Abandoned House Experience Broadcast
The alley where Kim Yi-yeon had put down the Corner Man was now sealed off behind yellow control tape and plastic sheeting, hidden from prying eyes.
"What the hell, why are you blocking a perfectly good road!?"
"If you close this off, we have to walk all the way around!"
"Did something happen here?"
The alley saw heavy foot traffic from nearby residents, so the complaints came pouring in — but the police had nothing to say for themselves. After all, they didn't know what had happened here either, or why the area was under lockdown in the first place.
A rookie officer who had only just managed to placate and send off one such elderly protester sighed and turned to his senior.
"Senior, what's the actual reason we're cordoning off this street?"
"Beats me. Orders come down from above, and we tape it up. That's the whole job."
"The people who went in would know. Can't we at least ask them?"
The junior officer lifted the edge of the plastic sheeting and peeked into the alley.
Tap.
"Hey, hey. Higher-ups say these people's identities are Class One secrets. If you get flagged for memorizing their faces, that alone is enough to strip you of the badge. Even if you do remember something, do yourself a favor and forget it."
At the senior officer's words, the rookie quickly turned his head away. But a moment later, his face twisted with indignation.
"Come on, how am I supposed to forget that?"
Two people had entered the alley. One had been a young woman — a beauty striking enough to turn heads, though forgettable if you tried. The problem was the other one.
"How does anyone forget a grandmother in a black suit, over 180 centimeters tall, wearing sunglasses!?"
"...Well. Try to forget anyway. I'm trying."
For all that he said it, the senior officer didn't hold much hope of purging that overpowering image from his own memory either.
"Crazy punk old hag, that one..."
What the senior officer, muttering under his breath, failed to notice was this: from the moment that complaint had left his lips, the old woman's face had already been wiped clean from his memory.
"I'm sorry, Team Leader? What is that supposed to—"
"Oh, nothing. Talking to myself."
Baek Gong-ju, Team Leader of the Paranormal Administration Bureau's Team 2 — a woman whose very identity was a Class One secret — waved off Yoon Soo-ah's question with a light shake of her head.
"So. Are these the talismans of the one who exorcised the Corner Man?"
"Yes, that's correct."
"Talisman written in red permanent marker on Post-it notes... has exorcism gone Gen Z these days or something?"
Baek Gong-ju studied the Post-it talismans papering the wall, then muttered quietly, "The craftsmanship itself is ordinary."
At those words, Yoon Soo-ah's eyes went wide. If anyone else said the craftsmanship was ordinary, it would mean exactly what it said. But when it came from Baek Gong-ju — one of the three finest talisman masters in all of South Korea — the story was entirely different. And Baek Gong-ju was infamous even within the Bureau for her brutal, uncharitable evaluations.
"What's actually worth noting is the sheer volume of spiritual power. Soo-ah, the hundred and twenty-seven talismans on this wall — how many days did the person who wrote them need?"
"One week."
"One week, hm..."
Talismans carry the impression of being easy — just yellow paper and red ink, and you're done. But a properly made talisman demands considerable time and painstaking effort. Writing one hundred twenty-seven of them in a single week meant one of two things.
"Either the output of their spiritual power is monstrous, or they're a master of the talisman arts."
Or both.
A mysterious psychic who had defeated the Corner Man. Whatever they were, they were no ordinary specimen. And judging by how precisely they'd identified the ghost story's weakness and exploited it, their wit and instinct were every bit as exceptional as their power. In the world of psychics, wit and instinct were, in a sense, even more decisive than spiritual ability itself. And the one who'd felled the Corner Man was a monster who possessed both.
Besides — they'd built all of that in a short span of time, self-taught, without a single teacher.
"They filled them in from the bottom, in the order they were written."
Baek Gong-ju swept her gaze slowly up the wall of Post-it talismans. The first was thoroughly average. But as she climbed, the quality crept steadily upward, until at the very last one—
"...Hmph. It's become tolerable."
This much change in a single week. There was no telling how far the person would grow given time.
"This business never does get a quiet day, does it..."
Just a few months ago, in a certain Southeast Asian country, a minister of national defense had died. Sudden cardiac arrest. That was what the world was told. The truth was different: the minister had made an enemy of one of his own nation's top-tier sorcerers, and been murdered for it. Incidentally, the sorcerer was never caught — they'd already fled abroad before laying the curse. Presumably they were living the leisurely life of a fugitive in Hawaii or Guam by now.
That was how it went: turned to ill purpose, spiritual power was useful beyond measure. You could curse a man to death from the other side of the planet without lifting a finger. You could loose a plague upon a chosen region. You could drive an ordinary, healthy person mad overnight. That was why nearly every country on earth secretly maintained a department for paranormal affairs.
