In the end, Kim Jin-Woo heard nothing from them. The very same Hyun-Ji that had been joking around just moments ago ended up shedding tears non-stop at the mention of their father, as if her energetic appearance prior had all been a lie. His mother brought Hyun-Ji back into her room, and told him not to worry about it.
“Did something happen to Father?” Kim Jin-Woo asked.
“Don’t worry about it. Your father is doing well; it’s just that he’s been busy with work and hasn\\\'t been home the past few days. Hyun-Ji’s probably just acting up because she wants your attention, possibly because she hasn’t seen you in a long time. Don’t worry too much,” his mother answered.
It didn’t sound right at all. Worry was written all over her face, and the Eyes of Truth had revealed how bad their psychological states were. It was also obvious that his mother was awkwardly embarrassed, due to the fact that she wasn’t the type to lie so easily.
However, Kim Jin-Woo didn’t probe any further. He figured it was something his mother didn’t want him to do.
She might have looked soft on the outside, but he knew that deep down, she was more strong-willed than anyone else.
After all, even when her own child had returned suddenly after disappearing for a year, she didn’t probe into what had happened, nor did she ask about why Kim Jin-Woo had suddenly disappeared. Thus, he respected her decision and decided not to probe either. He could have asked Hyun-Ji further about the issue, but he quietly decided to obey his mother’s wishes.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Kim Jin-Woo said. After saying goodbye, he sympathetically looked back at the quiet house behind the closed door for a long time, before finally heading off.
Kim Jin-Woo may have stopped probing any further because of his mother’s will, but that didn’t mean he had given up. As soon as he returned to his house, he called for Angela, explaining, “I have a family. I’m certain something has happened to them, but I don’t know what.”
Angela was surprised for a moment at the word ‘family’, but she quickly gathered her composure when she saw the coldness in her master’s expression. She asked, “What should I do?”
“See if anything is happening to them. And if there’s anyone trying to harm them…”
Kim Jin-Woo’s sentence trailed off vaguely, but Angela’s determined look suggested that she understood what he was saying. She asked as she licked her bright red lips, putting on a vicious smile, “When can I start?”
Kim Jin-Woo took out a mobile phone and passed it to her. He began, “As for how to use it…”
“I already know how,” Angela replied. Her face shone with confidence. It seemed she hadn’t entirely been idling her time away while she was on the surface.
“Great, I’ll tell you their location. Stay there for a moment,” Kim Jin-Woo said.
Seeing that they had to be apart so soon after their reunion, Angela pouted heavily. But Kim Jin-Woo was in no mood to accept her grumbling. He had a bad feeling. He had a feeling that his family was caught up in something troublesome. And it was possible that his father’s plight…
“Mm.” As his thoughts continued to spiral negatively, he shook his head hard to shake them off. He was worried that unnecessary delusions might interfere with his perception of reality.
However, the high sensitivity of his perception, that had come with his ascension, was by no means negligible. He was well aware of that fact and took the necessary course of action. He cautioned Angela, “If you run into difficulties with any group you come into contact with, be sure to find their whereabouts and let me know.”
Angela didn’t ask her master what he was going to do with all that information. Just by looking at Kim Jin-Woo’s face and the bright blue streaks of light trailing from his eyes, anyone could have guessed that he was in a bad mood.
But Angela wasn’t sympathizing with his misfortunes. Instead, she was more inclined to watch with great interest where her master would head next. As a tyrant from the Underworld, his time on the surface had been too passive. She felt that this time, he would behave differently, and she felt her dead heart finally coming to life once more.
And as if to confirm her expectations, Kim Jin-Woo’s eyes flashed brightly with an eerie light.
***
It wasn’t difficult for Kim Jin-Woo to find out the cause behind the darkness that had befallen his house. Angela’s surveillance was stealthy but daring, as she was skilled enough to watch the goings-on from right under the family’s noses. And after such tight surveillance, Angela succeeded in finding out the whole story before barely a day had passed.
