Free Web NovelThe screen changed.
An old man collecting cardboard staggered into the house, and someone watched him with a deep frown.
“The smell is seriously killing me.”
“That old man is the reason all the property values around here tanked! It’s driving me insane. Honestly, I ought [N O V E L I G H T] to just—”
The man glared at the house with bloodshot eyes, then eventually turned away.
In the following street-stall scene, he vented his frustration to a friend.
“You know my daughter’s a high school senior, right?”
“Of course I do, man. You brag all the time about how she only gets perfect scores.”
“But I’m seriously going crazy. She says she absolutely can’t study at home. The stench keeps drifting over, bugs keep trailing into our house.... The kid studies alone till dawn, and when she comes back inside, she says the smell’s so bad she can’t even sleep.”
Grrrk!
The man downed a shot of soju in one gulp and flared with anger.
“Go over there and at least pick a fight.”
“I did! You think I didn’t? How desperate do you think I had to be before I filed a complaint with the district office and even went to find the civil servants? But do you know what they said?”
Bang!
The hand slamming the street-stall table was violent.
“They told me, Please be understanding, he’s a pitiful old man. They said they came by now and then to empty the trash for him, so they were doing their best to manage it.... Ah, fuck. Like the rest of us aren’t pitiful too! Huh? Honestly, I feel like setting that whole house on fire.”
“Hold it in, hold it in.”
After drunkenly parting with his friend, the man’s gaze drifted to a gas station. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
Soon, he was holding a can of gasoline.
Arriving at the garbage house with his face burning red, he stood there staring for a long time.
Bloodshot eyes, hesitation as if weighing something, tightly pressed lips.
A moment later, the siren announcing a fire began to wail.
The garbage house was swallowed by flames.
* * *
Rushing urgently to the scene, Gam Seonghwan furrowed his brow.
It was easily the worst fire scene he had seen so far.
“Damn, what kind of fire is this....”
Even when he coughed and waved a hand through the air, the black smoke remained thick.
The youngest detective, who had already arrived on site, spoke.
“From what I found out, this house was pretty famous around the neighborhood. People called it the garbage house. The homeowner collected cardboard every day, but apparently it wasn’t just cardboard—looks like he picked up all kinds of random things and piled them inside.”
“Personal information?”
“That’s the thing....”
“Give it to me.”
Taking the file, Gam Seonghwan let out a sigh.
Everything was unknown.
“Resident registration number... erased?”
“Yes. From what I heard, he wasn’t exactly mentally sound, so the welfare civil servants had a hard time dealing with him too. Apparently all ten of his fingers were basically missing usable prints. They can’t tell if he’s a long-term missing person or an unclaimed death case.... There’s no way to know.”
“Then the house. Who owns it?”
“That’s complicated too. Apparently there was an original owner, but it had been left vacant for a long time. It’s not exactly an expensive neighborhood, so the procedures got messy.... It was inherited, but the current owner immigrated overseas, and it looks like the old man just moved in and lived there.... Ugh, I don’t know. Anyway, there was so much trash inside that the fire must’ve spread fast.”
Just as the two of them were trying to piece together the case—
“Aaaah!”
A scream rang out from somewhere.
“T-this, this is, a person, a p-person....”
Inside the garbage house, now reduced to ash—
“That’s a human body, right...?”
A corpse had been found there.
* * *
[〈Unfair Trade〉 Episode 1 live thread starting now wee-woo wee-woo wee-woo]
-Holy shit this is scary as hell
-Wait there’s a body here??
-Crazy old man wasn’t it;;;;; fuck, was he collecting corpses too what the hell TT_TT
-TT_TT what do we do, episode 1 is almost over already time flew by so fast
Aetami stared at the screen in total concentration.
Gam Seonghwan coolly took command of the case.
The garbage house was surrounded by police lines.
After returning from the scene, Seonghwan tried to immediately push forward with an at-large investigation, but it fell through.
“He’s unconscious? Ha.... this is driving me insane.”
And in the middle of all this, someone came looking for the station.
At first glance, it seemed like a completely trivial matter.
“A person has gone missing. They’re not the type to do this....”
“Yes. And what is your relationship to the missing person?”
“A friend.”
“And the missing person’s name and age?”
“That’s.... um....”
The visitor bit their lip for a moment, then answered awkwardly.
“I don’t know either of those.... I only know their nickname, phone number, and where they live.”
“Huh? What the....”
“It’s a friend I met online. But really, there’s been no contact for months, and even when I send packages, they never receive them. And their SNS activity has completely....”
The detective handling the report frowned in irritation.
“You came here asking us to find your internet friend? Right now?”
“This isn’t the kind of friend who would disappear without saying anything. I even went to their house, but there was no answer, so....”
“They probably moved. Ugh. Seriously, what is this....”
The situation was already in chaos because of the garbage house case.
There was no way they could take on something this minor too.
The hesitant visitor slowly rose from their seat.
“Excuse me!”
It was just as they were about to leave the station.
Gam Seonghwan ran over to her.
“That friend you just mentioned. Tell me about them.”
“...What?”
“In case I can look for them later. I at least want to hear it.”
After thanking Gam Seonghwan several times, the visitor left the station.
For now, Seonghwan tucked the notebook where he had written down the information into his coat.
“Hey! Gam Seonghwan! What the hell are you doing!”
“I’m coming, I’m coming—!”
“This is the time to accept that kind of report? Do you even know what kind of moment this is?!”
“Stop nitpicking which case deserves what. That’s no attitude for a detective.”
Gam Seonghwan shot back at the detective yelling from afar.
And then, shocking news arrived.
