Free Web Novel“Ah, yes...!”
Yohan swallowed hard and then spoke with all sincerity, laying everything out. He only hid one thing: that Park Seungmin and those mercenaries had deliberately made him fall into the Abyss. There was no proof, and even if those bastards were arrested, he doubted they would be punished to the extent he wanted. He merely held a secret resolve that he would repay them later as much as he wished.
“What kind of place is the Abyss?”
“It’s really, so, horrifying....”
Shaking all over, Yohan confessed honestly without concealment. A sky with neither night nor day, a city in ruins and nature in its rawest state, terrible monsters everywhere, the living Black Mountain that swallowed monsters, a space with high contamination.... Listening with a blank face, Jung Siyoung asked:
“Then how did you manage to escape with almost no contamination? In such an environment, even getting food must have been difficult.”
“Hyunmook hyung did something with an Eternity Stone. But I don’t know exactly what he did.”
Yohan covered it up with a lie. In truth, he had already been briefed on this by Lee Chanha. Astonishingly, Chanha had been able to come to Yohan’s dream while he slept. He had likely conveyed his instructions using a wide-area hallucination.
‘Yohan. 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 asked in confusion. Up to that point, he had not even realized it was a dream. Smiling gently, Lee Chanha pressed suddenly appeared popcorn and cola into Yohan’s hands and said:
‘You will probably have an interview soon with Captain Jung Siyoung.’
‘Listen carefully. I will tell you what you may say and what you must not say....’
When he woke after a deep sleep, the contents of that dream remained vivid. Thanks to that, Yohan could relay what happened in the Abyss during his interview with Jung Siyoung without being overly nervous. What had to be hidden was clear: his purification ability, the Black Mountain made of Eternity Stone, and the condition of his companions whose bodies had undergone irreversible changes due to severe contamination. After giving a continuous statement, Yohan panted and spoke with difficulty:
“And time flows faster there.”
He swallowed a dry gulp; his stomach churned, and his tightly clenched hands were slick with cold sweat.
“I lived there for a year before I came out....”
Jung Siyoung hummed low. It was similar to what she had heard earlier, yet every time she heard it, goosebumps rose. Yang Yohan had been missing for only about fifteen days. By this calculation, Lee Hyunmook and the others had been there for ninety years. But their own words were different.
‘It feels like about ten years.’, ‘Oh, Siyoung unni, long time no see. Feels like we’re meeting after about ten years.’, ‘About ten years? That’s how long it feels. But I did not count the days exactly, so I do not know.’, ‘It seems like about ten years.’, ‘A ten years that felt like centuries.’
Yang Yohan said one year, and they said ten years. Perhaps the flow of time in the Abyss was jumbled.... Writing that down, Jung Siyoung continued her questions.
“Then how were you able to get out of that place?”
He could deflect this one without trouble as well. He said that sometimes the Abyss swallowed a piece of land and then spat it back out, and that he happened to be on it and escaped by luck. Jung Siyoung nodded slowly. Next she probed in detail about the appearance of the monsters there and other characteristics. After nearly two hours of long interview, Yohan carefully asked her:
“Could I possibly contact my family?”
“Not yet.”
“Then could you at least let them know I am alive?”
“That is also not possible.”
He had anticipated that all information about the Abyss would be treated as classified, but hearing it cut off so flatly, Yohan wilted and asked:
“Then... are my family all doing well?”
“Probably not.”
Startled, Yohan lifted his head, and Jung Siyoung frowned.
“In a missing state that is no different than being dead, who could be doing well? Even so....”
Perhaps because Yohan had been cooperative all along, or perhaps because she pitied him, for the first time Jung Siyoung spoke in a gentle voice.
“If you wait just a little longer, you will be able to meet them soon.”
* * *
Even after the interview with Jung Siyoung, it was only after several more days of various examinations that he could finally meet Yoon Seungryong, whose complexion looked quite good. Unlike in the Abyss, here Yohan did not have to purify him for his contamination level to stop rising. In Earth’s air there was none of that unpleasant, clammy energy of Bumram.
“Our Yohan’s face has become half.”
“I’ve been eating well and doing fine.”
Answering stoutly yet so happy to see him, Yohan stuck close by Yoon Seungryong’s side. Where they touched, he quietly infused a trickle of his energy. Maybe because he had pushed his ability to the limit so often in the Abyss, he could now infuse it well without even shedding a single grain of light. Even so, as if something had been sensed, a nearby soldier on watch tilted his head faintly and glanced sidelong at Yohan.
“What about the others?”
“They’re doing about the same. But the team leader and the vice-captain are a bit busy. There is a lot to discuss with the government.”
Yohan nodded. Though they had happened to meet in the Abyss and grown much closer, under normal circumstances these were people so busy and famous that he would never have had the chance to meet them. Trying to act calm, Yohan bit his lip as a surge of emotion welled up.
“The Abyss... you were there for a really long time. Right?”
