Chapter 36: Return (1)

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The basement of the abandoned building in front of Sadang Station.

Sudden noises echoed through the gloomy structure that, until moments ago, had been utterly silent.

"I really thought I'd die this time!"

"Is everyone alright? Is anyone injured?"

Du-pal and Han-su gasped for breath as they looked around.

"Haaah.... Haaah......."

Su-myeon, too, sank to the floor, panting as though he might collapse at any moment.

With the effects of the briny salt candy gone, his lungs felt as though they were shriveling inside his chest, leaving him desperately short of breath.

The stale smell of dust pressed in from every direction. Clammy sweat soaked his entire body like a cold fever.

The discomfort made it feel as though the air itself were choking him, but none of that mattered.

If anything, it only made the fact that he had survived feel more real.

"Hnngh...."

Su-myeon felt a wave of relief as he watched Ju-hee clutch Hyeon-seok and sink to the floor, sniffling through her tears.

Hyeon-seok kept trying to push her away, looking both irritated and uncomfortable.

They had returned safely.

Back to the real world.

Once he had barely caught his breath, Su-myeon spoke in a dry, cracked voice.

"Now, can we get some explanations......?"

At his words, Ju-hee made a vague motion that could have been either a nod or a shake of the head.

"J-Just a moment. Just a moment...."

She clearly wasn't in any condition to explain anything yet.

Su-myeon assumed it was simply the overwhelming relief of having returned alive together.

But a moment later, he shot to his feet.

Something was wrong with Hyeon-seok.

"Nngh...."

When Su-myeon moved closer to the groaning man, he saw that Hyeon-seok's entire body was covered in wounds.

It looked as though every inch of his skin had blistered, cracked, and split open.

From the crown of his head to the tips of his toes, his skin was torn and bleeding.

Blood streamed from everywhere, soaking through the old-fashioned suit he wore.

It seemed to be a side effect of his body—waxified and hardened until moments ago—suddenly reverting to flesh.

Su-myeon urgently pulled out his phone.

"I'll try contacting Young-cheol first!"

* * *

Hwi-yeon listened intently to the voice of her team member over the phone.

There was an obvious reason she had worked hard enough to become the youngest section chief.

Would she finally be able to learn something about her sibling if she climbed this far?

She had worked with that single thought in mind, pushing herself with the resolve to die trying.

"......So, this executive director named Shin Hyeon-seok."

She had once dreamed of becoming a police officer.

Over the past ten years, the fruits of her efforts had carried her all the way to her current position.

And yet she still had no clue where her sibling was.

Nothing.

Not a single lead.

She had found absolutely nothing.

"......Ah, yes.... Understood, for now...."

But from this moment on, Hwi-yeon felt that something had changed.

The employee who had looked doubtful only moments earlier now seemed completely bewildered.

After hanging up, he sat there in a daze for a moment before speaking.

"Executive Director Shin Hyeon-seok. He... apparently does exist. They say they don't know why they told us he didn't just a moment ago......."

In less than five minutes, their answer had completely reversed.

They had insisted he did not exist.

Now they were casually changing their story and saying that he did.

Brazenly.

Shamelessly.

As though there were nothing strange about it at all.

"It's too strange to dismiss as a simple mistake.... No. What is this?"

They were dealing with an intelligence officer from the National Intelligence Service.

It wasn't as though they didn't know who was asking, nor were they unaware of the gravity of the inquiry.

Would anyone really play games with an NIS intelligence officer investigating the financial movements of a conglomerate tied to matters of national interest?

Absolutely not.

Watching her team member speak with a bewildered expression, Hwi-yeon picked up her phone.

[Kim Young-cheol (Missing Persons Contact)]

The line rang.

Just before the call was about to disconnect, Young-cheol answered, sounding somewhat breathless.

'I'm sorry! Could you call back later? They say they've found Shin Hyeon-seok.'

And then Young-cheol abruptly hung up.

In his own way, he had probably tried to convey the most important fact as quickly as possible amid the urgency.

But that single brief yet decisive sentence made Hwi-yeon feel as though she were losing her mind.

Ten years of relentless effort.

Ten years that had produced nothing but emptiness.

And now, as though to compensate for all of it, evidence she could almost reach out and touch was materializing before her eyes.

The expression of the team member who had overheard the call turned grave as well.

"......Don't tell me, is this... that? The sibling you've been searching for, Team Leader...... are they in a similar situation......?"

The story of Team Leader Lee Hwi-yeon's search for her sibling was fairly well known within the agency.

But a sibling she had failed to find even after joining the NIS?

A spy.

Mental illness.

Some elaborate hazing ritual for new recruits.

Every imaginable rumor had circulated about that missing sibling.

"They can... come back."

A person could disappear naturally from everyone's memories—

And then return.

It was possible.

Though that only applied to people who had already known of the missing person's existence.

For those who only became aware of the person after the disappearance, unnatural gaps remained.

And those very inconsistencies now felt like proof that what was happening was real.

Hwi-yeon immediately grabbed the jacket she had set aside.

"I'm heading out."

"W-Wait! Team Leader!"

Hwi-yeon hurried out while calling Young-cheol again.

* * *

After hearing what had happened, Young-cheol immediately took an ambulance from his hospital and headed for Sadang.

His reasoning was simple.

Trying to explain the situation at another hospital would be far too troublesome.

Fortunately, both the ambulance and Young-cheol arrived quickly.

"Good lord."

Young-cheol was shocked once at the sight of the group, drenched in sweat and completely disheveled.

"My God, what.... Hey! Are you alright? Can you see this clearly?"

Then he had no choice but to be shocked a second time when he saw Hyeon-seok, bleeding from his entire body.

