The Haircut

Never in my life had the walk to the office felt this light.

The bag, of course, was another matter. The man I'd saved had packed it to bursting with this and that out of gratitude, even pressing a thick wad of fifty-thousand-won bills down until the stack was dense. Do translators really have that kind of money?

I strode along in high spirits and, before I knew it, was already standing in front of the building. The security guard at the front desk recognized me and called out a greeting.

"Aigoo. You came in on Saturday, and now you're working Sunday too?"

"Hello. I'm just dropping something off."

"Heh. Don't work too hard."

"Thank you. You take care as well."

Ding!

I stepped into the elevator and pressed B5. Arms folded, I waited, and the whole time a muttering drifted up from the bag. I gave the Dokkaebi Club jutting out of it a couple of taps. It had been grumbling nonstop the entire way here.

"Keep it down."

I couldn't make out the words, but the gist was plainly a string of curses. I ignored it with ease and stepped off the elevator.

The planter stood empty. Not long ago I had pulled up every last ginseng plant that had shot all the way to the ceiling. I set a fresh ginseng seed in the soil, laid the fountain pen—split clean in half—in beside it, and covered them over.

Whoosh. Whoosh.

"Oh."

A blue line burst up out of the dirt, bright enough to catch the eye.

Then, like the beanstalk in Jack and the Beanstalk, the ginseng stem began rocketing upward in a frenzy.

Up—up—up it shot!

"Ah!"

I snatched the stem and hauled it over onto its side. It kept surging out at a tremendous speed, but because I had turned it sideways, I managed to avoid the catastrophe of it punching straight through the ceiling. The tradeoff was that I had to pace back and forth, steering the direction of its growth as it came. Thank goodness no one had bothered to fix the Information Documentation Room's CCTV after it broke. A little less luck, and I would have had to explain this grotesque phenomenon.

The stem's growth slowed sharply, stuttered, and at last came to a stop.

I drew a deep breath and looked around. The Information Documentation Room was packed with ginseng stems, as if some corner of the Amazon had been crammed indoors.

"They said it was a dokkaebi. It really is something else."

It wasn't even inside the fountain pen anymore. Whatever residual energy it had left behind after five years of living in that pen had driven the stems into explosive growth.

Comics had given dokkaebi a cute, innocent image. The dokkaebi described in Joseon Records of the Strange, though, were terrifying things—mid-grade spirits and worse, the sort the book didn't even get around to explaining until the middle pages.

"Hm. Figures."

Making the Dokkaebi Club had been the right call. There was a Silla monk known as Great Master Muyeong who was said to have sealed a dokkaebi into a broom and handled it that way. Afterward, the story went, that same monk displayed strength enough to put a general to shame.

I set about cutting the ginseng stems down to a manageable length. The moment I tried scissors or a knife, I could see the stems taking damage, and every time they did, the blue lines shivered and grew faint.

"I really shouldn't wound them if I can help it. There has to be some other way."

On a hunch, I drew the Dokkaebi Club and brought it down on a stem. The instant the yellow line struck the blue, I heard the crack of a spark.

Crackle!

For all that the sound suggested something charred black, the stem dropped to the floor without so much as a scratch. The yellow line threaded in among the blue, and the color only deepened.

"This is it."

Blue and yellow mixed ought to make green. More precisely, though, the two colors weren't blending at all. They were coexisting, like cars running their own roads—one in the first lane, one in the second.

I could get this effect without burning through much of my own blue line, and that put me in a fine mood. There was a reason people said it was all about the gear.

Thwack. Slide.

I beat the stems down in earnest and piled them in one place. There was enough to fill four or five large cardboard boxes. An iron box would have been ideal, but nothing except spirits would go into it, which was a shame.

"Hm."

The deliberation was short, and the action was faster. I was going to haul all of this home and eat it anyway, wasn't I? Simple enough, then.

Chomp.

I put a ginseng stem straight into my mouth.

Crunch. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

If I'd known it would be like this, I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of cutting them all. I should have just walked to the end and chewed as I went. Still, eating in one spot was more comfortable. I even dragged a chair over and sat there working through the stems.

Crunch. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

After a long while of eating, my stomach had swollen until it could have passed for Namsan.

"Wow... I can't eat another bite."

