Finding Sohee
32 3420.
The remaining 1.92 million won from two hours of day trading. The profit was roughly 16.8 percent.
It was an enormous figure on paper. If things had gone a little faster, I could have recovered the previous losses in a month and still had some left over.
But right now, I couldn’t even bring myself to touch the trading button.
The moment I pressed the sell button, the strange thing that had been drawing the chart in my head vanished.
“Please…”
I forced myself to wipe my face dry and cling to the feeling from before.
I dug through my thoughts, trying to remember how I had sketched the chart’s flow.
No matter how hard I tried, the memory didn’t come back.
I was wandering through thick fog with no thread of a clue to grab.
After a full hour of groaning alone, I gave up.
“Ha… it’s no use.”
With the last stubborn shred of hope, I finally admitted defeat.
I couldn’t force the feeling out, so I changed course.
I started tracing back what had triggered the strange situation just now.
I reviewed every single thing that had happened to me that day.
Like always, I had stared at the stock chart and felt the stress.
I had smoked a cigarette.
Then, with my seed almost gone, I had taken my hands off the stock market.
And…
After digging all the way to the end, I reached one conclusion.
The only thing different from usual that day had been one thing.
The secret, heart-pounding quickie in the commercial building emergency staircase.
That alone was the only possible cause.
“So it was mixing bodies that flipped the switch?”
I immediately put the idea into action.
For the next five days I hunted through the casual encounter app.
I even dropped into hostess bars.
Every day and night I tried to recreate the strange feeling from that day with other women.
But when I opened the stock app and looked at the chart… my head was completely dead silent.
No effect at all.
No strange sensation whatsoever.
“Fuck, what the hell…”
I was losing money with no income, and my head was pounding.
Then a thought brushed past my mind.
Maybe it wasn’t other women. Maybe only “Sohee” that woman could activate the effect.
The probability that her secret was the switch was high.
“I have to find Sohee.”
From that moment my life completely fell apart.
I refreshed the casual encounter app day and night, chasing her whereabouts.
I desperately waited for her nickname to light up in bright green.
But unfortunately…
Sohee had not even logged into the app for over a week.
.
.
.
Three more days passed.
The screen still showed Sohee’s profile in gray light.
[Last login: one week ago.]
She still wasn’t logging in.
But I couldn’t give up.
That woman was the only lifeline I had left to recover the starving seed I had squandered and escape the hellish reality.
Half a wreck, I curled up in a corner of my studio apartment and stayed there another few days.
I didn’t let go of my smartphone until I could open my eyes.
The fingertips of my hand that kept refreshing the app trembled constantly.
When I went to the bathroom, the reflection in the mirror suddenly hit me.
“Fuck… what a sight.”
In the mirror stood a monster with sunken eyes, dark circles, and a messy beard grown for days.
Completely ruined… the perfect image of a wreck.
At that moment my stomach growled loudly.
I searched the room like a starving beast for food, but
because I had been living like a wreck for days, there was nothing left.
No trace of the usual instant ramen.
So I dragged my aching body to the convenience store.
I shuffled out in cheap slippers and stumbled along the street.
People hurrying home from work passed by and wrinkled their noses at the stench I was giving off.
Each one of their reactions felt like a knife, slowly peeling away my humanity until I was nothing but rags.
But I didn’t care.
If I couldn’t find Sohee, my life was already over.
Then I stopped at the crosswalk.
By chance, an unfamiliar silhouette walked along the opposite sidewalk and caught my eye.
I recognized it in an instant.
That violent body and those eyes.
And the exact same outfit I had seen in the emergency staircase.
Sohee.
At that moment.
Sohee also turned her head by chance and our eyes met.
Her pupils shook violently and her expression hardened instantly.
The next second.
Sohee turned around without hesitation, then started running.
She was obviously trying to escape me.
“Stop right there!”
My eyes rolled back and I shouted, chasing her desperately.
Tear!
My slippers almost came off in the middle of the chase, but I didn’t care.
My entire fortune and future were sprinting ahead of me.
Finally, at the entrance to the alley, I snatched her thin wrist roughly.
“Kyah! Let go! Are you fucking crazy?!”
Sohee let out a huge scream and thrashed violently.
Passersby’s eyes instantly turned toward us.
Some of them started checking their phones while whispering.
If this kept going, I would definitely be labeled a stalker or rapist and have no way out.
I leaned my head close to her ear.
And whispered in a low, cold voice.
“Keep screaming. Then I’ll tell all these people in front of us what happened at the commercial building emergency staircase… you sucking my cock and swallowing the cum.”
“!!!…”
Her body froze solid the moment she heard my warning.
Sohee’s mouth, which had been cursing, shut tight.
And an instant of silence fell over the alley that felt suffocating.
****
Sohee—Kim Sohyun—was feeling the first true terror of death in her life.
And she regretted it the moment she was grabbed on the street: instead of obeying the man’s threat, she should have resisted even more fiercely.
Of course she would.
In front of her.
The man standing there had a face covered in days of dirt, a bushy beard, and an aura of madness.
‘If only I had pushed him away on the street… this…’
The reason she had followed him so passively was to hide the fact that she had done a quickie with a married man with a child.
Right now, she had turned herself into the victim of a vicious crime that would be on the news.
From her perspective, dragged here.
****
I succeeded in dragging Sohee to my studio apartment with the threat.
But when I faced her, still tense in the corner of the room, watching me nervously…
‘Now what?’
I had no idea where to start.
On the street I had acted in desperation, but
I had lived my entire twenty-six years far from violence.
So at this point.
Without me knowing, the woman who had been watching my wreck of an appearance gradually started to panic.
“Please, please save me! I’ll do anything you say! Just please save me!”
Sohee dropped to her knees on the floor, trembling, and begged.
Tears welled up in her red-rimmed eyes.
“I really did it because I was so desperate for money! My husband disappeared after racking up massive gambling debts in my name, and the debt collectors come every day…”
“…”
“Our daughter is only three years old. She has a rare disease and is hospitalized! I can’t afford the monthly surgery and treatment costs… I had no choice but to do everything I could and ended up there that day!”
Sohyun spoke in a broken, gasping rush, clutching her chest.
“It really was the first and last time I did that with you on the commercial building staircase! I swear!”
Her desperate screams filled the entire studio.
I felt a huge shock inside.
‘What? She’s a married woman with a child?’
I had thought she was just some ordinary woman doing casual encounters, but the truth was on the level of a human drama.
But what crossed my mind was not simple pity.
‘Wait.’
In that split second.
A single hypothesis brushed across my brain.
‘Could it be that the ability only activates through married women?’
I had mixed with women of similar age and appearance to Sohee for the past week.
But the moment I opened my phone to look at the stock chart, there was no reaction.
When the thought reached this point, my consciousness started to flow rapidly toward ‘married woman.’
‘Of course it could be that Sohee is special… but maybe the ability only activates through married women?’
It sounded crazy, even to me. But in this situation, it seemed the most plausible possibility.
So the next moment.
I looked down at the begging Sohee on the floor with cool eyes and slowly moved my hand toward my pants.
Leaving aside whether the strange ability only worked through married women,
the first thing was to confirm whether Sohee could give me that strange feeling again.