Two Thin Lines
Joo Chaeyeon's mother lay collapsed on the floor. She wasn't dead. Her face was peaceful, and she was still breathing—a small mercy, in the middle of everything else.
The problem was the creature crouched on top of her. I had never seen anything like it in my life.
"Hrrrrlp... hrrrrlp...!"
It was a monster in the shape of a very small person. Its body was a deep cement gray, starved so thin the bones showed through, and the whole of it was hideous to look at. The face was little more than a skull. Only the lips stretched out in a long, forward pucker, and a red light spilled from its eyes.
With a high, thin whine, blue lines rose from Chaeyeon's mother's head and vanished between those lips. I didn't understand what I was looking at. I knew it was bad.
The strange part was this.
I'm not scared at all. Why?
On any ordinary day I was too frightened to sit through a horror movie. Now a creature that could have walked straight out of one—a hundred times over—was right in front of me, and I felt nothing. Not a flicker of fear.
The monster still hadn't noticed me. I drew a slow breath and leveled my index finger at the back of its head.
That was when it turned. The instant it looked back, it saw me. Long nails flashed out, and it lunged.
"Kyak!"
One slip, and I was dead. The moment was that thin. And yet I had never been calmer. My heart beat slow.
Thump... thuuump...
A faint blue light seeped from my fingertip, about twice as bright as the glow that had come off me in the company restroom. A clean, bracing sensation tore through my body, and a blue line shot out and punched straight through the monster's mouth.
"Kyak...!"
It dropped to the floor, the back of its skull run through.
"Kyaruk... kyaruruk..."
Blue lines burst from its body in a wild spray. The monster thrashed, scrambling to catch them as they scattered. I aimed my index finger at its head, and another line drilled through. It died on the spot.
It didn't feel like killing a living thing. It felt like erasing something that had no business existing in the world at all.
I reached out on instinct. The blue lines scattering in every direction rushed into my palm with that same thin, sucking whine.
"Oh."
It was the sharp, greedy satisfaction of starving all day and then drowning a bowl of rice in instant ramen. Pleasure filled me to the brim. The blue line turning slow circles beneath my sternum grew thicker still.
I carefully shifted Chaeyeon's mother aside, drew a nearby blanket over her, and peered outside. To my relief, Chaeyeon had done as I'd asked. She was still inside the little farm hut and hadn't come out.
"Hm."
I looked down at my feet. Alive, it had been a monster. With its mouth shut, it looked for all the world like a small child. Anyone who saw it might think I'd killed a kid. I stuffed the corpse into a burlap sack and slipped carefully out of the storehouse.
I'd meant to bury it in some corner of the mountain. Passing the ginseng field, though, I felt the faint blue lines drifting off the roots strain toward the sack, hungry for what was inside. I set the sack down and pulled the corpse free. The lines reached to coil around it like vines.
"Here."
I took a shovel from nearby, dug a hole, laid the corpse in, and filled the earth back over it.
A faint tremor ran through the ginseng field. Strangely, it felt as if the field itself were speaking to me.
I'll eat well.
"Taken care of, for now. I should call this in."
I called an ambulance, then went back into the storehouse and got Chaeyeon's mother up onto my back. Any other time the effort would have left me gasping. Not this time. The blue lines I'd absorbed were still moving through my body, and I could feel it.
"Chaeyeon, open the door."
I knocked at the farm hut. The moment the door opened, there she was to meet me—baseball bat in hand, shaking so hard the bat trembled with her. Tears were pouring from both eyes.
"Wh—what the—!"
She'd taken me for a burglar. Or a thief.
"Your mother fainted."
The bat clattered from her hands.
"Wh-what do we do...?!"
"It's all right. No bruises, luckily, and she's breathing fine. I've already called an ambulance. They won't know where this hut is, so we'll have to carry her down a little ways."
"O-okay...!"
Still dazed, Chaeyeon helped me carry her mother down the mountain path.
The ambulance arrived not long after. The paramedics loaded her mother aboard and looked to Chaeyeon.
"We'll need a guardian to ride along. Only one of you can come. Who's the guardian?"
Flustered as she was, Chaeyeon's hand shot up.
"M-me...!"
"Yes. Please get in, quickly."
She scrambled aboard.
"J-Jiwoo... I'll be back...!"
