Death Is Only the Beginning
The missing Yoon Deok-soo has been revealed to have engaged in constant corruption and misconduct stretching all the way back to his days as a teacher.
In particular, allegations never stopped coming — rigged teacher hiring, embezzlement of school funds, leaked exam papers, and the systematic cover-up of school violence. He was, in fact, sexually harassing and blackmailing a female teacher right up until the moment he vanished.
The first person to report this incident was, in fact, Mr. Park, a contract teacher who had been summoned to his home⋯⋯.
"It's been a while."
"It really has. First time since Tae-sung's wedding, isn't it?"
"I suppose so?"
For a man of Yoon Deok-soo's social standing, his funeral was remarkably sparse.
Undoubtedly thanks to the flood of exposés and news reports that had begun erupting the moment his death was announced.
"Nice not having a crowd. I was half afraid I'd have to bolt before I even got a bowl of yukgaejang."
Moon Tae-hee — Yoon Deok-soo's protégée of fifteen years ago, now a bona fide star actress — settled into her seat as she spoke.
Beside her sat Park Hae-na, likewise his former student, her old friend, and now a lawyer.
"What about the boys?"
"You think they'd come? They probably can't even remember their homeroom teacher's face."
"True enough. They wouldn't show up even if we dropped dead."
"Agreed. Garbage, and then some."
At a glance, the two women looked quite close.
But in reality —
"You've been awfully busy lately, haven't you? Hard to tell you're a celebrity at all."
"Oh, please. You're the one living in the public eye. Shouldn't you be worried about burning through your image?"
— nothing could have been further from the truth.
Endless envy, jealousy, and wariness, each trained on the other.
That was what Park Hae-na and Moon Tae-hee had been to each other for fifteen years.
"Speaking of image, Hae-na, I really think you're something else. I don't know about anything else, but how on earth do you talk about school violence on broadcast⋯⋯ pfft! Ah, sorry. Old memories. Honestly, it just doesn't add up, you know? Right?"
Park Hae-na was, in today's parlance, a "star lawyer."
Famous for her television appearances as the attorney who handled dating violence, domestic abuse, and school bullying cases.
Perhaps thanks to that shamelessness of hers, she merely smiled at Tae-hee's blatant jab.
But she always paid words back in kind.
"I learned everything from Actress Moon, of course. How does anyone act that well? Night and day from the real thing, isn't it?"
The two women prodded, ever so obliquely, at each other's pasts.
A knife-edge battle of nerves, neither willing to give a single inch.
Their meetings were always like this.
"And how's little Do-jun? Last I saw him was his first birthday, right?"
"Don't get me started. He starts kindergarten this year, and the boy simply will not listen."
"Well, what can you do? Blood will tell. Raise him well. Be good to your husband."
For the first time, Moon Tae-hee's face twisted at Hae-na's exquisitely barbed remark.
But only for a moment. She swiftly recovered her smile and fired back.
"You should hurry up and share some good news of your own, Hae-na."
"I'd love to, but it's not so easy."
"Oh, relax. Women give birth in their forties these days, don't they? Everything has its season."
Having savored the words to the last syllable, Moon Tae-hee set down her spoon.
The yukgaejang she'd claimed to be craving hadn't touched her lips once.
"I have a schedule, so I'll head out first. Let's meet on a better day next time — not at a funeral like this."
Just as she seemed about to drift away with practiced grace —
"Oh."
She stopped, as if remembering something.
Then she added a few words to Park Hae-na.
"You've heard, haven't you, Hae-na? This Shadow fellow who killed Teacher Yoon? Anyway, it's been all the rage lately — apparently he picks out nothing but the bad ones and kills every last one of them."
"I know. People have been flooding me with offers related to the Shadow lately anyway."
Private sanctions in a nation governed by law.
Demand for a star lawyer was bound to be considerable.
At that, Moon Tae-hee smiled sweetly and went on.
"Watching all that got me thinking. If — not that it would ever happen, of course, but just suppose — suppose that Shadow picked his next target from among us. Who do you suppose would die first?"
Perhaps because the question was so far beyond anything she'd expected, Park Hae-na found herself unable to answer.
"Why so serious? It's not like we've ever committed a crime."
"⋯⋯."
"Even if he did come, the boys would die before us."
"⋯⋯."
"See you next time."
And with those loaded parting words,
Moon Tae-hee swept gracefully out of Yoon Deok-soo's funeral hall.
Gazing after her retreating figure, Park Hae-na muttered under her breath.
"That rotten bitch⋯⋯."
Of course, even that venom was short-lived.
Before long she too rose from her seat and slipped out of the funeral hall.
Her yukgaejang, likewise, went untouched.
Just as the world was being thrown into uproar all over again —
"So, what do you think? This should be enough, right?"
On a wooded hillside in Gwangtan-myeon, Paju, Gyeonggi Province,
inside a container facility erected on that land,
Lee Seo-hyun spoke — she who had carried out a certain request from Tae-jun.
"I managed to secure the warehouse exactly as you asked, but what exactly are you planning to store here?"
Yoon Deok-soo's underground archive had yielded mountains of documents.
They couldn't stay in Ggomul-i's stomach forever.
Even with its digestion suppressed, there was only so long it could hold out.
"Documents."
"Documents? What kind of documents?"
"You'll see when you look."
With that, Tae-jun lowered an intermediate soul stone to the floor.
A soul stone acquired, as a stopgap, by executing one more malodorous criminal.
"I'm about to summon something. It's not a wicked creature, so you can relax."
