The Hospital Where People Vanish [9]
Inside an inner world being devoured from the Outside.
The consciousness of Baek Gong-ju, who had lain as if dead—no, whom everyone had believed already annihilated—began to stir awake.
This is...
In the deep-sea darkness of a bottomless pit, Baek Gong-ju felt the light and warmth that had woken her. A power warm as a mother's embrace, gentle as the noon sun.
A mother's embrace, is it... Not a word I've ever had any connection with.
Baek Gong-ju had lost her mother the moment she was born. Her father loathed her, calling her the daughter of the woman who had eaten his wife. And to make matters worse, her inborn gift terrified the other children of the household as well. Even the stepmother who took her in had only ever had eyes for her talent; never once had she passed on warmth like this.
Was that why?
As her consciousness slowly awakened in that bottomless dark, Baek Gong-ju found herself looking back over her life, the way an old woman might sit basking in the noon sunlight and turn her memories over.
In childhood, she had been treated like a cursed thing—the spirit-possessed brat who ate her own mother—and grown up under constant abuse. In her youth, she had followed the teachings of her master and stepmother, devoting herself to helping people. When she came of age, she met her lifelong companion, and at his urging gathered the abandoned gods and enshrined them in Seoul. When her child was born and she had a family at last, her husband was branded a dangerous element and murdered at the hands of the Paranormal Administration Bureau.
She gave her entire middle age to vengeance. Every bureau executive involved in her husband's death—and even the government's high officials—she made into escorts for her husband's final journey. And once the revenge was finished, in her old age, Baek Gong-ju resolved to spend what remained of her life quietly helping people, as an act of penance for the countless lives she had taken. The image of Baek Gong-ju that modern psychics knew had been built entirely in those years.
And then, amid it all, the end times had arrived.
At first, she tried to look away. She was old enough to die any day now. Whether the world fell or not was none of her business—she wasn't paid to care.
But she couldn't turn her back forever.
"Grandma... someone with power has to take responsibility for it, don't you think?"
It was what Soo-ah's uncle had said, before dying in the line of duty at the Paranormal Administration Bureau. In the end, persuaded by her grandson's words, Baek Gong-ju had swallowed her pride about the past and joined the very organization her own hands had half-destroyed, deciding to fulfill her responsibility.
And this was the result.
What a pathetic life it's been.
Come to think of it, Baek Gong-ju's life had been an utterly passive one. In all those long years, she had rarely acted of her own will. First she helped people because her master told her to. Then she gathered the gods because her husband wanted it. After her husband died, she lived for revenge; after the revenge ended, she lived in penance. Even joining the bureau had been because of her grandson's last words. Not once, on the whole long road of her life, had Baek Gong-ju chosen a path by her own will. She had simply trudged down whatever road was handed to her, whatever road others insisted was right.
For an indecisive creature like her to end up in this state, well—it was only fitting.
But at the end of that indecisive life, Baek Gong-ju decided for the first time to choose something and act on her own will.
Decades of experience were telling her: this warmth was the one and only lantern that could light the way through the end times. She wanted to see the road this lantern would illuminate. She wanted to open that road herself.
...No, wait. Isn't even that just me following that boy's thinking, in the end?
With a bitter smile, Baek Gong-ju's consciousness pierced the dark abyss and opened its eyes. Kim Yi-yeon's warmth had been swallowed by the despair of the bottomless pit, and it had rekindled the will in Baek Gong-ju that lay dormant there.
Just like with Yoon Soo-ah. The Philosopher's Stone had only ever been a key—a means to connect with the existence of a person swallowed by an anomaly. What turned them back into humans was Kim Yi-yeon's own power.
Whoosh.
Baek Gong-ju opened her eyes and found herself staring directly into the face of Kim Yi-yeon, crouched down and peering at her. He was looking down at her with an expression of sheer disbelief.
"...I owe you one. No—this is far beyond what that phrase can cover."
Her memories were blurred in places, warped by the anomaly's corrosion, but Baek Gong-ju retained the broad strokes of everything that had happened. That she had looked at the Outside and been corrupted into an anomaly. That Kim Yi-yeon had saved her from it. All of it.
