The Underworld Map Revealed
"I need to be careful with this... I can't use it recklessly."
He was just thinking that it should only ever be used in a safe place.
Then the other soul that had slipped out of him suddenly sank downward, as if plunging into a bottomless cliff.
How long did he fall?
When the world finally came into view, it was red and grotesque.
Hell. The hell he had only ever imagined in passing stood right before his eyes.
The sky was stained with blood, and across the land, rivers of molten lava and dark crimson gore flowed like living things.
Looking down, he saw hundreds of thousands, millions of sinners writhing in unbearable heat and stench, skewered on iron spikes or burning alive in the flames.
“Aaaagh!”
“Save me!”
“Please, just kill me!”
“Aaaah! My eyes!”
“It’s hot!!”
Wretched screams and howls, enough to shred eardrums to pieces, filled the empty reaches of hell.
Suspended in the air in his soul form, Suhyuk looked down at that horrifying scene with a flat, emotionless gaze.
He felt no pity.
How am I supposed to find the sinner I killed in all this?
Hell was far too vast.
Countless sinners were packed together like beasts across a land with no visible end.
Just imagining himself flying through the sky of hell, checking each face one by one, made his head feel hollow.
They said I’d be able to talk for five minutes. Hell, finding him alone might take five years.
The moment he thought that, he pictured Cheolsu-pa’s waiter, Dakgangjeong, and the guard Kim Jong-chan in his mind—and as if pulled by a massive magnet, Suhyuk’s soul shot off in a fixed direction.
Suhyuk knew it instinctively.
The five-minute limit would begin the instant he reached the target’s vicinity.
The soul stopped above a pit where razor-sharp thorns burned with fire.
There, he saw a familiar face enduring a hideous punishment: his whole body engulfed in flames, flesh melting away and then regenerating, only to melt again.
“Kim Jong-chan.”
At Suhyuk’s call, the man thrashing in the fire jerked his head up.
“Graaah! W-who... who the hell are you!!”
Unlike when he had worn the robe of the Grim Reaper, Kim Jong-chan didn’t recognize Suhyuk from his intact face.
Then it happened.
“You son of a bitch! It’s you! You killed me, didn’t you! You threw me into this hell!!!!”
As if he had recognized Suhyuk’s identity by instinct, red fury and resentment burst from his eyes.
“Because of you! Because of you!!! I’m in this hell!! Get me out! Get me out of here now! It hurts. Save me. Get me out right now, you bastard!!”
His desperate screams and begging slammed into Suhyuk’s ears.
But Suhyuk only looked down at him coldly and asked,
There wasn’t much time left.
“Tell me everything you know about Kim Kyung-su and Cheol-gamen.”
Kim Jong-chan was Abyss.
He had to know at least some of the inner workings of Cheolsu-pa, and probably had access to fairly deep information as well.
But the answer that came back was nothing like Suhyuk had expected.
“I don’t know! Gyaaaagh! I don’t know! I said I don’t know! Jo Gi-hoon! That bastard Jo Gi-hoon knows everything! I’ve never seen Cheol-gamen or Kim Kyung-su, never met them, not even once!!”
It probably wasn’t a lie.
Echoes of Hell only compelled the truth.
“Why not? You’re an Awaker. You should’ve been a fairly valuable asset to Cheolsu-pa, shouldn’t you?”
“No... not me!! Aaaagh! It’s hot!! I’m only F-rank, and I hadn’t even been in Cheolsu-pa for long. I don’t know a damn thing about the inside!!”
F-rank. Suhyuk’s brow tightened slightly.
So he was an Awaker at the very bottom of the ladder.
And yet they’d still made him work club security...?
So someone like Kim Jong-chan is really just that pathetic.
How strong, then, were Kim Kyung-su and Cheol-gamen?
“Who is Jo Gi-hoon?”
“Dakgangjeong! That bastard you slit the throat of right in front of me—that’s Jo Gi-hoon!”
“Ah. So Dakgangjeong was Jo Gi-hoon.”
Come to think of it, he had only ever known him by his nickname.
Kim Jong-chan’s shrieking tale spilled out in fragments.
He had been a neighborhood junior to Jo Gi-hoon.
After becoming an F-rank Awaker, he had turned Abyss, murdering party members he disliked inside a gate and fleeing.
Because deaths inside gates were easy to disguise as accidents, making investigation nearly impossible, Kim Jong-chan had managed to avoid being branded an official criminal.
But in Suhyuk’s Eye of the Grim Reaper, the man’s murderous sins had stood out in stark clarity.
It was Jo Gi-hoon—Dakgangjeong—who had found the hidden Kim Jong-chan, brought him into Cheolsu-pa as both his lackey and a club guard, and installed him there.
“Useless piece of trash.”
Suhyuk cast a cold glance at Kim Jong-chan, who was crying out in pain, then immediately brought Jo Gi-hoon to mind.
His soul once again sliced rapidly through the air.
Not far from Kim Jong-chan, in a swamp of blood, a familiar face was floundering.
“Jo Gi-hoon.”
The instant Dakgangjeong lifted his head from the mire and spotted Suhyuk, he began to struggle violently.
