Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Father’s keepsake

At the top of the email a small number was stamped.

02XX

A number whose meaning could not be known. Anyone else seeing it would probably have taken it for the sort of mechanical number that is routinely printed when emails are exchanged.

Yi-hyeon recognized the number at a glance. The XX written right after the digits 02.

He also knew the numbers that belonged in place of those X marks. They were the password for the post-office box at Gangnam Post Office in Seoul!

Last summer, when his father had briefly returned to Seoul during vacation, he had called Yi-hyeon aside and spoken quietly.

“Yi-hyeon-ah. Your father made a contract for a post-office box at Gangnam Post Office in Gaepo-dong under someone else’s name. The person who signed the contract is someone you don’t know, and you don’t need to know, but you must memorize this number. Only by entering this password can the box be opened.”

“Dad. When you say it like that it sounds like there’s some huge secret. Haha.”

Yi-hyeon had laughed lightly, but his father had instructed him with a serious expression.

“You must not tell anyone about this.”

“······I understand.”

Seeing his father’s unexpectedly grave face, Yi-hyeon had nodded and answered.

His father had sent this email three months earlier—that is, two months before he died in the car accident—to Yi-hyeon by means of scheduled delivery. Under the name moo-ae.

Yi-hyeon’s throat burned with tension. Why had his father sent him an email in such a secretive way? Even going so far as to use these layered, triple methods. After checking the email once more, Yi-hyeon deleted it along with the other emails.

Guessing that his careful father must have had his reasons, he had deleted it together with the other spam. He had already confirmed his father’s intention well enough.

Yi-hyeon first took a cold shower. The moment he opened his father’s email, his whole body had been soaked in sweat. He had been too tense.

‘This is connected to Father’s death!’

Yi-hyeon was certain.

His father had anticipated that something might happen to him and had used this troublesome method in order to convey something important to Yi-hyeon. Come to think of it, he had also felt something odd in his father’s attitude during the few phone calls they had before the traffic accident. Unlike usual, he had not spoken at length; he had only asked briefly after Yi-hyeon’s well-being and then hung up.

‘Huu.’

After showering and collecting himself, Yi-hyeon began to think.

Now he had to go to Gangnam Post Office and open that box. But simply going alone and opening it did not seem right. He thought someone might be watching him.

Yi-hyeon called Lee Seong-man and made plans to see a movie.

Seong-man, excited at the rare chance to watch a movie with Yi-hyeon, spoke loudly.

“Hey, this is unusual for you. Asking to watch a movie and all. Okay, you’ll handle the reservation, right?”

“Yeah. I’ll send you a screenshot of the ticket.”

The next day Yi-hyeon met Seong-man at a movie theater near Gaepo-dong.

“Yi-hyeon-ah, after the movie let’s get hamburgers or something. The timing’s awkward.”

“Okay.”

The timing was awkward. It was eleven now, so even after the movie it would not yet be two o’clock.

The two bought popcorn and cola and entered the screening room. But as soon as the lights went out, before the movie even started, Yi-hyeon leaned close to Seong-man’s ear and said quietly.

“Seong-man-ah. I’m going to step out for a bit. Maybe about an hour? So just pretend you don’t know and stay quiet.”

“Huh? You···.”

Seong-man flinched, but he silently nodded. Even in the dark theater he had recognized Yi-hyeon’s serious expression.

Rising from his seat and leaving the screening room, Yi-hyeon carefully went to the restroom. Fortunately he did not run into anyone. Entering a stall, Yi-hyeon moved quickly. From the cloth backpack he was wearing he took out a thin shirt, changed into it, and put on black horn-rimmed glasses. Over that he put on a thin nylon windbreaker. Then, pulling a green baseball cap low, at least outwardly he no longer looked like the Yi-hyeon who had entered the theater.

Coming out of the theater, Yi-hyeon immediately called a Cocoa taxi. It was a weekday, so the taxi arrived quickly.

“Driver, please go to Gangnam Post Office in Gaepo-dong.”

“Yes.”

From the theater to Gangnam Post Office took less than ten minutes. Getting out of the taxi, Yi-hyeon carefully scanned the surroundings, then entered the post office and went to the area with the boxes.

‘There it is!’

Box number 0933.

Confirming the box in front of him, Yi-hyeon carefully entered the password he remembered.

