Nest of Miracles
“Hah… hah… hah…”
Wontong, Gangwon Province. Aside from the occasional city or intercity bus and a handful of private cars, the place saw almost no foot traffic. There, a vast marble building rose in ostentatious splendor. That enormous prayer house, planted in such a desolate stretch of countryside, had become the breeding ground for the miracles D Church had been performing of late.
“Hah… hah… hah…”
A man was running with the prayer house at his back. Deep into the night, beneath every desperate effort to escape and rejoin the world of ordinary people, a black terror had taken root. Terror-stricken, he ran and ran for his life.
But how far had he gotten?
Shhhk!
A sharp whistle of air cut the dark as something like a dusky disc came spinning in from behind him. The man flung himself forward in shock and ducked.
Whooom!
It skimmed past his head with a hollow rush of wind, missing him by a hair.
“Hah! Hah… uugh!”
Fog rolled in without warning. Startled again, the man hauled himself up and sprinted on. But the fog outpaced him with ease. And then—
Woooom!
The disc that had flown past came hurtling back and struck him square across the waist. Blood sprayed. His torso was nearly severed in half. His spine cracked with a wet crunch as his body folded backward on itself.
“Gyaaaaaah!”
A hideous scream tore free, but the fog swallowed even that, thickening into a dense, milky white. In that lonely stretch of countryside, the cry never reached the mountains or the fields. It simply died.
“You little rat.”
A black silhouette emerged from the mist and approached the corpse at an unhurried pace. From the dead man’s waist it retrieved a small notebook, a voice recorder, a digital camera. From the notebook it took a resident registration card, a driver’s license, a cell phone. The shadow flipped the phone open and checked the call log. Someone had been dialed only moments ago.
“Khrrr…”
The black figure heaved a long, weary sigh, then lifted the body and began smashing the recording equipment against it.
Crack!
Shards of the digital camera and its optical lens scattered across the rocks, reflecting the face of an owner already gone.
Se-gun stood atop Mangyeongdae on Mt. Samgak, drawing the clear air deep into his lungs, stirring spirit and soul awake. He did not follow any particular Daoist breathing method, yet something about the pure mountain air seemed to loosen the depression that had been gathering in a corner of his heart.
Of course, the air in Seoul—outside the Samgak range—was nothing to praise. When sunrise lit the eastern sky, the smog that had piled up overnight scattered the light into a strange, blood-red canopy. To escape that, Se-gun had begun, at some point, climbing Mangyeongdae to meet the dawn.
“Haa…”
His breath glittered like silver dust in the red wash of the sun. Thinking of it now, he remembered climbing with his brother once. He had been dragged along with his brother’s college hiking club for free—his brother’s private sorrow at having reached that age without ever finding a girlfriend to go with him. Se-gun, hauled along for no good reason, had not come out of it looking any better. Less a hike than a mountain MT, and even Se-gun—already thoroughly jaded since high school, shell and core flipped inside out—had failed to keep up with the drinking. How much of a wild free-for-all must it have been?
“Heh… heh heh heh…”
Se-gun laughed at the rising sun. Yes… if that sun looked like blood, it was only because his own heart was sick. But how did you cure a sickness like that? If he forgot everything, erased everything, turned his back on the mad moon and fled—would that heal him? He had already stepped too deep into the world of that mad moon. And whether he wanted it or not, the affairs that would drag him in seemed stacked to the ends of the earth. How many vampires had already entered Korea alone, hunting for the Jinma Jeong-ya?
Time to head down?
Hiking was a good hobby. Exercise, a clearing of the head. But the conflict remained lodged in his chest. He knew full well that his soul was growing sicker by degrees. Every time he hunted vampires, every time he poured out blood and violence, the means of violence slowly occupied the place of the original goal.
In that sense he was a man who truly hated violence. He did not shy from a fight—if anything he enjoyed it—but hatred of violence was something close to his essence. What he had meant to pursue was a trial license, a motocross license. Not this.
Whatever his own wishes, Se-gun was slowly making a name for himself in the world of the night. Cold eyes, a monster who roamed the dark steeped in killing intent and madness. By now, vampire hunters and vampires alike seemed to have some vague sense of who Han Se-gun was—mostly from how often he had trailed in the wake of the Jinma hunter Silvester.
“Maybe I’ll drop by Arjuna.”
He murmured it as he descended the sixty-degree slopes with the light, easy steps of a born mountain man. He was worried about the Jinma hunter Silvester’s condition, and curious about what had become of Deok-yeon as well.
