Treasure Hunting - 2
Forests blanketed the hills of Sanso-ri in Yeongcheon County, land that had been slated to become a theme park.
Thanks to its pristine natural setting and sweeping scenery, the number of visitors who came seeking the place had grown year after year. There was a natural recreation forest nearby, and the valley threaded through well-equipped campgrounds, so those who came once almost always found their way back again.
Then Joo Chang-nam announced he was going to build a theme park here, and the little mountain villages were thrown into an uproar.
He ruined a place this beautiful, completely.
They promised a drama filming set, adventure activity facilities, a magnet for foreign tourists—and the moment the promotional campaigns began, the land speculators and scheming real estate hustlers came swarming in. Land prices shot through the roof, and under the pretense of building accommodations, they started buying up the existing homes and demolishing them.
Rumors flew that some celebrity had invested, that a famous athlete had bought land, that politicians and businessmen were building vacation villas—none of it with a shred of proof. The talk got so feverish that people insisted the land you bought today would be the cheapest you'd ever see. Villagers and swindled outsiders alike poured in money, even taking out loans to do it.
And in the end, before the first shovel ever broke ground, the civil engineering firm and the construction company abandoned the project simultaneously.
They defaulted on purpose.
The people who'd invested in the theme park, the people who'd bought up shares in the two companies—even the ones who'd pre-purchased storefronts off blueprints alone were left sitting on the street, ruined.
We have a saying in this country: steal 200 million won and you go to prison, but steal 20 billion won and you walk free on probation. With hundreds of billions of won in fraud yielding hardly a single prison sentence, Korea's treatment of economic criminals amounted to little more than a slap with a cotton baton. Enormous law firms leaned on their cozy old-boys' ties with the courts to wring out nothing but light sentences.
And Jeong Hyeon-taek, the largest shareholder of Mirae Civil and Hanju Construction, never even set foot in a courtroom.
The reason: no criminal intent, because he'd merely accepted investments before folding the business. The project had never launched, they claimed, because the blueprints had been revised over and over again—and as construction dragged on, raw material prices had surged, driving the company into financial distress. The court actually swallowed that absurd excuse whole.
Today, the theme park site had been reduced to a wasteland. With the trees cut down, soil and rock streamed down the bare slopes in long, bleak scars. The container offices installed as a token gesture toward construction were stained a bloody rust-red, and on the half-graded earth, discarded appliances—dumped here by someone, by the look of it—lay heaped like a scrapyard.
I stepped out of the car and let out a long sigh. "Ha... to think they wrecked a place like this."
Launch a drone and look down from above, and it would seem as if someone had simply bulldozed a hilly tract out of the heart of a lush forest and dumped garbage in its place.
No. 1 had peeked out the window and asked. All that running around in nothing but his underwear while possessing Joo Man-deok's body must have worn him out—he'd been snoring away the whole drive here.
Apparently he was only just waking up now.
"I think Joo Chang-nam is here."
Joo Chang-nam had poured his entire fortune—the fortune he'd scraped together like a dog his whole life—into this place. He would have staked even his name as a National Assembly member on it. And then he'd been stabbed in the back by someone more wicked than himself, Jeong Hyeon-taek, and lost everything. So it seemed likely that even in death, he was still wandering this ground.
Think of the greedy dog that picks up a piece of meat in its mouth and, crossing a bridge, sees its own reflection in the water below. Mistaking it for another dog with a bigger prize, it barks—and drops the meat. Would that dog leave that spot?
Never.
He'd be convinced the dog in the water had stolen what was in his mouth, and he'd claw and snap with everything he had to get it back. He'd bark and growl, challenge his rival to a fight, and leap straight into the water—even if it killed him.
That was my thinking: the greedy Joo Chang-nam would be doing exactly the same thing, wandering this place, unable to leave.
"You could kill someone out here and nobody would ever know."
Maybe this desolate gloom was exactly what was keeping Joo Chang-nam anchored here. People who took a wrong turn, or people who deliberately sought out somewhere secluded—he could lunge at them, grab them by the collar, rage at them: Hand over my money! He could vent his fury to his heart's content. This was just the kind of place where you could do that without ever getting caught.
Abe, seated in the back, swept his piercing gaze across our surroundings.
