novelraw Chapter 89
Chapter 89
Chapter 89
People carried their bodies toward the Paradoxical Flame burning in the basin, and the sight stirred all kinds of feelings in me.
“It looks like Scripture.”
Han Sang-ah cracked a joke as she watched the scene.
“What are you talking about all of a sudden?”
“It looks like getting baptized by fire. It’s a line that shows up all the time in the New Testament.”
“I didn’t know you were into religion.”
She answered me.
“I’m not crazy into it. My grandpa goes to church every week.”
“That guy?”
She answered me again.
“There’s this church famous politicians and celebrities go to a lot.”
“Ah. So that’s the goal.”
So prayer or faith didn’t matter, he just went to build connections inside the church. Smart.
“If you’ve got time, there’s no downside to going. At my grandpa’s church, they ask something like two to three hundred million won for the elder’s appointment offering.”
Wow, pricey. Back in the day, I don’t remember anyone asking more than thirty million for an office offering, no matter how steep. Anyway, religion isn’t my business.
“A lot of the famous Hunters all have faith too.”
Some of them are probably sincere, and some go for image management. Not really important.
“And I’ve got a fun rumor about that.”
Jung Oh-hoon butted into our conversation, cracking peanuts from who knows where.
“A rumor?”
He smirked and replied.
“Let’s talk about it later. It’s not important, right? At best it’s something to chew on over drinks.”
I agreed it made sense to handle what was in front of us. Night was deep, and we were heading back out early the next morning. If possible, we needed to find Jaun Valley’s Erosion Core before tomorrow ended.
We ate, washed up roughly, tried to sleep, then finished our prep before sunrise and headed back toward Changchun.
“Same as ever huh.”
The thick purple fog draped over the Changchun area still covered everything without change.
— Headhunter, we begin guidance as of now.
The three of us were investigating the countless lakes and reservoirs in and around Changchun. According to the last reports before the missing Hunters lost contact, the fog ruling this region seemed to billow out of those places.
“This is insane.”
Following the operators’ directions, we made it to a lake on the outskirts of the city. Within a short distance, maybe five lakes clustered together in the land.
“Good lord, is this hell?”
From the water, which bubbled and seethed, an immense volume of thick purple fog poured out.
If about six hundred thousand people huddled together and hit their closed-system vapes at once, maybe it would look like this. The fog was that thick.
Exaggerating, it felt like you could grab the fog in your hand, knead it, and bake a loaf of bread.
“No wonder masks or resistance don’t help.”
The operators’ map and brief told us there were lakes here, but the fog hung like blackout curtains, so it was almost impossible to even tell where the waterline was.
“Let’s go in.”
The moment we stepped into the fog, all of us started coughing like we’d planned it. Looking uneasy, Jung Oh-hoon pointed at the Paradoxical Flame coiling around his head and burning.
“Hey, this really works even in a mess like this, right?”
Instead of answering, I cranked the Paradoxical Flame hotter. The fierce fire burned away the toxicity in the fog streaming toward us.
“It’s just thick steam making you cough.”
There was no toxin. You know how the steam inhalation therapy they use in ENT clinics sometimes makes you cough. A wet sauna’s a pretty good example too.
“Just know you’ll be fine.”
“Can’t you just burn all of this away? You’re burning the harmfulness out of matter anyway. If everything harmful around here loses its harmfulness, would that even be a problem?”
I shook my head at Han Sang-ah’s question.
“Even if something looks unnecessary, if it disappears, it causes problems. Since we’re in China, how about the Four Pests campaign as an example.”
More famous by this line:
That bird is harmful.
Most people know how that ended.
“Mercury, hydrochloric acid, radioactive material, antifreeze… what do you think happens if those substances lose one of their core properties?”
I had to limit things to a scope I could control. I mustn’t start something I couldn’t handle.
“Let’s just start the investigation.”
Cute little Casper-type ghosts apparently had been waiting for us.
With a whoosh, ghosts popped out of the fog, made weird noises, and drifted around us. They couldn’t hurt us anyway.
If anything, about thirty-three percent of them tried to possess me and were crushed into nothing. Sometimes a few turned poltergeist and took a swipe at us, but…
That wasn’t enough to deal real harm. If mind attacks were your main weapon and those bounced off, of course you were useless.
“Noting here.”
We finished the check and moved to leave the lake right away.
— You’re off course.
Moving through the soupy fog, I halted at the operator’s words. That couldn’t be right. I never go off course.
“Chan-seok, are you sure you didn’t mess up?”
Seeing my serious face, Jung Oh-hoon tossed a line. I answered simply.
“Mr. Jung, I don’t mess things like this up.”
I’d never stopped hammering into Mr. Jung and Han Sang-ah the importance of the five senses. And I supposedly took a wrong turn by mistake?
