Bloody Night

This dagger was formed from condensed blood, its hardness no less than steel—in fact, much stronger.

Shorty’s words got stuck in his throat. Both hands clutched his neck as blood sprayed from between his fingers.

Before he fell, the last thing he saw was…

Bloody blades swirling through the corridor.

Hundreds of them.

Dense and countless.

They didn’t even have a chance to pull the triggers before they were riddled like sieves.

Baldy collapsed against the wall, six blood blades stuck in his chest, his eyes wide open—refusing to close in death.

Lin Mo withdrew his hand. The blood blades dissolved into liquid form and flowed back into the mass of blood swirling around him.

After a few steps, he suddenly stopped and pulled a keycard from Baldy’s pocket.

“Thanks.”

The security room was at the far end of the corridor, the door bulletproof.

Of course Lin Mo could just phase through it, but for appearances' sake, he had to go through the motions.

The people inside had already seen the security feed—bodies scattered everywhere in the hallway, a man surrounded by blood walking straight toward them.

“Hit the alarm! Hit the alarm now!”

The fat man sitting at the control panel frantically slapped the red button.

It was a one-click notification system. The signal would be sent to all relevant personnel’s terminals, including the big shots upstairs.

“Damn it! Is there anyone who can stop him? Ten billion! I’ll pay ten billion won!” Fatty screamed into the communicator.

But everyone who could respond was already lying in the hallway.

No one answered.

Beep! Senior pass!

The keycard swiped across the reader.

The bulletproof door slid open.

Lin Mo stood at the entrance, glancing inside. Three people—two technicians and Fatty.

Fatty gripped a pistol, the barrel aimed at the door, his hand shaking like he had Parkinson’s.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Fatty emptied the magazine.

Every bullet stopped half a meter in front of Lin Mo, blocked by a condensed blood shield.

The copper-jacketed rounds embedded in the dark red blood, motionless.

Click.

The magazine was empty. The gun’s hammer fell on an empty chamber.

Fatty’s face had gone pale as the wall.

Lin Mo walked in, dispersing the blood shield. The bullets clattered to the floor.

“Ten billion?” Lin Mo smirked. “Your life isn’t worth ten billion.”

A blood blade pierced through his body.

Fatty collapsed onto the control panel, nose dripping blood onto the keyboard, staining several keys red.

The two technicians knelt on the ground, too terrified to speak.

Lin Mo didn’t kill them immediately. First, he collected Fatty’s soul and performed a soul search.

Just as he expected.

To build a slaughterhouse like this underneath the YJJ building, the names standing behind it were no small figures.

This information could be sorted out and passed on to Dongfang Shuye for handling.

Using this to control those people? Easy as pie.

Lin Mo rifled through the memories from the soul search, looking for information about Cai Junhuang.

Nothing at all.

It seemed Cai Junhuang’s matter wasn’t orchestrated by these people.

He needed to find someone higher up.

He turned to look at the two technicians sprawled on the floor. “How many people have you captured on this floor?”

A technician pointed at the people on the monitor screen.

Lin Mo nodded, raised his hand, and plunged two blood daggers into their hearts.

That should do for tonight. The people he needed weren’t here, but he might as well finish the rest.

Like taking care of the ones coming down from upstairs. Once these guys were dealt with, the rescued people could leave.

The alarm had already gone out. In a few minutes, more people would flood in.

He had to kill them all, or those forty-plus people locked up wouldn’t make it out.

Tonight was going to be bloody.

Well, it was already pretty bloody, wasn’t it?

Lin Mo walked out of the security room and opened the doors to each cell one by one along the corridor.

The sound of iron doors screeching echoed underground.

The people inside huddled in the corners. Seeing Lin Mo covered in blood, their first instinct was to shrink back even tighter.

Some didn’t dare move.

Some couldn’t understand Korean. No way around that—Lin Mo had to keep up his persona, so he didn’t say anything. Anyway, once he’d killed off all the thugs, these people could run out on their own.

More importantly, scanning the memories, he found there was a journalist among the captives.

No matter the country, there are always some righteous people.

Lin Mo walked up to that journalist and dropped a pile of things in front of him, saying in Korean, “Get out of here. Publish everything you’ve recorded.”

The journalist’s eyes went wide as he stared at the man before him, somewhat dazed.

“Who are you?”

“Don’t ask. It’s not good for you. Take these people to the elevator. Don’t look back. Just run.”

With that, Lin Mo headed toward the stairwell, since the thugs from upstairs were already coming down.

—System: A living hell, if ever there was one—

Choi Jeong-woong, freelance writer.

In plain terms, he had no steady job and made a living by typing words. But he had another identity—a truth seeker famous on the internet.

His blog went by that alias: Truth Finder.

It sounded cringey, but he lived up to the title.

Over the past few years, he had exposed chemical plants dumping illegal wastewater, uncovered bullying and murder cases at elite private schools, and even dug up an insurance fraud ring that had been running for five years.

Every single time, people tried to kill him.

But he was still alive.

This time, though, he almost didn’t make it.

The reason was simple.

Someone sent him an anonymous email, claiming there was something below the YJJ building’s underground parking garage.

Choi Jeong-woong looked into the building’s background and found that the approved architectural blueprints showed only five levels underground.

But the photos attached in the anonymous email revealed at least a sixth floor.

An extra floor—unapproved, unregistered.

What was hidden there?

And the lower three floors weren’t any pleasant place either.

Choi Jeong-woong’s professional instincts kicked in.

He spent two weeks casing the place, then another three days securing a temporary worker’s keycard. At 3 a.m., during the security shift change, he slipped in.

Underground level one was a normal parking lot.

Level two was the same, except the number of parked cars was obviously higher. Logically, there shouldn’t be that many cars parked late at night.

But at the far end, there was an elevator requiring fingerprint ID.

He couldn’t open that elevator door, but he found the entrance to a nearby ventilation duct.

Choi Jeong-woong, thirty-five years old, 163 cm tall, fifty-one kilograms, just barely managed to squeeze himself into the sixty-centimeter-wide duct.

His clothes tore, his back scraped raw, but he didn’t make a sound.

The duct led downward.

Along the way, he saw many things.

A casino, a bar, a brothel, even a drug den.

But when he crawled out at the other end, what he saw made the blood in his veins run cold.

Operating tables.

Not one—a row of them.

The lights were stark white. The air reeked of disinfectant, mixed with another smell—the smell of blood.

The kind of smell that disinfectant couldn’t mask.