And there was one saying that held true across all of those departments, everywhere.
'A top-tier psychic carries military value on par with a nuclear submarine.'
And right now, in South Korea, a nuclear-submarine-class psychic — no, perhaps a future aircraft-carrier-class one — was roaming free, unidentified and unregistered. For the Paranormal Administration Bureau, the very agency charged with managing paranormal phenomena, it was a situation enough to make them tear their hair out and dance.
"Soo-ah. You couldn't see the face, but you remember the voice, yes? When we get back, let's start with a voiceprint database search."
They knew the name Kim Ji-woo, but that alone was far too little to narrow the suspect pool — there were simply too many people named Kim Ji-woo in the world. And this Kim Ji-woo might well be an alias besides, which made the trail even colder.
"Um... do we really need to track Ji-woo down against his will?"
"What's this now?"
"The way I see it, Ji-woo wasn't the kind of dangerous person the Bureau needs to secure. If anything, he..."
Yoon Soo-ah thought of Kim Yi-yeon, who had cared for her — a woman who could not see — without a single trace of distaste.
"My darling granddaughter Soo-ah, I know exactly what you're thinking, but..."
Those who hold great power must be checked and balanced — even if they have no intention of ever abusing it.
"...Yes, ma'am."
Yoon Soo-ah nodded, her face clouded with unconvinced doubt.
Meanwhile, at that very moment, the aircraft-carrier-class psychic Kim Yi-yeon was...
"...How the hell am I going to make a living from here on out?"
worrying about his future livelihood.
"Thank god the money I've saved up can carry me a month or two, honestly..."
And that was only because he'd been cinching his belt to the bone. With so much money draining away to his father's [that son of a bitch] debts, he needed to land his next job as fast as possible.
"I should never have lent out my name just because they swore up and down 'this time it's guaranteed'... damn it all!"
The problem was where to work. Retail and customer-facing jobs were off the table now, for starters.
Anomalies and the arcane were two sides of the same coin. The arcane drew anomalies, and anomalies were drawn to the arcane. Which meant that if I took a job somewhere, innocent bystanders could end up bleeding for it — people like Choi Eun-ha.
"Yeah... that's a no."
In my life, I come first. That's non-negotiable. But I'm not so much of a bastard that I'd treat wrecking other people's lives as the natural cost of doing business. Besides, how was I supposed to work a shift with anomalies boiling out of the walls?
"So maybe... a job that uses the spiritual gift?"
A plausible idea — but not an easy one either. In Korea, people with spiritual power more or less all did the same handful of things: reading fortunes, performing rituals, that sort of work.
"Yeah, that's probably a stretch..."
It wasn't that I looked down on the shamanic trade. It's how people put food on the table — if you've got a knack, use it. What's there to be ashamed of? The problem was that this field, too, was viciously competitive. Why else would every village in the country have at least one fortune-teller's shop or Saju reader?
According to Yoon Soo-ah, this world was no exception to Korean reality — it ran on school ties, blood ties, and hometown ties, more or less. And a total greenhorn with zero pipelines and zero connections was going to charge into that?
"Not a chance. I'd starve to death before anyone paid me a glance."
I'd never studied fortune-telling or Saju a day in my life, after all.
"Ugh, this is rough..."
And just as I was agonizing over a future rendered in RGB values 0, 0, 0 —
Vrrrrr, vrrrrr.
"Huh? Choi Eun-ha?"
A call from Choi Eun-ha.
"Hey. What is it?"
"Do you maybe want to appear on a livestream?"
"No — hang on, why are you opening with that? That's like starting a meal with dessert. If you're calling me, shouldn't you open with a friendly greeting first? 'Hello! Yi-yeon oppa, how have you been? I've been well — my hair's growing back all prickly and new, so running my hand over it is quite the treat, ohohong~'? Something like that?"
"Mention my hair one more time and I will actually kill you."
"...Sorry."
"Anyway. Do you want to appear on a livestream or not?"
"Couldn't you at least explain which YouTube before asking?"
"A childhood friend of mine from middle school — we've been joined at the hip since forever — is a pretty famous streamer. She's putting together horror content this time, and she's looking for an expert in that field, both to build hype and to have insurance on set."
"...And if she needs an expert, why call me instead of, I don't know, a fortune-teller's shop or a shaman's shrine?"
"You do exorcisms too, oppa."
"......You actually remember that time?"
"Sort of. Vaguely."
Damn it. Wasn't the unspoken rule that you didn't keep memories from a possession state?
