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Chapter 41
If there's one silver lining to the platform at Jangji Station, it's that the area around the Phone Grave is relatively clean.
Well, if you exclude the chunks of flesh and the words written in rotten blood. It's not as if it isn't disgusting or terrifying. If I had seen this when the world was still sane, I probably would have vomited and shaken in fear.
But over the last four months, my threshold for stimulation has risen significantly.
We've seen so much that if we made a fuss over some blood-written words, we wouldn't have even made it into Seoul.
We took some time to regroup, sitting on a broken vending machine near the Phone Grave as if it were a bench.
Lee Se-jun tore open a bag of hardtack and began stuffing handfuls into his mouth, chewing away.
"Calling it the 'Phone Grave' sounds a bit weird."
"Se-jun, how can you eat hardtack here?"
"Oh. Should I boil some ramen?"
Lee Se-jun had interpreted my comment about his strong stomach as a question of why he was eating the hardtack all by himself.
Fortunately, the all-purpose foreign worker, Hamza, stepped in. He stopped Lee Se-jun from rummaging through his military gear and opened his own duffle bag, which was packed with everything from a portable gas stove to a lighter.
"I read that ramen isn't great in emergency situations. It's too greasy and requires too much water to boil."
"Really? I brought five packs."
"Just eat them dry. That might be better."
"Then why did you bring the gas stove?"
At my question, Hamza shrugged and tapped his chest as if he'd been waiting for me to ask.
"We don't even know if Seoul's water supply network is functioning. It could be contaminated, so we boil the water before drinking."
Then Pastor Park Yo-han, while plugging a charger into his phone and tapping the screen, spoke in a flat voice.
It was a thoughtless comment, the kind someone tosses out just to keep a conversation going, even though nobody was particularly curious.
"Islam. Where are you from again? Pakistan? Isn't that where people drink water from the Ganges? Do you guys boil the water there too?"
"You damn Jesus-freak."
"Huh?"
"Do you think North Koreans and South Koreans are the same?"
It was the first time we had ever seen Hamza this livid.
According to Hamza, Pakistan and India have different religions and have been arch-enemies for ages, so everyone gets pissed when they're treated as the same. Some people might not, but Hamza seemed to be the exception.
Only Shin Na-in remained perfectly composed in the face of Hamza's rage, merely arching an eyebrow.
"Why are you fighting? India and Pakistan. They're both just heretics who don't believe in Jesus."
"Everyone, you'd seriously be executed if you went to Pakistan."
In the end, Hamza was the first to surrender.
He had a look of resignation, as if wondering why he even bothered talking to these idiots, and only then did I feel a sense of reflection. Until now, I'd viewed Hamza as something like an AI Dronebot that warned us of danger, but he was human after all.
I looked over at the gas stove and the pot, arching an eyebrow.
"Since we're on the subject, should we try to get some water and boil it?"
It would certainly be convenient if we could source water locally. I figured it was time to test if Hamza's preparedness would actually pay off.
"Don't bother."
That was, until the Pastor shut me down instantly while tapping his phone screen.
"There must be a reason why people dumped their waste right here in front of the track rails, past the screen doors. You think they'd live with feces just because they didn't want to climb one floor? We shouldn't move recklessly until we find a clue as to how much pressure the Seoul survivors were under, or if there's something in the bathrooms."
"Maybe they just peed there because they were too lazy to move."
I said this while recalling a story from my third year of middle school, back when I was thinking about taking the GED; one of my friends at a PC cafe once pissed himself right in his gaming chair because he couldn't leave during a crucial fight and got kicked out.
This was the rare occasion where Shin Na-in actually agreed.
"How chilling."
"Right?"
"The chilling part is the possibility that Baek Jemin is that friend."
This bastard wasn't agreeing with my point; he was just digging through my memories for his own amusement.
