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“And it looks like you really did your homework digging into my background, but I’m in welfare services, you know? More than anyone, I know beneficiaries these days aren’t just elderly people who can’t work, so I said that unconsciously! Do you even know how many people in their twenties and thirties are beneficiaries these days? Want me to list every single applicant’s age under my care? Like this is some grand sting operation or something!”
As long as he didn’t open his mouth about the case, that would be enough.
If he just insisted on his innocence while only pushing back against Lee Seohae’s illogical leaps.
The case would close with that old man as the culprit.
“At first, you probably had your own standards. You likely started with victims who, despite being beneficiaries, appeared to be living what you considered ‘luxurious’ lifestyles.”
In contrast to Kim Yonggeun, who was growing increasingly agitated now that one of his crimes—land speculation—had been exposed, Lee Seohae remained as cold as ever.
Her icy voice was sharp enough to seem like it was slicing through the eardrum.
It was the kind of voice that forced anyone listening into tension.
“But seeing how the last victim fell outside those standards, it’s one of two things. Either it was impulsive, or you started thinking you were some kind of righteous force and just grabbed whoever you pleased to punish.”
Still, Lee Seohae wasn’t looking at anything.
She only stared straight ahead.
As if everything was already engraved into her brain, she continued speaking in the same posture.
“The victim did not become a beneficiary because she wanted to. In fact, before injuring her knee and leaving society, her final annual salary was actually higher than yours, Mr. Kim Yonggeun. Ah. Then perhaps the murders in the latter half were driven by inferiority? Resentment over not being as socially recognized as even the people on benefits?”
Gam Seonghwan was cross-cut into the scene.
He stood in front of the manure-processing machine.
Lee Seohae’s voice continued.
“If you buried the victim’s head on that land, wouldn’t it have been easy enough to dispose of the rest of the body there too? Why go out of your way to hide it in the hoarder house? I don’t understand.”
“Because at some point, his standards completely collapsed.”
“Standards....”
“If someone wasn’t properly paying taxes, then inside Mr. Kim Yonggeun’s mind, that alone would qualify them as deserving punishment. Watching the residents protest and rage at the old man because of the stench from the corpses probably gave him vicarious satisfaction. On the other hand, by being kind to that same old man, he assigned himself the narrative of the good-hearted protagonist all over again. One of them is....”
“I got it.”
He drove the shovel into the earth.
Instead of inspecting the farming equipment everyone expected to be the murder weapon.
-????What is he doing
-Ugh.. this is why high-IQ characters are so frustrating if they’re not geniuses TT_TT
-Seonghwan ah, fuck!! That’s not it!!!
-I said find evidence, why are you suddenly digging the ground
-Ah I feel like there’s something there but I can’t tell what it is TT_TT
Thunk, thunk, thunk....
The sound of the shovel digging into the earth was heavy and dull.
“Trophy.”
Gam Seonghwan’s brow furrowed.
Sweat poured down him.
The pit grew wider and wider.
“That bastard wanted to leave the corpse behind so he could keep looking at it. Because to him, it was no different from his achievement.”
Kim Yonggeun’s eyes, fixed on Lee Seohae, were burning red.
The ominous BGM gradually climbed into its climax, making the viewers’ hearts pound harder and harder.
“Why would I feel inferior? How many people are as open-minded about beneficiaries as I am? When I said they still had bright futures ahead of them, that was because I always worried about people like that....”
“Among welfare recipients, 45 to 60% are over 65, 20 to 25% are between 50 and 64, and around 20% are between 19 and 49, meaning—as you said—many are people for whom returning to employment is difficult. Since you were already in a position to infer the victim’s basic profile, isn’t that why you said things like ‘she still had a bright future,’ ‘she could still get married and have children,’ and ‘she could still find work’?”
“No.”
Kim Yonggeun’s voice turned eerie.
“Women... even when they get older....”
A voice crammed full of suppressed fury.
