Where Will I Sleep Tonight?
"Crews… can you tell me more about that?"
At Donovan's question, the food truck owner flipped the remaining sausages and dropped his voice low.
"The homeless crews are split into four big zones. Or more precisely, there are massive tent cities that rule each one. Abandoned subway tunnels in Brooklyn, the slums of the Bronx, the outskirts of Central Park — places like that."
"Pretty big operations, then?"
"Yeah. Sleeping alone on the street and getting jumped is worse, so people crawl into them. But you — never, never even think about going in there."
The owner waved the tongs in his hand with genuine alarm.
"There are real gangs that split New York into four territories, and they use the tent-city homeless as disposable tools."
His voice shrank even further.
"The east-side gang uses them as drug mules. The west-side guys plant pickpockets among them. Walking into one of those zones means becoming that gang's slave."
The homeless crews weren't simple alliances.
They were bottom-rung cells occupied by massive criminal organizations — convenient cutouts for when things went wrong.
Donovan stroked his chin and nodded quietly at the brutal, ruthlessly realistic ecosystem of New York's back alleys.
Good thing I asked.
Even if he'd walked in blind, he would have seen the murky criminal darkness clouding the bosses' faces and pulled out before he got in too deep. But deliberately wading into a cartel mud pit while freshly possessed and still half-broken would have been pure insanity.
"The problem is… I don't have anywhere to sleep tonight."
Donovan crushed the empty cola can as he muttered it. The owner paused a beat, then spoke quietly.
"There is one place. A small tent camp under a riverside bridge, right on the boundary where the four big tent cities' territories meet."
"Not gang-affiliated?"
"Nah. Too small and too awkwardly placed for any gang to bother swallowing. No nasty crime rumors either — just people sticking together quietly, trying to survive New York's rough floor. But it's got one fatal drawback."
"Drawback?"
"They're ridiculously selective about who they take. Not race, age, or size — the boss of that crew screens people like he's running some kind of strict job interview."
The moment he heard that, the corner of Donovan's eye curved into a sharp arc.
A gap zone free of the big gangs. People who hadn't been steeped in crime. And above all — a boss who chose his people carefully.
Perfect. Absolutely perfect.
Being that picky about membership also meant the place was safe.
Donovan tossed the crushed cola can cleanly into the trash and stood up.
"Thanks for the intel, boss. So how do I get there? I don't know a damn thing about this neighborhood."
The owner let out a disbelieving half-laugh at the brazen, shameless question.
"You were strutting around without even knowing the way? Head straight toward the East River from here. Past the abandoned factory district, under the big bridge piers. Ten minutes on foot — twenty at most."
Donovan looked the way the man pointed. Between the old brick buildings with their shutters down, a red sunset was sinking low.
A bleak outer slum, far from the bright commercial strips. Once the sun fully dropped and New York's knife-edged wind started cutting through these nearly empty streets, this thin field jacket alone wouldn't keep him alive.
If there had been foot traffic, he could have forced a few face readings and scraped together motel money. But on a desolate stretch like this, securing a safe base for the night wasn't optional — it was survival.
Ten to twenty minutes… right on my doorstep. I'll go check it out. If the vibe's all wrong, I just walk back out.
Even through the hollow disorientation of possessing a stranger's body, the simple fact that his one real skill still worked perfectly made the corner of Donovan's mouth lift.
"Your daughter'll call within a few days. Keep some diaper money ready."
"Oh! You bet! Watch yourself out there — and if you ever want another hot dog, you come right back!"
Leaving the owner waving with cheerful good humor behind him, Donovan turned up the collar of his worn field jacket and stepped out into the evening air that was already going cold.
Cutting through the cooling evening air, Donovan walked the deserted, hollow streets and quietly sorted his thoughts.
One thing that has to happen right now.
A safe place to sleep that wouldn't freeze him to death. A brutally practical, desperate survival goal.
But his gaze was already reaching past that — toward something more essential. As he walked, he looked down at his own rough, gaunt hands.
Right before the accident. The moment he'd shoved the little kid whose forehead had been thick with the Death Shadow. That brief, overwhelming sensation still lived vivid at his fingertips.
I changed fate myself.
To the old Kang Dohwan, physiognomy had been nothing more than a weather forecast — something that let you grab an umbrella because you already knew it would rain.
He'd believed you could only read a destiny already set and issue a warning. You couldn't reverse the great current itself.
All I could ever do, watching someone else's misfortune, was give advice.
Even that had earned him more money than most people saw in Itaewon. But his mouth had always tasted bitter, and something inside him had stayed hollow.
In the end, he couldn't change fate itself.
That day, though — throwing his whole body in front of a child who was supposed to die — he'd felt something entirely different.
The warm, swelling sensation of taking an absolute gray destiny in his own hands, bending it, and painting over it with the light of life.
This is why I learned physiognomy.
The thought only came when he hadn't merely watched someone's misfortune, but wiped it clean.
And now, Donovan had been handed a power that let him see those great currents of fate in even finer detail.
Almost too generous a trade for a possession.
Back in the Itaewon days, he'd had to dissect the shape of every feature and run complex formulas just to scrape a reading of someone's life thread.
Now it was different.
The realm of Color Reading, opened the moment he woke after the possession.