Kim Jin-Woo’s prediction hadn’t been wrong. His father had fallen into misfortune, and it turned out to be many times worse than he had imagined.
Angela started the story with something he couldn’t comprehend.
<I guess these people don’t know how great Master is.>
But of course. He held the highest title of the highest-leveled dungeon baby in South Korea, but to his family, he was a weak fugitive that was constantly being chased by the evil spirits of the Underworld.
In the eyes of his family, who had been watching him suffer from nightmares and mental pressure for years, he was nothing but prey to the vicious hunter that was the Underworld.
<It seems they sought out the services of someone in order to find the missing Master, but they didn’t trust those people, and thus Master’s father followed them personally.>
It was the worst case scenario. A lot worse than he had imagined.
With their son going a full year without any contact, on top of the fact that he had previously plunged himself into the Underworld in order to obtain a dowry for his younger sister, a misunderstanding had been inevitable.
However, the measure taken to resolve that misunderstanding was truly a foolish act in Kim Jin-Woo’s eyes. To even think of hiring other explorers to personally head down to search for one missing explorer… It had become quite a mess. It was a request that no ordinary explorer would ever accept. But nevertheless, the family’s request was somehow fulfilled.
Kim Jin-Woo didn’t want to admit it, but there was only one scenario that made everything make sense.
Fraud.
On top of that, it was the worst kind of fraud, where the life of a family member was collateral.
And Kim Jin-Woo knew better than anyone how that horrible scam worked, of course. After the war between the surface and the Underworld ended, this kind of scam had persisted for a very long time. It would be stranger if he didn’t know about it.
Immediately after the end of the war, scammers would approach families to find the whereabouts of their missing male relative in the Underworld. In a situation where even the government had given up on those missing men, the desperate families were left with no other choice but to grasp at straws. And of course, those scammers had disappeared with the money.
<Seems like it happened not too long ago. Probably a month?>
Angela faithfully reported what she had seen and heard herself.
“Mm…”
If all they’d wanted was money, they would have gone into hiding after receiving it. But the scammers had taken his father and disappeared. And they had kept using that as an excuse to ask for more money.
<What shall we do? Shall we wait a little longer?> Angela asked to verify their next move.
“Look up the number that’s recorded in the mobile phone. It might lead us to something.” With that order, Kim Jin-Woo hung up the call and let out a deep sigh.
His father hardly spoke. He preferred to take action rather than to talk. As he was such a father, Kim Jin-Woo never would have guessed that he would do something like this.
He couldn’t help but blame himself. In retrospect, all of this was due to his indifferent personality. If anything happened to his father, he would never be able to forgive himself for the rest of his life.
However, there was one thing he had to do before he lost his temper in anger against himself, and that was to deal with the scammer who had cheated his family.
“Here it is.” Angela had yet to fully adapt to the machine and didn’t know how to go through the call log on the mobile phone, and thus she had stolen his mother’s mobile phone wholesale.
“I think you have to consider the worst case scenario,” Angela said cautiously as she looked at him going through the phone’s call log and texts. “Perhaps your father…”
“Stop.” As Kim Jin-Woo quietly looked at the screen, he silenced her in a creepy, subdued voice.
Belatedly realizing her own mistake, Angela bowed as she apologized.
“Head back. Mother might be looking for her phone.” Kim Jin-Woo tried to send Angela back, but for some reason, she didn’t leave. He asked with a wordless look if she had something to say.
Angela hesitated for a while before speaking up. “That sister of yours… Hyun-Ji, was she? How about asking her for the details? I think she’ll tell you everything if you ask her.”
If it were Hyun-Ji, she could possibly confide in him without their mother knowing. However, Kim Jin-Woo shook his head and replied, “I plan to take care of things without Hyun-Ji or my mother\\\'s knowledge.”
“Why…” Angela, who valued efficiency above all else, tilted her head, unable to figure out why her master was making things so difficult.
