Scene 1. Rotten Feast
Thwack.
Something wet was hurled onto the floor. A slick juice spread across the cement.
Raw flesh. Uncooked, the severed cross-section oozing watery blood that crept slowly into the cracks in the floor.
The smell that reached his nose was rotting mud. A black puddle pooled in a paddy ridge during monsoon season—the rank, musty stench that rises when something dead has been soaking in it too long.
Lee Kang's jaw flinched, barely. Instead of saliva pooling in his mouth, the root of his tongue shriveled and the back of his throat went bone-dry.
This isn't it.
This is not something I can eat.
He nudged the lump of meat away with his toe. The slick texture smeared across his bare foot, then fell away. The meat rolled half a turn on the floor and stopped, its cut surface gleaming a dull brown under the faint overhead light.
Useless. Bone, blood, flesh. All of it.
This smell doesn't scratch the thirst.
"...Not eating, then."
A dry voice drifted from beyond the iron bars. Doctor Jang. Sleeves of his white coat rolled to the elbows, one shoulder propped against the wall. A clipboard in hand. The scratch of pen tip on paper was unnervingly sharp in the narrow room.
Lee Kang did not answer. The chain coiled around the back of his neck scraped against cement each time he shifted— scritch, scritch.
Instead, he heard something else.
From the other side of a single wall. From somewhere along Doctor Jang's throat—a very quiet, very steady sound.
Running water.
A thin, cold, clear stream trickling down between mountain rocks. The kind of sound that, in a noon desert with a throat cracked dry, would drive a man to his knees to press his mouth against. That sound was flowing beneath Doctor Jang's skin without pause.
The chain pulled taut.
Lee Kang's torso folded forward, tilting toward the bars. Not his fingers—his nails scraped the cement floor. The tendons beneath his jaw bulged, and rough breath leaked between his teeth.
Grrrr.
What rose from deep in his throat was not speech. A low, wet vibration beyond the range a human larynx could produce.
Doctor Jang's pen did not stop. His pulse did not waver. That steady sound of water still babbled on like a stream beyond a wall, and it was that steadiness that drove Lee Kang's nails deeper into the cement.
"Animal blood won't do."
The pen wrote something on the paper. Scratch, scratch.
"I knew that from the start, but."
Doctor Jang lowered the clipboard. The eyes that looked down at Lee Kang through the bars were arid. No expression, no pity, no fear. The eyes of a researcher recording a color change in a culture medium.
"The thing inside you is rather particular."
Cement powder crumbled beneath Lee Kang's nails. The taut chain eased back half a span with a soft scritch. When his back met the wall again, the tongue that had been pressed flat against his palate peeled away, and only dry wind circled inside his empty mouth.
The sound of water was still there. Without pause. Just one wall away.
Scene 2. The Warmth of Prey
Behind the folding screen, fabric rustled.
Lee Kang's spine froze solid.
Footsteps. Bare feet on wooden floor—very light, very careful. One step. Another. The air in the room changed. Not the temperature. The smell.
Something sweet grazed the tip of his nose.
Not flowers. Warmer than flowers, wetter than flowers, far more—
Saliva flooded his mouth.
The thirst broke through its wall and poured in. The thing that had not stirred before the animal blood now seized his throat in a single rush. Every vein in his body surged in one direction, and the tendons in his forearms twisted like rope.
Yeonhwa.
"—!"
The chain screamed. Lee Kang's body launched in the opposite direction. His back struck the wall. The impact rang through the back of his skull, but he did not feel it. There was no time to feel it.
The farthest corner the chain would allow. He crammed himself into the angle where wall met floor. Pulled his knees to his chest and buried his face. Stopped breathing.
Must not smell it.
If I do—
The footsteps did not stop. Pad. Pad. One step at a time. Aimed directly at him.
Don't come.
His mouth would not open. His jaw was locked. Upper and lower teeth clamped down on each other and would not let go. If he released them—if he let go, his mouth would open, and once it opened, he knew better than anyone what would come next.
Clack. Teeth struck together. Clack. Clack. His jaw spasmed on its own, teeth crashing dry against each other. Not his will. His body was preparing ahead of him. To bite.