0244

With a click the box opened, and Yi-hyeon took out a yellow paper envelope meant for parcels. It was a little thick but light. The size was not large, so when folded it fit in one hand. Curiosity surged and he could not hold it back. Yi-hyeon quietly went to a restroom inside the post-office building. Opening the well-sealed envelope, he saw a folded paper that looked like a letter, and something wrapped in bubble wrap that he could feel with his hand.

Zzrit!

When he grasped that object with his hand, there was a momentary sensation like being shocked by electricity. But it was only an instant, so he let it pass.

In any case, there were two things in the envelope. The folded paper was surely his father’s letter, and the other was the object wrapped in bubble wrap. Yi-hyeon put the object carefully back into the envelope and stored it in his backpack. Then, as he opened the restroom door and was about to leave··· he stopped.

A presence!

Someone had entered the men’s restroom. And not just one. Two?

“Hey, he’s not here either.”

“Damn, where did he disappear to so fast? Are we sure it’s that guy?”

“I don’t know either. The managing director told us to follow him, so we came, didn’t we?”

“Shit, what kind of job is this in this heat. Not even knowing if it’s him or not.”

Yi-hyeon swallowed. Damn it, they were definitely the ones who had followed him. Two of them.

It would be good if they just left without opening this stall, but those guys did not seem likely to do that. Yi-hyeon took a deep breath. Slowly, long. Even so his hands were trembling. Since receiving instruction from Monk Muae he had no longer been beaten at school, but that had only been against young students. He had never faced adults who made their living using their bodies, like now.

“Open that stall.”

“Yeah.”

As expected, they were coming this way. The building’s restroom was not large. Being for men, there were three or four urinals and two stalls for bigger business farther inside. He could no longer avoid them.

Yi-hyeon quietly unlocked the door. The stall doors opened by being pushed inward.

Clack!

The man pushed the door inward and opened it. In that instant, in the narrow restroom, Yi-hyeon’s hand moved quickly. He grabbed the tattooed, thick wrist and pulled, and the man’s upper body was dragged in.

“Huh?”

Short hair, a face full of fat. Before the man’s gaze could turn toward him, Yi-hyeon’s left hand rose.

Keok!

The man whose carotid artery was seized in one go exhaled a short breath from his mouth and collapsed to the floor as he was. Yi-hyeon shoved him aside and burst out. He had to catch the remaining one. That man was turning his body to leave the restroom. He probably had not thought there would be someone pursuing them in this restroom.

In one step Yi-hyeon reached behind the man, seized the nape of his neck with his right hand, and at the same time pressed the area around the spine firmly with his other hand. Then that man too sank down without a sound.

“Huk huk.”

Only now did Yi-hyeon release the breath he had been holding. From the moment he subdued the first man in the stall until he made the second man collapse, he had not breathed at all. From excessive tension he had even forgotten to breathe.

Swallowing, Yi-hyeon thought.

‘Was I this capable?’

Still, he had subdued two solid adult thugs in an instant.

Today the flow of energy seemed to move more smoothly; surely it wasn’t because of the object of his father’s that he had touched a little earlier···

He had learned from the monk for years and repeated the movements countless times, but this was the first time he had used them in actual combat. Before leaving the restroom Yi-hyeon looked in the mirror and flinched. His face was completely soaked in sweat.

Now he had to return quickly to the theater. From what those two had said, they did not seem to have confirmed that the person who came here was the same as the one who went to the theater, so if he returned quickly and played innocent it might just pass. In any case, it was certain that someone had attached a watcher to him.

Fortunately those two looked like the sort who only ran errands from below. At a glance, employees of some errand center.

Hurrying out of the post office, Yi-hyeon called a taxi as he had when coming and returned to the theater. Then he went to the restroom, changed clothes, and stuffed the nylon windbreaker, cap, the shirt he had worn, and so on deep into the large stainless-steel trash bin at the restroom entrance. The backpack? He had brought it when he entered, so he had to have it when he left as well.

“Huk.”

When Yi-hyeon, seated again beside Seong-man, exhaled, Seong-man asked quietly.

“Finished your business?”

“Yeah.”

Seong-man asked nothing more, and when the movie ended the two came out calmly, ate hamburgers, and parted.

