Editor’s Survival Guide - Chapter 123

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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A Survival Guide for an Editor Episode 122

ep18. Rescuer (7)
Even when readers encounter the same work, each discovers something different.
That is how a work’s meaning expands infinitely through its readers.
The same applies to human beings.
In fact, it applies to everything in this world.
Someone’s precious son can be someone else’s living nightmare.
A predator to insects becomes prey for snakes, and where gills allow breathing, humans drown.
Everything in this world exists in a unique relationship with everything else.
And the meaning of that relationship shifts moment by moment.
My first impression of the Special Management Bureau was one of irresponsible indifference.
When they offered me employment, they became collaborators whose interests aligned with mine.
After four months had passed, I came to respect them slightly—creaking though they were, they endured.
And now.
The meaning between me and them was shifting once again.
For better, or perhaps for worse.
* * *
“Let’s go in together for now.”
Kwak Jae-gyeom told us after hanging up the phone.
Kim Ji-an and I simply nodded in silence.
Kim Ji-an rode with us in the car heading back to the Management Bureau.
There was no conversation in the car.
Upon arriving at the Management Bureau, we followed Kwak Jae-gyeom’s lead straight to the Field Operations Conference Room.
Cha Si-eon was waiting there.
“Why don’t you go in first, Seo Do-un.”
“No, I’ll listen along with them.”
Cha Si-eon tried to usher me in separately, so I refused.
I sat down next to Kim Ji-an, and a heavy silence fell.
“What are you doing right now?”
Cha Si-eon asked after a long moment.
He was speaking to Kim Ji-an, not me.
At Cha Si-eon’s clipped tone, Kim Ji-an visibly stiffened.
Yet even as her hands trembled beneath the table, Kim Ji-an spoke with composure.
“Let me see Lee Sol.”
“That’s not possible.”
“You’ve kept her confined for far too long. Just let me verify her condition.”
“An outsider has no business being involved in this.”
“I’m…….”
Kim Ji-an seemed unfamiliar with this kind of situation.
Judging by her pallid face and the way she bit her lip.
Perhaps seeking me out and speaking to me had been the boldest move she could make.
“Lee Sol is really here, isn’t she?”
When I interjected, Cha Si-eon turned his gaze toward me.
I met his dry stare for a moment, then added:
“Show us.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I’m not an outsider.”
“This matter falls outside your area of responsibility, Seo Do-un. Do not meddle in unrelated affairs.”
“Why would it be unrelated? I was the one who saw Lee Sol out of the station.”
“Seo Do-un.”
“Team Leader, have I ever refused to cooperate with the Management Bureau until now?”
At my question, Cha Si-eon closed his mouth and stared at me.
As if asking why I had to put it that way.
That look only made the situation feel more absurd to me.
Cha Si-eon stared at me as though I were obstructing an ally, but I felt thoroughly excluded.
After all, the person sitting beside me—an outsider—was the one who had informed me of this fact in the first place.
The woman next to me in a short-sleeved blouse and black slacks.
Kim Ji-an had approached me without warning and introduced herself as a former employee of the Special Management Bureau.
When she mentioned she had been on the research team, I recalled her name.
Kim Ji-an, a researcher from Research Team 2 before the Management Bureau’s reorganization.
Before the reorganization was quite some time ago.
That a former Management Bureau employee who had quit at least two years prior had sought me out—and worse, had approached me after tracking my movements—was not something to laugh off casually.
But such concerns became almost trivial because of what Kim Ji-an said next.
-Did you know Lee Sol is being held in isolation at the Management Bureau?
Information I’d never heard before.
Normally, if a complete stranger brought up something like this, one would dismiss it as nonsense.
Yet I felt no suspicion—only confusion.
Doubts scattered throughout my subconscious rose of their own accord and convinced me.
There are times when hunger is felt only after one realizes they haven’t eaten.
Much the same way, facts I had carelessly overlooked came back to me one by one.
My last memory of Lee Sol was of her in surgical garments, quarantined at the Management Bureau.
Since then, I have not seen Lee Sol once.
Though I spoke with Management Bureau personnel about Lee Sol a few times, I never actually heard about her condition or welfare.
Surely they would conduct post-containment monitoring.
Surely they would talk excitedly about their work.
“There are safety concerns,” Cha Si-eon answered reluctantly.
“So visitation is not feasible under current circumstances.”
The premise that Lee Sol was here became self-evident.
And with that, the situation began to feel increasingly unreal.
Where should I even begin to untangle this.
It was unclear what I should even object to.
The same ambiguity applied to my own position and role here.
Kim Ji-an’s request for help and Cha Si-eon’s insistence that I step back pulled at me from both sides.
That was when it happened.
Click—
The conference room door opened without a knock.
The person who appeared was none other than Acting Director Oh Tae-o.
Oh Tae-o, as if he’d been listening from outside, spoke without even greeting us.
“Visiting may be difficult, but observing from outside is possible…… And besides, she’s sleeping right now…….”
