Leisure Time (13)
“It’s dwindling more and more.”
I open the white envelope the girls brought and count the bills myself, confirming with my own hands that the profits from turning my friends into prostitutes are steadily shrinking. I had known this line of work couldn’t last forever, but I never expected the end to come this quickly. Human bodies simply couldn’t withstand the forced brainwashing. Just as Chae-yun had warned, they were gradually breaking down, turning into wrecks or watching their health collapse.
I let out a long sigh.
“Seo-hee unnie, why are you sighing?”
Nabi, who now formed sentences far more fluently than before, asked the question while calmly biting into her ice cream.
“It’s nothing you need to worry about.”
“...You’ve got that look on your face again—the one that says you don’t know how to handle all the unnies who keep showing up at the house.”
“...”
It annoyed me that she could read my thoughts so easily.
“That’s part of it. We’re going to run out of money soon. That’s what I was thinking about.”
“Huh? Are we broke?”
“You were the one who used to look like a beggar.”
After I taught Korean to Nabi—who previously couldn’t even express her own intentions properly—she had become this articulate in just half a day. Once I straightened out her messy hair and dressed her in decent clothes, she finally looked like a normal girl her age. Was this what raising a daughter felt like…?
“That was back when I kept messing up my words. Why are you bringing up ancient history…”
“It was a week ago, you idiot.”
When my tone sharpened, she must have sensed the incoming fist; she quickly cleared her throat and changed the subject.
“Anyway, about dealing with unnie’s friends. I can handle that for you.”
“How?”
“Just clean it up neatly, right? I’m pretty confident about that kind of thing.”
“No. I’ll do it.”
It wasn’t for some noble reason like wanting to deliver my friends’ final moments with my own hands. I simply didn’t want to leave any traces. I could already picture exactly how Nabi planned to handle it—like a video playing in my head. She probably intended to grind each one of them beyond recognition.
I had heard that heavy damage to a corpse made identification difficult, but the people chasing us already knew what Nabi was. We couldn’t give them any openings. Above all, we had to leave no evidence. Among me, Chae-yun, and Nabi, this was the one area I was best at.
If I injected them in advance with the poison I’d used before—the one that melted a human body into liquid—and timed it to activate, they would dissolve completely without leaving a single trace.
They say strike while the iron is hot, so I’d take care of it today.
Then there was the other problem. How were we supposed to make money from now on? I could always go back to working part-time like a normal person, but… there was that saying, wasn’t there? Once your spending grows and your wallet gets used to being fat, it never wants to shrink again.
I wasn’t the type to spend lavishly, but now I had an extra mouth to feed. And if I had to give money to Im Chan-woo on top of that…
“You’ve got that look again—like you’re wondering how to earn money this time.”
“Shut up.”
I was considering whether I should find another decent woman and turn her into a prostitute when one decent idea flashed through my mind.
“...Drugs.”
“Drugs?”
The aphrodisiac I had created at Im Chan-woo’s request. The first completed version possessed an addictive quality almost like a real narcotic, so I had discarded it as too dangerous for use on humans. But if I wanted to make more, I could produce it anytime. Maybe I should try selling that instead?
In movies and dramas, that kind of business always raked in insane amounts of cash.
Once a concrete idea took shape, a plan quickly formed in my head. Still, I knew I had to be extremely careful not to attract attention.
Which meant I should ask the smart one and proceed with caution. The larger the operation, the greater the profits—but the risks would grow just as much.
“...First, I need to finish cleaning up the current work.”
Nabi, who had finished the rest of her ice cream, tilted her head once and followed after me.
I left her behind and called Chae-yun.
“Hey, what are you doing right now? Is school over?”
“Unnie, you’ve lost your mind.”
“...”
“...”
In a quiet café during the evening hours, Nabi and I sat listening to the lecture. Nabi shot me a look that clearly said Why am I getting dragged into this too? making sure Chae-yun wouldn’t notice.
“Unnie, stop watching so many dramas and actually do the work yourself. This is what happens when you dump everything on other people and spend all day glued to the TV.”
“...Are you in a bad mood today?”
“I don’t know.”
Im Chan-woo must have left her alone again and gone off somewhere. Chae-yun took a sip of her coffee and continued in a calmer voice than before.
