Young-cheol?"

By the time beads of condensation had begun to gather on his iced Americano, the person he had been waiting for finally arrived.

"Ah, yes. That's me. You must be Ms. Lee Hwi-yeon?"

Young-cheol rose to greet her, and she returned his greeting with a polite bow.

The person he had come to meet today was someone rather special.

"First of all, my condolences. Losing someone dear to you......"

At his words, Hwi-yeon fell silent for a moment.

For someone to acknowledge her loss immediately and offer their condolences—

She had grown so desperate that even such a small gesture felt like something worth being grateful for.

"......Yes. You said a friend of yours disappeared as well."

Young-cheol nodded gravely.

Someone precious who had vanished.

Young-cheol had come to meet Hwi-yeon, the organizer of a support group for people who had gone through exactly that.

"That's actually what I wanted to talk to you about today."

He hesitated for a moment, gathering his thoughts before continuing in a measured tone.

"Have you ever had any...... extraordinary experiences? Something nightmarish and surreal—something no one would believe even if you told them?"

Hwi-yeon appeared to consider the question.

The simple fact that she was seriously thinking about such a bizarre question was practically an answer in itself.

Realizing that, Young-cheol decided to speak first.

"I have. I was trapped in an impossible situation. There were monsters, and strange rules where breaking them could mean death."

As he spoke, Young-cheol undid several buttons on his shirt and exposed his shoulder.

The wound had not fully healed yet, and large bandages still covered much of it.

"I almost lost my career as a surgeon in that place."

But in the end, Young-cheol had returned.

Somehow, he had made it back to the real world, where he was once again going through the motions of an ordinary life that now felt emptier than before.

He could have pretended none of it had happened.

He could have simply accepted this reality and gone back to living normally.

But knowing that someone had vanished made that impossible.

He could not simply sit still.

He had to search.

He had to gather every scrap of evidence he could find.

"The problem is that no one realized I'd been gone for three days."

As Young-cheol continued, the look in Hwi-yeon's eyes began to waver.

Seeing that reaction, he pressed on without hesitation.

"And I didn't realize my friend had disappeared until after I came back. Before that, I was living as though I'd forgotten he ever existed."

At last, Hwi-yeon spoke.

"You believe that being able to recognize someone's disappearance is itself connected to those...... extraordinary experiences?"

Young-cheol nodded firmly.

Hwi-yeon thought for a long moment before beginning her own story.

"I went somewhere strange, too. In my case...... I went there with my younger brother. The brother who disappeared."

It had begun with reckless curiosity.

Her younger brother had suggested exploring an abandoned house.

A deserted mountain lodge somewhere deep in the countryside.

But the moment they stepped inside, they were swept into a completely unfamiliar place.

"It was...... a forest covered in darkness. So dense and dark that we had to rely on moonlight just to walk. It couldn't possibly have been anywhere in Korea."

Not a mountain.

A forest.

They wandered for hours without finding an end to it, and their phones could not pick up a signal.

Perhaps they had simply been walking in circles.

But even taking that possibility into account, nothing ever seemed to change.

"I was with my brother from the very beginning. We never separated."

In that place of endless darkness, something had chased them.

Some kind of unknown beast.

Hwi-yeon, apparently no more concerned with appearances than Young-cheol had been, slipped off her suit jacket and unfastened the button at her shirtsleeve.

A scar ran across her left forearm.

It looked as though something enormous had pierced clean through it.

It was difficult even to imagine what could have caused a wound like that.

Only now did Young-cheol notice that her left hand moved somewhat unnaturally.

"There were other people with us at first, but they started dying one by one."

In the end, only the siblings remained.

Hwi-yeon endured because her brother was there.

Her brother endured because his sister was there.

Neither of them could give up.

They clung to survival with everything they had.

"The last thing we found was a strange staircase."

A staircase.

Young-cheol, who had been listening in silence, interrupted.

"There was a staircase in the middle of the forest?"

"......Yes. It was...... jarring. Like a badly edited scene. Just one staircase standing there by itself, leading upward, with a door at the top."

Naturally, the siblings had been suspicious of it.

But there was nowhere else to go.

Everything around them was dangerous anyway.

In the end, they decided they had no choice but to try.

"I planned to go up first and see if it was safe."

At the time, Hwi-yeon was already in critical condition from blood loss.

Her brother, by contrast, was still relatively unharmed.

If something went wrong, Hwi-yeon intended to throw herself from the stairs.

If she was lucky, her brother might be able to catch her and run.

"Of course, I didn't really think that would work. I just...... wanted to use myself as bait. If there was something dangerous up there, I wanted it to focus on me so he would have a better chance."

Hwi-yeon climbed the staircase.

She opened the door.

And that was the end.

"When I came to, I was back here...... and my brother was already gone."

That was where Hwi-yeon's story ended.

After that day, she never saw her younger brother again.

His photographs disappeared.

The memories others had of him vanished.

Everything that proved his existence was gone.

Only Hwi-yeon remembered that he had ever existed.

"Everyone in your group who's lost someone—they've all been somewhere like that, haven't they?"

Young-cheol asked carefully.

Since she was the organizer of a support group for people whose loved ones had disappeared, he assumed she must have heard many similar stories.

"If simply recognizing that someone disappeared requires experiencing one of those places yourself, then anyone who remembers enough to attend the group should have—"

Hwi-yeon shook her head, cutting him off.

