Chapter 65. Do You Like Me?
Incheon International Airport.
Three people coming down from the immigration checkpoint caught people’s eyes.
A long raincoat, a hat that covered the entire face, sunglasses, and a mask made people look back, wondering if they were foreign celebrities.
A guide was already waiting for them in the arrivals hall.
But he was also similarly covered head to toe, so you couldn’t make out any identifying features at all.
The man went to the tall man standing in the middle of the three arrivals and bent at the waist.
“Greetings, Elders. I am Abe Yago, a Discipline Knight in charge of Japan.”
The three were Elder Nine, Elder Ten, and Elder Eleven—elders previously dispatched by the Blood Clan’s council of elders to secure the Daywalker.
“Fine. Since it’s daytime, guide us to the lodging first.”
Without even looking at Yago, the elders strode over and got into the car that was waiting.
“Is the Daywalker currently in Seoul? What’s the latest?”
Inside the car, Elder Nine asked Yago, who sat in the front passenger seat.
“As I reported, Chaerin made the child Blood Fiend she took that day into a Daywalker, and they’re living among ordinary people, acting like a normal human.”
“Hmph… Becoming a Daywalker is astonishing enough, but to make even another clan into a Daywalker.”
The moment he got into the heavily tinted car, Elder Nine removed his sunglasses and mask.
He was a white man in his early twenties.
Thin and tall, with the look of a young model, but his way of speaking was entirely that of an old man.
He was excited about the existence of Chaerin, a former Discipline Knight who could grant the Daywalker ability even to other clans.
A Blood Clan freed from the constraint of sunlight.
No one in the world would be able to stop them.
“If we attempt an assault, we expect fierce resistance, so for now we’ve only been monitoring from afar. What’s unusual is that humans also seem to have sensed something, and surveillance around the motel is strict. Within a one-kilometer radius of the motel, one U.S. Army division is disguised and lying in ambush in residential areas. If we directly raid the motel, they’ll rush in within minutes.”
“What are we afraid of—mere human gunpowder? Here in Korea, our Blood Clan has no restrictions at all.”
Elder Nine frowned, clearly displeased with Yago’s words.
He feared human eyes more than human weapons, but here, he didn’t need to worry about that.
“They are armed not with standard infantry equipment, but with undisclosed new weapons, so unless it is a clan member with a native ability, they are hard to face. Moreover, their numbers are not trivial, so it will not be easy to deal with them.”
“Why are the U.S. Army watching the Daywalker?”
“I bewitched a few humans and looked into that, but even the ones who received the order didn’t know the details. The command they were given was that the people of the motel are important figures, so they must provide protection equivalent to that of the U.S. President.”
Abe Yago, bald and fat, answered politely, trying to please the elders, the highest tier of the clan.
“You said the U.S. Army is attacking our clan members who are expanding their presence in Korea.”
“Yes. If there is even a slightly large disturbance, it doesn’t appear in the media, but the U.S. Army and their agents deploy first and either eliminate the clan members or abduct them. We confirmed they transport them back to the U.S. mainland and use them as living research subjects.”
“Cruel human bastards. Their cruelty has always been worse than our clan’s.”
Elder Nine ground his teeth.
A representative human-hater, Elder Nine saw the lifting of restrictions in Korea as an opportunity and argued they should aggressively expand the clan’s power.
They believed the Blood Clan should raise the primitive human species like pigs or cattle, and that true humanity should rule this world.
In the world he dreamed of, humans would be born and raised in cages like chickens in today’s chicken coops, locked behind bars until death.
“Then have you prepared the operation to capture the Daywalker?”
“Yes. Tonight, we deliberately threw out bait. Whenever the U.S. Army and CIA agents staying at the same motel hunt clan members, the Daywalker follows behind them every time. It seems to be for protection, so when they are in danger, they will reveal themselves. If, at that moment, the three Elders rush in at once, then no matter how much Chaerin claims there is no match for her among the third generation, she will have no choice.”
At that, Elder Nine nodded.
If elders with the power of the true Blood Clan stepped in, the third generation would obviously be unable to move even a finger.
