Chapter 150: A Beautiful Miracle

[Translator – Aren]

In the middle of the dim tracks, a small door set close to the cables along the wall showed clear marks of resistance.

As we approached the door, my brows furrowed on their own. I finally noticed something I’d missed because my attention had been drawn to the bright light and faint breeze leaking through the gap. Under the beam of my L-shaped tactical light, the door was covered in human handprints.

They had turned slightly brown, but the murky rust-red color and faint streaks running downward remained.

Anyone could tell it was blood.

Thinking back on everything I’d seen, heard, and experienced in Seoul, they were probably traces left by someone trying to keep monsters away with [Blood of the Right Hand]. Someone had been here. The moment we realized that, the pastor was the first to readjust his grip on the rifle.

-Clack.

The metallic sound of the gun’s internal parts locking together seemed unusually loud. Back when I was in the military, they told us to treat our rifles like girlfriends, which I thought was damn idiotic. Now that things had come to this, I finally understood. The gun in my hands was far more trustworthy than something as fragile as the human mind.

I readjusted my grip on the custom AR-15 as well and prepared to enter.

Tactically, tossing in a grenade would probably be the right move, but the explosion might draw monsters toward us. More importantly, while isolated somewhere without fog, we couldn’t recklessly burn through magic or our firepower.

Instead, I actively made use of the magic I had become the most familiar with.

Eyes-branch, Stage 1 [Cognitive Expansion].

This time, I wouldn’t use it at 100%. The True-Body Sarira prayer beads were excellent gear, but if I exhausted them by repeatedly reducing backlash, I’d only be limiting my own greatest strength. Versatility. The backlash for Eyes-branch, Stage 1, was a gritty sensation and burning pain. I could handle that with a few tears.

I examined any signs around me for several seconds.

I quickly swept my one good eye around, checking for lights flickering ominously, beams swallowed by shadows, or flashes of reflected light. I hadn’t put the eyepatch back on after taking it off. The tactical value of my right eye had risen far too much to just leave it covered now.

I opened the right eyelid that had been covering my dead eye as well. I couldn’t actually see through it, but it should still be enough to frighten or suppress any human or monster waiting for us.

I had to be fully prepared.

I immediately raised my left hand and pointed beside the door. The pastor caught on without me having to say it and pressed himself against the wall beside it, keeping his muzzle subtly aimed through the gap.

I did the same.

If there was a trap or ambush waiting for us when we opened that door, we might be exposed to an attack immediately. The pastor pressed his back against the right side of the door frame, while I took the left. In that position, I even activated Ears-branch, Stage 2 [Hearing Monster Voices].

There were no monsters inside, nor were any nearby.

All I could hear were faint voices far away.

Even then, I didn’t let my guard down. 

I immediately used Ears-branch, Stage 1 [Mind Reading], to check whether any humans had survived inside. The signs I’d seen through Eyes-branch, Stage 1 [Cognitive Expansion], showed me that things were fine, but in a situation this absurd, I also had to consider the possibility that my magic’s effects had been weakened.

Fortunately, there weren't any people inside either, but there was still value in having taken every precaution. Then again, did the absence of humans and monsters really mean it was safe? I felt cold sweat running down my body. I had to account for the possibility of booby traps as well.

-Ting.

A drop of water that leaked through the cracked ceiling struck the rail.

The signs showed whether there was a trap. No lights trembled ominously, and the door didn’t start opening on its own. There was no trap. Only then did I finally let out a deep breath.

-Huuff.

The distinctive sound of breathing through a gas-mask filter leaked out.

But even then, another surge of caution welled up inside of me.

There might be something like a Human-skin Tapeworm in there. I shoved the muzzle through the gap first, then glanced toward the pastor. He quietly tucked his rifle under his arm, reached out with his right hand, and gently pushed the door.

-Creeeeak…

The dim tracks, which had relied entirely on the faint lights and the L-shaped tactical light on my chest, brightened a little. Fresher air pushed through from beyond the door, unlike the stale underground air. There was a faint sour smell of garbage mixed in, but that was still better than mold.

