MIT 86

That’s a ridiculous analogy. Even if I am the Demon King, how could Joo-oh, with his long limbs and tall stature, be the princess?

But instead of challenging her expression, Mu-hae deliberately played along.

“Damn… you’re right. Actually, I’m not from the Intelligence Department. I just ended up taking on this job after being pushed around here and there. I have some debts to pay off.”

“I knew it.”

“If I knew it was that obvious, I wouldn’t have bothered with such clumsy acting. What a waste of effort.”

“Should I consider this a one-time encounter?”

“Most likely, yes. I hope so too.”

Olga fell silent with a thoughtful expression. After a brief hesitation, she subtly touched the ring on her left ring finger.

When Mu-hae’s gaze turned in that direction, the corner of her mouth twisted slightly.

“Does this ring bother you?”

“Huh?”

Her gaze turned toward the sky. Her smiling face, looking at the fake clouds, seemed strangely bitter.

After moving her lips a few times as if trying to say something, Olga finally got to the point.

“You know, if you do me one favor, I might remember something else.”

“A favor?”

“Actually, this is part of a set with a bracelet. But I lost the bracelet a while ago.”

Olga raised her hand and showed the ring. It was an ordinary accessory with a starburst decoration on a thin band.

For someone who would have given it as a gift, it was a modest keepsake. No, could this really be a matching ring shared with a lover, as I suspected?

“I tried looking for it myself, but it was useless. I searched everywhere I thought I might have lost it, but it didn’t turn up. The only thing certain is that it disappeared in a bustling area—maybe someone took it by now. Who wouldn’t covet an unclaimed piece of jewelry?”

“You want me to find it?”

“You don’t necessarily have to bring it back. If you can just find out where it is or who has it, I can handle the rest.”

In short, it was a bounty. It seemed she was having trouble finding it because the design wasn’t particularly outstanding.

Her eyes suggested she could pay generously, just to find out who the current owner was. Olga seemed convinced the bracelet had already passed into someone else’s hands.

“It might take more than a day or two.”

“That’s fine. Even if it takes time, just find the location for me.”

Her tightly pressed lips seemed to press down a little further. It looked like she was biting the inside of her cheek.

It must be more precious than I thought. Mu-hae nodded calmly, trying to look as reliable as possible.

“Should I report this request?”

“That doesn’t seem necessary. I’ll contact you again soon.”

Olga, her expression finally clearing up a bit, immediately drew a picture of the bracelet and sent it.

As expected, the design was plain and even a bit crude. Aside from the starburst pattern engraved in the center, it was no different from the accessories commonly found at street stalls.

“It’s platinum.”

Hmm. Maybe it looks more expensive than I thought. Mu-hae gave her his contact information and began sketching out a plan in his head.

Precious metals are usually traded through jewelry stores. If someone had picked it up and sold it, a simple inquiry could pinpoint its location.

But if it didn’t turn up after searching all the jewelry stores in the city, then the bracelet’s whereabouts had likely slipped into the underworld.

‘Pawnshops, or back-alley merchants who handle stolen goods.’

Fortunately, Jin Mu-hae had good connections in this area too. Mercenaries are often like that. When they come across valuable items while on missions, instead of trying to find the owner—who might be dead or alive—they quickly sell them off.

“It shouldn’t take too long.”

Mu-hae reassured her as if it were nothing. Maybe the job would be easier than he thought.

……Four days had passed since he made that confident statement.

“Damn it.”

He had misjudged. Mu-hae hadn’t even caught a single clue about the bracelet.

He had discreetly searched not only the four residential districts but also Central, yet no jewelry store gave a plausible answer.

A platinum bracelet that came in within the last few weeks. Professional dealers couldn’t possibly miss such an easy-to-remember feature.

Even when he visited pawnshops or fences large enough to handle precious metals, he received similar responses.

‘Are you sure you lost it just a few weeks ago?’

‘Well…’

Only then did he realize. Olga had only said she lost the bracelet “a while ago”; she never mentioned the exact date it was lost.

Typically, such an expression refers to at most a month or two ago… but who knows. She might have intentionally omitted that information.

Looking back, it was a vague request for someone who followed a strict daily routine. Though he suddenly felt tricked, Mu-hae guessed that her goal of finding the bracelet might not be entirely false.

The expression on Olga’s face that day was too serious to be fabricated. She had just passed off something she lost a long time ago as a job.

Accepting it that way made the daunting feeling a bit more manageable. Chasing a phantom and searching for something real are as different as 0 and 100.

‘I’ve been in this business for over 20 years, and even if I swallow pure gold, I wouldn’t touch something like platinum. The original owner must be someone significant, and if you want to survive long in this line of work, you have to be selective about what you take.’

‘But someone must have picked it up and sold it somewhere.’

‘Just because I don’t take it doesn’t mean others don’t, right? Those who deal in that kind of stuff don’t just do risky things once. Unless you’re extremely thorough, you’d eventually get tangled up with thieves and end up ruined.’

Through a pawnshop near Starlight Road, he obtained a plausible lead.

Jin Mu-hae immediately expanded his search to include those who had previously dealt in stolen goods.

Thus, the one he caught toward the end was a tattoo shop punk staying at a temporary station outside Goryeo City.

