What followed was swift.
Yoon Hwa-kyeong inserted the crowbar into the door crack and exerted force with a grunt. The hinges made a creaking noise. As the hinges wobbled, he set down the crowbar and shook the door with his hands. The metal door wobbled. Then, holding the door frame with one hand and pressing his foot against one wall, he exerted force with his arms and ripped the door off. The old paint flaked off and fell. Lee Young-jin just blinked as he watched Yoon Hwa-kyeong throw the door onto the floor with a thud.
The strength of an individual generally correlates with their physique and weight, but the slope of this increase curve is so gradual that there isn’t a significant difference in physical strength between completely different classes, such as alpha and omega. Even so, Yoon Hwa-kyeong seemed unusually strong for his size.
“You’re really strong.”
“Hmm.”
Yoon Hwa-kyeong just shrugged.
They went inside.
A short, dark hallway followed. Lee Young-jin turned on his smartphone’s flashlight app and lowered the brightness.
A wide, traditional Korean ondol room that used to serve as the living room for the entire village appeared. The entire space of about 40 square meters was submerged in darkness. Old newspapers with dates from ten years ago, discarded snack wrappers, and other items rolled around. A thick layer of dust covered everything. Lee Young-jin’s eyes stared at the desolate ruin. His vision blurred as he remembered the old days. Elders gathered around, turning the TV channels while guzzling makgeolli, looking at newspapers. Young him being dragged by his grandfather, sitting among them, peeking at the Hwatu cards being passed around. The wrinkled hands slipping crumpled thousand-won bills into his pocket.
“I should have cleaned.”
Lee Young-jin felt a bit of regret.
“I should have cleaned….”
Not just here but the entire village.
There had been more than enough time for that.
“Is this the place?”
Yoon Hwa-kyeong’s voice snapped Lee Young-jin out of his reverie. He hummed in affirmation and hurried ahead. The wet sneaker tips caught a flimsy plastic bag. The transparent plastic wrapped around the sneakers. Lee Young-jin bent down to remove it, and dried sugar crumbs fell out. He shook it off as if fleeing from it and crossed the room.
There was a small door where the walls met.
The door was barely 180 centimeters tall, without any decoration or pattern.
Lee Young-jin stood in front of it.
Beyond this heavy lead door was the panic room he had meticulously designed. His hand reached out to touch the flat surface of the door. His palm groped around somewhere on the door. Blue light flashed beneath where his five fingers touched the lead surface. The brilliance rose following the delicate fingerprints before fading slowly. Along with a buzzing sound, a green laser line descended from the top of the door. Lee Young-jin raised his head to align his face with the beam. The line scanned down his face.
Lee Young-jin’s breathing quickened.
Perhaps his betrayal had been discovered, and his name had been erased from the entrance authority list.
A brief moment of tension.
Ding.
The biometric recognition system turned off with a small notification sound. Simultaneously, a blue line appeared on one side of the door, drawing a tall rectangle vertically, and then that rectangular surface slid down with a buzzing sound, creating a recessed slot.
“Ha.”
Lee Young-jin sighed in relief.
He inserted his fingers into the slot created in the door and pushed it aside. Only after exerting all his strength did the heavy lead door open a crack.
“Do you need help?”
Yoon Hwa-kyeong, who had been standing diagonally behind with his arms crossed, asked.
Lee Young-jin turned around. Their eyes met briefly in the darkness, and Lee Young-jin slowly nodded, letting go of the door and stepping back.
Yoon Hwa-kyeong pushed his hand into the gap, fingers spread, and pulled hard. The sliding lead door moved with a grotesque friction sound. The gap widened, revealing a stairwell corridor gaping open into darkness. Yoon Hwa-kyeong, fearless, craned his neck through the gap, peering down the stairs. There was no light below, but his eyes, which absorbed light in the darkness, pierced through the shadows beneath.
Thirty steep steps down, there was a red door.
Yoon Hwa-kyeong glanced back. Lee Young-jin caught his look and nodded.
“I’ll go first.”
With that, Yoon Hwa-kyeong ducked through the low door,
He lightly held a steel crowbar in one hand, the other slowly feeling the wall, ready for any unexpected threats.
Lee Young-jin checked the time on his smartphone. 03:40. The numbers soon changed to 03:41. He put the phone away. Yoon Hwa-kyeong was already ahead. Hurrying, Lee Young-jin followed.
