Three days later, I went back to that alley.
The section where the streetlights were out. The exact spot where I'd turned back three weeks ago. The Grade Five vengeful spirit was still prowling around. Its shape had grown clearer. Its arms were longer, and the outline of its face was more distinct. It had grown by feeding on yin energy, absorbing the lingering spirits in the area.
My palm tugged. Hard. The walls of my meridians trembled. Jangmuk’s fragment sent a chill down my spine. Five lines. Stronger than before.
‘Don’t.’
It was Jangmuk’s warning. I knew. This was different from everything before. A mid-Grade Six spirit had been my limit, but this was beyond that. I wasn’t just crossing a level. I was crossing a wall.
But I couldn’t let this thing stay here.
The straight-line distance from this alley to my house was three hundred meters. If the Grade Five vengeful spirit’s yin energy spread any farther, it would reach the apartment building where I lived. It would reach my grandmother.
I took my hand out of my pocket.
The vengeful spirit looked at me. The moment the eyes of the dead recognized the living, the temperature in the alley dropped. My breath rose in white clouds. Yin energy settled over my skin like a weight. It was denser than the minor spirits I’d dealt with before. The air felt thick.
I reached out.
I pulled.
The vengeful spirit resisted. Explosively. Its yin energy slammed into the entrance to my meridians. It felt less like a push and pull and more like a collision. Sweat broke out on my forehead. The tip of my nose went cold. The walls of my meridians were pushed from within. It felt like the entire wall was expanding.
Jangmuk’s fragment reacted. A chill ran all the way down my spine. Not five lines, but seven. My spine, both sides of my rib cage, both shoulder blades, both wrists. All at once.
The edges of my vision darkened.
I didn’t stop.
Fifteen seconds. The vengeful spirit’s shape wavered. Its yin energy was sucked toward me as if being torn away. The walls of my meridians seemed to scream. The inside of my rib cage grew hot, then cold, then hot again.
Twenty seconds.
Blood ran from both nostrils. It passed over my lips and ran down my chin. The taste of metal touched my tongue.
Twenty-five seconds.
The vengeful spirit screamed. It wasn’t a sound, but a wave of yin energy. The alley walls vibrated. One of the streetlights flickered.
Thirty seconds.
It came in.
My knees buckled. I caught myself on the ground with one hand. The asphalt was cold. Backflow began at all seven points in my meridians at once. Raw yin energy pushed against the walls and poured toward the center. Toward my heart. It felt like my chest was about to burst.
My vision split. My left eye saw the alley. My right eye saw something else—the darkness layered behind the alley walls. The Other Side. The boundary between reality and the Other Side was wavering.
Jangmuk’s fragment became a lump of ice at the center of my spine. It wasn’t a warning. It was a scream.
I clenched my teeth. My jaw made a cracking sound.
I pushed the yin energy toward the walls. Consciously. Toward the walls, not the center. It was something I’d done twelve times over the past four episodes. But this time, the amount was different. It felt like forcing a river through a pipe instead of pouring water into one.
The pain pierced my bones. It felt like my ribs were being ground down from the inside.
I endured it.
The walls held. The walls that had thickened over the past three weeks. The walls strengthened by twelve absorptions.
And then they grew another layer thicker.
My vision returned. Both eyes saw the alley. The Other Side receded. The backflow stopped.
I was sprawled on the asphalt. Blood from my nose had fallen to the ground in black spots. I couldn’t feel my fingertips. Below my elbows, my arms felt like someone else’s.
Three thirty in the morning.
I had to get up. I couldn’t collapse here.
I tried to put strength into my arms. Nothing. I tried again. I barely managed to lift my upper body. I stood, bracing myself against the wall. My legs shook.
Three hundred meters to home. I walked. One step at a time. The streetlights blurred yellow. My vision swayed.
I opened the front door and took off my shoes. I looked toward my grandmother’s room. The darkness beneath the door was clear. The Grade Five vengeful spirit’s yin energy was gone. The entire area must have been clear now.
I went into my room and collapsed onto the bed. The springs creaked. I closed my eyes.
The inside of my meridians was noisy. Raw yin energy flowed along the walls. There was more than before. Much more. The walls had grown thicker, but so had what they held.
I couldn’t sleep.
The next day, I couldn’t get up.
My body wouldn’t move. More accurately, it felt like if I moved, the backflow in my meridians would start again. As long as I lay still, I was fine. The raw yin energy was seeping into the walls. I couldn’t interrupt it.
Grandmother opened the door.
“School?”
“I don’t feel too good.”
She put a hand to my forehead. It must have been hot. I had a fever.
“Let’s go to the hospital.”
“I’m okay. I just need to sleep for a day.”
