Chapter 27. Buried Alive
Chapter 27. Buried Alive
“What the hell is this?!”
The President shouted, throwing a foreign news report onto the table in the Cabinet meeting room. But the ministers gathered there couldn’t say a word.
“Report!”
“The foreign press is correct. The National Intelligence Service confirmed it was work by Chinese agents trying to stoke anti-American sentiment.”
“Then why the hell did our media flail around like that?! This is a national humiliation!”
“It seems the Chinese side greased it as well!”
“Call the media company presidents in here immediately. Is this the time to pull stunts like this for pocket change? The country is shaking, and our administration is in danger!”
While the President raged at people who couldn’t get their heads straight in a national crisis and only thought about profit,
I was deeply absorbed in reading wuxia novels.
From classics to all-time bests.
Legend-tier works.
Even the latest hits.
Reading that mountain of books meant I didn’t have time lately for anatomy textbooks or personal training.
But it couldn’t be helped.
Thirty billion was on the line.
Making the pink pig prettier.
I knew I could use my telekinesis to sculpt Bella’s face.
Moving bone structure and pulling skin wasn’t difficult. The problem was that Bella’s looks were already close to perfect, so there wasn’t much to fix—and my aesthetic standards were disastrously low.
So the answer was: rebirth through transformation.
Wuxia novels all describe the same thing: once a certain amount of internal energy builds up inside the body, the body expels impurities.
Foul qi that’s accumulated since birth pours out of every pore, stinking worse than shit, and sometimes the skin splits open and reveals skin underneath like a newborn baby’s.
The gold standard of handsome and beautiful is newborn-baby skin.
If I could make her skin like a newborn’s, Bella would be satisfied.
But even if I compressed ambient qi and stored it inside the body, there was no guarantee that effect would actually happen.
Every wuxia novel I’d read insisted it would. But as someone who’d already created internal energy for Cheolmin’s body and for the sixteen Isu Gang guys, I didn’t think it would be easy.
If you gather energy throughout the body, there’s a higher chance the fragile human body can’t handle it and just bursts. Someone like me—who’d trained the body for a long time—might endure it, but an ordinary person like Bella could go pop.
Still, that was only my prediction.
If I just ram pure qi into her like in the novels, maybe the body would evolve on its own…
…
I badly wanted to run an experiment on someone, but there was no suitable person.
The manager?
The owner?
That kind of thought was something only a psychopath would have.
My late parents had warned me not to cross the line—live as if blending into the human world—and I intended to keep that promise.
While my eyes read The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber and my head spun with these thoughts, Bella came out of her room and shouted.
“Kang Chan is a scammer? Why Kang Chan not make Bella prettier!”
“What are you saying, ma’am? A scammer? Don’t be impatient. The state you want has to be reached step by step. Martial arts can’t be achieved overnight. Without blood, sweat, and tears, nothing can be accomplished!”
It hadn’t even been that many days, but Bella was nagging me every single day.
“You should’ve said that before taking money! Then I would’ve thought again! Don’t scam—give money back!”
“I already have a perfect schedule planned. Relax, and tomorrow on my day off, we’ll start Stage One training. Then this customer—already beautiful—will become even more beautiful!”
I was polite and respectful to customers, but I’d never done flattery. Yet now that I was cornered, praise for Bella’s looks was spilling out of my mouth like breathing. I had to buy time.
First, I’d buy time with the one-hundred-million course I’d given the sixteen guys.
“Bella pretty? You said ugly.”
“What are you talking about? Ugly? Who says something that insane?!”
“You said it to me before.”
Had I? I thought I said her clothes didn’t suit her…
“That meant your looks and that pink tracksuit are unbalanced. I meant the pink tracksuit doesn’t suit perfect Bella!”
“Hm…”
Bella stared at me, then her face went cold again.
“If you don’t keep promise, I’ll break you, Kang Chan!”
Then she grabbed a handful of Scotch candy from the lobby counter and went back to Room 102.
Is this what it feels like to be chased by debt collectors?
I had to come up with something.
Should I just shove internal energy into Bella until she transforms?
Ah… no. Not that.
Should I ask Cheolmin hyung to introduce a guy that can be used as a test subject—someone it wouldn’t matter if they died?
Huh? But Room 104, Lauren, is basically on the verge of death right now.
Should I save her?
Wait—there are Isu Gang guys with her too!
While I was thinking that, Lauren clamped her mouth shut so the soil pouring onto her head wouldn’t get into it.
She’d been careless.
Thinking it was just some ordinary gangster crew and underestimating them was a mistake.
Thinking it was just some ordinary gangster crew and underestimating them was a mistake.
As four or five men took turns shoveling dirt in, the soil rose to her neck in no time. Beside her were two of Cheolmin’s subordinates who had followed the cap guy as well.
After slipping out of the club without Cheolmin noticing, Lauren had tailed the cap guy who’d placed the item in the locker.
Cheolmin’s subordinates had tailed him too.
The cap guy went into a building basement, and Cheolmin’s men loitered nearby, watching the building.
To Lauren—an expert in infiltration, surveillance, and intel gathering—those two were ridiculously sloppy.
They were amateurs screaming “We’re watching you!” with their whole bodies.
Watching them while pretending to smoke in the alley, Lauren suddenly felt something strange.
The sensation of being watched.
She looked around, but it was a dark alley with no CCTV.
With long experience, Lauren sensed danger.
She realized something smaller than a fly was watching her from a few meters away.
Something you’d dismiss as an ordinary gnat even in broad daylight.
But Lauren was certain that her sense of danger was coming from that tiny drone.
She flicked her cigarette onto the ground and ground it out with her shoe, then walked down the alley.
The micro-drone followed slowly at a distance.
She pulled out her phone to text the situation room, but suddenly a huge man burst out from the alley ahead.
