NOVPUBAt the top floor of Hwangmyeong Tower, as the sun set and the night sky became visible outside the window, Seong Guk-eon and Jeon Moo-young remained asleep.
The tigers had seen the replay countless times, and this time, since they were dealing with two individuals who had less interaction, they appeared to be at peace.
Of course, Kim Shin-rok was the exception.
“Kim Shin-rok, their Ineungpa states are normal. Didn’t you see that Jeok-ho also opened his eyes safely? Don’t worry too much.”
“Son, the students you taught won’t be easily broken by a dream like this. Come on, have some dried persimmons.”
“But....”
Kim Shin-rok briefly glanced at the neatly sliced dried persimmons but didn’t seem inclined to sit down.
Perhaps he couldn’t bring himself to eat dried persimmons with his disciple wandering through nightmares.
Watching him, Baek Ho-gun suddenly lifted a one-person sofa effortlessly.
It was a substantial weight, yet his movements were as light as carrying an empty cardboard box.
Baek Ho-gun set the sofa down right behind Kim Shin-rok.
“Sit down.”
Kim Shin-rok hesitated before sitting down.
Perhaps because he was the teacher, it seemed Baek Ho-gun handled Kim Shin-rok the best among the tigers.
Following this, Jeok-ho and Hwang Ji-ho moved toward Kim Shin-rok, causing the furniture to be rearranged. Meanwhile, I too sat in the newly placed sofa.
From a slight distance, it was hard to tell, but Jeon Moo-young’s expression was somewhat shattered.
‘In contrast, Seong Guk-eon’s face hasn’t changed since he first fell asleep.’
It seemed Seong Guk-eon was hiding his emotions even while asleep.
Anyway, judging by just their expressions, it was hard to determine how far they had come.
Thinking back to the Jeok-ho incident, it seemed that about a year had passed, and Christmas was probably approaching.
‘On Christmas, the Jiikhoe will be wiped out. The self-governing body that Seong Guk-eon had built will disappear, and his close cousin...’
I remembered Seong Si-wan, who had proudly smiled while talking about Seong Guk-eon as a great cousin.
I also remembered Seong Guk-eon, calmly smiling as he listened to Si-wan’s words.
It would have been nice if there was a feature to skip unnecessary parts in the replay, but even as the levels increased, that feature hadn’t been added.
“Seong Guk-eon, no matter how difficult things were during his school days, he never showed it. He bore everything on his own, and there was nothing I could do to help.”
Kim Shin-rok muttered to himself while looking at Seong Guk-eon with a complicated expression.
The tigers looked at Kim Shin-rok with approving smiles, as if they were proud of him.
Kim Shin-rok, noticing their gazes, became flustered.
He seemed to realize his mistake in speech, but he couldn’t figure out what the problem was.
“...What’s wrong?”
The old Kim Shin-rok would have kept worrying inwardly without asking.
It seemed the link to the Ineungpa had truly changed Kim Shin-rok a lot.
The tigers, who were most sensitive to this change, seemed very pleased.
“I didn’t point it out directly, but do you know how you always refer to Seong Guk-eon?”
“Huh? Well...”
Only then did Kim Shin-rok seem to realize what the issue was.
He had been calling Seong Guk-eon “student” for quite some time, but had he not realized it?
“Seong Guk-eon hasn’t been a student for quite a while, but you still keep calling him a student.”
“I refer to him as Seong Guk-eon-gun, but since I rarely get a chance to interact with him, I got used to calling him ‘student.’”
“Ah...”
Seong Guk-eon had graduated long ago and had become a capable adult, yet in Kim Shin-rok’s eyes, he still appeared as a student.
Kim Shin-rok, flustered by the tigers’ comment, began to worry more about his disciples.
Treating his disciples like that was why they continued to follow him as their teacher, even after they graduated.
‘With a teacher who cares for them like that, the disciples will probably return safely.’
