The Shape of Your Talent
Facing Seol Yun-ri and her tense expression, Seonwoo slowly drew a deep breath.
With it, he focused every sharpened sense he possessed on Astrape, engraved deep within his soul.
[Crackle-!]
A divine relic he could not yet fully bear, a sacred object whose lightning raged as though it might engulf the whole landscape of Seonwoo's inner world.
He reached toward that vast, destructive power, something so immense that no soul short of one that had attained the Path could have contained it at all.
[Crack-crack-crackle!]
And then, from only a part of it—truly, only the tiniest fragment of a single strand of lightning—he peeled away a splinter and drew it forth.
Bzzzzzt!
The lightning that had dwelled within his soul, existing in the domain of information, manifested and raced through his acupoints.
If he had not possessed the internal energy of Yeon-shin-geuk-gi-gong, built up beside the World Tree,
and if he had not been able to control it through the ultimate principle of one who had reached the Path,
then his still-fragile meridians would already have burned away.
Flash!
The golden lightning he had drawn out and controlled so perfectly finally flashed into the outer world.
Seol Yun-ri saw it, and her eyes flew wide.
Then—
Bzzzt!
It raced along the tree branch that connected Seonwoo and Seol Yun-ri.
"...!!"
Seol Yun-ri's body locked up.
She saw it, but the moment was far too brief to react. By the time she recognized it, the golden lightning had already swept over her.
Crack!
Thump-thump-thump-thump!
Her heart pounded violently beneath the wash of golden lightning.
It beat as if it might burst, wild and frantic.
And it wasn't just because she was startled.
At first she had been badly frightened, yes—but she had instinctively realized, almost at once, that the golden lightning had not harmed her.
The lightning inflicted no damage. It dissolved instead into shards of light and melted into the space around her.
So by the time her heart began to race, what filled Seol Yun-ri wasn't pain, but something else entirely.
Thump.
Thump.
She didn't understand it.
But her heart was pounding hard and fast with nothing but positive emotion, and only then did Seol Yun-ri realize.
Ah...
This was joy and excitement born from anticipation.
What is this...?
She was flustered.
In her entire life, she had never anticipated anything this intensely, never felt this kind of pleasure or excitement because of it.
Thump!
Thump!
As confusion swirled through her, her vision filled with Seonwoo, surrounded by mystical golden fragments of light.
And what flashed through her mind were all the novels she'd read in seclusion.
Some had only hinted at things. Others had been shamelessly explicit.
Scene after scene from those stories ran through her head.
Whoosh!
In an instant, Seol Yun-ri's face turned bright red.
Thump!
Thump!
Her heartbeat sped up even more.
Tsss...
And so Seol Yun-ri never saw it.
The tiny crack that opened for only the briefest instant.
Or the golden light that seeped into her through that crack.
Haaa...
Though his eyes had been closed, Seonwoo had sensed it clearly. He settled his breathing.
He drew back the consciousness that had sunk deep enough to reach his soul and opened his eyes.
Then he asked,
"How do you feel?"
Still staring at him with a flushed face, Seol Yun-ri answered,
"My heart... it's racing."
Seonwoo grinned.
"You know it's not acute heart failure, right?"
"...Yes."
It was such an unfunny joke that it cooled her burning face almost instantly.
But thanks to that, the mood shifted, and at last Seol Yun-ri understood the biggest reason her heart was pounding.
It felt as if she had crawled out of a black swamp filled with nothing but despair. Her senses had awakened into startling clarity.
Instead of that sticky darkness, a radiant certainty now wrapped around her body.
And that radiant certainty was—
"I... really could become a Spiritist."
The certainty that she truly would become one.
She could now confidently say that every one of the things that had mocked her and sliced her apart had been wrong.
"That's right. You are going to become a Spiritist. Not a vague hope—something you can be certain of. Right?"
"Yes!"
