Prologue: The Rusted Gate

The soles of her sneakers stopped at the end of the dirt path.

One step forward.

Half a step back.

Her toes hesitated again and again, unwilling to commit.

Her lips parted.

No sound came out.

She swallowed once.

Only then.

"...Ha."

Only then did Yuna realize she had been holding her breath.

She drew air in slowly.

A damp, rotting stench shoved its way down her throat.

"Kehek—khmm."

A cough nearly escaped. She forced it back down.

She lifted her head.

A rusted iron gate.

Beyond it.

The school stood waiting in the dark.

The sun had long since vanished behind the gaunt silhouette of the mountain ridge. Ash-gray darkness poured heavily down the steep slopes, swallowing the entire foothill. The lights of the city never reached this far; they lingered only as a faint orange smear in the distance.

Whenever the wind rose, withered branches scraped their bark against one another, releasing a dry, rasping friction—ssssssk—that clawed at the eardrums like someone carelessly striking rusted saw blades together.

She wiped her hands on her pants.

They were damp with sweat.

She could not remember when that had started.

At the boundary where the asphalt ended and the dirt began, she stood rooted at the mouth of the darkness, staring at the old iron school gate. Thick bars bloomed with red rust like a skin disease, weathered and corroded by years of wind and rain until they had split into sharp, jagged edges in places.

Beyond those bars, against the deep-blue night sky, the outline of the Old Building could only be guessed at—and it was strangely twisted. Lines that should have been right angles were warped and swallowed by the dark, occupying the center of the space with a heavy, wrong presence.

At the end of an approach road denied even a single streetlamp, in the perfect absence of light, a sour, clammy reek rolled forward in waves—the kind of decay that rose from an old earthen grave left out in the rain for days. Every shift of the wind pressed that metallic stench against the membranes of her nose.

Cool night air knifed through the collar of her thin cotton clothes. The fine hairs on her skin stood on end; the fibers of her muscles contracted stiffly and trembled.

She knew this sensation.

Once, as a child, following her grandmother into an abandoned house—

just once—

it had been the same.

An instinctive warning signal, branded deep into her bones by the bloodline of a shaman grandmother, slamming against her brainstem. The visceral refusal that said the moment she crossed this line she would be dragged into a space ruled by alien, hostile laws.

The lining of her stomach twisted hard. A nauseating surge of acid climbed her esophagus. A prickling unease that began in the soles of her feet raced up her calves, through her thighs, and struck her spine.

"Haa……."

She expelled a long, hot, turbid breath through lips dried and cracked. The white vapor hung in the air a moment before scattering into the dark.

With her right palm she roughly scrubbed both cheeks, already gone cold and stiff. The frayed shoulder strap of her canvas bag dug deep into her left shoulder. The hand gripping that worn scrap of cloth clenched so hard the veins stood out as if ready to burst. Without realizing it she had been biting down hard on the soft inner flesh of her lower lip.

Whether she squeezed her eyelids shut or snapped them open again, the same memory from a few days ago circled obsessively through her mind.

Inside a dusty one-room apartment, the only light in the darkened room had been the text on a smartphone gig-work app.

When she submitted the application she had thought it was simply a well-paying night gig. She never imagined that the chairman of the school foundation himself would appear for a mere security-guard interview.

On the top floor of the foundation’s imposing headquarters building, behind a massive mahogany desk, the School Foundation Chairman sat sunk deep into a leather chair. He did not spare even a single glance at the résumé she had stayed up all night filling out.

"Six students have gone missing."

The first sentence that slipped from the chairman’s lips was dry as a weather report.

"The police want to bury it as simple runaways, but what actually happened inside there… I have no idea. I gathered every so-called famous shaman and ritualist I could find, stuffed wads of cash into their hands. The moment they saw the energy of that school ground, every last one of them spat and ran."

Greed and impatience tangled stickily in his ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠cloudy eyes.

"I need to sell the school land for a fortune and relocate soon. If these ugly rumors make the papers, it’s over. I can’t exactly hold a full-blown exorcism out in the open."

