Hidden Records
“......?”
Lee Su-hyeok’s pupils flickered with a shock of blue.
Has our elder brother gone mad?
That was exactly the feeling.
“Hyung.”
Of course he objected at once.
He was the chief of internal medicine at one of the finest hospitals in South Korea, a man who represented modern medicine itself. And yet Chairman Cho was saying he would accept a shaman’s diagnosis without hesitation. It was enough to make the sky fall and the earth split.
“That’s absurd.”
Lee Su-hyeok shook his head.
“Dharma Master, could you step outside for a moment?”
Chairman Cho asked Kang-to for understanding.
“Of course.”
Kang-to stepped into the corridor without another word.
“Hyung.”
Su-hyeok’s voice from inside the room only rose higher.
“Doctor Cho.”
“I’m saying it can’t be done.”
“Because it’s superstition?”
“I know that man has real ability. But that prescription is far too over the top.”
“I agree with you, Doctor Cho. This is superstition. If anyone else heard it, they’d laugh and say Cho Chul-woong has completely lost his mind.”
“Hyung.”
“All right, let’s say it is. Then what about your hospital’s psychiatry, which everyone else accepts?”
“......”
“Don’t tell me I’m leaning on superstition—try fixing it with your hospital’s methods. Give me the same kind of clean, decisive answer that man did.”
“Hyung.”
“Arrange my discharge.”
“You mean you want to leave right now?”
“The full checkup that ended yesterday... didn’t you say it came back with nothing wrong?”
“But...”
“Before that, there’s something else I need to confirm.”
“Pardon?”
“My father kept one of my grandfather’s keepsakes. Honestly, I thought it was nothing special, so I glanced at it and shoved it away. But I think there may be something hidden in it.”
“Hyung.”
“Secretary Park.”
Chairman Cho called for his secretary and gave him instructions. Then he politely asked Kang-to for a little more patience.
“Could you wait just a bit longer?”
On the hospital walkway, Kang-to called Sol-bi.
“Dad, where are you?”
Sol-bi’s voice crackled like thunder.
“Seoul.”
“What are you doing there?”
Curiosity was her middle name; she always wanted to know everything.
“I’m delivering a divine message.”
“When are you coming back?”
“Hmm... I’ll come as soon as I’m done.”
“Okay. Don’t worry about Sol-bi and be careful with cars. I heard there are tons of them in Seoul.”
“......”
Kang-to, who had meant to be the one doing the reassuring, ended up being the one reassured. He ended the call with a warm feeling in his chest.
“Dharma Master.”
Not long after, Chairman Cho’s secretary approached him.
“The chairman asks that I bring you along.”
“Very well.”
Back in the room, Chairman Cho opened the pine box and showed him what was inside. The first thing Kang-to saw was an old cloth armband.
[Military Police Auxiliary]
An armband stained with years of grime and even a faint smear of old blood. It belonged to the auxiliary police of the Japanese colonial period. Beside it was a name tag.
[So-o Tsuchika]
That had been Jo Chun-bae’s Japanese-style name.
Jo Chun-bae, that dog of the Japanese, had never forgotten the days when he had served the imperial household. Why wouldn’t he remember them? That had been the turning point of his life, the period that had lifted him into the upper class.
“Here...”
As he flipped through the notebook inside, another clue emerged.
[Kome]
It was a record of a child’s birth. Apparently, he had given the baby the nickname Kome right after it was born.
“And then...”
He turned one more page, and a name that formed the heart of Kang-to’s divine message came into view.
[Baek Jung-geun — son of Baek Yeong-gil, sent to Ube coal mine]
Click.
The pine box was closed. The rest was Jo Chun-bae’s private record, and from the hardening expressions of Chairman Cho and his younger brother, it was clear none of it was pleasant.
“This man, Baek Jung-geun...”
Chairman Cho went on to explain.
“I asked a classmate of mine, Woo Chung-gyun, who works as a police commissioner at the National Police Agency, to look into it. He confirmed that in November of 1939, among those forcibly conscripted in Chilgok, there was indeed a man named Baek Jung-geun, and that he was sent to the Ube coal mine in Yamaguchi Prefecture. And also...”
“......”
“There’s a record showing that the mine was flooded on February 3, 1942, and the miners were all killed in the submerged shafts...”
“......”
“Truly astonishing. To be this exact... My younger brother said that if you compare it to medicine, it’s even more precise than an endoscope or MRI.”
“......”
