FLIA 95

“Ah, yes…!”

Yohan swallowed hard and spoke with sincerity. He just left out the part about Park Seungmin and the mercenaries deliberately pushing him into the Abyss. There was no proof, and even if those bastards got caught, they probably wouldn’t be punished the way Yohan wanted. He secretly vowed to exact revenge the thought of revenge later, no matter how much it cost.

“What kind of place is the Abyss?”

“It’s really, really, a terrible place…”

Yohan trembled as he spoke honestly without hiding anything. A sky without day or night, cities reduced to ruins, wild untamed nature, terrifying monsters everywhere, a living Black Mountain that devoured the monsters, a space thick with corruption… Jeong Siyoung listened without expression, then asked,

“Then how did you make it out nearly uncorrupted? In that kind of environment, it must have been hard just to find food.”

“Hyunmook-hyung, he did something with the Eternal Stone. But I don’t know exactly what he did.”

Yohan lied. In fact, Lee Chanha had already informed him in advance. Surprisingly, Lee Chanha had been able to enter Yohan’s dreams while he slept. It seemed like he used a wide-reaching hallucination to communicate.

‘Yohan-gun. You were having fun, I see.’

‘Huh? Chanha-hyung? How did you know I was here?’

That night, in his dream, Yohan had been at a movie theater when he looked around in confusion. At the time, he didn’t even realize he was dreaming. Lee Chanha smiled gently, then handed him popcorn and cola that had suddenly appeared.

‘You’ll probably be meeting with Captain Jeong Siyoung soon.’

‘Listen closely. I’ll tell you what you can say, and what you must not…’

When he woke up, the dream remained vivid. Thanks to that, Yohan didn’t feel too nervous during his interview with Jeong Siyoung and was able to explain what happened in the Abyss. What to hide was clear: hid purification ability, the Black Mountain made from Eternal Stones the condition of their companions, whose bodies had undergone irreversible changes from severe corruption. Yohan panted and spoke with difficulty.

“And time flows faster in there.”

He swallowed dryly. His stomach turned, and the hand he clenched tightly was damp with cold sweat.

“I was in there for a year…”

Jeong Siyoung fell silent. It was similar to what she had already heard, but each time she heard it, it sent chills down her spine. Yohan had been missing for just about two weeks. If the timeline added up, then Lee Hyunmook and the others had spent ninety years in there. But their story was different.

“It feels like it’s been about ten years.” “Oh, Siyoung-unnie, long time no see. It feels like it’s been ten years.” “About then years? That’s about how long it felt. I didn’t count the days exactly though.” “Feels like around ten years.” “Ten years that felt like centuries.”

Yohan said one year. The others, ten. Maybe time in the Abyss was completely warped. Jeong Siyoung kept writing as she continued questioning him.

“Then how did you get out of that place?”

He was able to lie about that easily too. He said there were patches of land that the Abyss occasionally swallowed and then spat back out. He’d been on one of those and escaped by luck. Jeong Siyoung slowly nodded. Then she began asking in detail about the monsters he had seen there, their appearance, and any other features. The interview stretched on for nearly two hours. When it was almost over, Yohan asked cautiously,

“Would I be able to contact my family?”

“Not yet.”

“Then could you at least let them know I’m alive?”

“That’s not possible either.”

Yohan had expected all information about the Abyss to be classified, but hearing it shut down so bluntly made him deflate.

“Then… is my family doing well?”

“Probably not.”

Startled, Yohan looked up, and Jeong Siyoung frowned.

“With a family member missing, practically as good as dead. Who could be doing well with that hanging over them? Still…”

Maybe because Yohan had been so cooperative, or maybe because she felt pity for him, Jeong Siyoung finally spoke in a gentle voice.

“If you wait just a little longer, you’ll be able to see them soon.”

***

After the interview with Jeong Siyoung and several more days of testing, he was finally able to see Yoon Seungryong. His complexion looked pretty good. Unlike in the Abyss, the corruption didn’t rise here even without Yohan purifying him. Earth’s air didn’t carry the foul, sticky aura of the Flood.

“Our Yohan’s face is half gone.”

“I’ve been eating and resting just fine, you know.”

He answered cheerfully, glad to see the other man again, and stuck close to Seungryong’s side. As they made contact, Yohan subtly flowed his energy into him. After pushing his power to the limit so many times in the Abyss, he could now transfer it without even letting a single speck of light leak out. But maybe something had been noticed. A nearby soldier who had been monitoring them tilted his head faintly and glanced at Yohan.

“What about the others?”

“More or less the same. But the team leader and deputy leader are kind of busy. They’ve got a lot to discuss with the government.”

Yohan nodded. They had grown closer after their chance meeting in the Abyss, but originally, these were people so busy and well-known that he never would have met them otherwise. He tried to act like it was nothing, but the emotions welled up and he bit his lip.