Pad—
The footsteps reached a hand's breadth away. The scent grew heavier. No longer merely sweet. It was soaking into his marrow. Wiping his mind blank-white. Closing his eyes was useless. He could not block his nose. Not with hands bound in chain.
Beneath that fragrance, blood was flowing.
He could feel it. The warm, red pulse running one layer beneath the skin. Incomparable to the sound of water he had heard in Doctor Jang's throat—clear, abundant, endlessly welling—
His nails dug into the flesh of his own knee.
No.
This is Yeonhwa. The one I must protect. No matter what. By any means. The only one in this world.
But the language his body remembered was different. The thickness of flesh. The elasticity where bone meets muscle. The resistance when teeth break through. Things he had never experienced—his body had already memorized them. Instinct had opened the textbook and was reading it to him line by line.
Nausea rose. Nausea at the monster inside himself. Something vile that could neither be swallowed nor spat out shuttled back and forth through his esophagus.
Fingertips touched.
Yeonhwa's hand. Small, cool fingers about to alight on Lee Kang's forehead.
"Don't—come."
What barely escaped his torn throat was less a word than a groan. Closer to the sound a beast makes gnawing its own leg.
Yeonhwa's hand did not stop.
The instant before her fingertips met his forehead.
Clack.
Teeth crashed together. Loud. Clear. A sharp sound that split the air of the room.
Lee Kang's eyes snapped open. His pupils had blown to their widest. What filled his vision was Yeonhwa's wrist. The thin skin on its inner side. The slender vein showing violet beneath.
His body pitched forward.
The chain bit his throat. His own weight strangled his own neck. Breath severed. Vision narrowed and hearing faded—and even in that instant, the scent pouring from Yeonhwa's wrist only grew sharper.
Lee Kang drove himself deeper into the chain that was crushing his throat.
Back. Farther back.
If I reach her, I bite. If I bite—
At the edge of his vision, he saw Yeonhwa's expression. Not fear. Not revulsion. What floated on that face was a kind of stillness Lee Kang could not interpret.
That was more terrible still.
Prey that does not flee at the sight of the monster. That is not mercy. That is cruelty.
Inside the pressure of the chain burrowing into the flesh of his throat, Lee Kang's teeth were still clacking— clack, clack—finding each other, beyond his will.
Scene 3. The Yellow Bridle
The needle went in.
The nape of his neck. The tip drove precisely into the narrow gap between chain and skin, piercing through muscle. Doctor Jang's hand did not tremble once. What Lee Kang registered was not the sensation of puncture.
It was fire.
Molten iron seemed to pour through his veins. From the needle's entry point, a searing heat crawled down the length of his throat and spread below the collarbone. There it branched. Into both arms, down his spine, between each rib. Scalding streams flooded every passage inside his body at once.
His back arched like a bow. Boiling breath hissed between his teeth. His fingers raked the cement floor, and his nails split where they scraped. He did not feel it. His entire body was a single, massive burn.
The convulsions began.
From his toes. They curled inward, calf muscles seizing hard as stone. Thighs, abdomen, chest. Like a wave surging from below, muscles locked and released in sequence. His jaw wrenched open and his teeth bit empty air. Nothing was caught. What spread across his tongue was not blood but something metallic—no, the thick, yellow taste of scorched egg yolk.
The yellow drug was spreading through his body.
The fire slowly changed color. From red to yellow. The veins that had been burning fell quiet one by one. The bow-bent spine uncurled by degrees, sinking back to the floor. His clenched fingers opened one at a time. When the last—the little finger—released, Lee Kang's body lay fully prone on the cement.
Breath returned.
The inhale that at first felt like being scraped by a saw blade softened, mouthful by mouthful. As though the grains of sand inside his lungs were dissolving, the texture of his breathing changed. The hand that had been choking his throat was slowly letting go.
Then he heard a sound.
From very far away. Or from very deep within.
A silver bell.
A clear, slender chime that tickled the inside of his eardrums. As if a tiny bell had been hung inside his ear, swaying with each breath, ringing faintly. He had never heard this sound before. And yet it was not strange. As though he had known it since long ago, somewhere in his body remembered it.
Each time the silver bell rang, one layer of scorched sensation peeled away.
Beneath it, something else seeped in.
Fragrance.
