By the time Baek Aeyeong had calmed herself with her own pleasant imaginings, Tumanako, the undersea base’s new recruit, who had been listening in a daze, asked Shuran.
“Can’t you void the contract? Quit midway or something. Or report to the government that your life is in danger because of the people you work with.”
“Then I’d have to pay back the six months’ advance I received, but I’d already spent it, so I didn’t have the money. Even if I decided to quit that very day, it seemed I’d have to work at least six months. I contacted the Labor Office and asked around, but there wasn’t really any good way. On top of that, when I contacted the HR team at the company I signed with, they asked why I even came to the interview if I was going to say I wanted to quit after only a month. The truth is, the company itself didn’t do anything wrong to me. I also applied for counseling inside the undersea base, but they asked whether, since I’d only just joined and they were people I’d only just met, I might not have done something wrong myself.”
I had wanted to quit five days after joining, so if Shuran only decided to quit after a month, wasn’t her patience actually pretty incredible?
Thinking back to the contract when I joined, I remembered there hadn’t been any particular clause about me quitting. Had there been? It wasn’t like someone joining a company thought about quitting first. While Tumanako fell into thought, perhaps thinking about her own employment contract, Yugeum asked Shuran anxiously.
“How did you manage after that?”
“I told the kids on my team that if another accident like that happened, after I died, scheduled emails would send tips about my mysterious death to every newspaper, broadcasting station, and foreign media outlet. And I threatened them that my parents and younger siblings would devote their entire lives to uncovering what happened to me and ruin all of yours. ……I practiced for three days just to say that.”
Shuran looked proud as she said the last part, but I was only swept up in even more unease. No, if you died after that, then you’d still just have died at work. Wasn’t that closing the stable door after the horse had bolted?
“Did that work?”
“It sort of worked, vaguely. It’s been almost two full years now. Just like I adjusted to them, they adjusted to me. I act like I’m more or less not there, and they treat me like furniture that happens to breathe. They don’t act as badly as they did when I first joined. After Team Leader Ha Iyun joined, things got a lot better.”
Baek Aeyeong said, lowering the muzzle of her gun.
“……You’re amazing. It’s only because you have such a good personality that you’ve managed to get by at all. I couldn’t live with those bastards for even three seconds. Ah, of course, I’d send one of them straight to the Dragon Palace as an example—” Baek Aeyeong glanced at Gang Sujeong. “—and after that, I think I’d try talking a little. I’d at least have to ask if anyone wanted to be the second one.”
Gang Sujeong let out a light sigh, then looked at me, Yugeum, and Tumanako as if making an excuse.
“Our Aeyeong isn’t normally such a violent girl. Her words are just a bit rough. She’s just a little quick-tempered. Usually, she’s so kind and gentle.”
Gang Sujeong was trying somehow to protect Baek Aeyeong’s image. But she seemed to have forgotten that this gentle person was currently walking around clutching a rifle as big as her own upper body. I heard laughter and looked over to see Seo Jihyeok twitching his lips as he said,
“Aeyeong’s personality is a bit…… like a mackerel, I guess. ……Agh! Ow. That temper.”
After being smacked on the back, Seo Jihyeok pretended to flee from Baek Aeyeong and hide behind Lee Jihyeon, but not even half his body was covered. Watching that, I asked Yugeum, who was laughing.
“What’s a mackerel’s personality supposed to be like?”
“They say it’s quick-tempered because it dies as soon as it comes out of the water. In truth, mackerel have to breathe constantly through their gills, so they die once they leave the water. He’s asleep.”
“Pardon? The mackerel?”
“No. No. Henry. He’s asleep.”
Was the drug still not completely out of his system? Or was he sleeping because he was being carried on someone’s back? Since there were two people carrying others as we moved, our walking pace was quite slow. Yugeum, holding my bag, looked at Henry’s back and said in a voice filled with pity.
“I know Nevae, Henry’s mother. There’s a free Skittles vending machine among the vending machines at our research center, so she used to come by now and then to get some. She would brag about her child once in a while, but I never thought I’d see that child here under the sea.”
I expressed agreement with Yugeum’s words.
“I’ll never forget the first time I saw Henry in Room 80 of Baekho-dong either.”
Even thinking about it now, it had been a shock like getting punched in the brain. A snake or a cat fell much more within the realm of comprehension. There were probably things you had to give up when you joined the undersea base that weren’t easy to compromise on. But when I saw a child sleeping in a bed, no matter how I thought about it, I couldn’t understand the situation.
As soon as I thought about rooms my brain couldn’t comprehend, Room 20 suddenly came to mind. Why would they grow something like that here? If you’re in pain, take painkillers; if you want to feel better, eat something sweet.
“Come to think of it, I’m curious who the owner of Room 20 in Baekho-dong is.”
What kind of bastard grew something like that in their room? None of the Baekho-dong residents answered, until Sin Haeryang, who had been walking silently ahead, asked me from in front.
“How much do you know about that room?”
“I only know that the owner decorated it like a flower shop or a pharmacy.”
“Room 20 of Baekho-dong officially has no owner.”
“I thought it was a room with an owner.”
