Kang Giha walked out of the hospital with his entourage. He ripped off the cumbersome cast and folded and unfolded my arm. The scissor cuts hadn’t healed, but he couldn’t afford to delay. He slipped the sturdy remote control ring onto his finger. Or so he tried to. The hand wrapped thickly in bandages felt out of place. Imsoo, who was following behind, bowed his head.
“I’m sorry, sir. Because of the smoke and poisonous gas… we couldn’t recover your fingers.”
“At least, we recovered our lives.”
His thumb, index and middle fingers were blown off, leaving him with nothing but useless fingers. ‘That gardener fucker, I’ll pay you back.’
“If anything happens to me, you’re in charge of the store.”
Imsoo looked at him with steadfast eyes. A hundred of his subordinates combined were no match for him. He had been groomed to be his successor and was now impeccable. Imsoo smiled, his face otherwise expressionless.
“Then we’ll have to wait another 30 years, because you’ll still be alive and well.”
“Of course, as long as you don’t stick a knife in my back, you’ll have to wait quite a while.”
Leaving the tasteless joke behind, they got in the car. Cocaine took a seat next to Kang Giha while the rest of the men piled into the van and waited for it to start. As he climbed into the passenger seat, Imsoo spoke up.
“By the way, I’ve been getting calls from a woman named Lim Jinhee for a while now. I took them without your permission the other day when you were out of town. I meant to tell you, but I was too preoccupied with the funeral arrangements…”
“That’s fine. But who did you say?”
“She said she was your father’s assistant in the past.”
Kang Giha belatedly recalled that name. He dialed the number on his phone. After a long ring, Lim Jinhee answered the call.
— I’ve been calling you for days, I heard you were sick, are you okay?
“Why don’t you just tell me what you need?”
She was silent for a moment in response.
— The thing I asked you about before. You said that you survived despite the screams from the telxiophe…
The woman continued.
— Whether it’s singing or screaming, the only thing a healer’s power doesn’t work on is a dead person. But if what Kang Giha said is true, then either Agraopeme was the only one in there, or Agraopeme and Telxiophe were together, or Agraopeme and Ligeia were together, or Agraopeme must have been there for your survival to make sense.
“Why?”
— The screams of Telxiophe and Ligeia are similar to how microwaves work. When you put an egg in a microwave and turn it on, the frequency and vibration causes the pressure inside to expand and burst. Agraopeme doesn’t have the power to kill, but it disrupts the frequency and vibration of killing. When the healer makes a sound, it creates a huge cone-shaped area of sound centered on her mouth, which acts as an offensive and defensive shield, respectively.
The corner of Kang Giha’s eye twitched. A sound field? Yaba screamed in the madhouse, and core members in that area were wiped out. At the time, Yaba was lying down, pressed down by his men, so the sound field must have been facing up. He was outside the room, so his eardrums only burst. If he had been inside the room with them… I shudder to think what would have happened next. And what about the day Yaba and Cocaine were castrated? If his survival necessarily required Agraiopheme’s presence, what about the villagers massacred by Cocaine?
“There were two healers at the time, and they both have the ability to kill.”
— Didn’t you say there was only one healer at the time?
“I thought so, and I witnessed one of them myself a few days ago, if you recall the Christmas murders ten years ago, but the other is the one who exterminated the villagers.”
Cocaine’s eyes fluttered slightly. He was looking straight ahead with a stoic face, but it was obvious that his nerves were directed this way. Kang Giha said.
— Of course I remember, it was a notorious murder case. But when children with killing power scream in the same room, the waves collide and the destructive power is beyond imagination. It’s impossible to survive in it. And you seem to be mistaken. The cause of death for the villagers was announced as blunt force trauma by the National Forensic Service.