That anticipation, that excitement—that was what had made Seol Yun-ri's heart pound so hard.
Seonwoo smiled softly and said,
"That's the size of the talent you have."
"Huh?"
Seol Yun-ri hadn't realized it, but through Astrape's lightning and the medium of her talent, a tiny crack had opened for a fleeting instant.
If the world found out, it would be thrown into chaos.
A crack so minuscule that not even a low-ranking spirit could have passed through it—and one that had lasted only an instant—but a crack that had undeniably opened.
In that instant, a high-ranking spirit, one of those famed for their arrogance, shoved everything else aside in desperate haste and placed a Marking on her.
And Seol Yun-ri had felt it clearly.
Something that even S-grade Spiritists could only vaguely sense and dimly speculate about—she had perceived it with absolute certainty.
Which meant she was not a Spiritist who would stop at a mere S-grade.
"Yun-ri. You could become the greatest Spiritist in history."
As Seonwoo said it with a smile, he looked as though he believed that even more deeply than she did herself.
To Seol Yun-ri, Seonwoo—who believed in her that completely—looked like a radiant sun.
"You definitely will."
He seemed like the source of a brilliant light that drove away the hideous darkness that had strangled her throat and scorched her from within.
Ah...
He's the one. The person who lights up my world.
The person she had come to believe that about said,
"There's something you need to do if you're going to become that, Yun-ri."
"What is it, Seonbae?"
If he's the one saying it, I can do anything.
That was what Seol Yun-ri thought.
"Exercise."
"...What?"
"You're seriously out of shape."
Seonwoo said it firmly to Seol Yun-ri, whose head had tilted to one side in confusion.
Sihyeok Group Headquarters, chairman's office.
"..."
Lee Beom-ho, the head and representative of the Beomho gang, stood at ease without the slightest movement.
He didn't even dare breathe freely.
Because Bang Seong-jun was seated in front of him.
Bang Seong-jun.
The head of Sihyeok Group and an S-grade Hunter of South Korea.
For a conglomerate chairman and an S-grade Hunter, he was rather young.
He was even around the same age as Lee Beom-ho.
"..."
But Lee Beom-ho couldn't even dare entertain such a thought. He couldn't bring himself to think words like around the same age.
The difference in their standing was too vast.
Every S-grade was a being that had transcended humanity.
That phrase might have sounded absurd on the surface, but Lee Beom-ho knew, without a trace of exaggeration, that it was true—simply by looking at Bang Seong-jun.
He wore the shape of a man, but that was not a man.
It felt more like a natural disaster had taken human form and learned to speak and behave like one.
That alone made him terrifying.
That fear in human shape was scanning the documents before him with an irritated expression.
They were the report Lee Beom-ho had written up on everything related to this incident.
Bang Seong-jun did not like verbal reports.
He demanded that everything be organized thoroughly and cleanly in document form.
And so Lee Beom-ho now stood in rigid tension before the man reading the papers he had spent all night preparing according to that format.
If the documents displeased him, he could die.
Or rather, he might end up in a state worse than death.
He had personally cut away every stray branch, including Lee Maeng-ho.
He had written down in meticulous detail how they had been dismembered and how they had been disposed of.
He had even included which routes had been used to send the useful survivors beyond foreign Gates to work in mines.
Nothing had been omitted from the report.
"Good. You worked hard."
"Thank you, sir."
Lee Beom-ho forcibly suppressed the breath of relief rising in his chest and bowed his head.
Bang Seong-jun's gaze moved past him.
More precisely, it dropped to the floor beside him.
There lay a blood-soaked lump of meat.
It looked like a freshly slaughtered animal tossed aside for butchering.
"Director."
No.
It was one of Sihyeok Group's directors.
Bang Hyeong-seok, Bang Seong-jun's son.
Bang Seong-jun himself had reduced his son to that state.
"Y-yes... Chairman."
