By Zephyria 
Gently pushing the suspicious Yoo Jiha’s back, Jeil Heon entered the exit side by side with him.
[Hidden World Record]
Name: Ten Million Movie Studio
Classification: Aberrant Realm-O-B.St-021
First Sighting Date: April 27, 202X
Survival Rate: 73%
Exploration Rate: 100%
Unexplored Area: None
Remarks: The Director Entity (reference link) was an unknown film director in life; his soul became contaminated after being crushed under a pile of floor heating panels during an earthquake, turning him into an Aberration. Gaslighting him is easier than trying to persuade him by flattering his ego. Please familiarize yourself with the separately established Director Entity entry for reference.
In the 38th exploration, Agent Choi Ye-rin’s advice—to plagiarize a past masterpiece rather than trying to film an original work beyond one’s capabilities—seems to have hit the mark. It is recommended to grasp the plots of famous movies before exploring.
└Why isn’t there advice to just hit ten million views with a face like Team Leader Je’s?
└└If five or more Agents determine that this method is viable, I will record it officially. For now, you definitely cannot.
└└└You’ll never know until you try! My team will take the 40th exploration^^
40th Exploration Summary: Through the sacrifice of Agent Lee Kang-min, a new fact was revealed: damaging the Director Entity’s aesthetic sense causes the audience count to drop. Since there may be other undiscovered conditions, the Exploration Rate is adjusted to 95%.
* * *
「Can you now gaze directly at me?」
“It’s a bit hard not to use the true eye for long periods, but it’s fine for a short while during a conversation.”
「You must have suffered a lot practicing even within the Aberrant Realm; you’ve done well. Has Je-gun gone to work?」
“As soon as we left the Aberrant Realm, he disappeared because he was summoned by the Director.”
「I see. I shall take my leave now. I may be away for a few days.」
As Yoo Jiha saw off Gong Ran-sa, who receded by passing through the wall, he buried his face in a pillow and lay face down on the bed. No matter how he thought about it, it seemed Jeil Heon had intentionally delayed the clear. He could only guess one reason. His own training.
Gong Ran-sa, unaware of the circumstances, had praised him, but in reality, the situation at the studio had not been great. Through consecutive filming, Han Geun-woo and the other victims began to feel hunger, and their cognition became so blurred that they couldn’t even pronounce their lines correctly. During the tenth take, they had done nothing but incessantly mutter the words ‘ten million movie.’
Even in the face of the danger that the victims might have become completely contaminated, Jeil Heon delayed the escape until the very last moment. Likely to make him practice controlling the true eye.
It was no different from abandoning innocent, unrelated others to danger. It was utterly unethical. It went against the Management Bureau’s conviction of saving people from anomalies. He should have felt chilled or repulsed by him, but…
“….”
Yoo Jiha bit his lower lip hard. He didn’t find it frightening at all. Rather, he liked that the man had gone that far for him. Was he actually a psychopath or a sociopath?
A muffled, aching groan escaped his face buried in the pillow. Even while doing ‘that much’ for him, the man wouldn’t return his feelings of affection. Bad human. He shouldn’t have been so kind.
‘I’ll just leave that mister alone whether he becomes an Aberration or not.’
After grumbling a lie to himself, he got up from the bed. He was already dizzyingly busy balancing work and school, and a bomb of assignments had dropped since the start of the semester.
While booting up his laptop and searching for materials, he received a DM from the class representative.
[You should visit Sunbae Jun-yeol at the hospital before he’s discharged, right?]
[Didn’t he get discharged last time?]
[He was readmitted for prosthetic surgery. I know you’re busy with your internship, but it would be better to show your face. There’s some talk among a few Sunbaes about the kids who didn’t visit.]
There were some loud male Sunbaes who defended Park Jun-yeol, claiming it wasn’t stalking just because they had some chemistry. Jiha had no intention of trying to look good to those guys, but it would be quite tiring if he got on their bad side.
Recalling the sight of Park Jun-yeol tripping others and fleeing alone at the Eight Phases Mental Hospital that day made him feel nauseous, but he had no choice.
If Jeil Heon were home, he would have complained about it, but he was unreachable until the following afternoon when Jiha went to the hospital with friends. When he casually asked Song Hilda about the atmosphere at the company, she said Kang Suk-young had also been absent since that day.
