Chapter 4
Daecheonmyeong, the Supernatural Incident Disposal Agency
Two people had died. One was hovering between life and death, and I had lost a hand.
And she said I had passed?
As though my glare meant nothing to her, Myeong Haebin stretched languidly, stepped over Lee Jaewon on the floor, and extended her hand.
“Allow me to introduce myself again. I’m Myeong Haebin, an employee of Daecheonmyeong, the Supernatural Incident Disposal Agency.”
She was holding an ID card.
The words Daecheonmyeong, along with her name and photograph, were printed on the black plastic. The face was unmistakably hers.
But none of her words registered with me.
“Fuck off. I never applied to your damn company.”
I pulled out my phone.
Everything seemed to have returned to reality, so I should be able to call emergency services now. Explaining this would not be easy, but Jaewon came first.
“What do you think a hospital can do for him?”
“Save him, obviously.”
“....”
Myeong Haebin tilted her smiling face to one side. Her lowered gaze settled on Lee Jaewon, whose face had been torn away.
“Anyone can see that his entire body was mauled by human teeth. And you no longer have a hand.”
She raised her left hand, still drenched in my blood, and opened and closed it.
Once. Twice. Again and again.
She made certain I saw it.
“Modern medicine might be able to do something for him with skin grafts. But don’t you think you’ll have to live with a prosthetic hand for the rest of your life?”
“What are you trying to say?”
Myeong Haebin no longer seemed like the person I knew.
She was cold, like someone else entirely—someone devoid of humanity.
“If you join our company, we can restore something as trivial as a hand without leaving so much as a scar. That would be better than a prosthetic, wouldn’t it? Oh, and we’ll treat this man too, as a bonus.”
I could not believe those words were coming from Myeong Haebin.
She had always been so warm and friendly to everyone, and everyone had adored her for it.
I looked down at my motionless left arm.
“Haebin, do you know what my dream is?”
I did not expect an answer, so I said what I wanted to say with a hollow laugh.
“To live an ordinary life. Work at a company like everyone else, buy a house with a bank loan, and raise a dog. That’s my dream.”
That was all I had ever wanted.
The life everyone else found dull and ordinary had been my lifelong dream.
So why had things turned out like this?
Bzzzz.
My phone vibrated like an uninvited guest.
Almost as though it already knew what my answer would be.
[Completion condition: Join Daecheonmyeong, the Supernatural Incident Disposal Agency.]
[Reward: Kim Hanmu’s left hand]
[Penalty for failure: Death]
“Ghh... Kgh....”
Lee Jaewon’s breathing faltered.
Everything around me was forcing me to accept her proposal.
Why is living an ordinary life so difficult?
I squeezed my eyes shut.
Before Jaewon died, I forced the words past the obstruction in my throat.
“I’ll do it. Just treat Jaewon first.”
Myeong Haebin had been staring intently at me as though every nerve in her body were focused on my answer. Now her entire face blossomed into a radiant smile.
“Wow, really? Of course! I promise we’ll save him!”
Myeong Haebin closed the front door and inserted the black ID card above the doorknob.
The door should have been a seamless slab of metal, yet it swallowed the card as though absorbing it and opened on its own.
People wearing black masks emerged without making a sound. Myeong Haebin spoke to them as though their presence was completely familiar.
“...so...”
She was speaking right in front of me, yet her words sounded as though pieces had been cut out between every phrase.
Had I lost too much blood?
My vision scattered and spun. My knees buckled, and my consciousness began slipping away.
The last thing I remembered was Myeong Haebin catching my swaying body and whispering into my ear.
“I’m so relieved. I really didn’t want to have to kill you, sir!”
They were words I could never forget.
“This way.
“...He’s a civilian. The one standing over there....”
“...Haaah!”
When I regained consciousness, I was in an unfamiliar room.
It contained only a bed, a shelf, and a desk. Nothing showed any sign of ever having been used, and the room was unnaturally cold.
