Can You See It?
The moment their eyes met, Rembrary picked up his pace and closed the distance to Jong-woo in an instant.
"Hey, why the hell are you following me!"
"When I see someone in pain and suffering, my hands and feet move of their own accord. It is simply my nature."
"You wanna get hit?"
"I merely wish to observe."
Sa Gam-jae had said the man was dead, but he was a suspicious fellow, and Rembrary was hardly inclined to take his word for it.
He intended to confirm with his own eyes whether the man truly was dead. And if the injuries weren't too severe, he was even willing to be discreet about it and quietly heal him.
"Wow, look at this. You want to watch a man die? Are you and Sa Gam-jae brothers or something?"
"We are all brothers."
"Not me!"
Even as he said it flatly, Jong-woo never broke his stride.
"Well, to be fair, Jong-woo, if you were brothers with the likes of me and Gam-jae, I imagine people would be quite curious whether you were raised by outsiders or by your own kin."
Jong-woo decided he wanted to punch Rembrary exactly three times—but he kept running all the same.
"Come now, Jong-woo. Are you not impressed that I even know the phrase 'raised by outsiders'?"
"Just shut your mouth already!"
Jong-woo, who had been grumbling and wheezing the whole way, finally fell silent when he spotted who he was looking for. He stopped, pulled out his phone, and crouched down beside the fallen man, pressing two fingers to his neck to check for a pulse.
He dialed 119.
"Hello? Yes, we have a dead person here."
— What seems to be the problem?
"What's your location?"
"Behind the XX studio—"
While Jong-woo gave the dispatcher their location, Rembrary stood beside the collapsed man, half-closing his eyes and offering a prayer.
So much for the soul wandering off somewhere. Sa Gam-jae had been right this time—the man had already stopped breathing.
Jong-woo stared at the praying Rembrary like he was out of his mind, then chalked it up to some personal religion and focused on describing their location to the paramedics in as much detail as he could.
"Yes. Yes. No, I don't know him. Yes. No, whether he collapsed on his own or was attacked, I couldn't really tell you... Yes."
Then Jong-woo's pupils dilated until they swallowed his irises whole.
Rembrary, who had seemed to be praying quietly, had suddenly raised his hand high overhead—poised as if to hammer it down on the dead man—and was now swinging it down in rapid succession.
"Don't hit the corpse!"
Jong-woo lunged and clung desperately to Rembrary's arm.
— I'm sorry? Is someone attacking him? Should I dispatch police as well?
"No, that's not—"
"Jong-woo. Kindly release my hand."
"I said don't hit the corpse!"
— We are dispatching police!
"That's not it—ugh, come on! Can't you loosen your grip a little?"
— Is this a dangerous situation?
"No, but could you maybe hang up for a second?"
Jong-woo was unraveling, harried by the voices coming from both sides of his head.
Rembrary shook his arm a few times, trying to dislodge him, but when Jong-woo refused to let go, he sighed in exasperation and went limp.
"Well, this is a disaster. Jong-woo, you have ruined my work."
What Rembrary had been trying to strike—strictly speaking—was not the corpse at all.
Mid-prayer, he had noticed an evil spirit clinging to his own shadow creeping stealthily toward the dead man. The way it crawled along, sluggish and careful, as if determined not to be seen, was suspicious to the point of parody.
So he had moved to swat it away before it could do anything. But with Jong-woo clinging to his arm and dragging him back, his shadow ended up touching the body after all.
Rembrary lowered his hand, muttering over and over, "This is your fault, Jong-woo."
"Ruin what, exactly—"
Jong-woo, who had just hung up with the paramedics, turned to yell at Rembrary—and instead let out a strangled yelp and stumbled backward.
The corpse—the very one whose pulse he had confirmed as absent—was staring up at him with wide-open eyes.
"E-excuse me?"
Jong-woo called out to the dead man—to the man he'd thought was dead but had apparently come back to life.
Before he could get an answer, he shuffled backward another step. The man he'd believed dead rolled his eyes wildly and fixed them on him.
A chill ran down Jong-woo's spine. He swallowed dryly.
What do I do? He looks kind of terrifying right now—but is that just because of the situation? No, seriously, aren't his eyes actually weird?
While Jong-woo wavered between panic and reason—
Rembrary smacked that wildly rolling gaze squarely with his open palm and bellowed.
"You wretched creature!"
"Hey—hey!"
His fear evaporating at the sheer absurdity of it, Jong-woo panicked in an entirely new way and grabbed Rembrary again.
But the moment he did, the once-dead man scrambled to his feet and suddenly bolted forward.
"Wha—he's running! He's actually running!"
Jong-woo shrieked, and Rembrary slipped free of his grip and took off after the resurrected man at once.
"Hey? Why are you—ugh, seriously!"
Cursing under his breath, Jong-woo found himself running after Rembrary without quite deciding to. In the distance, an urgent siren began to wail.
He was still running when his phone rang again.
"Hello?"
— Could you confirm your location again? We've arrived at the place you described, but there's no one here.
It was the same 119 dispatcher from before.
"Oh, I'm sorry. He was a corpse a minute ago, but then the corpse suddenly—no, the man who was a corpse came back to life and started running!"
— I'm sorry, what?
"I'm following him right now, so once I know where we are, I'll call you ba—hello? Hello? No, I'm not pranking you, I swear!"
At the sound of sirens rising not far away, Jungseo frowned.
He checked the clock hanging on the waiting room wall, then his phone, then the clock again.
The number-one announcement would be starting soon, which meant they needed to be on stage. Jong-woo being late was one thing, but now Rembrary—who had chased after him—wasn't back either, and the worry was starting to gnaw at him.
"Shit, what do we do? I guess we're going out there without them?"
Hye-gyeol asked anxiously.
