Chapter 83: Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (4)

[9. There is only one known escape method. Going upward through the stairs and door that appear at set intervals. No other method has currently been discovered.]

The day Seung-min first met Mu-yeon.

Looking back on that day, the story goes back more than ten years.

It was shortly after Seung-min and Hye-won had first entered this ghost story.

There had been no lies in the old story he told Su-myeon.

At the time, he and Hye-won had been dating when they visited Mimi Lodge and became caught up in the ghost story.

As the two of them wandered desperately through the mountain while being chased by monsters.

“Are you all right?!”

They met Mu-yeon.

Mu-yeon came running through the underbrush and skillfully kept the ‘wolves’ at bay.

His young face, barely old enough to be considered an adult, somehow inspired a strange sense of trust.

“Take this, at least.”

He readily handed them a wooden spear.

The weapon they accepted from him.

After completely driving off the wolves, he calmly introduced himself to the two people who were still bewildered.

“Those things are stupid.”

A younger brother who had been younger, but dependable.

“My name is Lee Mu-yeon. Hyung, noona, looks like you haven’t been here long?”

He was clearly young, but he had a natural talent for leadership.

When they followed him at his invitation, there was a small camp there.

A little over a dozen people had gathered and established their own rules and a measure of stability.

The camp he had built gradually grew as more and more people arrived.

“Doesn’t it seem like the surroundings change as more people gather?”

Little by little, insects and mountain birds began to appear around them.

During the day, the women gathered edible plants while the men went hunting for birds.

Everyone was searching for some way to escape, so their camp kept relocating as they moved.

Someday, we’ll reach the end of this mountain.

Back then, that was the hope we held onto.

We never doubted that every passing day was bringing us closer to escape.

“Mu-yeon, shouldn’t we check what’s at the top of those stairs?”

One day, Seung-min had asked that while looking at the suspicious stairs and door.

He could never forget Mu-yeon’s expression at the time.

“If you go in there, you’ll never come back.”

His eyes had turned so pitch-black they seemed hollow.

His words had been so firm that it was almost frightening to imagine what emotions lay behind them.

“Then we shouldn’t go.”

“Right, right. Come on. Let’s leave that suspicious place alone and do our best again today.”

The others forced themselves to smile and cheer him up.

The boy who had spent the longest time here.

They did not know everything about what had happened to him, but no one readily asked.

The truth was that they were a little afraid of what kind of answer might come back.

Several months passed like that.

“...I feel so sick. I really, really can’t keep going.”

“Hye-won noona looks really bad. Should we rest today?”

“I’m sorry, Mu-yeon....”

Something began to go wrong with Hye-won.

At first, they thought she had simply eaten something that did not agree with her.

But her condition grew too serious to be dismissed as such a simple symptom.

Around then, another middle-aged woman noticed.

“Hye-won, are you pregnant?”

It was a blessing like a curse.

In front of Hye-won, whose face had gone completely pale, Seung-min pretended to be endlessly happy.

He told her not to worry, that he would save her even if he had to carry her everywhere on his back.

“I’ll protect you no matter what. So don’t worry about anything and just think about yourself.”

That was what he said, but Seung-min was actually afraid.

What are we supposed to do now?

Can we get out of here before the baby is born?

And then, that person appeared.

‘......An old woman?’

Grandma. They met the old woman everyone called that.

Even now she looked well over ninety, but she had looked exactly the same when they first met.

She looked as though a single monster could swallow her whole if she were alone.

And yet, as if to prove them wrong, she lived peacefully in a small cabin.

Her garden was full of vegetables and grains they had not seen in ages, along with all kinds of spices they had gone without for so long.

How on earth had she survived alone?

Everyone wondered, but she did not tell them.

“I’d like you youngsters to leave tomorrow.......”

But Hye-won apparently could not give up that easily.

Revealing that she was pregnant, she clung to the old woman’s feet and sobbed.

“Please, please save us. Please save our child!”

As the old woman watched Hye-won cry out like that, she whispered something devilish to her.

“You only need to offer an appropriate sacrifice to Him. Increase the number of wolves that sustain the vitality of this forest.”

Learning that infection could be transmitted through being bitten by the monsters.

Beginning to call those monsters wolves.

And learning that sacrificing the few for the many was effective.

That was when the truths the old woman revealed began to burrow into everyone’s hearts like darkness.

“No, no. That’s wrong! Do you seriously think that makes any sense?!”

Mu-yeon strongly opposed those words.

At first, Seung-min had agreed with Mu-yeon as well.

No matter what, surviving by sacrificing someone else?

Everyone gathered there thought that was wrong too.

They had spent months enduring hardship together without giving up hope.

They had not survived together all this time just to kill one another like this.

But.

“Wolves! Wolves are here!”

“How.... Everyone, come this way!”

Then one day.

The day wolves avoided every trap and attacked the camp.

While fleeing from the wolf monsters, they lost everything they had gathered until then.

The food they had stored, their supplies, their medicine.

They abandoned everything and barely escaped with their lives.

And where they eventually arrived after fleeing.

The old woman was there.

“You must offer Him a sacrifice.”

Unless you wanted to be the next one to die.

That was what had to be done.

As the situation became increasingly extreme, people eventually began to change their minds.