“Of course I know that, but the drug reactions and skull fractures found in the bodies of the residents were not caused by that guy…”
— Blunt force trauma causes the skull to collapse from the outside in; a healer’s screams burst from the inside out under pressure. It’s not the same as a blunt blow to the skull. Oh, there was a similar case around that time. A hiker found two bodies buried in the wilderness near Seoul, and they both had ruptured skulls. A doctor or something, and they said the pressure caused the skulls to burst. They knew it was a serial killing, but they thought it might be the work of a healer.
“—!!”
His head spun. It must be the doctors who performed the castrations. He had his men secretly bury the bodies in a nearby field. When Kang Giha started to gesture with his hand as if drawing something, Imsoo quickly pulled out a pen and notebook from his briefcase. Kang Giha drew a layout in his notebook.
[① Yaba ② Young Doctor X ③ Old Doctor X ④ Cocaine
(Entrance)
⑤ Me ⑥ Imsoo]
If being farther from the sound area lessened the impact, then this location didn’t make sense. What if his memory was wrong? After the incident, Imsoo completely lost his hearing in one ear.
“You, was it your left ear?”
“Yes.”
Imsoo replied. Kang Giha slowly stared at Cocaine.
“Yeah, human memory can be unreliable.”
He redrew the diagram on the next page.
[① Yaba ② Young Doctor X ③ Old Doctor X ④ Cocaine
(Entrance)
Imsoo ⑤ Me ⑥]
If their positions were swapped and he was closer to Cocaine, both Imsoo’s left ear’s condition and his own survival would make sense. The assistant explained that the old doctor died despite being in Cocaine’s zone, he must have been closer to Yaba than he and Imsoo were, or his frail body could not have withstood the shockwave. After ending the call with the assistant, Kang Giha gritted his teeth.
“It was because we were in Cocaine’s area that we survived, not because of the ear plugs.”
Detective Park always claimed that the residents were killed by blunt force, and Kang Giha laughed at him. In fact, The one who was actually misguided was himself. Even after everything was exposed, Cocaine persisted.
“You never had the ability to kill in the first place. You didn’t kill the doctors, you didn’t kill Christmas, did you?”
Kang Giha blew a puff of cigarette smoke across the other’s stoic face. Cocaine coughed lightly.
“It’s kind of fun like playing twenty questions, isn’t it?”
He hadn’t realized there was another healer right next to him. Even if he had missed it in the test, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it in over a decade. Yaba and Cocaine didn’t get along, but they were always in the same room and pretty much stuck together. It hadn’t occurred to him that Yaba was a healer because he was always hidden by Cocaine. Kang Giha stopped thinking and turned his head. Maybe it was not that Yaba was hidden in Cocaine’s shadow…
“Did you… did you cover for him?”
Cocaine stared straight ahead without answering. Kang Giha snorted.
“So much for selling your friend to buy your freedom. Is that how you two are pitted against each other?”
If either of them were perfect healers, they would be immortal, unafraid of death. He planned to test them after he got Yaba back. A healer has to slowly give up their own lifespan in exchange for taking on someone else’s pain.
Could it be that a perfect healer, too, has to offer something of equivalent value in exchange for reviving a dead life?… No, the idea that using a healer’s power shortens their lifespan might just be a coincidence. It’s a shaky experiment to conclude based on just eight people. Perhaps it’s not the use of power that shortens their lives but that they can’t bear their fate and end their own lives. If so, then it’s just a matter of not letting that happen.
Kang Giha intended to make Paradiso his own by any means necessary. Once this was settled, he would attempt to meet with Chairman Cha quietly with the recordings. The disgusting things that madman did to corpses were captured on DVD. He would also give him the transcript of the conversation they had when he asked for a fake Cocaine to Chairman Cha.
He couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when he realizes he’s raised a venomous snake. He would make sure he didn’t live to tell the tale, but in the unlikely event that the madman refuses to hand over the store to the very end, he would have to give up on Paradiso and build a new paradise somewhere else.