Despite invading my privacy, Shin Na-in looked annoyed, biting his lower lip slightly. I don't know why he makes such a fuss; if the penalty of the Hearing Line magic—hearing people's inner thoughts without a filter—is so terrible, then so be it.
Of course, I have never once thought that going to the bathroom was too much effort.
When I was younger, I did get cursed out by my clan members in a popular online FPS game for disappearing for 45 minutes because I went to the bathroom, washed my hands, and then decided to take a shower, but I swear I never pissed in my chair.
Though, if there's a monster in the bathroom, I might change my mind.
"Well then. Since there's nothing else to do, let's just maintain our weapons."
"Ah. Jemin, do mine too."
"You have to take care of your own gun for it to reward your love for it."
I immediately shut down Lee Se-jun's attempt to sneakily dump his work on me. I then disassembled my weapon and pulled the cleaning rod and some oil out of my backpack.
If you want to avoid getting screwed over by a weapon jam during a critical moment, you have to put in the effort during downtime. A quiet peace settled over Jangji Station as I oiled a cloth and used the cleaning rod to scrub away the gunpowder residue.
Everyone had taken off their gas masks because it was hard to breathe, and as expected of the Supreme Mages, they were completely unfazed.
Hamza aimlessly clicked his lighter, staring blankly at the flame, while Lee Se-jun finished his hardtack, shaking every last crumb into his mouth.
Shin Na-in hummed a hymn under his breath while checking his phone's playlist, and Pastor Park Yo-han adjusted his glasses as he tapped on the screens of phones left behind by those who hadn't even left a corpse.
Jangji Station felt like a subway station on a quiet weekday afternoon.
Bloody handprints, grime-soaked clothes, and torn backpacks were everywhere.
Then there were the curses scrawled in blood on the walls and the stench of feces seeping through the screen doors.
"If you've got nothing to do, come over here and help me look through these phones."
"After I finish cleaning my gun."
Of course, weapon maintenance is never truly finished.
I had made a holy sacrifice for the sake of increasing the combat power of our fellow Supreme Mages. After cleaning and reassembling my AR-15, I volunteered to be the sacrificial lamb for the mission of increasing our firepower.
Under the watchful eyes of Shin Na-in, Hamza, and Lee Se-jun, I very carefully pricked the index finger of my left hand with the tip of a combat knife.
I felt a chill run down my spine at the sickening sensation and asked with my eyes squeezed shut.
"Am I bleeding?"
When I squinted, I saw the three of them looking at me with utter contempt.
Shin Na-in, in particular, clicked his tongue and scolded me.
"Jemin. Where's all that bravado from when you shot your own left hand and grabbed a red-hot barrel with it?"
"Shut up, that hurt like hell."
"And where's the grit you had when that tentacle bastard was digging into your right hand to fuse your blood vessels?"
"That didn't hurt."
I absolutely hated it, but since this was the path to magic, I gritted my teeth and pricked myself a bit deeper.
Sting.
As a droplet of blood seeped out, my whining vanished and my mind became calm. Baek Jemin was a man—a brave man who might squirm and struggle to avoid a needle in the butt, but became perfectly fine once he was actually pricked.
Remaining composed, I looked at Hamza, Shin Na-in, and Lee Se-jun and asked.
"One item. One enchantment effect."
Lee Se-jun rested his chin on his hand, seemingly pondering the request, before asking with a very serious expression.
"Jemin. For the enchantment, can't we do something like Invincibility, Perfection, Unrivaled, or Munchkin? Or maybe One-Hit Kill?"
"Try it."
I suspected it would be possible.
The problem, however, was my intuition that such an enchantment effect would apply to the user in the exact same way. It's like a sharp blade; once you swing it, it cuts everything regardless of friend or foe.
If effects like Invincibility or One-Hit Kill were actually applied, they would likely manifest as 'having no enemies because you can't feel hostility' or 'everyone, including yourself, dies in one hit.'
'Munchkin' might not result in an overpowered protagonist from a novel, but rather a Munchkin cat.