I took the lead. 

-Clack.

Along with the heavy metallic sound of my rifle, I poked my tongue out past my lips. Even if it meant dirtying the raw rubber inside my gas mask, I needed to avoid swallowing blood. I’d heard that swallowing too much blood could make you vomit, and in our state of isolation, vomiting would cause problems in the long run.

Even if I ended up licking up the blood later because it felt like a waste, I couldn’t afford to vomit.

With that resolve, I bravely stepped inside, but…

I slowly lowered my rifle as I walked farther in.

There was no hidden danger. Nor was there a clear blue sky shining all the way down into the underground. Instead, I saw a ceiling someone had desperately covered by taping cardboard boxes, clothes, and whatever else they could find into place. What I’d thought was a bright beam of light actually wasn’t that bright at all.

It was only a bit of sunlight piercing through gaps in the cardboard where the clothes had finally torn, gotten soaked, or fallen apart, leaving holes everywhere.

Only some dust clearly drifted through the tiny patches of light falling across the floor like stains. I could also see the cylindrical staircase leading upward, the kind that spiraled around and around, but there were no signs anyone had used it.

Because of the structure of subway ventilation shafts, dust that had fallen from above had settled in a thin layer over each step of the cylindrical staircase. If someone had used it, there should’ve been signs that it had been pushed away or traces of footsteps.

Then where had everyone gone?

I found the people just as the pastor carefully closed the door.

-Creeeeak...

-Thud.

For a moment, the subway tracks and the ventilation room were sealed off from each other.

Only then, beyond the shafts of light filtering through the hole-riddled cardboard overhead, did I see shredded clothes and ragged chunks of flesh. The corpses had been mangled so badly that if not for the precariously connected blood vessels and muscle fibers, I wouldn’t even have guessed they belonged to single bodies.

Bloody handprints covered the walls, and I could even see prayers written in Korean.

The moment the pastor saw it, he let out a short but profound sigh. The words were a total mess, written in blood that had run down the wall, dried, turned brown, and become mixed with dust. But that only made the desperation behind the prayer stand out more clearly.

+Lord, protect us.+

The pastor switched his selector to safe for a moment, then began praying quietly.

"Lord, look upon the sins committed in life by these brothers and sisters who did not abandon faith in You even in their darkest hour, but look also upon their repentance…”

While the pastor prayed for the dead, I focused on something else.

Anything that could serve as a record or clue… If there were phones left behind, gathering information would be easy. I had no idea where this palace was or what the hell had happened here, but it was clearly a modern 21st-century society. In that case, most people would’ve kept their peony with them until the day they died.

-Splash.

I stepped through a murky puddle of rotten garbage juices mixed with blood. Every corpse was slumped against the wall, but strangely, none of them had heads. When I approached to search through their clothes, I realized their torsos were nowhere to be seen too.

The clothes they wore—padded jackets, vests, coats, and shirts—had been ripped and shredded so badly they looked beyond repair. When I reached out and lifted one slightly, I could feel some weight to it. Whatever had been in the pockets seemed to still be there.

Which meant there was a good chance this hadn’t been done by humans in the process of looting….

Then it suddenly hit me. None of these corpses had heads or torsos. Normally, if a corpse had been mashed into something like a hamburger patty, you'd just think of it as a lump of flesh. Now I understood why these bodies hadn’t seemed like that to me. I understood now why I hadn’t been able to think of these corpses as one.

There had been four Predator Spines lying in ambush before we found the ventilation room.

Maybe it was a coincidence, but there also seemed to be four bodies here.

It was hard to distinguish them from the shredded clothes and blood splattered everywhere, but the shapes and wrinkles of the hands buried in the garbage juices would differ from person to person.

A smooth, delicate, pale hand. A wrinkled hand with a lump on it. A rough hand with thick calluses across the knuckles. A hand wearing a ring on its ring finger.

