Chapter 20
An Unforgettable First Meal
“It’s me, Kim Hanmu. Yesterday, at Hwaae High School...”
Jeong Dohyeon’s mouth fell open as though he had realized something.
“Ah, so you’re Kim Hanmu.”
“Don’t you remember me?”
“Hmm...”
Jeong Dohyeon thoughtfully tapped his lips with his index finger.
Was this really the Jeong Dohyeon I knew?
Now that I looked more closely, he wasn’t wearing his horn-rimmed glasses. There were piercing marks in his ears, and his brown hair had been parted and carefully styled.
I couldn’t tell whether he simply looked different when off duty, had some kind of split personality, or had undergone a strange change because of the ghost story.
“Actually, the team leader said you’d ask about me. He told me to pass on a message.”
The team leader?
Jeong Dohyeon cleared his throat and deliberately lowered his voice.
“‘If the rookie asks about Dohyeon, tell him to come have breakfast. I’ll explain everything there.’ That’s what he said.”
What was wrong with that man?
He knew I would ask, so he told me to come eat breakfast?
“Was that all he said? What about your injuries?”
“Hmm... Yes, that was all. Why don’t you go ask him yourself?”
“What exactly happened yesterday?”
“Who knows?”
No matter how I looked at it, something was strange.
But even when I stared intently at him, he merely drooped his eyebrows and shrugged.
Well, if I grabbed Team Leader Yong by the collar, I would probably get an explanation out of him.
“Understood. Should I go there now?”
“Yes! I was actually on my way to your room to deliver the message.”
“Thank you.”
I bowed and was about to run in the direction he had come from when Jeong Dohyeon stopped me.
“Wait, wait! Do you even know where you’re going?”
“The company cafeteria, isn’t it? I saw it yesterday.”
“I wouldn’t have stopped you if it was. Here, go to this address.”
He handed me a note with an address written on it.
He could have just texted it to me... except he didn’t know my number.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. I’ll see you again later, okay? And thank you for yesterday.”
He remained confusing to the very end.
Did he remember what happened yesterday or not?
What the hell was going on?
The address he had given me was in Seoul.
Wait. We were allowed to leave the company?
After using my Ask a Random Bystander lifeline one more time, I finally managed to take an elevator up to the lobby.
It really is a lobby.
With dormitories and even an employee cafeteria inside, I had assumed this was the kind of company that locked its employees in and worked them to the bone.
When I stepped through the doors, I found myself on a major road. There was a bank directly opposite, a department store beside it, and even a subway station.
It was a neighborhood even I recognized.
Why is a ghost-story company located right next to a subway station?
The absurdity left me dumbfounded. But when I took a few steps outside and looked back, the building that had unmistakably contained Daecheonmyeong’s lobby had become an ordinary office building like any other.
Still feeling as though I were dreaming, I descended into an ordinary subway station, boarded an ordinary train, and emerged onto an ordinary street.
It should be around here. But why this place?
The location shown on my phone’s map made me question whether it could truly be my destination, but I had no choice but to continue.
“Oh, you’re finally here. What took you so long? The sun’s already up.”
“I told you I should bring Senior here myself.”
Familiar faces greeted me, confirming that I had come to the right place.
Team Leader Yong, Myeong Haebin, and...
“Why are you here? How did you get here?”
Jeong Dohyeon was sitting with them.
His hair was neatly combed down, horn-rimmed glasses rested on his face, and his pale lips were pressed firmly together.
“I came with the team leader...? Ah, I heard what happened. Apparently, you went through quite an ordeal yesterday.”
The way he politely nodded was completely different from the man I had met earlier.
What was this, The Truman Show?
I was so bewildered that I failed to take the hand he offered me. Team Leader Yong slapped me on the shoulder.
“Bwahaha! You met him, didn’t you? You did!”
“Team Leader, don’t tell me...”
“Come on, it was funny! We had to call you here anyway!”
Was I the only one who didn’t understand what was happening?
My fingers twitched with the desire to grab Team Leader Yong by the collar.
Jeong Dohyeon noticed the murderous atmosphere around me and hurriedly tried to defuse the situation.
“I’m sorry. I think my brother and the team leader decided to play a prank on you. The person you met earlier wasn’t wearing glasses, right?”
