Thrown In as Bait, the E-Rank Lantern Wakes Up Every Time He Dies novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cold Pool
His guild master bars the cold room door on him and he dies, then wakes that same morning a year older, finds his nephew's lantern contract and warns every lantern in the yard, and the guild master puts the boy first in line.
At 1:40 in the afternoon, Byun Sang-cheol put his gloved hand on the steel bar of the cold room door.
Nobody had opened that door in ten years.
Twenty-three people had died behind it on the morning the Blue Crane Bathhouse turned into a gate.
The inquiry said a young firefighter had opened the wrong door that morning and let the monsters in on them.
That firefighter was Jeon Woo-seok, and now he stood at the head of the lantern line with a lamp strapped to his chest.
A lantern was an E-rank hunter, the lowest rank there was, paid to walk in front with a light.
The things in the steam went for the first light they saw.
For ten years Woo-seok had been that light, in these same tiled halls, for Byun's Haetae Guild.
"The client wants everything on the floor by the door," Byun said. "Thirty seconds. Bags. Then out."
The lanterns shook out their canvas sacks.
Woo-seok counted lamps out of habit, the way he'd counted heads on the fire truck.
There were twelve, one more than on this morning's roster.
The twelfth lamp was clipped to a gray hoodie, and under the hood was his nephew's face.
"Gyeol," he said.
Choi Han-gyeol was nineteen and was supposed to be at his convenience store until six.
He didn't look at his uncle.
He was looking at the door his mother had died behind.
Byun slid the bar back, and cold poured out of the gap and frosted the glass of every lamp.
The vice-captain with the shaved eyebrows shoved the first line through, and Gyeol was in it.
Woo-seok went in after him.
The cold room was white tile around a black plunge pool, and something under the water turned toward the lights.
He grabbed Gyeol by the hood and threw him back out into the hall.
"Bar it," Byun said.
The door swung shut on Woo-seok and four lanterns, and the bar slid home on the other side.
The thing rose out of the pool, pale and as big as a bus, and the air turned to frost around it.
Its hand closed on his chest, and his heart stopped from the cold before his ribs broke.
On the tile beside his face lay a child's pink waterproof phone pouch.
Then nothing.
Woo-seok woke up shouting.
He was on his own mattress on the floor of the rooftop room in Mangwon-dong.
Gray light came through the window over the laundromat sign, and his chest was whole.
Words hung in the air in front of his eyes, plain as a street sign.
[Return. Paid: one year.]
Then they were gone.
His phone said Wednesday, March 11, 5:52 a.m.
He had died at 1:40 this afternoon.
Across the room Gyeol was asleep on the other mattress with his earbuds in and his phone on his chest.
Woo-seok got up and went to the bathroom mirror.
A streak of white ran through the black hair over his left temple.
It hadn't been there last night.
His hunter license hung on the fridge under a fried chicken magnet.
"Jeon Woo-seok. Rank E. Awakened in the Blue Crane Bathhouse gate, January 10, 2016. Skill: Return. Effect: none observed."
For ten years the hunters had asked him what Return did, and for ten years he'd said he didn't know.
There was no way to test a skill like that without dying.
He laughed once, quietly, so he wouldn't wake the boy.
Gyeol's hoodie hung over the chair.
In its front pocket was a folded Haetae Guild lantern contract, signed last Friday, for today's raid.
Gyeol woke up to his uncle standing over him holding it.
"Why are you going through my stuff?"
"Why is there a lantern contract in your stuff?"
Gyeol sat up and pulled out an earbud.
"I'm nineteen. You don't have to sign anything for me anymore."
"You promised me you'd never go in there."
"You go in there twice a week."
"I go in so you never have to."
"Mom's in there," Gyeol said. "Ten years, and I've never even seen the door."
Woo-seok had seen it.
He'd died against it.
"Go to work," he said. "I'll take your shift on the raid."
"It doesn't work like that, and you know it."
He did know it.
The guild had the contract on file, and a lantern who skipped a signed raid lost his license.
At eight o'clock the Haetae lanterns lined up in the guild's fenced parking lot in Hapjeong.
A photo the size of a garage door hung on the fence.
In it, a boy of eighteen in an orange bathhouse uniform carried a little girl out of the steam.
In his other hand was a yellow helmet lamp.
Every lantern in Seoul knew that photo.
The boy in it was Kwak Do-han, the Lamp of Mangwon, Korea's first S-rank.
Bang Chil-seong shuffled into line beside Woo-seok and pressed a strawberry candy into his hand.
He was sixty-three, an old taxi driver with reading glasses on a string and a fishing vest full of candy.
"Three hundred thousand won today, Fireman," he said. "That's my granddaughter's piano lessons through May."
Byun walked down the line patting cheeks.
"Morning, my candles."
His gold watch was cold on Woo-seok's face.
Woo-seok stepped out of the line.
"At 1:40 he's going to open the cold room," he said, loud enough for the whole yard.
The lanterns went quiet.
"He'll send us in for whatever's on the floor by the door. Thirty seconds, with bags."
He looked at the vice-captain with the shaved eyebrows.
"And when the thing in the pool gets up, that man bars the door with us still inside."
Byun's smile stayed exactly where it was.
"Who told you about the floor?"
Byun hadn't told anyone about the floor.
Byun had said those words for the first time at 1:38 this afternoon, in the hall outside the cold room.
The lanterns were looking at Byun now, not at Woo-seok.
"Jeon Woo-seok is off today's raid," Byun told the guild clerk. "Strike him for the month."
Chil-seong looked down at his shoes.
He needed the money, and so did everybody else in that line.
Woo-seok turned to his nephew.
"Gyeol. Come home with me."
"I signed, Uncle."
Byun patted Gyeol's cheek.
"Put the firefighter's boy in the first line," he told his vice-captain. "It runs in the family."
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