The Failed Specimen Archive
The next day, before the sun had fully set, Ha Yul met Yoon Chaewon and Lee Sumin again. The location was a quiet café a short distance from the university district. Late-afternoon light filtered slowly through the glass windows, but the story she needed to tell felt out of place against such a tranquil backdrop. Ha Yul’s expression was more serious than usual. Chaewon noticed it immediately, and Sumin watched her carefully as well.
Ha Yul didn’t waste time with preamble. The longer she danced around it, the more awkward it would become, and more importantly, this wasn’t something she could keep from them.
She clasped her hands on the table and spoke in a quiet voice. “Last time I mentioned I’d be moving around because of something in the Jongro area. I only said it was a mutant-related incident back then, but now I can give you a clearer picture. The Blood Essence that appeared this time isn’t just some device that ruins people’s bodies and accelerates mutation. Someone was using it to induce mutations, directing their movements, and monitoring the results. The case has grown far larger than expected, and the Moorim Agency has formed an official investigation team. I wanted to let you know in advance in case they need civilian cooperation.”
Chaewon listened without blinking. Sumin quietly traced the rim of her cup. Ha Yul looked between them and continued.
“But there’s something I need to make clear. Even if they request civilian help, you are absolutely forbidden from entering the field. Whether it’s the Jongro underground, the redevelopment zone, or any area cordoned off by Moorim Agency tape, don’t go near it out of curiosity. And for the time being, it would be best if you avoided going out at night. I’m not trying to scare you. This incident has reached a point where it could erupt anywhere, crowded streets or not. If you absolutely must go out at night for some unavoidable reason, don’t decide on your own. Call me. It doesn’t matter what time it is. I’ll come.”
When she finished, Ha Yul waited for their answers. Both Chaewon and Sumin already knew she wasn’t the type to offer empty kindness, and that she could become ruthlessly decisive when necessary. Yet her words carried something heavier than a simple warning.
“Is this concern, or just a formal directive for managing potential investigation collaborators?”
Sumin smiled, trying to lighten the heavy atmosphere. “What is this? Sounds exactly like some overprotective boyfriend telling his girlfriend what to do. ‘Don’t wander around at night, call me if anything happens, stay away from the scene.’ You’re really going all out, unnie. I didn’t know you could be this dramatic.”
Normally, Ha Yul would have brushed the comment aside or changed the subject. This time, she didn’t. She closed her mouth for a moment and glanced out the window. The light had shifted toward evening, and people continued walking the streets as if nothing were wrong. Looking at that ordinary scene, one face always rose in her mind—her master, the man she had followed like a father. The one who had vanished without a word.
Ha Yul spoke slowly. “Yeah. It’s concern. I could dress it up as a formal directive, but I don’t feel like twisting my words that much.”
Her voice dropped lower, heavier than usual. “I had a master. Someone I followed almost like a father. He was a hunter who achieved extraordinary feats during the Great Mutation. Back then, there wasn’t a single person in Seoul who didn’t know his name. He wasn’t the kind of man who would die meaninglessly while hunting a few monsters. Then one day he disappeared. No warning, no body, no trace—just gone, so cleanly it looked suspicious. He wouldn’t have fallen to ordinary monsters. Someone, or some massive organization, must have gotten involved. Whether it was the upper ranks of the Moorim Agency, a corporation, or those rumored Guiin. Whatever it was, it happened far beyond anything I could reach with my own eyes and feet.”
Chaewon and Sumin listened in silence. Ha Yul rarely spoke about herself. For her to bring up this past…
“I became the successor of the Hyeol-a-mun and turned into a hunter just like him. After that, I kept searching for any trace of my master. Ten years have already passed like that. And I still haven’t found a single clue. Do you know what that means? It means a person can vanish in an instant. It means that if someone decides to erase you, no matter how wide you open your eyes, how sharply you listen, or how far you reach, they can take you somewhere you’ll never be found.”
She paused there. The next words needed to be said. If you two suddenly disappeared one day, I don’t know what I would do. They were difficult to voice, but she knew she had to say them anyway.
Ha Yul turned her gaze to the two women. “……If you two suddenly vanished somewhere my eyes, ears, and hands could never reach, I—”
The sentence never finished. Sumin pushed her chair back and leaned forward, pressing a short but unhesitating kiss to Ha Yul’s lips. Before Ha Yul could react, Chaewon reached out, gently took hold of her chin, and followed with a longer, calmer kiss. Their methods differed, but their intent was the same: Don’t say any more. We already understand.
Ha Yul closed her eyes briefly, then slowly opened them. Sometimes a single touch could reassure someone more than a thousand words. Sumin pulled back and smiled with a playful glint in her eyes.
“If you say scary things with that face, we’ll just get more frightened. We won’t disappear. At least, we won’t vanish without a word. Having someone cut off contact and evaporate should be enough for one lifetime, right?”
Chaewon added quietly, “It’s not that I dislike hearing you say you’ll protect us. It’s just that hearing you admit it without trying to soften it feels heavier than I expected. Still, I understand. I’ll be careful at night. I’ll contact you if I need to. I won’t approach the scene, and even if I get curious, I won’t cross the line. So please don’t try to go too far on your own, either.”
Ha Yul hesitated, then let out a small sigh and nodded with rare honesty. “Yeah. I promise.”
