The Abandoned Veins
Late at night, the black sedan from Garam Bio slipped out of the campus and glided across the heart of Seoul. Beyond the windows, the city still glowed with scattered lights. To most it looked peaceful, but to someone who knew how thin that calm really was, the quiet felt more like a mask.
Lee Garam sat in the back seat, neither fully relaxed nor rigidly upright, her gaze fixed on the passing streets. Two researchers occupied the front, while bodyguards flanked her on either side, silent and watchful. The car was quiet. No one spoke first. That silence wasn’t uncomfortable. Those who had worked with her long enough understood that when she was lost in thought, waiting was wiser than asking questions.
The scene from the plaza still lingered in her mind, unresolved. The mutant with crimson blood crystals exposed at the nape, its movements strangely purposeful rather than purely frenzied. And Kang Hayul—how she had read the creature’s intent in an instant and brought it down without hesitation. To Garam, whose eye for people had been sharpened by years in the field, Hayul was an intriguing variable. She fought differently from martial artists accustomed to modern firearms, and her approach diverged from the corporate-sponsored new generation as well.
Yet the face that truly held Garam’s attention wasn’t Kang Hayul’s. It was Han Seia’s.
Garam closed her eyes for a moment. Instead of the campus plaza, the cold lights of the research institute rose behind her lids. A mutant laid out on the dissection table, its incision lines stark under the white glare. And Seia standing before it, curiosity written plainly across her face.
She had always been that way, even back in university. Seia would study the creatures on the lab table with that same bright, inquisitive gaze. Garam had understood it, yet she had always remained wary. Understanding meant they shared something; wariness meant she knew exactly where that similarity could lead.
She thought to herself, eyes still closed, She still loves mutations, doesn’t she?
During their university years, the two women had shared the same lab. It was a time when every taboo and curiosity mingled under the banner of mutation biology, when academia, corporations, and the state all fixated on the same question: how the human body responded to mutation and how it might be reconstructed. Their research had centered on the interaction between mutations and the human nervous system—cervical nerves, blood flow, signal pathways, and how to induce responses in mutants. In hindsight, that direction had been eerily close to the artificial insertion of blood crystals.
The world had not yet grown as brazen as it was now. Countless ethical violations could still hide behind the word “research.” But the core question had already been the same: How far could the human body change? Was it a disease, or a possibility? Could it be managed and controlled—willingly or otherwise?
Seia had been fascinated by that question. To her, mutation was never merely a tragedy. She wanted to understand why certain reactions occurred, where nerves became overstimulated, how blood flow reorganized itself, and how regeneration and sensory hypersensitivity were linked. If humanity could comprehend mutation, she often said, it could expand the very limits of human physiology.
Garam had never contradicted her. More precisely, she hadn’t been able to. Seia’s explanations were largely correct, and the world was already moving in that direction. Their conclusions, however, diverged. Where Seia argued that mutation should be understood and utilized, Garam insisted it must be managed and controlled. Neither statement was wrong. In fact, they overlapped enough that the two women could remain in the same space for a long time. People who reach opposite conclusions can still stand together if they see the same things along the way.
Back then, they had been more than mere colleagues. They repeated the same experiments, pored over the same data through sleepless nights, fought endlessly over paper drafts and the priority of research funding and sample access. Yet there were also nights when they woke in the same bed after drinking too much, returned to the same building, and carried on with the next day’s preparations as if nothing had happened. Conversations in the lab sofa, the lounge, the empty corridors at dawn, and near the rooftop railing had always been more than professional.
They argued constantly when together, yet neither could bear to let the other go. Calling it simple physical comfort or loneliness would have been too shallow. What existed between them was thornier: the irritation of the other’s way of thinking, paired with the knowledge that no one else understood it quite as well.
Seia had always told her not to look only at conclusions. Garam had fired back that focusing only on process would leave them too late—the world would not wait for her curiosity to be satisfied, and understanding mutation was not the same as leaving it unchecked. Those conversations repeated often. Arguments that circled the same topic with different logic could sustain a relationship for a while, even when both knew it would eventually end. Perhaps they had both enjoyed the friction to some degree.
The decisive break came just before graduation. Seia proposed an experiment to artificially induce mutation responses. On the surface, it was meant to create stable observation conditions—tracking initial reactions under reproducible parameters rather than relying on uncontrolled field mutants. The logic was sound, even academically natural. But Garam opposed it.
“We’re not researching how to create mutations,” she had said clearly. “The moment we cross that line, it’s over.”