Even though he had never seen Suhyuk’s face in life, his soul seemed to remember it.
The face of the Grim Reaper who had killed him.
“You son of a bitch!! I’m going to kill you! Because of you!! My body!! Aaaagh!! Bastard!! Rot in hell too, you piece of shit!!”
He shouted the same way, with eyes full of hatred, glaring at Suhyuk as if he wanted to tear him apart.
His mouth kept spilling curses at him without end.
But as long as Echoes of Hell remained, his will meant nothing.
“What’s the exact identity of Cheol-gamen, and where is Cheolsu-pa’s base?”
The moment Suhyuk asked, Jo Gi-hoon’s mouth moved on its own, convulsively spitting out the answer.
It was the truth he had lied about not knowing until the very end, while he was still alive.
“I don’t know! I really don’t know who he is! He’s never once taken off the mask! He always wears the iron mask! The hideout is in OO-dong! Changho Building! The whole building is Cheolsu-pa’s base!”
At last.
A cold curve formed at the corner of Suhyuk’s mouth.
He had finally, completely located the base of the organization whose trail had gone cold.
“Cheol-gamen is Abyss?”
“Yeah! Abyss! Kim Kyung-su and Kim Tae-su too—they’re Abyss bastards as well! Cheol-gamen is way stronger than either of them! That’s why those two brothers are always scared of him!”
Suhyuk’s eyes flashed.
“Kim Tae-su?”
It was a name he’d never heard before.
And he was Kim Kyung-su’s brother—the same Kim Kyung-su who had been manipulating Lee Chisang.
“Kim Kyung-su is Cheolsu-pa’s second-in-command! Kim Tae-su is third! Kim Tae-su is the sword of Cheolsu-pa, and Kim Kyung-su is the brain! Aaaagh!! Stop asking!! You bastard!! The swamp is gnawing at my bones!! It hurts! It’s killing me!! Save me!!”
Cheolsu-pa’s sword, Kim Tae-su.
The moment he heard the name, Suhyuk knew.
The cruel knife-wielding bastard who had hacked at him in a dark back alley and split his stomach open was none other than Kim Tae-su.
“If I go to Changho Building, are those bastards always there?”
“Yeah! You bastard! They’re not glued there every day, but whenever anything happens, they always gather there! That’s where the leadership meets!”
Ping—
A clear, bell-like crack rang through his mind.
The brief five minutes were over.
“Wait, the real boss above Cheol-gamen—”
Suhyuk tried to rush out one last question, but his vision warped violently, and a powerful force yanked his soul upward.
As Jo Gi-hoon’s screams faded into the distance, Suhyuk opened his eyes again, jolting awake on his bed.
“Huuuh.”
He let out a long breath and sat up.
He still had a lot he wanted to ask.
Suhyuk tried to use Echoes of Hell again.
The other skills didn’t have any cooldowns.
-Cannot be used.
-Cooldown: 14 days
A firm System message cut across his vision.
Even if he wanted to track down the bastards he’d killed at the secret manufacturing plant and interrogate them, he’d have to wait helplessly through a two-week cooldown.
Two weeks... Honestly, storming Changho Building myself would be faster.
Still, the gains had been enormous.
Jo Gi-hoon wasn’t just some lowly waiter.
He had effectively been a key executive who managed XX Club in Cheol-gamen’s place.
That would explain how he could keep an Awaker like Kim Jong-chan under his thumb. There was definitely supposed to be someone above Cheol-gamen in that back alley behind the club. A little frustrating that I couldn’t ask about that.
The unknown boss who seemed to be pulling all of Cheolsu-pa’s strings from behind the scenes.
Well, if I crush Cheol-gamen and the Kim Kyung-su, Kim Tae-su brothers, the answer should come out naturally enough.
Now that he’d torn from Jo Gi-hoon the most important clues—the base and the names of the leadership—he decided to let go of the remaining attachment cleanly.
Suhyuk sat on the bed and sorted through the information.
When he killed the boss at the Yacha-pa parking lot, he’d gained 100 Hell Points; when he killed the man who seemed to be the second-in-command, he’d gained 50.
Kim Jong-chan was F-rank and worth 30 Hell Points, so judging by the point gap, the Yacha-pa boss and second-in-command were probably around D- and E-rank.
Because he had launched a surprise attack in the middle of the chaos, it had worked beautifully, but remembering that even Kim Jong-chan—an F-rank—had still sensed his presence made it likely that surprise attacks wouldn’t work properly in quiet settings.
Suhyuk’s mind raced.
He had to estimate how far that tactic would actually carry against Awakers.
Kim Kyung-su and Kim Tae-su are at least E-rank. Cheol-gamen has to be at least D-rank. No—there’s no way just one rank difference would make those two fear him that much. He’s at least two ranks above them.
Using Kim Jong-chan as a reference point and comparing Cheolsu-pa with Yacha-pa, he arrived at the conclusion that Cheol-gamen was at least C-rank or higher.
From what I saw of Yacha-pa’s forces earlier, Cheolsu-pa doesn’t seem that large. It’s more of a cell organization.
That also meant surprise attacks in the middle of confusion might be hard to use within Cheolsu-pa.
Enhancement Stone... could that be the answer?