I wanted to think that way, but honestly, I too felt worried.
Unlike Jeon Moo-young, whose expression had been shattered from the beginning, Seong Guk-eon continued to wander through his nightmare with a composed face.
Thinking of Seong Guk-eon, who was swallowing his emotions, I couldn’t shake the unease in my heart.
Christmas
As the barrier was normalized and they entered Eungwang High after midnight, it was already Christmas Day.
While only a day had passed outside, it felt like several days inside.
Many students had to endure severe debuffs for an extended period, and as a result, most of them had died or were seriously injured.
The few who survived were either incredibly lucky or were younger students who survived due to the sacrifice of upperclassmen.
“Guk-eon-hyung, Si-wan....”
Jeon Moo-young, looking at his device, spoke with a dazed expression.
Ever since becoming a member of parliament, Jeon Moo-young hadn’t called him “hyung” even in private, but now he was visibly distraught.
Seong Guk-eon, having accepted the possibility of Seong Si-wan’s death ever since hearing about the incident at Eungwang High, silently accepted it.
Had Si-wan focused solely on survival, he might have made it.
However, Si-wan was the type to always put the safety of others ahead of his own in times of crisis.
“Let’s go to the scene.”
Seong Guk-eon gave Jeon Moo-young’s back a light pat with a sharp pop.
Jeon Moo-young, who had been holding back tears with his fingers pressed to his eyes, looked up.
“This isn’t an ordinary incident. This may be part of the invasion that will begin at Eungwang High. They’re likely erasing evidence to hide the complicated truth. We need to see it with our own eyes before more clues disappear.”
Suppressing his grief and anger, Seong Guk-eon spoke.
Since Seong Guk-eon, who would be the most devastated by this, was acting with composure, Jeon Moo-young couldn’t allow himself to falter.
As Seong Guk-eon continued to speak, Jeon Moo-young gradually regained his composure.
“The government, the association, and the school will try to silence the families and exert pressure to avoid responsibility. We need to help them speak up before they do.”
As Jeon Moo-young’s anxiety calmed, Seong Guk-eon finished preparing to leave.
Although Seong Guk-eon had just returned from an otherworld invasion, he seemed full of energy, looking more than capable.
Seeing him like this gave Jeon Moo-young strength.
“After we’ve done what we need to do, we can offer our condolences. Si-wan and the others will wait for us. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
By the time they reached Eungwang High, both seemed to have regained their composure.
As they arrived in front of the school, Seong Guk-eon stepped out of the sedan, and a barrage of camera flashes went off.
They were trying to capture a moment of Seong Guk-eon in distress, mourning his cousin’s death.
But Seong Guk-eon simply offered his condolences in silence, showing no signs of anxiety.
Even when the funeral ended and the association and government tried to wrap up the Christmas incident as a simple case of an otherworld anomaly and demon involvement, Seong Guk-eon remained unshaken.
“It doesn’t seem like only enemies appeared inside Eungwang High. There are students who testified about the demon’s involvement, but what happened to Si-wan doesn’t seem to fit the demon’s methods.”
“Did Cheolheuk Punglim check?”
“Yes. They confirmed there were no signs of demon involvement in the residential areas.”
“Then, all the students who witnessed the Jin Tribe must have been killed.”
There were many suspicious parts to the Christmas incident.
First of all, it didn’t seem like Si-wan had been attacked by enemies.
Based on the autopsy, muscle loss and the remaining Ineungpa in his body, it was determined that Si-wan hadn’t died from exhaustion of his stamina or Ineungpa.
He must have stepped forward to protect someone else, but it didn’t seem like he had taken the blow for someone else.
He simply seemed to have fallen before overwhelming power.
‘Considering the rarity of the enemies that appeared at Eungwang High, it’s hard to say this was the work of the enemies. If someone could subdue Si-wan so easily, they must have been a top-tier player or a powerful member of the Jin Tribe.’