Seia had only smiled. “Everyone outside is already doing it. Why pretend otherwise? If we keep debating morality and ethics inside the lab, we’ll only fall further behind.”
That day, they fought for the first time in earnest. After that, Seia left Garam Bio’s founding team and moved to the Murim Agency’s Cooperative Research Institute. From then on, they stepped into different worlds. Their names still overlapped occasionally through joint research or data sharing, but that did not mean they stood in the same place.
Garam opened her eyes and looked out the window again. Seoul’s nightscape remained bright—convenience store signs, the dying embers of franchise cafés, traffic lights, Murim Agency public safety billboards, the glow of countless phones. Looking at such a city, it was sometimes hard to believe mutation was truly destroying the world. Yet the real threats always lurked beneath the surface.
From what little she had heard, Seia’s life remained unchanged. She still approached mutation as something to be understood rather than feared. And, ironically, that was precisely what still drew Garam to her.
She murmured to herself, “Lingering attachment?”
The words came lightly, but something heavier lay beneath them. Emotions she had believed long settled could resurface at the most unexpected moments.
One of the researchers in the front seat turned around carefully. “The video analysis of the campus mutant has been uploaded.”
Garam accepted the tablet. Multiple angles of the incident played across the screen. The mutant staggering in the plaza, turning, trying to slip through the crowd—only for Kang Hayul to slam into it from the side. What stood out was how quickly Hayul had recognized that the creature was attempting to escape rather than attack. She wasn’t merely strong; she was a hunter who read intent and purpose. Such people were rare.
Garam replayed the same sequence several times.
“Interesting,” she said. “This one might actually be useful.”
The researcher studied her expression but asked nothing further.
The vehicle soon stopped near the Jongro Redevelopment Area. Between the condemned buildings, construction fences, weathered walls, and shuttered shopfronts, the wind whispered across metal. Distant city noise barely reached this pocket of stillness. A place abandoned by people, overlooked by eyes—a space still clinging to the city’s center while offering shelter to other things.
Garam stepped out and regarded the site in silence. The first blood-crystal entity had been discovered here, and the chain of current events had begun. She scanned the surroundings slowly. During redevelopment, certain spaces had been marked closed on paper but remained very much present in reality. If the city was a body, this was an old blood vessel that had lost its official function yet still carried flow. Jongro’s old downtown was especially like that—its aging infrastructure refused to vanish completely, lingering beneath newer constructions. Anyone trying to move mutants unseen would choose a place like this.
A researcher offered a tablet displaying recently acquired blueprints and estimated movement patterns, but Garam did not take it. Some things could only be understood by standing in the field, not by staring at screens.
The campus mutant had prioritized movement over aggression. The first mutant found in Jongro had also aimed upward rather than simply rampaging. If blood crystals were receiving specific signals, then this redevelopment zone was less an accident site and more a testing ground.
Only then did Garam accept the tablet and study the map before lifting her head again.
“They conducted a live test,” she said.
A simple activation experiment would have been performed under sealed conditions. What had happened so far was different. The mutants had moved through the actual city, emerged into public spaces, and operated under variables that included external reactions, retrieval feasibility, escape routes, and witness presence. This had not been a controlled laboratory process.
“Someone is testing how to direct mutants inside the city—how far the signal reaches, whether it can be properly received, how responses differ in crowded versus empty spaces, and whether retrieval is possible if needed.”
The researcher fell silent. The word “test” carried a darker weight than “experiment.” Experiments assumed the possibility of failure; tests implied something already largely complete being thrown into real conditions. Garam understood that distinction better than anyone.
She glanced briefly at the sky. Seoul’s night sky was always faintly luminous from reflected light, stars rarely visible. Beneath a city that could never fully darken, she found herself thinking of Seia again—the trace of someone who had entered a different world yet never completely faded.
“Seia,” she whispered, too softly for anyone to hear. “This is the kind of research you’d love.”
After a moment, her lips tightened almost imperceptibly before she added, “Or perhaps… you’d hate it.”
There were reasons for both. The idea of turning an entire city into a laboratory was thoroughly modern—and carried the unmistakable sense that people were being treated as test subjects rather than fellow humans. Seia would likely respond to both aspects. And because of that, Garam could not shake the feeling that Seia would be drawn deeper into this case once more.
She turned her gaze back to the dark buildings of the Jongro Redevelopment Area. On the surface, everything was still. Yet somewhere beneath, something was moving. Old pipes and sealed passages, underground utility lines and shafts—forgotten spaces still connected to one another, and someone was using those connections through blood-crystal entities. At the end of this test, Garam knew she would face Seia again.