The Cow and the Man
The old white Bongo truck, familiar as an old friend.
Oh Hyeon-seong climbed into its rattling frame, and the vehicle groaned and sputtered along — it was so old it couldn't manage much speed even if it tried.
The mileage on the dashboard showed a frankly absurd number.
"You never thought about replacing it? This is past the point where maintenance can save it."
"Why would I replace a car that runs just fine?"
"Runs just fine? It barely runs at all."
A legendary ride, in the worst possible sense.
Thankfully, Hyeon-seong had a fairly strong stomach for motion sickness.
As long as it wasn't seasickness, he could handle anything.
He, Oh Hyeon-seong, prided himself on a will that would bend to no trial — but seasickness, at least, was one enemy he simply couldn't beat.
"At this point, you should replace it for safety reasons if nothing else. I could look for a decent used one for you, if you'd like..."
"It's not about the money, you rascal. How could I just toss aside the truck I've driven all these years?"
Heo Deok-soo clicked his tongue.
Honestly, Hyeon-seong couldn't understand it.
To him, a car had always been nothing more than a means of getting around.
But he knew better than to waste time forcing his way of thinking on someone with a different heart entirely.
"Fine, do what you like with the truck. So what's this sudden errand about?"
Hyeon-seong asked him.
Something about Heo Deok-soo had seemed off from the usual, and when Hyeon-seong had pressed him on it, the man had eventually let slip that he wanted company on a trip somewhere. Nothing was pressing at the moment, so Hyeon-seong had hopped into the truck without much thought — but he did need to know what was going on.
"Figured I'd swing by the village next door for a bit."
"Why the neighboring village all of a sudden?"
"An old friend of mine lives out there. Haven't been able to reach him lately."
"Then why bring a gun to go see a friend?"
"Ah... well, that's..."
At Hyeon-seong's question, Heo Deok-soo hesitated.
Jostled along the half-paved road, he finally forced the words out with difficulty.
"That neighboring village I mentioned... it's Sunyang-ri."
"Sunyang-ri, you say..."
Hyeon-seong's expression turned strange at the name.
Even as the drift toward the cities grew steadily worse, plenty of farming villages still remained across Korea.
Right along the borders, monster nests overflowed and the land was a constant battlefield — but within the country proper, gate management was enforced with a thoroughness no other nation in the world could match.
That didn't mean, however, that every farming village enjoyed circumstances as favorable as Changyeong-ri's.
"Isn't that village already gone?"
Hyeon-seong knew the name too.
A neighboring village, located not far from here at all.
But it was a name that no longer existed.
"That's right. We didn't exactly trade much, but we were neighbors. Then that damn takgi wrecked the whole place."
Heo Deok-soo said it with a short sigh.
The village hadn't been swallowed by a gate directly — it had simply sat within the indirect sphere of an S-Rank gate, and that alone had left it ruined.
It was a rare case by any standard, but certain gates were known to spew out an exceptionally virulent strain of takgi.
It hadn't been severe enough to be designated a Restricted Area outright, but prolonged exposure would have posed a genuine danger to human health.
The entire region, village included, was declared a Relocation Advisory Area.
Unlike a Restricted Area, of course, there was no legal compulsion behind it, and the residents were hardly eager to abandon the village where they'd been born and raised.
But the takgi was the real problem.
Farming the same land in the same way as always, the crops were utterly ruined by the thick miasma in the soil.
Even without it, factory-grown produce had already crowded naturally grown crops out of the market — and with the takgi problem layered on top, making a living off the land became flatly impossible.
And so the people left, little by little, until the village stood abandoned.
"And your friend still lives there?"
"He does. Kim Young-do. Everyone else left, but he held out to the very end."
"Held out? Why?"
"His stubbornness, what else. Besides, he couldn't leave — and there was nowhere that would take him in."
Hyeon-seong stared at him, still not following.
Seeing that look, Heo Deok-soo went on.
"That man raises cattle."
Eeeeak.
The rattling truck shuddered to a stop.
Hyeon-seong and Heo Deok-soo climbed out in the neighboring village and stood for a moment, blankly taking in their surroundings.
A deserted village, without a single trace of human presence.
The streets, abandoned for what looked like a long while, were desolate beyond description.
"What do you think? Creepy, huh?"
"Your friend does remarkably well living in a place like this."
"I know, right? At night not a single light comes on in the whole village — just his house, glowing all alone off a generator. I didn't ask you to come along for nothing. You're the most trustworthy person in our village, after all."
Heo Deok-soo said, clapping Hyeon-seong on the shoulder.
Had any other villager offered to tag along, Hyeon-seong would have refused.
But with Oh Hyeon-seong, someone he'd run into by chance, it was Heo Deok-soo who had made the request first.
Hyeon-seong was no awakened hunter, but he'd worked for the Management Bureau in Seoul, and to country folk that made him tremendously reliable.
There was the way he'd handled the erosion incident in Changyeong-ri, after all.
When the word erosion had sent everyone into a panic, a few words from him had been enough to calm half the village.
"Well... then finding your friend solves everything, doesn't it?"