After receiving their confirmation, Ha Yul joined Yu-jin before night fully settled. At the outskirts of the Jongro redevelopment zone, beside a fence already marked as having been sealed and searched once, Moorim Agency vehicles and portable lighting equipment were deployed. Today’s operation, however, was far smaller than before. Since the investigation team needed to push deeper, reducing personnel and minimizing traces had become necessary.
Yu-jin noticed the change in Ha Yul the moment she saw her. It was subtle, different from her usual pre-hunt sharpness. She looked like someone whose mind had been put in order. Her expression was calmer than usual, carrying the faint afterglow of having met someone else. Yu-jin could guess the source of that change—Yoon Chaewon and Lee Sumin. She knew their names and their existence. The thought that Ha Yul showed them expressions she never showed her stirred something uncomfortable, though the reason remained vague. Now wasn’t the time to dwell on it.
Yu-jin pushed the thought aside and turned the terminal in her hand toward Ha Yul. “The area we entered last time was near the observation point. Today we’re going further down. From that depth onward, even the city’s underground maps become unreliable. It means spaces that were erased from the maps still exist and overlap. Your senses will matter more this time. We’ll keep tracking the signal from above, but the deeper we go, the worse the interference will get, and the equipment may become useless.”
Ha Yul accepted the device and asked briefly, “Support personnel?”
“Only the minimum. Just enough to seal the entrance and secure the rear. We’ll check the inside first, just the two of us. …Honestly, we still don’t know what we’ll find down there. Fewer eyes might be better.”
The two of them opened the steel cover once more and descended into the Jongro underground. They passed through the tunnels they had already traversed and pushed deeper. After opening the hidden panel beside the previously discovered observation room and moving past the abnormally empty electrical room, the space changed. Between concrete walls, old railway tracks appeared. It was an abandoned subway tunnel. Though it no longer appeared on any official map, it looked like a line dug for the city’s expansion and emergency military use before being discarded.
Ha Yul drew in a breath. Amid the smell of iron, dust, and decaying insulation, she caught the scent of blood—more precisely, dried blood mixed with the odor of a laboratory. Someone had passed through here. More than once or twice.
They walked along the tracks. Midway, there were signs that the wall had been forcibly torn open, revealing old military communication lines. Thick cables with cracked black sheathing, aged relay boxes, and analog markings long out of use lay buried under dust, yet some showed recent signs of human handling. It seemed someone had been repurposing the old communication lines for power assistance or signal rerouting. If the Blood Essence was receiving external signals, these sealed underground tunnels and military networks would be ideal places to transmit without being seen.
At the end of the tunnel, where the tracks were half-broken and diverted sideways, a metal door appeared. Like the previous observation room, it was disguised to look like an abandoned utility entrance, but faint traces of recent use remained around the handle and on the floor. Too little dust in a long-abandoned place was always suspicious.
Yu-jin spoke quietly. “Don’t go straight inside even if the door opens. Be careful.”
Ha Yul nodded and turned the handle. The door wasn’t locked. The moment they stepped inside, the flashlight beam slid across the room. At its end lay the failed specimen archive.
The interior was larger than expected. The ceiling was low and the space horizontally long, with rows of transparent capsule-like cases lined along both walls. Some had lost power entirely, while others still showed faint status lights powered by emergency systems. What truly seized the eye, however, were the contents.
People. Or rather, beings that had once been called people—dozens of them. Their ages, genders, and builds varied, but they shared one thing: each had a Blood Essence embedded at the same angle at the back of the neck, near the cervical spine. Some mutants were frozen in grotesquely twisted postures. Others had veins swollen beneath their skin. Still others had half their faces retaining human features while the other half had collapsed into beast-like bone structures. Dried eyeballs stared into empty space, and mouths hung half-open as if the final convulsion had never left them.
Ha Yul held her breath for a moment at the sight. Yu-jin couldn’t find words either. After scanning the entire room, she spoke in a sunken voice.
“This is a storage warehouse. They couldn’t discard the failed mutants, but they couldn’t revive them either, so they just piled them here.”
It was the accumulation of the process—the inevitable failures that arose along the way. Yu-jin took out her terminal and began photographing.
“If we report this to the Moorim Agency, the entire site will be turned upside down. And it should be. At the same time, the people who built this place will realize we’ve come this far and likely flee to their next base. Damn it. The timing couldn’t be worse.”
Ha Yul walked more slowly between the cases. Several of the specimens were young. Every single one had that red nail—the Blood Essence—driven into the back of the neck. Further inside, on wall shelves, numbered tags and record cards were inserted. Compatibility Failure. Language Instability. Regeneration Overdrive. Insufficient Signal Response. Awaiting Retrieval. Within that systematic horror, Ha Yul stopped before the final row of shelves. Instead of transparent cases, several large objects covered in black sheets lay there. She hadn’t opened them yet, but she could tell. These were the ones scheduled for disposal—mutants that had likely lost even their human shape.
She reached out, then stopped. Opening them now might cloud her judgment. Instead, she spoke very quietly.
“Yu-jin.”
“What.”
“There’s more below this.”
Yu-jin’s gaze shifted. “The smell?”
“If there’s a storage room, there must be a separate sorting area. If they’re storing this many failures here, then somewhere deeper or beside it, there should still be a place that decides what counts as success.”
The existence of a failed specimen archive meant a system for selecting successful ones existed. And if those successes were already hiding somewhere in the city, then the corpses before them were both past sacrifices and a preview of what was yet to come.