The VIP who couldn’t finish the sentence looked back at the lady who had first run into the casino shouting that someone had died.
“Had they been dead long? That person?”
“No.”
The lady who received the question trembled her lips.
“It seemed they hadn’t been dead long.”
The VIP who heard the answer turned their head back to So Yeowon. It was so stiff that Son Yowan thought a creaking sound would come from their neck.
“The blood that flowed from the corpse… hadn’t even congealed yet… How did Captain So know about the incident and come?”
“You misunderstood.”
So Yeowon rubbed his brow and let out a long sigh.
“Never mind. I’ll just… organize and tell you. I am not someone dispatched to protect you. And the death that occurred here is not simple murder.”
“N-not simple murder?”
“It’s murder by abnormal phenomenon.”
“A-abnormal phenomenon?”
“Yes… Some of the strange tales floating (浮游) around this area mutated into Goeidam in Manghyang, and it’s presumed the victim lost their life due to that Goeidam.”
Perhaps feeling frustrated after all, So Yeowon muttered while inserting his fingers into the scarf covering the lower part of his face to widen the gap. A long, weak sigh followed.
“Huuuuu… Therefore.”
The moment he heard that sigh, a strange thought crossed Son Yowan’s mind.
‘Wait, that sigh.’
Son Yowan found the thought he’d just had quite ridiculous and laughed. However, once he’d thought of it, it wouldn’t be easily erased.
‘It’s too similar to that bespectacled guy’s sigh…’
Just then, So Yeowon continued speaking and erased Son Yowan’s absurd thought.
“From now, this moment, by my authority as So Yeowon, I declare Level 2 alert ‘Soyo’ and will implement closure measures for Manghyang. You… cannot leave this place until the Goeidam is suppressed.”
While reciting facts Son Yowan already knew well, So Yeowon pulled the scarf down slightly. His nose and lips, which had been hidden until now, were revealed.
“Ah!”
Son Yowan unconsciously pointed at So Yeowon. The very next moment, realizing what he’d done, Son Yowan turned pale as So Yeowon’s gaze reached him. His mouth slowly opened.
“Yes.”
It was only a single word of unknown meaning, but Son Yowan clearly understood.
“I’m really fucked…”
The fact that that “Yes” was an extremely shortened “That’s correct.”
02
‘Soyo (騷擾)’ was a Level 2 alert.
A Level 2 alert was a lower version of the Level 1 alert issued when a threatening situation arose in a region, distinguished from Level 1 alerts in that it was issued when a ‘strange’ security problem occurred. When a situation arose where mere rumors or stories—godam—materialized into Goeidam, specialized personnel were deployed to assess the harmfulness of these Goeidam, and that specialized personnel was none other than Goyo, which also served as the Godfather’s personal guard.
For that reason, the personnel who could issue a Soyo alert were also limited to a few figures in Goyo, and the Detective was one of them.
When Goeidam occurred, the standard procedure was to first close off and seal the affected area, then suppress the Goeidam before lifting the blockade. Since the position of the person who issued the alert was appropriate and the procedure was reasonable, there was actually nothing wrong with the closure of Manghyang.
That’s how it looked from the outside. In other words, the circumstances of the people trapped inside were different.
“Goeidam occurred? Somewhere around here?”
“L-lift the blockade immediately! Let us out, I say!”
“Captain So!”
People cried out in protest. Their reactions were several times more intense than when they’d heard someone had died.
“Goeidam, you say! How can we stay in a region where such dangerous things are roaming!”
There was a reason for that, in its own way.
Godam were mere stories, but materialized Goeidam were dangerous.
Take, for example, the Goeidam of ‘The Friend Sitting in the Waterway.’ In a remote area of a small city stood a university, and like most schools, several godam circulated among the students there. One of them went like this.
This is an old story. I graduated from art school and had frequent all-nighters, so that day too I was doing an all-night work session with several friends when I suddenly got hungry.
