The Calamity-Class Artifacts in Ghost Stories Are Obsessed with Me - Chapter 100

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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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Catastrophe-Class Relics in Urban Legends: Obsession Chapter 100
“Come to think of it, it’s been a while since I’ve been deployed on a mission.”
Woo Ju said this as the car moved, the thought occurring to him suddenly.
Baek Ho, who held the steering wheel, replied with a puzzled expression.
“A while? How so?”
“Well, yesterday’s situation wasn’t an official mission, nor was the business with the mudang, or what happened at the restaurant either.”
That was true.
Since returning from Japan, he’d encountered plenty of things, but none of them had been formal assignments.
They were all closer to situations he’d stumbled into by accident.
Though the mudang business—he’d stepped in voluntarily for a friend’s sake, rather than being swept up in it.
“Ah, I see your point. You really do get tangled up in all sorts of things.”
Baek Ho chuckled as he spoke, shaking his head.
Woo Ju had to admit he felt the same way.
‘Before, it was never quite this bad.’
When he thought about it carefully, the frequency of strange incidents had seemed to spike right after he’d picked up that iron pipe.
Ever since then, one complication after another—good or ill—had followed without pause.
His life had become genuinely thrilling.
But he harbored no resentment.
He was deeply satisfied with the life he lived now, changed as it was.
He’d endured a string of hardships that most people would never experience in a lifetime—but hadn’t he also grasped great fortune to match?
To possess relics that transcended human power, and to be loved by them.
“Well, there’s nothing for it.”
So Woo Ju simply smiled it away.
By then, the taxi had arrived near its destination.
As Woo Ju looked out at the passing scenery, he felt an odd sensation.
‘It feels like it’s been forever since I was here.’
The truth was it hadn’t been that long, yet it felt as though years had passed since he’d last visited.
As he continued to observe the landscape, Woo Ju caught sight of the villa where he’d once lived in the distance and mentioned it to Baek Ho.
“That’s the place where I used to live.”
“Yeah? Really just right nearby?”
The street where the human disappearance incident had occurred was merely a few blocks from the villa where Woo Ju had lived.
It had truly happened in the immediate neighborhood of his old home.
If Woo Ju had still been living there, unaware, he might well have been caught up in it too.
Not long after, Baek Ho parked the car in a suitable spot, and the three of them stepped out and surveyed their surroundings.
“Hmm.”
Baek Ho’s expression turned thoughtful.
He hadn’t expected to return here so soon after handling the case.
“You’ve read about what kind of incident this was in the reports, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
Both Woo Ju and Yeon Woo nodded in confirmation.
While they hadn’t directly experienced it, the detailed documentation in the case files meant they had a clear understanding of what had transpired.
“Good. Then let’s start by visiting the scene of the incident and examining it.”
Baek Ho led the way forward as he spoke.
The street appeared ordinary at first glance.
Passersby going back and forth, storefronts lined up in rows, and alleyway scenery like you’d find anywhere.
It was here that people had suddenly begun to vanish.
But there was something worth considering about this.
Why was it called “human disappearance” rather than “missing persons”?
Did the investigating team simply prefer more difficult terminology?
Of course not.
It was disappearance because that’s what it was—not missing persons.
Not people vanishing gradually to somewhere else, but perfectly ordinary pedestrians ceasing to exist without a trace right before one’s eyes.
‘Vanished into nothingness.’
Woo Ju turned the dictionary definition of disappearance over in his mind as he observed the street they had now reached.
Past memories overlapped the image of this street.
It was an utterly unremarkable street. It had been the same in the past.
After people had walked through it without incident one day, rumors suddenly began circulating the next day that someone had vanished.
And not in some isolated corner—someone had abruptly disappeared in broad daylight, right in the middle of the bustling street.
What’s more, some witnesses claimed they had clearly seen the moment that person ‘disappeared.’
‘And that incident repeated itself. Multiple times.’
As a result, the entire district had become little more than a ghost town.
Shops kept their shutters closed, and people went out of their way to avoid so much as passing near the area.
The problem resolved itself exactly one week later.
One of the vanished people reappeared, and simultaneously, the sudden disappearances stopped altogether.
People were wary at first, but as days passed without incident, they gradually let their guard down until the whole affair seemed to fade from memory, and they resumed their ordinary walks through the streets.
‘But then it happened again.’
For reasons he couldn’t yet grasp, the Inspection Bureau had failed to recognize that a similar event had occurred in the past.
Woo Ju had a dim sense he might understand why.
‘Someone intervened back then too, didn’t they?’
What if it had been the same two years ago?
What if someone had deliberately kept the Inspection Bureau from noticing?
If that were true, it would be entirely possible for the Bureau to miss a week-long incident like this one.
Though this time, it seemed they’d failed to evade their radar.
‘Or maybe they just happened to slip past the Inspection Bureau’s detection entirely this time, and whoever’s behind this now is someone else altogether.’
That possibility existed too, of course.
Fundamentally, possibilities were infinite until something was observed directly.
Right now, he had observed far too little. In other words, he lacked sufficient clues.
Which meant he could speculate as wildly as he wanted.
The Inspection Bureau might have noticed what happened last time! But deliberately chose not to intervene!
Why? To gather more data on the incident. Because they were working with whoever was behind it. Or maybe some lone agent gone rogue. Just for fun, perhaps!
‘Well, if I keep speculating like this, there’s no end to it.’
But not all possibilities carried equal weight.
Some were more plausible than others.
