7. Loan Shark Yoo Dong-cheol (1)

"It's been a while."

"It really has."

"The guards passed the news along, but it seems you've adjusted even better than I expected? You look well. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I suppose elite really is elite, wherever you plant it."

"You're looking well yourself, sir. I don't know the first thing about cars, but that one you picked me up in—anyone could tell it wasn't cheap."

My public defender. No—perhaps, by now, the man who chuckled at that was no longer merely a public defender.

"If it looks that way, good. That's exactly what I bought it for—to look as expensive and impressive as possible. Turns out us self-employed types need a bit of that."

"Like a cat puffing up its fur?"

"Sure. Like a puffer fish bloating itself up."

I broke into a grin.

"Look at that face. Yes—smile like that and you ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠finally seem like a kid again."

"I'm not a kid anymore. I'm twenty-one."

"Twenty-one is still very much a kid, trust me. Anyway, it's cold. I've got the heater on, so let's get in the car. We've got more than a little to catch up on as it is."

The interior was every bit as handsome as the exterior.

"So you really did make it, huh?"

"Well, it's all thanks to you. That case had the entire nation glued to its screens."

"And that's why you came to see me every quarter?"

"And that's why you wouldn't see me to the very end? Afraid I'd start pushing for a retrial?"

"I read your letters. That a retrial wouldn't meet the requirements anyway, and that even if it went through, there'd be little point. That you just wanted to see my face and talk. But... it was just hard for me. I didn't want to see anyone while I was in there."

"And now? Feeling a little less raw these days?"

"Hard to say."

I turned my gaze to the window. The face reflected in the glass looked faintly like a stranger's.

"So—do you have somewhere to go?"

"Home, I suppose. Ah—no, wait. I don't have a home anymore, do I."

"What do you mean, no home? There's the place you used to live, isn't there?"

"That was a jeonse rental—a lump-sum deposit lease. Come to think of it, what happened to my things? If someone renting a place gets sent to prison, doesn't the state look after their belongings or something?"

"Ah, right—if the landlord deposits it with the court, the court ships everything off to a private storage container. You can come collect it once you pay the storage fees."

"Are those fees expensive?"

"Four years of them pile up to plenty. Nearly ten million won, I'd say?"

"Ten million won? That's steep."

The sum was larger than I'd expected, and a flicker of shock must have shown in my voice, because he flashed a grin.

"But then, who am I? The capable lawyer with a regular slot on KBC broadcasts, that's who. I've already settled everything, legally and shrewdly. You've got nothing to worry about."

"What do you mean?"

"After you were taken into custody, the landlord threw an absolute fit about you clearing your things out. So the moment your parents' life insurance payout, along with the civil settlement I scrambled to wring from those trucking-company insurance bastards—who dug in their heels with one excuse after another, claiming drunk driving—landed in the account under your name, I sat down with the landlord and cut a deal."

The car slid smoothly through the Gimcheon tollgate.

This lawyer's voice—passionate from the very first time we met—now carried a seasoned confidence that four years had ground into it.

"As it happened, the market had just cooled off right after the real estate boom peaked, so prices had settled by then. Think it through: a cool ten million won in cash for four years of storage—and paying it wouldn't even keep your things safe. The damp would eat through everything until none of it was usable. And rather than burn money on broker fees hunting for a new place down the road, I persuaded the court that registering the deed outright in your name was far better—both for preserving your assets, and for the emotional wellbeing of the child. It wasn't easy, but the judge came around in the end."

"Four years untouched means some dust, sure. But it's all still there—from the bed you slept in to every last one of your family's belongings. Oh, right. I didn't know your old passcode, so I changed it. Your birthday—0704. Punch that in and you're home."

It felt like the first kindness anyone had shown me since the accident that day.

Something surged up from somewhere deep in my chest.

What was I supposed to call this feeling?

"What? Looks like somebody's rather moved."

"...Thank you."

"Oh, knock it off. Men don't need to get all sappy about gratitude—if you're that thankful, just live well from here on. Sit the high school equivalency exam. Go to college. You're sharp, Ba-reum; you'll do fine. And if anything ever gets difficult, call your hyung."

"Your hyung?"

"What, does it feel like I'm getting too familiar?"

"No, it's just... I don't actually know how old you are..."

"Hey!! Thirty-five and in the full flower of my youth, and you give me the 'and how old might you be' treatment!!"

"Ah..."

Little by little, streets I knew began unfolding before my eyes.

The snack shop where I'd buy tteokbokki—spicy rice cakes—after cram school. The bathhouse Dad took me to on weekends, and the seolleongtang place where we'd eat afterward, still flushed from the heat of the water. The shop where Mom brought home an ice cream cake on my birthday. The alley where my little sibling fell off a scooter and cracked their chin open.

"Here, take this."

He held out a sheet of paper he'd drawn from his breast pocket.

It was far too flashy to pass for a lawyer's business card—flashy to the point of being childish. It looked less like a professional's card and more like the kind a nightclub promoter wedges under the wipers of parked cars.

"I did tell you earlier to call me if anything gets difficult. For the record, 'Hyung, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I'm bored,' 'Hyung, I could really use a drink tonight,' 'Hyung, introduce me to a girl,' 'Hyung, question three on the mock exam was way too hard'—all of that counts. Got it?"

