Chapter 68

Only after losing something do we realize its value, and only after making mistakes do we realize they were wrong.

Byun So-jung was lying face down on the floor, her arms and legs bound with blue tape. Yeo Do-yeon gently stroked her mother’s face.

Having grown up poor and scarred by trauma, Attorney Byun So-jung, who spent her whole life obsessively pretending to be well-off, bit into her daughter’s finger with desperate hunger.

She bit so hard her jaw muscles trembled. But instead, her daughter’s finger was as hard as steel. Crunch. The sound of teeth grinding.

Yeo Do-yeon pleaded, on the verge of tears.

“…Don’t bite.”

“Groan! Grrr…!”

“Don’t…! I said don’t bite! You’ll hurt your teeth…!”

Yeo Do-yeon resented everything.

Her mother drooling and biting her own hand,

Her mother’s darkened eyes,

Her father growling and crawling on the floor nearby,

And even the fact that her own finger, bitten so fiercely by her mother, wasn’t injured at all.

“Ah, aah…!”

In the end, overwhelmed by grief, Yeo Do-yeon cried out in misery.

“Haaaah! Aaaaaah!”

Just as she was clutching her head and screaming,

“…Noona.”

Seol Jin-woon, who had shared life and death with her in Namyangju, carefully called to her. Yeo Do-yeon looked at the boy with half-vacant eyes.

“…If there’s one last chance, what will you do?”

—

Right after Han Seung-Moon’s group had defeated the black goat.

“…What did you just say?”

The Namyangju camp was split into three main factions.

“There’s someone I met when I was building up the Dongdaemun camp. Even when I tried to get them to escape with us, they stayed behind in Seoul, saying they had research left…”

“Just get to the point.”

“I saw someone turned back from being a monster.”

“…What?”

“Maybe we can cure the infected too.”

Led by Seol Jin-woon, the group of Seoul escapees.

“So what do you plan to do?”

“I’m going.”

“We’ve only just pulled ourselves together! I think going back into Seoul now is absolutely impossible!”

The group of North Korean defectors led by Ri Cheol-jin, a teleporter.

“…Sorry, but I’m going.”

“And I won’t ask you to come with me. Just please watch over my parents. Lock them in a basement, do whatever you have to—”

“Of course. The problem is, I don’t think any of us will make it back alive.”

“Do-yeon noona too, and us too, we’ve lost too many people…”

Seol Jin-woon scratched his head and gave his answer.

“I’m going.”

Ri Cheol-jin yelled at Seol Jin-woon and Yeo Do-yeon.

“Seoul is absolute chaos right now! My teleporting skills only work for one person at a time. How do you even plan to get there!”

Seol Jin-woon replied,

“On foot.”

*

Seol Jin-woon was an ordinary high school student, at least until the Gate opened.

He was one of the first Awakeners, and, being the first to awaken at his school, he ended up leading hundreds, even taking over for the principal (who died).

In half a year, those hundreds had dwindled to mere dozens, but what mattered was that Seol Jin-woon had kept dozens alive in central Seoul for six months. Even with disobedient students and teachers who resented answering to a student.

So, for someone who had just turned twenty, Seol Jin-woon had dealt with a lot of people.

Both physically and emotionally.

But the person he met about a month after the Gate opened was, by far, the most bizarre person he’d ever known.

In every way—physically and emotionally—the weirdest.

“You people are nuts!”

A man in a white lab coat grinned, the mouth on his right cheek opening wide.

A snake-like tongue flicked down to his collarbone and snapped back.

“Ahaha…! Hey! Seol Jin-woon! Kid, just because I once turned an escaped test subject back into a person, did you really think I could cure any random zombie?”

“Yes.”

“You know your stuff, kid. Your neurons fresh or something?”

He was a researcher who had run away to Seoul after hearing about Cha Jae-kyun’s suicide. In other words, he had reason to fear for his life after Cha Jae-kyun’s death.

To put it more bluntly, he was a scientist involved in human experimentation.

His name was Do Seo-jun, but since he had a doctorate (and not a master’s or bachelor’s), everyone called him ‘The Gambler.’

“Here, the vaccine.”

So, he also knew how to treat the plague tumor. Yeo Do-yeon stared blankly at the spray-shaped vaccine placed in her hand.

“……”

“Miss, what, you got a problem?”

“……”

She’d come here with her last hope, knowing it probably wouldn’t work, and then in under forty-five seconds, the problem was just solved. She was too dumbfounded to speak, but didn’t bother explaining.

“…Can’t take a joke? Why are you glaring at me?”

“…Thank you.”

“Whoa, you’re polite. You’re welcome, kid.”

“……”

“You see, because I messed around with my own body, my mouth is stuck on my cheek and I talk a lot, right? To be precise, if I don’t move my face muscles, my nerves get compressed and my head hurts. It’s sad, but even when I’m alone, I have to keep talking. So could you not look at me like that?”

“…Okay.”

“Whoa, why are your eyes so wide? Hey! Jin-woon! Take this girl home! Bring your friends too!”

Suddenly, Seol Jin-woon asked,

“…Mister, aren’t you leaving Seoul?”

“Why would I leave? I’m already half a monster. Plus, with my criminal record, I can’t exactly live among people. I used to be a government employee, you know? The problem is the person who covered for me died. Maybe still alive? Do you know a Chief Jang something? Never mind, you probably don’t know the NIS. Anyway, I’m not leaving Seoul.”

