Suspicions (1)
After somehow wrapping up the work yesterday, I was genuinely surprised by the morning news. To think he would actually turn himself in. It had seemed impossible for a person like that to live without any guilt, so I’d basically told him to at least carry some. Well, anyway, it was probably for the best. The result was quite different from what Seong Si-hyuk had hoped for, but this was the right outcome. And even if he had kept living that way, there was no guarantee Seong Si-yeon would have stayed happy forever. This was correct.
That was when my phone pinged. When I turned on the screen, the dummy gumiho had sent a message.
What was I supposed to do? It wasn’t like she was offering to cover my rent, utilities, and living expenses. Thinking about money made me curious about something else. Didn’t SnowFlower ride a bike? That meant maintenance costs, and judging by how much she ate, her food bill had to be pretty high. Where was all that money coming from?
I sent another message.
SnowFlower proudly sent me a screenshot. The screen showed a stock chart, and the amount was….
I immediately left the chat and blocked her. I had no reason to associate with a scammer.
That night.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
“What the…?”
Someone was pounding on my front door.
“Who is it?”
I asked without opening the door. An angry voice shot back immediately.
“You bastard! You said you’d help me, so why the hell did you block me?!”
“Wow, a yokai.”
“What?!”
“No, I mean, how did you even find my house?”
I had only blocked her as a joke because she was being annoying, planning to unblock her in the morning… I never expected her to show up in person. She must have thought I was seriously cutting her off forever. She really was naïve.
“You kept ignoring me, so I asked your friend!”
“Hey, it’s loud out here. Just come inside first. And what friend?”
“That… Bae Ju-hyuk guy!”
“How did you even find him… Never mind. The neighbor will complain. Keep it down and come in.”
When I opened the door, I was greeted by a completely drenched girl.
“Why are you soaked?”
“It started raining while I was riding the bike. I couldn’t help it.”
“Ah.”
It had indeed begun to drizzle on my way home from the part-time job, and now it was pouring.
“You rode a bike in the rain? Are you an idiot?”
“I thought it would only be a little!”
“Hey, quiet…”
The moment SnowFlower raised her voice, the neighbor’s door flew open.
“Will you shut the hell up?! Keep it down!”
“…Sorry.”
“…S-sorry.”
The door slammed shut with a bang. I glared at SnowFlower.
“I told you to be quiet.”
“S-sorry…”
“Get inside. We’ll talk after you come in.”
“O-okay…”
She seemed more sorry toward the neighbor than me. She kept glancing at the closed door as she stepped inside.
“Dry off first.”
“Ah, yeah.”
I handed her a towel. She was soaked from her head to her rider jacket all the way down to her legs. SnowFlower began carefully drying her hair first. I watched blankly, then realized a little too late that I had made a mistake.
What was I thinking, letting a yokai into my house…? Of course, given her personality, she probably wouldn’t try to hurt me, but a yokai was still a yokai. Inviting one inside was not something a normal person should ever do.
…Was I getting too used to this?
“Hey.”
“What?”
“Why are you staring at me like that? Never seen someone caught in the rain before? Or maybe…”
SnowFlower looked at me with clear disgust.
“You’re not having weird thoughts, are you?”
…I really couldn’t let this yokai get away with that. When I pulled out a talisman and the lightning strike talisman from my pocket, SnowFlower flinched and backed away.
“W-why are you taking those out?! I was joking! Joking!! Why do you always pull out talismans every time you reach into your pocket?!”
“You call that a joke? Your face looked dead serious.”
“Still, your reaction is way too extreme!”
“How could I stay calm after a mere yokai said something so insulting?”
“What insult?! Okay, fine! I’m sorry, so stop coming closer with that thing!!!”
After the little commotion, I earned SnowFlower’s acknowledgment that I had zero interest in yokai.
“Crazy bastard…”
She now saw me as a madman who hated yokai regardless of whether they possessed beauty that could topple nations. Not bad.
Once she finished drying herself with the towel, she handed it back. But her clothes were still wet. If she walked around the room like that, the floor would turn into a lake.
“Hey, this won’t work.”
“What?”
“Just take a shower.”
“…What?!”
When she jumped back in alarm, I frowned.
“I don’t have any weird intentions. Did I not explain myself clearly enough?”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“Your eyes, expression, and actions are saying plenty right now.”
