Even though Main Bureau Strategy Team Espers, who generally received support first when new items were developed, this was a type he’d never seen, so even if someone examined it, it seemed like it wouldn’t be easily discovered.
Hae-il, who learned how to use it, adjusted it to appear to be about D-rank and wore it on his left hand.
D-rank was below the standard to join the Special Abilities Agency through Esper special recruitment, but it was an ambiguous existence where Esper characteristics were too prominent to live as an ordinary person. Being in a position that was neither here nor there, there were actually quite a few cases of falling into crime.
Next, he bleached his hair to a bright color close to white and had several piercings put in both ears.
Since he’d often been told from a young age that he looked harmful or like a model student, it was a measure to look appropriately rough.
‘It would have been good if I could supplement my face or impression with magic stones too.’
Unfortunately, with current technology, the duration was very short for that, so it couldn’t be helped. Hae-il fiddled with his earlobes with awkward hand movements.
After organizing all other belongings or residences that might reveal his identity, he immediately moved to the city known as the criminal organization ‘Ban’s main area of activity.
A port city not far from the Namhae Regional Office, Icheop City. This place, famous for having few Gates but a high crime rate, had quite a large population because the cost of living was cheap. Thanks to that, Hae-il naturally permeated into those gaps.
Acting like a thug who’d caused trouble in another region and migrated wasn’t difficult either. He’d often witnessed it in his neighborhood during his impoverished adolescence.
The problem was what came next.
“Ban? This bastard didn’t look like it, but his dreams are really absurd.”
“Crazy bastard. Do you think that’s a place that just accepts anyone who wants to join?”
“If you mess around and stir things up carelessly, you’ll get fucked without anyone knowing, man. Just come to our organization, why don’t you?”
He wandered around dangerous areas every night, touched various fields of dark routes, and even directly approached people said to be of poor quality to secretly probe them, but he couldn’t catch any tail at all.
Most treated it like an imaginary animal, and people who knew even a little about Ban uniformly clicked their tongues. Looking at the scale of crimes they committed, it was a large organization operating nationwide, but all paths to approach its actual entity were blocked.
‘How is joining a criminal organization harder than joining the Special Abilities Agency?’
The Special Abilities Agency very kindly posts document submission methods, schedules, and even all evaluation elements as announcements on their website. For Ban, even meeting a single member of the organization was difficult.
The first month was blown away like that, chasing only mirage-like traces.
‘Isn’t the rumor that this is their main activity area just a smokescreen?’
With a sense of crisis that he might waste time without any gains like this, Hae-il expanded his activity radius. Not only nearby regions, but whenever information requested from Choi Ji-yeon came in, he traveled to distant places three or four hours away, trying to find even small traces.
Around the time he was entering the full second month, learning about a person named Kang Cheol-hyeon in an unexpected area was truly a coincidence.
“Hey, you wanna work under me? Since you’re an Esper, you can earn a lot of money?”
“Earn doing what? Can I earn money even though I’m D-rank?”
“This and that. Even a bastard who’s been rolling around recklessly would know what ‘Ban’ is, right?”
He looked obviously like a criminal with a rough impression and was clumsily being chased by police, so Hae-il had just helped him for a few days by hovering around. But somehow pleased, he made a sudden scouting offer and even bragged that he was a member of that ‘Ban.’
Objectively, it was very suspicious. It seemed like nothing more than a nobody pretending to be Ban and showing off. However.
“Just leave it to me, hyung-nim. I can do everything well!”
Hae-il trusted his instincts more than what was visible right in front of him. Even accounting for being an Esper, his remarkably sharp intuition was telling him. He had to catch that bastard no matter what.
“But what’s your name?”
“It’s Seo Hae-il.”
Anyway, the traces of living as the real ‘Seo Hae-il’ would be protected as top secret information since starting the spy mission, so using his real name was more natural.
Hae-il, who came to work under Kang Cheol-hyeon like that, literally rolled endlessly.