[Are you going to leave a cute 4-year-old waiting all alone and lonely at home? ㅜㅜ I received the cigarettes I ordered yesterday; I’m going to throw away one carton for every day you’re late♡]
He sent the text with intentional exaggeration. This seemed like a normal text a lodger would send to a missing landlord.
“Sunbae, are you feeling any better?”
His friends, carrying gift sets of drinks, entered the hospital room and greeted him. Yoo Jiha also slid his phone into his pocket and composed his expression. He had to pretend to be an ordinary Hubae, as if that day’s events had never happened. Ordinary, just ordinary.
However, that resolve failed.
“Hello—”
“You, you! Hey! You, you piece of sh—!”
The moment he bowed his head, Park Jun-yeol raised his voice as if having a seizure. With his perfectly fine right hand, he wildly threw a plate of fruit and a mug. Crash! Clang! The mug flying toward his head narrowly missed and hit the wall. Frozen by the sudden situation, Yoo Jiha couldn’t even dodge the cup flying at his head.
“Hey, hey. Jun-yeol. Why suddenly…”
“Get out of the way, you bastard!”
Park Jun-yeol brushed aside the Sunbae trying to stop him and stumbled forward. He seemed poised to grab Jiha by the collar, but perhaps realizing one of his hands was incapacitated, he scowled fiercely and raised his right hand high.
He was going to get hit. The moment he sensed it, Yoo Jiha squeezed his eyes shut. But no matter how long he waited, no pain followed. Wondering why, he opened his eyes slightly to see Park Jun-yeol’s arm trembling violently in mid-air.
To be precise, it was being held by someone’s hand reaching out from behind his back. The large hand, gripping so tightly it seemed it would crush the bone, was the hand of the man he knew well.
* * *
Jeil Heon cannot exist as a human without Yoo Jiha. This is an absolute proposition that cannot be denied by anything.
Even after coming to live at Pilgyeongdang, the child went down to his family home in Suwon every weekend. He had never become critical just because he couldn’t see him for two or three days. He could familiarly suppress the hunger that rose sharply. Thus, he thought it would be fine to be apart during the summer vacation as long as he could occasionally hear the child’s voice over the phone.
But it was not so.
After the child’s confession, Jeil Heon’s state of mind could hardly stabilize. His unsettled heart lost its self-control even further. On the day he went to work and returned home alone, the mere thought that the child would not be in this house caused him to sense his five senses twisting.
“You’ll be bored all alone in this big house without me, Mister.”
What would have happened if it weren’t for the child’s effort to greet him normally, despite having been rejected so coldly? Jeil Heon could not bring himself to imagine it. An Aberration that had lost its reason might have slashed everything in sight while chasing the child’s scent.
A deep sense of self-loathing felt as if it were tearing his entire body to shreds. Despite swearing to protect the child, despite being unable to exist as a human without the child, he harbored greed for him. He had made the child shed tears of sorrow.
He should never have made the child—the one who barely allowed him to live as a human—sad.
He, of all people, absolutely should not have.
In the lonely Pilgyeongdang while the child was away on vacation, a distant past surged between the slowly boiling hunger and heat.
The fourteen-year-old boy who succeeded in killing the Aberration that had murdered his mother and impersonated her by wearing her skin was, in return, dying himself. Ironically, it was Mae-gu who turned the dying boy into a Bearer. The fox demon who had taken the Aberration the boy killed as a sister.
He had become a Bearer without even knowing what it was, but he did not regret it. The more abilities one had to hunt and kill Aberrations, the better. Even if he had known beforehand that the end of a Bearer was to become an anomaly, he would have willingly chosen it.
Most Bearers were like that. Vengeful spirits hunting the Aberrations before them while walking toward the absolute future where they would eventually degenerate into anomalies.
There was only one bitter thing. Although they appeared no different from ordinary humans on the outside, the soul and body of a Bearer began to undergo contamination from the moment they accepted an Aberration. Children, whose human egos were not yet established, instinctively sensed this contamination.
Children were terrified of him and would burst into tears if he so much as spoke to them. Every time he experienced such reactions, a stinging regret lingered. As expected, I am not human. Since I am not human, shouldn’t I kill non-humans among non-humans?
Jeil Heon’s already narrow world closed even more exclusively. He was certain that he would fall into death, entangled with Aberrations, until he was killed by one or committed suicide just before becoming one. That was his conviction, until he met that child, Nam Jiha.