The Smuggler's Lair
The air here is filthy from the very first breath.
The place was built with oversized, sleek, and obviously expensive plate glass alongside glossy brown plywood. Rows of two-room standalone buildings stood haphazardly in every direction. This was the red-light district.
The air itself was so foul it seemed perfectly suited for the most wretched bastards to live in. Here in the red-light district, worries far more vicious and unclean than syphilis had been meticulously prepared just for Bread Hat.
Things like the debtor list, the delinquent debtor list, the long-term overdue debtor list, the missing debtor list…
Bread Hat pressed hard on his temples with his thumb. As always, he looked utterly miserable, stubbornly tormented by the occupational stress that came with his job.
“I told you, I just forgot my wallet again, okay?”
“Who the hell would believe that? Of all the trash that could show up, why did it have to be you!”
“What? Trash? You think I’d pull this shit just to skip out on one lousy quickie?”
“This piece of trash has the nerve to raise his voice?”
“Hey! You wanna go? Come on then, you son of a bitch! Hit me! I dare you!”
“Hey there, handsome~ You in a hurry? I’ll take good care of you~”
“Ugh… goddamn bastards…”
Bread Hat silently endured the headache-inducing noise for a while before letting out a groan. He had been flipping through a stack of documents as thick as his palm for quite some time now. The muscles around his shoulders kept tightening and aching.
Like any ordinary citizen of the empire living through these turbulent times, Bread Hat naturally thought of chronic fatigue syndrome.
And once he thought of chronic fatigue, something else naturally came to mind.
“They said this was good for fatigue, right?”
It was a lemon. For some reason, whenever he felt tired, eating one lemon wouldn’t cure him completely but would at least restore some of his energy.
“Munch munch… ugh, it’s so sour…”
He took a big bite out of the hefty lemon half. Clear, fine droplets of juice flooded his tongue.
Bread Hat frowned fiercely at the unbearable sourness, yet the citrus scent rising from the cut surface of the bright yellow fruit somehow reminded him of a memory that suddenly surfaced, sharing an oddly similar quality.
The memory was like a rather mischievous and capricious time machine; it refused to be organized in any logical way.
For example, certain afterimages rose very slowly, like drawing a monogram. All he could recall in fragmented, almost poetic shards were things like ash-gray hair that shimmered like an optical illusion, the sweet lingering scent of baby powder mixed with sweat, or the sight of small legs swinging across the desk in time with the rhythm of a clock’s hands.
“Goddammit, what the hell am I even thinking about?”
Bread Hat scratched the back of his head irritably.
Even as he scratched away, there was no way to shake off this persistent, annoying burst of energy…
“Boss!!!”
“Sir!!!”
“Hm?”
Bread Hat looked at his two subordinates who had come sprinting desperately from far away and let out a small chuckle.
“What are you two doing here? I thought you said you weren’t interested in a place like this.”
“That’s not… huff… that’s not it, sir…”
“B-Boss… it’s not… wheeze… it’s not like that…”
Tungtung-i and Bisil-i, panting as if they might pass out, explained in meticulous detail—following the five W’s and one H—exactly why they had come here at this hour and were suffering such hardship.
“…So Helen has been missing from home since this morning? You asked around the merchants and passersby near the harbor just in case, and the last sighting was at the police station?”
—Nod nod.
—Nod nod nod.
“And by the time you came out it was already dark, so you had a bad feeling and came to find me?”
—Nod nod nod.
—Nod nod nod nod.
“Hmm…”
Bread Hat let out a low hum as he gathered the given clues and struggled to figure out what they implied.
For the first minute or so, he thought it might just be a small act of rebellion. After all, she was at an age where she was gradually learning independence. It could be some game that only kids her age understood, something adults could never comprehend.
However, Bread Hat knew his own personality very well. He absolutely loathed anything troublesome.
So the longer time went on, the more those guesses started to feel like the kind of mechanical excuses one could spit out in any situation—a cowardly defense mechanism.
After a fierce internal debate, he finally admitted that was exactly what they were.
It looked like he would have to investigate after all…
“Boss…?”
“Ah? Yeah. Sorry, I was lost in thought for a second. Where was the last place she was seen?”
“It’s Dave Street 3rd.”
“Alright. Let’s head there first.”
.
.
.
.
.
Using the key the Sadist had been carrying, Helen opened the plain, heavy iron door and stepped out. What greeted her was an eerily long and winding corridor that gave the impression of an underground tomb.
She gripped the long skewer that now belonged to her with both hands and crept cautiously down the dark hallway.
“Where the hell is this?”
Incredibly, she got lost in just one minute!
Of course, this wasn’t because Helen had a worse sense of direction than others. The corridor was far darker than expected, and the thick fog covering the entire hallway was simply too dense.
Let’s move on. Anyway, the situation was extremely simple and clear.
She had to get out of here without being caught. The thought that one wrong move could mean being locked up for the rest of her life and beaten until she died finally snapped Helen back to her senses. She picked a direction and decided to push forward stubbornly.
