Seoul Object Story
Chapter 78: The Kkachisan Conference (4)

At an ambiguous time between day and night, a large man strode towards a huge mansion on the outskirts of Seoul.

Though luxuriously decorated, the mansion exuded a gloomy aura, as if a dark shadow loomed over it.

The man was quite large in size, with short, blunt cone-shaped golden horns sprouting from his forehead. He was in the business of kidnapping and selling people.

Contrary to his confident gait, the man’s mind was in utter turmoil.

Usually, the butler of this manor would initiate contact for requests. But this time something was different. The buyer had made quite an unusual demand: the man needed to visit the manor before receiving the request.

Ignoring such suspicious demands was standard practice. However, this buyer was a significant client, having made numerous requests before.

Furthermore, with a reputable title as the director of the Trinity Research Institute, he couldn’t refuse such a request and found himself visiting the mansion.

As soon as the man knocked on the entrance door, the butler answered instantly, as if he had been waiting for the man all along.

“The master is waiting. Please follow me.”

It was the same voice the man always heard over the phone.

The skinny old butler gave off a strange aura that made the man uneasy.

He followed the butler past the mansion’s gate into a strange black garden.

The garden was covered with some kind of black soil and covered in black-colored plants he had never seen before.

Moreover, the whole place smelled like petroleum. Despite the unpleasantness of the garden, he couldn’t show it, not with the eerie butler beside him. Fortunately, when they entered the mansion, the smell of petroleum vanished completely.

The interior was even more luxurious, starkly contrasting the eerie black garden.

A huge Trinity Institute logo dominated the center, while intricate stained glass mosaics adorned the windows.

Gorgeous tapestries hung on the walls, while soft light emanated from a chandelier above.

After passing through the luxurious lobby, they arrived at a large reception room. There, a man in a neat suit stood up from his chair to welcome him.

The middle-aged man seemed to be the mansion’s owner.

“Ah, you’re here. Welcome. I hear you’ve been putting in a lot of effort for me recently. Don’t be so tense. I just wanted to take a look at your face, so I called you.”

The middle-aged man glanced around the living room and said so. The walls were decorated with golden horns of various shapes and sizes, like mounted deer heads. All of them were golden horns which the large man had delivered.

“Thank you for always delivering such excellent horns. As expected, the bigger and more complex the shape, the more attractive they are. Simply exquisite.”

“A-Ah, yes….”

The large man had felt uneasy from the moment he entered this room. Though he couldn’t pinpoint why, he just wanted to end the conversation quickly and leave.

“Don’t you feel it too? I feel extremely comfortable whenever I am in this room. Although I don’t have enough data to prove it, thanks to the prohibition of research on the golden horns, it must have that kind of soothing effect, right?”

“Y-Yes, of course…” The large man answered half-heartedly and looked around.

“Oh my, it seems only I have been talking all this while. I apologise. Back to the point, I called you here because I was curious.”

The middle-aged man approached, handing him a round jewel-like Object. The sphere shone both in a light apricot color and an ebony black color. It looked like a strange blend of a white and a black pearl.

“Um… what is this?”

“This? Oh, it’s a new nutritional supplement that our institute developed. Give it a try!”

“Uh… do I have to eat it now? Can’t I eat it later?”

“Of course not! It’s a top-secret product of our institute. So please eat it now.”

The large man started to heavily regret accepting the invitation and coming to the mansion. It wasn’t worth it just to please the business contact.

Honestly, how could just some measly contract even be worth it? Having to come all this way to this extremely suspicious place and on top of that being forced to consume this sketchy ‘medicine’?

Of course, he had no intention of ever putting such a suspicious medicine in his mouth. Yet, seeing the middle-aged man’s mood, he feared the consequences of refusal.

Trying to get out of such a sketchy situation, the man hid the medicine in his arms, pretending to eat it.

“I’ve eaten it.”

The middle-aged man just stared at him.

“Khm! If there’s nothing else, I’ll excuse myself.”

As he turned to leave, a voice came from behind.

“That’s strange.”

Ignoring the words, he started walking back the way he came. However, the butler who had been waiting outside the reception room, blocked the man’s path.

“You must eat the medicine, dear guest.”

The man tried to shake off the butler’s hand but his hand wouldn’t even budge. Before he knew it, the butler’s face had turned eerily white, his place full of bulging black veins.

Crunch-!

“Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!”

The butler’s bony arm easily crushed his arm bones.

Subduing the large man who was struggling in pain, the butler found the medicine he had hidden in his arms.

“Yes, of course. it was so strange. No matter how good the suitability was, there should’ve been at least some change.”

The middle-aged man took the medicine from the butler and forced it into the large man’s mouth.

In a corner of his fading vision, the large man saw the old butler melting into black mud.

***

The Kkachisan Conference was quite well-organized, I must say.

The participating research institutes were all quite famous in Korea, and the government prepared thoroughly, so the event went smoothly. Smoothly for everyone but me, of course.

“There, there. Don’t be too angry. It’s okay, it’s okay,” I whispered trying to soothe the Golden Reaper.