Mu-yeon had saved people through countless dangers, but there had still been many he failed to save.

Compared to him, the mere fact that the old woman was still alive proved just how effective her method was.

“......They really aren’t coming.”

In fact, after this attack, the wolves vanished for a period proportional to the number of people lost.

Meanwhile, Hye-won’s stomach had grown visibly larger.

“No matter what, how can we send someone out as a sacrifice? Is surviving like that really worth anything?!”

Mu-yeon opposed the sacrifices to the very end.

And everyone else tacitly agreed to them.

Once things reached that point, people began making selfish rationalizations.

If we just get rid of Mu-yeon, then we can survive by offering sacrifices, right?

“In the end, you failed to protect them anyway, didn’t you?”

“Exactly! Instead of going on about escaping together, what if we’d built houses during all that time?!”

“And because we kept moving around, we never even had a chance to farm properly!”

“Right, right! If we’d planted something instead of wasting time like this, we could’ve been living comfortably!”

Those opinions began to gather.

The point at which people who had felt uneasy suddenly began protesting against Mu-yeon with one voice.

“If we want to survive, that guy has to be gone.”

That person was Hye-won.

Watching all of it unfold, Seung-min could do nothing.

Cowardly as it was, the most important thing to him now was his wife and the baby inside her.

If he could protect them.

Wasn’t it worth doing even this?

“How can you still call yourselves human?! How could you...!”

They tied Mu-yeon’s arms and legs and gagged his mouth as he shouted.

As we cast him out of the group, we established roles and rules at the same time.

Those of us gathered here would act as hunters, maintaining and protecting the surroundings in order to safeguard the community.

Among those who violated that shared goal and among new arrivals.

Some would be offered as sacrifices to maintain the community.

“...!”

Mu-yeon’s final gaze as he was abandoned in the forest, his mouth gagged.

Seung-min would never forget that look for the rest of his life.

And when the hunters returned, this was what they said.

With his limbs bound, he had been thrown away, bitten apart, and in the end.

“That bastard turned into a black wolf with another eye on its forehead.”

A wolf far larger than the others, with an exceptionally imposing appearance.

They said that ‘He’ must have been especially pleased.

That the sacrifice had been successfully offered.

In front of those people, Seung-min laughed through his tears.

Because he thought his child and wife would be safe for a while.

“...Ha, haha.... That’s a relief....”

That was the last time Seung-min saw Mu-yeon.

***

The enormous wolf that had suddenly appeared had pitch-black fur and the appearance of a genuine wolf.

Except for the fact that it had three eyes, it looked no different from a wolf in reality.

“......What are you talking about?”

Hwi-yeon asked Seung-min in a trembling voice.

“Why, why did you say my brother’s name when you saw this wolf? Why...!”

Why is this wolf standing in front of me like it’s protecting me?

Hwi-yeon’s thoughts spiraled into an ominous possibility.

The black wolf stared quietly at Hwi-yeon before surveying the surroundings.

Hye-won lay motionless with her neck torn open.

She was not breathing either, but the blood gushing from her wound had begun to lessen.

Probably.

‘Her heart has already stopped.’

Seung-min could not answer Hwi-yeon’s question and simply breathed heavily.

The child being restrained by Han-su seemed exhausted as well, doing nothing but panting harshly.

Only after confirming the entire situation did the black wolf lower itself in front of Hwi-yeon and quietly lie down.

The acrid smell of burning drifted toward them on the wind from afar.

They would need to start moving again soon.

‘Damn it.’

Hwi-yeon had the black wolf blocking her path.

Han-su was holding onto the child.

Neither was in a situation where they could easily leave.

Bzzz-

Su-myeon flinched when his phone suddenly vibrated at that exact moment and checked his pocket.

He pulled it out without thinking, and the words filling the screen immediately caught his eye.

That doll was originally human too.

Those who remain inside a ghost story for too long and are influenced by it change into forms belonging to that place.

A story devours humans and attempts to claim the possibilities they possess as its own.

However, those who retain a sense of self even after their form has changed are different from ordinary monsters.

Remember.

The essence of a human is not the body, but the mind.

As Su-myeon read, he remembered at the same time.

The question he had previously asked Dokkaebi had been about Cheshire’s true identity.

The answer that had taken several days to arrive was quite shocking.

Cheshire, whom he had assumed was simply something from inside a ghost story, had once been human.

“.......”

And the black wolf Su-myeon could see before him as well.

It was clearly protecting Hwi-yeon with a will and sense of self of its own.

In front of Hwi-yeon, who was trembling with emotions difficult to put into words, the blood-soaked wolf lowered its tail like a docile puppy.

The smoke and wind were growing stronger.

The spreading flames had now expanded in every direction until it was difficult to tell where they were headed.

“Are you Lee Mu-yeon?”

Su-myeon immediately walked down the stairs and asked the black wolf sitting obediently in front of Hwi-yeon.

The black wolf did not answer his question.

Its eyes remained fixed only on Hwi-yeon, as though everyone else meant nothing to it.

As though receiving recognition from Hwi-yeon alone was all that mattered. Several seconds passed that felt like an eternity.

“N-No way.... No way.......”

Hwi-yeon reached toward the black wolf with a trembling hand.

The black wolf slowly closed all three of its eyes and rested its head against her hand.