But regardless, Kim Yi-yeon simply kept staring down at her, aghast.
"Hmm? What's the matter, old woman? Got something on my face?"
It was then that Baek Gong-ju noticed something was off herself. Has my voice always been this high? A woman who had lived through every hardship heaven could throw at her, Baek Gong-ju's voice had been deep and gravelly even by grandmother standards. Never this thin, childlike register.
Then Kim Yi-yeon, who had been silently staring down at her, suddenly bolted away shouting.
"The Director's rejuvenated! She turned into a kid!"
"Huh?"
Trembling slightly, Baek Gong-ju raised herself up and, without thinking, looked down at her own hands. Wrinkle-free, white, and very, very small.
Baek Gong-ju had turned back into a child.
I have no idea how the hell this happened, but when I restored the charcoal briquette that used to be Baek Gong-ju into a human being, she came out as a girl of about ten. Going on my admittedly limited knowledge, I'd guess that since most of her body had been carbonized beyond use, her system rebuilt itself from whatever material it had left—hence the catastrophic result.
"Y-you're really my grandmother?"
"Yes, that I am..."
Baek Gong-ju answered while fidgeting with her hands and face, clearly as flustered by the situation as anyone. We had escaped the underground space and were now talking inside the Cosmos Medical Center of the I-myeon.
"...There's a great deal to be done, but first things first."
Then Baek Gong-ju, wearing the business jacket Yoon Soo-ah had handed her, came over to me, knelt down, and bowed her head to the floor.
"Thank you."
"Uh, when you do that in that body, it makes me feel like a criminal."
A grown man in his twenties receiving a dogeza bow from a ten-year-old girl—just how trashy does a scene have to get?
Though I suppose an eighty-year-old granny doing a dogeza at me looks equally trashy, doesn't it?
Either way, the old woman has a gift for making people's lives difficult.
"All this time, deep down, I suspected you. No—more precisely, I may have been stubbornly refusing to admit it."
Baek Gong-ju muttered that it was an old person's worst habit, and went on.
"I admit it now. You, my friend, are the hope of the end times."
"Th-that's kind of you to say, but no pressure please, so could you stop with the dogeza?"
"Ah, my apologies. No need for this old woman to make things awkward."
"So—hypothetically, if you acknowledge me, what exactly changes?"
"A great deal."
Baek Gong-ju nodded firmly.
"When I return, I intend to privatize the Paranormal Administration Bureau."
"......"
...Saying she'll privatize a government agency like it's nothing... this granny is terrifying...
"And through the bureau once I control it, I intend to actively back you."
"That's... very kind, but... do you know what I'm planning to do from here on out?"
"I don't have the faintest idea what you'll do next. But whatever it may be, I believe without a shadow of doubt that the road you walk is the road that will save humanity from the end times."
This old lady, contrary to her appearance, is surprisingly naive, isn't she?
Save humanity from the end times, my foot. Who exactly are you mistaking for a saint here? Then and now, number one on my list is me.
Damn it, this is heavy.
I changed the subject.
"If you're really going to back me, let me ask you a few things. First question—what on earth was it that broke you?"
There were two conditions for falling victim to the corrupted-Changeling anomaly. One was visiting Cosmos Medical Center. The other was suffering a great despair. So what despair could possibly have broken a Special-Grade talent like Baek Gong-ju?
"What day is it?"
"January 7th."
"Then there are only a few days left."
"Until what, exactly?"
"The day the government of the Republic of Korea publicly announces the existence of anomalies and the supernatural."
"......"
"The Korean government intends to be the first in the world to officially recognize and declare the existence of anomalies and mysticism."
That meant the end of the long-running Masquerade. With the end times would come a new age without masks.
"Ever since the Cosmos headquarters incident, I've been scrambling behind the scenes, fighting it however I could... but I got nowhere. Once the chariot of the age had started rolling, no old soldier's flailing could stop it. I despaired at that fact, and gave up. But..."
Whoosh.
