AGENT 2

The face that Yongnae was searching for so desperately before his death was one he had seen for the first time eight days ago. To understand the flow of events, let us go back to eight days ago—no, let us go back a bit further to the day that served as the initial trigger.

“Ugh, the smell. Yongnae, this has to be at least 100 times the limit.”

“It is 30 times.”

“30 times or whatever, I feel like throwing up. Hurry up and collect it.”

“Yes. I will begin collection.”

The place where Kim Yongnae had come for field work with his senior was a fertilizer factory that was well over 20 years old. The odor was so severe that from the moment they arrived nearby, the creeping stench grated on the two men’s nerves.

The senior made a gagging motion and blocked his nose, but since that didn’t make the smell go away, Kim Yongnae decided it was best to collect the sample quickly and leave this place. He pulled the equipment, the ASC—2000, out of the car.

To borrow the senior’s words, this ‘insanely heavy’ ASC—2000 looked similar to a 007 briefcase, and its interior was quite impressive as well. Since it had a VFD displaying collection data and a control panel, someone who didn’t know better might mistake it for a suitcase containing explosives. Of course, to Kim Yongnae, it was nothing more than an insanely heavy piece of equipment for holding air.

They use this equipment to collect air and perform what is called a sensory test method by diluting the air in multiples of three. Since a 15-fold dilution is already considered non-compliant with emission standards, a smell that persists even after a 100-fold dilution could be called the stench among stenches. For reference, the odor at this site is 30-fold. Because Kim Yongnae said so.

“Yongnae. Pork cutlet? Or spicy stir-fried pork?”

“I think the stir-fried pork is good.”

“Let’s go eat pork cutlet.”

“Yes.”

“You just thought to yourself, ‘Then why did she ask?’, didn’t you.”

“Yes.”

There are not many young people around Yongnae’s age at the Jeollabuk-do Provincial Office Public Health and Environment Research Institute located in Imsil-gun. For one, the Imsil research institute doesn’t hire often as they don’t need staff reinforcements, and it was also due to the lack of applicants as young people hope to go to research institutes belonging to metropolitan cities.

When Yongnae came to the research institute in the middle of the countryside at age 25, his colleagues’ seniors were old enough to be their uncles, but Yongnae was lucky enough to meet a senior of a similar age and was continuing a reasonably interesting life at the institute.

The name of the senior with the thick dialect was Choi Dawon. She, who was the same age as Yongnae’s second brother, was the exact opposite of Yongnae, who lived every part of his life within a planned framework.

Unlike Yongnae, who had never been late once in a year, Dawon frequently stayed out drinking the night before and showed up late. Unlike Yongnae’s desk, which was organized with knife-like precision, Dawon’s desk was cluttered with half-eaten snack bags, crumbs, and ballpoint pens rolling around haphazardly.

Though they were like oil and water and could not mix, Yongnae nevertheless stayed the closest with Dawon within the institute, and the reason was that Dawon controlled Yongnae the best.

Yongnae does well on his own, so is there a reason to control him?

There was. Since he was young, Yongnae lacked exactly one thing, and that was flexibility. As seen briefly earlier, from a very young age, Kim Yongnae’s personality was—should I say dignified, or should I say narrow-minded.

Yongnae did not live his life like a textbook; he lived it like the Myeongsim Bogam.

People around him asked if his parents were strict and had taught and raised him that way, but seeing as Yongnae’s first brother, Kim Yongmi, wore thick fake gold necklaces while claiming to be a rapper even after failing the Show Me the Rapper preliminaries five times, and his second brother, Kim Yongri, shouted in his room every night insisting on being a game broadcast BJ despite having only nine viewers for a year, it wasn’t particularly that the parents were strict.

It was just Kim Yongnae’s innate nature. A human who thought something terrible would happen if he broke a rule. A human who thought he truly had to live exactly like the Children’s Myeongsim Bogam he saw when he was little.

“Oh, right. You should go on a field trip to a developed site in Seoul.”

To such a Yongnae, Dawon, who was distracting just to look at, was unexpectedly a source of small deviations.

A person who does the things he cannot do. Yongnae felt a sense of wonder toward Dawon, whose personality was completely different from his own, and she also occasionally sparked curiosity about—why that person lives like that.

A man feeling curiosity toward a woman probably means he likes her. Although he didn’t feel the sensation of his heart “bouncing” from falling in love at first sight like his brothers talked about, since Dawon was the first person he felt curiosity for, Yongnae concluded five months ago that he liked Dawon.

So, from then on, when Dawon gave an instruction, Yongnae followed it without a word of complaint. Even if she told him to go buy a cup of coffee from a cafe that required a 10-minute car ride from the institute, he bought it; even if she asked him to write a delayed report for her, he wrote it.

It was the same this time. A field trip to a developed site meant researchers working at other provincial offices would go on a trip to research institutes in advanced regions. They called it a field trip, but in reality, it was an uncomfortable business trip. An uncomfortable trip where one travels for a long time only to end up walking on eggshells among the staff of another research institute before coming back.

“I’ll go for the next two times—.”

“Yes.”

It was obvious he would be the one going the next two times as well, but Yongnae just nodded. Because he knew Dawon was a windbag who only said she’d do everything with her words.

“But this place’s soft tofu is truly the best.”

Just like right now, having ended up at the Daepung Soft Tofu Stew restaurant in front of the institute, instead of having stir-fried pork or pork cutlet.

“But I feel this every time I see this tofu, it really looks like you.”

“In what way?”

Even if she was such a windbag, Yongnae found Dawon the most fun.

“The way it’s soft without any strength?”

However, he didn’t know how to react when she said things like that. He didn’t know if that was a compliment or a backhanded insult, so he felt both good and bad at the same time.

[This is the next news. Yesterday around 7:00 PM, the fifth body was found in Gucheon City. The victim was a 24-year-old male surnamed Yang, for whom a missing person report was filed by his family a week ago, but…]

“Another victim has appeared.”

So he quickly turned the subject to the breaking news coming from one side of the soft tofu stew restaurant.

[The Gyeonggi Southern Provincial Police Agency stated they will increase forces to further strengthen public security…]

“Right. They need to strengthen security more. Serial killings in this day and age, would you even be able to walk around out of fear?”

Fortunately, Dawon seemed to get sucked into the topic immediately, as she began to spill a long string of talk about the serial murder cases currently happening in Gucheon City.

“What did they say? Oh, a criminal psychology professor said this killer is a complete lunatic sociopath. Since the first body was struck so many times with a hammer, they thought at first that the culprit and the victim had a deep grudge, but they said the subsequent bodies were like that too. To do that to someone you’ve never even met means he’s just a completely crazy psycho bastard.”

Dawon laid out the contents she had eagerly picked up from Nutube, but Yongnae already knew these details.