The Hospital That Eats People [10]
"Ugh, damn it, seriously? That's how it ends? That's how it ends?"
High school senior Park Kyung-sik switched off his computer in a fit of irritation. The broadcast, which had launched with such a grand title proclaiming it the Season 1 finale of Kim Do-sa Is Coming, had ended with Kim Do-sa bickering with a nurse at the hospital entrance and cutting to black.
And it was Friday evening — golden hours, prime streaming time.
He'd put his college entrance exam prep on hold for the day, ordered chicken, and settled in expecting another show on the level of the Suicide Train or the Man-Eating Tiger of Bukhansan arcs. Instead, he got an ending this pathetically anticlimactic.
"Ugh, seriously... totally killed my appetite..."
His mood soured, Park Kyung-sik couldn't bring himself to touch the chicken at all.
So he stepped out into the living room to stash the barely-touched chicken in the fridge — and ran straight into his younger sibling.
"You ordered chicken?"
"Yeah, but—"
Park Kyung-sik eyed his sibling with guarded suspicion.
Their parents were out of the house all weekend for a distant relative's funeral, leaving Park Kyung-sik a hundred thousand won to split for meals with his younger sibling.
Except Park Kyung-sik had only actually shared fifty thousand of it.
In other words, he'd quietly devoured seventy-five thousand won of the hundred all by himself.
'S-shit. No way he caught on to that, right?'
He was supposed to stretch twenty-five thousand won across the whole weekend, and he'd just blown twenty grand on a single chicken order?
It would be perfectly reasonable for his sibling to suspect him of pocketing the allowance.
But instead—
"Oh, if we're out of cola, I bought some earlier. Help yourself."
"Uh... yeah, sure."
With nothing more than that, his sibling took a bottle of water from the living room fridge and disappeared into their room.
"......"
Park Kyung-sik stared after them, eyebrows knotted in confusion.
'Was this kid always like that?'
Okay, fine — maybe failing to suspect him of skimming the allowance just meant the kid was a fool. He could accept that.
But younger siblings were, by definition, the annoying little gremlins who whined for a bite the second their older brother or sister ordered anything delicious, weren't they?
In fact, Park Kyung-sik's own younger sibling had always been exactly that kind of kid.
That was who they were. It had to be.
'Come to think of it... something's felt off ever since they got that health checkup at Cosmos Medical Center...'
If anything, the changes were for the better. But still — something about it nagged at him, something he couldn't quite put his finger on.
And above all, the very name Cosmos Medical Center called to mind the Four Great Urban Legends of Seoul.
The truth was, the real reason Park Kyung-sik had been so hyped for Kim Do-sa's broadcast was that eerie, inexplicable wrongness he felt around his own sibling.
"...Gives me the creeps..."
He'd gone out for a walk to clear his head, and it was when he came home and turned his computer back on that it happened.
Kim Do-sa has gone live.
"Huh?"
Kim Do-sa was streaming again.
'Yeah! If it ended on an incomplete burn like that, of course he'd come back for more!' Park Kyung-sik clicked into the stream, and the chat was already rolling.
Park Kyung-sik scrambled to the kitchen, popped the leftover chicken into the air fryer, and rushed back to his screen.
"Ah, viewers — I apologize for earlier. The broadcast ended at such an awkward point because I needed time to prepare something."
On screen, Kim Do-sa waved from the deserted reception desk of Cosmos Medical Center.
"The urban legend chosen to crown the finale of Kim Do-sa Is Coming Season 1 — the legend of the Hospital That Eats People. After investigating it from every angle on this channel, we've finally uncovered its true identity."
"Its true identity?"
"Changeling. That is the true nature of the Hospital That Eats People, the last of Seoul's Four Great Urban Legends."
"A changeling?"
Park Kyung-sik had heard the name before. Wasn't it from a European folktale — a fairy swapping a human child for its own?
It matched the Hospital That Eats People rather well — the legend where people who visited Cosmos Medical Center vanished one day, and an entirely different person took their place.
"Huh... yeah, that actually does sound just like the legend."