Grandmother watched me for a long while, then brought me a glass of water. I drank it and lay back down.
A day passed. My fever didn’t go down.
The second day. I was still lying down. Backflow happened intermittently at the seven points in my meridians. Each time, my vision briefly shifted to the Other Side. The ceiling vanished, and I could see the darkness layered beyond it. A layer of the Other Side. The boundary between reality and the Other Side was wavering.
This was—dangerous.
It was worse than when I absorbed Jangmuk. Jangmuk had only caused trouble at one point in my meridians, but this time, all seven were unstable at once.
I closed my eyes and sensed what was inside my meridians. The raw yin energy was seeping into the walls slowly. There was too much of it. The energy was surging in faster than the walls could absorb it.
I pushed it in. Consciously. The yin energy toward the walls. Pain came. It felt like my bones were being ground away. I clenched my teeth.
Six hours.
The backflow in my meridians eased. From seven points to five. The walls grew a little thicker.
Twelve hours.
From five points to three. My vision steadied. The Other Side no longer overlapped with what I saw.
Twenty-four hours.
From three points to one. The last point—right below my heart. This was the deepest one. It was close to where Jangmuk’s fragment was embedded.
Thirty hours.
It stopped. The backflow came to a complete halt.
I opened my eyes. I saw the ceiling. An ordinary ceiling. The Other Side wasn’t overlapping with it.
I raised my hand. I could feel it again. My fingertips were sharper than before. I could feel something flowing through the air with them. A sensation I’d only felt inside my palm before now extended all the way to my fingertips.
The flow of yin energy. The faintest traces of yin energy mixed into the air in the room. I could read them with my fingertips.
A new sense.
At the same time, something was happening somewhere I didn’t know about.
The Spirit Management Bureau, Seoul Branch. The monitoring room.
The officer sitting in front of the monitor checked the screen twice. The southwestern part of Seoul, sector SW-17. It was an area where a Grade Five yin energy signature had been detected until two days ago. The Bureau had already assigned it a place in the processing queue. A Grade Five required an exorcist of Grade Four or higher, so it would take time to schedule one.
But the yin energy signature had vanished.
It hadn’t been extinguished. There was no trace of a purification response. That meant it hadn’t been handled by a Bureau exorcist. Nor had the yin energy simply evaporated on the spot. An analysis of the residual pattern showed signs that the yin energy had moved. As if it had been sucked somewhere.
A report was submitted.
Park Tae-gyeol received it.
A Grade Four Bureau officer. A yin energy concentration in the 500s. A faithful embodiment of the system. He read the report and went to the scene.
The alley. The section where the streetlights were out. Park Tae-gyeol read the scene with his Grade Four senses. The pattern of the residual yin energy was strange. There was no sign of refinement. Instead—traces of raw predation. As if a larger ghost had caught and eaten a smaller one. But there were no ghosts of Grade Five or higher in this area. None had ever been picked up by the detection network.
Park Tae-gyeol looked at the alley floor. There was a black spot on the asphalt. A dried spot of blood. Human blood.
He paused for a moment. His Grade Four senses read the air around the bloodstain. There was something there, faintly—raw yin energy. Unrefined. Not from a ghost, but from a human body.
Park Tae-gyeol narrowed his eyes.
He wrote a report. “Nonstandard yin energy absorption by an unidentified entity. Recommend continued surveillance of the area.”
The Grade Zero boy didn’t come to mind. A Grade Zero couldn’t do something like this.
On the morning of the third day, I got up.
My body felt heavy, but I could move. I washed my face at the sink and looked in the mirror. My face had grown thin. I’d barely eaten in three days. There were dark circles under my eyes.
But my eyes were different.
They were different from three weeks ago, and different from yesterday, too. I couldn’t put into words what had changed. It just felt like there was another layer to what I could see.
Grandmother had made porridge. I sat down and ate. It was warm.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You need to go to school.”
“I will.”
Grandmother studied my face for a long time. She looked like she wanted to say something, but didn’t. I didn’t ask, either.
I went to school. I sat through class. Nobody knew what I’d done over the past three days. Of course they didn’t. Nobody knew.
During break, I looked out the window. A lingering spirit was wandering around the corner of the schoolyard. A weak one. Not even Grade Seven level.
I opened my palm. The sensation was clear. I could feel the lingering spirit’s yin energy with my fingertips. Its distance, density, direction. Things I used to have to get close to sense, I could now read from inside the classroom.
Absorbing a Grade Five had cost me a lot. I’d spent three days in bed, my meridians had suffered backflow at seven points, and the boundary between the Other Side and reality had wavered.
But the walls had grown thicker. My senses had expanded.
And somewhere—somewhere I didn’t know about—someone was reading the traces I’d left behind.
I didn’t know that.
Not yet.