Uprooting (1)
The news that Sohn Wooseok had thrown himself to his death froze the entire legal world in an instant.
He had been one of the few still raising his voice, insisting they had to come up with a plan. In the end he was found as a corpse smashed to ruin after bursting through a window.
Those who had watched it happen clamped their mouths shut, and the faces of the judges who remained went paler still.
After that, there was no pause. As if the order of their turns had already been decided, the judges began to die in a line.
One was found in a bathtub, body sunk entirely in bloody water. Another was discovered in the courthouse's underground garage, inside a car, with charcoal briquettes still burning.
What they shared was simple enough. They were, as people say, judges on the rise — men and women with no reason at all to take their own lives. Money came in from the front and from the back, and their standing inside the institution was solid. And every last one of them had something filthy behind them.
Their deaths never looked like chance. At first the deaths were papered over as suicides. Now no one could make themselves believe it.
Weeks of deaths in a chain were hardening a ghost story into fact: that some unknown someone was executing the wicked.
Figures in politics trembled only on the inside and kept their mouths shut.
I might be next.
That fear was strangling the breath in their throats.
All of society was being eaten away by a terror no one could name. On the surface they pretended to be unshaken. Not one of them could swear their name was not already waiting on the next line of the list.
The conference room was airless.
Abandoned coffee cups and half-written stacks of documents sat stranded on the table. Judges were only the start. Chief prosecutors, senior police officials, even members of the National Assembly — people whose names carried weight — had gathered in a single room, and every face wore the same look.
Anxious. Drawn tight.
"What are we supposed to do about this now?"
Someone shouted it, the voice shot through with trembling.
"Even D.K is useless! If the hunters themselves can't stop it, what method do we even have left?"
The meeting soon collapsed into a free-for-all of bizarre ideas. Hire professional killer-hunters from overseas. Seize control of the press and bury the judges' pasts. Someone even said they ought to flee the country for now.
Proposals too shameful to speak aloud flew back and forth. Some of them sagged with relief. Others only shook harder.
They refused, absolutely, to look at the heart of the problem. Cover the facts that showed. Secure their own safety. Nothing else mattered.
"Do you even know who he is? Do you know his face?"
A man shouted.
"Does it make any sense to call in killers from overseas to catch a man we can't even identify?"
"Which is why I'm telling you we leave the country. How many times do I have to say it?"
Another voice rang out, cold.
"This is not an opponent who stops because you run."
Then, from one corner of the room, a young judge rose without a sound.
It was Choi Seongwoo.
His face was grim, his eyes burning. He stood as if he meant to look down over the whole hall, and when he spoke his voice was low and hard.
"Do you understand what hour this is? Flee overseas, summon killers, muzzle the press — is that our answer? Are we not the people charged with enforcing the law? If we are the first to break it, who in this country is going to keep it?"
For an instant the air in the hall stopped dead. Someone snorted. Someone else creased their face in open displeasure.
Choi Seongwoo did not stop. If anything, his voice only grew clearer.
"Consider why he has turned to extremes. He is not simply a madman who takes pleasure in slaughter. The absurdities of this society, the verdicts that turn their backs on victims, laws twisted as if they exist to favor the perpetrator — he has raised a blade against all of it."
Choi Seongwoo's eyes darkened.
"Whether the people call him a hero or a devil, one thing is plain. The blade of public feeling is pointed at us. He is saying he will not stop unless we change. If we do not change first, who is going to trust us enough to follow the law?"
Expressions shifted around the room. A few of the younger judges nodded. The mid-career figures set their faces like stone.
Choi Seongwoo drew a long breath, then drove on, lower and more resolute than before.
"The law must be built again for the victims. A verdict must stand with the people, not with the powerful. If all we do is run, hide, and cover our tracks, this will never end. Go on like this and it ends in our annihilation. What we are meant to do is not flee. It is to stand up straight."
He set the next words down with a terrible calm.
"Was this what you were like when you first began preparing for the bar?"
There was bone in it.
His palm came down on the end of the table.
"Do none of you remember? Clutching your books through the night. Thinking of a family that did not have a coin to its name. Turning the pages of the exam until you could barely breathe. Why did you run that hard? Surely not for some foolish reason like becoming a judge only to climb into senior management."
A few of the senior figures frowned.
"At some point, it changed. Passion curdled into greed, and the law became an instrument of power. Where did that first resolve go — the one you had when you were still only students of the exam? All I hear in this room is people begging for a hole to crawl through. Bolt overseas. Control the press. Bring in killers. Is that something a judge says?"
An elder judge snorted.
"Hey, young man. You're taking this too far. We have our ways of doing things, you know..."
"I was not finished."
Choi Seongwoo cut him off like a knife.
"Youth may be the greater responsibility. If we go on hiding, covering, and burying the problem as we are now, the next generation will copy us exactly. This vicious custom has to be cut off."
