The Return
Kang Hayul stood once more before the door to the official investigation team’s conference room exactly two weeks after being carried out of the second underground survey in Jongno, gravely wounded after clashing with Blood Crystal Martial Artists.
She could not claim to be exactly as she had been. A faint tug still lingered inside her ribs, and a sharp rotation of her shoulder provoked a heavy protest from the wound, as though it refused to be forgotten. Yet her stride, her breathing, her center of gravity, and her gaze had all returned to those of a hunter.
The others were already gathered inside. Whether Se-a’s persuasion had truly worked or whether she had intended to join from the start, Dang Seolhwa had naturally claimed a seat as well.
When Seol-hwa saw Hayul enter, she made no effort to hide her intrigued expression. Hayul ignored the look and headed for her own seat, only for Yu-jin to react first.
Yu-jin set down her documents and approached, stopping closer than usual to study Hayul from head to toe.
“You’re really fully recovered? Saying you’re fine means nothing, so let me check. You’ve always been the type to hide injuries behind a straight face.”
Before she finished speaking, Yu-jin’s hands were already moving. She pressed Hayul’s shoulder, checked beneath the collarbone and along the arm, traced the side and ribs with careful fingertips, and tested whether the muscles along the lower back had stiffened unnaturally. The touch was professional, yet this was not the sort of thing Yu-jin would normally do in the middle of a conference room. Hayul thought she understood why.
It was not merely a team leader’s duty. Yu-jin could no longer conceal her own feelings, yet she could not voice them outright, so she used the excuse of checking Hayul’s condition to reach out and touch her.
Hayul did not pull away. Being examined so thoroughly was embarrassing, but oddly enough, she felt no urge to refuse.
Yu-jin lifted Hayul’s arm to test its range of motion, had her bend and straighten her elbow, then pressed a little harder near the ribs. When Hayul’s brow furrowed, Yu-jin’s own brows drew together.
“This spot still hasn’t fully healed. Being able to return to the front lines and being completely recovered are two different things. Still, you won’t be carried out like last time.”
Seol-hwa watched the exchange and grinned mischievously.
“Oh my, the team leader is more thorough than I expected. Especially the way her hands linger in certain places. Quite a lot of room for interpretation, isn’t it? I rather like the view.”
Without turning, Yu-jin replied, “If human observation is your hobby, go grab a microscope and say that there.”
Seol-hwa shrugged. Se-a kept her eyes on her tablet, though the corner of her mouth twitched for the briefest moment. Ga-ram narrowed her eyes at the scene before calmly organizing the documents in her hands, as though nothing had happened. The investigation team’s complications were not limited to the case itself; the atmosphere among its members had grown equally tangled.
Yet even amid the tension, progress had been made. Over the past two weeks, the Moorim Agency, Ga-ram Bio’s internal audit team, and the research institute’s analysis division had each pursued different leads until the outline of the true mastermind hidden within Ga-ram Bio finally came into focus. Ga-ram lightly tapped the personnel file lying at the top of the meeting documents with her finger.
“It’s inconvenient that he’s already resigned, but at least on paper he did.”
Her tone was calm, yet a thin layer of mockery lay beneath it. She had never approved his resignation. When she later discovered that the system still recorded his departure while her own electronic signature as the final approver was missing, her anger had given way to the sensation of an old puzzle being flipped over.
A photograph appeared on the wall screen: a man in a neat suit, with an ordinary face and an unremarkable smile. The kind of face no one would look at twice or remember for long.
“Namgung Dohyeon. Forty-two years old. Former researcher at the Moorim Agency, roughly equivalent to a Grade 5 civil servant. He spent years in the gray zone between policy and practice, and after the Great Mutation he became deeply involved in the agency’s overhaul of research and management systems. He also joined our company in its early days.”
Ga-ram paused there, the corner of her mouth lifting in a self-deprecating smile.
“I may have come from a wealthy family, but it was still strange that someone in his position would abandon a stable government job for a company founded by a college student. At the time I told myself all sorts of talented people were drawn to promising young founders, but looking back, it was convenient self-justification.”
Yu-jin spoke. “Someone of your caliber couldn’t see through that? I thought you had better judgment.”
Ga-ram shrugged as though she had expected the question.