For instance, that the Inspection Bureau harbored a psychopath who enjoyed seeing people suffer, and who deliberately withheld reports from his superiors—or worse, actively sabotaged the investigation.
This possibility was slim.
By contrast, the idea that the Bureau’s detection systems had simply missed the incident, or that the perpetrator had carefully hidden their tracks, was far more convincing.
“Hmm.”
Woo Ju ran a hand along his jaw, then turned his head.
He wanted to share his thoughts with the others.
“Huh?”
But the moment he looked behind him, Woo Ju froze, startled.
There was no one there.
Not just behind him—ahead, to the sides, nowhere. Not a single person in sight.
All the pedestrians who’d been passing by, and his companions—they had all vanished without a trace.
His thoughts had occupied barely a minute of time. And he’d seen people walking normally in between.
So in reality, within the span of mere seconds, everyone around him had simply evaporated into thin air.
“Ah.”
Once he’d processed that fact,
Woo Ju remembered another possibility.
It wasn’t that others had vanished.
Wasn’t it far more plausible that he was the one who’d been taken somewhere else, rather than everyone else having disappeared?
‘Have I been pulled somewhere else?’
Woo Ju recalled what he’d learned about the disappearance incidents.
On the surface, it seemed as though people simply vanished without a trace, but in reality, they were all drawn to somewhere else entirely.
Baek Ho and the response team had succeeded in opening the passageway to that place.
They’d eliminated the source of the problem and resolved the incident safely.
Of course, detailed accounts of what lay within that location had been included in the reports.
‘First. I need to move.’
There was no point in standing in the middle of the street.
Although countless questions crowded his mind, Woo Ju quickly made his way toward a nearby building.
The building he entered housed a PC room he’d frequented before.
He’d been drawn to gaming less in recent years, but there had been times when he’d spent whole nights absorbed in it.
This place had been a frequent haunt during those nights.
‘They really did have excellent ramen here.’
Woo Ju arrived at the PC room on the third floor in moments, conducted a thorough inspection of both the interior and exterior, and only then stepped inside.
He then locked the door to the PC room and retreated deeper within, settling into an empty chair.
“Hmm.”
Only then could he allow himself some composure to continue his reasoning.
“This entire district is one massive playground.”
The thing is, that playground doesn’t operate by human standards.
Humans are merely toys scattered across it.
The moment he woke, he’d slipped away from the street and ducked into the PC room for exactly that reason.
If he caught the eye of those roaming this playground, things would become unbearably tedious.
‘But why, exactly?’
Still, Woo Ju’s thoughts were elsewhere.
Why had he been dragged here so suddenly in the first place?
True, he’d walked in defenseless.
He’d maintained some level of awareness, but he hadn’t been braced for full combat engagement either.
But that was because he’d known the case had already concluded.
‘Yet it seems it wasn’t actually concluded at all.’
Woo Ju’s eyes narrowed.
It was possible. Still, he found it hard to believe that Baek Ho and the others who’d been deployed in the previous operation had handled things so sloppily.
‘Maybe whoever was pulling the strings behind it all made another move in the meantime.’
Or perhaps Woo Ju’s own presence had created some unexpected variable.
He hadn’t been part of that previous operation, after all.
“Hmm.”
Woo Ju stroked his chin again.
For now, there were three major things he needed to figure out.
First: had his other colleagues been dragged here as well?
Although he’d found himself alone when he first arrived, it was possible they’d been scattered in the process of being pulled in.
So he’d need to search for the others.
Second: would the method that worked last time work again this time?
If so, solving this would be faster than expected. He knew exactly how it worked.
And finally, third.
‘Was the one pulling the strings actually involved again this time?’
Isolated from everything else, that was the most crucial point.
What was the reason he’d returned here in the first place?
To dig deeper into the identity of that mysterious ‘puppet master’.
He’d wanted to hear accounts from those who’d been caught up in the incident back then, and for the same reason.
From that perspective, the situation wasn’t so grim after all.
Since the same thing was happening again, wouldn’t there be even more to discover?
“Good.”
Woo Ju rose to his feet after thinking it through.
An ordinary person would’ve stayed hidden in a place out of sight, but Woo Ju had only needed a moment of quiet to think.
He had no intention of sitting still.
Of course, some preparation was necessary before heading out.
Whoosh.
Woo Ju first pulled out a mask and put it on his head.
Then he adjusted his jacket properly and took the Iron Pipe in one hand and the Necronomicon in the other.
He tapped Pandora’s Box to alert it as well, then summoned the Disc and stowed it in a bag he’d brought along.
That completed the preparations.
‘Let’s go.’
Woo Ju stepped outside without hesitation.
Just as he emerged from the building housing the PC room and set foot on the street.
Boom—!
A tremendous roar echoed from far away.
Woo Ju’s head snapped up reflexively, and he saw something.
It was colossal. Like watching a building over ten stories tall walk about on its own legs.
But what caught his eye most was its form.
A shape bizarre and repulsive, difficult to put into words.
These were the guests of the playground. Humans here were nothing but toys to be played with.
But instead of fear, Woo Ju watched with eyes gone cold and distant before moving forward again.
Deeper in.
To be continued ▶
In the Urban Legends, Catastrophe-Class Relics Become Obsessed
Author
Lee Se-gye-sa-jang
Publisher
Kim Seok-hwan, Choi Se-ra
Publisher
Grae Publishing
Contact Email
[email protected]
Publication Date
May 26, 2026
UCI
G720:N+A327-20260410110
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※ Pentagram welcomes your precious manuscripts.

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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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