When he showed up with a stash of high-end cigarettes that could easily be exchanged for cash, the shabbily dressed man grinned, revealing sparse teeth.

“Platinum, you say? What kind?”

“I heard it looks roughly like this.”

“Can’t you draw a picture?”

“I didn’t sketch it, so just focus on what I’m asking.”

Pfft. The man lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and rinsed his mouth with the smoke.

The description he’d heard hadn’t suggested it would be this bad; it seemed he had lost even his slum residence and endured all sorts of hardships after being pushed out.

“The star shape rings a bell. I bought it off some mercenary from outside as a quick sale.”

“Oh?”

“There was something else inside it. So I weighed it, and since it wasn’t solid platinum but just plated, I haggled him down to a tenth of the price. Hahaha!”

As if boasting about a past exploit, the man puffed on his cigarette repeatedly. Finally, when the faint ember reached the filter, he regretfully crushed the butt against the wall.

“But I couldn’t sell it for much either. Around that time, I got caught with stolen goods from Gi-seok, and not wanting to add more evidence, I sold it to some guy heading to Seogyeong City on business for about 2,000 deals.”

“Do you remember who that was?”

“How should I know? But around that time, most people going back and forth to Seogyeong City were either labor support or traders. If he bought that, he was probably the latter.”

The man, carefully closing the cigarette pack and tucking it into his pocket, scrutinized Mu-hae with scavenger-like gleaming eyes.

As often happens with those who’ve survived long in such places, his instincts seemed annoyingly sharp.

“What, you need the date too? That’ll cost extra.”

No sooner had he finished speaking than colorful packets fell in front of the man. Joo-oh had turned his bag upside down and scattered them.

Inside each palm-sized package were three or four pieces of thoroughly dried fruit. Not fake flavored with spices, but real fruit. It was an expensive snack, quite hard to come by even in Jaegang District.

“You think I’ll back off for some treats?”

“That. Jae-gu likes it.”

Joo-oh hugged his bag and retorted clearly. At the name, which sounded vaguely familiar, the man closed his mouth, which had been sneering.

Whether Mu-hae frowned or not, the man picked up every packet that had fallen on the floor and stuffed them into his jacket and pants pockets.

“It was around late February, I guess? Since I got dragged away in early March.”

“The year?”

“Let’s see… 16 years ago. No, no, 17 years ago. I was 36 then, so 53 minus 36 is 17. Right?”

A trader who went on a business trip to Seogyeong City around late February, 17 years ago. By now, he could almost certainly narrow down the target.

Mu-hae quickly left the musty back room and elbowed Joo-oh.

“Where did you get that? And who is Jae-gu?”

“I bought it while walking. Jae-gu is Jae-gu.”

What has he been up to without my knowledge? It was unsettling, but for now, finding the bracelet’s whereabouts was more urgent than questioning Joo-oh.

‘A while ago, my foot.’

Suppressing a sigh that threatened to escape, Mu-hae quickened his pace. That damn bracelet—at this point, maybe it was lost right when Solar City collapsed.

Mu-hae adjusted Joo-oh’s hat, which was about to fall off, and strode briskly toward the entrance of Goryeo City.

The bracelet’s new owner lived in Taeul District. He had worried that if it were someone from Central who had spent a fortune on a mere accessory… but thankfully, it wasn’t.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t get a contact number, so at an appropriate hour, Mu-hae slicked his bangs down to cover his forehead and rang the doorbell of someone else’s house.

He didn’t forget to position Joo-oh in front of the intercom. Though opening his mouth could lead to disaster, for first impressions, there was no one better than Joo-oh.

Beeeep—.

“Hello. I’m here about Park Soo-chan.”

“Who told you to say that? Move. I’m sorry. Are you a family member of Mr. Park Soo-chan?”

—……Who are you?

As soon as she heard the name, the front door opened a crack. Peeking through the gap was an elderly woman with graying hair.

Despite the visit from a stranger, her eyes held a faint trace of welcome rather than wariness.

“Ahem, do you happen to know our Soo-chan?”

The reason he was someone she missed just by hearing his name: 17 years ago, the eldest son of this house had returned from a business trip outside the city and gifted his mother an expensive bracelet.

Though he later passed away at a young age in an accident, his family still lived at the same address, remembering him.

Mu-hae quickly scanned the old woman’s wrist through the door gap. For some reason, no bracelet was visible. Ominous.

“We’re searching for a keepsake of the father who passed away long ago. Since he had an accident outside the city, some of his belongings were lost, and it seems some of them ended up with your son after passing through Gaeseong City.”

In the most polite and gentle voice he had ever used in his life, Mu-hae recited his fabricated story.

A similar tale of losing a beloved family member. The sad common ground of a keepsake he left behind.

Whether his ploy worked or not, the old woman glanced down at her own wrist. There was only a Link Watch there, but she clearly seemed to know about the bracelet.

After a long silence, she unlatched the lock with a clank and opened the door wide.

The old woman, slowly stepping forward, wore an awkward expression.

“You’re talking about the bracelet, right?”

“Yes. One that looks like this… If it’s alright with you, could we talk about the keepsake?”

“That shouldn’t be too difficult… Hmm.”

After hesitating briefly, she clasped her empty wrist and continued.

“That bracelet, I don’t have it anymore. I just got rid of it a few weeks ago.”