Chapter 1

My name is Jae-hun, and at twenty-two years old, I was just another face in the crowd, trying to navigate the chaotic waters of university life in Seoul. An ordinary guy still rocking V-card status, much to my obnoxious roommate Tae-jun's delight.

As usual, it was Tae-jun's booming voice that jolted me awake that crisp autumn morning. "Rise and shine, virgin king!"

I flipped him off without turning around, knowing engaging him would only encourage the crass comments. Tae-jun and I had been best friends since high school - partners-in-crime, the yang to each other's yin. He was brilliant yet crude, with a sense of humor that would make a sailor blush.

After a quick shower, I emerged from the bathroom to find Tae-jun sprawled on the futon in our cramped living room, video game controller in hand.

"Don't we have an 8 a.m. class?" I asked, toweling off my hair.

"Pfft, like I'm going to that bullshit," he scoffed without taking his eyes off the screen. "Not when I've gotta save Princess Peach's sweet ass from Bowser's clutches."

"You're hopeless." I said while Rolling my eyes, I grabbed a protein bar and headed out, leaving Tae-jun to his pixelated antics. The familiar cacophony of Seoul's morning rush enveloped me - car horns blaring, pedestrians rushing along the sidewalks clutching coffees, the pungent aromas of street food wafting from every corner.

Tae-jun emerged a few minutes later, lumbering towards me with a chunk of what looked like week-old pizza dangling from his mouth. "Dude, that better not be your breakfast again," I groaned.

He gasped with exaggerated offense. "You shut your pie-hole, Kimchi breath! This is an artisanal delicacy." He took another gratuitous bite, grease dribbling down his chin.

I shook my head in resigned amusement as we made our way across campus, Tae-jun regaling me with another ridiculous tale from his latest misadventures.

"So there I am, buck naked save for my lucky bowler hat and socks," he cackled, "when this pomeranian comes waddling out of the bedroom and starts--"

"Spare me the gory details, you ass." I cut him off quickly, feeling my face flush.

His riotous laughter only doubled down. "You need to get laid, my virgin friend. Pronto!"

We settled onto our usual grassy spot in the quad, rejoining the rest of our crew. A somber pall hung over the group as they caught me up on the disturbing campus news of the day.

"You hear what happened to Professor Kim?" Min-ho asked, shaking his head grimly. "Heard the old dude kicked the bucket last night."

My stomach twisted...Professor Kim was a rigid hardliner, but a good man and one of my favorite proffesor. The idea of him dead was sickening.

"If it were me kicking that bucket, I wouldn't mind too much," Tae-jun chimed in, trademark bluster on full display. He shoved another greasy bite of pizza into his mouth. "Just think of all the hot nurses giving ol' Tae-jun here a little mouth-to-mouth revival!"

He punctuated his crass comment with a lewd pelvic thrust. Yoon-seo, sitting nearby, recoiled in disgust.

"You're a freaking pig, dude."

I shot Tae-jun a withering look, but understood his vulgar humor was just a coping mechanism. Underneath the bravado, he too looked deeply troubled by the news of Professor Kim's fate.

Eventually, we resigned ourselves to gathering our bags and making the familiar trudge towards the lecture hall. The dread over potential pop quizzes or participation points felt overshadowed by the larger pall hanging over the class.

When Professor Kim's quiet teaching assistant finally arrived fifteen minutes past the scheduled start time, the hall had already erupted into a dull roar of restless muttering. I pulled my baseball cap low, trying to block out the noise as she wrung her hands and called for quiet.

"I-I'm afraid I have some very upsetting news regarding Professor Kim," she said, her voice shaking slightly. "Last night...he was assaulted in an unprovoked attack outside a restaurant."

A stunned hush fell over the room before the murmurs and gasps began. My heart kicked up as Tae-jun elbowed me discreetly with a pointed look.

Sure enough, he was already pulling up a sketchy gossip blog on his phone - the kind of unsourced trash I usually dismissed. But there were the damning images, grainy cellphone pics appearing to show Professor Kim's bloodied, prone form being dragged out of a seedy-looking Korean barbecue joint.

"No way..." I muttered, feeling ill as I studied the pictures. Random assault, my ass - those images reeked of premeditation. What had our respected political science professor gotten himself unwittingly caught up in?

As the visibly rattled TA attempted to restore order, going over details like makeshift lesson plans, her words became a garbled buzz in my ears. My mind stuck on one question - if this wasn't just a random mugging gone wrong, what were the real motivations behind such a vicious attack?