Kim Jin-Woo observed her body language before replying coldly, “I don’t want them to see my dark side.”
***
Kim Jin-Woo quietly visited Mr. Baek’s appraisal office after sending Angela back.
“What are you doing at this hour? I was just about to close for the day.” Mr. Baek was delighted when he saw Kim Jin-Woo arrive late in the night.
However, Kim Jin-Woo went straight to business. “It seems I need your help.”
As Mr. Baek listened to the circumstance Kim Jin-Woo was in, he froze at the absurdity of the situation. He asked, “How could this be?”
At one point in time, the scam had been so frequent that it became a major social problem. But today, it was an outdated scam method that no one was fooled by. Despite that, of all the families to fall for the scam, it had to be Kim Jin-Woo’s. Mr. Baek clicked his tongue with a sad face at that thought.
“Will you be able to find them?” Kim Jin-Woo asked.
Mr. Baek pondered for a moment and then nodded. “There’s nothing I can’t find if I put my heart into it…”
Watching Mr. Baek slur the tail end of his sentence, Kim Jin-Woo took out a down gem from his possession. It was a precious down gem that he desperately needed to upgrade the surface labyrinth, but he didn’t hesitate to do so.
“Ah, I am a businessman, but we haven’t just been doing business for a day or two. I don’t wish to charge a fee for something like this,” Mr. Baek said with pretend friendliness.
“This is advance payment. When the work is done, I’ll pay you properly.” Kim Jin-Woo pretended not to hear him as he placed the down gem on the table.
“Urgh.” With a low utterance, Mr. Baek groaned as he took the down gem, pretending to lose the conversation.
At that sight, Kim Jin-Woo’s hardened expression relaxed slightly. He wanted to buy information at a moderate price, and maintaining his relationship with Mr. Baek at this level was perfect. There was no need to chain himself down by being indebted..
“The sooner the better, right?” Mr. Baek said as he took out his old flip phone and called a few of his contacts. “How about you wait here a while and have some tea? I’ll be hearing from my contacts soon.” With that, he took out a cheap teabag and served it as he began gossiping about the scammers.
Seeing Mr. Baek talk like this when he himself had once held Kim Jin-Woo’s family hostage just to obtain a few more extra down gems was quite the spectacle, but Kim Jin-Woo didn’t let it show.
Mr. Baek suddenly went on a tangent from his gossiping as he asked, “But what do you plan on doing when you find those guys?” Kim Jin-Woo, however, didn’t answer. And Mr. Baek didn’t ask again either.
Mr. Baek feigned ignorance, but his yellow eyes made the truth painfully obvious as he remarked, “Those guys sure are unlucky. If they knew what kind of dangerous person they were dealing with, they wouldn’t have done something like this. Actually, no, perhaps they assumed you were dead, which was why they did what they did.”
Many explorers had lost their lives in the chaos of the past year. Among them were a couple of fairly high-leveled dungeon babies, so the scammers must have assumed that Kim Jin-Woo had also been caught up in it and died.
“Oh, I’m already receiving a call. Wait a minute.” There must have already been progress in the short period they had spent having tea, as Mr. Baek picked up his call. “So, have you looked into it? Hey, this isn’t the first day we’re doing business, is it? What kind of ‘privacy’ are you talking about? Don’t sweat the details and just talk.”
Instead of greetings, Mr. Baek talked back and forth with the person on the line for a long time, before suddenly falling silent as he warily looked at Kim Jin-Woo.
“Is there something wrong?” Kim Jin-Woo asked.
Mr. Baek pretended not to hear him as he wrapped up the call. But as he lowered his phone, his expression had completely hardened. “Do you remember when I asked what you would do if you found them?”
“What are you talking about all of a sudden?” Kim Jin-Woo asked.
It seemed Mr. Baek had discovered the identity of the scammers. A blatant show of concern was written all over his face as he asked, “My man, do you still have the same thoughts?”
But instead of replying, Kim Jin-Woo asked his question once more with determination. “Who is it?”
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