It wasn’t as if I knew much in detail about the cultivation process of such illegal plants, but didn’t it take a lot of work to grow them well enough to bear fruit?
Even if you grew lettuce on a veranda, you had to water it regularly; even to a layman’s eye, seeing how well those were grown, it didn’t seem like an ordinary amount of care had gone into them.
“Since it’s an ownerless room, no one should feel wronged even if a sudden fire of unknown cause were to break out.”
……It seemed Sin Haeryang couldn’t understand the owner of that room either. Gang Sujeong, who had been talking to Lee Jihyeon but had started listening midway through, asked in surprise.
“Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Our team leader was planning to set fire to an empty, ownerless room?”
“I never said that.”
Sin Haeryang denied Gang Sujeong’s words in an even voice. It sounded that way to me too. Wondering if she had perhaps misheard, Gang Sujeong asked her team leader again.
“If a fire of unknown cause were to break out in an empty room, how exactly would it break out?”
“Speaking under the assumption that I am not the one doing it, all it would take is one can of gasoline and a lighter.”
Gang Sujeong suddenly looked as though she had a headache and asked Team Leader Sin Haeryang,
“What about the fire sprinklers?”
“Unfortunately, due to a sensor malfunction, I don’t think they’ll operate.”
“You know that if you’re caught committing arson inside the undersea base, you’ll be kicked out immediately, right?”
“I know.”
Sin Haeryang answered Gang Sujeong without a trace of hesitation, and Gang Sujeong looked at her team leader as if she found him deeply unreliable.
When Gang Sujeong opened the messenger on the Sin Haeryang pad she was holding, the messages from Li Wei and Sato were displayed as 999 each. Weiqi and Haoran were no less impressive. Below them stretched message after message from all sorts of countries in all kinds of languages.
Gang Sujeong tapped Li Wei at the very top and looked, but it was all in Chinese. Perhaps curses did not translate properly on the undersea base pad, because all the Chinese was displayed as is.
When Gang Sujeong showed it to Lee Jihyeon and asked, “What does this say?” Lee Jihyeon took Sin Haeryang’s pad.
“Whose pad is this? ……Ahh. It’s our team leader’s pad. It’s all curses. Thug, madman, mentally ill bastard, digging up your ancestors’ graves for eighteen generations, this and that.”
Gang Sujeong asked Lee Jihyeon with a bitter expression,
“Is there nothing important? Something like asking for peace or cooperation first. Which escape boats are intact, where those Church of Infinity bastards are, that kind of thing.”
“Not among what I’ve seen so far.”
Lee Jihyeon, who had been looking at the messages Li Wei sent while walking, saw the endless scroll and sighed. Then she asked the owner of the pad,
“When did you stop checking this?”
“After I became team leader, I stopped looking at it entirely.”
“So it’s been almost two years?”
Lee Jihyeon scrolled wildly, but Li Wei’s messenger contents seemed endless, and she appeared to give up after trying to read them. Then she pressed the back button and tapped Weiqi.
When she tapped Weiqi’s messenger, she looked with a sigh at the scroll that began to stretch on endlessly. Then, with her finger, she began swimming upstream toward the past like a salmon.
Lee Jihyeon sometimes read the Chinese as it was, but spoke to her deputy team leader in Korean.
“What are you talking about, boat. I’ll hold a memorial service for you in place of my boat. As fish food, blah blah blah. The curses never end.”
After looking at the messages Weiqi and Haoran had sent, Lee Jihyeon got fed up and was now about to tap Sato, another topmost messenger conversation requester. So she was checking them by country. When I asked about the order in which she was checking the messages, Lee Jihyeon answered simply.
“I need to finish one language and then look at another one for the switch in my brain to flip on. If I look at Chinese, then Japanese, then English, my brain mixes them all up.”
Suddenly, messages from Li Wei, Weiqi, and Haoran began popping up in a tremendous flood of notifications. As I watched the contents translated into Korean beside her, messages like, This bastard seems to be reading this? Are you reading? Why aren’t you answering! Sin Haeryang! You crazy son of a bitch! popped up one after another.
After that, the translation no longer worked properly. Chinese flooded up in the notifications at an incredible rate. Then suddenly, messages started pouring in saying things like, If you release us so we can leave Baekho-dong right now, I’ll let everything you’ve done until now slide! Answer me!
Lee Jihyeon, who had been about to read Sato’s messages, paused and asked the team leader and deputy team leader,
“They’re saying that if we lift the Baekho-dong blocking wall, they’ll overlook everything we’ve done so far. What should we do? Should I answer?”
When Gang Sujeong looked at Sin Haeryang in bewilderment, Sin Haeryang answered simply.
“Who are they to overlook me or not? They still haven’t come to their senses. Ignore them.”
Hearing that, Shuran, who had been tense beside them, let out a sigh of relief. Baek Aeyeong tapped Shuran on the shoulder and said,
“Our team leader is the craziest bastard of all.”
Lee Jihyeon nodded at Sin Haeryang’s words and now began looking through Sato’s messenger contents. There, too, were quite a few Japanese phrases that did not translate. But once she scrolled up to a certain point, many extremely long messages came into view. Lee Jihyeon frowned for a different reason.