Illegal Elixir (2)

"Aha, so you were just the middleman? You brought the elixir in from somewhere else?"

"Eh, uhhuhh..."

The pronunciation slurred out of him in a wet, mushy stream, and it was hard to make out a single word.

Maybe I shouldn't have punched his face in before getting my answers. Hindsight.

Well, who could've guessed one punch would knock every last tooth loose?

"Hmm..."

I pieced together what information I could salvage from the fragments I barely managed to decipher.

So this illegal elixir is the source of the monster mutation ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠phenomenon.

Jin Han-seong, it turned out, hadn't been in this business from the start. When he was invited to Japan, someone working in the underworld gifted him the illegal elixir as an introduction.

Dirt cheap, and yet it outperformed even the finest top-grade elixirs by two or three lengths.

And he handed it out to his guild members to keep the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠guild's growth streak alive.

But then one of them overdosed and suffered 'side effects,' and afraid his tail would get stepped on, Jin Han-seong hastily disbanded the guild and ran. After drifting for a while, he fell into supplying this illegal elixir to Korea in earnest — or so the story went.

"You're rambling out the whole life story like you want to die."

Which, in the end, just meant he was a criminal scumbag. Nothing more, nothing less.

I gave his head one more gratuitous shake, then headed for the warehouse where they were storing the elixir.

He must have sold off quite a bit already, because the stock had dwindled considerably.

This is bad.

This was an elixir with the side effect of turning people into monsters, no less. If the supply shipments kept flowing like this, what would happen next was obvious to anyone.

"...I have to stop it."

I'd already planned to tear this out by the roots, but now the resolve had hardened into certainty. Whoever made this elixir, whoever sold it, whoever bought it — I wouldn't bother distinguishing between them. I'd catch every last one and beat them to a pulp.

"First things first. Deal with what's here."

That violet color would never grow on me.

Crack!

I crushed a single bead into powder.

"...?"

I crushed another one.

What is this?

"...Oh."

Come to think of it, I'd gained Exp when I absorbed the Otherworldly Fragment too. And this elixir, like the fragments, was almost certainly something tied to the Monarchs. Which meant the same kind of power was probably sealed inside it...

"..."

Crack!

Crack! Crunch-crunch!

"Hey. Bring me every last elixir in here."

"Eh...?"

"I said bring them. All of them."

Farming time.

"Gwahhk."

My Exp supply lines had been drying up lately, so this was a welcome windfall. It wouldn't be a bad idea to fill the bar to the brim while I had the chance.

But that's that, and this is this.

First, I needed to figure out how to get close to them — the people who brewed this elixir with their own hands and let it leak into the world. With high probability, the Advent Church was behind them. Or they might be the Advent Church themselves.

Either way, the plan doesn't change. Catch them and burn them all down.

The problem was that their home base, by every indication, wasn't in Korea.

"Japan, huh..."

Jin Han-seong had first been introduced to the elixir in Japan, and he'd sourced every subsequent supply from there too. However I turned it over, every thread of suspicion pointed straight across the sea.

My original plan was to work backwards and gut his elixir supply route.

Of course, this just happened to have been the final shipment. And knowing how underworld types operated, he'd probably scrubbed away not just the route itself but every last trace of it.

Not that it matters. I've got this 'business card' now.

Still, I couldn't move recklessly. If I did something that raised suspicions and they burrowed even deeper into hiding, that would be a disaster.

And besides—

I can't speak Japanese.

English I could manage. When I'd crossed over to America, I'd had to learn it just to survive.

...Well, it's not like there's no way around it.

It was a little childish, maybe, but there was always the Dad Card.

I picked up my phone and dialed my father's number.

Riiiing— click!

"Hello?"

"Father, there's something I need..."

That evening, a package arrived at my place. A cube the size of a die, shimmering with an indescribable iridescence.

"How did you get this in a single day?"

If the Subspace Bracelet was the item hunters dreamed of, then Babel's Box was one of the most coveted items among ordinary people. With it in hand, the very concept of a language barrier ceased to exist.

Even with money, there's no way he found one in stock.

As expected of the Great Cheonseong Group. Nothing was impossible for them.

Anyway, language problem solved.

All that remained was crossing over to Japan myself and making contact with the elixir distributors or the underworld crowd. While keeping Shin Min-woo company through his training, I brought it up casually.

"You're going to Japan?"

"Yeah. Something came up. Won't take long."

"You're not going to disappear for a week without a word like last time, right?"

"Of course not."

Sadly, I had no plans to craft Baek Seo-ha another companion spirit monkey. This time, I intended to explain things clearly and leave without a single misunderstanding.