One-Hit Kill might actually be useful, but at my current level, I could only manage a single word.
Moreover, the more characters used, the more the effect diminished, meaning One-Hit Kill could easily be downgraded to something like 'Hundred-Hit Kill.'
When I explained that practical enchantments with clear meanings and little room for interpretation were better than vague, extreme ones, a look of disappointment crossed Lee Se-jun's face.
"That's really lame."
"It's fine if you want to strengthen a function that already exists. Writing One-Hit Kill on a bullet would probably work."
But I had brought two ammo cans of 800 rounds each; if I wrote One-Hit Kill with my blood on 1,600 bullets, I'd collapse from anemia.
Only after making the three of them understand these constraints did I begin the actual enchanting.
I gave [Sturdy] to Hamza's duffle bag, [Clean] to Shin Na-in's weapon, and [Bulletproof] to Lee Se-jun's military gear. It wouldn't show an overwhelming effect, but it was better than nothing.
Naturally, since there were no visible changes, they all looked skeptical.
"Hmm. Could this be a placebo effect?"
"Well, I do feel better. A sturdy bag feels reliable."
"The ability to maintain a weapon's reliability even if you miss a cleaning cycle is a modest but powerful effect. It is certain that the Lord supports our holy war and has granted us this power."
"Since we're on the subject, you all should learn Hand Line magic if you have the time. Then you can actually use the lethal effects Se-jun wanted against the monsters."
According to the journal found in the abandoned hospital, one could face monsters using a baseball bat smeared with Blood of the Right Hand.
In fact, a sub-species of Amalgam called a Blood-Shatter Delta—a blood-web monster clinging to the ceiling—died as if poisoned the moment it touched the Blood of the Right Hand, so the potency was promising.
If our Supreme Mages enchanted their bullets with Level 1 Hand Line, Blood of the Right Hand, we could wipe out monsters with overwhelming firepower.
However, Pastor Park Yo-han loathed such enchantments and kept his distance from them. Honestly, Hamza, a Muslim who eats pork with soju, and Shin Na-in, a Christian who claims Alteration-type Magic is a 'Holy War Formula,' were the weird ones.
Shouldn't a devout religious person be disgusted the moment they see someone carving letters into things using human blood for enchantments?
Instead, the Pastor handed us one of the dozens of phones he had already checked, his face looking exhausted.
"I think I found one, so check it out."
While we were cleaning the guns and applying enchantments, it seemed the Pastor had found something.
I shook my stinging left index finger and carefully wrapped the wound with a bandage Hamza gave me before taking the phone. I could see the Pastor looking at me with disgust.
"I thought you were a hard-boiled type, but what's with the petit bandage with the cat on it?"
"It's filthy here; I can't risk getting tetanus."
However, why I had chosen a cat character out of all the possible bandages was not a question I needed to answer.
Hamza smiled warmly, humbly folding his hands as the attention shifted to him.
"Cats are animals beloved by the Prophet Muhammad. They are sacred creatures that will bless our journey."
"Did that Angel's Intuition magic or whatever tell you that?"
"No. Koreans call them furry angels, right? Even in this far-off eastern land, I think it's a beautiful expression. Since I couldn't bring a real cat on this journey, I settled for a bandage."
I kept my mouth shut, knowing Hamza would likely fly into a rage if he knew people also used the term furry wheels.
So, I just licked my lips and examined the phone the Pastor handed me, seeing that someone had left many notes in the basic memo app. They were either deep in thought or had nothing better to do.
Assuming there would be clues regardless, I tapped the screen with my thumb.
***
*Shelling hit near the department store. Those bastards. According to people who joined up along the subway tracks, they're targeting areas around department stores and large marts. Many don't know why, but if you're quick, it's obvious. Those sons of bitches. How could they go this far...
*A child has come down with a severe flu. The fever is raging. There's hardly any cold medicine left.
