The Hunting Dog of the Prestigious Family Has Returned Chapter 89

“Ugh?!”

Father Jeong Suhan drew a sharp breath and opened his eyes.

Looking around at his surroundings with eyes that were clearly flustered, he quickly realized that something about the situation before him was unfamiliar.

…He had probably been on his way back to his accommodations after meeting his friend.

Then someone had called his name from behind, and after that he could not remember.

“Have you come to, Father?”

“Huh… Y, Young Master?”

Snapping back to attention at the sound of my voice, Father Jeong Suhan turned toward me.

This was a hideout Mizutani had arranged on short notice.

The smell of dust from an old building and the faint scent of disinfectant mingled and drifted through the air.

The inside was perfectly soundproofed, and because of that, only a suffocating silence filled the space in place of any noise from the outside world. Thick concealment curtains had been drawn over the windows, making it difficult to even gauge the time of day.

Under fixed lighting, Father Jeong Suhan sat bound, his priest’s vestments disheveled. Sweat-damp hair clung to his forehead.

I looked at him and put on a ceremonial smile.

A gentlemanly posture, a soft tone.

But my eyes did not smile.

“The event you were just at, Father. Do you know what kind of event it was?”

“An event… you say? Oh! Were you there too, Young Master?”

For a moment, the flustered look vanished, and his face lit up.

He did not seem to even understand why he was bound.

He smiled faintly and launched into an explanation in an animated tone.

“They said it was a medical volunteer activity hosted by a church here. There are so many sick people in the outer district, apparently… and I was helping out as well.”

……A medical volunteer activity.

There was nothing strange about Father Jeong Suhan getting involved in something like that.

If anything, it was almost too like him.

But this was no time to let my guard down.

So I fed all of it into the analyzer: his brainwave readings, skin responses, and biological patterns. The analyzer installed on one wall of the room hummed quietly as it displayed complex graphs and figures on the screen.

Mooyoung, who had been watching silently from behind, passed over the results.

[Mental state assessment, emotional response, external feedback all within normal range. No intentional excitation-inducing response detected….]

There were no particular signs of anomaly.

It was equipment procured in haste, so not as precise as the analyzers used back in Hanseong, but to fool a pattern like this you would need to be at least a Royal Investigative Bureau operative.

In that case.

‘I’ve been barking up the wrong tree.’

The hypothesis that this Father was an outside spy, that the organization called the Society of Truth had been monitoring me and the Eight Outcasts Society from the very beginning, was all just my own premature conclusions and paranoia speaking.

-See! What did I tell you! My father is not that kind of person!

Through the communicator attached to my ear, Jeong Yurim’s rather sharp voice came through.

Father Jeong Suhan’s adopted daughter.

She had attached herself to this communications network from early on, saying she would speak in her father’s defense.

In truth, we had been the ones to draw her in first.

-In the first place, this is the father who put on his priest’s vestments and marched into the city constabulary to pay his taxes and ended up fleeing! He’s not a spy or anything like that, he just keeps causing trouble wherever he goes!

……Well.

Even if you’re defending him, saying it like that makes him sound rather pitiful. In more ways than one.

After a series of apologies, the communications ended, and Taewoong quietly approached and released the restraints binding the Father’s hands.

Click.

Cold metal struck the floor and made a small sound.

“We spent a good deal of money for nothing. Cross-border communications don’t come cheap.”

“Not entirely, though.”

In this corporate city, surveillance eyes flashed over all information and communications, and transmissions crossing national borders were managed all the more strictly.

To connect a communications line while evading that surveillance cost tens of times more than doing the same thing back in Joseon.

Taewoong said this matter-of-factly, but I shrugged.

“Thanks to it, we’ve now confirmed beyond doubt that our Father Jeong here is a simple ordinary person. At the same time, we’ve gained a contact who has ties to the Society of Truth.”

“Has it come to that?”

As I brushed off Taewoong’s skeptical look.

Having apparently gotten his bearings at last, Father Jeong Suhan glanced around at this and that before opening his mouth. His gaze settled in turn on the concealed windows, the light fixed to the wall, and the analysis equipment in the corner of the room.

“Ah, but… why are you here, Young Master? It seems rather noisy outside, has something happened?”

It has.

Thanks to you, I spent quite a long while deliberating whether or not I needed to kill you.

But I set that thought aside for now.

I quietly took a seat in the chair across from Jeong Suhan. The scraping of chair legs against the floor cut briefly through the silence.

“More important than that is why you were there, Father.”

“Ah, it’s just as I said before. A friend from the same faith told me he was hosting a gathering and asked me to attend together with him….”

A friend.

“Could it be, you mean the person who was treating the elderly woman at the event?”

“Yes. His name is Baek Donghyeon… he was the same age as me, someone I grew up with at an underground church.”

Baek Donghyeon.

The fellow who had been waving with that good-natured smile just a short while ago.

I filed the name away separately in my mind.

“If you lived together… why is someone like that in Japan rather than Joseon?”

“He went to help the Kakure Kirishitan suffering in the outer districts of the corporate city.”

Kakure Kirishitan.

The remnants of an old faith, scattered throughout Japan fleeing persecution.

So those remnants had survived in this city too.

It struck me as quite ironic that in a corporate city dominated by cutting-edge technology and the logic of capital, a faith community as premodern as that should exist.

As I was thinking that, Father Jeong Suhan wore a faint smile, as though recalling those days.