With two healers, he felt like he was about to realize the dream he’d been longing for. Wasn’t this a true paradise that didn’t exist anywhere else in the world? Wasn’t that the true Paradiso…
By the way, why was the madman so quiet? Kang Giha knew he would have already noticed and attacked. The endless silence was ominous. Suddenly, he remembered the raid on Cha Yiseok’s house. He believed that Yaba would be more miserable now that he was imprisoned by a maniac who was horny for corpses. He would want to come back to him, he concluded after a war of thoughts that tormented his mind.
He was satisfied with that conclusion and had no intention of changing it—until he saw Yaba again in that house. Yaba had blossomed incomparably like never before. It was palpable, that he was perfectly protected in an atmosphere no one else could penetrate.
Suddenly, he remembered what the female assistant had said at the end of the call.
— The Little Mermaid gave up her voice to meet the prince and chose to become foam instead of stabbing the prince in the throat with a dagger. Sirens were known as sea witches who devoured sailors, but perhaps they were sincerely waiting for someone who would love them, while sitting on that rock…
Kang Giha pushed the thoughts away. It would take time to reach his destination, so he closed his eyes and tried to sleep as the car sped up.
Cocaine glared at the other man’s reflection in the windshield. Perhaps due to wandering on the brink of death for days, the boss fell asleep as soon as his head touched the backrest. Cocaine wanted to plunge a knife into his sweaty forehead, so angry and resentful it made his skin crawl. His cell phone was confiscated and he had no way to call for help. The door was locked so he couldn’t jump out either.
That was when a cell phone poked its head out of the boss’s pants. At that moment, the car shook and the phone slipped out of his pocket. Cocaine’s heart beat fast as he shifted his gaze. The two subordinates in the front seat were staring straight ahead. The boss was asleep. Biting his lip, a scab broke and he tasted iron. He quickly pulled out the cell phone, slid his hand down to his lap and typed a text, sending it somewhere. He wouldn’t give in easily. Whatever it was, whoever it was, never.
My discord server for chatting! — Link
Kang Giha walked out of the hospital with his entourage. He ripped off the cumbersome cast and folded and unfolded my arm. The scissor cuts hadn’t healed, but he couldn’t afford to delay. He slipped the sturdy remote control ring onto his finger. Or so he tried to. The hand wrapped thickly in bandages felt out of place. Imsoo, who was following behind, bowed his head.
“I’m sorry, sir. Because of the smoke and poisonous gas… we couldn’t recover your fingers.”
“At least, we recovered our lives.”
His thumb, index and middle fingers were blown off, leaving him with nothing but useless fingers. ‘That gardener fucker, I’ll pay you back.’
“If anything happens to me, you’re in charge of the store.”
Imsoo looked at him with steadfast eyes. A hundred of his subordinates combined were no match for him. He had been groomed to be his successor and was now impeccable. Imsoo smiled, his face otherwise expressionless.
“Then we’ll have to wait another 30 years, because you’ll still be alive and well.”
“Of course, as long as you don’t stick a knife in my back, you’ll have to wait quite a while.”
Leaving the tasteless joke behind, they got in the car. Cocaine took a seat next to Kang Giha while the rest of the men piled into the van and waited for it to start. As he climbed into the passenger seat, Imsoo spoke up.
“By the way, I’ve been getting calls from a woman named Lim Jinhee for a while now. I took them without your permission the other day when you were out of town. I meant to tell you, but I was too preoccupied with the funeral arrangements…”
“That’s fine. But who did you say?”
“She said she was your father’s assistant in the past.”
Kang Giha belatedly recalled that name. He dialed the number on his phone. After a long ring, Lim Jinhee answered the call.
— I’ve been calling you for days, I heard you were sick, are you okay?
“Why don’t you just tell me what you need?”
She was silent for a moment in response.
— The thing I asked you about before. You said that you survived despite the screams from the telxiophe…
The woman continued.
