White Blood (1)
The launch event wrapped up, and at four that afternoon Netflix released episodes one through three of White Blood.
The twelve-episode series would drop three episodes a week over four weeks.
Yeon-woo's fans had been waiting since the night before, hearts hammering with anticipation. Most everyone else clicked into the newly released Korean fantasy drama with a mix of hope and dread.
The familiar Netflix logo bloomed across their screens, and the series began.
The opening shot was a man sprinting across a dreamlike violet desert. A shimmering distortion tracked him and fired; he twisted aside with feline grace.
BOOM—
Whatever had been aimed at him punched into a dune instead, blasting sand skyward in every direction. Ahead of him, an ancient castle shimmered into existence like a mirage. The man in black bolted for its gates.
The scene cut, and there it was—the one-take sequence Yeon-woo had spent an entire day shooting for a single minute of runtime.
"Whoa."
"Holy crap. The action's insane."
"Dude, it's the opening of episode one. Of course they poured their souls into this part. It's fantasy—the story's gonna go off the rails later."
College students clustered in their department lounge, streaming White Blood through a projector hooked up to Netflix, all nodded along with the last speaker.
"Fair. How many times have we fallen for Korean fantasy? Last time I watched Baldur and walked away with emotional damage. The plot was garbage."
On the projected screen, Yeon-woo took a full barrage from the androids and plummeted from the castle like a kite with a snapped string. A swallowing sound, a tear in space-time—and Yeon-woo, no, Jeong Do-jin, fell through.
Black screen. A stretch of silence. Then a waterlogged rush of sound that sharpened into the murmur of a courtroom.
What followed was the trial scene. When Yeon-woo, fully transformed into Jeong Do-jin, strode out with chains clanking and the bearing of a predator, the sheer charisma punched straight through the screen and left them stunned.
Then Do-jin and Ella tore through a medieval village on a hoverbike, weaving through android fire, and it felt like watching a Hollywood car chase.
"…Okay. This is actually pretty good?"
"Right? Feels like an American movie."
The unexpectedly polished CG and the performances began to pry open minds that had long since locked the fantasy genre out. Before they knew it, the students in the lounge were completely absorbed in the screen.
"Narrator. So if we just get past the thigh, there's a direct route straight to the heart?"
"—Cardiac, yes."
"Cardiac means heart. Got it."
Everything in this world was named that way. The heart was Cardiac. The thigh was Femoral. The shinbone was Fibula. Thanks to place names lifted straight from medical terminology, Jeong Do-jin—a doctor by profession—always knew roughly where he was.
Ella, riding behind him, tilted her head at Do-jin talking to the Narrator.
"Mister, who are you talking to?"
"Why am I a mister?"
"If it's the road to Cardiac, I know it."
"What? You know it?"
The fastest path from the thigh to the heart. The Femoral Vein—the great femoral vein itself.
Rumble—
A tremendous roar shook the ground hard enough to rattle their bones.
"Eek! The Great Tremor's starting!"
The Great Tremor was a week-long seismic event in this world.
"So. Another year's already gone by."
"A year? What do you mean?"
The cause of the Great Tremor was, in truth, his little brother's heartbeat. Do-jin had never calculated it precisely, but one pulse of the heart outside roughly equaled a year inside the body—so he had simply come to think of each tremor as another year passed.
Only a few seconds would have ticked by in the outer world. By the flow of time Do-jin perceived, he had already been trapped inside this body for six years.
"Mister, what's a year?"
"It's a thing. Anyway—you said you know the way to Cardiac?"
"Yes! When I do oxygen deliveries, the adults heading up toward Cardiac always go that way. I even had to deliver all the way to the entrance once because it was urgent!"
Do-jin nodded.
"Perfect. That's where I need to go."
"Then let's go together! I really, really want to get out of this awful village."
Do-jin scratched his cheek, looking troubled. They had already left the village quite a ways behind—hadn't she already gotten out?
"Hmm…"
"Please?"
Ella clung to his waist from behind the bike and shook him. In the six years since he had entered this body, she was the first cell who hadn't been afraid of him—who had come to him first. Red blood cells, especially, were so skittish that even a glance made them flinch. That was normal.
"…Fine. But if you get in the way on the road, I'm dumping you on the spot."
"Yes!"
They rode the hoverbike a long way along the route Ella pointed out.
"Here!"
Hearing her voice and the wriggling finger pointing from behind him, Do-jin brought the bike to a stop.
"Get off."
"Yes, sir!"
Once Ella dismounted, Do-jin activated the bike's built-in miniaturization function. He pointed toward a forest path.
"This way?"
"Yes! Go through that cave up ahead and you'll hit the Femoral Vein."
Watching her nod with fierce energy, Do-jin took the lead.
"How do you know a path like this?"
"It's a shortcut. Our village chief is lazy—he sometimes forgets oxygen delivery orders and tells us late."
"So everyone in the village who does oxygen deliveries knows this route?"
At that, Ella puffed out her chest a little, hands clasped proudly behind her back.
