The Man Possessed by an Evil Spirit
Sterling & Wright—S&W—a major real estate management agency in Times Square.
Senior Property Manager Richard was halfway through his morning coffee when the file from Accounting landed on his desk and drained the color from his face.
"Oh my god… That building on Forty-Fifth sold?"
The five-story property on Forty-Fifth Street had been on the market for barely three days. By dawn, it had a new owner—clean, complete, done.
To Richard, and to every manager at S&W, that building meant something. Inside the agency it was known as the promotion track, a nickname earned because every agent who handled it had climbed the ladder. Richard himself had clawed through a bloodbath of internal competition just to snag the assignment.
And now the owner had changed.
Worse—the speed of it was absurd.
In New York commercial real estate, a sale involving bank financing and title analysis took two or three months at the absolute fastest. That was normal. That was expected.
And this one had closed in a single day?
That doesn't make any sense…
Richard's eyes locked onto a line in the paperwork.
No mortgage.
No loan review at all. Someone had put down a hundred and fifty million dollars in cash.
Even that, though, couldn't explain a one-day close.
Because—
The paperwork is a separate problem.
No matter how much money you threw around, New York City Hall's notoriously meticulous document processing did not finish in twenty-four hours. Curious what kind of counsel could possibly pull that off, Richard checked the representing attorneys.
Wait—these are Wallace family people. They put Wallace people on a building contract…?
Enormous liquid capital plus the Wallace family's backing. Impressive enough on its own. But still not enough.
Even if you roll out the most expensive legal team money can buy, cracking City Hall's ironclad bureaucracy in twenty-four hours is beyond any lawyer's reach.
Which left only one explanation for a result like this.
This… only works if the top floor of City Hall—no, the mayor's office itself—pushed it through directly.
A chill ran down Richard's spine.
Cash to burn, Wallace family support, and the mayor personally greasing the wheels? What kind of person is that?
A heavyweight of that caliber could have bought any building on the main strip of Times Square. And yet, of all the properties available, they had chosen this ordinary five-story building.
Did they buy it because they knew it was special?
Nothing else made sense. Richard's mind was spinning itself raw with the question of just who had acquired the place.
Fortunately, the new owner had kept the existing PM—Richard—on the account. He swallowed hard, clicked his trembling mouse, and opened the new owner's profile.
"…A man in his twenties? Asian?"
It was a world away from the silver-haired Wall Street titan he had been picturing.
Who the hell is this?
Even at twenty-something, anyone who could wield absolute power and capital like personal tools was no ordinary person. Richard's imagination took off. Some obscure Eastern royal bloodline the public had never heard of? Or maybe the hidden crown prince of a conglomerate that could shake the entire Asian economy?
Doesn't matter who. This is a perfect opportunity for me.
Getting face time with someone that overwhelming—and earning their trust as the dedicated manager—was the dream of anyone who worked real estate. He drafted a courteous, formal meeting request and hit send.
The reply came back in under five minutes, and it casually demolished every hope he had been inflating.
"Ah…"
A long, hollow sigh slipped out of him. He had never fretted this hard over anything in his life.
At the very hour Richard was burning with frustration—
A Lincoln sedan glided up the drive of a grand estate on the outskirts of New York. Cole stepped out, took in the meticulously kept grounds, and let out a breath of pure admiration.
"It's beautiful. I never imagined a place like this existed outside the city."
He wasn't wrong. Garden hedges trimmed with ruler-straight precision. Clear water cascading from an antique fountain carved of dazzling white marble. Even peacocks strolling the lawn at their leisure. The whole scene looked like a masterpiece someone had poured a fortune into painting.
"It is, but…"
The man who owned the estate was a long way from beautiful.
This was the mansion of Salvatore—the so-called King of the Waste Empire—who held a total monopoly on waste processing and resource-recycling infrastructure across the American East Coast. He was no ordinary businessman. He was a legend who had clawed his way up blood-soaked, crushing street thugs and mafia outfits without mercy over the rights to every dump and scrapyard. From the skyscrapers of the daylight world to the lowest sewers of the underworld, there was nowhere his control did not reach. In the shadows especially, his absolute power was so overwhelming that even mafia bosses did not dare meet his eyes.
Lately, that man had collapsed under an illness no one could name. Rumors said that for all his rotting piles of money, he still couldn't find the cause—and had sunk into a vicious paranoia. Maybe a lifetime spent among filth and the stench of blood had done it. He had decided he was possessed by an evil spirit, cursed. In the end he put up five million dollars for whoever could drive out the demon choking his throat, and summoned mediums from every corner.
"Do you think he's actually possessed?"
Donovan snorted a quiet laugh.
"That'd be a real problem. There's nothing I can do about that side of things."
"…So this one is out of your range?"
"Yeah. I have zero connection to that world."
The reason he had taken the job anyway was simple curiosity.
Honestly, I'm just curious.
The same way Donovan had gained the power of Color Reading, there might be people out there with genuine special abilities. If any of them were real, he wanted to see what their faces looked like under physiognomy—what, if anything, set them apart.
"Come on. Let's go watch how the others work."
"…Yes, Boss."
Donovan started toward the mansion without a second glance back.
The moment they stepped into the main hall where the mediums had gathered, what filled Donovan's eyes was a circus beyond imagination.
Bizarre magic circles scrawled in red chalk across the finest marble floor. Atop them, a voodoo priest hung with a necklace of animal bones whirled in a seizure-like dance, chicken feathers flying.
