For some reason, a sudden chill ran through him, and goosebumps prickled all over his body. He almost brushed it off and kept walking, but then stopped again. It felt like something heavy and cold was pressing down on him from all sides.
He glanced around without thinking, but there was nothing out of the ordinary — just the familiar commercial building, the usual residents, and the local vendors.
Then something came to mind as Siyun stood there, puzzled.
Four days ago, on that night when the rain was pouring down in torrents — the man he had met then. He’d had a similar feeling from that man called Lee Gyohyun, who claimed to be the Executive Director of Hyosung Group. And from experience, a feeling like this had never once led to anything good.
The man who said he would come with a formal request had not made any contact since. For two days, Siyun had been on edge, worried he might actually send one. But even after three days passed, there was still nothing. He felt relieved.
Well, would a man who’s an Executive Director even be satisfied with something made in a tiny workshop like this? The keyring he’d brought in was special because of the materials — the shape itself was ordinary. Any other workshop could have made something like that.
But what had felt even more surreal than that was the man who had casually mentioned that the keyring’s owner was dead.
The way the man had looked so completely calm while saying that — it had given Siyun chills.
“Stolen” doesn’t really make sense either.
As soon as he got home, Siyun had looked into Hyosung Group. It amounted to nothing more than a few clicks around the internet, but through that, he found out that the man named Lee Gyohyun was the heir apparent of Hyosung. However, there weren’t many publicly available photos, and the ones that existed were taken from a distance or from the side, so he couldn’t be certain it was the same person.
His thoughts kept piling up. The man’s presence was too overwhelming to simply let go of. And above all — what on earth was that unsettling feeling he’d gotten at the very end?
“I’m getting a headache.”
He’d been turning that day’s events over in his mind so much that his head was actually throbbing. The one saving grace was that since yesterday morning, work had come flooding in, which meant he hadn’t had to think about that man for a while. But the moment he had even a bit of breathing room, Lee Gyohyun would surface in his thoughts, just like now. He pressed his lips into a firm, straight line — and then his phone beeped.
It was a schedule alarm.
“Ah….”
Siyun blinked his large eyes. He’d forgotten that today was the last day of the lunar month.
There were days each month when Siyun closed the workshop early and avoided going out. Those were the full moon and the last day of the lunar month. On those days, he never made personal plans, and no matter how much work he had, he always went straight home. It was because of ghosts.
Most people believed that the full moon was when yin energy was at its strongest, making it the night when ghosts ran rampant. That wasn’t wrong — but the scariest ghost Siyun had ever encountered had appeared on the last day of the lunar month.
He closed the schedule app and fidgeted with his phone screen. He had planned to stop by Jinwoong’s place after work today, but it looked like he’d have to push it to tomorrow.
Siyun quietly let out a sigh. It was because of Kim Jinwoong. Ever since he’d hung up on him like that, he and Jinwoong had been completely out of touch.
“Looks like he’s actually sulking this time.”
Worried, he’d tried reaching out several times, but it just rang and rang with no answer. He checked Jinwoong’s SNS account on a hunch, and sure enough, there was a post from Saturday night. It was a photo of a haunted house.
Seeing that, Siyun let out a low groan. I was hoping he wouldn’t go, but he did. He’d already been in a bad mood lately — his dreams had been restless and unsettling. Out of concern, Siyun had left him a message.
Since you’ve already gone, I won’t say anything more. But don’t touch a single thing inside that abandoned house — look with your eyes only, then leave.
But there was no reply all weekend. When he sent messages, the read receipt would appear, but Jinwoong wouldn’t pick up the phone. Siyun was starting to get irritated too, and was half-tempted to just ignore him — but then his resolve softened. Jinwoong’s birthday was coming up soon. And on top of that, it was his first birthday after being discharged from the military, which made it all the more significant.
“Honestly, Kim Jinwoong.”
Muttering to himself, Siyun checked his notifications. Then his hand stilled on one particular message. It was from the owner of Fever — his hyung. The content itself was a simple, run-of-the-mill check-in. It had been two years since he’d quit the job, but messages still came every now and then. He was someone Siyun was grateful for — and at the same time, someone who brought back a certain trauma. Along with Fever, it was because of a person named Song Jeonho.
When Siyun came of age, he had nowhere proper to go and spent some time living in a goshiwon. The first place he found after that was a property with a troubled history. Not only was he plagued by ghosts, but a lust spirit had latched onto him as well, tormenting him every night.
The lust spirit turned out to be the ghost of a young woman. She would hang from the ceiling with her wet hair trailing down, clinging to Siyun each night as if wrapping her arms around his neck. Day after day, the ghost whispered in a grotesque voice.
