By Zephyria 
The place Jeseongje took him, claiming it was where Jeil Heon was, was a villa at the foot of a mountain in Gangwon Province. By the time they arrived, it was already late at night. The damp night air of the mountains was chilly.
“In the unlikely event that Hyung isn’t there or if he needs medical treatment, contact me through my phone. I’ll be waiting below.”
“Ye-yes, sir!”
“This place is so remote that about forty years ago, an Aberration tried to kill someone and the outside world didn’t even notice. It wouldn’t hurt to be cautious, right?”
“…….”
After adding words that only served to make him anxious, Jeseongje’s car soon drove away. Yoo Jiha entered the villa, rubbing his goose-bumped arms.
The villa was incredibly luxurious, large, and spacious. Using a golf club he found in the study as a makeshift weapon, he diligently searched from the basement up to the third floor, but Jeil Heon was nowhere to be found. Just in case, he checked under the beds and even opened every wardrobe.
‘Could there be a hidden secret room or something? He said the building in the garden was an annex for the caretaker, so the mister wouldn’t be there.’
On a whim, he texted Jeseongje to ask if there were any secret doors, but the reply he received was simply that there were none. That left only the garden. Because Jeil Heon had given the caretaker a few days off upon his visit, the garden was pitch black, unlike the villa. It felt as if a real ghost might appear.
“Ah, damn it.”
Even so, he couldn’t just go back. After swinging the golf club in the air a few times, Yoo Jiha bit his lower lip hard and stepped out into the dark garden. His palms were drenched in sweat from gripping the club.
Startled by the rustle of stepping on grass and hiccuping at the sound of wind brushing through leaves, he walked cautiously through the garden until two small buildings hidden behind the villa caught his eye. They weren’t the annex.
‘Are they warehouses?’
One of the two was locked. He first entered the building where the lock was open. Air slightly cooler than the outside enveloped his body, and a faint scent of old wood wafted through. Using his phone’s flashlight to find and flip the switch, he saw wine bottles packed densely on shelves. It was a wine cellar.
He circled the wine cellar, but again, there was no sign of him. Just as he was about to leave, thinking it was a wild goose chase, he suddenly noticed a wooden door in the corner behind the shelves that was almost indistinguishable from the wall pattern. He quickly opened it to find stairs leading underground. Come to think of it, he remembered seeing it on YouTube once—that wine was originally stored in basements.
Before he could even descend five more steps, the experience he had internalized from entering Aberrant Realms and facing Aberrations multiple times sounded a loud alarm of vigilance.
Something extremely contaminated was down there.
The true eye was not some grand ability or an omnipotent power. At best, it simply allowed one to see slightly better than others. Being able to perceive the essence of an Aberration was not synonymous with survival. That was why the Exploration Division always required the escort of other Agents from the Enforcement Division.
Right now, the only Management Bureau Agent here was Yoo Jiha.
“…….”
Under normal circumstances, he should retreat immediately, report to the Management Bureau, and wait for support. He knew this rationally.
However, Jeil Heon had intended to hide his tracks from the Management Bureau and hoped that even Jiha wouldn’t know. He still didn’t know what the purpose was. He only guessed that Jeil Heon was plotting something dangerous enough to keep secret from him.
He had already ignored the man’s wish for him to stay out of danger to come this far; he couldn’t recklessly ruin his plan now.
[I think there’s something in the basement of the wine cellar. If I don’t come out by tomorrow morning, please report it to the Management Bureau.]
[Be careful.]
[I’ll text you again if the situation changes as I go down.]
After exchanging one more set of messages with Jeseongje, he took a deep breath. He wished he had secretly stolen a bomb from the Enforcement Division. Calming his wildly pounding heart as much as possible, he carefully stepped onto the stairs leading underground.
The darkness, spreading silently from below, surged toward him.
* * *
Jeil Heon found the Dividing Mist, which connected Aberrant Realm to Aberrant Realm and reality to the Aberrant Realm, extremely unpleasant. It made him feel bitter, reminding him of when he fled with Yoo Jiha twenty-two years ago to escape the Smiling Man, and the sensation of the Aberration’s presence within him thickening like glowing embers was irritating.
It was the same now. He felt the hunger and phantom pain that had been driving him to the brink subside slightly just before entering the Aberrant Realm. It wasn’t the way his Corruption Level stabilized when he was with Yoo Jiha. It was a sweet temptation—the idea that if he became a complete anomaly, he would no longer suffer from this pain.
