FLIA 166

Only then did Yohan lift his head, and he realized that Lee Hyunmook’s eyes hadn’t turned red from corruption. But there was another kind of madness burning there. It didn’t come from corruption. It was the madness of a person who had suffered too long, for so long that he had gone insane.

When Yohan looked back at the team members, all of them looked pale. But their faces also showed that they knew this moment would come someday. With his hand still resting on the glowing light in Lee Hyunmook’s chest, Yohan managed to speak.

“Those people earlier… where did they go?”

“To where they were supposed to go.”

Yohan understood Lee Hyunmook’s anger. He knew that if someone had tried to hurt Lee Hyunmook, he would’ve been furious too. He could understand wanting to punish someone personally. But this, this wasn’t right. He instinctively felt that Lee Hyunmook should never do something like this. He could tell that this would become something that couldn’t be undone.

“Hyung, I’m fine now. I’m safe. I didn’t get hurt at all…! So please, don’t do this, just send them to prison, can’t you? If that’s not possible, then maybe send them to an uninhabited island or something.”

“My Yangyang, you worked hard today.”

Lee Hyunmook didn’t seem to hear Yohan’s words at all. His gaze was fixed somewhere far away. Feeling something strange, Yohan looked down, and barely swallowed his scream. The lower half of Lee Hyunmook’s body had almost melted into the shadow.

“If you rest well at home, I’ll take care of it and come back. It might take some time.”

With a smile that looked like it had been drawn on his face, Lee Hyunmook stepped back. Yohan was dragged along, and when a hand pushed him away, he ended up letting go.

“Wait a second! Hyung, listen to me!”

“So that they’ll never do something like this again for the rest of eternity.”

Before Yohan could grab him again, Lee Hyunmook disappeared beyond the pitch-dark void. No, it looked like he melted into it, as if he was one with the darkness itself. Yohan, startled, tried to follow after him. But as he jumped forward, a hand grabbed him in a hurry. It was Lee Chanha, his face pale.

“Yohan-gun, you can’t!”

“Don’t go in! It’s already too late!”

Ju Hoyoung was also pulling on Yohan’s arm. The chain of shocking events had left Yohan staggering back. Panting in fear and disbelief, he looked around at his teammates and asked,

“But, but… what is this? I’ve never seen anything like this. What kind of ability is this? What did Hyunmook-hyung do?”

Even though the sun was up, the field reflected no light at all. It looked artificial and unreal. It was the same phenomenon he’d seen once before at the broadcasting station. It looked like a part of the world had been deleted by some kind of program, deep, unreachable, and distant. It wasn’t a black sphere, it was a hole in the world. Seo Yakrin, who had been clenching her teeth, murmured,

“That’s not an ability, Yohan-ah. That’s our team leader himself.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Yohan answered blankly. Pointing at the black hole that had opened between the ground and the sky, Yoon Seungryong spoke in a trembling voice.

“She’s right. What you’re seeing isn’t something created by using an ability. That thing itself is our team leader.”

Far above, the loud sound of a helicopter echoed in the air. But it couldn’t get close to the black field, only circled around it. None of them paid attention to the helicopter. Lee Chanha, staring at the dazed Yohan, spoke.

“Yohan-gun, do you know why we can keep a human appearance even though this is our original form?”

Yohan lifted his head. It was something he had wondered for a long time. They were people twisted by corruption so severe that calling it a disease was not enough. Even with purification, they could never fully return. Yet they still maintained their human form.

Lee Chanha thought back to something from a distant past.

Any living being couldn’t escape corruption from the Abyss. That included Lee Hyunmook. Unlike the others, Lee Hyunmook looked normal at first glance. But when he swallowed Lee Chanha, who was tearing off his own skin and going insane from pain, when he swallowed Yoon Seungryong, who was so crazed by hunger that he started eating the flesh of his comrades and himself, when he swallowed Seo Yakrin, who was raging with anger, and when he swallowed Ju Hoyoung, who was trying to run endlessly from fear and anxiety only to run toward death, everyone realized it.

Lee Hyunmook was the most horrifying and terrifying monster of all.

“I remember the first time we were swallowed by the team leader. When I opened my eyes, everything around me was writhing flesh.”

