Welcome to the World of the Mad Moon
The contest between a vampire hunter who had cast aside emotion and morality to fight for money alone, and a vampire who had to deliver a merciless death for the sake of comrades slaughtered in agony, could already have its ending read from their mindsets. And regrettably, this case did not stray far from that prediction. Se-gun took up a pistol with his left hand—his right arm still unrecovered—and leveled it at the head of the fallen Ryeo.
Like a marionette stripped of its clothes, Ryeo lay sprawled across the cold concrete floor, half resigned.
"Sarhyuk would have thought it a waste. Killing a woman like this just like that."
As he spoke, Se-gun thought inwardly how much of a blessing it would be to kill her here and now. Of course, he would still have to draw her blood.
"I... I was ultimately..."
Ryeo closed her eyes with a sorrowful expression, yet no tears fell. Without a word, Se-gun pulled the trigger against her head. She dropped her chin like a spring-wound doll that had finally run down and did not rise again. Even so, Se-gun swapped magazines and fired several more rounds into her skull before driving in the blood extractor.
"Newspaper delivery time is coming soon. What a pain."
Injecting himself with vampire blood, Se-gun leaned against the wall and let out a sigh. The night's plunging temperature sent white plumes of breath rising into the air.
……
He suddenly looked down at the corpse of the female vampire. Like an island rising from a sea of blood, her pale, naked body lay upon the crimson pool. Even with her head shattered by bullets, that body alone was beautiful enough to be intoxicating.
The faint orange glow of the sodium lamps deepened the shadows, rendering that beauty as chilling as the edge of a knife that could slice open a chest. Se-gun abruptly rested his head against the wall—hard enough that it might as well have been a slam. In that instant a wave of dizziness struck him like a hammer.
"Uweeeegh!"
Clutching the wall, Se-gun vomited. The blood he and Ryeo had spilled stained the alley, and an even more intense scent filled it; he kept retching until the yellow bile ran dry.
Chang-hyun stared in consternation at his slowly knitting hand. It should have been shredded by a pistol—hollow-point rounds, no less—yet here it was healing. And with that regeneration came a pain as if someone were wringing his heart. At first it had been bearable, but as his heartbeat grew fiercer the agony swelled like a swing pushed higher and higher until it became unendurable.
"Krrraaagh!"
Chang-hyun collapsed once in the street. Yet he forced himself up and ran. On and on. His heart convulsed as though it would burst; the world spun before his eyes. And the powerful scent of blood streaming from his hand summoned a thirst. His flesh... craved blood?
A vampire?
Suddenly he recalled what Jeong-ah had told him. Vampires—monsters that drank blood. Like Bram Stoker's Dracula. Turned to ash by the sun, the same if a wooden stake was driven through the heart; creatures that could not live a single hour without feeding, without killing people... Yes, even if such monsters that were supposed to exist only in fantasy turned out to be real, it no longer seemed so hard to accept. Even if he himself had become one of them.
Yet living by tearing into human throats was something Chang-hyun himself could not accept. This was a world where a man who once despaired of politics and shouted freedom and struggle among students would become a politician himself and use the very supporters who had backed him to smear the freedom he had once cried out for—but Chang-hyun had never been part of that mainstream. In South Korea he was nothing more than a minor figure in the athletic world, poorly educated, none too bright; and it wasn't as if he had avoided injury and hung a gold medal around his neck either. Why should someone like him live so cunningly that he had to harm others just to survive?
Such a sweet resignation, and such a reasonable surrender. Even if he soothed his conscience with morality while turning his eyes from reality, what of it? Chang-hyun almost felt proud of himself for making that choice. Yes. He liked it.
But then the woman named Jeong-ah rose unbidden in his mind. What had become of her? The one who had stood under a utility pole in the rain with a lonely face yet refused to come into his house. In this vast concrete forest, what was she searching for while dodging the predators that hunted her? Would she manage to live on?
Whatever it is, it's already nothing to do with me, right? How filthy...
Thinking that, Chang-hyun closed his eyes.
Twenty minutes before sunrise. Jeong-ah looked down at the unconscious Chang-hyun. She had managed to drag him to a nearby park, at least under the shade of trees, but his condition was critical. Malignant vampirism from VT depletion—the common fate of vampires that always invited the worst catastrophes—and Chang-hyun was following that path to the letter. He was a naturally occurring vampire whose VT was bound to be low, and he had already been wounded by a vampire hunter. Silver bullets that suppressed the regenerative power granted by VT were weapons of unparalleled lethality against a human in the process of becoming a vampire.
"If this continues, he'll die."
