The Locked Cage

“What do you think you’re doing right now?!”

Without a single word of warning, Cheong-hyun was aggressively yanked up by his collar. He wiped his blood-stained hands on his hospital gown, stood his ground, and looked up coldly at the man standing before him. Kim Byeong-ho. As the Center’s manager, his job was to oversee and run every single operation under Ki Soo-hyuk’s direct orders.

The man always seemed on the verge of exploding with rage, living his life in a frantic, desperate rush. Cheong-hyun could easily guess where that extreme anxiety came from. Surviving for twenty years right by Ki Soo-hyuk’s side was bound to take a toll. It certainly couldn’t have been easy. It was likely the sole reason a low-life thug like him had managed to secure the title of manager at the world’s only Center.

Cheong-hyun locked his sharp gaze onto the man before violently shaking off Kim Byeong-ho’s hand.

“My hair was messy, so I cut it. Is there a problem with that?”

Now that the shaggy strands framing his shoulders were neatly trimmed, Cheong-hyun looked considerably sharper and more collected. Unlike before, when his eyes were frustratingly hidden behind a thick wall of hair, his face was fully visible. His closely cropped hairline cleanly exposed the pale, bony nape of his neck.

Beneath his dark eyelashes, his pitch-black eyes stared directly at Kim Byeong-ho. It was far from the gaze of an ignorant, helpless child. Instead, it carried a cold, calculating clarity—an unshakeable boundary that made him feel as if he were surrounded by an invisible, solid fortress.

“You little… who do you think you’re talking to, you ungrateful bastard…!”

“He just trimmed his hair, sir. Please don’t be so angry, Manager.”

Someone quickly stepped in, cutting off Kim Byeong-ho before he could launch into a flurry of curses. It was Song Woo-jin, a Guide who had been drafted into security duty purely because of his massive, muscular frame to help transport Lee Cheong-hyun. Having joined the Center barely three months ago, his actions were still unrefined for a Guide—resembling someone who had spent his life doing backbreaking, rough labor on the streets.

Huffing and puffing with residual rage, Kim Byeong-ho placed his hands on his hips and spun around with a sharp scowl. Stepping past him, Song Woo-jin immediately picked up the shattered razor blade left on the windowsill.

“Senior, we should really treat your hand first. The blade cut you pretty deep…”

“Why exactly am I your senior?”

“Well… because you’ve been registered here much longer than me.”

“…”

Cheong-hyun had absolutely no knowledge of the Center’s internal hierarchy or Guide etiquette. The world he had spent the last ten years scraping by in was a brutal battlefield fueled by constant swearing, screams, and bloodshed. In that savage environment, seniority and experience meant nothing; only raw power decided who ruled the pack. That was why high-ranking Mutant Hunters were treated like royalty compared to regular civilians and were always scouted as top priorities.

And it made perfect sense. Unlike the civilian workers who were left to clean up the messy aftermath, those Hunters were the ones destroying monsters with a single punch.

Misinterpreting Cheong-hyun’s cold silence as something else, the young Guide quickly scrambled to explain further.

“I’m Song Woo-jin, a Guide who recently entered the Center. Everyone with an earlier registration number told me to address you as Senior. But… doesn’t that hurt? Let’s get you treated first…”

Cheong-hyun stared blankly at the man for a brief moment before turning to the sink. He twisted the faucet open and calmly rinsed the fresh blood from his hands.

“I’m fine… so stay out of my business.”

Beneath his slightly lowered eyelids, his pitch-black eyes caught the harsh fluorescent light, flickering with a cold intensity. Contrary to the countless wild rumors circulating through the Center, Lee Cheong-hyun was profoundly calm—radiating a bleak, desolated aura that made it seem as if he wouldn’t utter a single whimper even if someone snapped his arm in half.

This was also Song Woo-jin’s very first time seeing Lee Cheong-hyun in person. Within the Center’s walls, the man’s name was a breeding ground for endless gossip, with nine out of ten people scowling and actively avoiding the topic whenever he was mentioned.