“They still have things they can do. Easy ways to make money.... That’s what I meant.”
-Holy shit that IS what I think it is right
-Looks like it LOOLL crazy bastard holy fuck
-Just give him the death penalty, this is disgusting TT_TT
-Ugh blegh UUUUGHH I’m projectile vomiting right now blegh holy shit
-Someone bring the bat, hit him three times and restart the interrogation
Clunk.
Something caught at the tip of Gam Seonghwan’s shovel.
He knew instantly.
“Ah.”
Lee Seohae’s short reply followed.
“Oh my, you can’t just dig up the ground like this! You said you’d only look around for a bit, so I allowed—”
“...Found it.”
“AAAH! Wh-what is that?!”
Gam Seonghwan had found the victim’s head.
“I never said the victim was a woman, though.” ƒreewebɳovel.com
“Those victims. Their identities came out—they were all welfare recipients.”
“The victim did not become a beneficiary because she wanted to.”
Lee Seohae had also secured the decisive testimony.
Bang!
“I-Investigator! A head, a head’s been found! The victim’s head! At the barn!”
The interrogation room door burst open as a rookie detective charged in.
Kim Yonggeun’s face turned deathly white.
The police had already taken every corpse hidden in the hoarder house.
Which meant the only remaining trace of the evil he had “punished” was the head he had hidden in manure ✪ Nоvеlіgһt ✪ (Official version) and buried underground.
That was why, when the police had been about to close the case with the old man from the hoarder house as the true culprit, he had deliberately left the final head where it was.
He had only visited that place because he wanted to see it one more time.
Absolute righteousness.
No one was ever allowed to interfere with the protagonist’s righteous punishment.
“Mr. Kim Yonggeun.”
Lee Seohae pulled out a pair of handcuffs from inside her coat.
A moment ago, he had merely been on the suspect list.
Now he was a suspect beyond all denial, and she snapped the cuffs onto him.
“You are under emergency arrest as a suspect in the hoarder house murder case.”
Click.
The sound of detectives running rapidly down the hallway echoed outside.
Leaving the trembling Kim Yonggeun behind, Lee Seohae stepped out of the interrogation room.
“Have we made contact yet? Control the reporters first...!”
“At the scene, the forensics team is...!”
The entire building erupted into chaos over the sudden discovery of the body and the suspect.
As Lee Seohae calmly walked past the detectives rushing toward the interrogation room, she stopped dead in the hallway.
“Ah. I remember now.”
Near the barn, sirens blared violently.
Police cars with flashing red lights had arrived.
Reporters who had received the news were already scrambling for the best coverage positions.
“This is breaking news. The true culprit behind the ‘Hoarder House Murder Case,’ which recently shocked the nation, has been arrested. Mr. A, the elderly man previously identified as the prime suspect, has now been confirmed not to be an ‘illegal resident with a deleted resident registration number,’ but one of the survivors of the nationwide ‘salt farm slave case’ from years ago.”
A reporter holding a microphone stood before the barn, now surrounded by police lines, delivering the grim update.
“Over ten years ago, Mr. A was a victim of forced labor and was placed under temporary shelter and state support immediately after rescue. However, after the support institution responsible for his case was dismantled due to budget cuts and organizational restructuring, he was left alone once more.”
The screen showed Mr. A still lying in a coma in a hospital bed.
His finger joints were all twisted from countless hours of forced labor.
“Due to the prolonged abuse, Mr. A could no longer properly remember his original name. According to hospital records at the time, he repeatedly displayed cases of ‘identifying himself with other people’s names.’”
The screen changed again.
This time, it showed the hoarder house where Mr. A had lived, and where the bodies had been stored.
“However, after the support institution overseeing identity verification disappeared, Mr. A’s records were effectively left in a ‘blank’ state within the administrative system. His resident registration number was not deleted—the channel capable of verifying his identity simply vanished.”
The news continued.
This time, it shifted to the victim.
Her profile photo, once capturing the brightest moment of her life in society, had now become her funeral portrait.