“But what’s with your hair? What, are you an idol?”
“I’m sorry, hyung-nim. I’ll dye it over right away.”
“Dangling things all over your ears too. Take them all out, you bastard.”
“Yep.”
“Clean over there too, okay? Do things on your own without me having to tell you everything.”
“Ah, yes….”
From trivial chores to various odd jobs, the patterns were diverse too.
Fortunately, unlike the suspicious first impression, Kang Cheol-hyeon’s identity observed up close was certain.
‘He is a Ban member, but he’s low-level.’
The work he mainly did was processing strange products made from by-products from monster corpses and selling them at high prices to naive people.
To obtain monster corpses, they’d have to illegally enter Gates, and the only organization daring enough to commit such crimes currently was Ban.
After a few weeks passed, as if some trust had formed, he started sharing that work with Hae-il too.
“Your face is pretty and handsome, perfect. Sell all of this, by tomorrow.”
“What is this?”
“Pills made by grinding monster horns. Look, here. It’s written right here. Health supplement. Read all of this carefully and familiarize yourself well.”
On the tackily flashy pamphlet, the words that it was pills made with materials extracted from monsters were written very honestly, along with all sorts of efficacies listed.
Excellent effects for osteoporosis, diabetes prevention and treatment, ability enhancement and increased probability of manifesting as an ability user…….
Every single one was absurd lies beyond exaggeration.
Setting aside efficacy, he’d never heard or seen talk of eating something from a monster’s body. Just thinking about it made him want to vomit.
“……Is it okay to eat this stuff?”
“Would it be?”
Then why are you selling it? The price was even expensive. He wondered who would buy this, but surprisingly there were even regular customers. And Seo Hae-il unexpectedly had a talent for fraud.
“One set here!”
“Give me one too.”
“……You’re really going to buy it?”
“Oh my, I trust the handsome young man’s face right away.”
The problem was his trustworthy face. But it wasn’t like he could not sell them, since Kang Cheol-hyeon was watching with satisfaction right beside him.
“Wow, Seo Hae-il. Top sales right after joining! As expected, I have a good eye for people.”
“……Yeeees, thank you, hyung-nim. I’ll work even harder!”
“Right. You have to do more. Okay? Don’t be satisfied with one word of praise and just think about how you can raise sales even more.”
While creating a passionate gaze and expression, Hae-il felt a strong sense of skepticism washing over him.
Moreover, as sales increased, his guilty conscience also accumulated. Pretending not to know about his superior’s bad deeds had been hard, but directly participating in bad deeds was on a different level of difficulty. It pricked his conscience much more, that is.
He tried to rationalize that this was an unavoidable process to deeply infiltrate those bastards’ ranks and catch them all at once, but he was immediately refuted by himself.
‘If I just keep selling them saying it can’t be helped, what’s the difference between me and those criminals?’
In the end, starting from the very next month, Hae-il dragged his tired body around, cutting back on sleep to find ways to secretly help the fraud victims.
First, he secretly met with Choi Ji-yeon, currently his only contact with the Special Abilities Agency, and handed over a few pills.
“Ji-yeon, please have these analyzed for their components. Whether they’re safe for human consumption, if they have no impact on the human body, stuff like that, in as much detail as possible.”
“What is this?”
“They say it’s made by grinding up monster horns or teeth or something like that.”
“Ugh. People eat this?”
The result that shocked Choi Ji-yeon confirmed over several weeks was that fortunately there was no fatal impact on the human body.
Sometimes he would secretly visit patients who seemed truly desperate and leave behind money equivalent to the sale price. Out of his own pocket, of course.
Since he couldn’t get caught by Kang Cheol-hyeon, secretly cleaning up everything afterward made him twice as tired.
After rolling around like that for several months, Kang Cheol-hyeon, who had come to completely trust Hae-il, started piling on other tasks as well.
“You’re D-rank but you’re an Esper, so you can use your ability, right? What did you say your ability was?”
