Chapter 108

Hwang Gi-dong could not stop thinking that Gye Do-hyeop had somehow dragged home a young, pretty person from who-knew-where only to put him through hell. Gi-dong had known Do-hyeop during the most reckless and volatile years of his life, so news that the bastard was supposedly starting a family had nearly made him fall out of his chair. Family was a concept Do-hyeop had once despised with almost pathological intensity. Gi-dong had half expected him to have picked up someone equally feral. The quiet young man sitting before him was the exact opposite of that expectation.

Hwang Gi-dong truly did not believe Gye Do-hyeop was dead. At least, not right now. But he also knew that if the search dragged on for another day or two without results, the odds of survival would plummet exponentially.

“My wife is curious about you, too. The fact that Gye Do-hyeop was seeing someone came as quite a shock to her. If you don’t mind, I’ll bring her along next time. Gye Do-hyeop will be with us then, too.”

“…Yes.”

A man who had known the deputy director for a long time, and who was certain he was not dead. Geum Seoul barely managed a nod.

“And this.”

The man tapped his index finger against the glasses case. When Geum Seoul looked up, Hwang Gi-dong tapped near his own eye in demonstration.

“Jeong-ham asked me to bring this along as well. Your eyes right now, Seoul-ssi… are a bit too vivid, you see. It’d be best to wear them, especially in front of the people from the Heavy Gem Administration Office. It’ll make them look like an ordinary color to anyone else.”

It was a tool for disguise. Geum Seoul offered no answer.

“Is there anything else you need?”

“…No.”

Only then did he shake his head. Saying he would let the people outside know that Geum Seoul needed more time to rest, Hwang Gi-dong gathered up his folded newspaper and stepped out of the hospital room.

“……”

The moment the door clicked shut, a heavy stillness settled over the room. Geum Seoul reached out and flipped open the glasses case. Inside lay a pair of thin, silver-rimmed spectacles.

Fingering the silver frames, he turned his head. Resting upon the nightstand was a neatly folded jacket. It was the clothes the deputy director had dressed him in while they were trapped inside the building.

A soft rustle.

A fine veil of pale dust still clung to the cotton. Geum Seoul curled around the oversized garment in silence, clutching it to his chest. When he buried his face into the folds, the faintest trace of a familiar scent rose from the fabric. Pain opened through him like a raw wound torn wider by hand. The hospital smelled strange. The room looked strange. Nothing around him carried even a fragment of home. What hurt most was not the unfamiliarity itself, but the absence of Gye Do-hyeop.

“…Deputy Director.”

That single whisper of the man’s title extinguished the fragile spark of hope Seoul had barely managed to keep alive. Even breathing began to feel sinful. He had come back into the world while leaving Do-hyeop beneath the earth, so every lungful of air felt stolen. He had no right to survive alone. It should have been him trapped in that darkness. A part of him wanted to crawl back into the room beneath the stairs where sunlight never reached, curl into himself, and stop breathing there. Was he gasping for air? Was he suffering in agony? While I lie here whole and safe upon a bed. A hollow space opened inside Seoul, vast enough to swallow a house, and kept expanding until it seemed to consume him from within.

He pressed his nose deeper into the fabric and cradled his belly with one arm. Dread rose sickeningly through him. Without the Deputy Director, Seoul did not know how to do anything. From the beginning, he had been a page no one bothered to underline. His body folded smaller around the borrowed clothes.

Snap. Snap.

“Get into the ring.”

Geum Seoul’s fingers twitched.

What suddenly brushed against his shoulder was those jet-black eyes that had fixed upon him through the monitor not long ago. The curled fingers snapping in the empty air. That low, quiet voice. It seized Geum Seoul by the nape of his neck. He raised his head halfway. From a corner of the empty hospital room, a humidifier puffed white mist into the air.

“Aren’t you curious? How bright you can shine.”

The place where the Deputy Director had said that had also been a hospital.

“…….”

He no longer lived in a neighborhood rotting away on all sides. When morning came, he woke to the simple momentum of his eyes opening naturally. Submitting to violence, bowing his head before another man’s shins—that life belonged to the past.

Brief though it had been, the Deputy Director had never allowed him to live like that.

From a lifetime in the auction house, accustomed to measuring jewel grades, calculating figures, and assigning prices, the man had plucked him out with effortless ease. And it was never just a matter of physical places.

At some point, the man had stopped checking or measuring his jewel grade. Even knowing that it was the clearest means, the most direct shortcut to achieving his goal.

“Don’t calculate things like that.”

A man who tallied everything down to the second had excluded him from his calculations.

Ah.

So this life could no longer be called one riddled with surrender, failure, and resignation. The Deputy Director had taught him how to ball his empty hands into fists, how to measure the shape of victory.

“I told you I’d make you radiant. Without a single scratch, fucking precious.”

He had fed him the finest, prettiest, freshest things. He had parted curtains sealed tight and never once drawn back by a hand’s breadth; he had cursed with casual indifference yet yielded with an easy nod whenever Seoul said no; and above all, he had pulled him alive from the basement of an exploding building.

Rustle.

Geum Seoul rolled up his sleeve. The arm that had always carried some mark of hardship—red and mottled from summer sweat, frostbitten in winter, bruised and scraped through spring and autumn—was now clear. Not a scratch remained. It looked like the arm of someone who had been protected and cared for all his life.

