My Bloody Valentine - 1

Chapter 1

It felt like his head was about to split open.

“Ugh….”

The pungent smell of damp cement and thick dust pierced his nose. Near his ears, a clanging sound, as if someone were hitting a pot or a frying pan with a spoon, echoed.

Half-consciously, Han sensed the familiar yet strange smells and sounds as he opened his eyes. In his blurred vision, there was only a dark gray color.

Where am I…?

As if trying to wake from a dream, Han shook his head, but a sharp pain in his neck made him gasp in agony.

Unintentionally, he reached out to touch the painful area, only to realize too late that his hands were bound behind the chair.

…!

Instinctively, Han’s dilated eyes trembled.

Something was terribly wrong.

As his eyes gradually adapted to the darkness, the surroundings started to come into view little by little. It appeared to be a parking lot underground, maybe three or four floors deep. Still under construction, there were parts with cement flooring and exposed steel frames. It was a desolate landscape.

Scattered materials looked like bone fragments, and the abandoned construction equipment scattered around resembled hunched-over monsters.

“Ugh… Ugh….”

At the sound coming from nearby, Han turned his head absentmindedly, only to see four men sitting in a row, just like him, but the difference was that they had gags tied to their mouths.

His pupils shook as he instinctively sensed danger.

Something had gone wrong.

As Han’s eyes roamed aimlessly, he finally noticed the back of a man he hadn’t seen before.

A few steps away from the bound individuals, the man in a black shirt was lifting a large drum filled with gray powder and water. It had a length of about a meter and was carried on steel bars.

Clang, clang.

The sound that had sounded like hitting a pot with a spoon was, in fact, the noise of the steel bars colliding with the drum. More than confusion, Han felt bewilderment first.

Even though he was small, he had never imagined himself in such a situation, even in his wildest dreams. Besides, he was just a part-time worker with a meager hourly wage, and his balance had recently dropped to six figures.

Even if they tried to kidnap him, the amount of money they could get from him was meager, not even reaching six figures.

However harsh the world might be, he had never expected someone as inconspicuous as him to be kidnapped on a public street.

Was it possible he had been caught by organ traffickers? The sudden thought made Han’s bound hands shake as he tried to move them back and forth.

In the vast construction site, there was only one person. Since the rest of them were tied up like him, Han thought that he might have a chance to escape if he managed to outsmart this man.

Imagining his own image, like a shark with its fins cut off, being thrown into the sea with empty guts, Han frantically shook his wrists.

However, whether it was something he had learned as a Boy Scout in his childhood or some extraordinary knot-tying technique, the more Han tried to loosen it, the tighter the rope seemed to become.

Gasping for breath, Han doubled over, struggling with the pain that shot through his neck as he attempted to stretch the rope with his wrists. After catching his breath for a moment, Han decided to try a different approach. He pressed his hands together as if in prayer, maximizing the contact, and then, while rubbing his palms together, gradually pushed the rope away.

Perhaps it was more effective than forcing it apart because, by the time sweat was pouring down his forehead, the rope that had bound his wrists fell to the ground with a sudden thud.

The busy man, occupied with breaking cement, seemed not to notice. Han was fortunate to be sitting at the far end among the five captives.

He tried to calm his racing heart and keep his composure to prevent any mishaps. If he caught his breath and timed it correctly, he could make a run for it.

He looked around in a panic and quickly identified the fastest route to the exit. Throughout this ordeal, Han realized he had more determination inside him than he had ever thought.

I don’t want to die.

In reality, there wasn’t much to miss about his life. He was in his late twenties, struggling to pay rent, and he had to spend most of his earnings on medical bills after working for a week and lying in bed for three days. He had never had more than six figures in his bank account.

Girlfriends and friends were like mythical creatures from legends to him. He was entirely alone, and while others might ask, “What’s so bad about a life as dismal as mine?” they probably weren’t in his shoes. Being thrown into a pile of dung would still be better than this.

As his chest calmed down a little from its frantic pounding, a sudden thud, followed by a loud noise, was heard. The heavy iron door opened and closed with a loud noise that echoed throughout the construction site.