"Tsk."

I clicked my tongue once and kept searching. If there were no monsters, ambushes, humans, or traps, then all that was left was loot farming. I reached out and rummaged around wherever pockets seemed likely to be and felt for heavy, brick-shaped objects. Turning them out one by one and catching everything in my left hand produced wallets, phones, shell casings, and a hand mirror.

The shell casings looked useless unless I planned on making ammunition myself. Still, they seemed useful for making noise, so I decided to keep them.

I kept the wallets for now so I could check for records, and I obviously took the phones as well. I could give the hand mirror to the pastor so he could use it to check blind spots, send light signals, or ward off photosensitive Predator Spines.

Having come to that decision, I was sorting through everything when I tapped one of the phone screens a few times with my thumb to check whether it still had any battery left.

The pitch-black screen suddenly lit up, illuminating the entire ventilation room. Even the pastor, who had been quietly praying, stopped midway in surprise. Needless to say, I was even more startled with the screen right in front of me.

October 21st, 2038, 9:47 AM.

Battery remaining: 86%. 

And then there were the countless message notifications that looked like they’d take forever to clear away. The indicator for 232 unread messages densely stacked across the status bar seemed to reflect the chaos perfectly.

But what stood out most was the text beneath the date, delivered under the heading Disaster Alert.

+Crisis management failure. Disaster Level: Severe+ 

+Evacuate to nearby underground facility+ 

"Baek Jemin. Did you see something?” 

"Yes, Pastor, take a look at one too.”

I handed the phone I was holding to the pastor, then started fiddling with another one. The models themselves weren’t all that different. They were just smartphones. The only differences were slightly better CPUs, slightly better memory, and a generous 5TB of storage each.

Firmly deciding to take them with us, I kept tapping through the screens without pause, searching for information I could compare.

My legs started hurting in the process, so I naturally ended up perching in a squad on top of the pile of corpses. I figured they could at least make room for the benefactor who’d freed them from Eternity. Better to sit on a human corpse soaked in blood than in garbage juices. That’s how us MZ wizards think these days.

Thanks to the deceased's heartwarming consideration. I was able to sift through the information much more comfortably and efficiently.

One of the four smartphones seemed to be broken. No matter how I tapped the screen, it kept pulling up random displays and wouldn't work properly. But the one I’d given to the pastor and the other two worked perfectly fine, and thanks to them, I could clearly establish the current time and where we were.

October 21st, 2038, 9:56 AM.

Looking through message histories, galleries, and messenger apps like KakaoTalk, then piecing together the conversations the dead had exchanged with people they knew, the full sequence of events went like this.

October 20th, 2038. Suspicions arose that Seoul’s drinking water had been contaminated. Following a flood of reports from citizens, an emergency investigation of the water supply was launched. The story first hit the news properly at 10:21, and by 11:38, breaking news reports were airing as a ban on drinking the water and restrictions on water service began.

October 20th, 2038, 7:19 PM. With the water supply suddenly restricted, some dissatisfied citizens held protest rallies condemning the decision. Agitated citizens began appearing on the streets. Medical infrastructure was particularly badly affected.

October 20th, 238, 8:44 PM. Requisitioning of bottled water and a ban on hoarding were announced. As discussions over water infrastructure continued amid economic chaos, citizens who heard the announcement began flooding nearby commercial facilities to secure bottled water. Violence broke out in some areas with reports of insufficient police manpower.

October 20th, 2038, 9:16 PM. Amid the chaos an attempt was made to arrest a man in his 20s who had tried to sexually molest someone at the scene. Even while being arrested, the suspect resisted by attempting further physical contact.

October 20th, 2038, 9:41 PM. The possibility of biological terrorism was raised for the first time.

October 20th, 2038, 10:11 PM. Discussion of the possibility of an accidental nuclear war began spreading across the internet and elsewhere, adding to the chaos. Unreliable information began to spread like wildfire…

Knowing the truth made it all the more tragic to read.