"Perhaps so—assuming he never went to the afterlife."
I raised my spiritual awareness, trying to sense whether any ghost energy lingered in the air.
"Oh! There it is!"
No. 1 had caught it too—his yellow eyes flashed and he swung his head toward the same spot I was staring at. Abe was the last to feel it, his ears prick upright.
He's right!
One of the women was on the verge of death. Her breathing was faint, and a thin, sickly scent of blood mixed with gasoline drifted on the air.
"Leave the humans to me. You two handle the ghost. If it's Joo Chang-nam, do whatever you want—chew him up in one bite, grind him to pieces, I don't care."
I opened the video app on my phone and wedged it into my jacket so the lens stared straight ahead. If this turned out to be a crime scene, I wanted evidence on record.
Because they'd bragged about building a theme park, the cleared lot was enormous. There were patches where the trees hadn't been cut down, and boulders sat squarely across the way in places, but the car could still make it partway into the interior.
There!
Just off the clearing, along a stretch of forest path, a car sat parked and idle.
A luxury foreign model, too.
The trunk was open. A short distance from it, a man was rifling through the clothes of a woman sprawled on the ground.
Crack. He snapped the necklace he was trying to pull off, and his head jerked up toward me.
"Wh-who are you?!"
More startled than I was, the man stammered the question. Just then, from behind a thicket, a woman in a bright red dress came walking out.
"If we dig here with the shovel—huh? What's—?"
She hadn't noticed me at all until she followed the man's gaze, found me, and curled the corners of her mouth into a smile.
Ghost energy!
It billowed off her in waves. The woman parted her blood-red lips and let out words that crawled down my spine.
"So Abe has come."
What did you say?
Only then did I realize the woman was grinning at Abe, who stood behind me.
Abe stalked forward to stand before me, speaking through clenched teeth as he glared at the woman. A colossal killing intent roared out of him like a whirlwind. And yet Joo Chang-nam merely smirked, utterly at his ease—so certain, it seemed, that Abe could never lay a hand on him.
"You're the one who still hasn't come to your senses. A dog that's outlived its usefulness goes in the stewpot—that's the rule. That's simply your destiny."
Joo Chang-nam spewed his nonsense. And then—strangely—Abe's ferocity faltered. What little he could force out was nothing more than a vow to himself.
"A coin-locker baby, daring to—hohoho."
Joo Chang-nam cackled, jabbing a finger at Abe.
Coin-locker baby?
Something similar had been the title of a Japanese novel, I remembered. Lockers for stashing luggage, found in every train station—newborns abandoned inside them, growing up to take their revenge. That had been the story, if I recalled correctly.
And it was rooted in reality: in the 1970s, unmarried mothers in Japan had abandoned newborn infants in coin lockers, and some of them had died there. That's where the term coin-locker baby was born.
So Abe had been abandoned in a locker too, and had barely survived? Was that why he'd served so faithfully the person who raised him, taking his orders without complaint?
Joo Chang-nam clutched his belly, laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world.
"You still don't seem to know why you died, so shall I tell you?"
"Because I found a replacement—stronger and cheaper than you, and obedient on top of it."
Abe's fists clenched, his jaw grinding. But not a single word escaped him.
Joo Chang-nam went on.
"So if you're thinking of getting revenge or whatever, take your complaints to the replacement. Go whine at Jo Eun-sun. Hohoho."
"That's right—the shaman who killed you. And blame your own incompetence while you're at it. Understood?"
Abe stared blankly into empty space, his fighting spirit seemingly shattered.
That was the moment—
No. 1, who had been lurking in the background without so much as a whisper, suddenly swelled his body and let his malice off the leash.
"Ugh, wh-what is that?"
No. 1 conjured a swirling vortex, and it warped into the shape of an enormous hand that seized the woman by the throat.
"Aaaagh!"
Fine threads streaming off the spectral hand threaded their way into the possessed woman's body through her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.
"Uuueeeegh!"
Joo Chang-nam writhed under No. 1's merciless assault. Then a mass of black smoke slid out of the woman's body, coiling itself into the shape of a man. The woman—nothing more than a vessel—collapsed in a heap the instant Joo Chang-nam abandoned her.
No. 1 swelled enormously and tore Joo Chang-nam's soul clean in half.