Lilac. The damp, cool, faintly sweet breath that rises when you bury your nose in a lilac bush just after spring rain. That fragrance flowed deep into his lungs and moistened the places where the burns had been. What had hurt no longer hurt. What had been charring cooled.
Lee Kang's eyelids sank halfway.
The silver bell drew a little closer. The lilac scent grew a little deeper. At the point where the two overlapped, his brain assembled a single image.
A hand.
The sensation of a small, cool hand resting on his forehead. The sensation that had been severed just before Yeonhwa's fingertips could touch—it was completing itself now. The hand that could not reach him was resting there. At a distance where he did not need to bite.
It's all right. For now, it's all right. That hand was saying.
The thirst withdrew. His teeth stopped clacking. The violet vein showing through the inside of Yeonhwa's wrist no longer looked the color of prey. It was simply—the color of a person. The ordinary skin of someone he must protect.
The corner of Lee Kang's mouth eased, barely. A change he was not conscious of.
Relief. This was relief. The plain, simple kind that comes from knowing Yeonhwa is near. The defenseless loosening that comes from confirming the monster has fallen asleep.
The silver bell rang once more. Very quietly. From somewhere very deep.
Lee Kang closed his eyes. The cold of the cement floor pressed against his cheek, but all he felt was the temperature of cool fingertips.
Scene 4. The Slaughterhouse
Clang.
The empty syringe was set on the steel tray. A sharp metallic note scratched through the room and vanished.
Lee Kang sat slumped against the wall, back pressed to it. The chains hung loose on both sides, snaking across the cement like serpents. Cold sweat was drying. The perspiration that had trailed down his spine evaporated into the air, leaving a cool film on his skin.
His whole body was heavy. As though lead had been poured into every joint. Moving a single finger required a conscious command.
But his mind was clear. Brutally so.
Doctor Jang pushed the tray aside and perched on the old chair in front of the wall. Beyond the iron bars, maintaining precisely the distance a keeper keeps from a dangerous animal. He drew a cigarette from his coat pocket and placed it between his lips but did not light it.
The restraints were not removed. Not the chain at his throat, not the shackles on his wrists.
It meant: I don't trust you yet.
"Back to yourself?"
Instead of answering, Lee Kang raised his head slowly. His neck muscles creaked. A hoarse voice crawled out of his mouth.
"...How long will this hold. The drug."
"Half a day." Doctor Jang spoke with the unlit cigarette still in his mouth. "A full day, if you're lucky."
A short silence passed.
"So I need to find food again before then."
"If you mean the kind of food you can actually eat." Doctor Jang gestured toward the empty syringe on the tray with his chin, cigarette pinched between his fingers. "This isn't a meal. It's a muzzle."
The corner of Lee Kang's mouth twisted. Too dry to call a smile.
"At least the keeper's honest."
"If the keeper lies, the beast dies first." Doctor Jang's tone remained without affect. The voice of someone reading a report. "So let me be honest about one more thing."
The mouth holding the cigarette paused, then moved again.
"Ookami wasn't made here."
Lee Kang's eyes narrowed.
"Somewhere in Gyeongseong. I haven't pinpointed the exact location yet." Doctor Jang set the clipboard on his knee. He tapped a point on the paper with the tip of his pen. "Unit 731 branch. A mass-production facility is operational."
"Mass production."
"Large-scale. Think of it as a place that stamps out things like you." Doctor Jang's pen traced a slow circle on the paper. "The opposite end of the slaughterhouse. Not dismantling the meat—making it."
The air in the room thickened by one degree.
Lee Kang turned the back of his head against the wall, slowly, and looked toward the space behind the folding screen. Where Yeonhwa was. The fragrance from before had already faded; only the acrid aftertaste of the drug clung to the roof of his mouth.
He turned back. Toward Doctor Jang.
"...Find the location."
A hoarse voice. But what lay beneath it was not fatigue.
Doctor Jang removed the unlit cigarette from his mouth. He read Lee Kang's eyes once, then tucked the cigarette back into his pocket.
Instead of answering, he picked up his pen and began writing something on the clipboard. Scratch, scratch. Only that dry sound filled the narrow room.
The chain scraped the floor. Scritch.
Somewhere in Gyeongseong, dozens of monsters were being made. Even now, at this very moment.