The Concrete Labyrinth
Ryeo harbored a fierce loathing for her own kind — those who lived on nothing but rage and hatred. Madness, destruction, the will to kill… These were the destructive tendencies that surfaced in every member of her race, and she herself was, from time to time, ruled by those same dark passions. It was much like the way a human racked by thirst reacts with wild excess to any outside stress.
Even the finest of characters turns irritable when the body is in pain. How much more so, then, for a vampire who must kill and drink blood — a creature already possessed of terrifying power more than enough to satisfy that destructive instinct.
Yet even under the worst of conditions, those who cannot master their own emotions have no right to eternal life. False immortality or not, the undying vampires who endure the long centuries are expected to carry themselves with a dignity befitting that span of years.
But none of that mattered to her anymore. She would not let Gyeong's death — a death offered for the sake of their kind — be wasted. The problem was that finding a single vampire hunter in this vast city was all but impossible. Information bought through difficult channels evaporated by the following day. She was herself an illegal immigrant, so legitimate channels were closed to her, and she had no means to pay the illegitimate ones.
"I'll have to get the information from Tetra Anax."
In this concrete labyrinth called Seoul, she could not even find her way properly. This was neither the province of her birth nor a homeland where her language was spoken. Whether vampires had any concept of home was beside the point; she was a stranger to the geography. And so she made for the Seoul sales office of Flex Medical's Korean branch.
Even a vampire's means of transport differed little from a human's. At quitting time she boarded a subway car transformed into hell on rails and rode toward the forest of colossal towers where Flex Medical and other conglomerates clustered. Work hours were already over; the city center should have quieted somewhat. Instead, with nightfall, it changed its face into a pleasure district and greedily swallowed people whole.
After leaving the station, Ryeo wandered a while among the giant buildings. Fortunately, the Seoul outpost of Flex Medical's Korean operations stood in a place that stood out even amid that forest of towers. But the moment she looked up at that immense structure, her breath caught. It was the same crushing pressure she felt walking across asphalt still holding the day's fierce heat on a midsummer tropical night. She was feeling it again.
Would that arrogant king who stood atop that vast building and ruled both humans and vampires — Tetra Anax — grant her request?
"Not a chance."
She injected herself with resignation in advance, so as not to be disappointed.
To get home, Chang-hyun had to spar several more rounds with the club president and the other members. In H University's taekwondo club, only two people were good enough to hold their own in interdepartmental matches — Chang-hyun and the president — so the president's relentless demands were not entirely unreasonable.
"Honestly. At this rate I'd rather just wreck my body and be done with it."
Muttering that half-defeated complaint, he walked the streets. Only a few days ago it had still been pure winter, but now the leaves were budding and the forsythia was beginning to open; spring was finally taking hold.
"Huh?"
Turning into the alley in front of his house, he saw a light on. In a row of attached single-family homes, the glow of a twenty-watt bulb filtered through the frosted glass of the semi-basement boarding room, clearly visible even in the evening. So she hadn't gone anywhere else after all.
"…"
Chang-hyun felt something strange and hard to name well up inside him — a tangle of relief and bewilderment. A body that could not rein in the boiling blood of youth… Men and women should not sit together after the age of seven, or so the saying went. How obsessive the ancestors had been, warning that once both sexes passed seven, trouble was all but guaranteed. Yes — the bizarre thought even crossed his mind that a man past seven sharing space with a woman past seven and not causing trouble was somehow a shameless failure to meet ancestral expectations.
"Ah…"
The day of the college entrance exam, the day he enlisted, the day he performed at the national taekwondo festival — this was the first time his heart had pounded like this since those days.
"Oh. You're back?"
The door opened and Jeong-ah greeted him. Chang-hyun froze at the sight of her bright face. More precisely, he could hardly believe the neatly ordered boarding room visible through the open doorway. How had she managed to tidy it so thoroughly? It was clean enough to shame him — he who had kept putting off organization on the excuse that he had no wardrobe, no bookshelf, no storage cabinets.
"What's all this?"
"Ah, I cleaned a little. Is that all right?"
Jeong-ah said it with a smile. She had already changed into dry clothes, and she no longer looked quite human. He thought he finally understood why people said celebrities looked completely different in person from ordinary people.
"Well… thank you."
"Huh?"
"No — I mean, I'm grateful you went to the trouble, but… I should probably go. If I stay, I'll only cause you problems one way or another."