“‘An ordained priest must share the Gospel from the lowest of places.’ That was what he said as he set off. He was always a forward-looking friend, unlike me, who was a coward.”

“…Ordained?”

I looked back at Jeong Suhan.

“You mean you received formal ordination as well?”

“Ah, did I not mention that? Despite how I may appear, I am a formally ordained priest.”

The Father spoke with unmistakable pride.

What a reversal.

I had thought of this man until now as little more than ‘a person of faith who plays at being a priest,’ but to think he was actually a clergyman who had received formal ordination from Joseon’s Catholic congregation.

If the Administration learned of this, he certainly would not die a comfortable death.

“In any case, you and that friend of yours… Baek Donghyeon, you were quite close?”

“In our younger days, yes. After that we stayed in touch occasionally by wireless transmission, but… cross-border communications are so expensive. It amounted to no more than a few voice messages exchanged.”

“And this time you met in person?”

“Yes. It had been almost fifteen years. He had changed so much I nearly didn’t recognize him.”

Changed.

Catching that word, I looked up with a sharpened gaze.

“When you say changed, in what specific way?”

“Well, naturally….”

As though he found this kind of conversation enjoyable, Father Jeong Suhan smiled broadly, and said.

“His phase power.”

At that moment, the air in the room went cold.

“A friend who had gone his whole life with no connection whatsoever to phase power suddenly had an ability like that. I was truly… astonished.”

“……!”

“……..What did you say?”

I needed to turn the answer over in my mind again.

To retrace what those words truly meant.

“Exactly, when did you and this Baek Donghyeon last part ways? Around what age?”

“Well… it was well past our mid-twenties. It took time for both of us to become priests….”

“A person who had shown not the slightest aptitude for phase power up to that point is using phase power like that now? And of the bodily restoration type?”

“Yes… he himself said he received a ‘revelation’….”

At that moment, my brow furrowed.

I became aware of my own expression several seconds later.

A revelation?

Nonsense.

In this world, phase power is a hereditary trait based on aptitude.

There is not a single documented case of it awakening post-natally. At least, not as far as I knew.

In particular, awakening an advanced phase power like bodily restoration was in a realm so rare it bordered on miraculous, even among Joseon’s power clan families.

If what I was hearing right now were true.

If it were truly possible for someone with no ability to awaken such a rare power.

‘The Society of Truth…. Could these people be capable of ‘injecting’ phase power?’

The plan had changed.

At first I had only intended to use them.

Make contact with the Society of Truth, prod at the resentment between them and the corporate city to provoke a reaction.

Then use them as a tool for the backroom maneuvering needed to stab the corporate city in the back.

Just one cult. A fanatical terrorist organization that lashed out without knowing what it was doing. That was how I had thought of them.

But.

‘Not anymore.’

Cult leader Baek Donghyeon. The phase power he possessed, and the conversation exchanged with Father Jeong Suhan.

These people were not a run-of-the-mill religious organization, and they were far from one-dimensional terrorists.

They were a group as dangerous as this expedition operation itself. No, perhaps more so.

A technology, or phenomenon, capable of shaking the very foundations of phase power. That was a variable that could upend the order of this city, no, of the world.

“First of all, where you were, Father, was not a church.”

“…Excuse me?”

“An unlicensed religious organization called the ‘Society of Truth.’ To put it simply, a cult.”

“A cult, you say, what do you mean by….”

Hearing my words, the Father looked flustered and questioned me back with a puzzled expression.

It was plain from his face that he did not care for the direction the conversation was taking.

But my mood was not relaxed enough to enjoy a reaction like that.

“And today, that Society of Truth carried out a bombing attack on the building where the head of the corporate city resides.”

“A, a bombing……?”

“Do you understand now why we brought you here, Father?”

“No but, th, that can’t be….”

When words as alarming as terrorism started flying around, the Father looked thoroughly bewildered, his face draining white.

His color gone, he moved his lips without managing to produce any coherent words.

I had always enjoyed teasing this man, but he was not someone who would tell lies about something like this.

And in fact, the intelligence operatives from my family who had crossed over to Japan with us were updating information in real time.

[Security team equipped with flamethrowers is assembling. Attempted to hack the internal administrative network to pinpoint the precise assembly coordinates, but blocked by a local intelligence operative. Additional equipment required.]

[Confirmed: multi-angled anti-personnel tank has sortied from weapons depot Sector 33-1 of the corporate city. Believed to be loaded with live ammunition; current position unconfirmed.]

[Lockdown measures confirmed at major points throughout the city. All routes leading to the outer districts under reinforced checkpoints and searches. Anyone without a transit permit is being detained immediately.]

On the terminal screen, warning markers flashed erratically alongside predicted movement lines overlaid on a city grid map updating in real time.

Simultaneous movements were detected: major arterial roads being placed under control, checkpoints being established.

It appeared that the entire corporate city, stirred up by the bombing incident, was seething like a disturbed hornets’ nest.

“Young Master. The corporate city’s movements are not looking ordinary. Remaining here any longer….”

“I know.”

Staying put here much longer was not a particularly good option either. With the entire city having entered a state of heightened alert, there was no guarantee this temporary hideout would remain safe indefinitely.

But having come this far, I could not return empty-handed.

“Father.”

“Yes?”

I looked at Father Jeong Suhan, who was fidgeting with anxiety, and said.

“That friend of yours you were telling me about. Is there any way I could meet him?”

The cult leader of the Society of Truth.

I had to meet that man and pull back what lay underneath.

Even if it meant crossing through the middle of this dangerous city.