If strong teachers had been present at the scene, the situation might have been different.
However, since it was Christmas Eve and the teachers who didn’t directly participate in the event were absent, and the head teacher-level teachers were abroad, the situation was suspicious.
Additionally, the hidden strength of Eungwang High, the Jin Tribe’s chairman, was absent as well.
Seeing that so many teachers were absent, it was hard not to suspect something was amiss.
‘Could it be a coincidence? Could this have been part of the Ho-jok’s plan?’
If the Ho-jok, who used the identity of Chairman Hwang Myung-ho, had masterminded this, everything would make sense.
If he had orchestrated the scene, he could have manipulated the barrier anomaly, the absence of teachers, and the positioning of a powerful member of the Jin Tribe to subdue students.
Suspicion continued to grow, but there was something else that nagged at Seong Guk-eon.
‘Chairman Hwang Myung-ho was lazy, arrogant, and had a strong sense of superiority. If he wanted to kill someone, he would have chosen a method that wouldn’t soil his own yard.’
A final clue that stopped Seong Guk-eon’s suspicions toward the Ho-jok came from the behavior of the dragon tribe regarding the death of Yong Je-geon.
The dragon tribe, who had sent Yong Je-geon, were deeply saddened.
The Azure Dragon and Yeom Bang-yeol took the lead and demanded an investigation, strongly asserting that Yong Je-geon couldn’t have been taken down by just a few demons and enemies.
But they never suspected the Ho-jok.
‘This is strange. I thought there might be a conflict between the dragon tribe and the Ho-jok, but the dragons seem to trust the Ho-jok too much.’
The dragons didn’t suspect the Ho-jok because of Jeok-ho’s death.
The Azure Dragon firmly believed that Hwang Ho wouldn’t abandon Jeok-ho, and dragons who knew Hwang Ho also thought the same.
Furthermore, there were other Ho-jok members who died on Christmas Eve, not just Jeok-ho.
Some of the Ho-jok staff members who worked at the Hwang Myung Foundation were among those who stayed behind at the school that day, and they all died.
Additionally, the Ho-jok’s chief shaman, Jeok-ho, also perished in the frozen and broken bamboo forest.
This fact had been strictly concealed, and Seong Guk-eon did not know about it.
‘The testimonies from the students who witnessed Yong Je-geon’s last moments and the dragons’ reactions are also worrisome.’
A few surviving students had kept vigil over Yong Je-geon’s tomb from the first day until the last.
These survivors testified that they had survived because they had acted alongside Yong Je-geon.
“I saw it through an insight-type Ineungpa. Yong Je-geon had almost no Ineungpa from the start. He might have been attacked before Christmas Eve.”
“That’s right. The media is talking nonsense, saying that Yeoyiboju cherished Gwangrim and that the situation escalated. But no, someone must have made the first move!”
These testimonies were also heard by the dragons, who corrected them, stating it couldn’t have been the case.
Yong Je-geon, they claimed, had greatly exhausted his Ineungpa for some reason.
The dragons never revealed the reason behind it.
As suspicions mounted, the humans seemed more suspicious than the Jin Tribe.
‘If I had to choose between the dragons and these humans as humanity’s enemy, everyone would choose the latter.’
Many humans, even while mourning the sacrificed students, were only looking out for their own interests and safety.
There were many trying to bury the truth of the incident, leading people to forget it quickly.
For them, those seeking the truth and mourning were simply obstacles.
One of Choi Pyeon-deuk’s close teachers made a disparaging remark about the bereaved families, and was reported by Seong Guk-eon.
The teacher, criticizing Seong Guk-eon for emotionally reacting to the death of his cousin, was laughed at for turning the tables.
Anyone could believe that Seong Guk-eon would act the same, even if his family hadn’t been the victim.
Seong Guk-eon’s actions during the Children’s Day incident and the Youth Training Camp had earned the public’s trust.
Even amidst the chaos, spring arrived.
