Chapter 63
Naturally, I didn’t even remotely suspect that the friend of Kim Hak-ju’s daughter, whose name I didn’t even know, could be the culprit who committed ‘that incident’.
To begin with, I didn’t expect to see all of her sins just by calling her out of the blue, and I didn’t expect to be able to guess the culprit by luck without going through a meticulous deduction process.
━Who is this? Who are you to call me this late and say such strange things?!
As expected, Kim Hak-ju’s daughter’s friend showed a normal reaction.
Despite the fact that I, an unknown caller, mentioned the highly sensitive keywords of five years ago, a trip to China, and a friend at this late hour.
Very few suspects would be able to answer naturally like an ordinary person who knows nothing, without flinching or showing a sensitive reaction to this sudden and seemingly out-of-the-blue leading question.
“Oh, I think I dialed the wrong number. I’m sorry.”
━What a w*irdo…
She even seemed like she would remember a trip from five years ago, but she hung up the phone in annoyance, tired from the exhaustion of real life.
It’s proof that she lives a very busy and tiring life like an ordinary member of society found anywhere. So much so that she can’t even remember going on a trip abroad while in college five years ago.
In that way, I called each of the people who were friends with Kim Hak-ju’s daughter and checked their reactions.
Some didn’t answer the phone because it was too late, so I skipped them for now, but judging from the fact that most of her friends seemed to be living ordinary lives, they seemed far from being suspects.
Also, it was assumed that the exchange between her friends and their friends wasn’t very deep, because, for example, questions like ‘Who did you get this number from?’ or ‘Are you by any chance a graduate of XX University?’ never came back.
Well, I understand because it’s very rare for friends made during college to be maintained even after entering society as working adults. Even though I had a pretty good time in college, I didn’t keep in touch with any of my friends after I got a job.
In other words, even though everyone was directly or indirectly affiliated with the H University travel club five years ago, it meant that they had nothing to do with the incident where Kim Hak-ju’s daughter suffered spiritual damage.
Even putting aside those who I haven’t been able to contact yet, I had a hunch that the person I was most concerned about was the professor who was the leader and head of the club.
This time, instead of rashly calling him, I looked up the professor’s career history on the internet.
If he was a professor who had been at a famous university in Seoul for a long time, it was very easy to find out his career history just by searching the internet a little.
The professor’s name was Gong Hyuk-jin, 60 years old as of 2025, and unusually, he was a professor specializing in political science and diplomacy, economics, and folklore. Political science and diplomacy and economics are closely related subjects, so it’s not too strange to have a double major in them. But folklore?
What connection could there be between international affairs and the sensitive political diplomacy between nations, and economics, which allows us to understand the driving force and future of a nation, and the antiquated subject of folklore?
Well, of course, it’s not that strange if he majored in it to learn and understand the long traditions and cultures of each country, in other words, to connect it with political science and diplomacy.
It’s not that strange, but it was a field that didn’t match those majors, enough to raise the question, ‘Why?’.
What was the reason why this old man, with only five years left until retirement, took promising young diplomats on trips five years ago? And the reason why he insisted that they had a lot to learn from China?
As doubts turned into suspicions and I naturally searched for more information, I found a statement by Professor Gong Hyuk-jin, who majored in folklore, claiming that all the nations that settled on the Korean peninsula were greatly influenced by the continental culture that has been passed down from ancient China.
Well, I can understand that a professor could think that way while studying East Asian history from his graduate school days. In fact, the influence of mainland China on neighboring countries from ancient times has been significant.
But apart from that, I thought there was a reason why this professor specifically linked folklore, which doesn’t make money and has a difficult future, to political science and diplomacy and economics from the beginning.
Especially in a bad way, related to ‘impure thoughts’.
In this day and age, it’s not uncommon for people who openly admire and praise China to gain power. People who admired and praised Japan also gained power in the past, so it’s even stranger to think that there wouldn’t be such people now.
The problem is that the proportion of trips to China was particularly high in the process of Professor Gong Hyuk-jin directly managing and operating the H University travel club.
When dealing with political science and diplomacy in the international community, the main focus is on the West rather than the East, and even in the West, there is a tendency to focus on Europe.
How much so that the languages that interpreters, who are indispensable in international political society, try to learn the most are English and French（French）?
Languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Russian are relatively minor compared to English and French.
As I searched through the past records uploaded by the travel club in their club history section, I was able to find out which regions of China they mainly traveled to, what kind of people they met, and what kind of cultures they experienced.