In a gigantic labyrinth with hundreds of mirrors laid over the earth, I’d never once gotten lost or confused.
“I agree with Yoo Chan-seok. He wouldn’t make that mistake.”
It seemed like something was interfering. After staring at the ground a while, I clicked my tongue.
“Damn it, I finally found it.”
I managed to catch the thread of mana spread out through the ground as thin as microfiber. Between the fog and the ghosts, and the fact that the mana was smeared out so faintly, I hadn’t been able to pick it up.
“It’s a loop.”
The effect was a magic circle that made you circle the same place. I said low mana, but that was only because it had been thinned across the ground like gold leaf. The actual mana mobilized was enormous.
Even on the low end, the circle’s effective radius right now was about five kilometers in every direction.
They’d spread mana across the earth like a gold wash. No wonder it was hard to find. And this thing was insanely delicate and precise.
It felt like looking at a sculpture carved from pencil lead.
“I can say for sure there’s at least one real freak sitting inside the Erosion Core.”
But that could actually work to my advantage. I pressed my in-ear button at once.
“I think I can locate the Erosion Core. Please pull the other Hunters back to Harbin.”
If I back-traced, I could pinpoint the Erosion Core’s location. If they could lay a circle this covert and precise, they weren’t just free-floating ghosts.
— Understood. Sharing the update.
About thirty minutes later, while I was working through how to back-trace the circle, the operator came back in a slightly rattled tone.
— All Hunters participating in the investigation are confirmed to have lost their sense of direction and to be circling the same areas.
“Ha, shit.”
I’d hoped not. So it wasn’t a small circle covering just five kilometers after all.
— The Hunters are panicking. Even with masks and resistance, there’s a hard time limit.
And now the Hunters had gotten lost and trapped in this fog with the clock ticking. Everyone already knew what happened once the fog kicked in.
— About five percent of Hunters have additionally been hit by the monsters’ mind attacks. Other teams… are disposing of them immediately… but the psychological fatigue is mounting.
This circle mainly used auditory illusions and phantom voices to wreck your sense of direction. Thankfully, the operators were tracking positions and trying to keep the teams moving without veering too far.
— You can keep going straight there.
— Please move fifty meters to your right.
— Head thirty-five degrees to the northwest.
I stopped walking.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
I was hearing multiple operator directions through the in-ear. I’d heard three. That meant only one was real and the rest were phantom voices.
“So they’re jamming us like this huh.”
It wasn’t radio jamming. They were just using auditory illusions to mimic the operators’ voices and make the guidance worthless.
“Can’t you tell them apart?”
“I can.”
A phantom voice wasn’t the same as the real one. More precisely, since the illusion was a mana phenomenon, there was a faint admixture of mana in the voice. The problem was, for anyone else, feeling that and sorting out the phantoms was next to impossible.
I wasn’t like them. Since I used ambient mana directly, my sense for mana was incomparably sharper than other Hunters’. That was why this trick worked for me.
“Just the three of us getting out means nothing.”
I’d left two hundred fifty Hunters in Harbin just in case… but over six hundred were now trapped here. And once those Hunters got subsumed by ghosts, they’d come after us.
I kept staring at the mana flowing through the ground. I didn’t know how to construct magic circles, but I knew how to break them.
After spending time analyzing the circle, I spat on the ground.
“To crack this, we need to find and release twenty-four key points.”
“Eight teams besides us entered Jaun Valley. Instead of trying to smash the circle, we should roam, link up with other Hunters, and let us lead them. That’s more efficient, right?”
Han Sang-ah offered her take right away.
“During the rally, this circle could trip us and scatter us again.”
Jung Oh-hoon raised a pretty valid objection on the spot. He was right. And…
“You two could get hit by the auditory and visual illusions as well.”
They might think they were moving with me, then snap out of it to find themselves far away and alone.
“I can tell real from fake.”
With things this tangled, we had to hurry.
“Can you estimate how long the other Hunters can hold out?”
Immediately, real voices and phantom voices tangled together and boomed in my in-ear. Oh, so you think that’ll keep me from understanding?
Very funny. What do you think I am, you damn circle. I picked the real operator’s voice in a heartbeat, listened, then clicked my tongue.
“Three hours? That’s tighter than I thought.”
At that rate, we’d need to sprint through fire and water.
“Why? The sulfur willows can last at least fifteen hours, and the ones relying on resistance can hold even longer, right?”
Scowling, I relayed the operator’s explanation to Jung Oh-hoon and Han Sang-ah.
“Some of these damn Hunters are following the phantom voice instead of the real operator and moving exactly the way it says.”
And there was one more problem.
“Guess where those phantom voices are leading them? Ta-da, to the lake nearest to their position.”
“Damn it,” Jung Oh-hoon muttered.
“So, what’s your plan?”
“Do you know the easiest way not to get fooled by phantom voices and illusions?”