A thick gold ring tapped the desk in a steady rhythm—tuk, tuk.

"I’ve heard of your grandmother’s reputation. So here’s my proposal. Go in wearing a uniform, pretend to be an ordinary night guard, and quietly ‘normalize’ that ground without anyone knowing."

It was an insane offer. A cursed site so foul that the most renowned mediums in the country had felt the murderous energy and fled without looking back.

She should have refused. She should have stood up on the spot, opened the door of that gloomy office, and walked out.

But the large envelope the chairman slid from a desk drawer and sent gliding across the smooth wooden surface caught her by the ankle.

Through the gap of the envelope, swollen so full it would not quite close, crisp fifty-thousand-won notes glowed with a naked blue light. An advance so large she could never have touched it even after years of twelve-hour barcode-scanning shifts—plus the enormous remainder promised once the job was done.

The instant she saw that stack of money, something rose ahead of fear: a strange, stubborn defiance.

Fine. Whether the ones who ran had real power or not, they were probably just empty shells, frauds. Me—someone who’s actually driven out real ghosts more than once… me, who inherited Grandmother’s bloodline—I can do this.

Her gaze pulled free of that arrogant past certainty and slowly dropped to her feet.

The cracked screen of the old smartphone she was crushing in her right hand cast a pale blue glow into the darkness. Across the shattered liquid crystal, the numbers from the bank app she had checked days earlier overlaid themselves with perfect clarity.

If she ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠did not deposit the overdue rent by next week she would have to clear out her things. Worse, the enormous hospital bills for her mother—who clung to life day by day on IV lines—pressed against her throat like a blade.

That heavy shadow of death and the yoke of poverty had finally shoved her to the mouth of this hell.

Her grandmother had once been a shaman of such renowned spiritual power that political heavyweights and corporate chairmen had to take numbers and wait in line for a reading. Luxury sedans jammed the narrow alley; the wives of chaebol families prostrated themselves flat to ask about fortune and misfortune. Those were the glittering days.

But all that glory evaporated together with the spiritual veins of the earth, which for some reason began to dry up with terrifying speed. A cruel era arrived in which spiritual power vanished and true shamans, having lost the thread of divine possession, degenerated into frauds merely imitating the trade. Grandmother could not escape that vast decline of the age either.

Flesh melting from her bones, the light in her eyes fading to gray, she seized Yuna’s wrist a few days before she died and dragged her into a small room steeped in incense smoke.

Yuna still remembered every hair-raising sensation of that night as if it had been branded into each individual cell.

The touch of the yellow linoleum floor, ice-cold even in midsummer.

The acrid, toxic incense smoke that filled every corner and choked the breath.

In the midst of an ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠unintelligible chant mixing dialect and spell-words, the moment Grandmother’s bony, rough hand pressed hard just below her navel—

a hideous pain exploded as if a red-hot iron skewer had pierced the soft flesh of her abdomen and torn deep into her organs.

While Yuna’s body screamed until her throat tore, Grandmother pinned her as if binding her, then with fingers floating in empty air carved an invisible, grotesque talisman shape onto her belly.

The day after the ritual ended, Grandmother departed the world as suddenly as someone who had exhausted every last drop of life force, her body gone cold and rigid.

Yuna never learned what that invisible brand carved beneath blood and skin truly meant, or what purpose it served.

What was clear was that the moment the strange rite finished, a black disaster took root in the household.

Her once-healthy mother began to sicken with an unknown illness and waste away. At first they thought it was merely severe exhaustion, but gradually the hours she spent lying in bed staring at the ceiling outnumbered the hours she could rise. White-coated doctors at university hospitals ran battery after battery of precise tests and still found no organ abnormality. They toured every famous clinic, drew blood, took scans; the only result that came back was the indifferent diagnosis of a stress-related disorder.