“Your... brother?”
“Yes. I’m a twin. The man you met was Jeong Dohan. I’m Jeong Dohyeon.”
Looking genuinely apologetic, Jeong Dohyeon took my hand and fidgeted awkwardly.
He had a twin brother.
I had never even considered that possibility.
No wonder his personality had seemed so different from the Jeong Dohyeon I knew.
“I was genuinely worried about you. I had no idea what happened after you left early.”
“Well, I was thrown straight out of the ghost story. I got lucky. I couldn’t get back inside, so I waited for quite a while... Ah, I carried you back to the company yesterday, Hanmu. Don’t you remember?”
Yesterday?
I remembered nothing. I had completely lost consciousness before I could even finish watching the sunrise.
Team Leader Yong shamelessly threw his arms around both Jeong Dohyeon’s shoulders and mine.
“Hey, I’m sorry. Really, I am. Breakfast is on me today to make up for it!”
Fine.
I should focus on the fact that no one had been seriously injured or killed.
All three of them looked just as healthy as I did. Even Team Leader Yong’s hands had completely healed.
But of all the places he could have chosen to buy us breakfast...
“If you planned to eat at Gimbap Heaven, you could have just called me to the company cafeteria.”
“This is the only place open at this hour. It’s that kind of neighborhood—there isn’t even a hangover-soup restaurant. What, are you a picky eater?”
He was getting angry at me?
Still, I had come all this way. I might as well eat the breakfast he was buying.
The moment the four of us crowded around a table beside the window, Team Leader Yong raised his hand high.
“Boss! Four spicy pork rice bowls!”
“We don’t even get to choose what we eat?”
“...”
“Our team leader has always been like that. Ha-ha.”
“I’ll apologize on his behalf, Senior!”
The other two placated me, apparently accustomed to Team Leader Yong’s behavior. Team Leader Yong merely laughed heartily, as though he had expected them to do exactly that.
“So, how do you feel?”
“About what?”
“You survived a ghost story. And you cleared it on your first attempt. Honestly, even veterans would have trouble doing that.”
“Even if our team had gone in, I think it would’ve taken at least three or four days.”
Was that so?
Ahem.
Team Leader Yong’s claims were somewhat unreliable, but if even Jeong Dohyeon said so...
“Do you get injured that badly every time?”
“Well, yes? This time was actually quite mild.”
“There were also plenty of opportunities to escape. You could leave early, and there were two chances to go home at the end of the school day.”
Now that I thought about it, they were right.
If I hadn’t pushed myself to clean up the ghost story and had focused solely on escaping, surviving until dismissal might not have been that difficult.
That reminded me.
“The injuries from yesterday were completely healed. Is that normal?”
“More precisely, it happens when you fall asleep in a bed inside the company dormitory. Someone once tried to take one of the company beds apart and sell it. That’s how valuable they are.”
“Did they succeed?”
“Of course not. Apparently, they couldn’t even get it out of the room before they were caught.”
They certainly had guts.
They had tried to drag a king-size bed all the way through that long corridor.
“Well, there are cases where the bed doesn’t heal everything, but you don’t need to worry about that right now.”
“Anyway, you’ll be fine as long as you don’t die. Even your arm grew right back, Senior!”
Ah, I see.
No, wait.
Spending time with these people was gradually dulling my own sense of danger.
“I don’t think ‘you’ll be fine as long as you don’t die’ is a normal thing to say.”
“It’s okay. You’ll get used to it after working here for a while.”
Seriously, what was wrong with these people?
“Four spicy pork rice bowls~”
“Food’s here. Take them.”
In keeping with Gimbap Heaven’s reputation for speed, four bowls of spicy pork over rice were placed before us one after another, each releasing clouds of steam.
The flavor was ordinary.
But it was warm, sweet, and spicy. More than anything else, I was deeply moved by the fact that it was normal food.
It’s delicious.
Unable to withstand my rapidly growing hunger, I was shoveling rice into my mouth with only a spoon when a thick hand lightly tapped the table in front of me.
“You asked why I called you all the way out here, didn’t you? Look over there.”
Team Leader Yong pointed through the window.
Beyond it stood an open iron gate and an old building constructed from brick and cement. Its name was displayed on the wall.
