By Zephyria Only then did Yohan, lifting his head, realize that Lee Hyun-muk’s eyes held not a single trace of red madness. Yet, a different kind of madness flickered within them. It wasn’t born of Corruption. It was purely the madness of a person driven insane by suffering for far too long, an eternity of hardship.
He looked back at his teammates; they were all ashen-faced. But their expressions also conveyed a sense of “what was bound to come has finally arrived.” Yohan, placing a hand that shimmered with light on Lee Hyun-muk’s chest, managed to ask,
“Where did those people from earlier… go?”
“To where they rightfully belong.”
Yohan understood Lee Hyun-muk’s anger. He himself would have been furious if someone tried to harm Lee Hyun-muk. He even understood the act of personal retribution. But this… this was not right. An instinctive alarm bell rang, warning him that Lee Hyun-muk shouldn’t have done this. He knew it would be irreversible.
“H-Hyung. I’m okay now. I’m safe. I’m not hurt at all…! So please, don’t do this, just send them to prison… can’t you? If not, then maybe to a deserted island or something.”
“My Lamb. You’ve had a hard day.”
Lee Hyun-muk didn’t seem to be listening to Yohan at all. His gaze was fixed on some distant point. Yohan, suddenly finding it strange, looked down and barely managed to suppress a scream. Lee Hyun-muk’s lower body was almost dissolved into shadow.
“Rest well at home, and I’ll come back after I’ve resolved this. It might take a little time….”
Lee Hyun-muk, with a smile fixed as if drawn, stepped back. Yohan was dragged along, but a firm hand pushed him away, causing him to lose his grip.
“Wait! Hyung, my words…!”
“So they can never do this sort of thing again….”
And then, before Yohan could grab him again, Lee Hyun-muk vanished into the distant darkness. No, it was more like he melted away, becoming one with the darkness. Yohan, startled, lunged after Lee Hyun-muk. The moment he leaped without hesitation, a hand urgently grabbed him. Lee Chan-ha, her face pale, stopped him.
“Yohan-ssi! No!”
“Don’t go in! It’s too late…!”
By then, Joo Ho-young was also pulling Yohan’s arm. The series of shocking events had left Yohan stumbling backward. Gasping, a mixture of surprise and fear, he turned to his teammates and asked,
“But, but… what is this? I’ve never seen anything like this. This kind of ability… What did Hyun-mook Hyung do?”
The field, even with the sun overhead, reflected no light at all. It was profoundly artificial and surreal. It was a phenomenon he had seen before, even at the broadcasting station. It was as if a section of the world had been deleted by some program, infinitely deep, distant, and vast. It wasn’t a black sphere, but a hole torn in the world. Seo Yakrin, gritting her teeth, mumbled,
“It’s not an ability, Yohan-ah. That is our Team leader.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
Yohan replied blankly. Pointing to the black hole torn in the ground and sky, Yoon Seung-ryong said in a terrified voice,
“Just as she said, what we see before us isn’t the use of an ability. It simply means that he is our Team leader.”
From the vast sky above, the loud sound of a helicopter could be heard. However, it never approached the black field, merely circling around it. But none of them paid attention to the helicopter. Lee Chan-ha spoke to Yohan, who stood frozen.
“Yohan-ssi, do you know why we can maintain human forms despite our ‘original forms’?”
Yohan looked up. It was a question he had harbored for a long time. They were twisted by an extreme Corruption, so severe it could hardly be called that. Even with purification, it was irreversible, so how could they maintain human shapes in their daily lives?
Lee Chan-ha recalled events from the distant past.
Any living creature could not escape Corruption from the Abyss. This was true for Lee Hyun-muk as well. Unlike the others, Lee Hyun-muk appeared outwardly fine. But when he swallowed Lee Chan-ha, who was on the verge of madness as she peeled off her own skin; Yoon Seung-ryong, who, driven mad by extreme hunger, tore at his comrades and his own flesh; Seo Yakrin, who raged with fury; and Joo Ho-young, who, consumed by fear and anxiety, tried to flee endlessly towards death—everyone realized.
Lee Hyun-muk was the most horrific and terrifying monster of all.
“I remember the first time I was swallowed by the Team leader. When I opened my eyes, everything around me was wriggling, covered in swollen flesh.”
“What? Flesh?”
“Yes, Yohan-ssi wouldn’t know. That was in the early days of the Abyss.”
