Rest in Peace
On the other hand.
“...What is this?”
Mu Yeonghui had also discovered something bizarre in the area she was investigating.
It was the bathroom of the mansion, and inside the bathtub lay a corpse.
Its legs and toes had stretched like rubber in death. The face remained intact, yet the eyes were wide open in apparent resentment, shedding bloody tears.
‘Wh-what the hell happened here!’
Even Mu Yeonghui, who had seen nearly everything during her time in Murim, found the gruesome corpse utterly unfamiliar.
As she examined it with growing seriousness, her eyes fell on something clutched in the dead man’s hand.
‘A notebook?’
Whatever it was, he had gripped it tightly until his final moment.
Sensing something unusual, Mu Yeonghui carefully pried open the fingers and took the notebook.
My name is Professor Ham Gyeong-o.
I came here to find my friend, the scholar Kim Seong-gyeong, who has been missing for a month.
What I saw upon arriving at the mansion was horrifying.
The transformed corpse of my friend and what amounted to his last will.
In the diary he left behind, it is recorded that he accidentally opened a gate to another dimension, allowing them to cross over.
Realizing the severity of the situation, I immediately tried to contact the police, but it was already too late!
The creatures had opened the gate themselves and a significant number had already crossed over.
Some of them had been monitoring the mansion and captured me the moment they spotted me.
The notebook contained horrific details, but upon closer inspection, something felt off.
There was no mention of the Ghost Countermeasures Division.
If he had discovered a ghost, why would he try to contact the regular police instead?
And more importantly, how could someone being chased by monsters have the leisure to write numbered entries in a notebook like this?
The contradictions arose because both Professor Ham Gyeong-o’s corpse and the notebook were props prepared by the ghost.
However—
‘There were others who crossed dimensions besides me?!’
Mu Yeonghui, who had yet to fully adapt to the modern world, believed every word of the prop to be genuine.
Since she herself had truly crossed over from another world, it felt all the more credible.
‘S-so ghosts aren’t just like yokai or monsters. There are beings from other dimensions too.’
With a serious misunderstanding firmly in place, she continued reading the remaining notes.
They dragged me to the bathtub and tortured me.
As a result of the torture, my lower body has grotesquely mutated.
But the arrogant creatures did not kill me right away.
Before I die, I leave behind this notebook.
If anyone finds it, please reveal the truth in my stead and save the world.
I beg you.
‘...So two people were tortured to death here? Caught by monsters from another dimension they didn’t even know about, unable to close their eyes even in death.’
After reading all the notes, Mu Yeonghui gazed at Ham Gyeong-o with dark eyes.
Then she reached out with her slender, pale hand and gently closed his wide-open eyes.
The next moment.
“Aaaargh!”
“...!”
A scream erupted.
It had come from outside the mansion, not from within.
Mu Yeonghui rushed out of the bathroom and ran into Ryeonhwa’s group, who had burst out at the same time.
“Miss Mu Yeonghui, you heard that scream too, right?!”
“Indeed. A voice singing of a final moment steeped in despair.”
They regrouped and headed outside, only to be greeted by a scene straight from hell.
“Fire!”
“Don’t let them get any closer!”
The standby team that had been keeping watch outside was pouring gunfire in every direction. They were surrounded by monsters.
The creatures had an overall purplish hue and possessed extremely long limbs.
Their torsos were normal, but their arms and legs were abnormally elongated, as were their fingers and toes.
They writhed those long limbs like tentacles, pressing in on the standby team.
“Everyone, concentrate fire and break through the encirclement!”
“Yes ma’am!”
At Ryeonhwa’s command, the other fighters opened fire as well.
When their bullets felled the long-armed ghosts, the standby team hurriedly dashed through the gap.
They had abandoned the armored vehicle, its ammunition, and all their heavy weapons.
“How could you come back with just your bodies?!”
“W-we’re sorry!”
They were all rookies. In the sudden emergency, they hadn’t even thought to grab their weapons.
“We’ve cleared a path, so if we take the armored car— …Never mind, it’s too late! Just unload every bullet you have left!”
Ryeonhwa had been about to scold them but realized it was pointless now and issued new orders instead.
Fortunately, the long-armed ghosts had poor durability.
One or two shots wouldn’t kill them, but sustained fire brought them down.
The problem was their numbers.
No matter how many they killed, the count never decreased—in fact, it only grew.
“Hunter Ryeonhwa, look up there!”
One of the fighters revealed the secret behind the endless reinforcements.
The sky had split open, and long-armed ghosts were continuously pouring out from the rift.
“H-how is this possible?”
“Don’t tell me that diary was actually true!”
The fighters recalled the diary’s contents and felt a chill, realizing the scene perfectly matched a crossing from another dimension.