The doors slammed shut. The siren rose, and the ambulance pulled away.
I was left alone at the farm hut. Once I was sure everyone had gone, I dug back into the spot where I'd buried the monster.
What?
A quarter of it was already gone. Not rotted—gone, as if it had simply evaporated. And to my astonishment, the blue lines over the ginseng field had grown thicker.
"Ah."
I was certain of it now. The more monster corpses I fed that field, the thicker the lines would become. As they thickened, the scent rising from the ginseng seemed a little richer, a little more savory. Even the roots with only faint blue lines had sent strength surging through me when I ate them. Eat a root threaded with lines that thick, and I figured I could skip a solid two days of meals.
I slipped out my phone and texted the one expert I could ask, sketching the creature in a few short lines. A reply came almost at once. The phone buzzed in my hand.
According to Shaman Chuyeon, an expert in the occult, a hungry ghost was a spirit that never stopped being hungry. It ate and ate and ate, and still starved, snatching up whatever it could find. The most common of the lowest-grade spirits, she said, found in countries all over the world.
They lured people in with counterfeit treasure hidden in a chest, gnawed away at the soul, and in the end devoured the body as well. If things had gone even slightly wrong, Chaeyeon's mother would have died. The one small mercy was that the victim remembered none of it.
"Unbelievable."
I'd always liked webtoons and web novels, and I'd read my share of horror stories full of monsters and ghosts. I'd never once thought any of it was real. But now that I'd seen that thing with my own eyes, I was going to have to believe whatever came next.
When the blue line first shot from my index finger, I'd thought I'd become a mage. Now it felt a little like I'd become an exorcist. Or a shaman. In a way, it seemed as if all of it were connected—one thing, leading into the next.
I crouched and watched the hungry ghost vanish as if it were evaporating. The ginseng field was absorbing it and growing. At last, the ghost was gone entirely.
I gathered the few roots Chaeyeon had set aside and told me to take, shook off the soil, and tucked them into my bag.
The moment I reached the hospital, Chaeyeon came flying at me.
"Han Jiwoo!"
"Ghk—"
Her eyes were swollen taut from crying. She seized both my hands and jumped up and down where she stood.
"Mom's awake! The doctor said nothing looks wrong on the outside! He thinks she probably collapsed from exhaustion! She's gone in for a proper exam! Jiwoo! If it hadn't been for you...! Thank you, really!"
"Chaeyeon... this is a hospital. Keep it down."
She clapped a hand over her mouth, startled.
"Hup—"
"Anyway. That's a relief."
Her voice went thick, and her lips wobbled.
"If you hadn't been there, I would've completely lost it. I wouldn't have been able to do a thing...! Thank you, seriously...!"
"She did look tired. A little rest and she'll be fine. Don't worry."
"Y-yeah... thank you, really... I mean—I invite you all the way out here and then this happens... Next time I'll do it properly, I swear... Mom woke up earlier with no idea what was going on, so I explained, and she said to tell you she's so grateful...!"
"Yeah. I'll head to Seoul first, then. My afternoon shift starts soon. And... mind letting go?"
"Ah—! S-sorry!"
She flinched as if burned and finally let go of my hands. Then, all on her own, she flushed red in both cheeks again.
"The... the ginseng. I was going to give it to you... I set some aside..."
"Yeah, I already took it. See you at the office."
"You already got it? That was fast... R-right...!"
I left the hospital and went straight for the bus terminal. The truth was, I had no intention of showing up for that shift. What I wanted—what was rising in me hard enough to shove everything else aside—was to get home and try growing a ginseng field of my own. The blue lines that had thickened while the field absorbed the hungry ghost were still shimmering in front of my eyes, bright enough that I couldn't shake them.
There were still ten minutes before the Seoul bus. In the terminal restroom I rinsed the soil off the ginseng and patted it dry with a tissue, dabbing away the last of the moisture.
At last the bus pulled into the bay. I climbed aboard with my bag and dropped into a seat.
Slowly, I drew a root from the bag. Washed clean, the blue lines leaping from it sprang this way and that, as if showing off how high they could jump. I put the ginseng in my mouth and bit down with a crisp crunch.
A flare of heat tore through me. The thick blue line beneath my sternum suddenly shuddered and began to thin.
No. It wasn't thinning.
The thick line had become two thin lines.