139. Eye of the Storm
"...A pig this time?"
Oh Hyeon-seong stared blankly down at his feet.
Right in front of his front gate lay a large pig, dead and abandoned, just sitting there. Looking closer, he could see the marks of something having bitten and torn at the back of its neck.
There was no question of who was responsible.
First a rabbit, then a deer, and now a pig. At this rate, he half expected the creature to drag home a cow one of these days.
Hauling the carcass up with ease, Oh Hyeon-seong carried it off to a suitable spot and butchered it, and with a few practiced strokes of the knife, it became fresh meat.
And that evening, he pulled the grill out of the shed.
Sizzle!
Accompanied by a mouthwatering sound, the meat browned to a beautiful golden crisp. At first he'd wondered whether it was safe to eat meat dragged home by a mutant, but anything that passed through Alisa's hands came out purified — there was nothing he couldn't eat.
A perfectly cooked slab of pork belly. Oh Hyeon-seong lifted a piece with his tongs and sent it straight into his mouth.
"Mm...!"
It was the kind of flavor that made his head nod on its own. He'd already tasted the game the creature brought before, so his expectations were high — and even so, this exceeded them.
There's no doubt the quality is better than anything I've had so far. How can something taste this good?
Borrowing the power of Alisa, the spirit of light, he could drive the miasma out of meat, and thanks to that he'd been able to enjoy delicious game from his hunts.
But even Alisa's ability had its limits. Just as purifying miasma from his harvested crops still couldn't compare to produce raised in an environment free of miasma from the start, meat was no different.
To be fair, meat that had gone through Alisa's touch was beyond anything the clumsy synthetic products of today could hope to rival. And yet compared to the real meat of the past, it still fell somewhat short.
At first he'd wondered if it had been perfectly recreated, but it turned out to be no more than a convincing imitation. Considering that the crops from his fields didn't merely match the produce of the old, miasma-free era — they were actually better — the gap between his ingredients and the old ones was considerable. That was precisely why the difference stood out so much more now than before.
And yet the game this mutant had been bringing him came remarkably close to the real meat of the past. He'd set up two kinds side by side in advance just in case, grilling a pig he'd caught himself on the back mountain next to the one the creature had delivered — and the contrast was even more dramatic than he'd imagined.
"Where on earth does it find this stuff..."
It would have hunted the same game in the wild either way, so where did such a difference even come from? With that question lingering, Oh Hyeon-seong chewed the meat in his mouth.
..."
Meanwhile, beside him, Alisa — the spirit of light — was staring at him with shining eyes, swallowing audibly and gazing up at him so patiently that he felt a pang of guilt and reached for his chopsticks.
"Ah, sorry. Got lost in thought there."
Wham!
Alisa tucked into a piece of meat with gusto, eyes crinkling in satisfaction as she chewed.
"Good? Is it tasty?"
"Mm-hm!"
Her innocent smile drew a laugh out of him. Unlike the other spirits, Alisa was a newcomer, contracted only after he'd come to Changyeong-ri — but she had clearly grown far closer to him than when they'd first met. Where she'd once kept him warily at arm's length, now she neither avoided his gaze nor trailed off at the ends of her sentences.
"Want another one?"
"Yes, please."
She opened her mouth wide like a baby bird, and Oh Hyeon-seong simply pressed a whole plate of meat into her hands.
"Thank you."
High spirits, with their lofty pride, could speak human language but generally refused to sully their tongues with the words of another species. Alisa, however, seemed to have no great reluctance about it. Blea, who blurted out human speech without a shred of hesitation thanks to her impatience, was the unusual case — yet even Alisa, quiet and reticent as she was, used it. He'd certainly gotten the feeling that she was cut from a different cloth than any spirit he'd known before.
Whine!
"Yes, yes. You'll get yours too."
And so he shared a delicious meal with his spirits.
Oh Hyeon-seong had decided to meet the mutant face to face.
It wasn't out of any worry that the creature might cause trouble. An ordinary mutant with a monster's nature would never dream of periodically dragging prey to someone's door — and it had even protected a human under attack from other mutants besides.
Frankly, part of him had considered simply observing the creature a while longer.
But there was one thing he couldn't just sit back and watch: he wanted to know where the beasts it kept snatching up were coming from. And just how such a difference in flavor had come to exist in the first place.
And so he found himself standing in the middle of the forest. He'd already worked out the rough time of day the creature appeared, and now he was waiting in advance along one of the trails on the back mountain it crossed.
"So... what exactly are you two doing here?"
Oh Hyeon-seong glanced to the side. There sat Yoon Seol-ha and Choi Jeong-il, a picnic mat spread out, enjoying what could only be described as tea time.
"I was curious. A mutant that doesn't attack people? How could I not be."
Chunk.
Choi Jeong-il nodded as well, in silent agreement. In nearly twenty years, no such case had ever been reported anywhere. This went well beyond a mere curiosity — it was news that could turn the academic world on its head.
"Come on, Senior, come sit with us."
Yoon Seol-ha said, slapping the mat invitingly. Shaking his head, Oh Hyeon-seong ended up taking a seat anyway.
"Well... I suppose there's no harm in it."
Somehow the three of them had turned a stakeout into an outing, though in practice little changed. If anything, the upside was that with the three of them trading stories, time flew by.
He thought to himself that if he'd been alone waiting out the creature's late arrival, it would have been rather tedious. But it did, eventually, show up.