Despite being one of the founding Guides of the institution, the treatment he received was light-years apart from Seo Won-woo, who shared the same founding status. A mountain of malicious rumors and fabricated lies had built a deep wall of discrimination against him.

Yet, the actual Lee Cheong-hyun standing before his eyes possessed an inexplicable, utterly unique presence. Those detached, unfeeling eyes made him look like someone who had crawled through the absolute absolute gutters of life, while simultaneously projecting a pure, untouched cleanliness that felt completely untainted by the world’s filth.

…Wait.

Suddenly, as he washed away the blood, Cheong-hyun’s eyes widened slightly as he looked at the mirror. His gaze drifted past his own reflection, locking onto Kim Byeong-ho’s broad back as the manager stood a few feet away, still panting with irritation. Within those dark pupils, a hideous, grotesque shape began to materialize. Cheong-hyun’s lips parted, a deeply unsettled expression taking over his face.

“Why is that man carrying a giant bat on his shoulder? It looks like a Mutant.”

The question acted like a sudden trigger, plunging the hospital room into a suffocating, heavy silence. Among the frozen staff, Kim Byeong-ho slowly, deliberately turned his head to face Cheong-hyun.

“A bat?”

Cheong-hyun’s words had clearly struck a dangerous, deeply hidden nerve. Cheong-hyun had never known that human eyes could widen to such a grotesque, unnatural degree. Kim Byeong-ho glared at him so fiercely that the bulging, bloodshot veins in his eyes looked ready to pop on the spot.

A heavy wave of dread filled the room as everyone stared intently at Kim Byeong-ho, but the only thing visible to the naked eye was the man’s thick, fleshy frame. There wasn’t a single trace of a bat-like creature anywhere near him.

Observing their bewildered expressions, Cheong-hyun was forced to accept the bizarre reality. That monstrous creature perched on the man’s shoulder is visible only to me.

In a flash, his wrist was violently grabbed. Before he could even react, he was dragged ruthlessly out of the room by an enraged grip.

“f*ck it, if you’ve got enough energy to spout crazy shit, you’re perfectly fine to be discharged right now. Move your feet! How much longer do you expect me to act as your damn servant?!”

From the exact moment he had opened his eyes in this bed, Cheong-hyun had been desperately scrambling to piece his situation together. He had learned that he was a Guide, that he had spent his entire existence confined within this Center, that his body had been swapped with a stranger’s in a catastrophic accident ten years ago, and that he had finally been thrown back into his original flesh.

It was an incredibly difficult pill to swallow. The name he had carried while surviving as a civilian freelance Hunter was Lee Tae-eon, but now, he was forced to be Lee Cheong-hyun. The entire reality felt like an elaborate illusion. It felt like a horrific nightmare, a fragile stage play that would vanish into thin air the moment he woke up.

Gripped painfully by his shoulder, Cheong-hyun was entirely powerless to resist as he was dragged out into the corridor. He hadn’t even been allowed to change out of his thin hospital gown, let alone put on a pair of shoes.

His legs tangled beneath him, and his breathing turned into a ragged mess. The hallway outside the ward was crawling with countless watchful eyes and eager ears, all waiting for a show. Every single person passing by locked their eyes onto Cheong-hyun, whispering maliciously under their breath.

The disgust and pity on their faces made everything perfectly clear. For two long years, this body had laid in a comatose, empty slumber. Despite everyone unanimously assuming he would die, he had miraculously woken up—only to find himself completely unable to escape the shackles of a Guide’s life.

Amidst the swirling storm of foreign memories drifting through his mind, an old, buried conversation suddenly forced its way to the surface.

“Anyway, these Guides can’t survive a single day without this drug. The only reason I’m pumping this astronomically expensive medicine into a walking corpse is for the day Lee Cheong-hyun finally wakes up. So shut your damn mouth and inject the drug exactly as I ordered. Every single day without fail, understood?”

“B-but… how can we keep administering an unverified drug…?”

“What do you mean unverified? It’s a drug manufactured directly by the Center, so how the hell is it unverified? Even the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety personally authorized it, so what’s your problem?”