“The Abyss… you were there for such a long time, weren’t you?”

Yoon Seungryong looked at Yohan quietly, then smiled silently. Yohan swallowed down the lump in his throat. He didn’t feel betrayed for being kept in the dark. If he had known the Abyss flowed faster than the outside world, it would have made things much harder, more painful. He understood perfectly that they had hidden the truth because they didn’t want to burden him with their suffering, because they hoped his time there would be a little easier. So Yohan forced a cheerful tone.

“Actually, I was the youngest there, wasn’t I?”

“Oh, so you finally noticed? I wanted to tease you a little more. Hoyoung really enjoyed it.”

Yoon Seungryong said playfully, he patted Yohan’s head, then changed the subject.

“It’s been a while since I saw Captain Jeong Siyoung and it seems like she had a hard time.”

“She did look that way…”

Yohan agreed. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Korea only managed to hold on thanks to Lee Hyunmook and Jeong Siyoung. After Lee Hyunmook and most of the Sunrise Team disappeared, people started saying public safety in Korea was on the verge of collapse. Jeong Siyoung, now Korea’s only high-level awakener, was often driven to the brink of collapse from overwork.

During the entire interview, she drank two cups of extremely strong-smelling coffee. It didn’t look like she wanted it, more like she needed it just to stay upright. A regular person would’ve dropped everything and run. But she endured it all out of a sense of duty to protect people from rifts and monsters.

‘Come to think of it, most high-level awakeners seemed to be like that.’

It wasn’t just Lee Hyunmook and Jeong Siyoung. In other countries too, the ones who awakened at high levels tended to have unusually good character. Even without being drafted by the government, they would step forward without hesitation to fight the rifts, save people, and protect them. You’d expect at least one of them to throw their weight around and chase after wealth or power, but none of them did. It was like they had been chosen based solely on virtue…

A rumor he’d once heard suddenly came to mind. Yohan turned to Yoon Seungryong and asked,

“Is that true? That if someone does something bad, their powers disappear?”

“Huh?”

Yoon Seungryong, happily sucking on a sweet drink, scratched his cheek. He tilted his head as if trying to recall something from a distant past.

“Not totally sure… but I did hear a few cases like that. Guys who committed murder or robbery, something like that.”

“Do you think there’s some kind of supernatural being on Earth?”

Yohan asked in a worried tone. He had personally experienced the malicious will of the Abyss as a supernatural entity. Yoon Seungryong, understanding what he meant, looked a bit more serious. But he soon let out a bright laugh.

“Even if there is, it must be on our side. Right? You’re the proof of that.”

The way he called Yohan, who had awakened as a purifier, the proof, felt plausible but also a little embarrassing. Yohan’s cheeks turned red. Then he asked something he had been curious about.

“And the test results… did everyone turn out healthy?”

“Of course. There are some corruption symptoms, but nothing serious. All healthy. Well, the old hag’s anger issues and Chanha’s OCD are kind of annoying, but for corruption, that’s nothing.”

It seemed what he had been secretly worrying about had passed without issue. Yohan had been afraid that bad test results would lead to a lifetime sentence in one of the government’s containment facilities for the corrupted. He was relieved.

After chatting with Yoon Seungryong, Yohan returned to his isolation room and was finally able to get his phone back. His face lit up, but the examiner spoke stiffly.

“As I said, you are not allowed to contact your family yet. All information about the Abyss is classified, and until the official announcement, you must not reveal anything. If you violate these instructions, appropriate action will be taken. For the next year, you will be designated a corruption watch subject and placed under surveillance.”

They openly stated that there would be surveillance with no regard for human rights, but Yohan didn’t object. Since the Rift Incident, the global population had dropped by nearly half. In the face of such catastrophe, governments often took measures that ignored human rights in the name of safety, and people had grown used to it. It was a bitter reality.

After the examiner left, Yohan sat on the bed and carefully powered on his phone. It had been charged, probably while they ran corruption tests, but some of his messaging apps had been deleted. Resisting the urge to call his family, he opened the internet first.

The first place he went was social media. He couldn’t contact anyone or see them in person, so he at least wanted to check their accounts. But not only were his parents’ pages quiet, even his older brother, who usually posted several times a day, hadn’t updated anything.

Yohan had imagined countless times how his family might react if he went missing. He’d often felt hurt or resentful toward them, but they were still his beloved family. Seeing that all activity had stopped on their social media after the day he disappeared made his chest ache. He felt a mix of guilt and longing and stared at their photos for a long time, sniffling, before finally clicking into a news site. There, the first headline caught his eye.

[“A miraculous return” National hero Lee Hyunmook comes back]

There were dozens, maybe hundreds of similar headlines. Jeong Siyoung had been so furious, even firing warning shots to keep things quiet, and yet the media had already jumped the gun and released it.

Yohan took a deep breath and clicked the article.