“I was busy balancing university and the company, and my attention was elsewhere back then. I could tell whether someone was useful for running the business, but I wasn’t old enough to coldly question why they wanted to stay close to me.”
Every gaze drifted toward Se-a. No one said her name, yet the target was obvious. Seol-hwa happened to be sitting beside Se-a reviewing documents, so the remark carried not only nostalgia but a quiet warning. Se-a seemed to grasp the meaning and gave an awkward cough. Ga-ram let out a quiet laugh at the reaction, while Seol-hwa alternated glances between them with an “Oh-ho?” expression full of meaning.
Unlike what Ga-ram assumed, Seol-hwa did not see Se-a as a romantic rival. To Seol-hwa, Se-a was an interesting colleague and friend. Still, she was not the type to kick away an unfolding drama simply because it was boring, so she kept her mouth shut and watched. It was more entertaining that way.
⋯⋯Besides, Se-a had probably noticed as well, yet she said nothing. That meant she did not entirely dislike Ga-ram’s jealousy and possessiveness.
Before the atmosphere could drift further off course, Yu-jin steered the conversation back to the main topic. Ga-ram followed the flow and turned the page.
“In any case, once we identified the mastermind, the internal audit team immediately swept his office, computer, internal access logs, and external storage export records. The Moorim Agency investigators even searched his residence. Unfortunately, the man had already vanished long ago. There were almost no signs of daily life at his home; it appeared to have been empty for at least several weeks.”
Hayul looked at Namgung Dohyeon’s photograph and asked, “So did you find anything?”
Ga-ram nodded.
“Yes. He left behind research materials and a journal. Everything was neatly organized. Anyone could see he had deliberately left them to be read. That makes it even more repulsive. Far from fearing discovery, he behaved like a scholar waiting for future generations to understand his work.”
Se-a took over at once. She displayed Namgung Dohyeon’s journal and research records on the screen, overlaying scanned images of old memos with digitized experiment logs.
“Namgung Dohyeon was also a field researcher in the early days of the Great Mutation. He witnessed cities collapsing, monsters emerging, and the old order being torn apart right before his eyes. In his records he wrote that he saw the limits of humanity. More precisely, after repeatedly watching humans being violated and driven mad with terrifying ease, he concluded that humanity as it currently exists is still incomplete.”
Se-a turned the page. Hayul felt a wave of discomfort between the lines.
The legendary hunters of the Great Mutation era. The sight of survivors being deified or monstrous in collapsing cities.
Her own master had lived through exactly that time. He had been one of those legendary hunters. Namgung Dohyeon’s records included several martial artists from that period as reference material, and among them were descriptions Hayul could not help but recognize, even though the names were not fully written out.
A hunter who used archaic external martial arts.
Seventeen solo kills of large mutated entities.
Maintained selfhood even under the pressure of mutation.
Namgung Dohyeon never mentioned the master directly, yet his shadow was clearly present in the notes. Hayul felt her jaw tighten. Her master had killed monsters to survive and protect people, yet Namgung Dohyeon had looked at the same era and dreamed of a future in which humans would be remade. How could two people reach such opposite conclusions from the same events?
Se-a continued calmly.
“He judged that humanity had been driven to the brink of extinction because it was weak. In other words, he concluded that humans must be elevated to a higher existence. That is how the Blood Crystal Project was born. To him, the Blood Crystal was not merely a mutation accelerator but a means to artificially create Guiin.”
Seol-hwa added an explanation.
“All the standardized cervical implants we’ve identified so far, the storage facilities for failures and selection facilities for successes, the Blood Crystal Martial Artists, rapid regeneration, pain suppression, and command optimization—they were all aimed in one direction. He wasn’t satisfied with simply mass-producing monsters. He wanted beings that retained human intelligence and ego while controlling monstrousness and transcendence. In short, artificial Guiin. If successful, they would be living disasters; if they failed, they would become waste piled in warehouses.”
Hayul muttered, “Artificial Guiin.”
“Exactly. His goal is clear from this point. But this scale isn’t something an individual could achieve alone.”
At Yu-jin’s words, Ga-ram brought up the next set of data. A map of Seoul appeared, marked with four red points.
The Moorim Agency had restored even deleted CCTV footage and traced Namgung Dohyeon’s movements before his resignation, following access records, license plates, civilian cameras, and communication signals. They had narrowed his frequent locations down to four sites.
