Black Moon (2)
"One may frolic when it is time to frolic, but ought one not finish what must be done before making merry?"
I still had no intention of getting out of bed, and Dandanso pressed me.
"Ugh... I wanna lie around a little longer..."
A while longer on my back would have been nice, but I lost to her nagging and finally sat up.
"Well done. A proper adult sees to their duties before they play."
Ugh. This girl was definitely a J. One of these days I was going to sit her down and make her take an MBTI test. Hmm... the Heavenly Demon's MBTI. That actually sounded like fun. J was a lock—but was she an E, or an I?
Wait. Why did Dandanso feel more like the older sister?! I was a full ten years older than her....
Once I was up, I opened my laptop to sell the mana stone.
Hmm. I was an unregistered hunter, which meant a deal in the open was impossible. Trading in the light meant the official exchange run by the Bureau, and the moment anyone who wasn't a registered hunter listed a mana stone there, an investigation came down at once. Then I would have to explain exactly how I had obtained the stone I'd put up. Unregistered as I was, I had no explanation that would hold.
The lawful ways to get a mana stone were simple enough: climb a Tower yourself and receive one as a reward, or buy one on the exchange. The claim that I, unregistered, had climbed a Tower and been paid for it was absurd on its face, and saying I had bought the stone only to sell it back was equally impossible. Every transaction on the official exchange was logged. A lie like that would fall apart in no time.
Which left only the black market. Fortunately, Hunter Gallery had already taught me how deals in the dark were done.
Fadegram—an anonymous messenger used mostly by unregistered hunters and by criminal organizations. That second clientele sat badly with me, but it couldn't be helped. The mana stone still had to be sold.
I put up a single post.
"Th-that shameful name—what is the meaning of it! Change that moniker at once!"
Dandanso had seen the post, and she cried out in horror.
"Hehehe. Why?"
"There is no need to fashion a name in such a fashion! And we must hide who we are—what are you doing, choosing a name like that?"
"This is just how usernames are made. And this much isn't a problem at all."
I searched Fadegram for handles that contained "Heavenly Demon" and held the results up for her.
StrongestHeavenlyDemon · KoreaHeavenlyDemon · CosmicHeavenlyDemon
WeakHeavenlyDemon · CommutingHeavenlyDemon · JoblessHeavenlyDemon · UghHeavenlyDemon
"These wretches dare disgrace the Heavenly Demon's name! That 'UghHeavenlyDemon' most of all. This Venerable One shall see that cur punished."
I left her seething beside me and waited for replies.
Verify first, they said. Thinking it over, even I wouldn't deal with someone who had posted nothing but words.
All right. Here's the photo. I snapped a picture of the lowest-grade mana stone and pasted it into the post.
The moment the photo went up, the trade requests started coming in.
Hmm. Who should I pick? Fadegram was crawling with criminal organizations, and most of the people behind those messages were surely crooks looking to clean me out. Choose wrong, and getting robbed would be the gentle ending. I could lose my life.
This KindMerchant, though... something about them seemed all right. Everyone else had thrown a username together without a shred of effort, and this one had been made with care. Surely that meant I could trust them. Right—no criminal would bother building a name that earnestly.
I was just about to message KindMerchant.
"What do you think you are doing!"
"What? Look how much care they put into the name. It feels trustworthy."
"The Towers have not even existed for ten years. How could anyone have traded mana stones for a decade?"
Oh. Now that she said it, that was true. Some time had passed since the Towers appeared, but it had not been ten years.
"Hmm... Maybe I burned too many brain cells yesterday working out how to raise my Sync Rate. My head just isn't turning over today. Dandanso, you pick."
"What is there to agonize over? Send a message to every one of them. This Venerable One shall read the replies and choose without fail."
"Ooh..."
True to someone who had survived a barbaric age, the ancient was fluent in this sort of business. I sent a reply to all of them, waited a little, and the answers came back.
The terms were all the same: a face-to-face deal, at the official exchange rate of forty million won. And every one of them wanted the meeting somewhere of their own choosing. Trades that bypassed the official exchange were illegal, so the hunger for secrecy made sense. The places themselves, mostly, did not.