“You still have research left?”

“No, that’s been finished for a while now.”

Yeo Do-yeon asked casually.

“What kind of research was it?”

That question was the trigger.

“How to close a Gate.”

*

“You see, Awakeners can enter a Gate, right? Inside, there’s a huge creature—I call it the queen. Each one looks different depending on the Gate, but anyway, that thing gives birth to monsters. To be precise, it gives birth to the fleshy core that becomes the prototype of monsters. If you just go in and take down the queen, you can close the Gate.”

They experimented on a nearby small Gate.

“…Isn’t that a building?”

“It might look like a building made of flesh, but that whole thing is a living creature. I threw a Molotov cocktail at it and it got up on all fours and ran away.”

“You tried it yourself?”

“Would I know if I hadn’t?”

“How did you bring a Molotov cocktail in there?”

“Swallowed it.”

“…”

“Blegh. Look at this. Ever since I had my face rearranged, I can fit my elbow in my mouth.”

Seol Jin-woon diced up the queen monster, Yeo Do-yeon pounded it to bits, and Seol Jin-woon’s group poured every attack they had on it.

It took hours because of its endless regeneration, but Seol Jin-woon eventually absorbed the queen’s mana stone with the tip of his sword, and The Gambler threw one of his inventions like a grenade into the air.

“Look, just like this. When there’s no more mana stone reaction inside the Gate, since this place is maintained by mana, it needs a core. So a new mana stone forms in the air, and another queen forms around that. But if you throw in a fake decoy at the core, it’s treated as an impurity. So the process of making a new mana stone gets all messed up, and the axis gets a hole in it. That causes one side to warp, and the spatial coordinates go out of sync. Once the internal space collapses, the input and output coordinates of the passageway get messed up, so obviously…”

The Gate disappeared.

“Ta-da!”

*

“So, basically, what’s beyond the Gate is each queen monster’s nest. The queen gives birth to offspring, and when the nest gets full, she sends them out the door—that’s where monsters pour out. And when the house gets too cramped and she just wants to get rid of everything, a flood of babies burst out—that’s a Gate Outbreak.”

The Gambler opened wide the mouth on his cheek and stuffed in instant rice and spam.

“Mixing it in the stomach is delicious. Anyway, if you don’t kill the queen inside, monsters keep pouring out of the Gate forever. Leave it alone, and you get periodic Gate Outbreaks.”

“…”

“Hmm. I don’t really know what’s inside the Gate, either. As dumb as those things look, they have dimensional travel tech. Maybe there’s something more. Or maybe not!”

Apparently, he wasn’t lying about needing to talk constantly or else he’d get a headache. The Gambler’s tongue didn’t stop wagging even as Seol Jin-woon and Yeo Do-yeon were leaving.

“Anyway, I’ll just keep researching Gates. Lately, I feel like my body’s being more and more taken over by monster cells. But I think I’ll be fine! And the giant Gate in Seoul looks about ready to go berserk! Anyway, lots to study!”

Seol Jin-woon, looking drained, froze as he left the lab.

Slowly, he turned his head.

“…What did you just say?”

For six months after the Gate disaster, Seol Jin-woon had led the camp.

Sure, escaping Seoul with just Awakeners was easy. But he protected Dongdaemun Camp because he couldn’t abandon the civilians—they were his friends.

But when the monsters flooded in from central Seoul, he led just the Awakeners toward Namyangju.

That was when the siege of Seoul collapsed.

When there was no one left to protect, they escaped without hesitation.

The reason they were here was because of that Gate Outbreak in Uijeongbu.

And because of the Seoul Gate Outbreak, he’d lost all the civilians he’d protected for half a year.

Those civilians had been the teachers and friends he’d shared everything with.

“Uh?”

“What did you just say?”

Seol Jin-woon couldn’t let The Gambler’s words go.

Part of it was just his nature—he could never mind his own business.

“Huh? That there’s still a lot to research? Or that the Seoul Gate Outbreak is right around the corner? Or that I’m turning more and more into a monster?”

“The second one.”

“Oh, right. I’ve been observing monsters coming out of the Seoul Gate on a regular basis. After that black goat appeared in Uijeongbu, the number of monsters per hour kept rising, and after the last Outbreak, the graph spiked. I think the queen monster has evolved to the next stage.”

“…What?”

“Hmm. My theory says the space inside the Gate doesn’t expand any further. I tested it on tiny Gates, so I’m sure. But the monsters are getting bigger and coming out more often. The estimated cumulative amount is about to hit the saturation point for that space, by my calculations—”

“What does that even mean?”

“The Seoul Gate’s about to go berserk again. Maybe in two weeks? No, what’s happened so far doesn’t even count as a real Outbreak!”

“…”

“Hmm. If my theory is right, even if each monster only takes up five square meters, enough monsters will burst out to cover two and a half times the size of the Korean Peninsula.”

“…Wait, are you sure?”

“There’s no such thing as a correct answer in science.”

“…”

“But none of my theories have ever been wrong before.”

* * * * * * *

(T/N: Bad news. I will be pausing updates for this series in the mean time because of low support as well as I’m picking up a new novel soon. Thanks for understanding!)