“…You really just want me to shower?”
“You expect me to let you walk around looking like a drowned rat? Absolutely not. I cleaned the room after work tonight. You think I want to see the place I just cleaned turn into a swamp because of you? No way.”
I went into the room and brought out a bathrobe, extra towels, a plain T-shirt, and some loose shorts.
“If the shorts are too big, just tighten the string. Shower, change into these, and come out. Got it?”
“…Yeah.”
SnowFlower hurried into the bathroom, trying not to drip water everywhere. Once the door closed, I let out a long sigh and went into my room.
“The first woman to visit my room is a yokai. Why is my life like this?”
SnowFlower came out of the bathroom clean and fluffy, wearing my oversized clothes. Looking at her like this, she really did resemble a dog that had just been bathed and had its fur dried….
“You look like a dog.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”
Well, foxes are part of the canine family. A gumiho is basically a dog, right?
She had already naturally picked up the hair dryer and was drying her hair. I pointed at the dryer.
“Dry your clothes too. Leave once they’re done.”
“Ah… yeah. Okay…”
“So why did you come all the way here? I blocked you, but I already explained I couldn’t help because of work.”
“W-well, you blocked me!! I got worried you might actually be betraying me…”
“You play pranks all the time, but you take my pranks seriously? Did you really think I’d go back on my word?”
“……”
…Why wasn’t she answering? When I slipped my hand into my pocket, SnowFlower waved both hands frantically.
“S-sorry! It’s just… when you do this kind of work, you run into a lot of liars.”
“Liars?”
“Not all spirits are good. They say they want counseling, but when I go, they’re not even there half the time… Some evil spirits have even tried to lure me in to eat me.”
“Then how are you still alive?”
“Do you want to die?! I’m a thousand-year-old yokai! Most evil spirits can’t beat me!”
Of course I knew that. I just couldn’t help teasing her because her reactions were so entertaining.
“So that’s why you have trust issues.”
“It’s not that bad…”
“Yeah, I get it.”
I turned on my phone, opened KakaoTalk, and unblocked her right there. Then I showed her the screen.
“Happy now?”
“Ah… yeah.”
“Is that all you came for?”
“Yeah, I guess… Oh, wait!”
SnowFlower suddenly shouted as if she had just remembered something important.
“What?”
“Did you check the gallery?”
“No.”
I had been busy with classes and my part-time job all day, so I hadn’t had time. Besides, I had no reason to frequently visit a community where yokai and ghosts hung out.
“That guy! He posted about us this time!”
“Which guy?”
“The Tiger Great Demon King!”
“…Huh?”
Tiger Great Demon King? If it was that guy, then definitely….
“The one that seemed to eat people?”
“Yeah! He lives in the mountains around Busan!”
What the hell?
“What do you mean he posted about us?”
“The evil spirit that appeared at the university and the morning news about Seong Si-hyuk! He wrote about those!”
“…Wasn’t he the one who only ever posted about what he ate?”
“Exactly, that’s why it’s weird! Why would he suddenly talk about us?”
It was definitely strange. The guy who posted the same kind of thing every day—what he had eaten deliciously, posts that made you suspect he was eating people—had suddenly mentioned us? It was extremely suspicious.
“What did he write?”
“Just search for TigerGreatDemonKing. It’ll come right up.”
To check what SnowFlower had told me, I accessed the Ghost Gallery.
The familiar login screen passed, and I saw that quite a few new posts had gone up in just one day. I immediately searched for the author “TigerGreatDemonKing” and found the post SnowFlower had seen.
“It’s real…”
“See? I was so shocked when I saw it!”
“…I’m a normal person, so I get being surprised, but why are you scared? You’re a thousand-year-old yokai.”
“He eats people! It doesn’t matter how many years he’s lived; there’s no faster way to build yoki than by directly devouring humans!”
“…Are you falling behind?”
“It’s already been over fourteen years since he first appeared in the gallery. Do you know how many posts he’s written that imply he ate someone?”
“How is this gallery so old?”
“The Ghost Gallery has been around since 2005?”
It had a longer history than I thought….
“So it makes sense that you’d lose if you ran into him?”