“But Dharma Master...”
Lee Su-hyeok entered the conversation.
“What I said about it being more accurate than an endoscope or MRI was my line, yes. But there’s one contradiction in your message, Dharma Master.”
“What is it?”
Kang-to asked.
“It’s about descendants. On the island, you said the curse of a resentful spirit meant our family’s line would have no children. Then what are my brother and I? By your own words, shouldn’t we never have been born at all?”
It was a valid question, and one that only a doctor would have pinpointed so precisely.
“It may be thanks to your mother.”
“Our mother?”
“She passed away, didn’t she?”
“Well...”
“There are two possibilities. Either this spirit’s revenge only began recently, for some reason, or your mother accumulated great merit. That would be why you were spared childlessness. What sort of family was your mother’s side?”
“Ah.”
Su-hyeok fell silent.
His maternal grandmother had been that kind of person. A social worker who helped poor orphans. His mother had inherited that blood. She had insisted that in a developed country like Korea, no one should go hungry, and had provided lunches for children from broken homes. She also supported five free meal centers in Seoul.
What’s more, she had once donated five billion won to Han River Medical Center to cover heart surgery for poor children. That, too, had been part of why Su-hyeok rose above his peers and became chief. She was the complete opposite of his father, who had dismissed every good deed as a waste and never donated a single won.
“By the same logic... if the two of you now build merit, you’ll have children as well.”
“Children, too?”
“Yes.”
“As for me, I’d given up because of my age and only tried again at my younger brother’s recommendation, so fine... but what about the memorial rite? Would you be the one to preside over it, Dharma Master?”
Chairman Cho spoke again.
“For the memorial rite, I can recommend someone better than I am. The resentment of this spirit reaches the heavens, so it would be best to act quickly and not let anything else interfere.”
Kang-to handed him a business card, and it was Lady Gyeongsin’s. For a rite to console the dead, a high-ranking manshin was far more suitable.
“Let me confirm once more. We go to the submerged mine where Baek Jung-geun drowned, perform a memorial rite, offer an apology, and donate the rice mill that was taken from his father’s family to a public-interest organization under his father’s name. Quick, before anything else.”
“That’s right.”
“Anything more?”
“If you can also revoke your grandfather’s national merit award, that would be the cherry on top. I know that’s not an easy decision.”
“I’ll do it all.”
Chairman Cho made his decision.
Even Su-hyeok beside him no longer objected. The memorial rite itself was no longer the issue, given the divine message Kang-to had delivered. The real problem was everything else. The rice mill site now housed a logistics complex serving Busan and Daegu, an asset worth more than thirty billion won by bank appraisal alone. And the independence activist honor was no small matter either. That prestige was not something one could give up lightly.
But Chairman Cho, and his younger brother Su-hyeok, had both survived the threshold of hell. As Kang-to’s messages kept landing one by one, they rose above all else. They had seen through the illusion of their grandfather, and they knew that life mattered more than money.
“I’ve already put the fee in my car. Our driver will take you back to the pier where the boat leaves for the island.”
“Half is enough for now.”
“Pardon?”
“Go to the submerged mine in Japan and hold the memorial rite. Then, if either of you receives news of a pregnancy, pay the remainder.”
“Really... you think a baby is possible? Even after failed artificial insemination?”
“Once the spirit’s resentment is lifted, the Curse of the Deadly Star, the Heavenly Star, and the Baekho-dae-sal will all disappear. Then pregnancy will happen even without artificial insemination.”
“Even so, the fee...”
“This divine message is still in progress. If I think about how I was dismissed the first time I met Chairman Cho, even billions wouldn’t be enough, but it’s only right that I take the rest after the baby is confirmed. Even in hospitals, don’t they sometimes bill major surgery in installments and collect the remainder at discharge? Isn’t that right?”
Kang-to asked Su-hyeok for confirmation.
“Well...”
Su-hyeok trailed off. It was, after all, a fact.
With that, Kang-to left the room.
Su-hyeok followed behind him down the corridor.
Shaman.
In Su-hyeok’s memory, prejudice crossed and recrossed like the twisting strands of DNA.
-Be careful of water accidents this summer.
-The east is your lucky direction. Go east.
-You’re bound to face a legal dispute this year.
-There’s someone in your family who drowned, isn’t there? That person is holding a grudge.
It was a complete grab bag of random dread.
