One Lead After Another (1)

The morgue was cold. Fluorescent light bled white over the long sheets, and beneath them the dead lay in a row.

A recent surge in deaths had the staff rushing without a moment ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to breathe, and it wasn't only the workload. Most of the deceased had been ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠violent criminals, and that left everyone faintly sick to the stomach.

They looked down at a man with an utterly ordinary face.

"This guy killed more than ten people?"

"I know. He just looks like some middle-aged nobody."

The staff member who had been staring down at the body cut himself off.

"Let's wrap this up and go get something to eat."

That was when the morgue doors swung wide.

Men in black suits. Every time their dress shoes struck the floor, the air in the room seemed to sink, growing thick and damp.

"This area is restricted. Entry without the family's consent is—"

A staff member moved hastily to block them, but the man at the front drew out a single sheet of paper. Scorn rode his voice.

"D.K Guild. We've been cleared by the police and the Hunter Association. Verify it, and step aside."

There wasn't a shred of apology in his manner. Not even a state agency—a private organization, speaking as brazenly as if the law itself knelt beneath it.

The staff member's brow twitched, but he couldn't find a reply. D.K, all on its own, was a wall.

The staff hurried out. Only the guild members remained, filling the morgue.

Cold corpses. Faces hidden under white cloth. Every one of them a death-row inmate who had taken his own life over the past few days, in a bizarre chain of suicides.

Gloved hands turned the bodies this way and that. A magic-type guild member summoned a circle and bent her focus into it, straining to feel anything at all.

A suffocating stillness passed.

"...Nothing. As expected."

"And you?"

The woman who had just been concentrating behind the circle shook her head.

"I'm sorry..."

Lee Jeongwoo's expression crumpled in an instant.

"Fucking useless bastards."

There had never been any chance of evidence here. What was there to find in a case already ruled a suicide?

He let his head drop. A hollow air hung about him, as if coming here had meant nothing at all.

Then another staff member, still beside them, spoke up.

"There's a record of their condition before death."

Every eye turned. He opened the file with care.

"Most of them died at dawn, or in the early morning. The interesting part is... every one of them showed abnormal behavior before they died."

He traced a line with his finger.

"Yoo Hosoon, at Seoul Southern Detention Center, suddenly started singing hymns and smashed his head into the wall... A death-row inmate at Daejeon Prison screamed through the morning, then hanged himself."

Lee Jeongwoo's gaze cut upward, sharp.

"Keep going."

"The death-row inmate in Gwangju died at dawn after a sudden seizure. In Cheongju, a prisoner serving life harmed himself more than seven hundred times, then severed an artery and died."

A short silence.

Lee Jeongwoo stared down at the report, and his brow furrowed deep.

"...Abnormal behavior."

He murmured it low. It might have passed for nothing more than a petty superstition. But the fact that it repeated, so strangely, snagged in his mind.

In the Kang Moojin case, too, the man had thrashed alone and died in that grotesque way.

Dawn. Morning. And death, after some bizarre act.

He spoke as if to himself.

The words weren't meant for anyone. The morgue filled with a silence heavier than that of the dead.

Uijeongbu Prison.

Over the past few days, even the air had changed. The laughter that used to drift to the end of the corridor, the crude jokes, even the deals that slipped past the guards—all of it was gone.

Word had come that death-row inmates and lifers were killing themselves, one after another. Seoul, Daejeon, Gwangju, Busan... Men infamous at the mere sound of their names were ending their lives in a chain.

That was how the news told it. As if someone were pulling the strings. As if some uncanny hand were closing, directly, around the criminals' throats.

"...What if I'm next."

No one gave the words voice, but the same unease lay across every pair of eyes. Inside the prison, the jokes had vanished, and so had the threats. Where there had been laughter, they only swallowed.

At that moment a howl burst from the solitary cell across the way.

A scream like a throat tearing open. The dull pound of something against the iron bars. Fear spread at once.

"This time... it's that one."

Someone whispered it. A young prisoner, still carrying the look of a low-ranking gang member, pressed himself urgently against the huge man beside him.

"H-hyung..."

What came back was a sharp bark.

"Shut your mouth and stay still."

The voice rang heavy. Even so, he couldn't hide the tremor in it.

The worst of them, even by a prison's measure. Murderers who had made their names in blood, gangsters—now they curled in on themselves night after night, the fear that they too might start screaming like madmen and die clenched tight around their throats.

Today, the cold walls of Uijeongbu Prison felt damper than ever.

Every time the picture changed, the sheer absurdity of it hit me all over again.

Since when had this country rotted like this? There'd been a time people called it a drug-free nation, and that hadn't even been a joke. These days a new story broke every other day—celebrities, athletes, influencers, even high schoolers. They bought the stuff and smoked it like convenience-store cigarettes, stuck it in their arms, and the whole place had gone to hell.

Even so. Drug user = curse them = dead. They'd done wrong, sure, but wasn't this going a little too far?

Still, it was one of the biggest problems out there right now. I couldn't just shrug and go, eh, taking this one down feels a bit much, so I'll pass.

I couldn't treat it as some simple drug case, so I decided to look at the thing from higher up.

