Death's Incarnation
The curtain rasped along its rail with an unnaturally loud scrape. She flinched, then forced herself calm. This was her home. No one could reach her without coming through the front door, and no one would try—not while she remained inside.
“There’s an extra ten-thousand-won bill in here.”
She pressed the money from the envelope against her cheek and looked out the window. The young man was already astride his motorcycle again, weaving out of the apartment complex. Something about him—drenched in the color of blood—struck her as more terrifying than any gang boss. The terror of brutal, vicious men was real enough; she had suffered at their hands.
“Ah.”
Her hand found the burn scar without thinking, and she let out a soft sound. Yes. Fear of the gangs only went that far. This youth was different. An incarnation of death, perhaps. An ominous harbinger that promised death felt far more dreadful than any ordinary, earthly threat.
She watched Se-geon’s figure vanish, quietly traced the sign of the cross, and drew the curtain shut.
“To suffer this kind of insult… he really is a Jinma hunter.”
Sarhyuk clenched his teeth and swallowed the rage. He might not match the legendary Silvester, but he was still a vampire hunter of repute. To be treated like this… so this was what Kenneth Yang had meant by “go fuck yourself.” Fresh anger boiled up again.
There was no time for it. If he meant to establish himself in Korea, the list of tasks was endless. Because he refused to unload blood through vampire brokers, he would have to manufacture Psychedelic Moon himself and carve out sales routes. Door-to-door salesmen struggled just to move rice cookers and magnetic mattresses; peddling a brand-new narcotic would make that look easy.
He put a cigarette between his lips. A subordinate snapped a lighter and lit it. Smoke filled the cabin of the Dynasty sedan.
“Boss. Want us to take that guy out?”
“Don’t be stupid. We’re not street thugs, and how the hell do you plan to fight a monster that can butcher Jinma? There are people you simply don’t make enemies of.”
As he spoke, Silvester’s image rose in his mind: long silver hair, skin so pale and flawless not even peach fuzz marred it. The muscles were well developed yet lean and springy like a deer’s. In short, he looked less like a priest and more like a host-bar idol.
“But if that thing is a Jinma hunter, how the hell does he actually hunt vampires? Worth looking into.”
“Then what about the one next to him—Se-geon?”
“Se-geon? Ah, the young one.”
He pictured the youth. The face looked young; the age couldn’t be high. But skill? Solid musculature, controlled dosage of Psychedelic Moon, and the moment people entered the doorway he had already counted them and shifted his gaze. Fast judgment, fast recognition, excellent dynamic vision, wide field of view.
When someone spoke to him from the side, he only rolled his eyes to look—broad peripheral and lateral vision. Calluses even on the backs of his hands spoke of brutal close-combat training. The training had been unbelievably harsh.
“Whoever raised him drilled him systematically. And he reeks of blood. The kind who’s already killed everyone worth killing—I like that. Even if his raw power is still low, he’ll grow fast. Foundations are solid.”
Sarhyuk grinned.
“My type, actually. Wouldn’t mind having him on the team. Hahaha.”
Still laughing, he crushed the cigarette into the ashtray built into the car.
Se-geon was assembling a computer in his room. Until now he had lived almost like a monk, owning nothing, but information was precious. He had no interest in shopping channels or variety shows, yet he needed to stay sharp on news and rumors, and maps of Seoul plus every sort of document were far easier to keep on a computer than in books.
“Ugh. Only a year and change, and everything’s different.”
He marveled at the sheer force of Moore’s Law across eighteen months. Still, no matter how the hardware evolved, the basic paradigm of a PC never really changed. Assembly itself was simple—just tedious.
“Mmm.”
He left the hard drive formatting and looked around the room. He had bought a small townhouse near Yongin and Seoul. He had been taught that staying too long in one place invited suspicion, but thinking of Deok-yeon living in the same spot for years made the rule feel like an excuse.
The furniture was so sparse it might have come from a prison: a simple bookshelf, a bed, a wardrobe that doubled as a linen closet, and a desk. On the floor sat a table and rattan sofa the previous owner had abandoned; he rather liked them. Weapons were locked in the built-in closet of another room—stainless-steel door, solid locks that would not open to any casual effort.
“Mm. Line installation’s going to take a while.”
He set the manual down and eyed the machine. People called it the darling of civilization, the flower of IT, yet in Korea a computer was still basically entertainment gear—at least that was how a high-school dropout like Se-geon saw it. So this was a luxury. Monitor included it had cost less than a million won, but given the intended use it still counted as extravagance.
“No.”
He muttered the word and placed a standing photo frame on the computer desk. The same blunt family photograph. Taken on a summer vacation after grinding through a jammed expressway under murderous heat, finally reaching the coast. Exhausted faces of a family—the version of them closest to Se-geon’s current age. Movies always hung the most loving, harmonious family moments; why these expressions?
“Heh heh heh.”
He laughed, half-disgusted. Pure eccentricity. But a man who had already stepped off the human path was allowed one ugly hobby.
A technician arrived, hammered and clicked for about an hour, and the internet line was live. Se-geon silently cheered, Praise Korea’s IT infrastructure!, then sat down and connected to Web Finder. Finder was essentially an alliance of vampire hunters—a closed information group that charged a hefty annual fee of two million won. The intelligence they provided was worth every won.