Yoon Seungryong gazed at Yohan for a moment and then, without answering, simply grinned. Yohan swallowed a lump that hurt going down. He felt no sense of betrayal over the fact that they had hidden this from him. If he had known that time in the Abyss flowed faster than outside, it would have been far harder and unhappier. He knew well that they had hidden the truth because they did not want to burden Yohan with their misfortune and had hoped it would be less hard for him, so he forced himself to speak brightly.
“Actually, I was the youngest... right.”
“Ah, you only just caught on? I wanted to tease you a bit more. Hoyoung was having a great time with it.”
Joking, Yoon Seungryong roughly scrubbed Yohan’s hair and then changed the subject.
“Seeing Captain Jung Siyoung again, she looked like she had been through a lot.”
“It did look that way....”
Yohan agreed. It was no exaggeration to say that the people of Korea could barely go on living thanks to these two—Lee Hyunmook and Jung Siyoung. After Lee Hyunmook and most of the Sunrise team disappeared, rumors even spread that public safety in Korea was in jeopardy. Especially as Korea’s only remaining high-tier Awakener, Jung Siyoung had often been driven to the brink of collapse from overwork.
During her whole interview with Yohan, Jung Siyoung drank two cups of extremely strong-smelling coffee. It looked like she drank not because she wanted to, but because she had to endure. An ordinary person would have thrown it down and run away, but she was someone who endured purely out of a sense of duty to save people from rifts and monsters.
‘Come to think of it, high-tier Awakeners all seem similar.’
It was not only Lee Hyunmook and Jung Siyoung. In other countries as well, those who Awakened at the high tier especially had good character. Even without being forcibly conscripted by the state, they would readily step forward to fight the rifts, save people, and protect them. You would think at least one of them would wield their overwhelming power to pursue wealth and authority, but they did not. It was as if they had been chosen solely for character.... Remembering a rumor he had once heard, Yohan asked Yoon Seungryong:
“By the way, is that true? If you do something bad, your ability disappears.”
“Huh?”
Happily slurping a sweet drink, Yoon Seungryong scratched his cheek. With a face like he was groping after something from unimaginably long ago, he tilted his head.
“I am not certain... but I did hear there were a few such cases among guys who committed murder or robbery.”
“Then is there some transcendent being on Earth?”
Having personally experienced the malice of a transcendent entity called the Abyss, Yohan asked in a voice full of concern. Understanding what he meant by that, Yoon Seungryong’s face grew a bit serious. But soon he laughed it off cheerfully.
“Even if there is, it seems certain it is on our side. Right? You are the proof of that.”
Since Yoon Seungryong had said that Yohan, who Awakened as a purifier, was exactly that proof, Yohan’s cheeks flushed—partly because it made sense, partly out of embarrassment. A sudden curiosity made him ask: fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
“By the way, did everyone’s examination results... come out healthy?”
“Ah, of course! There are some contamination symptoms, but we all came out fine and healthy. The old man’s temper and Chanha’s obsession with cleanliness cause a bit of trouble, but for contamination symptoms, that level is pretty ordinary.”
It seemed the very thing he had been worried about had somehow safely passed. Yohan had been anxious that bad test results might lead the government to issue a lifelong confinement order to an isolated contamination facility, so this was good news.
After chatting with Yoon Seungryong and returning to his isolation room, Yohan was able to get his phone back. As his face brightened, the inspector said stiffly:
“As I mentioned, you must not contact your family yet. All information about the Abyss is classified, so until an announcement is made, you must not reveal anything. If you violate the instructions, measures will be taken, and for the next year you will be designated for contamination caution and ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ placed under monitoring.”
He openly stated that there would be surveillance with human rights thoroughly ignored, but Yohan took it as it was. After the rift crisis, the world population had dropped by nearly half. Faced with the need to survive a severe catastrophe, government power structures in many countries frequently took measures that somewhat ignored human rights in the name of safety, and the public had grown used to such measures. It was a bitter reality.
After the inspector left, Yohan sat on the bed and carefully turned on his phone. Perhaps because it had been checked during the contamination tests, it was charged, and several communication apps had been deleted entirely. Suppressing the desire to contact his family immediately, Yohan first connected to the internet.
The first place he went was social media. Since he could not contact them and could not meet them right away, he looked up his family’s accounts. But not only his parents, who updated rarely, even his brother—who normally posted several times a day—had no updates at all.
He had often imagined how his family would react if he went missing. They had often made him feel slighted and hurt, but they were still the family he loved. Seeing their posts cut off right after the date he went missing, something welled up and surged in him. Feeling guilty and missing them, he sniffled and stared at their photos for a long time, then entered a news site—where the first headline he saw was this:
[“A Miraculous Wonder” National Hero Lee Hyunmook Returns] fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
There were dozens, hundreds of similar headlines. Despite how furiously Jung Siyoung had warned them and even fired a warning shot, the media had quickly gone and announced it. Taking deep breaths, Yohan clicked the article.
