The Gathering Tide of Sin
He had everything now — the meeting place, the time, every last detail firmly in hand.
That meant the pig in front of him had no reason to keep breathing.
This one’s no longer useful.
The moment the manager let out a relieved sigh and lowered his phone, Suhyuk raised the Reaper’s Scythe and mercilessly slashed at the thick neck in front of him.
Swish—!
“Ghk—!”
Blood burst from the manager’s throat in a spray.
Still not understanding what was happening, he clutched his neck and rolled his eyes back in his head.
His convulsing body collapsed grotesquely under the sofa.
The blood surging up his throat made even a scream impossible.
“Judgment and punishment.”
Suhyuk’s dry sentence fell.
A black shadow opened its maw and came down over the manager’s writhing body.
“Krrrgh...”
The man thrashed wildly, soaking the floor in blood.
Then, before long, he crumbled into black flecks of light and scattered into the air, leaving not a single trace of blood behind.
No one outside the soundproof manager’s office noticed the death inside.
The Capital employees went on working as if nothing had happened.
Having erased the manager, Suhyuk left the office and began to carefully search the entire Changho Building, all the way up to the twelfth floor.
The higher he climbed, the clearer it became that this building was nothing less than a giant den of crime.
The second floor had been the Changho Capital office he’d just left behind.
From the third floor up, nameless ghost companies took over; when he opened their doors, dozens of monitors showed illegal macro games running nonstop.
Three or four managers sat there smoking, staring only at the screens.
The fourth floor was no different.
Employees were leaning into their monitors as if they wanted to get swallowed whole, manipulating illegal coin charts.
From the fifth floor to the tenth, most of the offices were empty.
Behind unlocked glass doors, there was nothing but a few bare desks.
Looks like everything up to the tenth floor is just for laundering the money they made from drugs and organ trafficking.
When he reached the eleventh floor, a sharp chill swept over him.
It was the main server room, packed tight with massive server equipment.
The heart of the building — the core that ran all the illegal sites, coins, and game farms.
And finally, the twelfth floor at the top.
Blocking Suhyuk’s way was an iron door far thicker and more luxurious than any of the ones below.
Not even the sound of an ant crawling could be heard from inside.
Even if this is their base, they said Cheol-gamen doesn’t stay here all the time.
Just as Jo Gi-hoon had said, it seemed the leadership was away.
Anyway, tonight is just reconnaissance.
And for a scouting mission, he’d gathered some very good information. Now it was time to follow the thread.
When I come back, I wonder what Cheol-gamen’s face will look like after I’ve calmly cut off his arms and legs.
He still needed to grow stronger.
With the hope that there’d be plenty of trash piled up at the workshop tonight, he left the building at an unhurried pace.
Suhyuk rode the scooter, following the long red line — the Thread of Sin — that stretched from Team Leader Park’s feet.
It led him to an old, deserted dockyard in Incheon.
Riding a rattling old scooter from Seoul to Incheon in the cold wind had been a fairly miserable trip.
I should really change scooters.
If he was being honest, buying a car would have been easier on his body, but he didn’t have the kind of money for that right now. Besides, a motorcycle or scooter was far better for slipping through narrow alleys and shadowing a target in secret.
An electric bike or a mana bike would be perfect — silent and highly maneuverable.
Of course, for all their performance, those things were absurdly expensive for someone like Suhyuk.
I’ll have to think about the money problem more slowly.
If he were truly an all-powerful reaper, he wouldn’t be grinding himself down over expenses and operating costs, but Suhyuk was, after all, a human living in the real world, so he couldn’t completely erase these petty middle-class worries.
But the worry lasted only a moment.
There were far more important and urgent prey right in front of him than the condition of his wallet.
Suhyuk hid the scooter at a distance, pulled the Reaper’s Robe low over his head, and approached an old abandoned warehouse by the dock.
He slipped through a gap inside, killing his presence as much as possible, and the scene within was even busier and more horrific than it had looked from outside.
People dressed in white protective suits like sanitation workers were wiping away the bloodstains that had crusted over here and there with harsh chemicals.
Elsewhere, others were busy disinfecting and organizing bloodied surgical tools and the grotesque equipment used for organ removal.
“Hey! Be careful with the ice boxes — don’t let the batteries come loose. If the power cuts out while we’re moving them, everything inside will spoil. Then both you and I are screwed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the four of you, go over there and finish handling the bodies.”
“Yes.”
The four men who had received the order went down into the basement.
They opened a large plastic coffin-shaped container stuffed with corpses, then began dumping jugs of hydrochloric acid into it without hesitation.
Sssssss—!
Along with the sound of flesh and bone melting away, a rancid, sickening cloud billowed up and burst through the warehouse.