“Selling drugs is a much more serious crime than you think. Especially in a country called the democratic Republic of Korea. You do realize that, right?”
“...”
“Prostitution is illegal too, but the police don’t go after it with the same fire they reserve for drugs. And most importantly—if it really is ‘much stronger and better than what humans can make,’ like you said—don’t you think it will attract a lot more attention?”
“I should have stopped Seo-hee unnie.”
“I’ll deal with you later.”
Nabi, tired of Chae-yun’s endless nagging, tried to sell me out and slip away from the table. I grabbed her arm and forced her back into her seat.
“...Fine, then we’ll look for something else—”
“No, that doesn’t mean you should give up on the idea.”
“Then what the hell do you want me to do?”
The way Chae-yun kept flipping back and forth made a curse slip out before I could stop it.
She made a soothing gesture, stroking her chest as if telling me to calm down, waited until I settled, and then continued.
“Why are you trying to sell the finished product right from the start? It’s not like you’re planning to run an honest business. You said making it strong is easy, so making it weaker should be possible too, right?”
The nonsensical words made my head throb.
“Then what if we get caught? Who are you going to sell it to, and how?”
“...It looks like you really came here without thinking anything through. I’ll help you, so just wait a little.”
“How exactly are you planning to help?”
Chae-yun let out a small, incredulous laugh, then pulled a slim laptop from her bag.
“How am I going to help? If you don’t know something, you study.”
She took out a pair of glasses, put them on, and began typing away at the keyboard with fierce concentration. Too curious to resist, I leaned over to look at the screen. She was buying a mountain of books from an online bookstore.
“...What are you doing?”
“I bought study materials. Books on how to run a business, how to use computers. They’re all full of useful information. If we just do the exact opposite of what they say, won’t that help with the bad things you’re trying to do?”
Every single book Chae-yun had chosen was completely ordinary—guides for self-employment, computer basics. To think that simply reading these could enable such criminal activity… We had both become parasites inside human hosts, so why did it feel so unfair?
“The books will arrive in three or four days. After that, just give me one day to read them all.”
The kind of intelligence that could absorb all that knowledge in a single day. I was genuinely envious.
As I awkwardly sipped my coffee, Chae-yun took off her glasses and put the laptop away. A question occurred to me.
“By the way, where do you get your money? I’ve never seen you working part-time or anything.”
“Huh? Didn’t I tell you my family is well-off?”
...Fuck. It really is unfair.
“...Never mind that. Why are you suddenly so eager to help? You always just nagged whenever I wanted to do something before. Now you’re jumping in so actively.”
“Well… maybe because someone keeps leaving me out and I’m bored. Until that person finishes what he’s doing, this seems like the perfect way to kill time.”
...What should I do about Im Chan-woo? She seems a little sulky.
“But what do you mean by ‘what he’s doing’?”
It had only been a week since we last saw each other. How could so many things have happened that I didn’t know about? He told me not to cause any trouble, yet I had no idea what he was actually up to.
“He said he was going to a boxing gym, remember? Looks like another woman caught his eye there.”
“Looks like we’ll have one more of our kind soon.”
While we were talking, something seemed to occur to Chae-yun. She asked in a slightly excited voice.
“That’s right—speaking of our kind. Unnie, when you gave birth to your seed, was there anything strange about it?”
“W-why are you suddenly asking something like that…”
“Don’t get embarrassed. What happened was…”
Chae-yun began explaining about the strange seed. After I left the house, the flower had bloomed from the pot I planted in a very short time. And that flower had displayed a completely different color from the ones we were born from.
“...You’ve never seen anything like it either, right?”
“Don’t you know? If it wasn’t in the Root’s Memory, that means our ancestors never encountered it either.”
Root’s Memory. It was like a vast warehouse that stored every experience, emotion, and pain that our entire kind had ever gone through.
The appearance of a blue flower that didn’t exist even there.
“I thought maybe since you were the one who gave birth to it, you might know something.”
“Sorry. I don’t know anything.”
“I didn’t really expect much anyway.”
“You fucking bitch.”
Chae-yun joked and let out a small laugh, but she quickly fell silent again. After thinking deeply for a moment, she spoke to me in a serious tone.
“...Unnie. Could it be that Chan-woo oppa is the Root’s King?”