No details, only fear and anxiety. If you traced any family tree far enough back, what household didn’t have someone who drowned? Shamans, in Su-hyeok’s mind, were people who preyed on that anxiety and lived off the fees they extorted from it.
But Kang-to was different. He checked only facts, and as a man of medicine, there was no argument to make. And on top of that, his fee system—payment after the fact—was flawless. It was a method only someone with absolute confidence and conviction could use.
They say AI and robots are advancing astonishingly fast... did shamans innovate first?
All Su-hyeok could feel was his head spinning.
Ping.
The elevator doors opened.
“Oh?”
One of the people stepping out stopped in his tracks.
“Lee Kang-to?”
The man who frowned first was Lee Hyeong-wook, the son of his biological father.
“What brings you to the hospital?”
“I came for business.”
“Business? At a hospital?”
A cold smile surfaced around Hyeong-wook’s mouth.
You’re not here shaking down desperate people with some revival ritual, are you?
Instead of the words that sat on his tongue, what came out was something hollow and insincere.
“You have a daughter now—don’t tell me she was hospitalized or something?”
“I said I came for business.”
“Right. Of course you did.”
“What about you? Why are you here? I don’t see any signs of the Six Harms on your face.”
“The Six Harms?”
“The misfortune of illness or accidents affecting one’s parents, siblings, or children.”
“You’re not trying to sell me something, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then don’t go tossing around shaman jargon in random places. I came here for business too.”
“Then you should get on with it.”
Kang-to passed his shoulder and stepped into the elevator.
Swish.
As the doors closed, Kang-to disappeared from sight.
Business?
Hyeong-wook gave a snort. A shaman talking about business. What a joke. Anyone and everyone liked to call things business these days.
Business isn’t something you tack onto vulgar nonsense like that.
He quickened his pace and looked at the message he’d received.
[Han River Medical Center, VIP room 22]
Huh?
Hyeong-wook lifted his head.
Come to think of it, this was the same corridor Lee Kang-to had come down. And this corridor had only one VIP room.
“Excuse me. This is Chairman Cho Chul-woong’s room, isn’t it?”
He asked the secretary standing at the door.
“Yes, but how did you get here?”
“Then that young man who just got on the elevator...”
“......?”
“Did he visit this room?”
“He did, but why do you ask?”
The secretary looked up.
Instead of answering, Hyeong-wook glanced back toward the elevator.
I came for business.
Business.
The very business he had just scoffed at. But... the target was none other than Chairman Cho Chul-woong of Taebaek Construction?
No.
At most, he must have come to arrange some kind of ritual using the helicopter crash as leverage.
Hyeong-wook forced himself to deny it and opened the hospital room door.
“......?”
Hyeong-wook’s expression, after hearing Chairman Cho’s words, froze like ice.
“He’s the Dharma Master I invited.”
That was Chairman Cho’s answer. No hesitation at all.
“Why? You know him too, Mr. Lee?”
“......”
Now Hyeong-wook was the one who had lost his voice. Kang-to, who was not yet registered in the family registry, could neither be fully acknowledged nor denied. It was an inevitable fact waiting to happen.
“He walked away from death by a hair’s breadth... You like the sea, don’t you? Well, you haven’t gone through that yet, have you? But I have. And... since I’m speaking frankly with you, Mr. Lee, the one who saw it coming and tried to stop us from sending up the helicopter in the first place was that Dharma Master Kang-to.”
Shock and confusion.
Those words crossed and tangled in Hyeong-wook’s brain.
Click.
After finishing his visit, Hyeong-wook stepped back into the corridor.
His feet trembled as he walked toward the elevator.
Chairman Cho was a man of real backbone. That was precisely why he had so much to learn from him, in yachting and in initiative alike. And so the impact was on a completely different level from the drama selection conversation he had heard from Yoo Jae-hee. A helicopter crash. Chairman Cho’s narrow escape from death. Even a man like that was intrigued by Kang-to’s divine message.
......
Hyeong-wook’s gaze landed on Kang-to. He was still in the hospital. His eyes were turned toward the emergency room.
“Please move aside. It’s a difficult labor.”
A stretcher was barreling out of the emergency room entrance. Four medical staff members were clinging to it, sprinting at full speed. The stretcher came to a halt in front of the patient elevator.
And then—
Unbelievably, Kang-to stepped in front of it.
And—
With a face far too grave for a man who was not even a doctor, he said something impossible.
“You can’t take her into surgery right now. Both the mother and the baby will die.”
Kang-to’s expression was solemn, and more than solemn.