But I couldn’t concentrate on the presentation at all. How could I? The Golden Reaper was in a highly strung state, practically radiating its emotions…

For some reason, it seemed both sad and angry. Very angry.

Even though I tried to calm its anger by patting its head, it didn’t have much of an effect. Bribing it with lots of candy also didn’t help. I know, shocking, right?

The only upside was that it didn’t try to escape from my hands. Instead, it clung to the back of my neck or my head. What on earth was going on? Clearly, I was no Reaper whisperer.

I didn’t have to look far to find the culprit. The source of the Golden Reaper’s abnormal behavior was clear as day: The researchers from the Trinity Research Institute, and more specifically, the strange snacks they were fond of.

The little treats looked harmless enough, so at first, I thought the Reaper was angry because it wanted to eat it. I mean what else could it be?

So, naturally, I went over to the researchers affiliated with the Trinity Research Institute and asked for one of those snacks. But the Reaper’s reaction was anything but expected.

It launched itself at the snack, pulverizing it with a swift punch, its tiny body huffing and puffing in rage. Then, just as abruptly, it flopped down with a dejected on its face.

Huh? The snack was a small, apricot-colored, cube that looked like a small piece of cheese. It smelled fantastic as well… So why did the reaper hate it so much?

“What is this snack made of?” To satisfy my curiosity, I asked the researcher about the snack.

“Ah~ this?”

The researcher looked at my outfit from top to bottom and spoke with an annoying sneer on his face.

“Well, It is a prototype of something Trinity is working on, synthetic food—Object food, to be precise. It’s something that all the world-famous research institutes are working on actually. Sigh… I never thought there was still a research institute that didn’t know about it.”

Saying so, he turned on his heel and left leaving a trail of snide remarks about the Sehee Research Institute.

‘Government subsidy leeches…’, ‘Idiots with large egos who try to contain Objects when they don’t even know how to use them properly…’, stuff like that.

I should have been livid, but honestly, I was more preoccupied with stopping the Golden Reaper from turning him into a human pincushion. The little guy seemed ready to punch a hole right through him, and it took all my effort to keep it from launching an attack.

In the end, one thing was clear: the Golden Reaper clearly didn’t like that snack. And frankly, hearing that it was a suspicious snack made out of Objects, I wasn’t eager to taste it myself.

Crunch-! Crunch-!

As I listened to the rest of the presentation, I could hear the Reaper angrily biting into a piece of candy as if to express that it was angry.

Crunch-!

As I was enjoying the cuteness of the pouting reaper, the crunching sound abruptly stopped.

Hmm? Has it finished already?

I glanced down, only to find that more than half of the candy was still intact. But the Golden Reaper was frozen mid-bite, staring intently at something.

Before I could react, it vanished. Poof! Gone, like a magic trick. Hmm, did it turn invisible like the Gray Reaper?

Then the chaos began.

A shattering noise, like a giant glass pane cracking, reverberated through the hall. A hot, fierce wind followed, whipping papers and shaking the chairs into a frenzy. The very air seemed to warp and twist as if we were seeing through a distorted lens.

Red sand spewed from the ruptured space, swirling around us in a surreal storm.

Everyone raised their voices in confusion at the strange and chaotic situation, but they were all drowned out by the wrecking sound of the wind.

And then, with a sharp ‘pop’, stones—the size of a fist—blasted from all directions.

And of course, one of those deadly rock missiles with enough force to easily tear apart a person was coming straight towards me…

Ah. Dammit.

***

The containment room of the Gray Reaper at the Sehee Research Institute was enveloped in a comfortable atmosphere, like a cozy blanket on a chilly day.

Inside, the Gray Reaper was enjoying a nap, blissfully unaware of what it was about to go through.

Suddenly, a lot of Golden Reapers popped out around the sleeping Gray Reaper. Then as if they had discussed this before, all of them then started hitting the Gray Reaper in the most adorable and chaotic way possible.

Punching the reaper’s cheeks, pulling on its eyelids, jumping on its stomach.

These beatings even took place in the Garden of Golden Reapers. Golden Reapers were beating the Gray Reaper who was sleeping away there, too.

All of them wore an urgent expression on their face.

It was as if they were shouting ‘Wake up quickly!’

***

Agent Black stood at the back of the presentation room, his gaze fixed on the unfolding chaos.

While everyone else was panicking, Agent Black reacted with precision. He scooped up the blonde young lady, securing her on his back, and ran away from the crack in the space. with the blonde girl on his back.

He moved swiftly, almost instantaneously, as soon as the hot wind blew through the room.

“Ahjussi?! What’s going on?”

“It seems like another Object-related incident. First, let’s leave right away. At the very least, we need to get out of Kkachisan.”

With gritted teeth, Agent Black kept running. But it wasn’t enough. A shock wave hit him hard just as the sound of glass breaking echoed through the hall. Thrown off-balance he rolled across the ground, clutching the girly tightly to protect her.

Faced with endless wind and swirling sand, the agent shielded the blonde girl in his arms, enduring the storm with grim determination.

When the chaos finally subsided, Agent Black stood up, brushing the sand off his suit. Yet what lay before him was a completely different scenery.