Baek Gong-ju pointed at me.
"It should be possible to grab hold of the chariot's rudder. And that is your role."
"...Great, more weight on my shoulders."
"Piling burdens on the young is what the old are for, my friend."
"Hoo..."
I swept a hand down my face and finally asked the most important question of all.
"Then... second question. You went and saw the source of the end times—what did you make of it? What do you think it is, Baek Gong-ju?"
"You felt the same thing I did when your mind was awakened, didn't you?"
"Sure, but not as clearly as you did."
"...A force that acts upon the soul. I don't know how else to put it."
"A force acting on the soul..."
Baek Gong-ju trailed off, as if unsure of her own conclusion, but I agreed with her wholeheartedly. In restoring Baek Gong-ju to humanity, I too had brushed against the remnant of the Outside that lay beyond the window. And in that instant, I had felt an indescribable comfort. The serenity of a fetus in its mother's womb, and the certainty that this was where I belonged. Even though it was nothing but a fragment, I'd nearly been pulled in by how good it felt. It was, exactly as Baek Gong-ju described, a gravitational pull acting on the soul itself.
And whatever is eroded by that pull becomes an anomaly. In that sense, what the fake Dragon King did back in Yeoin-do had been a kind of dilution—endlessly flooding his interior with the concept of "mermaid" to shrink the Outside's share, ultimately wrapping himself in it. But considering what he'd become despite centuries of mindlessly devouring mermaids and half-mermaid hybrids, simply thinning the Outside's ratio clearly wasn't enough.
And the fact that the fake Dragon King had appeared in this world at all meant one thing: doors leading to the Outside existed beyond this one.
"Baek Dong-sik."
"Y-yes?"
"Besides this place, how many doors to the Outside are there in the world, total?"
"...Even Cosmos hasn't mapped them all. But the number we've confirmed is roughly eighty-two. Fifty of them are in Korea, and thirty-two are in Seoul alone."
"Just as I thought. So the holes leading to the Outside—you people didn't make them, did you?"
"That is a preposterous misunderstanding. If anything, Cosmos is in the business of managing them—making sure the holes don't widen or run out of control."
"And while you're at it, you run experiments manufacturing anomalies through the holes you manage?"
"......"
"Um... what is all this?"
Yoon Soo-ah, who had been listening to the whole exchange, asked with a bewildered face.
"In short, there are already countless windows like the ones we saw underground, open all across the world."
And through those windows, the power of the Outside was flowing into this world in real time, this very moment. That leaked-in power wouldn't be anywhere near as potent as what had corroded the fake Dragon King or Baek Gong-ju, who had gazed upon the Outside directly. But power seeping in from the Outside was permeating every corner of this world through eighty-two holes—possibly far more than that. An infinitesimal trace of Outside force, so faint that even trained psychics couldn't detect it, spreading like a colorless, odorless poison. And that power was acting as a catalyst, provoking anomalous phenomena that otherwise would never have occurred.
Granted, aside from the extreme case of thirty doors crammed into cramped little Seoul, the effects might not be immediately obvious. But as long as those doors stayed open, the Outside's power would keep pouring in, and the frequency of anomalies would increase geometrically.
The moment my thoughts reached that point—
a name surfaced in my mind unbidden.
The Golden Narrative. The special stories that superhumans throughout human history had left to me through the Reverse Heaven Society. Every one of them...
Every single one was written on the premise that a hole to the Outside had been opened!
Oh, my god...
Baek Gong-ju had been right. From the moment I first connected to Dongbin's Dao Study Room, I was the savior destined to deliver the people from the end times. Lü Dongbin, Solomon, Nicolas, Paracelsus—they had chosen me as humanity's redeemer and entrusted everything to me.
...Every last one of them, heaping burdens on people without a shred of shame.
I scratched my head once and picked up my phone. That was quite enough of the headache-inducing talk. Which means, from here on...
"Time to do a stream. I got cut off mid-broadcast, after all, and I need to calm down an angry mob."
The stream title: The Hospital That Eats People, Part 2 — How to Slay a Changeling.