The XX abandoned factory, and the XX used-car complex. A map search put both of them out in deserted outskirts. I didn't even have a driver's license, so just getting there would be hard—and worse, there was nothing around either site. Kill someone out there, bury them in the nearest mountain, and nobody would ever know.
"The used-car complex and that abandoned factory will not do."
Dandanso was thinking the same thing.
Next, XX Harbor in Incheon. Getting there was difficult to begin with, and it was no different from the factory or the car lot. A search told me the harbor was old and no longer in use. Kill someone there, dump the body in the sea, and again, nobody would know.
"This place will not do either."
Last, Club XX. The location, at least, was Gangnam. It wasn't an enormous club, but a search did turn something up: a mid-sized place, open only on Fridays, Saturdays, and holidays. And there wasn't a single article tying it to drug trafficking or anything of the sort.
"This one will do."
Night had fallen, and the streets were dark. I pulled on a black cap and a mask and headed for the club. I meant to avoid using Dandanso's body outside the Tower as much as I could, so I moved in my own body, not hers.
"Do not be so tense. Is This Venerable One not with you?"
"Mm..."
I had never been to a club in my life. What was I supposed to do? I had seen them in dramas and movies, but I had never once set foot in one. Dark, loud, and packed with people—I hated all of it. And I was an extreme introvert. Just imagining the walk through the door was enough to set my heart hammering. Worse, meeting a stranger to make a deal was, for an internet-only Lü Bu like me, an enormous undertaking.
"What is the matter?"
I had made it to the club's vicinity and then refused to go any farther, and Dandanso asked why.
"Go, Dandanso-mon."
I shoved Dandanso-mon out in front and hid behind her.
Inside a club in Seoul's Gangnam, there was not a single customer. Dozens of hard-faced men had claimed the floor instead. They were members of the Gangnam branch of Black Moon, the syndicate that ruled Seoul's underworld.
"Boss. It's almost time."
"Yeah."
Seo Dongcheol, head of the Gangnam branch, spun a knife in his palm and grinned.
"The cameras?"
"Club cameras are off. The ones on this whole block'll be dead any minute."
"Dr. Hwang?"
"Standing by in the workshop."
"We finish it here and ship the body straight over, so tell him to have everything set for immediate work."
"Yes, Boss."
Seo Dongcheol was in a fine mood. Before long, more than a billion won was going to come rolling in of its own accord.
A lowest-grade mana stone worth all of forty million won. He had never cared about that. The target was the one coming to sell it—some brat calling themself BabyHeavenlyDemonChan. The username alone stank of otaku, the sort of person who didn't know how the world worked. Trying to sell a single lowest-grade stone meant they were almost certainly a greenhorn who had only just awakened. They probably didn't even know a hunter's body sold for a fortune.
A hunter's corpse started at a billion won. Younger, or in good condition, and you could get even more.
Seo Dongcheol looked over his men with a greasy little smile. One of them was white-knuckling his weapon, nerves written all over his face.
"You nervous?"
"I... what if the guy turns out to be a high-rank hunter..."
The newest recruit, brought in not long ago, hemmed and hawed.
"You little shit. Relax. He's level two or three at most. We've got five B-Rank Hunters in here at level eighteen and nineteen. With that kind of force, even a low-level A-Rank Hunter is nothing. And if the rank's high, all the better for us. Hunter corpses sell for more the higher the grade."
"Y-yes, sir."
If the brat were S-rank, that would be a different story. As if that were going to happen. Korea had all of two S-ranks. Three, if you were counting carefully. Kang Mujin and Kang Chaemin were not about to hawk a lowest-grade mana stone over Fadegram, which left one hunter.
Dandanso. Awakened not long ago, and already rated Korea's current number one. Someone like that, peddling lowest-grade stones on Fadegram? Not a chance. She was probably tucked inside the Bureau, drowning in preferential treatment.
"Boss. They're coming."
"Everyone, get ready."