Yet contrary to the printed words on the medical reports, her mother’s body withered day by day. Eyes sunken, skin stripped of all vitality, she lay connected to IV lines and monitors. The air of the hospital room mixed disinfectant alcohol, the metallic scent of blood, and the peculiar sweetness of saline. To keep that fragile breath attached even one more day required a constant pouring of money—expensive non-covered drugs and hospital fees.

Knowing full well it was pouring water into a bottomless jar, Yuna hunted day and night for anything that paid. But her only real talent—spiritual ability—was synonymous with “con artist” in a modern society ruled by reason and science.

Finding ordinary work was its own ordeal. As a minor she could not obtain a legal guardian’s consent form because her mother was bedridden. Government support was a sandcastle before the hospital bills that swelled terrifyingly each month.

While her peers dreamed of the future at school, she had to worry about tomorrow’s survival. She grew up far too early and, as the practical head of the household, clawed for money with vicious determination. Inside the law there was nothing she could do, so she forged documents, lied about her age, and bounced from illegal part-time jobs. She worked night convenience stores and late-night warehouses, taking whatever came, only to be caught as a minor and thrown onto the street without even the back wages. In front of bosses who turned the tables and threatened her over the illegal employment, she swallowed tears of injustice and immediately searched for the next job so she could buy medicine the following day. That was how she endured, body breaking, clinging on.

Even after she became an adult the situation did not improve. Because she had spent her youth on physical labor just to cover immediate hospital costs, she could not even dream of the credentials needed for a proper job. The sole small mercy was that she had not been born male, and therefore would never be ground down as a “Grade-1 conscript resource” labeled with a serial number instead of a name.

Using the thin knowledge Grandmother left behind, she occasionally drove out minor spirits or wrote talismans, gradually making a name for herself by word of mouth. With the money scraped together that way she opened a tiny fortune-telling café on the outskirts—her only means of livelihood. But the footsteps of people who leaned on superstition were always fickle. Café income alone could never fully shield her from the enormous hospital invoices that arrived without warning.

The yoke of poverty tightening around her throat.

That was the single clear reason her own feet had brought her once more to stand before the rusted iron gate of this abandoned school seething with murderous energy.

Wiiiiing—.

In the instant she was submerged in past memories, the phone clenched in her right hand spat out a short, rough vibration. The intense tremor traveling through the plastic case into her palm made her shoulders, locked with tension, jump.

Across the liquid crystal screen that sliced the darkness, the caller’s name rose in white.

She dragged in a long breath, as if a massive boulder were crushing the center of her chest. She swallowed once to moisten her parched vocal cords, cleared her throat, and with her right thumb shoved the call button outward hard.

"Yeah, Yunseo."

The voice coming through the tiny speaker hole was clear and clean. In this darkness vibrating with the stench of decay it felt like the only thing that still held warmth and light.

Even though the space was empty and no one was watching, she feared that if her expression hardened the edges of her voice would harden too, so she forced both corners of her mouth upward into a long, artificial smile.

"Yeah, I ate. Stopped by the convenience store and polished off a solid lunchbox. I’m right in front of the school gate now."

At the teasing scolding a foolish little laugh—pfft—slipped between her tightly closed lips. Inside her ribcage a heavy pulse hammered the chest wall; the left hand gripping the bag strap trembled faintly; yet the voice she pushed out of her mouth she made exaggeratedly cheerful.

"Heh… hey, who’s a chicken? With pay like this, what’s a ghost? If a ghost smacks my cheek and hands me a wad of cash I’ll offer both cheeks. And for the record, I’m the granddaughter of a famous shaman household. If a ghost shows up I’ll just throw a full-blown gut for it."

She deliberately raised her tone and mixed in bravado, but her uneasy gaze still wavered toward the outer wall of the Old Building drowned in pitch black. Every time the wind blew, the black shadows of bare branches rippled across the concrete. The fine tremor at the tips of the fingers clenched around the bag strap would not stop.