The first was Yongsan Military Base, abandoned by the U.S. military and now consisting of wide empty lots and remaining facilities.
The second was an old factory district in Seongsu-dong.
The third was a data center in Gangnam.
The fourth was a remote temple on the slopes of Bukhansan.
Ga-ram pointed at the screen.
“He visited these four places frequently. Yongsan looks abandoned on the surface, but the equipment and underground facilities left by the U.S. military are still there. The Seongsu-dong factory would be ideal for hiding Blood Crystal production facilities. The Gangnam data center would be useful for signal relay, record storage, and adjusting operational algorithms. As for the temple on Bukhansan, he was probably conducting something involving Blood Qi, training, religious symbolism, and isolation from the outside world.”
Seol-hwa let out a short laugh.
“Politics, business, the military, and religion all seem to be involved. If only one location overlapped it could be coincidence, but no one would call this chance.”
Someone had provided the facilities. Someone had erased the records. Someone had supplied the funds and personnel.
Se-a agreed.
“Especially the presence of the data center strongly suggests that the operation of Blood Crystal entities was linked to a specific signal system. If they were used for movement guidance and response detection like we saw in the Jongno underground, then a great deal of experimentation and data accumulation would have been necessary. Calculations on that scale are impossible as a researcher’s personal hobby.”
Hayul looked back and forth between the four points on the map. Nation, capital, military, faith. Every element that actually ran the world was embedded there.
Yu-jin spoke, her voice lower and harder than before.
“The scale of the incident has grown enormously. At this point it’s a national-level case. Once politics, business, the military, and religion are all potentially involved, the Moorim Agency can’t openly take the lead. The evidence we currently have isn’t enough. Until truly decisive proof appears, even the upper echelons will minimize official action. In the end, the only ones who can actually obtain that evidence are the people sitting here right now.”
She looked at each of them in turn—Hayul, Se-a, Seol-hwa, Ga-ram. People who had each become involved in this case for different reasons. That was precisely why they were trustworthy. Half-hearted justice would never have brought them this far.
Yu-jin pointed to the first mark on the map.
“Our next target is the abandoned U.S. military base in Yongsan. It may look like empty lots, but underground bunkers, communication tunnels, sealed warehouses, and emergency power supplies are likely still present. If Namgung Dohyeon went there multiple times, there must be something substantial. Naturally, there will be Blood Crystal Martial Artists guarding it as well⋯⋯ and quite a few of them.”
Ga-ram spoke.
“Because it’s politically sensitive, it has become a blind spot where people’s eyes don’t reach. People remember the army that left; they don’t think much about the space that remained. I’ll secure a way to infiltrate. If I look into former investors and real estate owners, I should find something.”
Se-a continued.
“I’ll cross-reference the materials recovered from Jongno with Namgung Dohyeon’s journal and extract the types of facilities we can expect in Yongsan. That should speed up our reactions on site.”
Seol-hwa narrowed her eyes and smiled.
“I’ll dig deeper into the Blood Crystal response patterns. If he was trying to create artificial Guiin, he would have been desperate to identify the differences between failures and successes and produce more successes. It’s a long shot, but if there are any entities that came even halfway to imitating a Guiin, make sure you bring one back.”
Hayul tapped her own nose.
“I heard someone say they were going to turn it into a park someday. If old U.S. military equipment is still there, the scents will be confusing. But if something has been hiding there for a long time, it will have left plenty of traces. Once we’re inside, we’ll find it.”
They had identified the mastermind, uncovered his purpose, and located the next coordinates. The enemy was still hidden, yet now they knew where they had to move.
As the meeting drew to a close, Hayul looked again at Namgung Dohyeon’s photograph on the screen. The arrogant conclusion that humanity was still incomplete and therefore must be evolved. A man who had cultivated such an ideology atop the blood and corpses of those who survived the Great Mutation. Her master had passed through the same era and left behind the exact opposite.
A master who, with a body covered in wounds and scars, fought monsters to protect the powerless and taught others how to remain human until the very end.
Hayul recalled the sensation of the scar still present in her palm. Artificial Guiin. The more she repeated the word, the more repulsive it became.
Yongsan would be the next hunting ground.
And what they had to find there was the heart of an arrogant process that sought to arbitrarily reshape humanity.