"It does."
Heo Deok-soo nodded at Hyeon-seong's words.
But something uneasy still lingered on his face.
"He's gone quiet now and then before, sure. But this is the first time he hasn't answered my texts in days."
"Couldn't he just be busy with something?"
"I'd like to think so, but at our age, dropping dead without warning wouldn't surprise anyone. And his health was never good to begin with."
Clack.
Heo Deok-soo pulled the hunting rifle out of the truck, loaded it, and gripped it firmly in both hands.
"Stay close to me. There shouldn't be any monsters here, but aggressive wild animals are another story."
The thicker the takgi, the more aggressive animals became.
In regions like this, even the gentlest creature could turn into a beast of prey.
That was exactly why Heo Deok-soo had brought a firearm.
Hyeon-seong nodded, and the two set off.
They climbed over a fallen utility pole blocking the road and cut across the village, heading toward Kim Young-do's house.
Everywhere they looked along the way, nothing but empty buildings.
"Ahem! Ahem!"
"Are you alright, ahjussi?"
"Just a cough. The air's gotten thicker than last time."
Heo Deok-soo's face looked a little drawn.
That cough was no accident.
Ordinary people were far more vulnerable to takgi exposure than awakened ones.
Of course, the serious cases — psychosis and the whole catalog of miasma-related aftereffects — broke out almost entirely among hunters, but only because hunters were exposed to so much more of it.
They possessed greater resistance to takgi than ordinary people, to be sure, which was precisely what let them march into gates, slaughter monsters, and be deployed to related sites over and over — until the damage finally compounded beyond what even that tolerance could absorb.
Aside from a handful of places in Changyeong-ri, there was nowhere on Earth today where takgi couldn't be detected at all.
The background exposure of daily life was something ordinary people could resist well enough.
But once levels approached Restricted Area territory, the consequences for civilians could be fatal — which was exactly why the law existed to keep them from ever setting foot inside.
And yet this place... is it really just a Relocation Advisory Area?
Hyeon-seong's brow creased slightly as he took in the miasma in the air.
By his own standards it wasn't a remarkable concentration — but by an ordinary person's standards, it was far from trivial.
Normally, area-wide takgi contamination thinned out gradually over time.
But there were cases where, without any outside interference, the concentration kept worsening instead, climbing until it peaked.
Whether that took months or years, only after hitting that ceiling did the miasma finally begin to fade.
This place was almost certainly one of those cases.
At this level of takgi, the village should have been designated a Restricted Area long ago.
"Ahem! Damn it all. Whatever hardship this turns out to be, it's all his fault. I'm going to give him one hell of a lecture."
"I'm starting to think a lecture won't be enough."
Hyeon-seong said.
"Once we find your friend, we're carrying him out of here on the spot."
"Y-yeah? You think so? The miasma's gotten worse since I last saw him. But will he actually leave? The man never listens to a word I say — swears he'll die before he goes."
"...If he doesn't want to actually die, he goes. That's final."
Hyeon-seong said, leaving no room for argument.
This wasn't a difference of opinion, nor a matter of personal choice.
An ordinary person who tried to scratch out a living here would die. Without question.
No exceptions, ever.
And yet somehow... I've got a bad feeling about this.
It seemed they'd both arrived at the same unease, because the two men picked up their pace.
And with every step, what they saw weighed on them.
Looking out over the fallen village did nothing for the heart.
Honestly speaking, Hyeon-seong had once seen ruins like these as routinely as he ate meals, and they hadn't stirred much in him at all.
In China especially, there had been a time when it wasn't villages vanishing but an entire city, week after week.
But knowing that this place had once lived the same quiet everyday life as Changyeong-ri stirred something different in him now.
Which was, in its own way, proof of just how deeply life in Changyeong-ri had worked its way into him.
"There it is."
Nothing remained inside.
No Kim Young-do, no cattle carcasses, not so much as a single bloodstain.
Running a livestock operation in this day and age — the man had to be out of his mind.
Hyeon-seong suddenly recalled what Heo Deok-soo had told him on the drive in.
His friend Kim Young-do had been a dairy farmer.
In an era when takgi had sharpened livestock into something violent and unpredictable, and everyone else had given up on raising animals entirely — he simply could not bring himself to abandon his barn.
"Goddamn it! I told him, over and over — dump every one of those damned animals and get out — and did he listen?!"
Heo Deok-soo hefted the rifle with a clenched fist, looking ready to kill the first thing that moved.
Hyeon-seong pressed down steadily on his hand and lowered the muzzle.
"Easy, now. Nothing's actually come out yet."
It was too early to jump to conclusions.
They only needed to follow the trail.
Hyeon-seong quietly summoned Merz beneath the ground, and while the earth spirit worked in secret, he read the traces pressed into the surrounding soil, tracing the path Kim Young-do had taken.
The man's footsteps ran in an unbroken line, and Hyeon-seong's head turned slowly toward where they led.
...This could be a problem.
The direction of Kim Young-do's trail pointed toward the very spot where the S-Rank gate had once torn open — the gate that had ruined the village through its indirect miasma alone.