“…Now where is this?”
Once again, Helen had gotten lost. “Am I really that bad with directions?” She lightly tapped her own head in self-reproach, then decided this wasn’t working and tried using her left hand as a guide.
“Ughhh…”
Yet again she got lost. Helen finally acknowledged that she was indeed directionally challenged. Rather than trusting her terrible sense of direction in such an urgent situation, she figured it would be better to leave it to luck. This time, she stood the skewer upright and started walking in whatever direction it fell.
“Ah… a door…”
Amazingly, she now saw a row of other doors that she hadn’t noticed before.
After wracking her brain so hard she nearly fried it searching for another path, the moment she left it to luck she found one. One could easily imagine how unpleasant that made Helen feel.
Therefore, let’s skip all that. Helen used one of the keys the corpse had been carrying to open the door immediately to her left.
She inserted the key, twisted the old doorknob, and instead of the scream of hinges came the deceptively smooth silence of well-oiled metal.
It seemed this door saw far more use than its appearance suggested.
Or perhaps it was simply well-maintained. Maybe it was even an exit.
“Dammit… it’s just a storage room.”
However, the space beyond the door was far from an exit. The inflated expectations burst in an instant, and the resulting backlash made irritation surge through her. But the well-mannered Helen simply shook her head instead of shouting and stepped into the storeroom.
“Whoa… what is all this?”
Once inside, Helen looked at the oak barrels stacked so precariously they seemed to reach her ribs, along with the fat white cotton sacks that sagged like the belly of an overweight sailor. She let out a small gasp of admiration.
The scent of unrefined high-proof rum leaking through the tiny gaps in the oak barrels, combined with the white spores floating thickly in the air right before her eyes, convinced her that all of this was smuggled goods.
“Ah… a smuggler’s base. So that’s why the layout here is such a goddamn mess.”
Helen plopped down in the so-called fake storeroom—a space that was far too well-maintained to actually be called a storeroom.
“Alright… from now on, I am a super genius… the first super genius in the history of Korea University…”
The greatest genius in history, Rua Helen, who would make even the gods blush, began drafting a magnificent escape plan worthy of an epic poem.
First, let’s try to deduce where this place is.
The greatest genius in history, Helen, thought: This has to be near the harbor at minimum.
Why? Because it’s a smuggler’s base. Isn’t that obvious?
Of course, there were other reasons too. The thick fog that decorated the entire corridor—salt that had evaporated and then solidified, making it feel as if the very taste of salt had become a scent—was obviously sea mist. That was correct.
This was a good sign. A place filled with sea mist couldn’t be a completely sealed space. That meant there had to be areas where air could flow in.
For example, something like a sewer? Now that she thought about it, this place really did look a lot like a sewer.
“Hmm…”
There was no direct light source, but thanks to the dense sea mist that scattered what little light there was, the fake storeroom was filled with a dim glow. Helen stabbed the cotton sack filled with flour repeatedly with her skewer.
The sack burst open. The fine flour particles scattered silently, drifting slowly along the faint current of air that was too subtle for humans to notice.
Helen decided that the direction the flour was flying was the direction of the exit. She scooped up a few handfuls of flour and stuffed them into a makeshift pouch.
“So all the rooms around here are smuggled goods storerooms?”
That seemed likely, and just as expected, every single one was.
There were four fake storerooms in total. The first one contained the liquor and flour she had already seen.
The second held various luxury textiles like imported lace and silk.
The third was packed with real, truly high-end cigarettes and cigars.
And the last, the fourth, contained several boxes of very fresh and appetizing fruit.
“Whoa, lemons!”
Helen, whose stomach was desperately empty, drooled like Pavlov’s dog and snatched up a lemon to devour on the spot.
Then something astonishing happened.
“Wow! It’s super sweet!”
The juice trapped within the thin flesh burst out with a pop. Instead of the sourness she had expected, an overwhelmingly large sweetness flooded in, so intense it made the area beneath her ears tingle.
It seemed she had been far hungrier than she realized. The thought that she might have been on the verge of starvation made her appetite surge violently.
“Nom nom.”
The simultaneous relief of both thirst and hunger felt strangely sensual. It drove Helen half-mad while also easing her gloomy depression and helping her regain a clear mind.
The fog in her head lifted completely. Her dulled senses gradually began to recover their proper functions.
Once her sense of smell had recovered to some degree, it allowed her to distinguish the various scents she hadn’t noticed before in fine detail.
That was how she discovered the coal tar that had been quietly waiting in the corner.
“Right… those bastards aren’t idiots. They must have already figured out what it’s made from.”
Helen shrugged. Since they had even tailed her, they probably realized it even faster. But she figured they didn’t know the method, which was why she had been kidnapped.
“Liquor… lemon… coal tar…”
Thanks to the lemon she had just eaten, Helen’s fatigue had mostly faded.
She began racking her brain over what she could do with these items.