The Bloodless Scene
Oh Sae-ah's car came to a stop at the mouth of a back alley, right where the noisy lights of Jungang-dong's Rodeo Street finally died out. Police tape had already been strung across the entrance, and clusters of onlookers milled about with their phones held up, murmuring among themselves. Blue and red patrol-car strobes washed the dark alley in an ominous light.
The moment she stepped out of the car, a smell hit her — sharp, wet, slamming into her senses through the damp air. The nauseating stench of blood. The metallic reek of a corpse. Layered over it all was the faint iron tang of spent adrenaline.
Oh Sae-ah ducked under the police tape and stepped into the alley. Damp, cold air seeped through her thin leather jacket. The alley floor was dark and wet, something clinging to it — rainwater, or some other liquid. She couldn't tell. Under the faint glow of a streetlamp, overturned trash cans, graffiti scrawled across the walls, and cigarette butts scattered everywhere only deepened the grim atmosphere.
"Team Leader!"
Sergeant Park spotted her and came over. His face was drawn with fatigue, and something else — an unfamiliar tension that had settled into his features.
Oh Sae-ah nodded without a word and immediately turned her gaze toward the body. Deeper in the alley, beside the back door of a rundown commercial building, a man's shape lay sprawled on the ground. Under the pale blue wash of the emergency lights, his body had already gone cold and stiff.
A death scene. A suffocating silence always hung over places like this.
She approached a forensic tech crouched over the body and asked Sergeant Park,
"Do we have an ID on the victim?"
"Name's Kim Sung-jin, twenty-eight. Narcotics unit had him on their radar — an MZ-generation gangster."
Kim Sung-jin.
A name she'd never heard before.
"Narcotics?"
"Yes. They were watching him for dealing ecstasy and cheap meth, apparently."
A drug dealer. No shortage of people who'd want him dead.
Oh Sae-ah shifted her gaze to the body.
"Cause of death?"
"Multiple stab wounds from a sharp weapon, for now. Forensics says they turned him into a honeycomb. Feels like someone who barely knows how to use a knife just went at him in a rage."
An amateur? A grudge?
In Oh Sae-ah's mind, a single image surfaced — the one wound on Park Kyung-chul's body, as precise as a surgical incision. The complete opposite method. Perfectly, impossibly opposite. In that instant, a chill ran down her spine — the unnerving sense that two completely different cases were connecting in some strange, invisible way.
She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and spoke to the forensic tech.
"Hold on. Let me take a look at the wounds."
While everyone else was looking at the simple picture of a grudge match between drug dealers, she could feel the presence of an invisible director hiding behind that picture.
The victim's back was, quite literally, a honeycomb. The wounds were concentrated almost entirely behind him. Oh Sae-ah's eyes swept over the horrific injuries for a moment, then shifted to the asphalt around the body.
For wounds like these, there was almost no blood at the scene. That was strange. If someone had been butchered this badly, the alley floor should have been a sea of blood. And yet... in her mind, Park Kyung-chul's crime scene overlaid itself on this one. A single stab wound. And there, too — almost no blood. Opposite methods. Same result.
A bloodless murder scene.
"There's... too little blood..."
At Oh Sae-ah's murmur, the forensic tech examining the victim's back looked up, as if it were nothing unusual.
"None of the wounds hit an artery. Stabbing someone doesn't automatically mean blood gushes everywhere."
A plausible enough explanation. But Oh Sae-ah couldn't accept it. In her mind, Park Kyung-chul's body surfaced again — the opposite method, the same bloodless scene.
"So he didn't die from blood loss?"
The forensic tech pointed to one spot on the victim's back.
"We'll need the autopsy to be sure, but... shock is the most likely cause. Here — this spot, he got the liver."
"The liver?"
"Yes, the liver. Biggest organ in the human body. Basically a giant blood bag."
The forensic tech continued, a look of genuine revulsion on his face.
"The second a blade tears through the liver, the blood vessels rupture and a massive amount of blood dumps into the abdominal cavity. You don't see much of it on the outside because of the skin and fat layer, but inside, it's already a bloodbath. Combine hemorrhagic shock with the neurogenic shock from the liver rupture itself... the victim probably lost consciousness within minutes."
Someone who barely knows how to use a knife just went at him in a rage.
Sergeant Park's words came back to her. Oh Sae-ah looked down at the horribly mutilated back. Was the one fatal blow mixed in among all those countless stab wounds really just a coincidence?
While she was following that thread of thought, a commotion broke out at the mouth of the alley. A young patrol officer shouted, unable to hide the excitement in his voice.
"They found the weapon!!"
That single sentence sent a jolt through the stagnant air of the crime scene. Sergeant Park and every other detective on site rushed toward the voice.
Oh Sae-ah rose slowly to her feet. Unlike the excitement lighting up everyone else's faces, her expression only grew colder.
They found it? This fast? At the scene?
All of this was going far too... smoothly. As if someone had deliberately left a clue behind, and they had found it right on schedule. Carrying that uneasy feeling with her, she walked slowly toward where her colleagues had gathered.
She arrived in front of a large dumpster at the far end of the alley. A forensic tech was carefully lifting a small knife sealed in an evidence bag. It was a very thin paring knife — a plastic handle, the kind of ordinary blade you'd find in any kitchen. Dark crimson blood stained both the handle and the edge.