In the darkness, the red door looked like the mouth of a monster, wide open.
Yoon Hwa-kyeong looked this way and that, inspecting the door for a handle or opening mechanism, but the smooth door had no visible seams. Lee Young-jin pushed forward, past Yoon Hwa-kyeong’s shoulder.
It had been three years since Lee Young-jin had come down here.
Three years since that event which reset his life to zero.
Breathing heavily, Lee Young-jin incessantly felt around the red door with his palms.
Beneath the lead surface lay a complex web of electronic circuits, entangled like human veins, changing the location of the recognition panel each time. It was a circuit Lee Young-jin designed three years ago.
After about a minute of searching, the panel recognized his five fingerprints. Dull yellow lights flickered in the shape of his fingerprints before fading. A rough mechanical sound followed. [Supreme authority recognized. Red door unlocking initiated.]
Thud! Clank!
The lock disengaged with a chilling sound of metal scraping metal, echoing through the empty stairwell.
Simultaneously, at the top of the thirty steps, the door began to close slowly with a rumbling sound.
Yoon Hwa-kyeong swiftly turned back.
Lee Young-jin shook his head.
“No, it’s designed that way. When this door opens, that one closes.”
“Can it be opened again?”
“Yeah… don’t worry.”
As he spoke, the door fully closed.
The smartphone’s light faintly illuminated their faces as they looked at each other. Without hesitation, Yoon Hwa-kyeong pushed open the red door.
Creeeak! The sound of the door scraping the floor broke the silence.
Lee Young-jin took a deep breath.
The door opened to reveal a dark, dusty, empty space inside.
Yoon Hwa-kyeong asked as he looked around inside.
“Can’t we turn on the lights?”
“We can, but it’s better not to. The generator, I mean, using electricity will… What I mean is, the generator…”
Lee Young-jin had seldom made an effort to explain such things to others. He was a bit incoherent, perhaps due to nervousness. After taking a deep breath, he managed to organize his thoughts.
“If the generator runs, it could be detected.”
“What about the door lock system?”
“That’s powered separately, always running, so it’s fine.”
“Hmm.”
Yoon Hwa-kyeong nodded.
“It’s impressive you managed to live here all by yourself.”
“I didn’t live here…”
Lee Young-jin’s face flushed slightly.
“In another house outside, my grandfather’s house. It wasn’t like this. Just a regular house. I mean, a normal house.”
“Normal house.”
Yoon Hwa-kyeong repeated, nodding.
“Nice. A normal house. I lived in a normal house too when I was young, well, until my mom remarried.”
He stepped into the red door as he spoke.
Lee Young-jin glanced at his profile.
“What happened after she remarried?”
“Well, it wasn’t a normal house anymore. But my stepdad was a fun guy. Loved jaguars. I mean, the living ones. Funny, right?”
Yoon Hwa-kyeong chuckled, and Lee Young-jin found himself laughing along. It was an odd conversation, but it helped ease the tension.
They moved into the long corridor.
On either side of the narrow corridor, metal shelves were tightly packed, each shelf laden with boxes of various shapes, each tagged with a few classification tags. Decades’ worth of double-entry ledgers, government records, down contracts, up contracts, and all manner of documents, whether falsified or tampered with.
This panic room itself was a giant vault.
Designed and created by Lee Young-jin under Teacher’s orders, it was a storeroom of corruption and malfeasance that had started at Gyeongup Industries and spanned decades.
As the corridor ended, another corridor branched off to either side.
“Should we split up?”
When Yoon Hwa-kyeong asked, Lee Young-jin nodded. He took out his smartphone and tapped the screen lightly.
A 3D map sparkled and appeared before Yoon Hwa-kyeong, who wore glasses.
“Ah.”
He blinked.
“So this is how you show it. Impressive, isn’t it?”
“Yeah… You go that way. There’s a door, but it shouldn’t be locked.”
“Just need to find that item, right?”
“Yeah. The laptop.”
“Got it.”
They split up, each taking a side of the corridor.
Lee Young-jin swallowed dryly and looked at his smartphone. Yoon Hwa-kyeong’s unhindered view swayed on the small display panel. He gazed for a moment at the effortless and decisive view of the real Omega, different from his, then lifted his head to look into the darkness.
The corridor was like the maw of a gaping beast.
Inside, likely, was the item Lee Young-jin was searching for.
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