‘No, that can’t be right.’
But Ryeonhwa calmly assessed the situation.
‘This is just another ghost. Logically, other dimensions can’t exist! That rift probably isn’t a real dimensional gate—it only looks that way.’
Then what exactly was that crack in the sky?
As she pondered, the answer struck her like lightning.
‘Ah, that must be the real ghost!’
The rift wasn’t a dimensional portal at all—it was a ghost that merely appeared as one!
Should they call it the Rift Ghost?
In that case, the mansion, the diary, the corpse, and even the long-armed ghosts were all props prepared by this creature.
Everything had been staged to make it seem as though enemies were endlessly pouring in from another dimension.
‘I almost fell for it completely! The long-armed ghosts are nothing but creations of that Rift Ghost.’
Eventually its power would run out and it would be unable to create more.
If they could just stall for time, the enemy would lose all means of attack.
‘The problem is we can’t attack it either.’
The enemy existed in the form of a spatial rift.
Since they couldn’t physically interfere with it, even if its power ran dry, they had no way to counterattack.
‘No choice then. Once its power is exhausted, we’ll escape in that opening. We need to call in specialized hunters who can deal with this properly!’
Ryeonhwa decided to abandon the fight and plan a retreat, but in her panic she had forgotten one crucial detail—she had forgotten that Mu Yeonghui still hadn’t done anything.
“Huh?”
“Hunter Mu Yeonghui?”
When Mu Yeonghui suddenly stepped forward, the others belatedly remembered her presence.
She moved as if to stand between the fighters and the ghosts, gazing straight ahead.
Her eyes were filled with boundless displeasure.
At that moment, nature itself trembled.
Whoooosh!
Dark clouds suddenly gathered in the sky as a violent gale began to swirl.
The weather churned wildly, and soon the ground began to shake.
Centered on Mu Yeonghui, the earth quaked like an earthquake, cracking open with fissures.
The ground defied gravity and rose upward, sending boulders soaring into the sky.
“Haaah!!”
When Mu Yeonghui let out a sharp shout, the floating rocks shattered into pieces.
The formless power radiating from her split the gathered storm clouds apart, scattering them, and even the wind fell silent.
Nature had raged according to one person’s mood, then grew calm once more.
….
The guns in the hands of Ryeonhwa and her team froze at the sight.
The long-armed ghosts also halted in place.
Even the Rift Ghost that had been spitting them out stopped for a moment.
What the hell did we just witness?
It was as if they were all asking the same question.
While everyone stood stunned, Mu Yeonghui began walking forward.
“It has been a long time since I last encountered something this unpleasant.”
She simply walked forward in silence, yet the long-armed ghosts that hadn’t even come close were slaughtered.
Every ghost standing in a straight line along her path was sliced apart in an instant.
‘I have no intention of calling myself humanity’s savior or anything like that. But since I was asked, it would be difficult to ignore the request.’
“I have no desire to decide the fate of humanity. However, having received a plea from one so frail, I shall not turn a blind eye.”
She advanced while speaking each word deliberately.
In less than ten seconds she had annihilated all the long-armed ghosts, then looked up at the Rift Ghost in the sky.
Uwoooooooo!!!
The Rift Ghost immediately let out a scream.
A howling cry like a swirling vortex erupted, widening the rift even further.
A colossal long-armed ghost with an enormous stature began to emerge from within.
It had squeezed out every last ounce of its power to create something far beyond anything it had made before.
Sixty meters tall.
Even accounting for the exaggerated size caused by its long limbs, the gigantic long-armed ghost that emerged looked down at Mu Yeonghui.
Unaware that this would be the last sight it would ever see.
And then—
An invisible colossal sword manifested in the air.
A blade no one had noticed sliced through the giant long-armed ghost and continued on to cut the Rift Ghost behind it as well.
“That’s impossible…”
Ryeonhwa, who had been watching, muttered blankly.
The ghost made of space itself had been cleanly severed and vanished.
What had caused such an absurd event was Mu Yeonghui’s martial arts.
The Formless Sword.
Because it had no physical shape, it was invisible,
and it was one of the pinnacles of swordsmanship capable of cutting other formless things.
In less than a minute since Mu Yeonghui had stepped forward, the entire situation had been resolved in the blink of an eye.
The feat was so transcendent that no one could even cheer. They simply stared at her in stunned silence.
Yet Mu Yeonghui did not look pleased. Instead, her expression was bitter.
‘I have closed the gate. Since I have fulfilled your request, rest peacefully with your friend. Professor Ham Gyeong-o.’
Believing the fictional character created by the ghost to be real, she had avenged him in his stead—and now felt utterly depressed.