But in this room, neither Bang Seong-jun nor Bang Hyeong-seok looked like father and son.
"So, Director. You're a director, and this is the kind of report you submit?"
Thwap.
A document, soaked in Bang Hyeong-seok's blood and no longer legible, was thrown aside.
Bang Hyeong-seok hurriedly gathered it up and bowed his head.
Blood dripped steadily from him, but he had no room to care about that as he apologized.
"I'm sorry. I'll correct it."
"Good. Do better from now on."
"Yes, sir."
Judging by the exchange alone, it almost seemed to pass too easily.
But it hadn't.
Anyone who knew them would have been trembling with fear.
Because they knew there would be no next time.
There was a simple reason Bang Seong-jun let things pass without deliberately picking at faults.
If it happened again, he erased them.
So after delivering a single warning, the papers Bang Seong-jun picked up next were those submitted by the secretary's office.
It was a group at the very heart of the conglomerate, known as the Risk Management Division.
The material they had organized contained every detail Bang Hyeong-seok had left out.
The fine cracks that had formed because he had failed to follow Sihyeok Group procedure.
Along with projected information leaks, methods of response, and the measures already taken in response.
It was the best response possible—the very reason Sihyeok Group had survived and grown until now.
And yet, despite that...
There had been pursuit that surpassed even it.
He didn't know who it was.
Which was exactly why he knew who it was.
This has to be Changseong Group.
If the pursuit was this merciless and they still couldn't identify the source, then it could only be Changseong Group.
The grim reaper of anyone involved in the elf slave trade.
...We've been bitten by something filthy.
The moment he realized it was Changseong Group, he cut away that branch of the business as ruthlessly as amputating one of his own limbs.
Even though Changseong Group's headquarters was in Korea—and precisely because that meant it could have become an even more lucrative high-value enterprise—he had still tried it.
And yet he had been forced to throw away intangible and tangible assets beyond imagination without hesitation.
Because if he hadn't, they would have died.
Knowing that, he soothed the sting of those losses and thought,
Who the hell are they?
It was genuinely hard to believe.
Changseong Group, a force counted among the best in the world in this area alone, had only moved after receiving information.
What kind of people could possibly have the capability to pass information like that to Changseong Group?
Information that they had caught hold of a Sihyeok Group tail that had escaped even Changseong's eyes.
There had been cracks, yes, but this had still been the work of Sihyeok Group's heir.
The heir who, until now, had done his job without mistakes.
And yet someone had uncovered it, passed on only the information, and vanished without leaving a single trace.
It was enough to make the back of his neck run cold and rob him of sleep.
The person who naturally drew suspicion in this case was Kim Seonwoo.
The eldest son of the family that owned the small pocket dimension Bang Hyeong-seok had meant to use as a warehouse and hobby space.
That a boy who didn't even have a Hunter license had beaten a D-grade like Lee Maeng-ho and tossed him aside—that was certainly strange enough.
But only within the bounds of a minor anomaly.
It had already been confirmed that Changseong Group had approached him.
Kang Han-na herself had moved.
And yet no further action had been taken afterward.
At most, he'd probably just undergone a reawakening.
The odds that the boy was truly hiding something were close to zero.
Something as trivial as that couldn't possibly have caused all this.
And to be sure, the information the secretary's office had investigated on the boy proved exactly that.
Which made the question all the more pressing.
Who is it, then?
Who?
Who the hell?
What organization?
What had they touched?
Had they laid hands on something they never should have touched, and this was the result?
Thump.
Thump.
The heart of Bang Seong-jun, an S-grade superhuman, was pounding with unease.
It was a cold winter day.
And so no one came to the empty lot tucked away in a corner of the moon village.
There, Seonwoo stood facing Seol Yun-ri.
She had changed into an old tracksuit and tied her hair back tight.
Seonwoo smiled faintly and asked,
"Yun-ri."
"Yes."
"Have you ever heard of PT 8?"