So this was how non-wizards saw things.

The pastor clicked his tongue in sympathy and looked to me for agreement.

"Reports came flooding in about strange water coming out of the taps, saying that water sources might’ve been contaminated. We know a monster that can do something like that, don’t we, Baek Jemin?”

"Human Slimes. Those Cellular Degenerative Colony Organisms must’ve contaminated the water supply. If the entire water system was contaminated badly enough for people to start reporting it, then the contamination must’ve spread long before that. And according to the records we recovered at Jangji Station, there’s an incubation period as well. Unless you’re an Ears-branch wizard, it’s hard to distinguish an infected person during that period.”

"That settles it. I don’t know whether this place is some kind of illusion, but it isn’t the reality we came from.”

The pastor declared this as he tucked the smartphone I’d given him inside his clothes.

I tapped the screen and turned off the smartphone I had before bringing up the most horrifying possibility.

"Or this could be the real reality, and the palace we’ve been living in could be inside some kind of barrier.”

"There’s no such thing as a ‘real reality.’ Wherever we live and breathe is reality. No matter where you are, all you have to do is live your life properly. That kind of nihilism is exactly what you need to be most wary of, Baek Jemin.”

I frowned at that, then slowly nodded.

Yeah. What good would taking the red pill because I didn’t want to leave the Matrix actually do me? That was a much healthier way of thinking than lazily telling myself my real life hadn’t started yet while obsessing over some ‘true reality.’

Boring philosophical thoughts weren’t really up my alley.

What I needed to do was set a goal and move toward it. My immediate goal was to escape this absurd phenomenon and return safely. And while I was at it, I could search this place thoroughly to scrap together every piece of knowledge about magic I could find and bring it back with me.

Instead, I quickly accepted the clear truths in front of me.

This wasn’t the Republic of Korea I had lived in.

This was the Republic of Korea from a world where, in 2038, the Basement Level 2 platform at Hwaseo Station on the Shinbundang Line had been completed and was in use.

And unlike our world, the Republic of Korea of 2038 had failed to make the ruthless decision and met a fate no different from extinction. This ventilation room was the result of a conscience that had refused the unethical decision to shoot all 10 million people dead.

Rotten garbage juices, brownish blood, and human corpses torn apart after turning into monsters lying everywhere. What an irony that this was the result of human morality.

And yet my heart was pounding even harder amid the horrors of 2038.

-Huuuuff—.

The breath leaking through my gas-mask filter was filled with pure excitement.

"But one thing’s certain. The 66-Society and Alteration-type magic exist here too.”

"..."

The pastor looked down at me uncomfortably, but that didn’t make the truth disappear.

"The handprints covering the door and these walls. They’re clearly traces of people trying to use [Blood of the Right Hand]. It looks like there weren’t any actual wizards around, so they all ended up becoming Predator Spines, but if anything, that makes this even more encouraging.”

"Encouraging?”

"It means a considerable amount of knowledge about magic had been made available even to non-wizards. There’s the text telling people to evacuate underground, similar to the Yellow Gaze Monsters alerts in our world. People in 2038 probably evacuated underground or into enclosed spaces as well, so let’s search for similar facilities. Sergeant Lee Jinho’s notebook said we’d have to find the fog if we wanted to escape anyway.”

The 66-Society possessed a wealth of knowledge about Alteration-type magic, but they were extremely reluctant to give information to anyone outside their control.

There had to be far more truths about magic than what we knew, yet even Father Kang Peter had only been drip-feeding us scraps, which had already been pissing me off. Even the strategy of hunting down their members had been made more or less pointless because every last one of them kept their damn mouths shut and almost never showed themselves.

At least in the world of 2038, where Hwaseo Station existed on the Shinbundang Line, they seemed to have made a different choice.

But despite the insight I’d gained, Pastor Park Yohan only looked uncomfortable. Far from getting excited over this information worth its weight in gold, he showed concern over something I hadn’t even considered.

"Baek Jemin. Aren’t you getting weirder and weirder?” 