"Spirits of blood and earth! Tear open the jaws of the cursed serpent and open the path of life!"
On another side, a self-proclaimed exorcist—supposedly defrocked by the Vatican—flung holy water in every direction, veins bulging as he spat Latin in a frenzy of tongues.
"Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus! Foul spirit crawled up from the sulfur fires of hell—by the name of God I command you, leave this flesh at once!"
Not to be outdone, a gypsy-styled tarot master had her face buried in a massive crystal ball, moaning as she claimed communion with souls.
"Ahhh… I see it. The blood-red wheel of fate is spinning in reverse! The gatekeeper of the underworld comes with his scythe to drag the old man's soul away!"
Acrid white sage smoke. The coppery reek of unidentified blood. Shouting loud enough to sting the ears. Rituals of every stripe, each one supposedly meant to drive out an evil spirit. The hall felt like a world's fair of the occult.
"…Boss. This is a lot different from what I expected."
Cole whispered it, half-stunned by the absurd free-for-all in front of them. Donovan nodded.
"You too? Same here."
He answered without much concern, eyes glittering behind his sunglasses as he took in the spectacle with genuine interest.
Then Salvatore, slumped in his wheelchair, opened his mouth in a voice rough with metal.
"Well then. Who's next. Who among you will drive out this vicious curse upon me."
At the old man's labored rasp, the assorted mediums mid-ritual hesitated and parted. Through the gap, a middle-aged man with blond hair—dressed head to toe in a pure white suit—strolled out at an unhurried pace.
"Finally. The real one steps up."
Awe flooded the other mediums' eyes in an instant. Alexander. The most famous medium of the moment—Hollywood A-listers and Wall Street billionaires alike sought his counsel before making a move. The moment he appeared, the floating carnival atmosphere of the hall dropped into something heavy and still.
Alexander used no animal bones, no charms. He simply fixed the slumped godfather in the wheelchair with a long, cool stare from those blue eyes.
Suffocating silence.
Then his finger rose and pointed into empty air with absolute conviction.
"I see it. A vast black vengeful spirit, rising from the deep basement of this mansion… has its hand around your throat."
Bullshit, it turned out, depended entirely on who was selling it. His words sounded thoroughly plausible, and his expression carried the weight of a man speaking only truth.
"This is no illness. This is a curse. I will purify the darkness."
It looked for all the world like a legendary medium's refined exorcism was about to begin—when a woman walked up beside Donovan.
"Seems you and I are the only real ones in this room."
Donovan, lounging against a leather sofa, turned his head slowly. A deep wine-colored suit. Sharp, intelligent eyes. She settled elegantly into the seat beside him, crossing her legs, and murmured,
"That flashy con man is busy fighting a vengeful spirit that doesn't exist—but you and I can see it, can't we? That old man has so much vitality boiling over he could stand up right now and dance a tango."
She smiled with total certainty. She had decided that she and Donovan alone had seen through the truth of the whole farce—Salvatore's act.
Oh-ho.
Behind the sunglasses, Donovan's gaze slid across her features—especially her eyes. Black and white in razor-clear contrast, pupils set like lacquer dots: the sharp, piercing look that physiognomy associated with an inspector who could cut through to the truth of things.
He wiped his hands lightly with a napkin and answered in a calm voice.
"Good eyes."
"Pardon?"
"Good head, too."
It sounded like praise. It wasn't.
"But that still doesn't make you the real deal."
"…!"
Her smile vanished in an instant. Stripped bare in a single stroke, she parted her lips without a sound.
"You're missing the most important thing."
Having delivered the remark like advice, Donovan walked out into the center of the hall and spoke.
"Seems like you've done about enough work for the money you've been paid. How about wrapping it up?"
Alexander's movement stopped cold. The shaman who had just finished his noisy show and was catching his breath, the exorcist still clutching his holy water—every one of them froze solid. The moment every gaze in the hall locked onto Donovan, his eyes swept, almost casually, across the Color Reading blooming on the mediums' faces.
For people running a five-million-dollar scam on the absolute ruler of New York's underworld, their complexions were far too calm. Not a thread of the blue aura that lingers at the mouth under life-or-death tension. Not a flicker of the red aura that boils between the brows under the greed of easy fortune. Laid through every feature was the clear, stable true color unique to people moving strictly by a script—people whose safety had already been guaranteed.
Color Reading does not lie.
Those flashy mediums had been plants from the start—shills Salvatore himself had hired.
While the entire hall sat stunned and silent, Donovan drove the wedge home.
"If the test is over, let's move on to the next part."
He jerked his chin toward the godfather's aide standing off to one side of the hall—a man who, from the beginning, had shown zero interest in the ritual itself and had been recording, with a hawk's eye, only the reactions of the real ones mixed in among the mediums.
"Hasn't that side already decided who to keep?"
Silence dropped over the main hall like a bucket of ice water. A crack ran through Alexander's elegant expression. The aide's shoulders flinched rigid—
"…Hahahahah!"
The old man who had been gasping for breath in the wheelchair suddenly erupted in a bizarre, full-throated roar of laughter. Salvatore tore the cumbersome oxygen mask off with open irritation, and a flash of light kindled in his eyes. The dying invalid from moments before was gone without a trace. What remained was the true face of the man who had crushed every scrap of filth and bloodstain in New York's underworld and built an empire on top of it.
Salvatore fixed Donovan with a stare of pure interest and spoke.
"Correct, young man."
Donovan nodded, and delivered one last line.
"Well then—since the evil spirit seems to have been driven out, go ahead and deposit the five million."