"⋯⋯Somehow that makes me more nervous."
"I remembered you always hated bugs."
A single memory, dim and distant.
A very long time ago, Lee Seo-hyun had once fled to Tae-jun's family home because a cockroach had appeared in her cramped one-room apartment.
After that incident she had moved into her father's house — and the memory had surfaced in his mind just now.
"Wow. I can't believe you actually remember that."
Seo-hyun must have remembered too, for she smiled a wistful smile.
A time when nothing of their lives had been destroyed.
A time that could never, ever be returned to.
"But why a bug, all of a sudden—"
Hell's Cleaner
Demonic Familiar — Non-Combat Utility
Before Lee Seo-hyun could even finish her question,
the demonic tongue Tae-jun murmured called forth the Hell's Cleaner.
"Kkeruk!"
"KYAAAH!"
The colossal silkworm cocoon materializing right before her eyes sent Lee Seo-hyun into a screaming panic.
Despite the warning, it seemed she simply couldn't cope.
"Wh-wh-what is this thing⋯?"
"Say hello. This is Ggomul-i."
"Ggomul⋯ i?"
"And this is my sister-in-law, Lee Seo-hyun."
"Kkeruk! Kkeruruk!"
That concluded the introductions.
"Would you spit out everything you brought back?"
At Tae-jun's command,
"Kkeruk!"
the cocoon — no, the Hell's Cleaner, Ggomul-i — began regurgitating an enormous volume of something.
THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD!
Documents hauled back entire bookshelf and all.
And even Yoon Deok-soo's meticulously laundered physical assets.
The tightly wound threads dissolved away, revealing everything in its original form.
"Wh-what is all of this⋯?"
Even as doubt filled her, Seo-hyun's eyes ran over the papers filed into the shelves.
A short while later, her eyes went round as saucers.
"You're telling me⋯ all of this was in Yoon Deok-soo's house?"
"He kept it tucked away in a secret underground archive."
"He must have been terrified out of his mind, honestly. Of being devoured."
The fate of the hunting dog once the hunt is over.
Still, even so — there was only one way to put this.
The man had simply gone to extremes.
"And thanks to him, we've hit the jackpot, haven't we?"
It wasn't only the documents relating to the incident fifteen years ago.
Piled high were the files he had steadily accumulated over long years spent as principal of Daeha Middle School — as the loyal dog of the powerful.
Which meant, in other words: there was now a great abundance of new prey.
"And this part isn't⋯ exactly trivial either."
Documents hadn't been the only thing carried out of Yoon Deok-soo's archive.
The safe that had anchored one whole side of it had been emptied to the last.
Its locking mechanism had long since been shattered by Tae-jun's hand.
"Same arrangement as before? Half for operating expenses, half for you to do with as you please?"
Tae-jun nodded silently — then, as if something had occurred to him, spoke.
It was about Park Min-ah, the contract teacher who had been at the scene when Yoon Deok-soo was dealt with.
"So, in other words⋯."
Lee Seo-hyun listened quietly until he finished.
Then she organized his words and echoed them back.
"You want me to pay that teacher's parents' hospital bills in her place, right?"
"It's money Yoon Deok-soo promised her. Because I killed him, she'll never receive it now."
"I can more or less piece together how it all went down⋯⋯."
"She'll probably lose her job over this affair as well."
"That⋯ does seem likely."
After a moment's deliberation, Lee Seo-hyun nodded.
"⋯⋯I understand what you're asking. Paying a hospital bill discreetly isn't a difficult thing to do⋯ so I'll handle it your way, brother-in-law. Innocent people must not be made to suffer because of the Shadow."
It wasn't merely a question of morality.
Lee Seo-hyun was, piece by piece, sculpting Ki Tae-jun — no, the figure known as the Shadow — into a kind of dark hero.
That shaping had already met with a measure of success, and all that remained was to wait for his fame to swell like a snowball.
All the more reason to be careful now.
Public opinion turning against someone — "falling into the abyss," as people said these days —
really did happen in the space of a heartbeat.
"I'm counting on you."
"Oh, please. It's the least I can do."
Lee Seo-hyun thought to herself,
that although her brother-in-law had returned as a demon, fragments of the man he had been still remained.
Whether that was a good thing or not⋯
well, only time would tell.
"Anyway — how did it feel? Yoon Deok-soo, that bastard's final moments."
"I carved a brand into him."
"A brand?"
"A brand that condemns him to live as the demons' slave for all eternity, even after falling into Hell."
"Wow, there's actually something like that? Oh — so that's why⋯!"
Truthfully, she had found it a little strange.
Granted, the man had been nothing but dregs.
And yet her brother-in-law had seemed altogether too nonchalant about it.
So this was the grand design behind it all.
A picture that only a being returned from Hell itself could paint —
truly a scheme so vast, so audacious, so utterly complete it bordered on the impossible.
"That is absolutely magnificent, you know. Honestly, it always bothered me a little, before — you take your revenge with a man's life, but once he's dead, it's over and done. Isn't that far too easy? I always felt something was missing. And now it turns out I was wrong?"
Death is not the end.
Death is only where the real beginning lies.
For one who dreams of vengeance, there could be no sweeter news.
"Well, either way — thank you for the good news. I'll comb through every document here and set aside whatever might be of use to you."
"I'll be waiting."
"Oh, and this is your new prey. Care to take a look?"
A sheaf of papers was handed over, right on schedule.
Tae-jun lightly flipped past the first page.
"⋯⋯And this is?"