Looking down at that state, Jeong-ah was torn. The world of the mad moon... dragging one more person into it might have been something she had been wishing for all along. In this enormous city, how many more trials would she have to endure—she who already bore the shadows of Juk-yo and Chang-woon like destiny—before she met her death? Thinking of that, she needed someone to lean on, or someone who would lean on her. She was not like the mad dog Se-gun; she did not know how to thoroughly isolate and abuse herself. Unlike Han Se-gun, who hardened himself into a lump of limestone simply to adapt to the concrete forest... she was, to the end, human.
From the moment the vampire hunters abandoned morality and chose to move for money, she and they had already stepped onto parallel rails that would never intersect. Parallel lines that would never cross—yet how alike their forms were.
"Ah..."
She looked down at the dying Chang-hyun. There had been many people who had shown her kindness before. When a woman of outstanding beauty wandered alone, men approaching her was only natural. But Chang-hyun... was different. Leaving appearance aside, he was someone who truly helped others out of compassion. Could she not trust a person like that?
No—trusting him was nothing more than her own greed. She had already made one person into a vampire. Because of her wounds, this man's vampirism had surely accelerated even further. The blood of a Jinma could fully awaken a vampirism patient with nothing more than the scent of blood spreading through the air. Without that, he might have remained human for years—even decades.
"Even if this man wakes and curses me... that will be the fruit of my sin."
Murmuring so, she cut her finger. As a Jinma, the consumption of vampire factors under sunlight would be drastically reduced; he would be able to endure the morning. And so she resolved to give him her blood and make him another Jinma.
Regardless of Chang-hyun's will, his body—wracked by malignant vampirism—began to suck her blood fiercely, like an infant nursing at its mother's breast.
"Welcome to the world of the mad moon."
Jeong-ah sat on a desolate gray bench, waiting for sunrise, and whispered.
Even without borrowing the hackneyed phrase that the internet is a sea of information, more than enough information was flowing. Of course, trash information overflowed among it as well.
If one were to classify such trash simply, it would fall into information that could never be believed—believing it would make one a fool—and information that could not be believed yet was still sufficiently intriguing.
Yet people had a tendency to believe even trash information. How else could there be claims that Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and the Beatles had been aliens, and that Jesus Christ too was an alien who would return someday aboard a UFO? (Of course, those rumors had already existed long before the internet became active.)
And recently, the various bizarre incidents unfolding in Seoul were lending even greater force to such baseless rumors. Through the concrete city the blood vessels of power lines carried the blood called electricity, and Seoul was now entering an age of demons and monsters.
Jinma Phantom—now the capable entrepreneur Row Gibson—had taken a serious economic blow. No, not only he; anyone whose assets consisted largely of multinational stocks would have suffered equal damage by now.
"We've already had a second Black Monday and a third Black Monday—so is it the fourth's turn now?"
Row Gibson watched the American stocks plunging day after day and found himself speechless. Of course he would not go bankrupt from this. He already held natural-gas extraction rights in places like Alaska and Canada, and he had planted dealers not only for gold and oil but for food as well. He had learned thoroughly during the Great Depression just how dangerous it was to rest one's entire body on stocks alone.
Even so, the damage from the crash was severe. Because he had received advance warning of the plunge from Tetra Anax, he had limited the loss to around ten percent—but ten percent was still an enormous sum.
He rose from his seat. Through proxies he had quietly ordered hopeless stocks converted to cash, but without him present it would not have gone so well. The problem was Korea today and tomorrow. Now that the American market had crashed, what would become of consumer behavior that had only just begun to recover from severe contraction? Inwardly he suspected Tetra Anax might have engineered the whole affair deliberately. If this incident brought a recession to the world economy, public sentiment would be shaken to its core.
"Honestly. This is no time to sit around so comfortably."
Jinma Phantom looked at the computer. There was no keyboard, no mouse, no input device of any kind, yet it operated without contact and began web surfing.
The page he opened was Finder, the information-sharing site used by vampire hunters. Originally a network for hunters, anyone could become a member by paying, so vampires often gathered intelligence there as well.
"Hmm. So the vampire hunters have also discovered Jinma Jeong-ya?"
He closed his eyes at the information posted on the site. It might be genuine; it might be fake. The hunters surely knew that Tetra Anax monitored what appeared on Finder—there was no way they would carelessly post information about a Jinma here. If they did, it might be a trap to lure vampires. In fact, the location they had written was Yangpyeong, quite far from Seoul. A place that would favor hunters armed with automatic weapons.
"Still, I can't very well not go."
The probability that it was false was high, yet even knowing that, he could not stay away. Phantom rose from his seat and slipped on a pure-white coat.