Dried up like a mummy, only her eyeballs bulging out, she looked as though she would be better off dead than living like that. Her dark, dingy skin was covered in age spots that looked like mold blooming on it. She looked less like a person than a tree about to rot and crumble away.
I couldn't keep standing on the threshold with the door open, so I took a step into the room.
"Excuse me, can you hear me?"
FLINCH!
The old woman, gasping for short breaths through her respirator, hsss, hsss, swiveled her eyes toward me. She wasn't in any state to talk, but fortunately she wasn't deaf, so she seemed able to hear me.
"Don't you want to get out of here?"
With a clatter, the bed shook hard, and she drew violent breaths, already ragged as they were, her eyes bulging wide: a yes. The old woman's eyes were filled with rage.
"The cursed gold coin. Just hand that over and I'll get you out."
RATTLE! CLATTER!
The bed shook wildly up and down. At the mention of the 'cursed gold coin,' she seemed even more enraged, her eyes going bloodshot as her body shook.
BEEP—!
The respirator detected the hyperventilation and set off an alarm. Afraid the sound would bring a nurse running, I hurriedly pressed the respirator's alarm button with my hand.
'She can't talk, so there's no communicating at all.'
I went over to the old woman, who was still shaking, and sat in the chair. Partly to wait until she calmed down, I took out the nail clippers I had brought to collect her fingernails and took her hand. It was a relief that fingernail clippings could be used instead of fingerprints. Otherwise, I might have had to cut off one of her fingers.
"Don't be so angry. Let's talk once you've calmed down."
I said it to the old woman, whose hand was trembling so much I could feel it shake, but her rage didn't subside. She was glaring at me, her eyes glinting sharply, but I paid her stare no mind and started clipping her nails, snip, snip.
'Is this enough?'
When I had put the gathered nails away in a small container and looked at her, the furious old woman's teeth slowly parted and made a clacking sound. I leaned in close, wondering if she could finally talk.
"Blood.... My blood... give it... back."
She seemed willing to make a deal. I took a moment to sort out my thoughts at her demand. Then, looking around the hospital bed, I noticed two blood bags hooked into her arm.
Some kind of curse, or a market penalty.
The possibilities narrowed to one of the two. Only then did the old woman's mummy-like, brittle condition make sense.
"I can still only make D-Grade wishes, you see."
"Shhee... shhee.... Thie... ving bastard."
Thief of what? So many things came to mind that I had to think about it, and then I snorted.
Normally, the one who stole would be the bad one, but in a case like this, it was only natural that the fault lay with the one who got robbed. This belonged to a world where common sense didn't apply anyway.
"Grandma. I don't have time. Tell me where the coin is."
When I leaned right up to her ear and whispered with a blank face, her eyes swiveled upward again and glared at me fiercely. Not that an old woman lying there with one foot in the grave could do anything, however hard she glared.
"A person should know their place. I'm giving you a chance to start over."
RATTLE! RATTLE! RATTLE!
The bed shook violently, like crazy. At this point, it looked closer to a seizure. If she died while I was here, it would be a problem, so I wondered whether to call a nurse, but if she was that spry, she seemed fine.
'From the look of her... she isn't going to talk....'
I decided to look for it myself. I thought about where I would have hidden the coin if I were the old woman. Even if no one was likely to come looking for it, I didn't think she would have hidden it anywhere an ordinary person could reach. That meant the bed she was lying on, or else she still had it on her....
"Whew."
At the thought of searching the body of an old woman who had gone past a seizure into a frenzy, a sigh came first. When I slowly felt my way up from her feet, she desperately twisted her unmoving body, resisting my hands.
'I knew it. She does have it on her.'
The moment I thought so, my hand found something strange. I didn't even need to go up to her upper body. When I pulled her pant leg all the way up, there was a long knife scar along the side of her thigh. And inside it, I could feel something small and hard.
"...Haha."
That old woman might be lying there like that now, but she had made it all the way to Expert. I was an idiot for thinking she would have hidden it somewhere ordinary. I didn't know whether only people so ruthless they had gone mad entered the market, or whether the market slowly drove them mad, but the only way to get this out was to tear open living flesh.
"The deal's off. I'm the one who found this."
I took a paper knife out of my bag. After everything it had taken to get here, I had no intention whatsoever of giving up. A person doesn't die from a little cut on the thigh. Besides, this was a hospital.
"Bite down on this for a moment."
Worried that a sound might leak out, I wadded up a handkerchief and stuffed it in her mouth, then set the tip of the knife where the coin was. I had done my military service, so if I just controlled the force, I could keep the bleeding to a minimum. The bleeding could be stopped quickly anyway, so I put strength into my fingertips and drove the knife into her thigh.
"Mmph!!! Mmmmph!!"
The old woman's screams leaked out through the handkerchief, but all my attention was focused on the tip of the knife.
The flesh had parted maybe 5 cm when the gleaming gold coin came into view, and I forced it out with my fingers.
"Kkeok! Mmph mmph!"
I heard the old woman writhing in pain, as if she would really stop breathing, and her bulging eyeballs were a breath away from rolling back into her head.
[The previous owner's fingernails, the cursed gold coin, the vault password, the Ghost Story Market key.]