Disgust flooded Suhyuk’s eyes.
This was a place where human dignity didn’t exist — a dump in the literal sense of the word.
There were roughly thirteen men bustling around, hauling supplies and dissolving bodies.
Add Team Leader Park, who stood in the middle of it all with an imperious expression, meticulously checking off equipment on a list and giving orders, and the total came to fourteen.
So Kim Kyung-su still hasn’t arrived.
From the way the workshop relocation was in full swing, it looked likely that Kim Kyung-su would be joining them directly at the new destination rather than at this abandoned warehouse.
I can’t move yet.
He would have to wait for the right moment.
These guys moved in tightly compartmentalized cells, and if he lost the thread even once, it wouldn’t be easy to pick up their trail again.
He had to seize the chance and sweep them all up in one go.
I only need Kim Kyung-su. As for Kim Tae-su and Cheol-gamen, I’ll track them through Kim Kyung-su with Echoes of Hell.
Suhyuk stood silently in a dark corner of the warehouse, watching them with his presence completely suppressed.
Since there wasn’t a single Awaker among them, no one detected him.
The hours of dull waiting passed, and at last the men finished sorting the supplies and began splitting up into several vans and trucks.
“Move out.”
With Team Leader Park’s curt radio call, the vehicles left the dockyard.
Once they were completely gone, Suhyuk slowly came out of the warehouse and got back on the scooter.
Then he resumed the chase, following the blood-red thread slicing through the dark.
His destination was an abandoned hospital deep in the mountains, far from any sign of human life.
Weeds had grown wild across the courtyard, and the broken windows gave the place a damp, chilling, almost ghostly air.
It was the sort of place where a ghost might leap out at you any second.
“All right, we’re here, so unload fast and get some rest.”
At someone’s encouragement, the organization members wordlessly began unloading supplies and surgical equipment from the vehicles.
Then, kicking up a cloud of dust, an old minibus pulled through the abandoned hospital’s front gate and came to a stop in the courtyard.
“Team Leader. I brought three guys for today’s job. What do you want us to do with them?”
Ten people got off the bus in total.
One driver, three people with their hands bound behind their backs and gags in their mouths, and six burly gang members hauling the three captives down roughly from both sides.
When he heard the driver’s question, Team Leader Park checked the paperwork and lazily held up three fingers.
“Yeah, got it. Hey, second floor. Take them up.”
The three men, terrified and thrashing uselessly, were dragged into the hospital by force.
Standing in the dark, Suhyuk counted every one of them.
The fourteen men already here, plus the seven gangsters who came on the bus.
That made twenty-one members of the Cheolsu-pa gathered inside this abandoned hospital.
He was dying to draw out his scythe and beat every last one of those trash piles to death on the spot, but Suhyuk forced his mind cold and held his breath.
At last, the phone in Team Leader Park’s pocket rang, the sound carrying to Suhyuk’s ears as he circled silently around the man who was in charge here.
“Yes, sir.”
He knew instinctively that it was Kim Kyung-su.
“The relocation work is just about finished.”
After listening for a moment, Team Leader Park tilted his head.
“What? The boss still isn’t answering his phone? Ah... then he’s probably drunk and asleep again. Happens all the time, doesn’t it? No need to worry so much. When morning comes, I’ll go straight to the boss’s place myself.”
How are you going to find a guy who’s already in hell?
As Suhyuk sneered inwardly, Team Leader Park continued the call and gave a slight bow from the waist.
“Yes, sir. Understood. Then I’ll have everything perfectly prepared by the time you arrive.”
After hanging up, Team Leader Park nodded at one of the gangsters nearby who was carrying equipment and issued an order.
“The executive director and his younger brother are coming together now. That Black Moon bastard Jo Tae-joon we sent up to the third-floor operating room earlier — send that bastard back down to the empty room on the second floor and keep him waiting.”
At those words, Suhyuk’s gaze flashed coldly.
...?! Kim Tae-su is coming too?
The younger brother. The third in the Cheolsu-pa, the knife of the gang who personally handled the dirty work with a blade in his hand — Kim Tae-su.
Kim Kyung-su and Kim Tae-su, two Awakers at once.
This had turned into a difficult situation.
A fight that would not be easy, one that demanded absolute caution, was beginning to take shape.
And yet, a deep smile spread across Suhyuk’s lips.
At last... I can take my revenge. Kim Tae-su.
That night, as he had been butchered to death in unjust suffering, the memory of that cold blade returning to stab through his abdomen again sent his blood surging backward in his veins.
Tonight, either you die or I do. One of us is definitely going down.
Snikt—
From the darkness, the Reaper’s Scythe — thick with murderous intent — was summoned into Suhyuk’s right hand.
Before those two get here, I’d better prepare the stage.