The nights in the Grey Zone froze even the warmth of the living. The hands that had been pounding against my chest suddenly went limp. Her skin was like a furnace, and a constant moan leaked from between her parched, cracked lips. Her consciousness, marinated in a high fever, was drifting past the boundaries of reality.
"Min-seok... it's hot... please hold my hand..."
My heart sank at Yeon-woo's delirium. She reached out a thin hand into the empty air. Staring into the dark corner of the warehouse where nothing existed, she shed tears mixed with relief rather than fear.
"Mister... Mr. Chul-soo... you said we'd go eat soup together. Why did you go alone..."
It seemed the corpses we had left behind were standing before her eyes. The children who burned in the storehouse, Min-seok who spilled his guts in the swamp, and Chul-soo whose upper body had been torn apart. Those 'wraiths' were reaching out to her. To her, the hallucination was a more comfortable refuge than this hellish reality.
"Yes... I'm coming. Take me with you. It's too cold here..."
Yeon-woo smiled and offered the very hand she had used to try and slit her throat to the ghosts. I shook her shoulders violently, but her vacant pupils continued to chase only the void. She could no longer see me. She heard only the whispers of the dead.
I gritted my teeth as I placed a cold rag on her burning forehead. The dead are supposed to be silent; why must they ransack the minds of the living?
"Don't go... Yeon-woo, please."
My voice broke. I killed comrades to survive, shot my own countrymen, and burned civilians. To think the conclusion of all those sins was merely watching Yeon-woo be dragged away by ghosts. I squeezed her hand so hard it might crush. If the dead were trying to take her, I was ready to fight even the wraiths themselves.
Yeon-woo's breathing grew shallow and ragged. As if someone were strangling her, she gasped and clawed at the empty air. If left like this, she wouldn't survive the night. The wraiths had already dragged half of her soul away.
"Hey! I heard there's a doctor in this district. Where is he!"
I lunged out of the storehouse and grabbed the one-eyed man by the collar. Flinching at the murderous look in my eyes, he pointed toward the very heart of the 'Grey Zone'—the abandoned mine where the rotting mist coiled like a snake.
"The old man they call 'The Butcher' lives there. But be careful. Instead of money, that man takes... fingers or eyeballs as payment."
I didn't look back. I ran. The heat radiating from Yeon-woo's body on my back seeped into me. It was proof she was still alive, yet a warning that she was melting away.
The path to the mine was hell itself. Wild dogs, deformed beyond recognition by magic contamination, snarled in the darkness, and hallucinating deserters blocked my way, swinging rusted blades. I pulled the trigger until I ran out of bullets, and when the magazine was empty, I smashed their skulls with the butt of my rifle.
"Move, you pieces of trash! If you're going to kill someone, kill me!"
I didn't stop even as I rolled through the muck and thorns tore at my flesh. A shard of glass embedded in my foot screamed with every step, but it didn't hurt as much as Yeon-woo's fading breath.
Finally, at the entrance of the mine, an old man holding a massive surgical scalpel waited for me, wearing a blood-soaked apron. His eyes were cold, like a machine stripped of emotion.
"Do you want to save her, or do you want to send her off peacefully?"
I carefully set Yeon-woo down and knelt before him. My hands were so caked in blood and mud they were unrecognizable.
"Save her... just save her. I'll pay whatever price you ask."
The old man gave a sickly smile and pointed at my left hand.
"Then give me three of those fingers. They'll make for excellent medicinal ingredients."
The old man laid Yeon-woo down on a rusted operating table. The flickering gaslight cast a precarious glow over her pale face. The man known as 'The Butcher' sharpened his blade nonchalantly and then pinned my left hand to the table.
"There is no anesthesia. If you scream, I'll drive this blade into the girl's heart. Endure it as if you were dead."
I gritted my teeth and bit down hard on an old leather belt. The old man's callous hands traced my index, middle, and ring fingers one by one. The moment the cold metal edge bit into my skin, every nerve in my body shrieked.
Crunch, crack!
The sound of raw flesh tearing and bones crushing echoed through the silent mine. The agony was so intense that my vision flashed white, and I couldn't even manage a scream. Cold sweat poured down like rain, and my jaw muscles convulsed as I bit into the belt as if to swallow it whole. But I looked at Yeon-woo. For her, as she hovered between life and death in her fever, I had to accept this pain willingly.
"Hhh... ugh...!"
The Butcher calmly placed my severed fingers into a glass jar. Then, he began injecting a mysterious black fluid into Yeon-woo's veins. It was a forbidden drug meant to neutralize the miasma of the Holy Relic.
"It is done. Now, leave her life to the heavens. Of course, your hand will likely struggle to hold a heavy rifle for the rest of your life."
I roughly staunched the blood spurting from the stumps and crawled to Yeon-woo's side. My chest ached more than the left hand that had lost all sensation. Could this part of my body I sacrificed serve as atonement? No, this was merely a selfish price paid by a monster like me to keep her trapped in this hell just a little longer.