“As bait to hook Chaerin, a second-generation—who is the reincarnation of Elder Three—will step forward.”
“Fine. Understood. Then we’ll rest until evening.”
While they talked, the car arrived at a hotel located in the tallest building in the Republic of Korea.
Entering the largest and most expensive room, they smiled in satisfaction at the bathtub filled with human blood.
It was a gift from Yago, the Discipline Knight on the Japan side.
Outside Korea, even an elder couldn’t easily enjoy the luxury of bathing in blood, but Korea truly was paradise.
Each elder took a room, submerged themselves in fresh blood drawn not long ago, and closed their eyes.
Vitality surged through their bodies, and it felt like they were growing younger by a hundred years.
The President summoned a few ministers.
It was an informal meeting held without the ministers who always nitpicked his words and only shouted “no.”
But even the ministers who usually followed his words faithfully were now speaking with one voice: they had to tell the people about the current situation and declare martial law.
Martial law.
The President opened his mouth, thinking that was the one thing that absolutely could not happen.
“So you’re saying media control is impossible now, no matter what.”
Since it wasn’t an official meeting, the President spoke bluntly.
A good number of them were people he had clinked whiskey glasses with as “hyungnim and dongsaeng” since before he became President.
“Yes. There are media companies that will break it as soon as tomorrow. Before that, it looks better for the government to proactively disclose the current monster situation.”
“I really don’t understand it. The media. The ones who should cooperate with government policy—why are they so desperate to flap their mouths and ruin the country?”
The President spoke with venom in his eyes.
“The monsters’ rampages have increased exponentially and are spreading through social media. Even if the media doesn’t say it, most citizens know something is happening. More and more people have directly witnessed scenes of monsters appearing across the country, tearing people apart and drinking blood. We’ve reached a point we can’t stop.”
“Good. Then let’s turn this crisis into an opportunity! An unidentified terrorist force. Push it as monsters trying to overthrow the government and collapse Korea from within! Tsk… if this were before, we could’ve said it was North Korean bastards and it would’ve been clean.”
The Minister of the Interior and Safety spoke with an uneasy expression.
“I don’t think it’ll work. Isn’t it too out of the blue?”
The President sneered.
“Hyungnim, you’ve been in politics so long and you still have no feel for it. You know ‘three men make a tiger.’ If three people insist, they can create a tiger out of nothing, and if you repeat a lie a hundred times, it becomes truth.”
Then the Minister of Culture cautiously spoke up.
“What if we say it’s Japan? A scenario where anti-Korean monsters mutated by exposure to Japan’s nuclear wastewater are rampaging in Korea might sell better.”
But the President snapped.
“You’re Minister of Culture and you don’t know international affairs this badly? Right now we can’t sell China, the U.S., Japan, or even North Korea. We’ll just go with domestic subversive forces! Give it a red-leaning feel and label every group critical of the administration as subversive!”
The ministers gathered frowned, thinking it might not work, but the President’s words were absolute.
He was a supreme master, political level 13, who survived even life-or-death crises by turning them into opportunities like a phoenix. The ministers sighed inwardly and stood, swallowing down the thought that if he said jump, they had no choice.
“Ah! And the Americans! Why are those bastards taking the monsters?”
The ministers who were about to rise sat back down at the President’s question.
“Most monsters are difficult to capture alive. They’re violent, more ferocious than wild beasts, and hard for humans to handle. Also, when they reach death, the bodies turn into ash and disappear. The U.S. Army uses their special equipment to suppress monsters by force, and they are transporting every captured one back to their home country. No matter how you look at it, they’re trying to use them as test subjects.”
“Really? Then we should catch a few and experiment too! This is happening on our land—why are we just sucking our fingers?”
“Large conglomerates and pharmaceutical companies are already trying to capture monsters alive, but we understand it’s difficult to subdue them.”
“What is that U.S. Army equipment they use to capture them?”