"Yes. Thank you, Dong-yeop-hyung."

Cleaning the house took a full day.

That was only possible because the status window had given me stamina that barely knew exhaustion; with my old body, it would have taken three days and nights at the very least.

Traces of my family remained everywhere in the house.

Fortunately, no tears came. I had come too far to go sniveling over something like this now.

A tally of results, earned over four years of putting down the trash of Gimcheon Prison.

When Durability, the second stat I'd brought to its ceiling, hit the limit, the reward had been a roulette ticket—same as it had been for Strength, the first time. But when the last stat, Stamina, reached its cap, things went a little differently.

The ceiling of 50 chained onto my body. The key to shattering it had finally come into view.

Let me examine the foundation of my skill.

The Scales of Karma.

First—what exactly is karma?

It is a principle of cause and effect: every act of thinking, speaking, and doing circles back in time as a corresponding fate or price.

When someone commits an evil deed, the matching sin accumulates; when I bring them to judgment, I forcibly execute the retribution they owe. And as the executor, I receive a settlement of Karma equal to that amount. That, as I understood it, was the formula of the Scales of Karma.

But if that were true, then surely the reverse could exist as well.

If punishing evil accrued Karma, then the moment I rescued someone who had done good and delivered the reward they were owed—shouldn't something be granted to me, standing on the opposite side of the scale?

That was my theory for how to obtain the Limit Breakthrough Rune—deduced from the words "proof that this world can become better."

Fine. Good.

Overwhelming power. If that was what it took to gain a transcendent ability—the kind that could laugh off the state's dragnet the way those figures in superhero movies did—then I would gladly play along with this system's game.

I powered on the computer that had been fairly new before I went to prison and was now, unmistakably, a relic. With a raucous whine of fans, the monitor lit up.

—The bleach murder of a high school girl in the restroom of a Bupyeong commercial building.

The moment I entered the search, a staggering number of articles came pouring out.

He had strangled the girl to death and raped her. To destroy the evidence, he had doused her body in bleach, dumped it in the restroom of the commercial building by Bupyeong Station, and fled. A savage crime that set the entire country alight.

The reason I was searching for it was simple: the man arrested and imprisoned for this crime was not the real killer.

And beyond that—the man now locked up in Gimcheon Prison as the true culprit was, of everyone I had laid eyes on in Gimcheon, the one with the highest "probability" of actually being a decent human being.

Prisoner number 447. Kim Jin-hwan.

In that cesspit of a prison, he had belonged to a strange breed indeed.

The first time I offered a handshake, he recoiled sharply and slapped my hand away, his eyes unmistakably charged with menace. Judged by appearances alone—the filthy tattoos crammed across his body—he looked, by every measure, a confirmed lowlife thug.

And yet, astonishingly, Resonance of Sin had never triggered on him.

Going by several years of experience, Resonance of Sin required a minimum of 500—that is, it activated only on those who had piled up sins at least on the scale of taking a human life.

That was proof Kim Jin-hwan was not the true culprit behind that grotesque murder.

Above all, prison is the bottom of the bottom. And it is only when a person has hit that bottom that their raw, unpolished nature is laid bare.

He never stole anyone's commissary money, never preyed on the weaker inmates by cutting ahead of them in line or taking their food. Honestly, that alone would have placed him in the top 0.1 percent of decent human beings in Gimcheon Prison.

He simply sat slumped in a corner, clutching a Bible, staring blankly at nothing, alone.

"Hey, psycho killer. What do you even do, cooped up in that corner every single day?"

Jin-hwan glanced sidelong at me and let out a hollow, self-mocking laugh.

"Pray. And I'm not a murderer."

"Aw, and I'm sure the Big Man upstairs just loves taking requests from a murdering ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠piece of trash like you."

"I'm not a murderer, you son of a bitch..."

"Sure, let's say that's true. Then what do you pray so hard for, huh? Asking them to catch the real killer?"

He shook his head.

"No. For the girl who died. Minju. She was my age. I asked for her to get to go somewhere good."

"Clearing my name is something the human realm can settle. But praying for a dead girl to reach a good place—that's the realm of God."

Was that just image management on his part?

Or was it sincere?

I couldn't tell.

"Settled in the human realm, my ass. What settlement? The investigation closed ages ago. What, you've got some cop buddy still grinding away at it?"

"Cop? My ass. There's a guy named Yoo Dong-cheol—he runs quick-cash loans out by Bupyeong Station these days. He's not the type to just sit still. One way or another, he'll get this frame-up off me."

"Well, look at that. What a gem of a friend you've got."

Of course, people don't change that easily. I still didn't believe that a thug like Kim Jin-hwan was some saint deserving of salvation. But I couldn't deny that, in my present circumstances, he was the most viable lead I had.

The articles I combed through didn't diverge much from what Kim Jin-hwan himself had told me back in prison. If anything, the things he'd told me were more useful.

Which meant that right now, the thread he'd left me was this: a man named Yoo Dong-cheol, operating around Bupyeong Station.

"Looks like I'm paying him a visit after all."

Darkness settled over the space where the monitor's glow had been.

It was time to pack.

— End of "Loan Shark Yoo Dong-cheol (1)" —