You Must Eat to Live
Han Se-gun handed a portion of the vampire blood over to Bill Murray, then sat down and waited for the appraisal.
"Hey. Se-geon."
"Se-gun."
"Se-gun. Hmm. This is about eighty million won. Big money."
"Is that so? Well, I'm not complaining."
Se-gun looked at the fairly high VT reading and nodded to himself. Bill Murray studied him, then asked:
"I've got a job. Won't you help me? Extremely, extremely important job."
"A hit? Sorry, but that's not my hobby."
"Ow, cold man. With that heart, you won't truly heal."
"......"
Se-gun wanted to say he couldn't care less about healing, but he kept his mouth shut. Bill Murray was a business contact, after all—and for all that this shabby building suggested otherwise, the man was absurdly rich.
"Lately many hunters die, so no one useful. Healing very, very hard. But hunting—must-do job."
"What is it?"
Se-gun asked, listening through Bill Murray's jumbled accent. As if he'd been waiting for the question, Bill Murray launched into the case.
"D Church. Revival meeting. People with injuries get miracle treatment. Not touch, not trance. That level—no. They say trauma healed. Unthinkable. No means like that except vampire blood."
"So? Even if you didn't sell it, they bought from another dealer, right? Do you need to care?"
"No. I want to investigate that. But people look at me very strange. Foreigner draws attention here."
Bill's face turned serious. Fair enough. But Se-gun sighed. Finding the Jinma Jeong-ah mattered more right now—and if it was money he wanted, that would bring in far more.
Come to think of it, that human?
Se-gun clicked his tongue, recalling Chang-hyun, the former taekwondo athlete. Probably a vampire by now. Honestly, Se-gun had no particular feelings toward him—or rather, goodwill would be more accurate. Since he'd lost him, Se-gun could only hope the guy wasn't going around killing people. No reaction either way. Burned up under the sun? Or had that woman turned him into a Jinma? Or was he fighting down the bloodlust with sheer willpower? One of the three.
"Ahh... damn it. Fine. I'll look into it. But don't expect much."
"Good. Good. Then next trade, I raise trade level."
"Huh? Trade level?"
"Ah, that is joy after you come back? Leave it at that."
Bill Murray beamed and handed over information on the place called D Church.
In Yangpyeong, a catastrophe known as the motel fire had claimed nearly two digits' worth of civilian lives. But the fact that even more hunters had died was buried in absolute secrecy. They had no public identities to begin with, and they had been heavily armed—information more than enough to throw society into chaos. For that control, both vampires and hunters alike owed Tetra Anax their thanks.
"Figures."
Sarhyuk muttered as much and set down his geomantic compass. The instrument was a powerful vampire-detection tool—without the necessary occult skill, even a Jinma could not hide from it. Though he used a geomantic compass, the technique had no direct connection to feng shui itself; it was an art that applied the principles of the I Ching, one of the few remaining points of pride left to a man who had walked away from the path of a Taoist master. The problem was that it reacted to every vampire indiscriminately, so there was no way to tell which ones were Jinma.
"Boss. What do we do?"
His subordinates sat in the car, staring with open hostility at the vampires mixed among the humans spilling into the night city. To hate someone that purely just for being a vampire—the spite was almost admirable. Then again, after the wild goose chase that bastard had put them through, they could hardly let it go.
"Fine. Take them!"
Sarhyuk gave the order to the new vampire hunters who had come under his command. After Agni slaughtered so many of them in Yangpyeong, a sense of crisis had begun to spread through the hunter community. They had lived with crisis hanging from their noses long before that, of course—but the mass arrival of Jinma in Korea was another way of saying that anyone without serious skill was going to die.
So they had thrown themselves in with Sarhyuk, who had already been pushing to corporatize vampire hunting. Even a man as shameless as Sarhyuk could not exactly confess that he was the one who had set the vampires and hunters against each other in Yangpyeong. He had decided to bury that fact completely and put them to use instead.
"Ha. It's really something."
Sarhyuk watched the work unfold and stuck a cigarette between his lips. The subordinate beside him lit it for him.
"What is, sir?"
"Those people over there."
"Sir?"
The subordinate, failing to understand, asked again—and Sarhyuk rewarded him with a fist for his trouble. Then, as if nothing had happened, he explained to the man clutching his bloodied face.
"How many of those people became vampire hunters for the money?"
"I-I wouldn't know, sir."
"And somewhere along the way, the means and the end swapped places. Me—I'm a corporate vampire hunter, aren't I?"
If you want to put it nicely, sure, the subordinate thought, but he had enough sense not to say it out loud. Besides, for one of the very people who had corrupted them to sit here marveling at the result as if it were some profound mystery—that was nothing short of a fraud against everyone involved. And yet, for all that resentment, Sarhyuk possessed a black charisma that rode right over it. Then the radio crackled to life again.
"It's done."
"Yeah? Then shall we go find the next prey?"
Sarhyuk picked up the geomantic compass once more. At this rate, they would bag quite a few vampires tonight as well.
You must eat to live. That is the basic proposition by which a living thing turns its energy cycle into an open system. And it applied to Chang-hyun no less than anyone else.
"Mmm."
Hunger opened Chang-hyun's eyes. He looked around. Beside him, Jeong-ah knelt with her head nodding, sound asleep.
"......"
He watched her in silence. She was his master now—the one who had guided him into being a vampire—but at the beginning, how they had fought. Was this even living? Avoiding people as a vampire, cutting every tie with his family? He had rebelled hard against that question.
Better to just die.
When he had watched from a distance as the landlord of his wrecked studio apartment and his mother, who had come up from Cheongju, screamed at each other, he had wanted to show himself that very instant.
Aigoo, you bastard! Give me back my child! My child!