"Japan...! Sounds fun!"

"Not a vacation. Work."

"I heard they opened a hunter-and-gate theme park there! You have to go take pictures!"

"It's work, Min-woo."

Shin Min-woo's eyes were sparkling. If he wanted it that badly, he should go himself.

"And when you say Japan these days, there's really only one person who matters!"

He whipped out his phone and searched for something at lightning speed.

"Ayase Karin! Japan's number-one ranked hunter and a candidate for the next World Ranker!"

A woman of stately, refined grace appeared on the screen — the kind of delicate, classical features you'd expect from a noblewoman of an old family.

"Oh. Popular, huh."

Even though she was Japanese, there were quite a few fan articles about her in Korea.

"Incredible, right? She even has a fan club here in Korea."

I could see why she'd built a cult following. An exquisite blend of Eastern and Western beauty, plus the number-one spot in Japan's hunter rankings. The woman had gathered every element that drove people insane, all in one package.

But why is my memory of her so blurry?

Someone like this shouldn't be easy to forget. Even allowing for the fact that she was a foreign hunter, anyone who represented an entire nation was bound to leave behind some landmark achievement.

And yet, no matter how far I dug, my memory held nothing of what the hunter 'Ayase Karin' had accomplished.

Let me switch categories, then.

Forget achievements. Just search for anything about Japanese hunters in general.

"Heeek. Look at this! They say an autographed Ayase Karin signature just sold for 300,000 yen!"

"...Hold on. Say that again."

"Huh? Ayase Karin's handwritten autograph..."

"Shorter."

"Ayase Karin's signature..."

"That. Right there."

"...What?"

And just like that, I finally remembered why she'd barely registered in my memory at all.

Ayase Karin.

Japan's number-one ranked hunter, a national-treasure-class talent wielding a special skill called Divine Artifact Summon. She had been the single most likely candidate to become the next World Ranker.

She was going to die soon. And in a way that was almost insultingly meaningless.

Japan's hunter industry didn't differ much from Korea's. From the way it was run down to the systems that powered it, you'd have to compare them piece by piece to find any difference at all.

Except for exactly one thing.

"Kyaaaaah! Look, look! It's Murakawa-kun!"

"What's all the commotion?! Don't tell me a gate opened and he's here to handle it?"

In Japan, the idolization of hunters ran far deeper. In Korea, strong hunters were certainly objects of worship, but in Japan the scale was on another level entirely. How much another? Enough that plenty of hunters belonged not to guilds or the government, but to entertainment agencies.

Hunters were celebrities. The hunter himself was the brand, and the product. Nowhere was that truer than in Japan, where popular hunters retired from the field entirely to become actors or idols.

A hunter's image is power!

And in that Japan, the one who outshone countless hunters to claim the crown of most popular was the Empress herself — Ayase Karin.

Say she filmed a commercial, and she'd shatter sales records like eating breakfast. Every show she appeared on exploded in ratings. In today's world, where media was everything, no hunter was more beloved than her.

That woman, drenched in every blessing the world could offer, was right now—

"Hhk... uuuurgh...!"

—dying in real time.

Writhing in bed, she twisted her body from side to side, moans tearing out of her throat. It felt like a blade was churning through her from the inside.

"Haah...!"

Only after swallowing several pills from the painkillers on her nightstand did the convulsions of agony begin to slowly subside.

"Haah... haah..."

Her breathing shuddered unevenly. In the mirror across the room, she caught her own reflection — a woman so frail she looked like she might collapse from a single touch.

"No... I can't get weaker, Ayase."

She bit down hard on her lip.

"I'm almost there. I can't fall apart now."

Roughly three months remained until the new World Rankings were announced. She had to hold her position until then, no matter what.

Japan's number-one ranked hunter. Japan's number-one hunter popularity index.

Only by defending both of those seats could she safely step into the next generation of World Rankers. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠So she had to push her body harder, even if it burned her out faster — even if it only hurried her along toward a quicker death.

"I have to..."

There was no room for a single step of compromise.

Swish.

She pulled a tissue from the box and wiped the blood pooled in her mouth.

Ding!

Her phone rang.

It was the usual bulletin — another gate had opened somewhere. In her case, contact requests only started coming in at B-rank and above.

She left only a brief reply, then hurriedly dressed. She needed no weapon — she herself was the weapon.

"Work hard today too... work as hard as you always do, Ayase."

Before stepping out the door, she murmured the encouragement to herself. Because by now, the only person left in the world who would say those words to her was Ayase Karin herself.