“Don’t even talk about it. Look at how many posts he’s written in fourteen years. It’s not easy for yokai to eat people, you know? That’s why they usually have to live for hundreds or thousands of years before becoming Great Yokai. In the end, it’s not about time; it’s about how much spiritual energy they’ve stolen from humans.”
“I guess… that makes sense.”
“But what if he really has eaten as many people as the number of posts he’s written?”
SnowFlower looked at me with a slightly creeped-out expression.
“He would have surpassed the level of what we call a Great Yokai long ago.”
“……That does sound dangerous.”
“Of course you have your shikigami and those annoying talismans, but you know they aren’t invincible.”
“Still, it’s not like he suddenly came looking for us just because he mentioned us.”
“That’s true, but… it’s weird that he suddenly brought us up. Aren’t you worried?”
“Now that you’re making such a fuss, I am a little.”
“Hey! I’m being serious!”
Well, it wasn’t that I had zero worries. There was something off about it, just like SnowFlower said. I scrolled through the posts written by TigerGreatDemonKing to see if there was more, but besides the strange post from this morning, he hadn’t uploaded anything else. The rest were the same as before.
Wondering if there was more information, I glanced at the recommended posts….
This was…
“What are you looking at?”
“Huh? Nothing…”
“Wait, isn’t that IP about you?”
“Looks like it…”
What the hell was going on? I clicked on the post that seemed to have started it all—the one with over two hundred comments.
Remember the floating user who did the offline meet with SnowFlower a while back? At first I didn’t think much of it, but when I looked closer it was seriously weird. Check this out. (screenshot of IP listed as 100.100) See? The IP is 100.100, right? Isn’t that strange? How is this possible?
It was a short post. The fact that so many comments had piled up under a simple “isn’t this weird?” post meant there had been a lot of debate. I checked the next post.
As most of you gallery users already know, Ghost Gallery IPs are divided between those of yokai/anomalies and those of spirits. For the newbies, the former is determined by (birth year.birth month and day) and the latter by (date of death.time of death). These days there are so many newly deceased spirits that IPs overlap, so sometimes it uses (address of death.time of death). Check the gallery notice for details. Anyway, IPs are assigned like that. Now look at this floating user’s IP. Doesn’t it feel incredibly out of place? I’ll explain why it’s out of place for those who don’t get it.
First, assuming 100.100 is a yokai, this IP makes no sense. Born in the year 100? Even if we say it’s some ancient yokai that smells like it’s been around since the Goryeo dynasty, the second half is also 100. January 00? October 0? Both are impossible. Those dates don’t exist.
Then let’s assume 100.100 is a spirit. The first formula for spirit IPs—date of death and time of death—would mean death on October 0 at exactly 10:00, which is also impossible. That leaves only the second option, which would make sense: death at 10:00 on the 100th street or 100th road of some district. That works, right?
But those of you who saw the incident that day know that 100.100 is very strange. First, spirits cannot touch objects. Their bodies also don’t interact with physical terrain. Yet look at the photo uploaded in the post 100.100 wrote during the SnowFlower offline meet. (screenshot of post) It says they took the photo themselves. Doesn’t something seem off?
??? : Wait, what the fuck? Spirits upload photos to the gallery all the time. What’s the problem?
??? : Doesn’t this guy know that spirits these days can use Galaxy Pads to browse the gallery, chat, and take photos?
That’s what some might say. But the act of taking the photo isn’t the issue. Look at the angle of the photo. If you look closely, it’s taken from the perspective of someone sitting on the bed next to the subject.
The moment I read that far, I froze. One poorly written post had snowballed into this. It was honestly a little chilling. I kept reading.
What did I say earlier? Spirits can’t touch objects and they pass through physical terrain. Sitting on a bed should be impossible. But what about 100.100? They sat and took the photo. Now do you get it? What’s weird about it? Do you understand why the 2009.603 user said it was strange?
The IP format is impossible for a yokai and only possible for a spirit, yet the user is doing something a spirit cannot do. What does this mean? What exactly is 100.100? According to this logic, 100.100 is neither yokai nor ghost. Yet they’re casually posting in the gallery. The mods need to explain this. And don’t bring up VPNs. The mods here prevent VPN use.
The analysis post ended there. A drop of cold sweat fell from my forehead. I looked at SnowFlower.
“…Have I been found out?”