Where the hell am I?
I snatched up my phone, which had been placed neatly on the desk.
A sticky note had been attached to it.
You kept checking your phone, so I examined it just in case. There aren’t any problems, so it’s safe to use! —Haebin
I had no idea how she had examined it....
But she thought this had no problems?
[Congratulations on successfully joining the company.]
The sight of the white text against the black screen sent a chill through my bones, and the memories of yesterday returned.
Right.
I had agreed to join a company specializing in supernatural incident disposal.
And after that....
“....”
[Your reward has been delivered.]
Right. My hand.
What had happened to my left hand?
I sprang out of bed and examined it. It was perfectly intact, as though it had never been severed.
“Ha... Thank God.”
Only after feeling it repeatedly could I finally relax.
There was no way I could forget the moment my entire hand vanished—or the pain that came with it.
Then what was this app?
Had the company created it?
That seemed unlikely. Myeong Haebin had never once taken out her phone inside that house.
[ ]
The app had a pitch-black icon and no name.
Opening it revealed nothing but a black screen. Touching it produced no response.
“Do you belong to that company too?”
Ha.
I must have finally lost my mind. I was clutching a phone and muttering at it as though it could answer me.
“Of course not....”
[That question is unimportant.]
A single line of crisp text appeared.
It actually answered me?
[You have one answer remaining.]
My hand trembled.
I had dozens of questions, but I was allowed to ask only one.
Any trace of sleepiness vanished as my mind raced. It had said that questions about the company were unimportant, so in that case....
“What do you want from me?”
[For Kim Hanmu to continue cleaning “supernatural incidents.”]
The text vanished like an illusion.
“Shit....”
My chest tightened.
It would have been better if it had simply demanded my life.
No. Maybe this was actually a good thing.
The app needed me. As long as I remained with this company, it might continue helping me.
Just as it had inside that house.
But if I say, “My hand is fixed now, and I’ve gotten everything I can from you, so I’m going home”... that probably won’t end well.
Myeong Haebin had said it herself.
She had not wanted to kill me.
There was a common cliché in stories like this.
You know too much.
Then—bang.
I shouldn’t take any unnecessary risks.
Sliiide.
Still frozen with tension, I opened the door.
Beyond it was a cold living room with the lights off, just like the room I had awakened in. It looked like an ordinary home....
“Shit, that scared me.”
I nearly jumped out of my skin when the motion-sensor light by the entrance came on.
All that lay beneath it was my pair of shoes, neatly arranged and completely free of blood.
Creak.
I cautiously poked my head outside.
The drably colored corridor was sparsely populated, but a few people were walking through it.
“I’m exhausted. They scheduled me for a morning shift right after the night shift, so I didn’t get any proper rest.”
“Then transfer to the Dismantling Team.”
“Hell no. I plan on living a long, uneventful life.”
They held cups of coffee and chatted like ordinary office workers.
I had been incredibly tense because this was supposedly a company that dealt with supernatural incidents, but....
Was it more normal than I had expected?
My shoulders finally relaxed a little as I walked. Before long, the view opened before me.
“...Whoa.”
<Await Heaven’s Mandate>
<At the end of night lies the dawn, and we are those who behold it.>
The ceiling above the enormous circular plaza was so high that I could not even see it. Ornately carved pillars rose around it, each so thick that even four grown men joining hands could not have encircled one.
Far more people than I had seen in the corridor hurried through the plaza in similar uniforms.
Wait.
Where was I supposed to go?
I had been told that I had joined the company, but I knew absolutely nothing else.
Just as I considered stopping a passerby to ask, a thick hand slapped my shoulder from behind.
“Hey, you’re a new recruit, right? Why haven’t you gone inside yet?”
“What? No—I mean, yes, but....”
The speaker was a middle-aged man with dark stubble across his face.