Look, lady! I'm a victim here too! What about this smashed door, all these broken windows?
Aigoo, Chang-hyun-ah. Where did my fine youngest go? Aigoo... aigoo... If I'd known it'd come to this, I never would have made you study. Never would have...
His mother had practically been keening—she had doted on Chang-hyun, the late-born son of her old age, more than anyone could know. He had always hated that overprotectiveness. But watching her break down over his disappearance—effectively a death certificate—something thick rose in his chest. He had wanted to run out that second and tell her he was fine. He couldn't. If he did, people who wanted his blood would come for his family.
"......"
Three older sisters, and then a son born late—his parents' love had only driven the wedge between him and his sisters deeper. The household atmosphere had felt like a museum of every traditional vice, a living hell, and apart from scraping by on a thin local scholarship, the studio life had honestly been a relief. But did that make the living separation any less painful?
That he had been cut off from his family not by any fault of his own, but by some fatalistic reason—at first that had become rage, and he had poured it all onto his master, Jeong-ya. Still unable to understand his own fate, he had turned every arrow of blame on the woman who had made him a vampire on a whim and let the accusations fly. But he had fought the hunters for her in the first place knowing she was a vampire, because he could not hate her.
If she had not made him a Jinma, he would have burned to ash under the sunlight. And then he would have been no better off than he was now.
"Mmm."
Chang-hyun got up and looked around. A few days without a bath and some rough sleeping, and already grime was settling into his body and clothes.
Crrrack!
He began stretching as if wringing out his flesh. By the time he finished a full-body stretch and started kicking at the empty air, Jeong-ah opened her eyes.
"Yawn. Hmm? What are you doing?"
"Nothing. Just moving a little."
Then a thought struck him, and he asked her:
"Aren't you hungry?"
"W-well. But do you really have to keep using formal speech?"
"Honestly, it's more comfortable this way."
Chang-hyun said it and sighed. Right now, finding something to get through the day's meals mattered more. Starving to death—what difference did honorifics make?
"I'll go find some food, or some money."
"L-let's go together."
"......"
Her words left him speechless. It felt like being a kid caught shoplifting by the stationery-store owner. There was an old saying that three days of hunger would make even a scholar climb a wall—but that scholar probably wasn't taking a woman with him over the wall.
"Ah—ahahahahaha."
"Why? You were going to do something bad, weren't you?"
"Ah, well. Actually I was thinking of selling this face of mine and offering my services to some rich ajumma."
"......"
Jeong-ah looked at him as if she did not believe a word. Either way, he carefully folded and rolled the newspaper he had been using as a blanket.
"So I'm going alone."
"No."
Jeong-ah hooked her arm through his.
"Even so, you can't do bad things. You can't kill people or anything."
"Look, I never said I was going to kill anyone."
Chang-hyun said it and flushed—his stomach had chosen that moment to growl for food. Damn it, what kind of vampire had to eat rice like some ordinary slob just to keep from looking pathetic? Couldn't he fill up on human blood alone? Grumbling inwardly, he left the park.
In the neon-flickering dark of the city, a way to make money turned up easily enough.
Hey. You borrow money, you pay it back on time. You really gonna play it like this? Huh?
That kind of voice. Chang-hyun stopped at once and carefully pricked up his ears.
"Over there?"
He found a building with black film over the windows—on the third floor, a place called Sangdong Credit Loans. A loan shark had someone and was beating the debt out of him, by the sound of it, and the way they talked was pure gangster.
"Right. If you're going to climb walls because you need money, better to hit a gangster or thug house than some civilian's."
Of course, politicians and worse floated through his mind as even more vicious targets than gangsters—but that was work for professional thieves with a developed talent for wall-climbing, not a rookie like Chang-hyun. He made up his mind and headed for the building.
"Huh? We're closed. Who the hell are you?"
An aluminum shutter blocked the stairs from the second floor to the third, and a big thug standing in front of it, phone in hand mid-game of go-stop, spotted Chang-hyun. He barked at him on the spot—but Chang-hyun's hand-blade flicked lightly across his throat. The bulk started to tip backward with a concussion; Chang-hyun passed him and caught his collar, and the man stopped properly upright.
"There we go. Just lie down here..."
Chang-hyun laid the man on his side and went through his pants pockets. Sure enough: a wallet and a key. He opened the wallet and recovered thirty thousand won in cash, one hundred-thousand-won check, and seventeen hundred won in coins. Even that would cover a few days of eating. A check that common would hardly get flagged, and no one bothered to write down serial numbers on every hundred-thousand-won check. But Chang-hyun did not stop there.
"Is this the shutter key?"
He unlocked the shutter and carefully lifted it. The sound startled the people inside into silence. Men who had been beating a debtor half to death going suddenly quiet—Chang-hyun's hearing was not about to miss that. At this range he could catch breath, the creak of joints, everything.
"Excuse me."
Chang-hyun opened the door and walked in like he owned the place. He had meant to climb someone else's wall. Now he was a robber.
"Who the hell are you!"
Even in this absurd situation—maybe from the fear that he might be a detective—they put their weapons away, and one of them stepped forward and shouted.
Crack!
Chang-hyun's high kick buried itself in the man's neck, and he dropped flat beside the first one.
"Mmmph!"
The debtor, mouth sealed with packing tape and being tenderized with a baseball bat, welcomed Chang-hyun with tears. The thugs, watching a man kick people without so much as producing a warrant, all lost their minds at once.
"You little—!"
But Chang-hyun vaulted the sofa, dropped two of them with a beautiful spread-legged kick, landed, and slid across the floor like a snake to drive a side kick home.
"Ghk!"
Three grown men went down in a breath. Chang-hyun had been holding back—but he was a taekwondo expert to begin with, and a Jinma on top of that. The power was no joke.
"W-what now?"