"Weird?”

"People are dying, so what the hell is with you?”

I blinked at him for a long while after hearing that, then grabbed the chin strap of my gas mask with my left hand and slowly pulled it up. My skin, freed from the raw rubber, met the moldy, humid air unique to this underground space, but even that was enough to remind me what it felt like to breathe.

I gently closed my eye.

-Sssup, haaah…

The smell of rotten garbage juices mixed with decaying blood, the dusty scent of an old study, and even the distinct damp, musty stench of my poncho. All of it reached my nose and snapped my mind awake. There might not be any Alteration-type magic associated with smell, but that didn’t mean the sense of smell was unimportant in mysticism.

Smell was a sense that shaped not only taste, but could also the mind through scent and led it toward mysterious visions.

If anything, wasn’t it less a human sense than a staircase for reaching the mystical?

And just as a staircase wasn’t a one-way street, it was also a sense that rebuked humans who tried to ignore reality while staring only at endlessly noble and sublime ideals. I smelled the acrid stench of gunpowder, the reek of blood, rotting trash, even my own desires and ugliness.

-Rustle.

I pulled the gas mask down again.

My one remaining eye, my left eye, seemed especially clear and clean as it looked out at the world. 

I looked up at the pastor like that and willingly met his gaze.

"Fine. I’ll bawl my eyes out whenever I see people dying.”

"Ugh. You twisted little bastard.”

"Let’s just call me honest, okay?”

By graciously yielding, Baek Jemin, the embodiment of Confucian order and seeker of social harmony, successfully patched the cracks and conflict between us.

After that, I took over for the reluctant pastor and shook out the clothes to collect whatever supplies I could find. Emergency rations or bottled water, just in case. Only about a day had passed since the disaster began, so there should still be things left behind.

The infrastructure should still be relatively functional as well.

The problem was how long that infrastructure would keep functioning properly with the streets empty. How long could it maintain enough services for a comfortable life? A week at most, maybe? Even being generous, three months would probably be the limit.

And although we didn’t know exactly what was happening overseas, things were already bad enough that there probably wasn’t even the public will or incentive to stop a nuclear strike. If I wanted to move quickly, I had to throw away my flimsy sense of morality and know how to search corpses.

Fortunately, my stomach has gotten incredibly strong lately, so I managed to screw some blood-soaked chocolate,Honey Butter Almonds,ColMc canned drinks, and even a canned drink calledCedar Bud Drink. The pastor, who had always hated this kind of thing, looked even more disgusted than usual.

"That’s not from our world, right…?”

"Must’ve survived this long because it’s such an acquired taste. Better than having nothing, so I’m taking it.”

"Hah. Fuck. Fine. Take it, take it.”

With no other choice, the pastor kept letting out heavy sighs while gathering up the remaining smartphones. He turned them all off and left only one powered on, apparently planning to rotate between them and use them as clocks.

"There might still be survivors or government agencies trying to get things under control. If the phones are showing that communications are available, then the cell towers haven’t been completely wiped out. Doesn’t look like there was shelling or some meticulous sabotage campaign like in our world.”

"I guess that’s just how a normal country acts."

Compared to some lunatic country that, all to stop monsters, started restricting traffic in a city of 10 million people months in advance, ran AI bots to manipulate public opinion, secretly cut off cell towers, shut down the power and water all at once, then started shelling the palace and blowing up every supermarket and department store, this one was much more like an actual country.

I’d gone on about their ruthless decision before, but thinking about it again, it really had been totally insane.

I was stuffing the food and cans I’d gathered into the cargo pockets of my pants when a thought suddenly crossed my mind.

"Pastor. Didn’t Lee Sejun, Go Ryeoha, and Hamza say they were going to explore the subway?”

"Hm? They did.”

"Do you remember when they went in?”

"That’s…”

I pulled Sergeant Lee Jinho’s notebook from my chest pocket, where I’d shoved it beside my L-shaped tactical light.