Inside the ambulance on the way back to the hospital, Young-cheol examined Hyeon-seok from every possible angle.

For the moment, everything except his skin appeared largely intact.

But it was far too early to let their guard down.

The moment they arrived, they began running every test available.

Blood work.

CT scans.

MRI scans.

While they waited for the results of the various examinations the hospital could perform, Su-myeon finally heard the full story from Ju-hee.

"Hold on—he wasn't your boyfriend, but your younger brother?"

Ju-hee recoiled in disgust at Su-myeon's words.

"What.... No! We had reasons for pretending to be strangers in public."

"For starters... you two have different last names."

It was a question everyone had been curious about, but no one had found the right moment to ask.

Du-pal, who was lying with an IV in his arm while claiming all that running had completely drained him, added his own question.

At that, Ju-hee finally nodded, as though admitting they had good reason to misunderstand, and began explaining in more detail.

"Our parents divorced when we were young."

Ju-hee had followed her mother to Jeju Island and taken her mother's surname.

Afterward, the siblings had stayed in contact, secretly exchanging news behind their parents' backs.

"Shin Hyeon-seok's grandfather is the chairman of Shinseong Group."

The divorce had completely cast Ju-hee and her mother out as strangers to the family.

But that wasn't the case for Hyeon-seok.

"When I was little, my name was Shin Ju-hee, too."

If things had gone so far that a child's surname was changed, there was no way the divorce had been amicable.

And yet after all that, the siblings had somehow reunited as an ordinary employee and an executive director within the same company?

That was quite a turn of events in itself.

"Nobody in the family is on Hyeon-seok's side. His stepmother only supports his half-sibling, obviously."

A chaebol family tearing itself apart over management shares.

In that world, Hyeon-seok had been fighting tooth and nail every moment simply to hold on to his position.

That was precisely why Ju-hee had secretly joined Shinseong Group.

The siblings had struck a kind of deal.

They agreed to work together.

Ju-hee pretended to be an ordinary employee while quietly siphoning off bits and pieces of information and passing them on to Hyeon-seok.

"Man, that's a whole drama plot right there."

At Du-pal's admiring remark, Ju-hee let out a short sigh.

"I'm only telling you all because it's you. You absolutely cannot breathe a word of this to anyone!"

At last, everything made sense.

Su-myeon was nodding when another thought occurred to him, and he turned toward Young-cheol.

"By the way, is it really okay for us to be camped out here like this?"

This was, after all, the office of a professor at a university hospital.

Even if it was already afternoon, was it really alright for all of them to occupy the room like this?

Young-cheol nodded at Su-myeon's concern.

"It's fine. My shift is actually over."

With that reassurance, everyone relaxed a little and continued talking.

Everything they had experienced in Baekya Land unfolded like some bizarre adventure story.

But in the end, there was one fact that left everyone more stirred than anything else.

"In any case, you really did find someone who had vanished and bring them back."

Young-cheol spoke in a voice thick with emotion.

The fact that Hyeon-seok had returned meant other missing people could return as well.

"Trying to rescue people at random is far too risky. Ideally, we'd need to determine which ghost story our missing person disappeared into."

Even in that hopeful moment, Su-myeon voiced the most objective concern he could think of.

The possibility of rescue now existed.

The problem was finding the people who needed rescuing.

KNOCK KNOCK.

Just then, someone suddenly knocked on the door.

"This is Lee Hwi-yeon."

A woman's voice, slightly low in tone.

Young-cheol answered immediately, as though he had been expecting her.

"Ah, come in!"

Assuming this might be one of Young-cheol's personal visitors, the group began rising from their seats, exchanging uncertain glances.

But Young-cheol gestured for them to sit back down.

"So, this is—"

"Has Shin Hyeon-seok returned?"

The woman named Hwi-yeon, dressed in a crisp suit, cut Young-cheol off with a blunt question.

Ju-hee immediately furrowed her brow.

"And who are you—"

"Has a missing person returned?"

Hwi-yeon cut her off as well, pressing the question.

But—

A missing person?

Was there someone else who could recognize that Hyeon-seok had been missing?

The group still had no idea what Young-cheol had discovered while they were inside Baekya Land, so their expressions turned confused.

Ju-hee, already wary because of her family's circumstances, fixed Hwi-yeon with a sharp glare.

Young-cheol, the only person who could clear up the misunderstanding, gestured for both sides to calm down.

"First, let me explain the situation."

In Young-cheol's eyes, Hwi-yeon and Su-myeon possessed strengths that complemented each other perfectly.

"Let me start with the reason I arranged this meeting. It's simple."

Young-cheol pointed toward Su-myeon.

"This person knows how to pull missing people out of ghost stories."

Then he pointed toward Hwi-yeon.

"And she is someone who can help in the real world."

In Young-cheol's mind, the central problem was the same.

Which ghost story contained the person they were searching for?

A definitive answer would be difficult to obtain.

But if they pooled what each of them knew and experienced, there was a chance they might uncover a lead to the missing person hidden somewhere within those accounts.

Just as Su-myeon, despite knowing nothing about Shin Hyeon-seok beforehand, had brought back a clue about him from inside a ghost story.

"Given what we're trying to accomplish, I think we'd all benefit from sitting down and having a proper conversation, don't you?"

Like the sharp doctor he was, Young-cheol made the purpose of the discussion clear from the very beginning.

With some of the mutual wariness finally easing, Su-myeon spoke first.

"So, you're Ms. Lee Hwi-yeon."

In truth, Su-myeon already knew exactly who Hwi-yeon was.

UTG: Records of the Bottomless Pit.

She was the protagonist of that special episode.