Vampires needed blood to restore or increase their power. Drinking another vampire’s blood magnified the effect still further. So what did blood-hungry vampires do?
The feral ones attacked the first living thing they saw. Such degenerates usually had VT so low their vitality as vampires was already failing. Below ten VT a vampire’s life hung by a thread; at three or less, death was certain.
Those whose VT stayed high enough to preserve reason acted differently. If they belonged to a proper clan they simply bought human blood. But members of the twenty-four Jinma-led clans made up barely ten percent of all vampires. The rest preyed on society’s weakest: the homeless, the incapacitated, the elderly—perfect game.
Therefore, to watch for rising vampire numbers, information from the homeless was vital. When disappearances among them began to climb, vampires were almost certainly active in the area. One caveat: modern transport let some vampires travel far from their true hunting grounds to mask their territory.
“Hmm. So this is why blood prices dropped in America.”
Se-geon studied the Psychedelic Moon market rates and nodded. Half the Korean price—genuinely cheap. America offered cheap weapons and vast open land where gunfire wouldn’t bring police in minutes, so hunters had an easier time. But demand for Psychedelic Moon and vampire blood should be high there too; a gap this wide made no sense.
No—meth, heroin, cocaine are two to ten times more expensive in Korea than abroad.
Korea’s narcotics laws were strict; anyone involved in trafficking or production faced heavy penalties. Celebrities caught using drugs walked out of prison looking fresh, said “I beg the nation’s forgiveness,” received none, then launched a one-man show of “I’ll work harder!” That made drugs look trivial, yet the statutes themselves remained severe.
Web Finder’s data confirmed it: across major U.S. cities the homeless population had plummeted, and socially vulnerable people were dying or vanishing under suspicious circumstances. Newspapers mentioned the cases only in fragments; compiled, the pattern was glaring.
“A pile of society’s weak dead. The Republicans must be thrilled.”
Se-geon muttered and switched to Korea. Local data came mostly from religious groups that fed the homeless. Numerically, nothing stood out.
“Hmm.”
He spun a knife across his palm while he thought. Korea already held an excess of vampires relative to its population, yet human casualties remained low. So the vampires who had flooded in were mainly busy eating one another? With the two Jinma—Juk-yo and Chang-woon—dead on Korean soil, most had come to lap up their blood or slaughter the vampires who had followed them.
“Problem. Hit the Sangdong faction again? Comb the streets for vampires? Or pay this Sarhyuk a visit?”
Still thinking, he flicked the knife through the air.
Swish.
The sharp whistle of steel cutting wind filled the room.
In winter the homeless gravitated to subway stations. Windless, still warm with residual human heat, the platforms were among the best shelters available. When the last trains stopped they drifted inside, laid out cardboard, and slept curled like shrimp.
“Damn it, I told you I’m a law-school graduate.”
Gu, three years into street life, poured soju into paper cups and passed them around. Whenever he claimed he had finished law school and even started a master’s, the reaction was always the same.
“Quit bullshitting. Then what the hell are you doing now? Huh? You should’ve snagged a judge’s seat at least!”
Jang sipped the soju as if it were celestial soma, delighting like a child.
“Ah, shit. I sat the bar exam eight times and never even passed the first stage. That’s why I’m here.”
Gu sighed.
Fall.
Yes—that was the only word for it. Not that his life before the fall had been glorious. Like most graduates of provincial law schools, he had clawed desperately at the bar exam until he tumbled off the ladder, failed even to become an ordinary salaryman, and simply wasted away. He sometimes regretted not preparing for a job instead of the exam, yet he felt no particular bitterness about street life now.
Sleep when you want, eat when you want—what more could you ask? No promotions, no family worries, nothing left to lose. Once you decided nothing worse could happen, a strange peace settled in.
Plenty of homeless never found that peace, of course—mostly those still crushed by debt. Even here they tried anything to repay what remained. In winter those efforts usually ended in a fatal cold.
Winter was the hardest season for every one of them. Many died of cold; almost no one died of heat. Without the occasional charity groups that handed out cup noodles, rice soup, coffee, or tea at night, the frozen dead would have piled up.
“Still, you managed to score some booze from somewhere.”
Cheon smacked his lips and rubbed his hands.
“Should we climb Inwangsan and catch a snake? Soak it and it’d taste damn good.”
“As if we’d wait for the liquor to mature. Besides, the snake would catch you, not the other way around. Haigoo, bullshit! Fuck Inwangsan’s mountain spirit’s dick!”
They spat words that would have earned a sexual-harassment suit from the mountain spirit himself. Gu threw his head back and laughed.
“Keh-keh-keh. What’s a guy supposed to do with a man’s dick anyway?”
“A man’s dick? So your old lady had one too?”
“Hey now, you’ve had too much.”
“What’re you talking about? Bring me a real drink and I’ll put it away fine. So where the hell did this come from?”
“Ah, some punk kids were drinking in the park, got cold, and left. I asked for the leftover soju.”
“Keh-keh-keh. Nice work. Tonight we sleep warm.”
Fellow homeless Jang and Cheon grinned and knocked back the soju without side dishes. Then footsteps sounded on the stairs; people were coming down.
“Huh? What’s that?”
“What else? Another charity group. Aigoo, thank heaven.”