For a lowly gun wizard, the man had been impressively spirited. The fact that he’d kept himself sane with a few drug injections and left behind useful records made it obvious he possessed the spirit of a true Supreme Archmage.

But I had my doubts about how Sergeant Lee Jinho managed to leave those records at all.

No matter how impressive a gun wizard was, there were limits. Even a Great Archmage like myself had pushed his vigilance to the absolute limit down here. Could one gun wizard really have gone in alone and made it back alive?

Had he even gone in alone to begin with? A soldier?

Our Muslim friend who could use [Angel’s Intuition] had been making a huge fuss, and the military command seemed to know the underground was incredibly dangerous and had apparently made several attempts to explore it on its own. So why hasn't any detailed information gotten out?

At the very least, it should've been shared with us Supreme Archmages, the strongest assets outside the blockade line.

-Impossible things happen.

I opened Sergeant Lee Jinho’s notebook and reread the rambling entries scribbled without any real order.

Every time my right hand, soaked in garbage juices and blood, turned a page and left another stain behind, the dry rustle of paper echoed through the ventilation room. As dust drifted lazily into the air, the crooked handwriting gradually grew steadier.

-Sorry.

-Need to find the fog.

-Sorry.

-Dream. Promise. Question. Answer.

Meaningless entries repeated over and over. The handwriting was so terrible that I hadn’t looked closely before, but once I barely managed to make out that some of it actually said sorry, I started noticing more things I’d missed.

Once I could distinguish the writing from the symbols, I saw markings scattered throughout the notebook.

I could recognize them right away.

A V shape. The Cuneiform Grimoire.

Overlapping semicircles. The Double-Semicircle Grimoire.

A heart shape split horizontally in half. The Bisected-Heart Grimoire.

A symbol of a tightly curled tail spiraling inward toward a circular dot at the center. The Spiral-Tail Grimoire.

Finally, I carefully examined the words written in one corner of a page stained with tears. This wasn’t Baek Jemin-style speed-reading. This was Baek Jemin-style detail reading. There were signs that someone had deliberately folded the corner over to keep it hidden.

"This..."

Before I knew it, the pastor had come right up behind my shoulder and was looking down with me. His expression twisted like some wrathful Demon.

Seeing his eyes contort viciously behind the lenses of his gas mask was incredibly unpleasant, but I understood how he felt, so I generously let it slide. He had every reason to react that way. There was no way one amazing gun wizard had simply escaped this absurd phenomenon on his own.

Reality was cruel.

We looked at the note written in one corner.

-Escape impossible without a sacrifice.

-Thump.

I closed the notebook. 

In 2028, the military command of our world had already sent troops to explore the subway, and some Supreme Wizards had been among them. They’d probably deployed a tremendous force, and then they forgot about it. because they had been forced to forget.

As a result, the troops and Supreme Archmages they sent in still hadn’t escaped.

There was only one reason.

Going into the fog wasn’t enough to escape.

People hoping for some grand, beautiful miracle would want a heroic tale. But even they would understand once they thought about it rationally.

Compared to an amazing gun wizard getting lucky and escaping, the idea that he shot one of his comrades as a sacrifice and successfully escaped was far more believable.

I couldn’t help glancing at the Double-Semicircle Grimoire the pastor was carrying.

If the locals of 2038 knew this too…

The pastor’s eyes met mine.

Neither of us said anything. We simply stood up.

We’d already wasted too much time, so we opened the door leading back to the tracks. We couldn’t risk exposing ourselves when we had no idea what was waiting aboveground. Subway ventilation shafts were usually located near sidewalks or major roads, which would make it easy for monsters to spot.

-Creeeak…

The dim subway tracks welcomed us again.

We were returning with more than we’d had when we came in, but there was clearly something we had lost as well.

Before raising his rifle, the pastor absently felt around over his poncho raincoat.

I didn’t ask.

Whether what he was searching for was his Bible or the Double-Semicircle Grimoire.

Only the pastor himself would know.