Returning to the house in Apgujeong-dong, Yi-hyeon opened the backpack and took out the parcel. Then he began to examine it carefully.

The parcel had been sent as an Air Parcel from some post office in New York, America. Seeing the post-office box address written in blue ballpoint pen, Yi-hyeon knew at a glance that it was his father’s writing. When his father wrote English, he curled the alphabet ‘0’ inward so that at a glance it also looked like the Arabic numeral 8.

Yi-hyeon hurriedly read the letter first. A letter written in Korean. Seeing his father’s familiar handwriting, tears welled up in Yi-hyeon’s eyes before he knew it.

[Yi-hyeon-ah. There is no time so I cannot write at length. While sending you this object, since I could not tell anyone, I took several measures before sending it. This object is something I happened to obtain last year from the village chief of a village near the site when I went with university colleagues to excavate ruins in the Algerian desert in Africa.

The chief also did not know what this object was and said his ancestor had picked it up in the ‘Valley of the Gods’ near the village. ‘Valley of the Gods’ is the name the residents of the nearby villages call the place where our excavation team was working. The strata of that valley are known to be strata from about two billion years ago that were uplifted by crustal movement.

If this object came from that stratum as the chief said, then it is without question an OOPART.

While bringing this object to New York and researching it, there were unusual movements around me. So, growing uneasy, I decided to send it to you for the time being.

Be careful with your body and be wary of the people around you. I will wait to meet you in Seoul.]

Yi-hyeon read the not-long letter several times. Clearly his father had known that something might happen to him. And the cause was this ‘object.’

After thinking for a moment, Yi-hyeon decided first to destroy his father’s letter. Searching the house, he found a lighter and burned the letter in the bathroom. And he carefully burned the parcel envelope as well and flushed it down the toilet.

After that, only the object in question remained.

A crude bracelet of a brass color. No, it was not a bracelet. First of all, if it were a bracelet as jewelry there should be a device that allows it to be fastened on the wrist. But this was simply crudely formed as a solid piece. And the size was not spacious enough to be put on the wrist as a bracelet.

“If I force it in it seems like it might go on···.”

Examining the object this way and that, Yi-hyeon decided to try forcing it onto his own wrist.

Spreading his fingers as much as possible, pressing hard···

“It went on··· Ah, damn, I’m bleeding!”

He had forced it on, but the soft skin on the lower part of his palm had been scraped. So, though only a few drops, blood began to flow.

“Ah, where’s the tissue··· Huh? Why is this like this?”

About to look for tissue to wipe the blood, Yi-hyeon opened his eyes wide. The blood that had been flowing from his wrist had begun to soak into the bracelet. A little later, the blood disappeared without even needing to be wiped with tissue.

“What on earth is this.”

Yi-hyeon brought the bracelet close to his eyes and examined it while muttering. The bracelet had become clean; there was no trace of blood anywhere. It was still the same crude, lusterless brass color.

On the outside of the bracelet dozens of thick and thin lines and large and small circles were engraved in intaglio, but of course Yi-hyeon could not know their meaning. The width was a little under three centimeters, perhaps.

After examining the bracelet, Yi-hyeon decided for the moment to take it off his wrist. He could not go around with this on his wrist.

At that moment Yi-hyeon was startled by a tingling energy rising from his left wrist.

“This is···.”

Was this like the feeling when, as a child, he had played the prank of sticking chopsticks into an electrical outlet at home and gotten shocked? A sensation of a hot yet cold, awl-like energy driving into his body through the wrist.

“Uh, uhh.”

Yi-hyeon could not speak. As if his tongue and whole body had stiffened, he could not move at all. And his consciousness faded out.

A little time passed, and from the wrist of Yi-hyeon, who had fainted as if falling asleep, a blue light burst forth several times and then vanished. That light was not as bright as the lights in the house, but it was a blue like the color of the deep sea, so it was extremely mysterious.

* * *

“Ugh, my head. What on earth happened.”

A little later, waking up, Yi-hyeon, whose head ached as if being poked, rubbed his forehead and temples and was startled. The bracelet he had put on his wrist was not visible.

Dumbfounded, Yi-hyeon rubbed his own wrist and looked around. He thought that perhaps while he had been asleep (?) the bracelet had come off by itself and rolled somewhere. But the area around Yi-hyeon in the living room was clean. Even if the bracelet had come off, there was nowhere for it to roll.