Yohan suddenly recalled the time he entered Lee Hyun-muk’s interior. The outside was fine, but the inside was hollow, empty to the point of being vacant. It was a long time ago, but the memory still sent shivers of fear down his spine. Lee Chan-ha’s explanation continued.
Lee Hyun-muk would shed his own blood onto the bodies of the teammates he swallowed, washing away the impurities. He would fill their hunger with his own flesh, give them his bones to break and quell their rage, and block off their surroundings to soothe their intense anxiety.
At first, these actions had some effect. Corruption transferred from inanimate to living things. And among living creatures, it moved from weaker to stronger. From insects to frogs, from frogs to foxes, from foxes to wolves, bears… and then humans. And among humans, to the strongest being.
And the strongest among them was Lee Hyun-muk.
At some point, Lee Hyun-muk’s interior began to gradually empty. This was because his flesh and blood were not an infinite resource. Yet, he could not refrain from acts close to self-sacrifice. As his teammates were driven mad by extreme Corruption moment by moment, Lee Hyun-muk kept swallowing them whenever a crisis struck.
He swallowed them when they attempted to die. He swallowed them when they deviated too far from human form for too long. But now, with no flesh or blood left to give, a terrible counter-reaction began to occur within him. Perhaps Lee Hyun-muk himself was also profoundly mad.
Yohan listened, stunned, to the unimaginable story. He could not even begin to fathom their despair, their horror…
“If you stay inside the Team leader for too long, you melt and disintegrate. You become living dough.”
Even in their already mad state, they were made to suffer by the encroaching void, an alien sensation they instinctively recoiled from. In a place where they couldn’t tell if they were breathing or not, they melted softly. Lee Hyun-muk would shape the sticky, viscous teammates, who screamed silently, into human forms and send them out. He repeated this dozens, hundreds of times.
Then, at some point, Lee Hyun-muk stopped swallowing his teammates. He had reached his limit, unable to perform even that horrific act. He could no longer even speak properly, and his only remaining method was to keep his colleagues, who couldn’t distinguish friend from foe, far apart so they wouldn’t kill each other. That was the best he could do at the time. When Yohan fell into the Abyss, Lee Hyun-muk was truly at his absolute limit.
Yohan recalled the time he entered Lee Hyun-muk’s interior after failing to attack the core of the Abyss. He only then realized that what he thought was a soft, yielding floor was actually flesh. That flesh was shallow. It was shallow enough that Lee Hyun-muk’s Eternal Stone was revealed after only a little digging…
“That’s why you can’t go in. They’ll probably return to normal soon. It’s unlikely to be considered the Team leader’s ability, so we should prepare from the outside….”
“No.”
Yohan, who hadn’t even shed a tear despite hearing the shocking story, stared intently at ‘Lee Hyun-muk’ and replied with determination.
“I’m going inside.”
“Yohan-ah, let’s calm down for a moment and think about this?”
Seo Yakrin tried to soothe him, but Yohan shook his head. Seo Yakrin paused as she looked at his face. The team’s youngest member’s eyes were red, but he showed no signs of being overwhelmed by emotion.
“I’m not agitated. And no matter how I think about it, it’s strange, isn’t it?”
“What’s strange?”
Joo Ho-young said, glancing at the black void. He was so anxious he couldn’t stand still, looking as if he wanted to pick Yohan up and run far away immediately.
“What happened to Hyun-mook Hyung’s Negative Reinforcement?”
“…!”
At Yohan’s words, everyone froze. Lee Hyun-muk had said his Negative Reinforcement was ‘never giving up.’ He had never given up on his teammates, nor on escaping from here. But after escaping the Abyss, with his goal lost, in what direction did his Negative Reinforcement turn? Here, where there was nothing to give up on, unlike in the Abyss…?
Even after escaping the Abyss, and even after Yohan purified them, the teammates’ Negative Reinforcement weakened but did not disappear. They still easily indulged in gluttony, got angry, suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and were often anxious. Similarly, Lee Hyun-muk’s Negative Reinforcement would never have disappeared.
His Negative Reinforcement, which could be considered a noble human will, stemmed from a desperate environment. The desperation to survive, the desperation not to let his teammates die, the desperation to escape this hellish place.
Therefore, the more Yohan thought about it, the more he felt that Lee Hyun-muk, now that he had escaped the Abyss and lost all his goals, was in a very dangerous state.