I checked the notice just in case, and the post writer was correct. The Ghost Gallery really did assign IPs that way. Even SnowFlower….
“…I have nothing to refute.”
“The logic is perfect.”
“But why is my IP like this? Of all things, it had to be the easy-to-remember 100.100.”
“You’re human. Maybe that’s why?”
“If that were the case, I shouldn’t have been able to access it in the first place. But I could.”
“That’s… true. Honestly, I still don’t understand that part either.”
“…Maybe access was granted due to a bug, but since I’m neither yokai nor ghost, the IP was assigned strangely?”
“Could be.”
Anyway… in the end, I had no way to refute the suspicion. After the last incident I had planned to only lurk anyway, but now I really couldn’t do anything.
“If the mods step in, I’ll get IP banned. Seems like the only way to shut this down.”
“…I don’t need to post there, so getting banned doesn’t matter.”
“Then you don’t have to worry about it. By the way, that analysis post was written by that guy.”
“Who?”
When I asked, SnowFlower looked at me like I was an idiot.
“You know. The one who always clung to me saying ‘Snowy~ Snowy~’.”
“…Ah.”
No wonder the IP looked familiar. 1102.84. It was the friend who used to spam “Snowy” and beg for her photos. After I uploaded that tail picture, he had been the most passionate about cursing her….
“…That bastard.”
“Pfft, he must have a lot of resentment toward you.”
“I have zero interest in a yokai’s body, yet one photo caused all these weird misunderstandings.”
The other person wasn’t even human. People were saying strange things about what I supposedly did to her… As expected, every gallery had its downsides once you got doxxed.
“…Hey.”
“What?”
“I can’t let that comment slide.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You just called my body ‘a yokai’s body’ like it was nothing.”
“……?”
I was already feeling complicated, and now she was starting this….
“This body that I take such good care of! How dare you call it ‘nothing’!”
“Ah, yes. Is that so.”
“Hey! What’s with that tone? Honestly, my figure isn’t something people would call unattractive, you know?”
“What do you want me to do about it…”
“Apologize for calling it ‘nothing’.”
“……Should I issue a national apology?”
“Stop joking around!”
“Ugh, what kind of yokai gets so obsessed with receiving an apology? You always demand apologies.”
Bickering with SnowFlower over something so ridiculous made the fact that I had been doxxed in the gallery gradually slip from my mind. Well, it wasn’t like I absolutely had to use the Ghost Gallery… Whether I got banned or not, maybe I didn’t need to care.
Then SnowFlower suddenly seemed to remember something and asked me.
“By the way, you said you have a part-time job, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What is it?”
“Café near the school.”
“Pfft, you?”
“Is there a problem with me doing it?”
“Yeah, it doesn’t suit you at all. Ahahaha.”
When I slowly reached into my pocket, SnowFlower jumped back in fright.
“T-threat! You’re threatening me again!”
“You started it.”
“Okay, okay! I’m sorry!”
Her apologies were incredibly fast. The effect was solid. I pulled my hand back out of my pocket. SnowFlower relaxed and asked,
“What time does the part-time job end?”
“From six to ten. Four-hour shift.”
“You can pay rent with just that?”
“I work longer on weekends.”
“…Then when the hell are you supposed to help me?”
“Monday afternoons.”
“Hey! How can a person survive on one meal a week?!”
You’re not a person, though. Since you’re a yokai, maybe you don’t need to eat as much as humans to get by?
“This won’t do. Quit the weekend shifts. Even on weekends you should help me send spirits to the afterlife!”
“What? Then how am I supposed to survive…”
When I started arguing, SnowFlower shoved her phone in front of my face.
Dividend Stocks Held: Substantial quantity
Estimated Daily Yield: Sufficient to cover living expenses
Proof that the offer is not a lie.
“I’ll pay you. Think of it as a part-time job exorcising ghosts.”
The stock chart she had shown me earlier was displayed in full. The considerable amount of dividend stocks especially caught my eye. It proved her offer wasn’t a simple lie.
“……What’s the hourly rate?”
“Twenty per day. I’m giving this much because it can be dangerous.”
Then just two days would be… forty? I immediately dropped to my knees on the floor and bowed my head.
“Please take good care of me, boss.”
“Hehe, you got it!”