“Ah….”

Once again, he hugged the clothes close and cradled his belly, bowing his head. But this time, it was not to curl away in defeat. Resolve flooded his hands, locking into hard, unyielding strength.

“…….”

He refused to be broken like this. He could not allow it. Even if defeat awaited in the end, he could not collapse so easily, rolling onto his back and surrendering his belly. This life was not so frivolous, nor was it a breath bought cheaply. The life of a man who had climbed to Deputy Director of the Special Security Department at twenty-nine, a man driven endlessly to the brink of cliffs by a ruthless grandfather’s trials yet surviving every fall—the worth of the life of Gye Do-hyeop was never light, never easy, and never cheap.

There might be a way to fight. There might be a way to win—I might be able to find it.

Therefore, what he had to do from this moment on. What he could do to reclaim Gye Do-hyeop. His hollow, unfocused eyes sharpened with uncanny, vivid clarity. His fist-sized heart raced frantically, yet this time it was not out of despair. Nor was it simple optimism. It was the appetite for victory that the man had instilled in him.

“…I have to find him.”

A quiet shiver pierced through his thin frame.

***

After remaining lost in thought for a brief time in the hospital room, Geum Seoul summoned the Heavy Stone Management Office representative and laid down two demands. First, his pregnancy was to be classified top secret. And second, Director Noh Pil-gyu of the Special Security Department was to be brought to this room immediately.

If those two demands were met, he offered the condition that he would submit to a gemstone grade appraisal in one week’s time. After that, through an examination kept under strict secrecy, he confirmed only that the baby was healthy. No other tests were permitted.

He offered no answer to the official’s probing questions about whether the report of a Grade A gemstone being discovered was false. Geum Seoul insisted only that he would speak with no one except the Special Security Department’s director.

The opportunity arrived faster than anticipated. Geum Seoul could not help but be stunned by how many doors opened simply because he might be a Grade A.

Quite literally, everyone was bending over backward to grant his requests and heed his words. Yet his mind and heart were wandering through a swamp of mire, far too thick for him to marvel at such a newfound shift. With every passing hour, Geum Seoul carried himself like someone whose very life hung by a thread.

Knock, knock.

“Hello. Director Noh Pil-gyu has arrived outside.”

The man, speaking with almost excessive politeness, introduced himself as a director from the Management Division of the Heavy Stone Management Office. He explained that all intelligence related to Grade A was classified at the highest level. Once Seoul’s status was formally verified, every piece of his biometric data in the existing system would be erased. New credentials could be created for him, allowing him to begin again as an entirely different person and live anywhere he wished in relative safety.

“Is there anything you require?”

“Please feel free to make any request at all.”

He stopped by the hospital room nearly every hour and treated Geum Seoul with unfailing courtesy. Yet there was no warmth in it, no affection. He was simply polite, nothing more.

Rattle.

The door slid open wider. Clenching his fists, Geum Seoul lowered both feet from the bed and slowly stood up.

Because Seoul insisted he would speak only after meeting Noh Pil-gyu, the man had no choice but to come to the hospital in the dead of night. Seoul had seen him once before at the office. Back then, Noh had looked him over from head to toe as though estimating the value and dimensions of an object, then turned away without another word.

Now, however, as he opened the hospital room door and stepped inside, his face was twisted in deep annoyance.

“A piece of shit like you had the nerve to drag me all the way out here?”

“…….”

Rude from his very first breath. Geum Seoul thought it was just as well. Insolence of this degree could not wound him. It could not shake him either. Thankfully, having lived an entire lifetime under such treatment before meeting Gye Do-hyeop, he had developed an immunity.

“Let me handle the recovery at the collapse site.”

Geum Seoul had no time to waste. He cut straight to the chase.

“What?”

Noh Pil-gyu grimaced as though he had just heard the most bizarre demand in his life. Then, realizing this meeting had been arranged specifically to beg a favor of him, he promptly lifted his chin and crossed his arms.

“Now, what to do about that? We don’t rescue stragglers. That’s a rule that bastard came up with himself—didn’t you know?”

After Gye Do-hyeop’s apparent death, Gwak Chun-young—the architect of the whole scheme—had also gone strangely quiet. Having succeeded, Gwak should have been celebrating or making his next move. Instead, silence. Noh Pil-gyu privately found that delightful. Perhaps the two bastards who had spent so long tossing him around and tormenting him had managed to wipe each other out in one stroke. With the transaction ledger in Do-hyeop’s possession, the man’s death was cause enough for joy, and Gwak seemed to be keeping his side of their agreement by disappearing from Pil-gyu’s life. Better still, if the ledger had vanished with Do-hyeop, then Gwak had lost the evidence that could be used against him too.

If Gye Do-hyeop were declared dead as things stood, his personnel authority would revert to Noh as well. That ghost of a bastard, who trusted no one but himself, would never have handed the ledger to another person, but just in case, Noh had intended to purge and bury Gye’s entire lower line. Yet one of those very subordinates had summoned him all the way here.

He had not even been told the business before arriving at the hospital. He had received only an order from the Director-General of the Heavy Stone Management Office telling him to get over here immediately.

“I’m begging you.”

“Who the hell do you think you are? You’re not even a Grade A. Did you think you could fool me too?”

His shock upon seeing the code had been brief; the moment Noh Pil-gyu learned the subject was Geum Seoul, he had sneered.