The First Curse (1)

I went straight to Nutube and found my criminal.

Was there a better warehouse of information anywhere? Trash lay heaped as high as the glut of videos, and I almost had to admire it. When it came to things that didn't matter, people were viciously diligent. How did so many of them keep crawling out of this cramped little scrap of land?

Cockroach bastards.

I was cutting the list down in my own way.

I wrote them down without favor or exception, and before I knew it the page was crammed with charges and names. Keep on like that and there would be no end.

What mattered now wasn't filling out the whole list of people who needed a lesson.

Did it actually work on a human being? And how strong was the curse? If all it could manage was a clumsy little poke at someone's sleep, I was better off not using it.

What I wanted was pain deep enough to grind bone and mind to powder.

There were other things I had to confirm, too—things the Status Window still wasn't showing me.

I was only at the beginning of my awakening, and how little I knew put a faint ache behind my eyes. Even so, the thought of giving those pieces of trash a thorough, satisfying thrashing tugged the corner of my mouth upward.

First, choose the first piece of trash. This one bastard would let me confirm several things at once, and because it was the first, I couldn't just grab anyone.

I set my own standards and sifted the criminals again.

One. A case big enough, and infuriating enough, to have enraged the entire country.

Two. A slap on the wrist, whatever the excuse.

Three. Whatever the sentence had been, they had to be out in the world now.

And—

Four. After all that filth, not a shred of guilt. Living brazen and shameless, iron-faced to the bone.

I was skimming video after video when I started watching only one channel.

The editing was clean, the voice landed dead on the beat, and—more than anything—the information ran so deep I caught myself thinking, How does he know even this? A normal search wouldn't have turned up half of it.

I dug through his channel and nothing else.

That was when a title so foul it hurt to look at pinched my face.

I knew the story.

Put simply, a child had been born into a toilet bowl. For thirty minutes, no one pulled the baby out. The newborn died.

It was more than rare. It was grotesque, and a few years back the whole country had recoiled in horror. What had driven people even further into a rage was what those demons—the child's own parents—had done afterward.

The piece of trash called a mother had walked out of the bathroom and sat there fiddling with her phone. The maggot called a father had jabbed the baby, checking whether it was still alive.

And for that, five years and three.

Back then, everyone with a mouth had cursed them to their heart's content.

The Nutuber's voice cut the memory short.

What's past is forgotten quickly. I was no exception, so I had no right to blame anyone else.

Five years would have been enough to choke a person on rage until it killed them—and on top of that, a reduction?

What do these people called judges even do?

So a dead newborn doesn't count as murder. Quite the saints we've raised.

Looking through all of it today, I could tell I was about to get busy. Even leaving criminals aside, there were far too many people who needed to be punished properly.

It had been a massive case, so their social media wasn't hard to find.

They'd split, by the look of it. Every trace of each other had been scrubbed clean. Once they were caught it had probably been I did nothing wrong, you were the monster—each of them scribbling out a trash melodrama of their own.

I started with the man's account.

Sleeves shoved up to flaunt the tattoos on his forearms, photo after photo from bars strung in a line. The comments underneath were the usual rot, and he was grinning, tossing out hearts.

The woman was no better.

A fresh account, photos from her trips, the full performance of a brand-new life. Restaurants, cafés, selfies. Anyone looking could see there wasn't an ant's tear of guilt on her.

Both of them were living perfectly well, as if nothing had happened. As if what they'd done amounted to ducking out on last night's bar tab.

My teeth ground. A life—small, but alive. Their own child. And they'd killed it like that.

Did they think rotting in a cell for a couple of years meant the sin was forgiven?

The toothless law could tell itself it had forgiven them. The child who was gone. The people who had burned with rage. And me. Not one soul in this world had ever forgiven them, and this was the moment to make sure they understood that.

I quieted my hammering heart and opened the Status Window.

The man first.

"Yes."

I swallowed, hard. Would it work on a human?

It worked.

Meet the conditions the Status Window set, and it worked on a human too. The tightness in my chest slowly let go.

The first question was answered. The next one was the problem. How threatening was this curse? I had to know what it could actually do.

He wasn't some man who lived down the street. So what was I supposed to do?

More useful than I'd expected, it seemed.

Feeling as if I'd just done something enormous, I lay back on the bed.

What was going to happen over the next seventy-two hours? I didn't know a thing. I looked into the kaleidoscope.

My vision warped. A room surfaced, shivering the way the inside of a mirror does, and there he was—Lee Byungju, a thug smothered in tattoos.

Drunk and staggering, Lee Byungju opened the door of his studio.

A bag stamped with an oversized luxury logo hung off one shoulder. A watch flashed on his wrist. He came in pouring off look at me, I'm rich for all he was worth, and before his shoes were even off he dropped onto the floor.