"I'm the only one who does oxygen deliveries."
"Huh?"
Do-jin didn't know the full ecology of a red blood cell village, but oxygen was heavier than it looked. It resembled a clear glass marble, yet in the hand it weighed like a solid iron ball.
"How much do you carry on a delivery?"
"Mmm. Two basket backpacks, filled all the way up."
In real-world terms, that was a load five grown men would struggle to lift. Definitely not something a little girl should be able to carry.
"Are all red blood cells as strong as you?"
"No! I'm unusually strong. That's why the chief said I get the special privilege of doing oxygen deliveries."
Why this girl was stronger than the others, he had no idea—but it was classic grunt work dressed up as a privilege.
"So what do you get for oxygen deliveries that the others don't? Money, or something?"
"Money? What's that? When I do oxygen deliveries, I get to leave the village! I get to see trees and grass like this."
Do-jin thought it over, then nodded. He was starting to understand what she was.
Strong. Bright. Always smiling.
"Hmm. You're an idiot, aren't you?"
"I am not!"
"A sucker, then?"
"What's that supposed to mean! Oh—while I was mining oxygen I found this neat thing. Pretty, right?"
Ella, already beaming again, pointed to a blue gem brooch hanging with a strip of purple cloth against the red cloak she wore.
"Not really."
"Why not! It sparkles. It's pretty."
"It's not pretty."
Bantering back and forth like that, they walked until the end of the cave came into view. The Narrator still checked in now and then, but talking to an actual person for the first time in six years since entering this world was easing a mental fatigue he hadn't fully registered. Ella wasn't a person, of course—she was a cell. The gruffness in his voice was just the awkwardness of conversation after so long.
Do-jin stopped at the cave mouth.
"Ow!"
Ella, following close behind, planted her forehead squarely into his back and made a face.
"You can't just stop like that."
She grumbled—but Do-jin didn't answer. He was staring, overwhelmed by what lay ahead.
"Hehe. Super pretty, right? The Femoral Vein."
The Femoral Vein. Translated, the great femoral vein—the fastest route from the thigh to the heart. A passage out of this place and up into another dimension. An orbital elevator.
"What kind of vein looks like this…"
A colossal pillar of light soared so high its end was beyond reckoning. The vast column pulsed with regular surges of energy, glowing the violet of violets as it punched through the sky. No—it was tearing the sky open and surging into a higher dimension still.
"…Looks just like a quasar I saw online."
He had once seen an image of energy swallowed by a supermassive black hole, flung outward as a jet by the accretion disk's ferocious magnetic fields and explosive force. What stood before him was exactly that.
"Mister, you always say words I've never heard. Quasar?"
"So this is why they call the human body a microcosm."
"There it is again. Another word I don't know."
Do-jin ignored Ella bouncing in front of him, waving her hands and blocking his view, and walked forward.
"Wait for me!"
The Leukocyte Army was guarding the orbital elevator's boarding gate, so a frontal approach was impossible. He could have dealt with them, but that risked shutting the elevator down entirely—so Do-jin needed to board in secret.
"Mister, you have to make the jump. You really have to!"
Ella wanted adventure beyond the village, but she was too scared to leave alone; she clung to Do-jin and made him promise over and over. He sent her ahead to board first, then waited on the cliff nearest the elevator, timing his leap.
"There she is."
Far off, he spotted Ella mixed in with the other red blood cells, clearing inspection and stepping aboard. Her twin braids bounced with every step, making her easy to pick out from the rest.
"This should be about right. Narrator—run the numbers."
"—I'll analyze your sprint speed against the Femoral Vein's motion and tell you the exact moment to go."
Do-jin nodded and backed up, giving himself room for the run-up.
Before long, the Narrator's voice rang in his ear.
"—Now."
"Hup!"
Do-jin drove off the base of a tree behind him with explosive force and shot forward like a bullet. The broad white cylindrical elevator looked almost like a cream cake; the instant he launched, its doors sealed and the drive engaged.
Wuum—
Tak—
The elevator rose on magnetic levitation just as Do-jin arced off the cliff in a perfect parabola—and the two met at a single point.
Tak—
His black-clad form landed cleanly on the roof of the orbital elevator, already thirty meters into the air.
"—Hang on tight. The pressure's going to be enormous."
"Pressure? What pressure?"
The moment the Narrator spoke, the Femoral Vein's light pillar blazed violet and began driving the elevator inside it upward with tremendous force.
"Ugh!"
He had no idea what the per-second velocity was, but he was certain it outpaced any rocket humanity had ever launched. Do-jin clenched his teeth and endured the crushing pressure bearing down on him.
They climbed for a long time. The planet he and Ella had left shrank to a pinprick, and the violet pillar of the Femoral Vein—its end still unknowable—drove on past the edge of space itself.
Time stretched on and on.
How much farther?
The pressure was so fierce he couldn't even open his mouth. When he asked the question in his mind, the Narrator answered.
"—About halfway, I think."
And then—
The instant the Narrator's voice reached him, the orbital elevator began to shake with terrifying violence.