Even setting aside Marxist readings of labor and capital as exploitation and the exploited, the relationship between worker and employer was usually that of dog and cat. Lee Jin-hye, however, genuinely liked her job at Arjuna. Thirty-eight hundred won an hour, flexible hours, and an owner she got on with. Part-time gigs like that did not grow on trees. For the past few days, though, her mental state had driven her into unexcused absence. Kim Seong-hui was fairly generous about such things, but even so, walking back in after no-shows was not something you did with a light heart.
“And my face is a wreck on top of it.”
Two days and nights of nonstop drinking—if she looked normal after that, that would be strange. Makeup was not going to cover it, and if she worked the floor like this she would only be bad for business.
“Ugh, this is all that bastard’s fault!”
She muttered it with real venom as she walked inside. Fortunately, the owner was nowhere in sight.
“Perfect.”
She changed into her work clothes at once and started cleaning. If she got some of the work done before the owner arrived, she would at least have something to stand on. Not that the owner’s personality was the sort to scold her for a few days off. Come to think of it, the owner here was remarkably easygoing. Because business was good? Or because she had a lover?
“Still, a foreign boyfriend—that’s something. The owner, I mean.”
She thought of Silvester and smirked. Both the owner and Silvester denied it to the bitter end, but if that was not dating, what else would you call it?
A boyfriend, a boyfriend… She had spent the last few days drowning that very problem in alcohol. She had been seeing a senior from her theater troupe, and two days ago it had fallen apart. Too full of himself, too arrogant—that was the reason, apparently.
“Honestly. The nerve of him.”
She ground her teeth. Then, suddenly, she heard someone enter. She had clearly put up the Closed sign, and yet the door was jingling open behind her. Startled, thinking it might be the owner, she turned—and found a young man with green partial dye standing there.
“Huh? Long time no see.”
He said it while glancing around the shop.
“Where’s Silvester?”
“Beats me.”
Lee Jin-hye dunked the mop into the bucket and shook her head. She had only just come in herself; she had no idea whether Silvester was around. Judging by the car parked outside, though, he almost certainly was.
“Hmm…”
Sure enough, Silvester appeared descending the stairs. He looked a little sleepy as he regarded Se-gun.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. You feeling all right?”
“As you can see.”
Silvester said it and patted his leg. It was the same leg Phantom had severed—and he had reattached it cleanly with a spare. Se-gun could roughly guess why the man looked so pale. Not much of his body still carried living blood. The rest was false flesh fixed in place by secret arts, magic circles carved into the body to keep that false flesh under control. Out of caution Se-gun had once researched the circles he could still remember from Silvester’s body; they had turned out to be geometric arrays rooted in numerology, rather than the Western white or black magic that called on angels.
“So what brings you here at this hour of the morning?”
“Let’s say I showed up because I had nothing better to do.”
Se-gun set a table and sat down. Lee Jin-hye made a face of pure dissatisfaction.
“We’re not even open yet. If you came because you had nothing better to do, help out a little.”
“Huh?”
“You can’t even do that?”
“No—sure. I’ll help.”
Se-gun stood and lent Lee Jin-hye a hand. The café was not large, so the cleanup was not difficult. The problem was the occult merchandise… Se-gun knew all too well how merciless Kim Seong-hui’s methods could be—she had once set tsetse flies loose to guard the shop—and he had no desire to touch those items.
“Anyway… do you know what kind of man Bill Murray is?”
Se-gun put the question to Silvester. Buying drugs from Bill Murray’s Healing School and offloading vampire blood did not exactly put him in a position to ask, but he was under commission from the man now. Investigate something called D Church, and if possible deal with it—that kind of request. Well. For Se-gun, who had nothing better to do, it would make a fine pastime. But what if he was simply dancing to Bill Murray’s tune? It was that risk that had set him to preliminary research.
“Bill Murray… one of the dealers.”
“That’s all?”
“I’m not the sort who bothers himself with every small fry.”
Silvester said it, but having taken Se-gun’s help, he could no longer dismiss the younger man as a pure greenhorn.
“I don’t know what this is about, but once you start playing along with a dealer’s game, there’s no end to it. Same as with that Corrupted last time.”
“Hmm.”
Even so, Se-gun had decided to take the job. There was a limit to how long a man could fill every day with nothing but exercise. He was not a martial artist who had withdrawn to the mountains like Choi Yeong-ui, founder of Kyokushin karate and the real-life model for Fighter in the Wind. He was a hunter, through and through. Lately he had been putting in some trial practice on a YZ-125, but without becoming a competitor or even joining a club, there was no real fun in it.
Extreme sports certainly dumped adrenaline into the system—but Se-gun’s body was already engaged in vampire hunting, which flogged the pituitary harder than any extreme sport ever could.
“All right then. Time to dig around a little.”