He shrieked, and to No. 1 it seemed to sound like the sweetest song.
No. 1 held out one half of Joo Chang-nam's soul. At the sight, Abe blinked with a dazed face.
No. 1 stretched his jaws wide to swallow the soul whole.
"Wait!"
Abe stopped him, forcing the words out with effort.
No. 1 offered up the half-soul again.
Torn in two, he was still begging for his life.
He popped the half-soul into his mouth, chewed it up, and promptly spat it back out.
Shmp. No. 1 coalesced back into his cat form and extended the claws of his forepaws, raking them across Joo Chang-nam's soul until it hung in tatters.
Right beside him, Abe chanted an incantation and conjured a transparent talisman.
Abe flung the talisman. It fastened itself onto the half of Joo Chang-nam's soul, and flames leapt up—the soul began to burn.
I watched Joo Chang-nam—split in two, dissolving under two different torments—and murmured under my breath.
"Surely you didn't endure ten months in your mother's womb just to die like that."
Greed and malice. For those who could never let them go, the end was annihilation at the hands of evil spirits and ghosts.
"Ji-hee!"
The man who'd been stripping the unconscious woman of her valuables rushed to the woman Joo Chang-nam had possessed and gathered her into his arms.
"Ji-hee! Ji-hee! Damn it—who the hell are you?"
First things first, I checked on the woman lying on the ground.
She's still breathing, but she's drugged. I can smell the chemicals on her breath.
Blood was trickling from beside her ear; she must have struck her head as she collapsed unconscious. Expensive perfume, well-maintained hair, neatly manicured nails. Designer clothes, designer shoes—and the necklace the man had just snapped off her neck was worth tens of millions of won.
The perfume on this woman matches what was coming from the car.
Which meant the car was hers. This man and the woman named Ji-hee had apparently kidnapped wealthy women.
"Who am I? A witness at a crime scene."
"You crazy bastard!"
The man pulled a knife and threatened me with it.
"Thanks—because of that little move, you're going to be living in prison for a long, long time."
Whack! I kicked his wrist and sent the knife flying.
"You son of a—!"
Just as he bent down to retrieve it, I struck him squarely on the head. He dropped like a sack of rice and went out cold.
"You'd better reflect on your life, or you'll end up like Joo Chang-nam—wheezing out your last breaths in some lonely grave, dying in agony. Consider this your wake-up call."
I gathered strength in my thumb and pressed it hard into the exact center of the man's forehead, weaving in a charm so that whenever the urge to do evil stirred in him, today's events would come rushing back to mind.
Then, suddenly, it occurred to me.
Who slipped this into me?
Had anyone I'd sent to the afterlife known how to do something like this?
A few days later, word came from the Yeongcheon Police Station. The woman who'd nearly been abducted had been discharged from the hospital in good condition.
Her name was Kwon Su-jeong. Her profession, apparently, was gambler—there was such a job? Yes, as it turned out: a professional gambler hired by a casino. She was a player brought in to lose money at the right moments and win it back at others, keeping the baccarat tables balanced and lively.
Then she'd fallen for the charms of Lee Do-hyuk and Kim Ji-hee, two visitors at the casino, had a drink with them, and blacked out. She'd walked to the very threshold of the afterlife and clawed her way back by the skin of her teeth.
This was how Lee Do-hyuk and Kim Ji-hee made their living—luring in wealthy marks, reselling their luxury foreign cars at used-car prices, and making off with their jewelry.
Hand the car keys to a used-car dealer near the Taebaek Casino and he'd handle everything else, so they never got caught.
Around the time I was receiving the Brave Citizen Award from the chief of the Yeongcheon Police Station, Joo Man-deok was being taken into custody at the Pyeongcheong County detention center. Partly for wrecking the housing complex's water system and threatening the workers to cough up 100 million won in compensation. Partly for running wild in nothing but his underwear, inflicting sexual humiliation on everyone who saw him.
But mostly, he'd become a suspect in an attempted murder case.
Really, though—what did he expect? Why would you mix your own hair in with the strands of Joo Chang-nam's hair meant for a curse doll?
In any case, the world had been turned upside down exactly as I'd hoped—thanks to Moon Sung-il pulling every string he had and blowing the whole affair wide open.