Call drugs a product, and the ordinary user is only the customer. From the start, I turned my eyes toward the supply. Addicts were closer to tools. The problem was the supply line, the people above it, the money. The ones I meant to hunt sat up there. Cut off the head, and the body doesn't last.

I shut off the TV and opened Nutube.

I searched for videos on drugs right away. Even the thumbnail looked wrong.

I hit play.

The core of it was this.

First, Blue Dust's efficiency was obscene. It was cheap, and it reached so easily that everybody and their mother was jabbing it. The product was simple to get, so the pool of users had grown exponentially.

Second, the effect was different. It blew past a mere high and into a pleasure you couldn't even put words to—but hypersensitivity, violence, and delusion ran wild all at once. Plenty of cases went straight to self-harm or assault. Those high schoolers I'd just watched suddenly throwing punches, the spur-of-the-moment knife attacks and the rest of the snap crimes—odds were good Blue Dust was riding along.

Third, the source was clean. So clean it was even more suspicious. Cut down a mid-level dealer and a replacement appeared at once. The line itself could change, and the quality stayed uniform. That wasn't an operation some neighborhood pill pusher could run.

There was probably something on a staggering, factory-level scale behind it. And with a scale like that, the odds of a large organization were high.

By then my gut was boiling. Were they trying to turn the whole country into a drug warehouse? Money-mad bastards, dragging in kids who didn't know any better.

I tore through the comments and the forums, and the feel of it only grew sharper. Anonymous posts spilling stories about using Blue Dust weren't hard to find. The jobs and the ages were absurdly varied. Insane world.

At this rate, no matter how many the police hauled in on the front lines, there was a limit. The line had to be cut.

I bundled it all under the keyword Blue Dust distribution route and dug in again. Old With Crime videos, articles, public databases of court rulings, press releases from the courts. I scraped them stitch by stitch. Lay it all out like a spreadsheet, and a pattern showed itself.

One neighborhood kept overlapping.

Itaewon.

I pulled up the articles on drug cases that had broken in Itaewon over the past few years. The photos of the men arrested came out in a row like a string of cocktail wieners, every face mosaicked, of course, for the sake of their precious human rights. Every last one of them had tattoos smeared over his body, disgusting to look at.

Sure, these days even middle schoolers got inked, so what was so suspicious about that? Except most of the men arrested had been taken in the same stretch of time, in the same district. Cross-checking the articles, I found they used the same lawyers, or overlapped as similar probation cases.

This wasn't coincidence. Those bastards were very likely more than ordinary neighborhood punks.

I ran a search on the With Crime channel for famous Itaewon organizations. Among the flood of videos and articles, one name kept repeating.

A thug outfit that had started in Itaewon and grown into a nationwide syndicate. The Yongmun Gang.

I caught the rotten stink of it on instinct. I tried to look into them, but an ordinary internet search turned up almost nothing.

Now I needed With Crime. This wasn't something I could dig up alone and be done with. As agreed, I'd pick one key figure tied to it and take him down. The reaction would come right on its heels.

I ran a search on the keyword drug offenders at once. Filtering through them one by one, a single name snagged my eye dead-on.

"...What the hell is this guy. Euiri—loyalty? That's his name?"

Drug distribution was only the baseline. Prostitution procurement, violence, fraud. Every kind of garbage there was, a full omakase course of crime. And this bastard was out in society right now, breathing?

I looked up the sentence. Three years. Three goddamn years. The curse tore out of my mouth on its own.

They were going to wash filth like that clean with nothing but three years?

I was furious enough to go bald. I made myself a promise. Before long I'd dig up every last personal detail, from the judge bastards on down to the lawyer bastards, and take them all apart. This country needed its justice system torn open first.

As an ordinary person I'd had none of their information, so I hadn't been able to do a thing. Now it wasn't as if I had no method at all. Taking down the judges I'd only ever dreamed of wasn't far off—if I could just reach him directly.

For now, I decided to focus on the case in front of me.

The son of a bitch had gotten out and immediately started a Nutube channel, making money off stories of his past crimes. All that talk of remorse was just content, wasn't it? A way to rack up views and cash. And to top it off, he sat there lecturing kids, claiming he was setting them straight.

In the monitor, a face like a wild boar cackling away seemed to be sneering at me. Tattoos plastered over every inch of his body, and nothing in his mouth but loyalty and hyungnim. A gangster, through and through.

I drummed my fingers and tore through the search bar again.

Then.

Yeah. Of course.

I'd gotten a rough feel for it, watching him play games with drugs, but I hadn't actually thought he was really from the Yongmun Gang.

And anyway—what was so great about being ex-Yongmun that he had to advertise it in letters the size of a front gate?

Criminal bastards really were just wired different.

Nothing left to think about.

A man slouched crooked in a computer chair stretched both arms overhead and cracked a yawn.

He was the one they called With Crime.

Several nights without sleep had dragged dark circles deep under his eyes, but a faint smile hung at the corner of his mouth. He was looking, pleased, at the site he himself had built.

The servers routed through ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠dozens of nodes overseas. The logs were wiped every hour. A site you couldn't even reach unless you already knew the address.

Himself, and that other man. A hidden passage shared by the two of them alone.