X
Join our Discord server and get release updates for every novel you follow.
Join the ServerThe place they arrived at was a small apartment.
Inside the bathroom, a young man was gasping for breath, with death hovering right before him.
He had tied a rope to the shower curtain rod and hanged himself from it. He was wearing nothing but a pair of underwear. Maybe he had come in to wash and, on impulse, made that extreme choice.
His bleached yellow hair was soaked and tangled with sweat and water. The young man’s face, turned blue, showed through the strands, half hidden. It was a pretty face, with even, well-defined features.
His feet, dangling in the air, thrashed about as if trying to find something to step on. Maybe he regretted having put the noose around his neck. Both hands gripped the rope with all their might, but they could not break the cord that had already bitten into his flesh.
A death rattle spread through the damp bathroom.
Then the violently jerking body went completely still. The hands that had clutched the rope lost all strength and dropped. His head tilted at an unnatural angle, and nothing moved after.
Heavy silence hung over the bathroom. The tub faucet had not been turned off completely, and only an occasional drop sounded.
Drip. Drip.
“He’s dead.”
A cluck of the tongue broke the heavy silence.
“It can’t be helped now.”
“What do we report to the Registry this time?”
“What else? That he killed himself. At least we arrived in time. That’s a relief.”
The two men speaking so flatly over a dead body looked to be in their early thirties. The one frowning at his watch and sighing was Dong-cheon. The one with the blue scabbard in his left hand, his face expressionless, was Cha Seol-young. They were underworld messengers from the Registry.
“But what is this one taking his time for? If he had the nerve to hang himself, he should just come crawling out.”
Dong-cheon looked up from his watch and grumbled irritably. He had every right to be annoyed. Collecting the souls of people who had ended their own lives before their allotted time was always a nuisance.
And these incidents happened with no warning. The messengers had to drop everything and dash over, and if they didn’t make it in time, the soul would wander off, get lost, and turn into a ghost. When that happened, the blame always fell on the messengers in charge.
So whenever a signal started flashing that someone had hastened his own death, the messengers in the area rushed over, abandoning whatever they were doing. Among all urgent calls, it was the most headache-inducing. A thoroughly annoying, tiring affair. That was what human suicide was to an underworld messenger.
“I’m tired. Stop dawdling and come out right now! Min Seo-jun! Min Seo-jun! Min Seo-jun!”
Dong-cheon irritably called the name three times.
The young man’s soul gradually slipped out of his corpse.
The soul stared around with huge, terrified eyes. When it found Dong-cheon and Seol-young standing a few steps behind, it flinched but did not ask who they were. It realized at once that they were underworld messengers.
Well, it was obvious. The soul had just died by hanging, and two men were standing before him in neat black suits, long dark robes over them. Underworld messengers. Who else could they be?
The soul alternated glances between the two men, its face turning a shade whiter. His small body, wearing only underwear, trembled visibly.
“Um, I…”
The young man turned to Seol-young and stammered in a thin voice, but the rest was too faint to make out. Seol-young did not answer. Dong-cheon beside him shook his head as well, as if to say he would not listen.
Black cloth suddenly covered the young man’s face. Red ropes wrapped around both his wrists and ankles.
“You may exercise your right to remain silent, and you may appoint a defense counsel. Anything you say may be used against you before King Yeomna, so for now, keep your mouth shut.”
Dong-cheon recited the Registry’s Miranda warning in a practiced voice. The soul, cowering with its shoulders drawn in, was sucked into the gourd bottle in his hand.
Only then did Dong-cheon close the lid tightly, with a relieved face. He checked the time again. It was lucky that collecting Min Seo-jun’s soul had not taken long.
What still bothered him was the work he had left at the Bureau. A civil servant to the bone, Dong-cheon was wondering whether he could hurry back and still finish it all within the day.
At that moment, Seol-young, who had been silently watching Min Seo-jun get carried off, opened his mouth.
“Messenger Dong-cheon. My accumulated leave is still valid, isn’t it?”
He still had not put down the longsword. Dong-cheon stared at him blankly. It was odd enough that Seol-young was still holding the sword instead of sheathing it, but the word “leave” coming from his mouth was even stranger.
In this situation? After all this time? Dong-cheon was so suspicious of his own ears that he raised a hand and tapped at them.
“Leave? What leave?”
“Didn’t you say I could use my leave whenever I wanted?”
Seol-young mentioned leave again, in the same calm manner. Finally Dong-cheon snapped back to himself.
“Seol-young! You can’t be serious…”
“What did you say this young man’s name was?”
Seol-young let his gaze fall on the young man’s body, which was still hanging, slack. The two had run out in such a hurry that he had not properly committed the dead man’s information to memory. Not that it was his job, it was Dong-cheon who summoned souls. But what had Dong-cheon called him just now? Min, was it…?
“Min Seo-jun.” Dong-cheon answered at once, but his eyes were bulging. “Look here, Messenger Seol-young. You want to take leave at a moment like this, in this busy season? Are you for real?”
“Mm. Min Seo-jun. Age?”
“Twenty-two! How am I supposed to manage by myself? You know people are dying left and right these days, everyone is stretched thin!”
“Occupation?”
“A singer. Hey! At least wait until Hye-gang comes back! I can’t do anything alone!”
Seol-young looked at Dong-cheon, who had raised his voice, his face turning red and white by turns, yet still answered each question faithfully. Seol-young’s lips curved in a small smile.
Dong-cheon flinched.
“You know I’ve never taken a single leave in eight hundred years, right?”
“Yah… Cha Seol-young…”
The remark had struck where it hurt, and Dong-cheon’s voice shrank to nothing.
“How many leaves have you taken during that time? Four? No, was it five?”
“Three! It was three!”
“Yes, three. And who did your job for you every time you went on leave?”
Seol-young asked with a relaxed smile. Dong-cheon closed his mouth, mute. Then he slapped his forehead and ground his teeth.
“Even so, this is too much! You suddenly say you’re taking leave, and what am I supposed to say to the department chief?”
“A human I like has appeared at the right time, so it can’t be helped. You explain it when you get back. The chief won’t have much to say anyway.”
“That makes no sense! You should have mentioned you were thinking of taking leave at least once! Go and report it yourself!”
“If I go down to report and get caught up there, Min Seo-jun’s body will be rotten by then.”
That wouldn’t do. Seol-young answered lazily and walked over to the young man still hanging by the neck in midair. Behind him came a sigh and the sound of grinding teeth at the same time, but Seol-young raised his hand as if he had heard nothing.
The longsword swung up toward the young man’s head. It drew a fast, light arc, and the instant it sliced through the rope, the body that hung from the shower rod fell to the bathroom floor with a loud clatter.
Seol-young approached the body, which lay in a grotesque tangle, and Dong-cheon asked behind him with a sigh.
“Messenger Seol-young, let me ask you one thing. Why now of all times? Why this person?”
“Because it just occurred to me that I haven’t used my leave in far too long.”
Seol-young answered in the same indifferent tone with which he was looking at the young man.
“What?”
“And because he’s as pretty as a flower.”
“…What?”
Dong-cheon could not find a word to say. With his mouth half open, he stared blankly at Seol-young as if his soul had left his body. He had worked alongside Cha Seol-young for eight hundred years as an underworld messenger. In all that time, he had never once seen Seol-young’s face light up like this.
You think this chapter was thrilling? Wait until you read The Lich’s Journey in Another World After Reincarnation! Click here to discover the next big twist!
Read : The Lich’s Journey in Another World After Reincarnation
