Chapter 49: The Final Mission
Chapter 49: The Final Mission
Changsu was a single man in his mid-thirties who worked at a major corporation.
A graduate of a prestigious university, with a job others envied.
Proud of calling himself “MZ,” faithfully keeping his work-life balance, and living what he believed was a successful life, his life began to break down one day.
He felt as if his once endlessly shining life was plunging off an infinite cliff.
The problem was that there was no way, with his own power, to stop it.
It started the day he met Hangyeon at an Itaewon club he went to with friends.
A public servant in her late twenties, she said she came to blow off stress, and that night the two naturally became intimate.
Hangyeon handed him a tiny pill, saying it was a fatigue-recovery supplement she took often, and that night Changsu felt like he’d been reborn.
It was definitely drugs.
But Changsu didn’t blame Hangyeon.
If anything, he resented that he’d learned about something this good so late.
At first, the drugs made Changsu’s life better.
When the drug high kicked in, he could be more creative and more focused.
At his workplace, which valued individual performance, Changsu was able to be recognized for his ability thanks to drugs.
The problem was that the duration of the drug’s effect kept getting shorter, and when it wore off, a time of hellish pain arrived.
Just three weeks after first trying it, Changsu reached a state where he couldn’t live his daily life without drugs.
Because of withdrawal symptoms so severe that normal life was impossible, he took sick leave from work.
He tried to set his life back on track as it plunged toward the cliff, but drugs were the devil’s medicine.
Human will couldn’t quit it.
When the effect wore off, he craved it like a madman, and when he ran out, he hit Hangyeon’s contact and screamed at her to bring more.
Last night too, he used with her in a motel room, then got seized by madness and caused an incident.
In his blurred memories, he remembered beating her violently and indiscriminately.
As he slowly came to, a splitting headache pounding, Changsu took water from the mini-fridge in the motel room, drank it, and turned on the TV.
Beside him, naked Hangyeon was asleep, her eye badly bruised and swollen.
His forearm stung, and when he looked, there were clear bite marks—torn skin with dried blood stuck to it. His chest and shoulders were filled with fingernail marks, and there were bruises.
Changsu drank another glass of cold water, trying to steady himself.
The TV was showing the news, and the content was strange.
“The government announced that this incident was the successful result of a top-secret operation carried out to eradicate the rapidly increasing number of drug offenders in recent times, but voices from all walks of life are condemning it as a brazen lie. In reality, frontline police stations and precincts—where large numbers of drug offenders turned themselves in—are experiencing severe administrative chaos, and testimonies are pouring in that they received no prior information at all regarding this incident.”
He focused on the news, thinking, What are they talking about?, and a story he never could have imagined came out.
Last night, tens of thousands of drug offenders across the nation voluntarily turned themselves in.
And serious criminals—like drug manufacturers and distributors—were all wiped out.
Changsu’s mind snapped fully awake, and he shook Hangyeon beside him to wake her.
Hangyeon was the one who pushed him into a pit of despair, but she too was no different from him—practically a victim who’d become addicted unintentionally. When she was in her right mind, rather than resentment, he sometimes only felt pity, thinking they were in the same boat.
“Mm… ah… my eye. Why does it hurt so much!”
As she came to, Hangyeon frowned, pain surfacing.
Changsu handed her bottled water.
“Huh? What’s wrong with me?”
After drinking cold water and clearing her head, Hangyeon shouted as if she’d seen something shocking, even though she hadn’t looked at the news.
“Look at this! I don’t have withdrawal symptoms! I don’t have the drug high, but I don’t have withdrawal symptoms!”
Only then did Changsu realize he also couldn’t feel withdrawal.
When the drug high wore off, the anxiety and restlessness that felt like dying—
And the racing thoughts that made it impossible to focus on anything—none of that was there.
He had returned to the state he’d been in before falling into living hell.
Overjoyed at this unbelievable phenomenon, the two hugged each other tightly.
It felt like they’d returned to the living world from right in front of the gates of hell.
Incheon Airport, arrivals hall.
For the British man Sam, this was his first time coming to Korea.
Even though Korea had recently been classified as a developed country, to Sam it was a backward country tucked into a corner of Asia.
After traveling through Southeast Asia, influenced by people praising it to the skies, he’d gone to Thailand last year, but he ended up deeply disappointed in Asia.
Thailand was hot and humid.
By Sam’s standards, it was underdeveloped.
After that Thailand trip, he swore he would never travel to Asia again.
But an urgent business trip to Korea came up at his company, and Sam was assigned as the person in charge.
His coworkers envied him, saying Korea was popular these days, but Sam wanted to beg them to go instead if they wanted it so badly.
The biggest reason was that Sam was a drug addict.
He’d heard Korea’s drug control was strict, so he wondered whether he could endure the trip without using.
But he couldn’t refuse the Korea trip. Sam planned to finish quickly and return to the UK.
It would be painful, but he intended to endure withdrawal during the business trip.
But Sam realized on the plane that he’d made a serious miscalculation.
He thought he could last about a week without drugs, but in reality, even the flight time was hard to endure.
Irritation and discomfort crept up. A throbbing headache arrived, and he began to feel as if bugs were crawling on his forearms and calves.
In a few more hours, it felt like auditory hallucinations and delusions would start.
Sam decided he had to find drugs inside Korea somehow.
Usually drugs were traded in back alleys, and he worried he’d get into trouble if he tried to make a clumsy deal in an unfamiliar country, with unfamiliar Korean.
But on the plane, he realized how meaningless those worries were.
Within 24 hours, no matter what price he had to pay, he had to get drugs.
However, the moment the plane entered Korean airspace—at that very moment—Sam had an experience he couldn’t believe.