*Jang Han-su from the makguksu shop and the butcher, Park Seok-ju, volunteered to find a pharmacy. They are good people. I gave them a few cans, telling them they were free to go if they intended to use the excuse to run away.
*Why do good people always end up like this?
*I hear sounds. Countless voices overlapping inside a human body. It's too late. Quarantine for those returning from outside activities.
*It's contagious. I got the order of events wrong.
*The army has no intention of letting us escape. I would have done the same. They herded us into the bathrooms.
*March 27, 2028. All 73 survivors of Jangji Station are dead. Do not search for them.
***
April 15, 2028, 10:14 PM.
That was the current time displayed on the phone containing the significant records.
We Supreme Mages put our gas masks back on and headed for the first-floor bathroom. As we climbed the stairs and opened the emergency shutter side door, we used tactical lights or phone flashes to illuminate the area whenever it got too dark.
Fortunately, the first floor was in better shape than I had expected. Many fluorescent lights were broken because the ceiling had collapsed, but since the station still had power, the area near the bathroom was adequately lit.
And there, in front of the common entrance to the men's and women's bathrooms, lay a charred human figure.
It sat there surrounded by scorch marks, a discarded fuel can, and melted plastic residue that had hardened again. I used Eye Level 1 to check if it was a monster, but it didn't move an inch.
I looked back at Shin Na-in.
*Exhale*.
After a moment, Shin Na-in spoke in a low voice.
"I can hear bubbling sounds coming from inside the bathroom. It sounds like talking, but it's too faint to make out."
It seemed there was indeed something inside.
In a chilling silence, we Supreme Mages marched past, our combat boots crushing the broken and scorched floor. The burnt figure was clearly a corpse; no one went near it, fearing it would crumble into pieces if touched.
As we kept our distance and were about to enter the bathroom, a strange sound echoed.
Pop.
It sounded like a bubble bursting in a pot of thick, boiling soup.
At that moment, I immediately scanned the surroundings with Eye Level 1. Thanks to that, I discovered tiny red footprints on the bathroom tiles. Facing the evidence that a monster would appear in ten seconds, I raised my hand to signal the group.
"Get back."
Perhaps because they had fought so many monsters already, everyone moved in perfect sync.
I also stepped back to create distance, retreating until I was right in front of the burnt corpse, and raised my muzzle to aim at the red footprints. However, what was following the red footprints was not a grotesquely shaped monster.
Rather, its appearance was relatively familiar.
A thick, amorphous, flesh-colored jelly-like creature was sliding across the bathroom tiles. It stretched out pseudopods—some bouncy, some sticky—straining to grip the gaps in the tiles to drag its massive, shapeless body along.
It looked like a giant amoeba, but the way the pseudopods reached for the tiles was unsettling, strangely reminiscent of webbed human hands.
It was a Slime characterized by its flesh tone, whitish wave-like patterns resembling sedimentary layers, and a surface where bubbles occasionally popped.
The most notable feature was the eyes. Just beneath the surface of the opaque flesh-colored Slime, near the edges of the pseudopods, lidless human eyeballs stared back at us, clouded white like dead fish.
There wasn't just one or two, but many.
They were clustered together like eyes on a seashell.
Surprisingly, Shin Na-in was the only one who gagged.
"Urgh, blegh!"
Shin Na-in pulled up his gas mask to expose his mouth and retched against the wall.
Bleegh...
Pastor Park Yo-han, myself, Lee Se-jun, and Hamza were all aiming their guns at it, so none of us could comfort Shin Na-in. To be honest, even if we weren't gagging, our tension was through the roof in the face of this new monster.
But perhaps because it was as slow as it looked, or maybe because it saw us armed, the flesh-colored slime stopped approaching. Instead, it rolled the pale human eyeballs embedded in its edges and began to slither back into the bathroom.
At that moment, Pastor Park Yo-han let out a groan from inside his gas mask.