— Whether it’s singing or screaming, the only thing a healer’s power doesn’t work on is a dead person. But if what Kang Giha said is true, then either Agraopeme was the only one in there, or Agraopeme and Telxiophe were together, or Agraopeme and Ligeia were together, or Agraopeme must have been there for your survival to make sense.
“Why?”
— The screams of Telxiophe and Ligeia are similar to how microwaves work. When you put an egg in a microwave and turn it on, the frequency and vibration causes the pressure inside to expand and burst. Agraopeme doesn’t have the power to kill, but it disrupts the frequency and vibration of killing. When the healer makes a sound, it creates a huge cone-shaped area of sound centered on her mouth, which acts as an offensive and defensive shield, respectively.
The corner of Kang Giha’s eye twitched. A sound field? Yaba screamed in the madhouse, and core members in that area were wiped out. At the time, Yaba was lying down, pressed down by his men, so the sound field must have been facing up. He was outside the room, so his eardrums only burst. If he had been inside the room with them… I shudder to think what would have happened next. And what about the day Yaba and Cocaine were castrated? If his survival necessarily required Agraiopheme’s presence, what about the villagers massacred by Cocaine?
“There were two healers at the time, and they both have the ability to kill.”
— Didn’t you say there was only one healer at the time?
“I thought so, and I witnessed one of them myself a few days ago, if you recall the Christmas murders ten years ago, but the other is the one who exterminated the villagers.”
Cocaine’s eyes fluttered slightly. He was looking straight ahead with a stoic face, but it was obvious that his nerves were directed this way. Kang Giha said.
— Of course I remember, it was a notorious murder case. But when children with killing power scream in the same room, the waves collide and the destructive power is beyond imagination. It’s impossible to survive in it. And you seem to be mistaken. The cause of death for the villagers was announced as blunt force trauma by the National Forensic Service.
“Of course I know that, but the drug reactions and skull fractures found in the bodies of the residents were not caused by that guy…”
— Blunt force trauma causes the skull to collapse from the outside in; a healer’s screams burst from the inside out under pressure. It’s not the same as a blunt blow to the skull. Oh, there was a similar case around that time. A hiker found two bodies buried in the wilderness near Seoul, and they both had ruptured skulls. A doctor or something, and they said the pressure caused the skulls to burst. They knew it was a serial killing, but they thought it might be the work of a healer.
“—!!”
His head spun. It must be the doctors who performed the castrations. He had his men secretly bury the bodies in a nearby field. When Kang Giha started to gesture with his hand as if drawing something, Imsoo quickly pulled out a pen and notebook from his briefcase. Kang Giha drew a layout in his notebook.
[① Yaba ② Young Doctor X ③ Old Doctor X ④ Cocaine
(Entrance)
⑤ Me ⑥ Imsoo]
If being farther from the sound area lessened the impact, then this location didn’t make sense. What if his memory was wrong? After the incident, Imsoo completely lost his hearing in one ear.
“You, was it your left ear?”
“Yes.”
Imsoo replied. Kang Giha slowly stared at Cocaine.
“Yeah, human memory can be unreliable.”
He redrew the diagram on the next page.
[① Yaba ② Young Doctor X ③ Old Doctor X ④ Cocaine
(Entrance)
Imsoo ⑤ Me ⑥]
If their positions were swapped and he was closer to Cocaine, both Imsoo’s left ear’s condition and his own survival would make sense. The assistant explained that the old doctor died despite being in Cocaine’s zone, he must have been closer to Yaba than he and Imsoo were, or his frail body could not have withstood the shockwave. After ending the call with the assistant, Kang Giha gritted his teeth.
“It was because we were in Cocaine’s area that we survived, not because of the ear plugs.”
Detective Park always claimed that the residents were killed by blunt force, and Kang Giha laughed at him. In fact, The one who was actually misguided was himself. Even after everything was exposed, Cocaine persisted.
“You never had the ability to kill in the first place. You didn’t kill the doctors, you didn’t kill Christmas, did you?”