His gaze swept the room, cold enough to raise the skin. A few people turned their faces away. Someone lowered their head. The silence had weight.
Choi Seongwoo stepped closer and dropped his voice.
"The only thing that can stop his slaughter is our changing of our own accord. Put the victim at the center and build the verdicts again. Change the sentencing standards, the grounds for reducing a sentence, the crooked habits we have let stand. If we truly set the law upright, his merciless killing may not turn on us."
He steadied his breath and stared at the table.
One line. Sharp, and desperate.
Deep sighs broke across the hall, one after another.
That was when a mid-career judge objected, his face uncomfortable.
"What you're saying is idealistic enough, but reality is different. Too much is riding on us standing upright. Politics, the conglomerates, our ties to the guilds — we can't just ignore all that."
"Then why is so much riding on us alongside them?"
Choi Seongwoo turned the question back on him.
"Is it not because we dirtied our own hands? Because we dealt with them, looked the other way, and handed down the rulings that suited them — and stood exactly where we stand because of it? I will say it once more. If we do not set everything down with our own hands and begin again, everyone in this room dies. Those of you who objected so strongly to what I have said are the likeliest of all."
Heavy air pressed down on the conference room.
Judges who had once worn their authority like a boast could not easily open their mouths. A faint stir passed over the faces of a few of the young ones.
That was when the door of the conference room swung wide and clean.
Men in black came in.
"D.K?"
"What are you doing here?"
Park Jeongho walked slowly to the front. His presence alone quickened the breath of more than one person in the room.
"Good. You're all here."
He said it coldly.
"We will not go on sitting here and taking this."
The judges turned.
"What do you mean?"
Lee Jeongwoo added his voice, smooth and precise.
"I was a witness at Judge Sohn Wooseok's incident a few days ago. I watched the whole of how he died. I will be frank with you — I was shaken. This is not an ordinary hunter's skill. If anything, the things that cannot be explained outnumber the rest. This is not a problem we solve by hiding it and keeping it under control."
Light flashed in Park Jeongho's eyes.
"It is time you made this an open investigation. We need an inquiry on a full scale."
"What did you just say?"
The hall plunged into complete chaos.
Park Jinho stood shaking from head to foot, staring into the mirror.
Ever since the dead had started coming one after another out of the Blue Dust affair, he had not even dared to step outside the house. All he could do was tremble with fear and pray, please, that he at least would not die.
Whether it was the withdrawal, his anxiety had only grown worse.
He stole a glance out the window. Two members of D.K Guild were blocking the entryway. Sweat ran on him as he snapped, raw with nerves.
"Fuck. This is so goddamn suffocating."
Park Jinho mocked himself, hands shaking. Today, at least, would be fine.
Brother isn't even here. Just this once. If I don't do even this, I feel like I'll die. He'll understand.
He opened the wardrobe. Between the piled blankets, transparent bags were packed in tight.
Blue Dust. Far more of it than any ordinary user would ever hold.
Park Jinho. The man the trade called P. The first man to manufacture Blue Dust, and its supply line as well.
He forced his trembling hands still and took the drug out.
He used it without a moment's hesitation, but the pleasure he had gone so long without did not know how to stop. A single hit was never going to be enough.
"Fuck. Who the hell else am I supposed to waste this on."
He drove it in, hit after hit, and little by little his eyes lost their focus. His vision smeared. His heart hammered as if it had gone mad.
"If not today, then when."
He muttered it the way someone else might whisper, and kept dosing himself. His pupils blazed and rolled back. Spit glistened where it had run from the corner of his mouth.
Severe addiction was one of Blue Dust's side effects. The greater problem was that it magnified whatever violence already lived inside a person.
The drugs he had taken one after another broke his mind completely. Nothing remained but a thirst for rage and for violence.
Slowly, grinding his teeth, Park Jinho got to his feet. He ran to the kitchen and pulled out a single kitchen knife. The tip of the blade caught the light, sharp.
One of the guild members happened to step away from his post. In that instant Park Jinho flung the door wide and drove the knife into the back of the man who remained.
Caught by the ambush, the guild member staggered and went down. Park Jinho did not even spare the time to look back. He ran for the street.
"Aah—!"
"What the— that guy!"
People scattered to get away from him, and in an instant the street was chaos.
Park Jinho, sprinting like a madman, came to a stop at a small park.
Under the evening moonlight, a family that looked warm and close was laughing with their child. Happily. Every face among them was full of sincerity as they drank in the hour, as if they wished time itself would stop right there.
Park Jinho stared at them, blank.
Little by little their happy shapes warped. In the end they changed into the monsters one only ever saw inside the gates.
In that instant his heart began to pound as if it would burst. His blood vessels went hot. He could feel the blood moving through them.
His mind already in ruins, Park Jinho never looked back. He hurled himself at the family without a moment's hesitation.
"Die! You monsters!"
The child's laughter cut off. The little park, which had been nothing but happiness, was in a single moment drenched in blood.