The airport that the travel club used the most was Guilin Liangjiang International Airport in China.
Naturally, the main travel destination was Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
“He took these young people who knew nothing about this region on trips.”
Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region is a region in China that has a long history stained with blood and madness, and if there is one of the most horrifying old customs, it’s the ‘slaughter’ culture.
It was a basic of basics to cruelly slaughter and eat all kinds of animals, and it’s said that in the distant past, people in this region ate human flesh to an extent that was incomparable to other regions, and even opened markets to buy and sell it.
It doesn’t make sense that he took young people who had just entered society on trips to this region, which can be seen as a Chinese version of the Aztec civilization, claiming that they would ‘learn this and that through traveling to China!’.
To put it bluntly, even if a professor who knows nothing about political science and diplomacy, economics, or folklore chose a destination for a trip to China, he would have chosen Shanghai or Beijing as the first candidate.
It’s as natural as looking for Paris when you think of France, New York when you think of the United States, and London when you think of the United Kingdom.
Suddenly, I thought that there might be more victims besides Kim Hak-ju’s daughter even now that this club is still active.
It’s obvious if you think about it for a moment. Considering that Professor Gong Hyuk-jin stubbornly chose this region as a travel destination, and that the bonds between the members of the club don’t seem as deep as expected, this club would have had a lot of frequent inflows and outflows of members.
People who initially joined the travel club out of curiosity but left without hesitation when they found out that the professor was taking them to strange places, and conversely, people who followed the professor like fools, suffered damage, and quietly disappeared.
If the victims all complained of unexplained mental pain like Kim Hak-ju’s daughter and died in agony, no one would have blamed Professor Gong Hyuk-jin. To begin with, if they were like Kim Hak-ju’s family, whose family was falling apart, most of them would have met a bad end before they could even figure out the cause.
Then now, we have to think one more time under the premise that Professor Gong Hyuk-jin is the suspect.
What exactly was his intention and what did he do? And if he’s not the culprit, then who is?
A male ghost of unknown identity threatened the family to give him something, and Kim Hak-ju’s daughter, who was suffering from the torment, claimed that she had to constantly run away from something or hide.
Here we can find one clue. At least if there’s a chance, you can run away from the opponent or hide.
In fact, Kim Hak-ju and his family are still running away from that ghost. Although they seem to be constantly tormented in their dreams.
‘When they first moved, Kim Hak-ju’s daughter came back to her senses for a moment and said they had to run away in a hurry. If it was a K-ghost who knows the geography of Korea like the back of their hand, they would have been chased and tormented without even a moment’s respite. In other words, the thing tormenting Kim Hak-ju’s daughter isn’t a Korean ghost.’
Then the answer is obvious.
Either something that attached itself to her in China followed her to Korea, or its main body is still in China, but it’s tracking her from a distance because it’s spiritually connected to Kim Hak-ju’s daughter.
It might sound a bit strange, but how would a clean and young v*rgin appear to the evil spirits or evil gods who have settled in a region where there is a culture of human flesh consumption and where people with a cruel nature of brutally slaughtering living beings reside?
Perhaps from the perspective of the evil spirits or evil gods who have settled in that place like territorial deities, Kim Hak-ju’s daughter, who had just turned twenty, might have looked like a rare delicacy with tender flesh.
Of course, no matter how powerful a spiritual being is, it can’t interfere with a living human without help or a scheme.
What if Professor Gong Hyuk-jin, who majored in folklore and has a suspicious fondness for China, pops up here?
‘Did he offer the soul of a living person as a sacrifice to an evil spirit or an evil god?’
It’s possible.
If a professor asks for a student’s personal information, a student who is new to society has no choice but to provide it, and the possibility that he found out trivial but not-so-trivial things like their birthday or four pillars of destiny in the process is even higher.
All that’s left is to pretend to go on a trip and take the targeted student to the destination. Even if you lack knowledge of the occult, if you just cooperate with the locals, it’s not a big deal to get rid of a person or two.
Although there’s still no physical evidence and it’s just a suspicion based on circumstantial evidence, I felt the puzzle pieces coming together in my head as I opened the door and went out into the hallway.
However, as soon as I opened the door, what I saw was not the familiar hallway of the motel, but the middle of a dark stone chamber with only a few candles lit.
“I smell it. The smell of that delectable thing.”
Something in the darkness began to sniff and crawl around the stone chamber like a snake.