"Now, on to the main event. Exorcising the changeling is going to require your cooperation, everyone. Let's be honest here — I can't exactly go door to door to every single household of someone who's visited Cosmos Medical Center and perform an exorcism for each of them, can I?"
"Fair enough."
"So I've prepared something. Ta-da~!"
The table Kim Do-sa showed on screen was covered with food.
"I'm going to do a mukbang."
"A mukbang?! Out of nowhere?!"
The table held a chocolate fountain — apparently for fondue — along with an assortment of foods to dip.
"I've always wanted to try cheese fondue, you see."
And with that, Kim Do-sa switched on the chocolate fountain.
Then he poured the cheese he'd brought along into the churning chocolate.
Except—
"Um. That cheese looks WAY too firm?"
Cheese fondue is supposed to use a specialty cheese loosened with milk or white cream to cut the viscosity. If you dumped cheese that stringy in without doing any of that—
"Ooh, here it comes, it's rising! The cheese is—huh? Huh?! WHAHHHHH—!"
Instead of flowing, the highly stretchy mozzarella clumped together and began spinning with the machine's rotation, a bloated mass riding the fountain's churn.
The endlessly stretching cheese whipped around like a flail, sweeping across Kim Do-sa and every dish on the table.
"AAAAAAAAGH!"
"PFFT—HAHAHAHA!"
Kim Do-sa shrieked, eyes bulging in panic as he flailed at the airborne cheese chunks. It was so absurd that Park Kyung-sik burst out laughing before he could stop himself.
After the cheese storm had blown itself out—
"...Ha..."
Kim Do-sa gazed down at the devastated table with a face of pure desolation.
"HAHAHAHAHA! Kim Do-sa, what are you DOING?! I've lived my whole life and I have never seen anything this funny!"
Park Kyung-sik howled with laughter, slapping his desk.
But then, in the very next moment, Kim Do-sa looked straight into the camera with an utterly serious expression.
"From this moment on, show this clip to anyone you know who's recently visited Cosmos Medical Center. If they're one of the swapped ones, the effect will appear immediately."
The abrupt shift in Kim Do-sa's tone made Park Kyung-sik's breath catch for an instant.
He had no idea what any of this had to do with exorcising a changeling, but—
'If Kim Do-sa says so, I guess I'll try it?'
Being a die-hard fan, Park Kyung-sik decided to follow the instructions for now.
"Hm? What's up, oppa?"
"......"
Walking into his sibling's room clutching the clip, Park Kyung-sik felt that wrongness prickle at him all over again.
Had his younger sibling always been like this?
This kid barged into his room without knocking all the time, yet threw a fits of tantrum whenever he did the same. A moody little creature like that.
When had things changed?
'Wait — no, more than that...'
Park Kyung-sik scanned the room.
Dainty little trinkets and small plush dolls everywhere.
This was not a boy's room. It was a girl's room.
"...Hey, watch this for a sec?"
He held up the clip of Kim Do-sa's cheese fountain disaster.
And the instant it played, his younger brother — no, whatever that thing was — let its face twist into a sneer.
"Keh heh heh heh! I've lived a few hundred years, but I've never seen anything as hilarious as this fool!"
"...A few hundred years?"
"...Ah. Caught me."
The thing wearing his sibling's face smirked, then dissolved and vanished like smoke.
"F-fuck...!"
Park Kyung-sik's legs gave out and he crumpled to the floor.
Right. Why had I forgotten?
I don't have a younger brother. I have a younger sister.
How long had they been swapped?
"N-now's not the time for this!"
Park Kyung-sik scrambled to his feet and hammered out a post in the stream chat.
"HOLY CRAP GUYS! I showed the clip to my sibling who came back from Cosmos Medical Center recently because something seemed off — AND IT WASN'T MY REAL SIBLING! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!"
He didn't stop there. He spread the video to Kim Do-sa's fan cafe and to every site he could think of.
'I-I have to warn people! There are non-humans mixed in among us! Wait — then where the hell is my real sibling right now?!'