"Senior, over there—"
"Yeah. Sounds like it's finally here."
Their heads turned at once toward the approaching presence. And a moment later, with a rustle of undergrowth, the mutant emerged from between the bushes.
The two parties came face to face.
Thump.
Startled, the creature dropped the chicken it had been carrying in its jaws. Faced with this unexpected encounter, it seemed somewhat wary — understandably so, since it wasn't just Oh Hyeon-seong standing there, but strangers it had never seen before.
Swish.
Oh Hyeon-seong rose alone from his seat. At the same time he waved a hand behind him, and Yoon Seol-ha and Choi Jeong-il nodded and stayed quietly where they were.
Grrr...
"Easy. I'm not going to do anything."
Approaching slowly, Oh Hyeon-seong took out a rice ball he'd prepared in advance. He knelt on one knee and held out his arm, and after flinching at first, the creature sniffed the air and edged cautiously closer. Then it began to eat the rice ball.
"...It's real. It's actually real."
Yoon Seol-ha and Choi Jeong-il watched the scene with wonder. A mutant that doesn't attack people. They'd heard the story in advance, but seeing it with their own eyes left them no choice but to be astonished.
Just counting the variants the people gathered here had killed in China alone would have taken dozens of cargo trucks to haul away. And yet never — not once — had they seen or even heard of a case like this.
They rose from their seats and came closer, but the creature, wholly absorbed in its rice ball, paid them no mind. However much of a beast an animal may be, it knows good taste from bad. Having eaten nothing but wild game — every bit as appallingly bland as factory-made synthetic meat — it was hardly surprising that a rice ball made from rice grown in his fields had driven it out of its mind.
"..."
Yoon Seol-ha cautiously reached out, gave the creature's head a couple of gentle strokes, then withdrew.
"Looking at it up close, it's kind of cute, isn't it? Maybe I should take it home."
"Don't you dare. You'd give the whole village a collective heart attack."
"Does it have a name, by any chance?"
"Probably... Bori."
At his words, the mutant's ears pricked up for an instant. It seemed that was indeed its name. Perhaps having gathered that they meant it no harm, the creature didn't leave even after finishing the rice ball — it simply settled down on the spot and didn't refuse their touch at all.
...Does it truly hold no hostility toward humans at all?
Going by appearance alone, no one would object to calling it a kind of monster. It wasn't some nightmarish monstrosity, to be sure, but its sheer size and markedly evolved physiology gave off a deeply unsettling wrongness. It was the kind of thing you recognized immediately as no ordinary creature of the Earth.
"I see no trace of aggression toward humans whatsoever. I would have expected at least some instability, even if nothing more. How is this even possible..."
Choi Jeong-il murmured, studying the creature intently. His astonishment was entirely justified. This wasn't some creature that had merely absorbed a little ambient miasma — it had undergone mutation this complete, this thorough, and yet remained this docile. There was no sign of it forcibly suppressing its impulses or aggression either. It simply looked at ease.
Scramble.
The mutant — Bori — got up from where it sat. With its catch delivered, it seemed ready to head back. Oh Hyeon-seong promptly readied himself to follow. That had been the whole point, after all.
Yoon Seol-ha rose to come along as well, but Choi Jeong-il stopped her.
"Two of us is plenty to follow it."
"Hm? Why all of a sudden?"
"It may head inside the Restricted Area. The projected miasma concentration there is extremely high — there's nothing to gain from unnecessary exposure."
Yoon Seol-ha's condition was far more stable than it had been in the past. The odds that a brief brush with miasma would shatter her mind again were slim. But the worry itself was more than understandable — she was hardly a disinterested third party who could wave it off.
"...Thanks for worrying about me."
A strange look crossed her face for a moment, but she soon broke into a wide grin. Then she thumped them both soundly on the back.
"All right then, you two boys go have fun! Leave this place to me."
With a dull ache blooming between their shoulder blades, the two men were herded on their way. Yoon Seol-ha beamed after their departing backs, waving her hand vigorously.
"She hasn't changed a bit."
As she vanished from view, Oh Hyeon-seong chuckled. It was a side of her that had been buried beneath the whole affair with her psychosis, but this had always been who she was.
In the grim, blood-soaked battlefields of the old days, even when every face around her was worn hollow, she'd smiled brightly and kept morale alive — and more than a few of the male squad members had fallen for her because of it. The punchline, of course, being that she was the one who made a relentless play for the stone-faced Choi Jeong-il of all people, and won.
"Back then, watching you squirm was half the fun. Seeing you not know what to do with yourself."
"Th... that's enough of that."
Choi Jeong-il's face went rigid at the dredged-up embarrassment. Feeling it now, he realized this man had become far more human compared to the old days, too.
"Who knows — maybe Seol-ha only reeled you in for the entertainment of watching you like that."
"..."
Choi Jeong-il chose not to answer and simply strode off ahead. His expression gave nothing away, but the back of his scarlet ears was plainly visible even from behind, and Oh Hyeon-seong laughed inwardly and let it go.
Meanwhile, ahead of them, Bori kept glancing back over its shoulder as it led the way. Having registered that they were following, the creature was guiding them along the path.
So it really is heading that way after all.
The direction they were moving in — it was toward the Restricted Area near Sunyang-ri. And not toward the village site on the periphery of its influence, but straight toward the very center of it. Toward that space, surely saturated with the foulest miasma in the region, Bori marched steadily on.
Well... fine. Let's see what's in there.