She quietly released the strap, then shoved that trembling left hand deep into the shallow pocket of her old jumper. Inside, her fingertips met the rough, stiff texture of paper. A bundle of talismans. Her thumb rubbed the surface restlessly. The edge of a nail caught a corner of the paper, folding and unfolding it again and again.

Her sister’s voice continued through the receiver.

Somewhere inside her chest a dull impact dropped like a stone hitting the floor.

She had only just become a high-school senior. At that age even sitting at a desk all day grinding through textbooks left no spare time. And already her little sister was talking about hunting for an hourly part-time job.

Her jaw tightened.

She drew a short breath and hurriedly put an edge on her voice.

"Don’t talk nonsense. Why would you get a job? You just sit at the reading-room desk and study. Big sister will earn all the money."

"I’m not struggling. Really, not even a little."

Even while speaking, her gaze drifted downward of its own accord—to the torn hem of her clothes, the bloodless tips of her fingers, the black stain pooled at her feet.

"This security job I’m doing is super easy. Just sit in a soft chair and look at my phone—pure honey gig. So stop worrying about useless stuff and memorize one more English word. I’m hanging up, okay?"

Before she could even hear the answer she fled, crushing the red end-call button.

The connection tone cut off and the surroundings sank once more into heavy silence. The shoulders she had been holding exaggeratedly straight collapsed limply downward.

"Ha…"

Hearing that bright voice only made the impulse surge harder—to turn around right now at the boundary of this cursed ground and run like mad down toward the bright foot of the mountain. Instinctive terror scraping the lining of her stomach openly dragged at her ankles, pulling her backward.

Yet the moment that instinct to flee lifted its head, the crushing weight of reality settled on her shoulders again and locked her body rigid.

The notice that if she did not pay by next Monday the electricity would be cut off at once.

The pile of IV-cost and medicine-payment receipts stacked high beside the hospital bed.

And the internet-lecture fees for a younger sister who still wore the title of exam student.

If she let some nameless fear cow her into turning back at this threshold, the family she loved more than her own life would be sitting out on cold asphalt by tomorrow. The oxygen machine would stop. Her sister would have to wring restaurant rags instead of problem sets.

Just one night.

I can finish it in one night. That’s how I calculated it from the start.

But there’s no need to rush.

If I say I finished in a single day, I only get paid for that one day and it’s over.

If I stick around a few more days, pretending to investigate, pretending to purify, pretending to drain the energy…

The daily wage piles up, and I still keep the advance the chairman promised.

Her ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠jaw set hard.

Turn a one-night job into a four-day job. That’s all.

…When did I get this far?

A bitter smile brushed her lips and vanished.

She clenched her teeth, locking the jaw joint tight, and repeated the words endlessly inside herself.

More terrifying by a hundredfold than whatever unknown presence might be lurking in the dark was the landlord’s twisted face pounding on the door, demanding overdue rent.

She roughly shoved open the eyelids she had squeezed shut. Inside her pupils the fragments of fear that had been trembling and scattering light were forcibly crushed and erased.

In front of money,

I guess I’m no different either.

Into the empty space she packed, tight and dense, a vicious, stubborn will to survive no matter what.

She clenched the talismans inside the jumper pocket until they nearly tore, feeling the sharp friction of paper against her palm, then released the force again.

She parted the teeth she had locked, expelled one long hot breath, and at last lifted her heavy foot.

She planted it on the ground and took her first complete step across the boundary of the rusted iron school gate.

Kiiiiik—.

As if it had been waiting all these long years for someone to open it, a fierce wind that had raced down the mountain slope struck the iron gate at the perfect moment. Unable to withstand the pressure, the old gate swung inward and screamed a tearing metal cry.

Yuna breathed roughly and slowly pushed her hand into the cold iron gap of the firmly closed gate. The temperature of the metal under her fingertips was as icy as a midwinter scrap heap, even though it was summer. Red rust powder flaked from the friction points and crumbled soundlessly onto the white toes of her sneakers.

She passed completely through the gate’s boundary and set both feet fully on the dirt of the school grounds.