“The victim whose identity has now been confirmed, Ms. Y....”
At the funeral hall, the victim’s friend—the one who had approached Gam Seonghwan—was serving as chief mourner.
“So this is what you looked like....”
She was crying.
A friend whose face she had never known.
She had never imagined their first meeting would be with her surrounded by white chrysanthemums.
“Um....”
“This is the right place, isn’t it...?”
At the entrance to the funeral hall, several people stood hesitantly.
Their ages were all different.
Some wore school uniforms.
Others looked to be in their mid-forties.
“We came after seeing the post you made on SNS....”
They were the victim’s internet friends.
Though she had been afraid of the outside world and hidden herself away in a small room, she had still gathered the courage to wait for the day she could go out again.
She had never stopped communicating with people.
The victim was still smiling brightly in the photo.
Underneath it, the dolls she had loved were slowly piling up one by one, taking the place of everyone’s grief.
“Oooh. I shot it, but still.”
Watching Episode 3 of <Unfair Trade>, Park Jaeyeong left a brief review.
“It really lands with impact. Seriously.”
Just as Park Jaeyeong said, Episode 3 of <Unfair Trade> exploded into even greater buzz than the week before.
[<Unfair Trade> IQ 160 genius criminal profiler’s razor-thin psychological battle with the culprit... netizens go wild over the sweat-inducing scene]
[The culprit is finally caught, the terrifying chemistry between Shin Seojin and Han Yeoreum in <Unfair Trade> ⎢ Today’s Best Scene]
[Han Yeoreum’s insane amount of dialogue leaves viewers stunned: “Is this even real?”]
An article about KBC’s rom-com <See You That Day>, which had now entered its full love-triangle arc with the male lead’s first love appearing, was uploaded in the same time slot.
But the view counts told the whole story.
“That part seriously gave me chills.”
“I thought Yeoreum was literally possessed, I swear.”
“Ah.... Even watching it again, it’s insane.”
The staff around them made a huge fuss.
Park Jaeyeong could feel the atmosphere heating up by the second.
Even he had been clenching a sweaty fist since the interrogation scene, to the point his knuckles were going numb.
“At this point, didn’t we surpass the original?”
At the staff member’s swelling pride, agreement burst out from every direction.
Park Jaeyeong thought back to Han Yeoreum’s solo domination scene, which he had already watched dozens of times.
“Right.... Oooh, I’m so happy. It really felt like a webtoon.”
It was as if every word Lee Seohae spoke had turned into text, floating beside her face.
Han Yeoreum was not an actress who made scenes visible.
She was an actress who made them readable.
A voice that branded countless sentences into the eardrum all at once.
“What do you think our ratings will be?”
“Can we beat <See You That Day>? Ah, no. We ARE going to beat them!”
“If nothing else, we’ve already secured the reverse-happy ending crowd. Just look at the comments. We’ve got the most people asking for follow-up articles!”
Since it wasn’t a live shoot yet, the staff were still full of energy.
That energy was burning entirely from their desire for the work to succeed.
A genre piece hitting double-digit ratings in only two episodes had never happened before, which made it burn even hotter.
“What are you saying? Mmhm. Of course we won’t just catch up soon, we’ll overtake them....”
Even though he already knew every scene by heart, Park Jaeyeong watched Han Yeoreum drive the impact in all over again and thought:
“The drama viewers remember this year will be this one.”
The SBC director’s decision had not been wrong.
INTUBE
[Is she a robot or what? Does she breathe and talk through hidden gills ㅇ0ㅇ Han Yeoreum’s tongue twister that genuinely shocked the MCs] 05:27
Views 345,551
The reverse climb Gam Dajeong had predicted had begun.
INTUBE
[Ep3. Han Yeoreum, the IQ 160 genius profiler, enters a psychological battle with the prime suspect ⎢ Unfair Trade] 06:45
Views 167,823
Now carrying direct synergy from the drama itself.