“What? Flesh?”

“Yes, Yohan-gun, you wouldn’t know. That was at the beginning of the Abyss.”

Yohan suddenly remembered the time he had gone inside Lee Hyunmook. The outside looked fine, but the inside had been empty to the point of hollowness. It had happened a long time ago, yet when he thought of that moment, he still felt afraid. Lee Chanha continued to explain.

Lee Hyunmook poured his own blood into the bodies of the teammates he swallowed to wash away the filth. He filled their hunger with his own flesh, and he offered his bones so they could grind them down and calm their anger, and he sealed the surroundings to quiet their unbearable anxiety.

At first, that act had some effect. Corruption spread from lifeless things to living things, and among living things, it moved from the weak to the strong. From insects to frogs, from frogs to foxes, from foxes to wolves, to bears, and then to humans. And among humans, it went to the strongest one.

The strongest among them was Lee Hyunmook.

After some time, Lee Hyunmook’s inside began to empty little by little, because his flesh and blood were not infinite resources. But he had no choice but to continue his self-sacrificing acts, because the team members were falling into madness under extreme corruption every moment. Whenever they were in danger, Lee Hyunmook swallowed them.

When a teammate tried to die, he swallowed them. When a teammate stayed out of human form for too long, he swallowed them. But now there was no more flesh or blood to give, and inside him, a terrible reaction began to occur. It might have been because Lee Hyunmook himself had also gone completely mad.

Yohan listened blankly, his mind lost from the shock. He couldn’t even imagine how miserable and how horrifying they had been.

“When you stay inside the team leader for too long, you melt and disintegrate. You turn into living dough.”

Even in their madness, the emptiness that seeped into their bodies made them suffer. There was a repulsion that they felt instinctively, and they could not even tell if they were breathing or not as they softened and melted away. Their sticky, soggy bodies screamed without sound, and Lee Hyunmook shaped them again into human form and sent them out. He repeated that tens, hundreds of times.

Then one day, Lee Hyunmook stopped swallowing his team members. He had reached the point where he could not even bring himself to do that terrible thing anymore. He could no longer speak properly, and his comrades who could no longer tell friend from foe had to be separated so they would not kill one another. That was the best thing he could do then. When Yohan fell into the Abyss, Lee Hyunmook had already been driven to the very end.

Yohan remembered the time he entered Lee Hyunmook’s body when he had failed to attack the core of the Abyss. He had thought the floor was soft ground, but then he realized it was flesh. That flesh was thin, and when he dug only a little, Lee Hyunmook’s Eternal Stone had soon been revealed.

“So you must not go inside. He’ll probably return to normal soon. It’s hard to think that this is his ability, so we should prepare outside.”

“No.”

Yohan, who had not even shed tears despite hearing that shocking story and who had been staring at ‘Lee Hyunmook,’ answered.

“I’ll go inside.”

“Yohan, why don’t we calm down a little and think about this?”

Seo Yakrin tried to soothe him, but Yohan shook his head. Seo Yakrin then looked at his face, and stopped. The youngest member of the team had red eyes, but there was no trace of emotional agitation.

“I’m not upset. And no matter how I think about it, something feels wrong?”

“What feels wrong?”

Ju Hoyoung looked at the black sphere and asked. He looked restless and anxious, he wanted to grab Yohan and run away right now.

“What happened to Hyunmook-hyung’s negative enhancement?”

Everyone froze at Yohan’s words. Lee Hyunmook had said that his negative enhancement was ‘never giving up.’ He had never once given up on his teammates or on getting out of there. But after escaping the Abyss, where had that negative enhancement gone? Here, unlike the Abyss, where there was nothing left to give up on?

Even after escaping the Abyss and even after Yohan had purified them, the teammates’ negative enhancement had weakened but not disappeared. They still easily gave in to gluttony, anger, obsession with cleanliness, and anxiety. Likewise, Lee Hyunmook’s negative enhancement had never disappeared.

His negative enhancement, which could be called a form of noble human will, came from desperation. The desperation to survive, the desperation not to let his teammates die, the desperation to escape that hellish place.

So the more Yohan thought about it, the more he believed that Lee Hyunmook, who had now lost every goal after escaping the Abyss, was in a dangerously unstable state.