"Ah, fuck… why won't this booze hit tonight. Am I coming down with something? I'm all shivery."

Grumbling, he threw himself onto the bed.

The instant his eyelids slid shut, the air in the room changed. Someone was right beside him, breath held, looking down.

His eyes flew open.

An empty room.

In the corner, in the deepest part of the dark, a small shape stood. It looked like a child with no face. It wasn't moving. It was definitely looking at him.

"The hell… Did I drink too much."

He swallowed and forced his eyes shut again.

The time was 1:11 in the morning.

The moment his eyes closed, it crashed down on him.

Pale lumps of flesh came crawling, mouths gaping like holes. Lips peeled back on nothing but black gums tore into his skin, and little fingernails dug through muscle and ripped the tendons out.

"Aaaagh—!! Fuck! Let go of me!!"

Blood fountained. The dry crack of breaking bone echoed inside his ears. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠He screamed until his mouth split, and the children only clung tighter. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Bones twisted. Flesh tore away in small pieces. He could hear those pieces being chewed inside the children's mouths, horribly clear, the sound scraping at his brain.

Only after he had been torn apart for a long while did his eyes snap open.

"Fuck!!"

Dazed, Lee Byungju looked around the room, realized it had been a dream, and dragged a hand down his chest.

"Some creepy little brat showing up—what the hell kind of dream is that. I get the weirdest garbage."

He raked his hair back and checked his phone the way he always did.

"Only a minute?"

He could have sworn they'd been eating him for hours. Barely a minute had passed.

Cold sweat slid down the nape of his neck. His heart slammed. He forced a calm face and lay back down—and that was when it happened.

The ceiling swelled, and countless eyeballs dropped out of it. Eyes piled across the floor, all of them blinking at once, staring at him. Every blink drove a nail through his skull. His ears rang as if something were howling, and inside them he heard blood pouring out.

He thrashed. He opened his eyes again.

"Wh-what the hell is this."

Faced with a time he had never seen in his life, Lee Byungju rolled off the bed and hit the floor. Certain that something had gone wrong, he shook from head to toe. He was staring a hole through his phone for no good reason when the face reflected in the screen smirked.

He was plainly terrified. The him in the screen was smiling.

The display split straight down, and a pitch-black arm shot out. The instant that arm closed on his throat, the whole room twisted as if it were sinking underwater.

His eyes opened again.

He sucked in air and snatched at empty space, fingertips trembling. The phone on the table was fine. The screen was dark.

He hit the power button.

"What. It was 1:12 a minute ago, too. Did I dream a dream inside a dream?"

He couldn't tell which way was up. His head, which hadn't worked well to begin ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠with, felt as if it had hardened into an even denser stone.

He flung the phone away as if it had burned him. His heart was beating hard enough to tear through his chest.

He forced his eyes wide. His lids only grew heavier.

Can't sleep… I absolutely cannot sleep…

He muttered it and shook his head, and sleep swallowed him anyway.

A voice tickled his ear out of the dark. The room hummed as if dozens of people were whispering at once. He lurched upright and looked around. Gray wall. Empty air. Nothing else.

He lay back down, and this time hands burst out of the floor. Black hands. White hands. Hands soaked in blood. Dozens of them seized his ankles and his wrists and pulled.

"Fuck! Let go!!!"

His vision flipped. The room came down all at once, floor and ceiling trading places.

Then his eyes opened.

"……"

He pressed a palm to his forehead. Time was not moving. No matter the pain, no matter how many hours seemed to pass, he opened his eyes and a single minute had gone by.

"Fuck… am I losing my mind."

The profanity left his mouth, and the wallpaper split.

Through the tear came a baby's crying. At first it was one thin thread, then two, and soon dozens, filling the whole room. The crying wasn't merely sound. It raked the inside of his ears and stabbed his brain.

He drove his head into the wall and screamed. He thought he was bleeding. He couldn't tell whether this was real or a dream.

He opened his eyes again. Only—

How many times had it repeated? Every time he closed his eyes, a new hell opened.

At one point his own face crawled out of every mirror in the room. A sneering face. A face spitting curses. A face howling. Every one of them was Lee Byungju, and those dozens of faces trampled him all at once. The him in the mirror choked him. His arm bent backward. He thrashed as if his breath were about to snap.

Sometimes the hour itself was an impossibility.

Close his eyes, and another nightmare. A nightmare inside the nightmare. There was no end.

Light seeped through the gap in the curtains. Blood beading on his fingers, he forced his eyelids apart and glared at himself in the mirror.

His eyes were bloodshot and swollen fit to burst. His lips had cracked.

Then the face in the mirror began to smile, the mouth tearing wider and wider.