“Haa···.”

Sighing, Yi-hyeon organized his thoughts. But he could not logically accept what had happened to him.

“I can’t ask anyone about this either. No, I should tell the monk.”

For something this strange, it seemed right to ask the monk.

After catching his breath for a moment, while Yi-hyeon was taking cold water from the refrigerator and drinking it, his phone vibrated.

Looking, it was not a saved number. Normally Yi-hyeon did not answer calls from unknown numbers, but this time he decided to answer. His parents had passed away and he still had not canceled the phones the two of them used, keeping them, but he thought this number might be someone his parents knew.

“Hello.”

As soon as she heard Yi-hyeon’s voice, a woman’s voice came from the other side.

“Oh my, is this Yi-hyeon? Is it you? It’s me, your aunt, Aunt Sukja. Do you remember?”

Aunt Sukja? Lee Sukja? A cousin or second cousin on his mother’s side, or something like that?

“Ah, I remember, Aunt Sukja.”

“Yes, yes. Yi-hyeon-ah. I saw you when you were just a little kid, and only now can I contact you. Um··· I heard the news, from the news. About your parents’ traffic accident. I only had your mom’s phone number so I kept trying to contact her, but she didn’t answer. So I vaguely remembered hearing that you had entered Korea University, and I called the school and found out your contact.”

At the somewhat proud-sounding tone, Yi-hyeon briefly took the phone away from his ear.

“Yes··· I was out of it so I didn’t look at Mom’s phone. But what is it?”

Yi-hyeon asked indifferently. He knew this Aunt Sukja well from occasionally hearing about her from his mother. She was said to be a few years younger than his mother, and when he was young they had lived in the same neighborhood for a short time.

When Yi-hyeon was young and occasionally talked on the phone with Aunt Sukja, his mother had said one thing.

“This girl has a thick face and so much greed, really.”

And from listening to conversations with his father, it seemed she had recommended strange investments to his wealthy mother or asked to borrow money. His mother, who had a clean personality, had simply cut off the investment talk and refused. But she had lent not a small amount of money a few times, and it seemed it had not been repaid.

That person called aunt had asked around and found Yi-hyeon to contact him.

“What do you mean what is it. I couldn’t even go to your parents’ funeral, I cried so much. How could you hold the funeral without even contacting me? To you I should be the only adult in the family.”

The only adult?

Even so, he was not particularly glad. He knew from hearing from his mother that Aunt Sukja had caused trouble for their house several times.

After chattering on for a long while after that, Aunt Sukja finally brought out the conclusion.

“You, how did you handle your parents’ property? You can’t just handle that much property carelessly when you’re a minor.”

A minor? What is she talking about?

“I, I’ve already handled it all. I’m already an adult, aren’t I. There’s nothing that could be a problem.”

“Huh? You’re an adult? That can’t be··· That has to be when you turn twenty···.”

Because she kept talking nonsense, Yi-hyeon said bluntly.

“You become an adult at nineteen. I am. But what does it matter what I inherited that you keep talking about it?”

No longer wanting to listen any more, Yi-hyeon asked directly and openly.

“Ah, that’s because you’re still young, so if you manage that big property clumsily and meet a swindler or something, what then. Yi-hyeon-ah, since the subject came up, do you know how harsh the world is? You have to keep your head straight. So if it’s difficult for you, I—no, our couple—will manage it well for you. You know, right? That your uncle-in-law is running a big business.”

Yi-hyeon sighed.

How much longer did he have to listen to this ridiculous talk. Even to him, who had only just become an adult, she was spouting absurd words without any hesitation. This Aunt Sukja seemed to have lower intelligence and social sense than ordinary people.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle our family matters myself. I have an appointment now so I have to go out.”

He did not want to mix words any further. Even without that, his head was complicated with the matter of handling his father’s keepsake.

“No, hey. Yi-hyeon-ah. Just a moment, just···!”

Yi-hyeon hung up as it was. But immediately the phone vibrated again. He switched it to reject call at once, but this person did not seem likely to give up.

Whatever.

Tomorrow he planned to go down to Seong-an Temple. He had to go and ask the monk about the situation with this bracelet.

Since there was the SUV his father had driven, he was thinking of driving himself. Only now did his mind feel a little organized.

© 새둥이#1tjzr