Jeong-ah watched the flustered Chang-hyun and explained the situation.
"No. There's nothing for you to worry about on that score."
"There are people looking for me. That's what has me concerned."
"What?"
Chang-hyun was briefly at a loss. Looking for her? Was she being chased by someone? Did she have microfilm hidden on her person and foreign spies on her trail, or a tape full of a politician's scandals that put her life in danger? But that was the stuff of movies. It couldn't possibly be happening right in front of him.
"No. It's not really anything to worry about — ugh…"
A sudden pain lanced through his chest as if a knife had been driven into it. Chang-hyun could not finish the sentence and sank to his knees.
"Damn it. I thought I was getting better…"
"Ah!"
Jeong-ah caught him as he pitched forward. A body of hard, trained muscle — a man like this simply did not collapse from anemia without warning.
"A-are you all right?"
"…I'd like to say I am, but it doesn't seem that way."
That was as far as Chang-hyun got before he let go of consciousness. In the army they would have called it a failure of discipline, but the truth is that fainting is not a matter of willpower.
It can't be.
As she hauled the fallen Chang-hyun upright, Jeong-ah felt a rush of dismay. The symptoms this man was showing were of a kind she knew all too well.
"But that's impossible."
She shook her head as if to cast off the suspicion. Anemia and dizziness were not necessarily linked to vampirism. Dizziness was a common enough symptom.
She brought Chang-hyun inside. She had meant to leave at once for fear of her pursuers, but abandoning a man who was losing consciousness seemed unpardonably rude.
This is hardly the time for manners.
She looked at the sinking sun and shuddered. As a Jinma she had nothing to fear, but once night fell, the eyes of the trackers grew sharp. The old saying claimed that daytime words were heard by birds and nighttime words by rats — and Tetra Anax's intelligence network made that proverb literal. A single vampire alone could not hope to slip through it.
"I just hope this man doesn't come to harm because of me."
She spread a blanket and laid him down. She placed a damp cloth on his forehead, then pulled ice from the refrigerator, packed it into a rubber glove, tied the opening with string, and hung it from a hanger to fashion a makeshift ice pack. After checking Chang-hyun's condition one more time, she rose from her seat.
Outside the window, darkness was rolling in like a tidal wave.
On weekend evenings, for a limited window of time, Arjuna set special merchandise out on the ordinary tables: flawless crystal spheres that retailed for around two hundred thousand won, one on each table. Since the shop sold tarot decks, Russian Gypsy cards, and other tools of astrology, staging merchandise as occult atmosphere pieces was not a bad idea at all. The only problem was that if a customer spilled coffee, the goods would be ruined.
"Well, that's just how it is, isn't it?"
When Lee Jin-hye complained about stocking expensive crystal spheres on every table, Kim Seong-hui answered with that brief remark. It was a service for the customers, and it could also be seen as an extension of the interior design.
In truth, her main income did not come from these minor sales or the teahouse itself. Ah — of course it had become a revenue stream she could no longer ignore, but if money had been what she wanted, there had always been far simpler methods.
The stairs creaked as a black-clad priest descended from the second floor. Black cassock, black long coat over it — the man radiated a murderous chill as sharp as a drawn blade.
"Hmm. Are the preparations complete?"
Silvester rested his fingers on a crystal sphere on the table and put the question to Kim Seong-hui. Of course the preparations he meant had nothing to do with opening the shop. They were preparations to fight a Jinma. Now that a Jinma had set foot on Korean soil, even a veteran Jinma hunter could not venture into the night without first accepting that he might die.
"Everything's ready. There's a Land Rover parked outside — take that."
"Is that so? My thanks."
Father Silvester caught the car key Kim Seong-hui tossed him and walked toward the door. Lee Jin-hye felt as if she were choking on the air between those two — a conversation so spare and controlled it carried a tragic grandeur of its own. The boy Han Se-gun, the owner, and this foreign priest who seemed to be the owner's lover — all of them looked like beings somehow out of step with reality.
"Um, excuse me…"
"Ah. Time to get to work, is it?"
The owner, who had been seeing Silvester off as he vanished into the street, turned back to Lee Jin-hye with a smile. Faced with that expression, it felt strangely impossible to voice the questions she had been turning over in her mouth.
"No — it's nothing."
Lee Jin-hye grumbled as she set a crystal sphere on a table and wiped it with a cloth.