At the same moment, across Seoul—
Exactly the same phenomenon was playing out in house after house.
And as the people who'd experienced these eerie encounters began posting about them online, every internet platform in the country was—
#KimDoSa #CosmosMedicalCenter #Changeling
—flooded, wall to wall, with three keywords.
Watching it all unfold, Yoon Soo-ah asked, slack-jawed with disbelief:
"H-how... how on earth is this even possible? From one silly video...?"
"Since ancient times, the simplest way to expose a monster that hides among humans is to make it confess the lie out of its own mouth."
And the way to force that confession was never threats or violence.
Those things only made the target tense up and hide the truth more desperately.
What disarmed them was wit.
This trick was simply one such wit among many.
The most popular method for driving out changelings in old Europe was, famously, the absurdity of boiling water in an eggshell.
Faced with such bizarre behavior, the changelings would blurt out, 'I've lived hundreds of years and never seen anything as stupid as this!' — exposing their true nature with their own lips.
"I see. The water-drawing of Gangrim Doryeong, who arrested Dongfang Shuo."
Baek Gong-ju — freshly transformed from a hulking old battle-axe into a tiny, knee-high gremlin — nodded approvingly.
The tale of Dongfang Shuo and Gangrim Doryeong is one of Korea's classic folktales. Ordered by the King of Hell to capture the immortal Dongfang Shuo, Gangrim Doryeong devised a ruse: he bought a mountain of charcoal and sat by the stream Dongfang Shuo would cross, washing it.
When passersby asked why on earth he was washing charcoal, Gangrim Doryeong replied, "I'm washing it white."
Naturally, people pointed and laughed and called him a madman.
But he washed on, steadfast and unbothered — until one day a white-haired old man appeared and posed him the very same question. And when Gangrim Doryeong gave the same answer, the old man snorted in exasperation.
"Tsk tsk. I've lived three thousand years, but I've never once seen anyone wash charcoal to make it white!"
At those words, Gangrim Doryeong saw through the old man's identity as Dongfang Shuo, seized him, and dragged him down to the underworld. So the story goes.
"You could call it the most classical form of Narrative Coercion — or rather, a law of stories."
A being that must conceal its identity is defeated the instant it betrays how unnatural it is.
Yet confronted with something absurd, these creatures simply cannot let it pass — they sneer at it, and in sneering, invoke the vast centuries no human could ever have lived through.
Changelings and Dongfang Shuo alike had never escaped the law of this story.
And of course, the changeling that Cosmos had warped into an urban legend was no exception to that law either.
"The clip's spreading well?"
"Yes! I'm pushing it out across every site as fast as I can! Though honestly, it seems I didn't even need to bother. It's going viral at an insane speed — faster than I could ever have managed on my own!"
"Then that side of the problem takes care of itself..."
Once the changelings were gone, the patients in the hospital ward would open their eyes too.
And as for what to do with them—
"May I leave that in your hands?"
"Anything you ask of me. Besides, this is exactly the sort of thing the Paranormal Administration Bureau was supposed to be doing in the first place."
Baek Gong-ju declared it flatly.
Her appearance had changed from a slab of muslin-gristle into a ten-year-old child, but the way she threw her complete trust and support behind me made her, if anything, more reliable than before.
Looking at her, I confirmed the words she'd spoken earlier.
"Did you mean it? What you said back then."
About taking control of the Paranormal Administration Bureau and backing me openly.
"Of course I did."
At that unhesitating answer, I made my decision.
Looking back on it, everything I had done until now had been reactive. Painfully, unforgivably passive.
I trained to exorcise the anomalies I began facing the moment I stepped into sorcery. I streamed, ran into stronger anomalies, trained again to exorcise them. Then I trained yet again, simply to survive the entanglements with Cosmos and Jeong-myung-gyo that the process dragged me into.
When my opponents acted, I merely grew stronger as the reaction.
But no more.
'I can't afford to keep doing that.'
Being dragged around by the nose was beneath me now.
Like it or not, I already stood at the center of the stage called the Age of the End.