Gritting his teeth, Jeil Heon crossed the Dividing Mist and tore through another void to enter the Aberrant Realm. He was greeted by an unfamiliar landscape of blurred pit-houses. After walking along a dirt path for a while, a scene resembling a marketplace unfolded, making him wonder if it was the Jeonmae Five-Day Market. He soon realized it wasn’t. The attire of the Aberrations coming and going was fixed around the late Goryeo and early Joseon periods.
‘……It’s quite wide.’
His altered senses instinctively detected the nature of the Aberrant Realm. This place was vast and extremely ancient. Likely one that the Management Bureau had not discovered.
His heightened senses also detected a sense of familiarity. The air composing this place. The scenery. The scent. Ah, my brothers. What did I do so wrong? I resent you. Jeil Heon swallowed a groan and pressed his hand to his face. A hatred that was not his own surged like a storm.
This was an Aberrant Realm that manifested the lifetime of the fox demon mixed within him—the one who had been burned alive by his older brothers after being framed for murdering their parents. And the entity that had contaminated this Aberrant Realm was surely Mae-gu.
「Heyyy, why are you standing there like an idiot¿」
The hunger shouted. If he couldn’t pluck out his brothers’ livers, he should at least devour these irritating things. Crunch the flesh. Suck out the marrow, deliciously.
「The dog right here isn’t buying—¡」
Jeil Heon grabbed the neck of a merchant entity trying to force the sale of jewelry. Without giving it time to scream, he crushed its head and swung the Divine Blade. The bodies of nearby Aberrations split open, spraying bodily fluids and flesh in all directions. Both the entities that attacked in rage and those that tried to flee died.
Having suppressed the hunger by killing a dozen or so Aberrations in an instant, Jeil Heon picked up the head of one Aberration rolling on the ground.
“Where is the most prominent noble house in the vicinity? There should be at least three sons, and one youngest daughter.”
「Over there¡ Walk in the direction where the sun rises and—」
He threw away the head that had desperately explained and sprinted in the indicated direction. He had to find Mae-gu before the hunger flared up again. Soon, a decent tile-roofed house came into view. He leaped over the wall and entered immediately, startling a girl who had been playing tuho with Mae-gu in the garden.
「Little brother, it has been a long time.」
Mae-gu looked back leisurely, as if only then noticing him. He then affectionately stroked the girl’s head.
「You are my brother’s guest, so you go back to your room.」
The girl—an Aberration clearly mimicking the fox demon mixed into Jeil Heon—soon vanished. Jeil Heon bit his lower lip instead to swallow the hunger and pressed his forehead.
“What is this imitation for?”
「Do you think I was pleased to summon you? There was no other way to deliver the Mansin’s Divine Tool to you without contaminating it.」
Mae-gu sighed and unfolded a fan.
「This place is a private sanctuary, no different from my own Sueum. It is quite embarrassing to expose it to you. Please do not dwell too long on your elder brother’s unsightly side.」
“Whether you do Sueum or Boksangsa, do as you please. The Mansin’s Divine Tool is—”
「You’re quite impatient, unlike yourself. Why, can you not keep your senses because you want to devour everything around you?」
Fiddling with the Seonchu, Mae-gu put on a mock-concerned expression.
「This is quite a problem. There is a necessary procedure to hand over the Divine Tool to my little brother, but since the sister’s blood craves livers so much…… Hm?」
Suddenly, Mae-gu’s head tilted to the side. Narrowing his eyes as if observing something through the void, he let out a hearty laugh and climbed up to sit in the pavilion.
「Wait a moment.」
“What trick are you playing now?”
「I shall soon provide a way to calm your hunger, so trust me.」
Jeil Heon did not trust Aberrations, but he trusted the reality that Mae-gu’s goal was the same as his own.
Time passed. Beside Mae-gu, who was grinding ink to paint orchids, Jeil Heon was barely managing his increasingly ragged breath. The presence of servant entities busily moving through the house beckoned him sweetly. Eat. Eat. Let’s eat. Though his starvation could never be filled by anything, couldn’t he at least vomit out this resentment?
A new presence mixed in. The sound of footsteps approaching stealthily and hesitantly. Light and nimble footsteps belonging to someone whose weight would fit perfectly in his arms. A familiar presence.
“Mister!”
The hunger subsided.