That was right. It had seemed strange from the moment I entered the address Jeong Dohan gave me into my phone.
Why had Team Leader Yong deliberately called me here?
It was not a place I had ever wanted to visit again.
[Hwaae High School]
It must have been time for students to arrive.
Uniformed students streamed into the school, some laughing, some grumbling, and others fooling around with their friends.
It was completely different from what I remembered.
It was nothing more than the perfectly ordinary morning scene of students arriving at an ordinary school.
“What do you think? It’s different from how it looked at night, isn’t it? If we had left that ghost story alone, it would’ve kept growing stronger until it devoured innocent students like them.”
“By ‘devoured,’ you mean...?”
“One day, they would’ve woken up and realized something was wrong with their school. They would’ve wandered around without understanding anything until they died. Even if people put up dozens or hundreds of missing-person posters, there would’ve been no way to find them. In the end, they would’ve been classified as runaways.”
It was horrific merely to hear about.
That school had not been a place where human beings could survive.
It would have been even worse for someone dragged inside without knowing anything.
“Senior, isn’t that Seryeong?”
Myeong Haebin pointed to a spot outside.
There was Lee Seryeong, whom we had seen inside the ghost story. She was entering the school beside another student whose name tag read [Im Jinseo].
Her face was neither pale nor shadowed, and she was not trembling in fear. It was a warm, living face filled with human vitality.
She looked so different that it was hard to believe she was the same student we had seen inside the ghost story.
“So she really was an actual student.”
“She probably has no idea what kind of consequences that One-Man Hide-and-Seek game caused.”
Those students would never know how dangerous their school had become or how much blood had been spilled to restore it.
“They don’t need to know.”
After all, ignorance could be bliss.
Seeing the real Lee Seryeong alive, laughing without knowing anything, filled me with a strange emotion.
It was something I had never felt before.
A sense of accomplishment, perhaps.
“There are other reasons too, but this is what makes the job worthwhile. Right? Huh?”
“I see.”
“You’re one dry bastard. What are you, a V?”
“You’re supposed to ask if he’s a T, Team Leader.”
“Right, that.”
Eating breakfast after work while watching peaceful daily life beneath the morning sunlight...
Perhaps this company wasn’t entirely terrible after all.
“This is nice.”
“You two go ahead. We’re heading in the opposite direction.”
“You’re not returning with us?”
“We still have some work to do outside. I’ll see you at the company, Hanmu.”
After breakfast, we parted ways at the subway station. Only Myeong Haebin and I returned to the company.
We entered what appeared to be the entrance of a perfectly normal office building filled with people coming and going, only for Daecheonmyeong’s lobby to unfold before us.
“That’s fascinating. It looked like an ordinary building from outside.”
“That’s because we have ID cards. Things become a lo~t more troublesome if you lose yours. Want to know what happens?”
“No.”
I had no particular desire to cause trouble.
That aside, I had been following Myeong Haebin as though it were only natural, but...
“Where are we going?”
“To our office! Do you remember what I told you before?”
Before I left for orientation with Team Leader Yong, Myeong Haebin had briefly mentioned that our office wasn’t ready yet.
She had said it in the cafeteria too.
“Is it finished now?”
“Yes! We finally have a dedicated space of our own! Although we’re the only employees at the moment.”
I had mixed feelings.
Still, a new office had to be much better than an old one.
Myeong Haebin led me through an unusually deserted corridor and stopped before a metal door.
“Um... Promise you won’t be disappointed?”
“What is there to be disappointed about? It’s not as if an office matters that much to us.”
Janitors were field workers anyway. We weren’t going to spend all day sitting around, so there was no reason for me to be disappointed.
Creeeak.
Despite Haebin’s claim that everything was ready, the door opened with the groan of rusty hinges. A moment later, the fluorescent light flickered on with a loud pop.
“...It’s spacious.”
“Ha-ha. Right?”
Extremely spacious.
On one side of the office stood a few lockers and shelves holding cleaning supplies that did not require electricity.
That was all.
There was nothing else.
No desks. No chairs.
Nothing whatsoever.
That emptiness was why the office looked so spacious.
I wanted to take back what I had said about this company not being entirely terrible.