Unlike me, who wore only a white T-shirt, he was dressed in work clothes marked with blue stripes.
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“Your new-employee orientation and team assignment, obviously. Just look at you. You must’ve lost the rest of your group.”
“No, that isn’t what happened.”
“What do you mean, it isn’t?”
The middle-aged man burst into hearty laughter. Claiming he had only been joking, he grabbed me firmly by the shoulder and strode away with me in tow.
“You’d better keep your head on straight. I’m sure you had your reasons for coming here, but... forget it. I could explain it a hundred times, and you still wouldn’t understand.”
“I know supernatural incidents aren’t something to take lightly.”
“You sound as if you’ve already experienced one.”
His thick eyebrows rose.
He looked at me as though I were a naïve chick that knew nothing about the world.
Admittedly, that was probably what I was within this company. Still, I had survived an ordeal that had nearly cost me my life.
“Just once, I suppose....”
He looked like a veteran employee, so I could hardly boast to him. When I trailed off awkwardly, he pointed at me as though he had suddenly realized something.
“Oh! Are you that special case Haebin brought in?”
“You know Haebin?”
“Of course I do. Hey, meeting like this must be fate. You should join my team.”
“I don’t even know who you are.”
“Me? I’m Team Leader Yong of the Dismantling Team.”
I was about to ask what the Dismantling Team was, but we had already arrived outside a seminar room.
“...Some of you may have come because you needed money. Some may have a personal interest in supernatural incidents, while others may have come because of a desperate wish that could never be fulfilled elsewhere.”
Through the small window, I could see Myeong Haebin standing at a podium beneath a banner. Her clear voice carried through the door.
“Well, asking you to join my team was just wishful thinking. Let’s go inside.”
Team Leader Yong opened the door and gently pushed me inside.
Because the entrance was at the back of the seminar room, we managed not to attract any attention.
We barely secured seats in the last row, but it seemed I truly had arrived late.
“That concludes the presentation! Does anyone have any questions?”
The orientation was already over. They had moved on to questions.
“I heard the Exploration Team receives higher hazard pay. Is that true?”
“About the categories of supernatural incidents you mentioned earlier....”
People dressed in white T-shirts like mine raised their hands and began asking questions.
Most of them were about things I knew nothing about.
“What a shame. You missed the entire orientation.”
I had expected him to leave, but Team Leader Yong settled into the seat beside me. He chuckled as though he found the situation entertaining.
“I’ll ask Haebin about it later.”
“Why go to all that trouble when you have an outstanding senior employee right here?”
Outstanding?
Team Leader Yong looked more like a neighborhood uncle who spent his days scratching his stomach and fiddling with the television remote.
Still, I shouldn’t judge someone solely by appearances.
“What does this company do?”
“Oh, an extremely fundamental and important question.”
Looking pleased, Team Leader Yong rubbed his hands together, cleared his throat, and answered.
“Ahem. You could say Daecheonmyeong is a company that throws its employees into supernatural incidents and makes them resolve them.”
“You throw employees into them?”
“That’s right. It’s the only way to resolve a supernatural incident.”
“And employees sometimes die in the process?”
“Why do you keep striking right at the heart of the matter? It hurts. It really does.”
He had not answered explicitly, but his response was practically an admission.
There was still something I did not understand.
“Why do you have to do that?”
Why continue working here when they knew it might kill them?
Was it truly because the only way to leave after joining was to die?
If that was the reason, I could understand.
Team Leader Yong stroked his rough chin before answering.
“Because if we leave them alone, innocent civilians get swallowed up by supernatural incidents. We do it to prevent that.”
“That’s the only reason?”
“For me, at least.”
I had more questions, but Myeong Haebin’s voice cut through the room.
“Now, shall we begin assigning everyone to their teams?”
Team Leader Yong had asked me to join his team.
But now that I thought about it....
Hadn’t someone in the corridor said that the Dismantling Team was dangerous?