Chapter 219

“Is the suppressant not working?”

Siron stood in the hallway, voice heavy with worry. Baekgyeong lifted Isaac’s blanket, checked the bulge tenting his pants, then covered him again with a displeased look.

“The suppressant was tailored for my body. It’s not fully effective on him. He’s still running hot.”

Baekgyeong retrieved a purple ampoule from the briefcase on the tea table—the tranquilizer he’d stolen from the McCarthy siblings’ house.

“You’re going to inject him again?”

“Of course. We can’t move anywhere like this. If he keeps leaking pheromones and loses control, it’ll be you in trouble, won’t it?”

Siron remembered how Baekgyeong had only settled into a lull of his rut cycle after they had sex, and he glared at the back of his head.

“Right. It would be damn troublesome.”

Baekgyeong snickered at his repressed tone, bit the cap off the syringe, and drew the fluid. He jabbed it carelessly into Isaac’s forearm and pressed down the plunger.

“Let’s go. He’s finally got a proper bed—he should rest.”

Once outside, Baekgyeong wrapped an arm around Siron’s waist.

Back in their bedroom, he ignored Siron’s protests and pulled him down onto the same bed, crooning a lullaby.

“With your singing, sleep’s more likely to run away.”

Yet contrary to his prediction, Siron fell asleep before the song even finished. Listening to his quiet breaths, Baekgyeong too drifted off. He didn’t know how much time passed, but in the early dawn a message alert jolted him awake. Reaching for his phone, he saw an email from Daniel. The subject line drove away the last dregs of sleep.

[There’s something in Kim Seontae’s encrypted messages we need to check.]

Baekgyeong left the bed, sat at the tea table, and opened his laptop. He logged into the private mail server he and Daniel had built together, accessible only through an anonymous browser.

The email contained notes about chat logs Kim Seontae had exchanged with someone on his company computer. Recklessly, Kim had used a work machine to converse with an anonymous partner. Most of the records were deleted, but some were restored from automatically saved server logs. Yet the two had used PGP encryption, leaving the recovered text unreadable.

Hyung, you asked if we could break Kim Seontae’s encrypted messages. To be blunt: it’s impossible.

The chat used a 2048-bit encryption key. With current tech, there’s no way to crack it. Even a supercomputer would need about 6.4×10³² years. Basically, the universe could be born and die in endless cycles and it still wouldn’t be solved. ㅠㅠ

But... maybe we should pass this material to Baeksang hyung?

Baekgyeong scowled. One imagines a genius hacker could break anything, but reality was harsher. With Kim Seontae’s death, the case had slammed into a colossal wall.

“Haa... that bastard Kim Seontae.”

He wished he could drag him back from the Hudson, alive, just to pour the filthy river down his throat. Even his chosen death felt far too merciful for his crimes.

That left only one path—he’d have to penetrate Hybris himself, dig out the truth behind his mother’s death.

Can I really take revenge?

Her sudden death had shoved him onto this path without choice. All he had wanted was to find Yoon Siron and be happy together. But vengeance had shackled him.

He shot Daniel a short reply, then downloaded the attached compressed file. It contained the restored logs from the company server.

“Fuck. So he pocketed his salary and spent all day chatting?”

The sheer number of records floored him. Each chat ran on a one-time connection, with a new window generated each time. When the connection closed, the record disappeared—too early, Kim Seontae had felt safe. But a background program on the PC had periodically copied everything to the central server.

For him it was lucky: the chats were encrypted, so their contents remained hidden. Only timestamps, senders, and endless blocks of coded text filled the logs.

[2014-04-12 13:14:22] NoName:

--BEGIN PGP MESSAGE--

hQEMA4YxJERAQf+7x94rY=E4K.......

--END PGP MESSAGE--

[2014-04-12 14:15:36] Anon:

--BEGIN PGP MESSAGE--

hQIMAyK8u7rZmAQ2HlTkYN4jM.......

--END PGP MESSAGE--

“...So you’re saying the universe could be born and die a thousand times and we’d never decrypt this?”

Baekgyeong muttered at the incomprehensible strings. Pure ciphertext between “NoName” and “Anon.” Scroll after scroll, it was nothing but unreadable data. The second file, the twenty-third file, all the same.

Then, after combing nearly five hundred logs, he struck gold—a fatal slip by NoName. Kim Seontae had forgotten to encrypt.

[2013-10-02 16:11:25] NoName:

I’ve received the USB you sent. By current market value it’s worth around $100,000. Was this your idea of a ‘cyber toy’ since I said I didn’t need money? Either way, I’ll accept it. I’ll come to you again this time. Let’s meet at Éclavis, where we had dinner before. I remember you liked the trout dish, Joseph.

So “NoName” was Kim Seontae’s ID. Anon’s reply came 40 seconds later:

[2013-10-02 16:12:15] Anon:

--BEGIN PGP MESSAGE--

wkdkjnw-2dkwhldHkdlsADq.......

--END PGP MESSAGE--

A panicked response, likely warning him to encrypt properly. Baekgyeong dug through forty more files but found no other slipups. Still, one was enough.

A cyber toy worth $100,000—Kim had been paid in cryptocurrency. To Baekgyeong, the idea of money mined by running machines still felt alien, though Daniel had forced him to dabble in it. But one thing was clear: it was the currency of shady dealings.

And now he had a name—the man behind the money.

“Joseph Elliott.”

Baekgyeong’s eyes clung to the name. A trafficker tied to human-smuggling rings once sheltered by the pre-Belzoras government, entangled in the case of Sonia’s missing son. The one who had spurred Kim to infiltrate the Vile Group servers, who had ordered Baekgyeong’s kidnapping. Perhaps even the hand behind his mother’s death.

The threads he and Isaac had gathered now converged on a single figure: Joseph Elliott.

“Damn. He really lived a busy, filthy life.”

Baekgyeong wanted to see the face of the bastard who’d darted all over the Americas, picking out only the dirtiest jobs.

He searched “Éclavis,” the name from the message. Across the entire United States, only one result came up. By coincidence—or fate—it was in Hellsota, in Vargas City itself: a French restaurant.

Perhaps at last he had found a lead to hunt the one who had ordered his mother’s death. A cold shiver welled deep inside. His heart beat heavy with tension.