"I think that's the third identified species."
"What was it called again..."
"Degenerative Cell Cluster."
"It has eyes, though."
Just as the flesh-colored slime split and vanished into the men's and women's bathrooms, Shin Na-in approached, forcing his gas mask back on.
His voice was slightly raspy, likely from the severity of his retching.
"Freedom."
I narrowed my eyes, wondering what the hell he was talking about.
"Not the freedom of a human, but the unrestricted freedom of the things that make one up."
"..."
"Instead of the minimal order required to form a human, it's an unrestricted, chaotic freedom granted to every cell. They are colonies. Monsters whose souls have been split into trillions of pieces to hunt other humans."
*Grit*.
For the first time, Shin Na-in gnashed his teeth and glared toward the inside of the bathroom.
Yet he didn't dare step closer, instead continuing to swallow saliva to soothe his throat, which had been scorched by stomach acid.
I picked up the phone with the records and continued reading the journal.
And looking back at the burnt corpse—likely the owner of the phone—I couldn't help but let out a bitter laugh.
"If you were going to burn it, you should have burned that too. Instead, you just burned yourself."
It was the phone of someone who had burned to death, not my own.
I powered it off again and placed the phone back in front of the deceased.
After a brief moment of silence, our Supreme Mages conducted a search using Future Sight, Past Sight, and Shin Na-in's Hearing Line magic, finally reaching a conclusion about the flesh-colored slime—the Freedom Colony.
"It's weak."
And slow. While bullets might be meaningless, it seemed it would die instantly if it absorbed a blast of pressure or the Blood of the Right Hand. Compared to Amalgams or Predatory Spines, it was undeniably sluggish, and its infectivity wasn't particularly unique since other monsters had it too.
Although it did have the trait of spreading more easily.
The problem lay in its amorphous, slime-like characteristics. Pointing to that, Hamza honestly admitted that the gas stove and pot he brought in his backpack would be useless.
"If that thing comes flowing out of the faucet and attacks, I'll faint. I don't think we can just boil that away."
"And if that's why the army gave up on Seoul... that means the sewers must be packed with those things."
"Maybe it's weak to salt? Like, if it hits seawater, it might shrivel up from osmotic pressure."
"Hmm. Even if it's not that, considering the purifying power of salt, it might actually weaken as the concentration increases. It might survive the sewers, but seawater could wash it away. It's a hopeful observation... but it's worth considering."
Pastor Park Yo-han pondered how to deal with the monster in his own way.
He seemed to expect that spraying salt water or a holy water sprayer would deal a meaningful blow. I thought that since it was sticky, it might burn quite well if coated in oil and set ablaze.
However, the consensus was that since it could smother a flame with its own body—even if it got slightly cooked—you had to burn it completely.
Lee Se-jun clicked his tongue and looked back at the burnt corpse.
"Poor guy."
It seemed they had herded all the infected people into the bathroom to burn them to death before they could mutate into those flesh-colored slimes, but this person had failed and burned to death alone.
I don't know how the infection works, but seeing as this person, who was presumably a Hearing Line mage, had burned to death normally, I could only assume that mages have some resistance to the slime's infection.
Pastor Park Yo-han checked the bathroom entrance, tapped his gas mask, and then turned around to speak.
"Since that shitty monster stayed in the bathroom without any barrier, humidity might be a factor. Also, if infected people clump together too much, the mutation might accelerate. From now on, Hamza checks the water first, and we only use it once Shin Na-in listens and deems it safe."
"Should we stay here, or go back down?"
In response to my question, the Pastor shivered and pointed down the stairs.
"I'd rather be next to a cesspool or a grave. Let's go down."
We all followed the Pastor down the stairs.
There was no prayer.
Only a strange silence hung over us, as if we were all bracing ourselves.
Only Pastor Park Yo-han let out a deep sigh and spoke.
"Tomorrow, let's go scout the surface."
The End.