"If that guy thinks everything's fine, you can bet he's out there causing some kind of disaster instead."
Cathy clicked his tongue.
Taein snapped at Hye-gyeol for no good reason.
"Can you not swear? It makes my ears rot. Seriously, did the kid shove a mop in his mouth or something?"
"My problems aren't exactly small either, you know."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Jungseo wound up Hye-gyeol and Taein with one hand as they circled each other for round two, checked the time once more, and finally made the call.
"We have no choice. We're going out there ourselves."
Hye-gyeol asked, frightened.
"If Yeon-woo-hyung doesn't show up, people are going to tear into us, aren't they? They'll find some angle to nitpick. They always do."
"If he doesn't show up at all, it'll be worse. Later he can say he was sick or whatever—let's just get out there."
Jungseo glanced at Sa Gam-jae. "Will this be all right?" he asked.
Sa Gam-jae was still an unproven manager, but he was a manager nonetheless, and asking was simply a matter of courtesy.
Sa Gam-jae nodded, and the members filed out of the waiting room, slipping into the stream of idols queuing up onto the stage.
While they did, Sa Gam-jae pulled out—not his usual work phone, but a tiny, ancient-looking burner—and pressed and held the number-one button.
— Yes, hello?
The other end picked up almost immediately.
The voice was that of a woman—very low and husky.
Though the waiting room was empty, Sa Gam-jae still lowered his voice to match hers.
"I'm in a situation where slipping away isn't exactly convenient right now. You remember that fake Saint from before? Look into him for me. Now."
— Hey, I'm extremely busy right now!
"Did you have some major incident?"
— A soul-taker showed up who is completely my type! And now he's showing a suspicious amount of interest in me!
"...My Cheohaeng-eondo is showing quite a bit of interest in your neck as well."
— You rotten bastard! The reason I've been single for 179 years is entirely your fault! Why do you always have to interrupt me when I'm busy?
"179 years or 180, what difference does it make. Find the fake Saint first."
— Find him and then what? What am I supposed to do with him?
"Exactly. Watch what he does."
Ending the call, Sa Gam-jae slipped the little phone back into his pocket, took up his work phone, and stepped out of the waiting room.
He made his way to the front of the stage where the staff were gathered, and there he spotted the Wild Animal members standing in the second row.
The two MCs were tossing jokes back and forth, cackling away, but the Wild Animal members standing behind them wore grim expressions.
And they had every reason to.
Sa Gam-jae hadn't seen it, but originally Jungseo had planned to lead the members to the very back row. With Yeon-woo missing, the intention was to tuck them out of sight on purpose.
But the FD, unwilling to leave Wild Animal—a group that had been surging up the charts lately—buried in the back, had deliberately sent a staffer to usher the members toward the front.
Which was how they'd ended up in the second row—and how the members had ended up thoroughly flustered.
When the rankings were tallied and the number one was announced, they had clapped along with everyone else and bowed at a proper ninety degrees, but all the while the members worried themselves sick: what if the antis noticed Yeon-woo's empty seat?
That fear played out exactly as they'd feared.
About fifteen minutes later, whispers began creeping across social media: Woo Yeon-woo had been absent when the number one was announced.
And it wasn't only fans who knew the members' schedules.
The zealous antis confirmed that Woo Yeon-woo had no schedule after this one, then began murmuring that his absence during the number-one announcement meant he simply couldn't stand not being the one in first place. Whether it was true or not, of course, was beside the point.
They felt no guilt, either. On the contrary, they took satisfaction in the conviction that Woo Yeon-woo had already grown cocky before his fame had even properly taken off, and that they had caught that cockiness early.
His name even popped up in the comments under the number-one article itself, dredged up out of nowhere to be cursed at.
There was incitement dressed up as criticism, too: How long has it been since that scandal died down, and he's pulling this already?
Jungseo, watching Yeon-woo's name slink across the internet, called Jong-woo again.
Meanwhile.
Having successfully relocated the resurrected corpse, Rembrary channeled Divine Power into his palm and brought it down hard on the man's back.
The instant the holy light entered him, the man who had been sprinting every which way crumpled forward and collapsed once more.
Jong-woo, who had arrived panting and wheezing, very nearly fainted at the sight.
From where Jong-woo stood, all he could see was Rembrary knocking the once-dead man flat with a single blow.
"Hello? Yes, we're near the XX convenience store—here. Yes. He's stopped here now. No, he collapsed again."
Leaning against a wall, Jong-woo got back on the line with the 119 dispatcher.
In the meantime, Rembrary checked whether the collapsed man was alive, and finding a faint breath still in him, attempted a Divine Power healing.
Jong-woo was busy on the phone, so he meant to finish the treatment completely while he had the chance.
But the man did not wake. His body had already been fully restored back when Rembrary had struck his eyes with Divine Power—there was nothing left to heal.
Then why won't he wake?
Rembrary remembered Sa Gam-jae's words and clicked his tongue.
He said the soul had safely departed for somewhere else.
The soul had left, but he had healed the body first—and the departed soul had yet to return. The result was inevitable: a body in perfect condition, lying in a limbo between sleeping and waking.
Still, the fact that he isn't dead means the soul can't have gone far...
Leaving Jong-woo to his phone call, Rembrary set off in pursuit of the soul once more.
Fortunately, this time he found it nearby.
He rushed toward it at once—but failed to catch it.
Because a woman dressed head to toe in black reached it first and seized the soul by the nape of its neck.
Rembrary recognized her face.
She was the same woman who had stood beside Sa Gam-jae at that funeral.
The woman's eyes and Rembrary's met.
She arched an eyebrow and tilted her head. It was the look of someone asking, Did you just chase that soul all the way here?
< 69. Can You See Him? > End.
ⓒ Shinhwajin