“Mine. You’re mine. Heheheh.”
Regardless of age, whenever Siyun made eye contact with any other woman, the lust spirit would fly into a fit. And the more that happened, the worse the torment became. Eventually, Siyun began consciously avoiding speaking to women altogether. Later, even when the lust spirit wasn’t there, his body would instinctively freeze the moment he saw a woman.
He wanted to run away. But his lease still had time left, and he had nowhere to go. The lust spirit brought other lust spirits along, and Siyun had to endure them every single night. Eventually, the hallucinations of real women and the ghost girl began to overlap in his vision.
That experience had left a deep, lasting trauma that remained with him to this day.
Against that backdrop, as he naturally distanced himself from women, Siyun ended up working at a gay bar called Fever. The owner and the senior staff were all good people, and the work wasn’t hard. Then he began dating Song Jeonho, a lawyer who was a regular there. He was warm, and always showered Siyun with affection.
But two months later, Song Jeonho took Siyun to a hotel and led him to a room where an orgy was taking place. Leaving Siyun frozen in shock, Song Jeonho smiled as if this were perfectly familiar to him. When Siyun tried to flee, Song Jeonho came after him, insisting he had wanted this too, and tried to drag him back.
Before Siyun could even scream, the door slammed shut and he was thrown down onto the bed. The sharp, suffocating smell of alcohol from all directions, a raw and rank scent underneath it, and the leering laughter of the men gathered around the bed — all of it bored into his ears in the most grotesque way. His teeth chattered with terror. As he thrashed and struggled to escape, a merciless hand came down hard across his face.
Smack! Smack!
His head snapped to the side, and the iron taste of blood seeped from his split lip. Song Jeonho had shed any pretense of warmth entirely — he grabbed Siyun by the hair, slammed him down into the mattress, and the savage beating that followed, along with rough hands tearing his shirt apart, sent Siyun into a pure instinctive panic, his vision going white. In the midst of the despair that he might be trampled to death right here, with trembling hands Siyun groped the nightstand beside the bed, found a heavy glass ashtray, and swung it without hesitation.
A sharp crack of impact — and Song Jeonho’s forehead split open, blood gushing out in a rush.
“Aaagh! You little—!”
The man screamed and stumbled backward. In that split second, Siyun clutched his torn clothes to his body, wrenched open the tightly shut hotel room door like a madman, and burst out into the hallway. But Song Jeonho wiped the blood from his forehead and immediately came after him, grabbing Siyun by the hair again. To keep from being dragged back into that hellish room, Siyun clawed at the hallway floor until his nails broke, screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Help me! Someone please help me!”
Siyun’s desperate screams rang out sharply through the closed-in hotel corridor.
At the sound, the door directly across flew open and startled guests poked their heads out — and at just that moment, a staff member who had been organizing a room service cart at the far end of the hallway looked up in alarm and came hurrying over.
In an instant, people appeared from every direction, all eyes turning toward them — and Song Jeonho, wiping the blood from his forehead, spat a string of curses through clenched teeth. In the end, he shoved Siyun’s hair roughly down to the floor and retreated into the room, slamming the door shut behind him. That was the moment Siyun barely managed to escape from that hell.
As he fled in a daze, he got a call from Jinwoong. Siyun told him everything through tears, and Jinwoong treated him exactly the same as before, as though nothing had changed. He was truly grateful for that.
After that, Siyun never went back to Fever. For a while, he avoided contact with the owner too. They started talking again only after he opened the workshop.
Yeah. I’m doing well. Hope you’re well too, hyung.
Having sent his reply, Siyun slipped his phone into his pocket and quickened his pace. With each breath, a puff of white mist curled into the cold air.
The one silver lining was that since opening the workshop, the ghosts that used to lunge at him trying to make contact had stopped getting close.
The workshop was about a ten-minute walk from the market. The neighborhood itself wasn’t bad, but the location was tucked away in such a remote corner that it was a bit awkward. He walked down a quiet alley with little foot traffic.
The winter sun set early, and dusk was already settling in. He picked up his pace a little more and had just rounded the last corner when Siyun stopped short. Someone was waiting in front of the door.
They were very tall. For a moment, the name Lee Gyohyun flashed through his mind — but that was just his nerves getting to him. Siyun stood at a comfortable distance, sharpening his focus to get a better look — and then his eyes went wide.
“Kim Jinwoong?”
The moment he recognized who it was, the tension that had locked his face rigid instantly melted away.
“Hey! What happened to you?”
All that worry he’d carried through the weekend seemed almost laughable now — Jinwoong looked completely fine. Relief washed over him — followed immediately by the frustration he’d been holding in bursting out.