Several makeshift lights, which were often used for catching squid, dangled from the ceiling, casting long shadows of the man breaking the cement. It felt like the entire space was shaking.

Three men entered through the open door. Excluding the middle-aged man wearing a Hawaiian shirt, all of them were dressed in black.

Han’s heart skipped a beat as he realized they each had a blade in their arms. The thud, thud, thud sound seemed to reverberate from the top of his head to his toes.

“Hello.”

The middle-aged man, with a friendly face to the extent that you could call it handsome, introduced himself as Kim Youngdal, a specialist in torture.

In the hierarchical structure of most organizations, the leaders are typically in their 40s, with those in their 30s as field commanders, and those in their 20s as subordinates. However, here, age seemed to be all over the place. This was because the head of the organization, Baek Junggil, who was the chairman of Cheongsong Construction, advocated meritocracy.

Youngdal glanced at the five individuals bound to their chairs, his double eyelids flicking. With a bit of luck, all five of them would become his playthings tonight. The anticipation already made Han’s legs feel shaky.

Youngdal sat down in front of the captives, like someone examining feces, and spoke.

“Well, folks, do you know where you are? It’s the courtroom of instant judgment. In a little while, we’ll have a tall, good-looking judge here, and he doesn’t like noisy outbursts, so you’d better behave. Honestly. Okay?”

The words echoing in Han’s ears, almost as mismatch as Youngdal’s black suit and the fancy palm tree pattern shirt he was wearing underneath. For a moment, there was a sense of dissonance due to the odd combination of words.

“Some of you may have heard about it through rumors, but you’ll be in big trouble if you make fun of me just because I’m young. Behave yourselves, without any deceit. Do you understand?”

With the tone of someone giving a lecture, Youngdal made his point quite clear.

Listening to the man’s words, Han was searching for any possibility of escaping this altered situation. There were now four others with the initial man, so running away wouldn’t be easy.

The people sitting beside him didn’t look like they belonged here at all. Despite being covered in dust and cement powder, they were all dressed in high-end suits, and most of them appeared to be in their 40s or 50s. The likelihood of them being long-term smugglers had decreased.

So why was Han sandwiched among these middle-aged men?

Various possibilities about how he had ended up in this situation raced through his mind. Among them, the most likely one was that there had been a misunderstanding, and they had wrongly taken him.

The foreign name “Lee Han” wasn’t too unusual, and there could be others with a similar name. Besides, there was no way people like this would have any business with someone like him, who had no connections to the criminal underworld and not even a single credit card.

Before witnessing anything related to a crime, he needed to appeal to his innocence right now. After all, it wasn’t uncommon for witnesses to crimes to be silenced to eliminate potential problems, as seen in movies and TV dramas.

“Excuse me,” he began to raise his voice.

As Han’s gaze fell to his feet, he noticed something that had fallen unnoticed right under him. A small clump of black fur, about the size of his palm, lay on the gray cement floor.

Han’s worn-out Converse toe gently nudged the fur. When he pressed it with the tip of his shoe, he felt a slightly softer texture compared to the cement floor.

What is this…?

As he gently lifted the fur clump with the tip of his shoe, something like a piece of burnt cloth appeared. Long, black fur was densely embedded in the black and burnt leather.

After some contemplation, he finally figured out what it was.

“…!”

What he had been casually poking and prodding with the tip of his shoe was part of a person’s forehead and head, buried in the cement.

“Hmph…! Huuh… Kgh…”

The sound comes from people who suffered from asthma often exhibited hyperventilation symptoms as a result of psychological and physical shock.

Sure enough, when an unexpected rush of air filled his lungs, Han, whose lung function wasn’t particularly good, couldn’t digest such a volume of air.

After clutching his chest several times and struggling for breath, Han’s pupils gradually rolled upwards. His glass-like body, plagued with various diseases, couldn’t withstand this shocking situation.

In the end, Han collapsed onto the floor, slipping off the chair with a metallic thud, making a strange noise as he lay there.

As he sank into unconsciousness, Han thought:

Why… How did I end up in this place?