Just as he'd seen on the food truck owner's face moments ago — good fortune and calamity, life and death, all of it appearing on a person's face in colors as clear as highlighter strokes. A broken, unfair ability.
I can see so much more now. So much clearer.
Holding a hand this perfect, there was no reason to stand by and watch other people's misery the way he used to — or to end his life as just another homeless man on a New York sidewalk.
If he could twist even someone else's death line and save them, then this freezing bottom-rung fate he'd been given could be torn apart and rebuilt warm, too.
All right. Let's change it for real.
This cold, cutting fate of his in a strange land.
And the fates of the countless people who would sit in front of him from now on.
He intended to rewrite every last one.
Lost in thought, he walked for a little over ten minutes.
Before he knew it, he had left the city proper behind, and a cold river wind carrying the smell of water brushed his nose.
Donovan slowly lifted his head.
An overwhelming landscape — a massive steel structure blotting out the sky.
The great bridge spanning the East River.
And beneath its dark shadow, a cluster of worn tents emerged, steeped in a strange stillness that seemed to warn outsiders away.
By the time he arrived, the sun had fully vanished under the bridge.
In the thick dark, only the crackling firelight of a burning oil drum flickered red.
"Made it."
Donovan tugged one corner of his mouth up and strode toward it.
But before his foot could even cross into the deep shade under the bridge—
"Hey, Asian. Wrong turn."
From a corner of the entrance, a scrawny white man warming himself by the battered drum stepped out and blocked Donovan's path.
"We don't take people here. Do yourself a favor and get lost while I'm still being nice."
Sunken eyes. A thick, unkempt beard. A coat of filthy rags.
The gray at his temples and the deep-cut wrinkles said he was well past fifty — the kind of shabby figure anyone would write off as a washed-up gatekeeper for a place like this.
But the real face Donovan saw was something else entirely.
…Wow.
Those eyes had looked hollow. The instant they met Donovan's, though, a razor-sharp light flashed through them — the kind that scanned a whole body in a single second and left a chill in its wake.
In that same moment, the Color Reading settled in Donovan's eyes and dissected the man's face piece by piece.
The Gwanlokgung — the Career Palace — running broad and solid across the center of his forehead.
This was not the face of a man meant to stand gate duty under someone else. It carried the firm, settled energy of a ruler who held countless people in the palm of his hand.
This guy is the boss here?
Even better. Whatever this place really was would be written all over the boss's face.
Donovan's gaze moved to the man's eyes and jaw. No red blood-threads of violence in the pupils. No murderous killing intent.
The jaw and cheekbones weren't brutally flared either.
Not the face of a man who casually takes lives and gets blood on his hands.
So how were they surviving this brutal New York at all?
The structure of the nostrils and chin was pure merchant — the shape of a man who calculated profit down to the last coin.
Except around the ears — the palace that gathers sound — countless fine threads of dense, secret color were winding in like silk.
Not money. A special kind of merchant who scrapes up information.
Using thousands of homeless people across New York's back alleys as eyes and ears — the center of a spiderweb that held the city's underbelly.
A neutral zone that committed no crimes of its own, yet even the big gangs didn't dare touch lightly.
Some kind of information network for New York's underworld?
Having confirmed the tent camp's true nature, Donovan let out a short laugh and opened his mouth.
"I need somewhere out of the cold wind. Let me crash here for one night. I'll pay the room fee in some very useful information."
At the brazen demand, the man's brow twitched.
"Bullshit. This isn't a charity. Not my call anyway — I'll go get the higher-ups. You stand right there and don't move."
The man made a show of suffering as he started to rise from the battered chair by the drum — and that was when Donovan spoke.
"You can drop the fake gatekeeper act."
"…What?"
"No need to fetch anyone higher up, boss. It's written all over your face that you're the head of this tent camp."
For a second, the man who'd been half-rising froze solid as stone.
The fact that he was the leader was a secret.
And some Asian drifter who'd just rolled in had seen through it in a single second?
Then the "information" this guy was offering as rent was almost certainly not ordinary either.
The wariness filling the man's hollow eyes began to flash with massive curiosity and a strange new light.
"…Who the hell are you. Who sent you?"
At the man's low, growling voice, Donovan casually slid both hands into the pockets of his worn field jacket.
"Just a physiognomist — a face reader — who needs somewhere out of the cold wind tonight."
"…A face reader?"
Right then, a homeless man in a heavy press of old rags coughed roughly as he brushed past the two of them and headed deeper into the tent camp.
Donovan's gaze flicked to that man's face — and the corner of his mouth curled up thick and dark.
"A little expensive for one night's lodging, maybe. But I'll throw you a free sample."
He stepped closer to the man and dropped his voice to a confidential murmur.
"That guy who just walked past. A rat planted here as a plant from another zone. You already know that, right?"
In an instant, the man's sunken eyes blew wide enough to tear.
He knew. As the boss who controlled every scrap of information in this zone, of course he knew about a spy from another organization who'd crawled into his own tent camp.
But that wasn't why he was stunned.
An unidentified Asian who had set foot under this bridge for the first time moments ago had taken one second-long glance at a passing face — and cut straight through to that enormous truth.
"You really… read faces?"