Guides were completely incapable of surviving without the specialized medicine provided by the Center. Cheong-hyun didn’t know the scientific reason behind it. While skipping it for a day or two was manageable, by the third day without the drug, a Guide would suffer from extreme, bone-deep fatigue, followed by agonizing, unquenchable thirst, eventually culminating in a fatal heart attack.

During the two years he had laid unconscious on that hospital bed, this comatose body had been systematically kept alive through a steady, intravenous drip of that exact drug.

Back in the harsh, unforgiving slums where he had lived as Tae-eon, life was an exhausting, bleak struggle, yet he had desperately wanted to live. Even if it meant living a pathetic, scraping existence, he had forced himself to climb up and down those steep hilltops every single day just to put food on the table. He had never once had the luxury to complain about his lot in life.

Even if he was destined to live a miserable life forever, Cheong-hyun just wanted…

“Uh, it’s me. We’re heading up right now, so make sure a vacant room is prepared. Don’t argue with me. I’ll personally get the kid cleaned up and bring him to the Boss. Yeah.”

The moment the call connected, Kim Byeong-ho barked his orders and immediately hung up. Cheong-hyun stared down at his trapped wrist before squeezing his hands into tight, trembling fists. A faint, deadly flash of bloodlust flickered within his dark eyes.

He thought of that cramped, dilapidated single-room apartment, where the biting winter wind leaked through the shattered window frames, yet he and his brother had survived by fiercely relying on each other. Cheong-hyun simply wanted to go back to that place.

No matter how hard he rationalized it, for a wretched, miserable person like himself, that tiny slum apartment was the only true home he had left in the world.

Far away from the bustling city center, an imposing skyscraper that resembled a massive, futuristic tower loomed over the outskirts. The building was heavily guarded, surrounded by a dense forest where dozens of security personnel equipped with earpieces patrolled the perimeter, accompanied by trained guard dogs sniffing through the thick brush.

To travel from the heart of the city to the Center, one had to pass through several heavily fortified security checkpoints.

The exact same region, the exact same plot of land. Ten years ago, the Center had stood on this very spot. Back then, it was nothing more than a modest five-story building, but it appeared they had completely demolished the old structure to rebuild it; the new tower rose to an intimidating, dizzying height.

“f*ck, the sun is already setting. Dammit.”

Just as Kim Byeong-ho muttered, the sky bleeding through the tinted windows had already turned a deep, bruised crimson. Ever since the Gates had manifested across the globe, the world had been plagued by extreme, unnatural weather anomalies. It wasn’t uncommon for heavy snow to blanket the southern regions in the dead of summer, or for night and day to completely flip in the north.

While South Korea remained relatively safe from the worst of these climatic disasters, it suffered from one consistent anomaly: regardless of the season, a sudden sunset would inevitably trigger at precisely 3:00 PM, plunging the entire world into pitch-black darkness by 4:00 PM.

Initially, the sudden surge in electricity consumption to combat the darkness had caused the national economy to buckle under the strain. However, humanity eventually managed to harvest Gate byproducts as a massive alternative energy source, stabilizing society into a new normal after two decades of adaptation.

The elevator chimed as they reached the executive upper levels of the Center. The moment the doors slid open, a staff member rushed forward and bowed deeply to Kim Byeong-ho.

“You’ve arrived, sir.”

“Where’s the Boss?”

“He entered the conference room just a few minutes ago for an urgent meeting. He mentioned it should wrap up within two hours and explicitly ordered us to have everything prepared by then…”

Kim Byeong-ho glanced up at a specific corridor, gave a lazy, disinterested nod, and then forcefully grabbed the collar of Cheong-hyun’s gown.

“First things first, we need to do something about that pathetic, ragged look of yours. Stop overthinking things, go inside quietly, and wash yourself up. And throw that garbage excuse for a gown straight into the trash.”

The brute force pulling him along was immense, making it entirely impossible to wrench himself free. He was dragged straight into a long, tunnel-like corridor lined with identical white doors. At the far end of the carpeted hallway, a sharp, brilliant crimson light from the artificial sunset spilled across the floor.