At Oh Tae-o’s unexpected entrance, Cha Si-eon’s expression hardened further.
By contrast, Kim Ji-an showed no particular reaction.
As though she had known in advance that Oh Tae-o would appear.
I had thought her someone who didn’t know how to fight.
I was mistaken.
Kim Ji-an was simply unfamiliar with direct confrontation; she was far from ignorant of strategic maneuvering.
Perhaps she was even skilled at it.
Kim Ji-an had orchestrated this board, and Oh Tae-o and I were the game pieces she had chosen to place.
The confusion I felt stemmed from being dragged into such a game without my consent.
Though the situation was not to my liking, I decided at least to play along for now.
“Then let’s go now.”
I stood, and Cha Si-eon called to me.
“Seo Do-un.”
“Team Leader.”
I met his gaze directly without flinching.
“To be honest, I don’t understand the situation. So I’m going to see it for myself and make my own judgment.”
……
Cha Si-eon had no way to overturn this.
He couldn’t afford to lose my trust, and he had lost any convenient excuse to back out.
In short, he was cornered.
And the woman who had set this trap still sat quietly beside me, trembling.
Cha Si-eon seemed to realize he’d been snared. He swallowed silently.
Then he rose from his seat.
“I’ll guide you myself.”
In the end, Cha Si-eon took the lead, and we followed him into the corridor.
Cha Si-eon led us deeper underground.
It was the same route I had taken to meet Ryu Dan-a before.
We arrived at the Contamination Containment Facility on the lowest level of the Management Bureau.
Even then, we had to venture much deeper.
The endless corridor gave the sensation of wandering through an underwater tunnel.
How long did we walk like that.
Cha Si-eon stopped before a vast wall.
There was nothing but wall.
It didn’t look like a space where people would stay.
“Where is Lee Sol?”
Instead of answering me, Cha Si-eon pressed a switch on the wall.
In that instant, the beige wall became transparent, and the space beyond revealed itself.
It was a cavernous space, large as a grand hall.
Within it stood a structure that looked discarded, left in the middle of the floor.
An enormous siren.
And the iron framework supporting it.
To my eyes, it was scrap metal awaiting disposal—nothing more.
Until I spotted the girl hunched beneath it.
……
Surely not.
……Surely not.
I couldn’t process what I was seeing.
The girl sitting there was small, and the siren towering above her was impossibly huge.
The girl was clearly alive, yet what had grown from her back was cold and sharp—utterly inorganic.
So that it looked as though she had been impaled upon the cruel iron scaffolding.
“Ah…….”
Kim Ji-an covered her mouth and let out a stifled cry.
Only after witnessing her reaction did I barely comprehend that this was Lee Sol.
As Oh Tae-o had said, she was asleep—her head hung low.
Unable to lie down because of what had sprouted from her back and shoulders, she slept sitting upright like that.
Finally, I processed the information before me, yet I found myself besieged by a sense of dislocation from the world itself.
It was as though the wail of a siren was ringing in my ears.
* * *
Lee Sol was contaminated.
From the moment she emerged from the Train Station on February 3rd, she registered high contamination levels.
The Management Bureau observed her progress, waiting for her contamination level to drop.
But the contamination level refused to decrease, and by March, physical transformation had begun.
Thorn-like projections started sprouting from her shoulders.
They grew at a rate of one span each day, and Lee Sol developed delirium.
Each night she cried out for her father.
She repeated “Dad, save me” like an incantation.
By April, aggressive symptoms became pronounced.
Researchers were injured by the thorns Lee Sol wielded like wings.
Around that time, Lee Sol was transferred to the Contamination Containment Facility.
There, she was assigned the designation Contaminated Person Number 146.
A siren sprouted from Lee Sol’s shoulders around May.
It was then that people understood precisely what Lee Sol was becoming.
Or rather, could no longer deny it.
From that point on, Lee Sol began wailing like a siren and destroying her surroundings.
She would destroy, be subdued, destroy again, and be subdued again in an endless cycle.
That cycle continued even now.
So Lee Sol had been confined to the Management Bureau for the past four months.
Truly, the lamp casts the darkest shadow beneath it—we had been in the same building all along.
Yet these taciturn people had hidden the fact so well.
They had buried her underground and concealed her from me.
If asked whether I felt betrayed by this, I would struggle to answer.
I’m not entitled to know everything about the Management Bureau’s affairs.
Still, Lee Sol was someone connected to me—I questioned whether such complete exclusion was necessary.
On the other hand, what could I have done even if I had known.
Nothing but the realization that my actions at the Train Station were ultimately meaningless toil.
So there was nothing to complain about.
Lee Sol was contaminated and is now isolated in the basement of the Management Bureau.
I simply hadn’t known—but this has already been going on for four months.
Then why did Kim Ji-an seek my help now, of all times.
The reason was simple.
A discussion was underway among the higher-ups.
A discussion about Lee Sol’s disposition.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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