A stage where, even if I did absolutely nothing, I would inevitably be trampled by every protagonist and side character under heaven.
There was only one way to survive at the center of that maelstrom of blood and chaos.
'I lead the stage myself.'
And the preparations for that were already complete.
The fighting strength to survive a Special Grade without dying. Rough gems brimming with genius talent. One of Korea's foremost Special-Grade shamans. A national institution that shaman would seize for me. And last of all — the golden narrative entrusted to me by the transcendent beings.
The cards were already dealt.
And the first move to be made with those cards was this.
Duuuu—duuuu—
"Your call is being connected."
Before the ringtone even finished, the person on the other end picked up.
"Mr. Yoon Chang-sik."
Baek Gong-ju's son, Yoon Soo-ah's uncle, and simultaneously an executive of Cosmos Corporation — Yoon Chang-sik.
"...Surprising. After pulling a stunt of this magnitude, I hadn't expected Kim Do-sa to be the one calling me first..."
His voice trembled thinly, as if strangling down fury.
But I didn't miss it.
Hidden in the cracks of that threadbare voice — a glimmer of expectation.
'So that was the right answer after all.'
The paranormal operatives Cosmos had sent had told me as much: that Hwang Young-gyu and Yoon Chang-sik had been watching me closely, with hope in their eyes.
At first I'd assumed that hope came simply from my potential to carve a new rule into the Age of the End.
That was part of the answer — but not all of it.
'Cosmos's existing doctrine is to write narratives into the Age of the End by exploiting urban legends.'
I don't know what Yoon Chang-sik truly desires.
But judging by everything he says, one thing is certain: he despises the existence of gods.
Would a man like that take pleasure in a narrative written with the power of anomalies — monsters that defy heaven and mock the gods?
'Not a chance.'
What he wants is for a new law to be written into the Age of the End by purely human hands.
"I'm aware that Cosmos has been researching ways to exploit urban legends to invoke Narrative Coercion. But you're not happy about that, are you, Mr. Yoon Chang-sik?"
"...You seem to have uncovered a considerable number of the company's secrets."
"Things just worked out that way. So — how about an answer to my question?"
"You're right. Whether it's gods or anomalies, I find depending on such things distasteful."
"Thought so. Which must be why you like me — a human being who might write a narrative as a human. In that case, doesn't Cosmos no longer have any need for this urban legend research of yours?"
"...It's not as simple as it sounds. A corporate dinosaur like Cosmos is riddled with factions, and the urban legend research faction in particular is enormous..."
"And if you borrow outside power to deal with them, doesn't that only accelerate the Age of the End?"
The Wonjin-Origin Refining was nothing more than an amplifier for producing urban legends from an insufficient headcount. The true driving force behind Cosmos's legend-crafting was, in the end, the door that opened outward.
And the problem was this: the more of the Outside's power they drew upon, the greater the volume of what flowed in — and the faster the Age of the End accelerated.
Like a river whose inflow bursts the levees and widens the floodplain year after year.
That was something I'd learned through my own contact with the residues of the Outside's power.
"And if you stop using the power flowing in from Outside, what then? The energy doesn't simply vanish. Uncontrolled anomalies multiply by that much more. And..."
Yoon Chang-sik let his words trail off.
But I could guess the rest.
When enough of the Outside's power gathered in this world, what would be born were beings like the Fake Dragon King.
Those things, like the Fake Dragon King, would exert a gravitational pull on souls — and devour and erode the world itself.
If it came to that, it was over. All that would remain was a soft, cozy apocalypse in which my very existence had dissolved.
"Is that why you built things like the Corner Man? A conveniently feeble set of rules and traits, so the deaths it produces don't add up to too many?"
"......"
Yoon Chang-sik answered with silence.
It may well have been their version of the optimal solution — dispose of the inflowing energy as harmlessly as possible while, on the side, continuing their research into Narrative Coercion.
But what if I could offer them a different answer?
"...You're claiming you can?"
"Yes. I can."
And so—
"Leave it to me. Do that, and I will show you an age written by human hands."