“There wasn’t just one body found!”
This was not a typical murder case.
“There are six. Six bodies!”
It was serial murder.
* * *
To solve the case, they first had to separate the arson from the murders.
Gam Seonghwan headed to a nearby gas station to investigate.
“A suspicious person.... Not really. We’re self-service here.”
“Well? I’m not sure. Boss! There’s a detective here!”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m busy as hell right now!”
But no particularly useful evidence turned up.
Scratching the back of his head roughly, Gam Seonghwan climbed back into the car.
-Sunbae, are you returning to the scene? Preservation is getting really difficult right now.
“Yeah, I’m going, I’m going.”
The garbage house was now tangled in disorderly police lines.
When Gam Seonghwan returned there, he let out a sigh at the sight of the floor crawling with maggots in patches, the ceiling thickly spread with mold, and the mountains of trash piled so high there was barely room to step.
“This is exactly why preserving the scene is impossible....”
“Seriously. It’s driving me crazy.”
It was already a scene where evidence was crucial.
But on top of being ravaged by fire, the insects and all kinds of bacteria made preservation extraordinarily difficult.
Bzz. Bzz. Bzz.
Gam Seonghwan pulled the vibrating phone from inside his coat.
The edit crosscut there.
A sleek, gleaming black sedan stopped in front of the garbage house.
“Yep. Chief.”
-Hey, Seonghwan. We got someone from the National Forensic Service attached to your case. They’ll be there soon.
“What? I can’t hear you well!”
Outside was noisy.
Someone was pushing through the police line.
-Na. Tion. Al. Forensics! IQ 160.... There’s a genius who solved a few cold cases, and because everyone’s breathing down my neck over the serial murders, I called them in! Anyway, since preserving the scene is hard, gather as much evidence as you can in the next few days!
Just as Gam Seonghwan pressed one hand over his other ear to focus on the call—
Step. Step. Step.
The sound of measured footsteps rang out.
A shadow appeared.
Then polished dress shoes.
“Hello.”
And then came the calm, even-toned introduction.
“National Forensic Service, Criminal Behavioral Analysis Team, Analyst Lee Seohae. I was requested for on-site cooperation.”
A cool gaze turned toward Gam Seonghwan.
The screen alternated once between Lee Seohae’s face and Gam Seonghwan’s.
The hidden card brought in to solve this case that had fallen into a labyrinth.
Lee Seohae’s entrance was the kind that instantly planted expectation in viewers.
Her neatly tied hair fluttered around the nape of her neck wrapped in knit fabric.
Her pale white skin stood in stark contrast against her black clothing.
As the precarious, dangerous-sounding main OST swelled, the screen passed in slow still-cut flashes.
“It really wasn’t me. I-I did think about it, yes! But would I really have done that if I thought about my daughter?”
Then the preview for episode 2 of 〈Unfair Trade〉 rolled.
A middle-aged man appeared during questioning, desperately protesting his innocence.
“Sunbae, look at this. There aren’t many viewers, but.... if you look at the date.”
-Bros! This is the garbage house from the news. Does this even make sense? They tax you for getting even one balloon gift, but these trash bastards only suck up tax money?
In the evidence video the junior detective brought in, a BJ’s live stream appeared.
“Please find my friend....”
The woman refreshing an inactive SNS page began to tear up.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The old man from the garbage house lay silent, eyes closed, on oxygen support.
“It’s obvious.”
Gam Seonghwan was convinced of something.
“I disagree.”
Lee Seohae openly challenged him.
Bang!
〈Unfair Trade〉
The moment the preview ended, the commercials started.
“Hoooo....”
Aetami finally let out the breath she had been unconsciously holding.
She hadn’t even realized when she had stopped breathing.
“Hey! This is fucking amazing!”
Aetami’s review after finishing episode 1 of 〈Unfair Trade〉 was simple.
It fit the blueprint of a genre drama perfectly.
“Hey! That was so damn cool!”
And even though it lasted barely ten seconds, Lee Seohae’s entrance scene delivered impact instantly.
Han Yeoreum had perfectly expressed the character with just two lines of self-introduction. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
* * *
Reporter Wi’s hands sped up.
Clack, clack, clack.
[〈Unfair Trade〉 Shin Seojin’s perfect acting transformation? “Forget the second male lead~” reborn as a powerful detective]
[Han Yeoreum flawlessly pulls off a ‘genius criminal profiler’ this time.... Will she conquer the small screen as ‘IQ 160’ Lee Seohae?]
[Shin Seojin–Han Yeoreum, after 〈The Great Garland〉 can 〈Unfair Trade〉 succeed too? Netizens overflowing with anticipation | One-Cut News]
As the most anticipated work of the second half of the year, entertainment news articles poured out one after another.
“The response... is really good, isn’t it?”
Reporter Wi smiled in satisfaction as he skimmed through the articles.
It might not have had quite the same impact as episode 1 of 〈The Great Garland〉, but it was still more than excellent.
[〈Unfair Trade〉 Gallery]
[Gam Seonghwan’s actor seriously gritted his teeth this time, I’m not even thinking of Lee Taejin at all LMAO]
[The preview just made me more curious so who the hell is the culprit]
[The heart of a genre-obsessed freak is pounding.... episode 1 was insanely well-made]
[Even if it’s called a guaranteed hit, this one felt like it would succeed before it even aired LOLOL so is there romance or not]
Posts were flying into the 〈Unfair Trade〉 gallery at incredible speed.
Reporter Wi was sure of it.
“No matter how much screen time Summer gets from here on out....”
Her image transformation and acting spectrum had already been fully recognized.