Maybe he didn’t discriminate between men and women—because the attacker immediately drove a fist toward Lauren’s abdomen.
He was a giant over two meters tall, and strong enough that if she didn’t dodge, it felt like her organs would rupture.
Lauren slipped to the side and grabbed his collar.
Then she tried to use his forward momentum to throw him with a grappling technique.
But he didn’t budge.
The technique landed, but his strength was so absurd he held his ground. Instead, with one hand he seized Lauren by the throat and lifted her into the air.
She thrashed, but as oxygen cut off to her brain, Lauren lost consciousness.
And when she opened her eyes—she was in a pit like this.
The dirt had already climbed to Lauren’s head. Cheolmin’s two men—still not fully conscious—were taller, so the dirt was only up to their chins, but they’d be buried like her in seconds.
Darkness swallowed everything, and Lauren was buried under soil.
Hoo…
Hoo…
At least she could still breathe, but claustrophobia was starting to surge.
In her agent life, she’d faced death several times and always made it through. But now she couldn’t see an opening.
She only had a few minutes. She had to get out before then.
Lauren tried to breathe slowly and conserve air.
Hoo…
Hoo…
Huh?
Why could she breathe?
Something was wrong.
She was buried alive in a pit, yet she was breathing normally.
Lauren wriggled her hands behind her back.
And the ropes binding her wrists slid off as if loosening on their own, slipping from her hands.
Inside the soil, she lifted her arms as if swimming, and started moving upward like she was floating.
If you’re buried in a pit, it should be like sinking into a swamp—no footing, no leverage. But strangely, the place her feet pressed against had hardened, and she could launch her body upward as if climbing stairs.
She felt the soft, yielding sensation of a human body beside her.
Cheolmin’s men, buried with her.
In the dark soil, Lauren felt around for their faces—yet the dirt parted without resistance wherever she moved her hands, like water.
After a few tries, her fingers touched near someone’s nose.
They, too, were breathing normally like her. They weren’t moving—still unconscious.
Lauren wondered if Korean soil was loose and low-density enough to make this possible.
That seemed like the best explanation.
She’d thought she was dead for sure, but once she could breathe again, her mind started moving fast.
She didn’t know what was happening outside, but the enemies could still be nearby.
Carefully, she pulled herself up toward the surface.
When she was close enough to sense the ground above, she heard fighting outside.
“Where did you hide my younger brothers?!”
It was Cheolmin.
“This one’s impressive! Are you a Korean enhanced soldier?!”
“No wonder the triad guys have been acting cautious. With swordsmanship like this, ordinary people can’t handle you!”
Lauren gently cleared away dirt and exposed only her eyes, checking the situation.
Cheolmin was fighting the giant who had subdued her—sword in one hand.
Behind the giant were four more men of similar build, and the triad members who’d been shoveling were standing by with rifles.
The fight between Cheolmin and the giant was intense.
Choi Cheolmin was leaping and swinging his blade, and the giant was moving that massive body at an impossible speed.
Lauren slipped a hand into her chest and activated the emergency transmitter attached to the end of her bra underwire.
A compact beacon with GPS and a distress signal function.
How long would it take?
Probably a few minutes…
If the CIA—currently concentrating all efforts on Korea—was on full alert, they’d deploy within minutes. Once the transmitter activated, satellite monitoring would begin over this mountain clearing.
Since her life wasn’t in immediate danger, Lauren decided to stay inside the soil and emerge when backup arrived.
Then she started slapping the cheeks of the two men beside her to wake them.
To Cheolmin, it felt like he was fighting the Hulk from a movie.
The enemy’s entire body was wrapped in muscle, and each blow looked like it could smash rocks. And that Hulk moved like someone who’d trained in martial arts for years—no wasted motion.
Cheolmin’s swordsmanship wasn’t actually high-level. The truth was, thanks to internal energy, his reflexes improved, and he just swung fast.
So even with a real sword, he couldn’t subdue an enhanced soldier who’d trained martial arts systematically for a long time.
Cheolmin—who’d felt like he could face anyone with the internal power overflowing in his body—was panicking now.
“I’ll just solve it with guns!”
A triad man, glancing at the soldier the Party had provided, spoke when the fight showed no sign of ending.
After taking control of Seoul’s underworld and pushing drugs into distribution, the biggest obstacle was Choi Cheolmin.
In a short time, he’d fought dozens of gangsters barehanded and won, taking over Gangbuk.
And he was brutal—once someone became his enemy, he chased them down to the end and cut off their breathing.
That was why the triad had dug a trap and planned to eliminate Choi Cheolmin in one go with firearms.
But the soldiers sent from the Party were insisting they would handle Cheolmin themselves, stopping the triad from stepping in.
The soldiers the Party sent were real monsters.
Even now, one of them was single-handedly fighting Choi Cheolmin flying around with a real sword—it didn’t look like a human fight. The five enhanced soldiers were chuckling among themselves, judging the battle like spectators.
But the triad leader was getting anxious.
They’d worked hard to set bait and successfully lure Choi Cheolmin here.
Now, with the automatic rifles they held, they could turn him into a beehive and end it all—but the soldiers were dragging their feet, enjoying themselves.
If this went wrong, the soldiers might not care, but he would obviously be purged.
“Wait. We need to confirm whether he’s a Korean enhanced soldier—or just some unusual guy!”
The enhanced soldier glared at the triad man who spoke in a goading tone.
But right after he said that, his body suddenly began to tremble violently.
Pop!
With a sound like leather bursting, the enhanced soldier the Party had sent swelled up, then exploded like a balloon.
“What the—?!”
Everyone gathered in the clearing froze in shock at the unexpected turn.
Watching a human being burst like a balloon was a horrific sight even to people who’d seen it all.