The two rings seated near my heart had grown to the size of bracelets. The moment I opened my mouth, it felt as if the stems would come pouring back out.

"Mmph..."

Fortunately, what remained looked as though it would fit in a single small cardboard box. I fetched one from the storage room and transferred the stems into it.

Slide.

Just holding the Dokkaebi Club kept consuming blue lines. It was faint, but it was still about as much energy as walking around the house. I shouldered my bag and picked up the small box.

It was already past six in the evening. Time to go home.

The moment I got home, I washed up and went straight to sleep. I opened my eyes to a strange, alien sensation before the alarm had even gone off.

"What is this...?"

Half-asleep, I had thought something felt incredibly lush, and that alone had struck me as odd. Not in my dreams would I have imagined this was the source of that lushness.

"...?"

My hair, my beard, every bit of body hair had grown out to well over a meter. Even my eyebrows were so long that I had to hook them behind my ears just to see in front of me.

"Insane."

I grabbed a pair of scissors and hacked away. Luckily, years of cutting my own hair at home to save money meant there was a set of clippers in the drawer. I brought them out and buzzed my hair down to a reasonable length.

The clippers droned on and on, a long electric whine that didn't seem inclined to stop.

Never in my life did I think I would take hair clippers to a beard, to eyebrows, and to armpit hair. My leg hair had run wild as well, so I spent a good long while on that too. The eyebrows came out a little uneven, but I managed to get them close to their original length.

The leg hair and the hair at my groin, I simply shaved clean. Overnight, I had essentially given myself a waxing.

Looking closer, though, it didn't feel like my old hair at all. It used to be a bit dry and brittle, with a touch of hereditary thinning, and all of that was simply gone. Even at the very tips of the hairs, faint almost to the point of imagination, blue lines were flickering in and out of sight.

"Oh."

Before, the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠blue lines had mostly flowed where the blood flowed. Now an exceedingly faint blue line ran through every single strand—well over a hundred thousand hairs, each one of them. Put simply, the inner vessel that could hold blue lines had grown larger. It was the effect of adding dozens of SSDs to expand a computer's storage. This is actually great, isn't it?

Just as I finished the entire haircut, the alarm went off.

I had made it—just barely—in time for work.

Maybe it was all the weekend overtime, but the company felt familiar now.

Ding.

The first person to greet me the moment I arrived was Oh Seorin, from the same Information Documentation Department.

"Jiwoo!"

I nearly jumped out of my skin and dropped the bag I was holding. This wasn't like her at all. Oh Seorin was always quiet, always soft-spoken.

Face flushed, she came scurrying over to me, like a dog that had waited for its owner right up until quitting time.

"Jiwoo! Thank you so much!"

"Uh, Senior. What's going on?"

She poured the words out like a machine gun. I had never seen her like this.

"I did what you said and went ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to the hospital after work on Friday night. And they found a nodule on my thyroid. They said if it had been found even a month later, it would have grown into cancer! They call thyroid cancer the 'good cancer,' but cancer is still terrifying...!"

Trembling, Oh Seorin seized both of my hands.

"If it weren't for you, I really might have needed a much bigger surgery! Thank you, truly, thank you!"

"I'm glad, Senior."

"I'm really grateful. I actually put in for a long stretch of leave because of the surgery, but I still wanted to say thank you to you before I went!"

"The surgery will go well. Don't worry, Senior."

"Once I'm safely through it, I'm going to repay you properly—something big!"

"Senior, don't worry. Just go and take care of yourself."

"I really will repay you! I mean it!"

Bowing over and over, she stepped into the elevator and rode it up. She kept her head lowered until the doors slid shut.

Thud.

I hadn't actually cured her. Still, being thanked like this didn't feel bad. In practice it was a cheat of an ability—knowing exactly where someone hurt without an X-ray or an MRI. I couldn't operate, but my diagnostic hit rate was one hundred percent.

"I wonder if someday I'll be able to erase Red Lines with my blue lines. Then surgery would be possible too."

Muttering to myself, I set my bag on the desk and turned on the computer. The moment it booted, notes came flooding through the company messenger as if they had lost their minds. Public Relations, of course, and then Finance, HR, General Affairs, the R&D Division—on and on.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!

I blinked.

What is all this?