Class eventually began trickling out in a daze, the raucous laughter and horsing around of earlier replaced by grim, uneasy quiet. As Tae-jun and I lingered behind, he eyed me carefully.

"I know that look in your eyes, bro," he said with a small smirk. "The gears are already turning, aren't they? You wanna do some digging into this whole Professor Kim thing."

I pursed my lips, choosing my next words carefully. Out loud, it sounded half-baked...but I couldn't shake this gnawing premonition.

"Let's meet up after my shift at the convenience store tonight. If Professor Kim really did get caught in the crosshairs of something bigger...I need to know what the hell's going on."

The garish red "OPEN" sign buzzed incessantly, filling the cramped convenience store with its harsh neon glare as I zoned out behind the counter. I'd worked this soul-crushing night shift one too many times, the mind-numbing tedium momentarily erasing the turmoil churning in my gut.

My eyes kept straying to my phone, replaying those grainy images of Professor Kim's bloodied, crumpled form over and over. Despite Tae-jun's typical bravado, even he looked shaken when the first reports trickled in about the old man's assault. The brutality just didn't add up for a random mugging…

I flinched as the front door's chime jolted me from my spiraling thoughts. A grizzled salary-man stumbled in, eyes bleary and reeking of cheap soju. He belched out his order, practically throwing his crumpled won at me before snatching up a fistful of dried squid snacks.

As he lurched back out into the neon-streaked night, I slumped against the counter, sinking back into my anxious reverie. What the hell was Professor Kim caught up in to have earned such a vicious beatdown?

My phone buzzed, snapping me back to reality – a stream of Tae-jun's trademark raunchy memes filling the screen. I rolled my eyes but managed a smirk. Only that twisted comic relief could make light of such a dark situation.

"Dude," his next message read, that trademark shit-eating grin practically oozing from the pixels. "If you grow a pair and stop being a virgin, maybe that stick wouldn't be so far up your ass."

I shot back a middle finger emoji, but my heart wasn't in the banter. As my shift mercifully wound down, I punched out and stepped outside into the humid night air. Seoul's familiar catcall of drunken laughter, blaring horns, and neon beckoned all around me.

By the time I arrived back at the shoebox apartment, Tae-jun already had a ramshackle pile of greasy takeout containers and beer cans erected around him like a crumbling citadel. His rootless gaze flitted distractedly between the lurid scene unfolding on the TV and his phone screen.

"About time, Sleeping Beauty!" He crowed, hardly looking up. "I was starting to think you got kidnapped by some depraved ajumma wanting to—"

"Stow it, asshat," I grumbled, swatting away the half-eaten park of shrimp chips he flung at me. For a beat, an uncharacteristic pall hung between us as we both silently replayed the horrific images from earlier. When I finally spoke up, I struggled to keep my tone hardened against the rising dread:

"We have to do something about this Professor Kim situation."

Tae-jun cocked an eyebrow, his façade of detached amusement momentarily slipping to reveal a rare glimmer of seriousness that sent a shiver through me. "You mean like…?"

"I don't know!" I snapped, raking my fingers through my hair as the words spilled out in a torrent. "But those pictures, the way he was beaten within an inch of his life? It doesn't add up for some random robbery or gang initiation shit!"

For once, Tae-jun didn't have some snarky quip or crude deflection at the ready. He simply gave a grim nod, sucking down the last of his beer.

"Then I guess we need to start doing some damn digging of our own."

Those words hung ominously in the air, draining what little mirth still clung to the evening. Deep down, I sensed we were strapping in on a harrowing descent into darkness – one that may show no mercy in the end.

Over the next couple of days, we tried maintaining an air of detached nonchalance as we lurked around the fringes of campus life. But our casual inquiries started raising eyebrows from the more suspicious students who saw through our flimsy façade.

That's when Yoon-seo approached me between classes, those penetrating eyes of hers seeming to glimpse straight through my thinly-veiled poker face.

"Don't even try denying it," she said flatly as we ducked into a secluded corner of the library's stairwell. "I know damn well you and your degenerate sidekick are sniffing around Professor Kim's situation."

I opened my mouth to protest, but she silenced me with a raised finger and a withering glare that made me snap it shut instantly. Over the next few tense minutes, I reluctantly confided in her about our nascent investigation, dancing around the more grisly details that made my skin crawl.

Despite her typical hardline demeanor, I noticed Yoon-seo's composure waver slightly when I showed her the photos of Professor Kim's battered body. We may have played at being urbane, disenchanted youths…but underneath, we were all just kids still shaken by the darker realities of the world.