“It appears to be undisclosed exoskeleton enhancement suits that maximize infantry capability. According to reports from defense research institutes, the performance is high enough to easily win even one-on-one against a polar bear or an elephant. Looking at the Chinese terrorists who appeared in Seoul during the previous terror incident, China also seems to have related technology to some degree, but their equipment is severely inferior compared to the U.S.”
“Don’t we have that? What are the defense researchers doing?”
“They say there are a few prototype units built for testing, but safety is still poor, so it’s hard to run trials.”
“Just approve it immediately. We’ll catch a few monsters too, distribute them to the conglomerates, and have the defense labs research them. Are we just going to watch others do it?”
The Minister of the Interior and Safety and the Minister of National Defense had headaches.
The people under him couldn’t keep up with that bulldozer-like drive.
Day off.
I went up to my lodging, washed up, cooked and ate two packs of jjajang ramen lightly, felt full, and closed my eyes.
The ticking clock annoyed me, so I stopped it with telekinesis.
The sound of water running through the pipes in the lodging also annoyed me.
Could I stop that too?
Why not?
I stopped the water flowing through the pipes as well.
Now it was quiet.
But once the irritating sounds disappeared, all kinds of everyday noises became audible instead.
A dog barking. A man shouting that he collects used computers.
Noises that didn’t bother me normally felt seriously irritating today.
A dog and the used-computer guy were not things you could stop like a clock’s second hand.
I knew exactly why I was suffering insomnia right now.
So I checked the coin price of what Chanhyeok hyung bought a little while ago.
It was skyrocketing.
A blazing red thunderbolt.
In just two hours, it went up fivefold, and the rise wasn’t stopping—it was climbing like it had gone insane.
I almost searched for the reason why some coin I’d never even heard of was surging like this, but instead I threw my phone and pulled the blanket up to the top of my head.
Then I numbed my auditory nerves to block outside noise.
One sheep…
Two sheep…
I tried to calm my mind and sleep in silence, but my mind grew more and more wide awake.
And only the scene of ten million won swelling into 150 million stayed vivid before my eyes.
Since it rose five times after that, it would be about 750 million now.
When I watched Bella gradually grow her assets from 100 million, it was bearable, but thinking Chanhyeok hyung earned 750 million in a few hours made it impossible to sleep.
And Bella said it would keep rising until before 10 a.m. tomorrow, so there was no telling how high it would go.
Still, I forced my desire down.
Taking interest in things that weren’t mine.
Greed that didn’t match my station.
That was how people ruined themselves.
This was also a kind of inner demon.
I was already in an inner demon, and that was why I was suffering this pain.
After counting maybe ten thousand sheep, I finally felt my mind grow quiet.
But then I felt someone shaking my body.
When I opened my eyes, it was Bella.
“Why don’t you answer when someone calls you!”
Since I had only been moving my lips, I reconnected my auditory nerves.
“What did you say?”
“Aren’t you eating? Let’s go eat!”
Bella said, with a bit of kimchi soup spilled on the front of her pink tracksuit. She must’ve eaten kimchi stew for lunch.
Now that my mind was quiet, even seeing Bella didn’t make me feel hateful.
I overcame the inner demon.
And we went out to eat dinner.
The long-term guests were all out, and only the kid in Room 102 had come back from school and was gaming, so we took him with us.
“What are we eating?”
“Why? Kang Chan is buying?”
At Bella’s words, I snorted and said,
“Going Dutch.”
Bella smiled slightly and said we should go eat beef.
Then do I pay only what I ate?
But Bella coolly paid not only my share, where I ate timidly and little, but also the kid’s—who devoured four servings.
No matter how I looked at it, Bella clearly had romantic interest in me.
Kindness only goes up to pork.
From beef onward, it’s love, isn’t it.
I asked Bella what I was curious about.
“Bella, do you like me?”
Bella, who had been walking along in a good mood, sucking on an ice cream after eating beef, stopped short.
Then, with a cold expression, she said icily,
“I’m saying this clearly right now so there’s no misunderstanding later. Kang! Chan! You are not my type! Don’t you dare dream about that kind of thing!”
At her decisive tone, something surged up in my chest.
It felt like the inner demon I’d forced down was rising again.