Since the school was in such a remote location, even getting to the nearest convenience store took quite a while on foot. What’s more, the path to the convenience store was a farm road, so narrow that only one person could barely pass through, and there wasn’t a single streetlight.
But that day, everyone was unbearably hungry, so we played rock-paper-scissors to pick who would go to the convenience store. We picked a total of three people, and unluckily, I got picked too.
Grumbling, we walked down the farm road one by one, but gradually everyone fell silent. All around was dark and chilly. Then suddenly I realized that even the insect sounds or frog sounds that would normally be heard frequently while walking the farm road weren’t audible.
I suddenly became very scared, but fortunately someone spoke up.
“Kyungwoo-ya, look at this.”
Kyungwoo was my name.
“Look at what? It’s so dark, how can I see anything.”
“Kyungwoo-ya, come closer and look.”
“Where?”
“Next to you. Next to you.”
Next to the farm road were rice paddies, and between the farm road and the paddies was a narrow waterway where water passed through. The friend calling me seemed to be telling me to look there.
“What is it? It’s so dark I might fall in… Ack!”
At the continued calls, I had no choice but to stop walking, and I screamed because someone suddenly grabbed and yanked my ankle.
“You crazy bastard, what if I got hurt with this kind of prank… Huh?”
With my lower body stuck in the waterway, I flailed about and barely managed to pull myself out when I flinched. The friend who came on this errand with me was in the same predicament.
“……”
And the spot I’d barely managed to touch with my hand… felt strange.
If I had such a thing as intuition, it seemed to brush past the back of my neck at that moment. I was certain that I absolutely must not confirm what I had touched.
“Ahhh!”
But the other friend had already confirmed it and screamed.
“A-a-a person, there’s a dead person!”
Dragging that friend who had started crying in terror, I frantically crawled up onto the farm road and started running.
Only after arriving in front of a lit streetlight did I report to the police, but even after searching for hours, there was no corpse—instead only one dead stray dog turned up. The police said we must have mistaken the dog carcass for a person in our shock, then loaded up the dog and left. We were finally relieved.
Then suddenly, a friend asked.
“But Kyungwoo-ya, why did I call you?”
“What are you talking about? You called me.”
“No, you called me. Dajeong-ah, look at this. And when I didn’t go, later you even told me to come closer and look…”
Goosebumps rose all over me.
“That wasn’t me?”
That wasn’t even the problem—I hadn’t even heard the sound of my friend calling me. It seemed my friend hadn’t heard me calling either.
“Not you? Then who… Ah, did Seunghyun do it?”
At my friend’s muttering, I suddenly realized. Three people had left school after losing at rock-paper-scissors. But……
“Seung… where did Seunghyun go?”
Right now there were only two of us.
The next day, I heard a godam that sometimes folded corpses were found in the waterway next to our school’s farm road. The reason I called it a godam was because although the rumor circulated, there were absolutely no specific stories about which department’s who had witnessed it.
I was very curious whether that corpse was Seunghyun, whom I hadn’t seen since ‘that night,’ but after that I never once went out to the farm road on a dark night. Who was it that called me that night? And where did Seunghyun disappear to? Why was the dog dead there of all places? Could it be… was that dead dog Seunghyun?
The story itself was ordinary. Godam like there being a corpse under the school lake, an outsider entering somewhere in the mountain by the school and freezing to death, or a homeless person who snuck into the school kidnapping and killing a student returning home from studying late—such godam existed at any school.
But for some reason, that godam materialized. The godam that became Goeidam actually began to occur, and thanks to that, many students were sacrificed.
Numerous students ‘actually’ heard sounds calling them near the farm road. They ‘actually’ saw crumpled corpses in the waterway next to the farm road and were terrified, or in severe cases went insane. Naturally, an ‘actual’ corpse role was also needed, so there were people and dogs who ‘actually’ died and were stuck there.
‘The Friend Sitting in the Waterway’ was a case proving why Goeidam that became godam were dangerous. Stories from absurd godam became real and indiscriminately put people in danger.