To my surprise, she simply nodded slowly after digesting my recounting of events – no tirades about reckless stupidity or self-righteousness. If anything, I saw the flicker of admiration in her stone-like expression.

"I'm coming with you two dumbasses then," she stated matter-of-factly. "It's clear you're in over your heads already."

A part of me wanted to argue, to shield her from the caustic path we were careening down. But another part – whether instinct or machismo – had my chest puffing out as I gave her a resolute nod.

"Whatever you say. Just don't expect us to pause every five seconds while you primp and preen."

Her scowl and Virginia punch to my shoulder were more reassuring than anything. In that moment, I knew we were a united front locked onto this collision course, come what may.

Over the next couple of nights, we camped out in my room surrounded by a warzone of empty energy drink cans and nicotine-stained printouts. Bleary-eyed, we pieced together a conspiracy web that would've made a TV writer blush – the kind of lurid, shocking allegations that college kids drunkenly slur about the elite before scoffing at the very notion.

Only this time, the damning money trails and incriminating documentation took on a hallucinatory quality. We became obsessed with hunting down every lead, chasing liberal professors and human rights whistleblowers who'd vaguely commented on rumors about a comment Professor Kim made at a symposium or buried subtext in a decades-old dissertation abstract.

When we finally strung together enough threads to outline what looked like a rudimentary map, we could only gape at the mural in stunned silence. It was too sinister, too wildly unthinkable to even fully process.

"Oh my god…" Yoon-seo murmured first, her voice barely above a gravelly whisper. "If even a fraction of this is right, it's…"

"Yeah," I said flatly, suddenly feeling more lucid and resolute than I had in ages. "We're in way over our heads."

My gaze hardened as my brain flitted to thoughts of Professor Kim lying in a twisted, crumpled heap – merely a potential casualty who strayed too close to the edge. Then I thought of innocent students like Yoon-seo and Tae-jun being snared in the web's tangled lies and brutal suppression tactics. An icy wrath flowed through my veins, straightening my shoulders into a defiant stance.

If we walked away, let this sprawling evil metastasize in the shadows, how many more innocents would have to suffer or disappear? Suppressing the arctic tendril of fear in my gut, I turned to face Tae-jun and Yoon-seo – their expressions a convergence of disgust, rage, and festering dread.

"Let's burn this whole fucking thing to the ground," I growled.

Tae-jun cracked his knuckles, lips twisting into a grim, mirthless grin of deranged resolution.

"About damn time…"

So in the dead of night, we gathered our meager supplies and dispersed into the dank, strobe-lit bowels of Seoul's underbelly – chasing incessant whispered rumors of a cabal so nefarious, its very existence seemed an urban legend.

The deeper we descended, the more we attracted scrutiny from the scavengers and hyenas lurking in the shadows. No amount of

Shadowy sidestepping or good-natured deflection could mask our increasingly frantic prodding. The whispers and steely glares from Seoul's seedy underworld told me we'd gone too far down the rabbit hole.

One night, while roughing up a scrawny hustler for one last lead, we turned around to find ourselves surrounded. A phalanx of towering brutes in cheap suits filled the cramped alley, knuckles cracking ominously.

"You kids have stuck your noses where they don't belong one too many times," the hulking ringleader sneered, a gangrenous scar bisecting his face. "You're in way over your heads."

Before we could bolt, the goons were on us – fists and boots raining down from all sides in a torrent of blinding pain and terror. I tasted copper, felt bones crunching as the shadowy figures merged into a kaleidoscope of violence. Just as the edges of my vision started graying out, I caught a glimpse of Yoon-seo crumpling under a bone-jarring haymaker, her scream reverberated in my head long after unconsciousness mercifully took me.

I don't know how much later it was when I finally came to. Every nerve ending screamed in shredded agony as I peeled my swollen eyes open, straining to make sense of the dank, dripping concrete walls enclosing me. My ribs throbbed with each ragged breath, but I managed to pull myself up to a sitting position.

Tae-jun stirred beside me, groaning as blood trickled from a gash over his eye. Yoon-seo was still unconscious on the other side, a mottled bruise darkening half her face.

"J-Jae…what the f-fuck happened?" Tae-jun sputtered out through a thick wad of bloody phlegm. The wild, primal panic flashing in his eyes sent a jolt of sick dread through me – we'd both been in our share of drunken tussles and street fights, but this was uncharted territory.

"I think we finally got their message," I gritted out, wincing as my jaw throbbed in time with my heartbeat. "That we wandered way too far into their world."

As if on cue, the rusted metal door opposite us screeched opened, silhouetting a solitary figure.