Kang Giha blew a puff of cigarette smoke across the other’s stoic face. Cocaine coughed lightly.
“It’s kind of fun like playing twenty questions, isn’t it?”
He hadn’t realized there was another healer right next to him. Even if he had missed it in the test, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it in over a decade. Yaba and Cocaine didn’t get along, but they were always in the same room and pretty much stuck together. It hadn’t occurred to him that Yaba was a healer because he was always hidden by Cocaine. Kang Giha stopped thinking and turned his head. Maybe it was not that Yaba was hidden in Cocaine’s shadow…
“Did you… did you cover for him?”
Cocaine stared straight ahead without answering. Kang Giha snorted.
“So much for selling your friend to buy your freedom. Is that how you two are pitted against each other?”
If either of them were perfect healers, they would be immortal, unafraid of death. He planned to test them after he got Yaba back. A healer has to slowly give up their own lifespan in exchange for taking on someone else’s pain.
Could it be that a perfect healer, too, has to offer something of equivalent value in exchange for reviving a dead life?… No, the idea that using a healer’s power shortens their lifespan might just be a coincidence. It’s a shaky experiment to conclude based on just eight people. Perhaps it’s not the use of power that shortens their lives but that they can’t bear their fate and end their own lives. If so, then it’s just a matter of not letting that happen.
Kang Giha intended to make Paradiso his own by any means necessary. Once this was settled, he would attempt to meet with Chairman Cha quietly with the recordings. The disgusting things that madman did to corpses were captured on DVD. He would also give him the transcript of the conversation they had when he asked for a fake Cocaine to Chairman Cha.
He couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when he realizes he’s raised a venomous snake. He would make sure he didn’t live to tell the tale, but in the unlikely event that the madman refuses to hand over the store to the very end, he would have to give up on Paradiso and build a new paradise somewhere else.
With two healers, he felt like he was about to realize the dream he’d been longing for. Wasn’t this a true paradise that didn’t exist anywhere else in the world? Wasn’t that the true Paradiso…
By the way, why was the madman so quiet? Kang Giha knew he would have already noticed and attacked. The endless silence was ominous. Suddenly, he remembered the raid on Cha Yiseok’s house. He believed that Yaba would be more miserable now that he was imprisoned by a maniac who was horny for corpses. He would want to come back to him, he concluded after a war of thoughts that tormented his mind.
He was satisfied with that conclusion and had no intention of changing it—until he saw Yaba again in that house. Yaba had blossomed incomparably like never before. It was palpable, that he was perfectly protected in an atmosphere no one else could penetrate.
Suddenly, he remembered what the female assistant had said at the end of the call.
— The Little Mermaid gave up her voice to meet the prince and chose to become foam instead of stabbing the prince in the throat with a dagger. Sirens were known as sea witches who devoured sailors, but perhaps they were sincerely waiting for someone who would love them, while sitting on that rock…
Kang Giha pushed the thoughts away. It would take time to reach his destination, so he closed his eyes and tried to sleep as the car sped up.
Cocaine glared at the other man’s reflection in the windshield. Perhaps due to wandering on the brink of death for days, the boss fell asleep as soon as his head touched the backrest. Cocaine wanted to plunge a knife into his sweaty forehead, so angry and resentful it made his skin crawl. His cell phone was confiscated and he had no way to call for help. The door was locked so he couldn’t jump out either.
That was when a cell phone poked its head out of the boss’s pants. At that moment, the car shook and the phone slipped out of his pocket. Cocaine’s heart beat fast as he shifted his gaze. The two subordinates in the front seat were staring straight ahead. The boss was asleep. Biting his lip, a scab broke and he tasted iron. He quickly pulled out the cell phone, slid his hand down to his lap and typed a text, sending it somewhere. He wouldn’t give in easily. Whatever it was, whoever it was, never.
My discord server for chatting! — Link