Sergeant Park took one look and slapped his knee.
"Ah! That's why there was so little blood — the blade's thin!"
The forensic tech nodded in agreement and added,
"That's right, sir. A blade this thin, even if the wound itself is deep, the entry point stays narrow. Like I said earlier — once the victim's fat layer contracts and seals that narrow opening, you get almost no external bleeding."
He held up the paring knife.
"No blood on the outside, but this knife completely ruptured the liver from the inside."
The other detectives around them all nodded along. The scattered puzzle pieces were finally clicking into one plausible picture.
A rage-filled amateur used a common kitchen knife to butcher his target.
But Oh Sae-ah couldn't believe that picture. She stared hard at the paring knife inside the evidence bag.
Too perfect.
It answered every question far too perfectly. This wasn't a mistake the killer had left behind. It felt like a signpost the killer had kindly tossed their way, telling them to go in this direction.
She pulled her eyes off the knife and lifted her head, scanning the surroundings. In her mind, the CCTV coverage of the entire area mapped itself out — a space that was miraculously empty, nestled between the tangled web of storefronts. The killer had chosen exactly that spot. A perfect blind spot.
Someone meticulous enough to pick a location like this... just tosses the weapon this easily? It didn't add up.
Oh Sae-ah's gaze returned to the paring knife found in the dumpster. Was all of this really a coincidence?
Leaving her colleagues' murmuring behind, she walked back to where the body lay. She stood before the asphalt, where the bloodstains stood out clearly. In her mind, the tangled mass of information converged into a single question.
In that moment — what exactly happened?
The victim's direction of movement: from the inside of the alley toward the outside. Wounds concentrated on the back. The killer had clearly approached from behind. Oh Sae-ah pictured those obvious facts in her mind and quietly closed her eyes.
From this moment on, she was no longer a mere observer.
Victim Kim Sung-jin, sauntering down the alley. Behind him, a ghost in a black hoodie closes the distance without a sound. The first strike — fast, deep. The victim's body locks up before he can even scream. And then the meaningless butchery that follows. A knife slashing wildly, like a madman's, at a body already collapsing from a fatal wound.
Oh Sae-ah opened her eyes.
That was the part that didn't sit right. Exaggerated rage. Unnecessary brutality.
An amateur?
She shook her head inwardly. If an amateur stabbed someone in the back dozens of times with a paring knife, they'd injure their own hand. Every single time. The hand gripping the handle slips. The blade cuts them. There was no blood at this scene other than the victim's.
Judging by the victim's build, if you didn't land a fatal blow on the first strike, he'd have plenty of room to fight back. Were there any signs of a struggle? No.
To turn her hypothesis into certainty, she approached the medical examiner crouched beside the body.
"Doctor. If the liver is stabbed... does that leave no room to resist at all?"
The medical examiner adjusted his glasses and looked up at her.
"Well... pretty much, yeah."
He pointed to a specific spot on the body with a gloved hand.
"There's a thin membrane covering the liver — we call it Glisson's capsule. It's packed with nerve bundles. The instant a sharp blade tears through that membrane and punches into the vascular mass of the liver tissue, the victim goes into immediate neurogenic shock, along with pain beyond anything you can imagine."
"......"
"Blood pressure drops vertically. Blood flow to the brain gets cut off. Forget fighting back — he probably lost consciousness before he could even get a proper scream out. If that first strike hit the liver dead-on, this wasn't a fight. It was closer to flipping a power switch off."
The last fog of doubt in Oh Sae-ah's mind began to lift.
"Would a clumsy amateur be able to target the liver in a single strike?"
The medical examiner looked at her for a moment, then pushed his glasses up and asked back,
"...Team Leader. Do you happen to know exactly where your own liver is?"
Oh Sae-ah's words caught in her throat. Unconsciously, her hand went to her right side, just below the ribcage. Seeing her reaction, the medical examiner smiled faintly and continued.
"Most people don't. They just think of it as 'the stomach.' The liver sits much higher than you'd expect — tucked up behind the ribcage. From behind, avoiding the spine and the ribs, hitting this exact spot in a single thrust? That's either luck with worse odds than winning the lottery... or it was design from the start. Someone who had an anatomical chart drawn in their head when they stabbed him. One or the other."
Oh Sae-ah had no more questions. She didn't believe in things like luck.
The problem was... the suspect her instincts pointed to — Lee Doyun — had no connection to this case whatsoever. The Park Kyung-chul murder at least had a motive: Park Ajeong's revenge. But this? What connection did a drug dealer named Kim Sung-jin have with Lee Doyun? Why? Why bother?
She asked herself. Money? A grudge? Neither one had any evidence behind it. Not yet.
That left only one possibility. He did it because he enjoyed it? Had the first murder awakened a monster that had been sleeping inside him? The Park Kyung-chul case was murder for revenge. This one was murder for pleasure? If the same person committed both crimes, what the hell was driving him?
Oh Sae-ah shook her head. She couldn't tell.
What she was hunting right now was an entirely new kind of monster. One that didn't fit any criminal profile she'd ever known.