"Don't go telling people about that. It's not a party trick worth bragging about. Anyway, thanks for the offer, but I'll pass."
It wasn't just the anomalies being drawn to me that worried me. People were a problem too — no, people were the bigger problem. Yoon Soo-ah had told me the field was crawling with established psychics eager to sink their teeth into a talented young one. Getting on anyone's radar and tangled up with those vultures would do me no good at all.
"What? You won't do it?"
"Right. You wouldn't get it, but the arcane and the anomalous are two sides of one coin — if a real deal like me shows up on camera, who knows what could—"
"They're paying a million won a day."
"...THAT'S exactly why you need a genuine expert like me on set!"
Rule of thumb: if someone refuses your offer, check whether their wallet was thin!
"Okay~ then it's settled. I'll text you the shoot schedule."
"Sure. So who is this streamer, anyway? Someone who can throw around a million won a day has to have real weight to them."
"Tsukumo Momo."
"Japanese?"
"Nope. She's a VTuber or something — says it's a stage name."
"Ooh, a VTuber. Lot of streamers doing the VTuber thing these days, huh? Wasn't like that before I enlisted. Wait, don't you all worry about red pills nowadays? If they're bringing in actual psychics for horror content, isn't that going to be one of those abandoned-house exploration things?"
"What's a red pill?"
"Ah — never mind, if you don't know."
"Why do you sound suspiciously well-versed in this exact field..."
"Got the text. See you then."
"Ah, wait—!"
I hung up in a hurry and let out a long breath of relief. It wasn't that I had any particular love for VTubers. I'd just been a little interested in internet broadcasting — YouTubers, streamers, that whole scene — once upon a time.
"Well. That was a vague, idle curiosity from my student days."
The market had ballooned since then, and the environment was nothing like the old free-for-all where every man and his dog ran a stream. A former JCS chairman telling army stories! A Harvard professor solving the CSAT math section! A famous idol's daily vlog! Modern streaming was a meat grinder that shredded ordinary people the instant they stepped in. Not a road meant for someone as plain as me.
"Hmm, shoot's in three days... better get moving."
I eyed the things I'd ordered off Coupang and ran the numbers. "Yeah. I can just about make the timing work."
Psychics attract anomalies. Hearing that, I'd thought: then how do all the other psychics in the world survive? Do they all live every single day like it's open war against the things? As if. They weren't idiots — of course they'd have prepared at least a mosquito coil's worth of protection against an anomaly's approach. Thinking so, I'd dug through Dongbin's Dao Study Room, and sure enough, there it was: exactly the right thing for the job.
The peach wood sword. The quintessential Daoist anti-demon weapon, used to drive out wicked beings. Just as the name said, it was a wooden sword carved from peach wood, saturated with warding energy — they said its mere presence was enough to repel wicked things.
Besides the peach wood sword, the Dao Study Room listed plenty of other crafting guides for implements that lowered your odds of crossing paths with anomalies. I chose the sword for one simple reason: it was the easiest to make.
"You just whittle down some peach wood into a sword shape. How easy is that!?"
Laugh if you want, but I'd once earned an A in art class for wood carving. Whittling soft peach wood into a sword? Trivial.
"All right, then. Let's do this."
Carving knife in hand — bought in the same order — I laid newspaper across the floor and got to work.
Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch—
Slip!
"Tch! My hands are still stiff, that's all. Rookie mistake—"
Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch—
Slip!
"Tch! Hngh... maybe I'm holding the wood wrong?"
Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch—
Slip!
"Tch...! ...Maybe I should've just made prayer beads instead."
But it was too late. No refunds — in for a penny, in for a pound. A man who picked up the carving knife had to see the wooden sword through to the end.
Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch—
Slip!
"Ah! Yi-yeon oppa!"
Shoot day. Choi Eun-ha, who had been waiting for him, spotted Kim Yi-yeon and waved.
"Uh..."
Kim Yi-yeon waved back.
"Hm?"
"Were you waiting long? Sorry."
"No, I just got here early, so it doesn't matter — wait, what is wrong with your hand? Did something happen?"
Choi Eun-ha pointed at Kim Yi-yeon's hand, which was wrapped in bandages from fingertip to knuckle.
"Nothing happened."
"Excuse me? No, I'm asking why your hand looks like that—"
"Nothing. Happened. ...!!"
"Uh. Yes, sir."
Under the sheer pressure radiating off him, Choi Eun-ha had no choice but to nod and let it go.
"Anyway, hurry up! We have to do the pre-shoot briefing first!"
And so began Kim Yi-yeon's first-ever exorcism livestream.