"Most of the people in our group are ordinary families looking for ordinary missing persons."

Her expression turned deeply bitter.

"There are a few who experienced supernatural phenomena like we did. But most of them eventually convince themselves that they've gone insane and stop coming."

A death-defying, impossible experience.

Something like a midsummer night's dream.

And afterward, the realization that someone had disappeared.

Only you remembered them.

Everyone else's memories of that person were simply gone.

Under those circumstances, believing that you had lost your mind was actually the more rational conclusion.

"I doubted my own sanity for a long time, too."

At Hwi-yeon's words, Young-cheol hurriedly waved his hands.

"No. I can tell you with absolute certainty that what happened to us was real."

His voice carried an intensity that bordered on agitation.

"Every person we remember was caught up in those phenomena and disappeared. And the reason we still remember them is because we experienced those places ourselves!"

Young-cheol took out his phone.

He showed her the employee ID belonging to Shin Hyeon-seok—the missing man Ju-hee had lost.

"This man is Shin Hyeon-seok. He's an executive director at a cosmetics subsidiary under Shinseong Group. He's one of the missing."

Hwi-yeon studied the image on the phone before slowly shaking her head.

"The people I'm talking about disappeared without leaving behind even a single photograph. They were erased from everyone else's memories as well......"

"Exactly. The same thing happened to this man. His company has no record that he ever existed."

Even then, Hwi-yeon only half believed him.

Perhaps he was speaking metaphorically.

Perhaps the man had simply been abruptly dismissed from his company and erased from its internal records.

It had been nearly ten years since Hwi-yeon lost her younger brother.

In that time, she had endured denial after denial.

"We entered another supernatural phenomenon and found this man there. We took this from him ourselves."

That was something Hwi-yeon could no longer dismiss so easily.

Her expression stiffened.

"How...... how could that possibly......"

Was something like that really possible?

The unfinished question was written plainly across her face.

Young-cheol answered it.

"The person who saved me—the person who got me out of that hotel—is going into another phenomenon right now to rescue this man."

Everything Young-cheol was telling her was completely unfamiliar.

And yet, little by little, Hwi-yeon's heart began to pound in a strange way.

If what he was saying was true......

If it really was true....

"You said his name was Shin Hyeon-seok? An executive director at Shinseong Group. May I look into him myself?"

"Yes. Please do."

At Young-cheol's answer, Hwi-yeon nodded and abruptly stood.

There might be a way to find her brother again.

Before she could truly believe Young-cheol, she needed to verify his story for herself.

"If we share what we know and work together, wouldn't we be able to save more people?"

Young-cheol called after her as she turned to leave.

His voice was neither particularly loud nor soft.

And yet the words struck Hwi-yeon as though they had lodged somewhere deep inside her chest.

"Is that...... really possible?"

"I think it is. If that person is involved, then yes. It's possible."

A powerful curiosity stirred within her.

She wanted to know who this person Young-cheol spoke of was.

But the stronger that desire became, the more firmly Hwi-yeon reminded herself to remain cautious.

Wasn't a person easiest to deceive when they were at their weakest and most desperate?

Especially when that desperation involved tales of supernatural phenomena.

Even in her own estimation, it sounded like perfect material for a scam.

"I'll contact you soon."

Hwi-yeon clenched her trembling hands, struggling not to let the turmoil inside her show, then left the café.

The moment she stepped outside, she raised her phone to her ear.

"Hey, it's me. Look into someone named Shin Hyeon-seok. Executive director at Shinseong Group."

***

Su-myeon felt a bolt of pain shoot through his captured wrist, as though the bones might snap.

Good God.

What the hell was that Trump Card head doing here?

Caught between the sudden shock and the pain, Su-myeon forgot even to scream.

He grabbed his own arm instead.

"Is that staff member from Baekya Land or not?!"

Han-su fired the question at him in the middle of the emergency.

Du-pal shouted that it was an absurd thing to be asking at a time like this, but Su-myeon immediately understood Han-su's intention.

"No!"

If it were one of Baekya Land's staff members, it would have appeared as an NPC in the game.

Which meant something that had no business being here had somehow followed Su-myeon into this place.

The moment he heard Su-myeon's answer, Han-su pulled an item from his Heartphone storage.

THWACK—!

A hatchet appeared in his hand.

Han-su brought the blade down without hesitation.

The Heart figure's forearm was severed cleanly at the elbow and dropped to the floor, rolling across it.

"Ngh...!"

Su-myeon flinched and tore the severed hand from his wrist.

It had only been gripping him for a moment.

Yet the force had been so immense that clear finger-shaped marks were already imprinted on his forearm.

"Are you alright?"

"Are you okay?"

"Is your arm broken?!"

All three immediately crowded around him, checking his arm.

The sensation of something's limb being severed while its hand was still wrapped around him.

The feeling of the strength suddenly draining from those fingers as the nerves were cut.

Even Su-myeon found the grotesque sensation deeply unsettling.

Still, he shook out both hands and forced himself to move past it.

"I'm fine. I'm fine! Let's just win that thing and get out of here."

More than anything, Su-myeon wanted to finish what they had come here to do and leave this place.

At least there was one small mercy.

They had already received the game coins they had purchased.

"......We have to win it with only these, right?"

Ju-hee asked, staring at the coins in her hand.

That small mercy ended there.

"..........."

They had only ten coins.