At last, every condition for opening the vault had been met. At a glance they looked like simple conditions, but a clause was attached saying the handover was only recognized as formal if the owner was conscious, so if the old woman had been unconscious, I would have had to raise my investor grade to restore her consciousness and try again.
'It's a stroke of heavenly luck that I didn't run into a mishap that wasted my time.'
"Nurse! Over here. Please hurry!"
I quickly hid the coin in my pocket, put the knife in the old woman's hand, and calmly called the nurse. As luck would have it, the old woman had just lost consciousness and fainted, so even when the nurse came, she couldn't give any testimony at all.
"What's going on here?"
"She suddenly hurt herself. She said she didn't want to live...."
At my words, the nurse, who knew the old woman's condition, shot me a suspicious look, but when I lied boldly, she soon went to the old woman's side to give first aid.
Hurried footsteps sounded in the 19th-floor VIP room, and two more nurses and two doctors came running. While they were frantic changing the blood, disinfecting, and treating her, I hung back, watched for an opening, and calmly slipped out of the hospital. I had come in using fake documents and a fake ID, so even if the old woman died, they wouldn't be able to find me.
Two months since I had set foot in the Ghost Story Market.
Now all that was left was to break another record and rise to Experienced Investor.
Experienced Investor
- An investor who has built up experience through numerous trades.
- Holds various items; may use the item box in reality as well.
- May trade privately with ghosts below the Superior tier.
- Wishes up to C-Grade are possible.
- May recover soul fragments from an opponent driven to death.
- May acquire Investor Skills with fragments.
- Wishes possible outside the market as well.
Being able to trade with ghosts of the mid-tier vengeful spirit or wraith level, rather than the god-like evil spirits that counted as Superiors, looked like a way to collect quite a lot of points.
The ghosts in the market, apart from the god-tier Superiors, were usually divided into mid-tier and low-tier. Trading with the low-tier, departed spirits who hadn't been dead long, didn't earn many points, so at the thought that I could solve my points problem, I got impatient. So as soon as I got back from Jeju, I rushed straight to the market's Nightmare Trust and opened the vault. Then I sold 10 of the 38 soul fragments and converted them into 500 points. 10 soul fragments made one person's whole soul.
Soul fragments could only be obtained through trades between humans. Since no one was insane enough to trade away their entire soul in one go, the structure let them be traded in fragments, so if I used them now, it would take time to fill them back up. It was a bit of a waste, but promotion came first.
"Adjust my grade to Experienced Investor."
[Promising Investor No. 3029, will you spend 500 points to be promoted to Experienced Investor?]
"Proceed."
[Promising Investor No. 3029 has been promoted to Experienced Investor.]
An alert announcing the grade adjustment appeared in the air, and confetti and fireworks burst. Then, in the Ghost Story Market's shopping street, a huge banner of me rising to Experienced Investor floated up.
I didn't plan on using soul fragments for a while since I might need them later, but exchanging them would get me a whole 500 points. Soul fragments were more valuable right now because I couldn't easily come by them, but raising my wish grade would widen what I could do by far. Right now, getting wishes above D-Grade was more urgent. Even a C-Grade wish fell far short of avenging my despair, but I left the 28 soul fragments for future plans. To go to Expert, I needed double that, 1000 points. Not spending them carelessly just because I was in a hurry was the wise course. When a moment came where I truly needed them, I could convert them then and raise my wish grade.
'I have to become a new target.'
Having learned that Kim Hyun-woo had started preparing a new scam, I generously converted points into real money so I could be his sucker again. I had to get Kim Hyun-woo to see me as a wallet and approach me again. It was all for the finale in which, in the end, he would turn into my wallet and become their prey in the market.
First, I planned to buy the goods I needed from the shop and stock them in my box.
"Shall I go shopping first?"
***
I sent Min-seo a message asking for help and got dressed.
I had bought a good car for just such a moment, and now it was time to deck myself out from head to toe to prove I was a sucker who could be fleeced again.
'Um... I should definitely buy luxury brands, right?'
I had converted nearly 400 million won into cash, so I could go department store shopping without worry. But I had always gone to work in a suit, so I was hopeless at fashion. I worried that if I bought things just for the luxury brand, I would end up looking like Eden.
[Calling me out shopping without even sharing your plan. You've got some nerve.]
When I checked the phone alert that went off just as I started the car, it hit me. Come to think of it, I had only sent a message out of the blue asking her to help me shop, without explaining why in detail.
From Min-seo's point of view, it might have looked quite rude.
'She won't mistake it for a date, will she?'
I was still wondering what to reply.
[So where am I supposed to go now?]
[Ah. Please come to the Galleria Department Store in Gangnam.]
It was the biggest, so there would be plenty there that could change me into someone who looked like a person. Even to my own eyes, I looked less like a person right now than a walking zombie.
'You really never know with life.'
Until a few days ago, I had been dragging myself to work out of resignation to pay off my loans, and ironically, now I was going shopping without even paying off my debts, so I could become a sucker again. Appearances weren't everything, but to show others that I wasn't a penniless beggar, wrapping myself in luxury brands was the most effective way.
The socially vulnerable, a misfit on the margins, one weeded out of the ecosystem.
Those had been the labels that followed me around, but after I learned of the Ghost Story Market, everything changed 180 degrees.