It felt like something throughout his entire body turned to ash and vanished in an instant.
At the same time, the withdrawal aftereffects that had been building little by little disappeared as if washed away.
His mind cleared, and he felt refreshed.
Sam instinctively realized that all the drug residue in his body had vanished.
And when he arrived, he saw breaking news at the airport: Korea was, as of today, a drug-free country.
It also reported that tens of thousands of drug offenders took drug tests, and every single one tested negative.
Sam wasn’t the only one with this experience.
On the internet, there were countless testimonies from travelers to Korea who experienced the same thing.
They said that the moment they entered Korea, their bodies—saturated with drugs—returned to normal, and this fact immediately spread across global social media.
Countless people around the world suffering from aromatic psychoactive substances and drugs began preparing to go to Korea as soon as they heard the news.
A train bound for Daejeon rolled into the platform.
The sun still hadn’t fully gone down, and everything was filled with golden sunset light.
Seorin sat on the train and stared, enchanted, at the red sun sinking far in the distance.
No matter how much she looked, she never got tired of it.
She remembered her father from when she was still human, riding an ox home along the dusk road as the day faded.
She could also vividly see her mother, bustling in and out of the kitchen to cook dinner.
Even though so much time had passed, the memories didn’t fade—they only grew sharper.
Her younger siblings, younger than Seorin, were learning to read in front of the porch, glowing red in the sunset.
It had been a happy time.
Those seventeen years as a human were clearer than her vampire life that had lasted over four hundred years.
Sometimes Seorin felt a boiling impulse to throw herself into sunlight.
The sun was an absolute existence that burned away all that was wicked and impure.
Under it, she wanted to turn her cursed, filthy body into a handful of ash.
But Seorin had something she absolutely had to do.
Revenge for her parents.
Revenge for the monster that tore apart her beloved siblings.
Until she found that filthy vampire who trampled a mountain charcoal-burner village in a single night and crushed its heart, she couldn’t close her eyes in peace.
A man with white, snow-like hair.
She still remembered the blue eyes and the long fangs that protruded.
When she saw him in Joseon four hundred years ago, she thought he was simply a blue-eyed dokkaebi.
But now she knew what he was.
A Western-born, old, powerful bloodkin.
If he had been strong even four hundred years ago, then he had to be at least a thousand years old.
On a night with a full moon, the scene was vivid: the demon tore apart the villagers, then drank their blood.
For some whim of its own, it spared only Seorin in that charcoal-burner village.
She charged at it with the sword she learned from her father, but she quickly suffered a deep wound and was dying.
Even at the brink between life and death, she cursed it again and again, filled with rage.
Perhaps intrigued by Seorin’s furious cursing, her enemy turned Seorin into a vampire.
Then it disappeared, leaving the words that it would wait forever, so if she wanted revenge, she should come find it.
From that day on, the driving force of Seorin’s life was rage and hatred.
After becoming a vampire, Seorin felt deep disgust toward herself, but she believed she had to survive in order to repay her grudge.
A blood fiend was a being that could only live by drinking the blood of the living. It couldn’t consume any other food and could only swallow human blood.
Human blood used to be easier to obtain in the past. When there were no police or CCTV like modern society, if a woman walked alone at night, prey would approach like fish biting bait.
Not knowing they were prey, they always came creeping in, filthy and leering.
But even harder than obtaining blood was dealing with the corpse.
In the past, it was enough to bury it deep in the mountains, but in modern times, disposing of a corpse was truly difficult. That was why she always chose coastal areas as her residence.
Because the sea swallowed everything.
Seorin looked at her phone again.
The thousandth and final directive from the Elders’ Council.
Discipline Knights become free once they complete 1,000 missions.
And they can demand one wish from the Elders’ Council. Seorin planned to use the Elders’ Council’s organization to find her enemy—the blue-eyed monster.
“Near Daejeon Station. Traces of bloodkin are on the verge of being exposed to the media and the police. Find the target and deal with it.”
The rules of the vampire bloodline were simple.
First: do not form groups.
It was said this was an agreement made long ago with the leader of the human race during the Crusades. The detailed inside story would be best known by the old Elders who had lived since then, but no one explained it—as if it were the bloodline’s shameful history.
But because of that agreement with humans, blood fiends could never form groups. The only exception was the Elders’ Council, composed of twelve Elders, and their subordinate Discipline Knights. If other blood fiends dared to gather in groups of two or more, Discipline Knights would immediately set out to punish them.
If it couldn’t be handled internally, then the human king would step in. If it came to that, the bloodline could be annihilated.
The blood fiend group in China—Seorin’s mission not long ago—were older beings than Seorin herself.
They believed blood fiends were superior to humans, and that humans were nothing but food for the bloodline.
Their goal was to domesticate humans as livestock.
But they were completely wiped out by the Discipline Knights, including Seorin. There were occasionally blood fiends like that within the bloodline—ones who wanted a bloodline that had to live hidden in the shadows to come out into the light and rule the world.
The second rule was not to let the bloodline’s identity be exposed.
This too was an agreement made with the human race.
But this rule was even harder to keep than the first—especially in modern society, as everything became more digitized. That was why most of those executed by Discipline Knights were killed for failing to keep the second rule.
Young individuals who hadn’t been bloodkin for long were always hot-blooded and arrogant, so they constantly made foolish mistakes.
That was why Discipline Knights like Seorin never had a day of leisure.
In fact, among the 999 missions so far, most were executions of bloodkin who broke the second rule in modern times.
This final mission, too, was a similar mission, nothing special.
Before she knew it, the train arrived at Daejeon Station.
By the time the train stopped at the station, darkness had already settled.
Seorin covered her face with a mask and got off the train.