Chapter 283

Baekgyeong stared down at the phone that had been forcibly disconnected, his face drawn tight, then let out a sigh that was too light, almost theatrical, his shoulders rising and falling once.

“Right. ...Anyway, I’ve gotten through more than half of it. I can do this. There’s no limit on how many times I can try to crack the password.”

Steeling himself to attempt as many access combinations as possible before Isaac woke, Baekgyeong opened an online encyclopedia and searched for animals.

Animals range from simple forms such as sponges to groups including cnidarians, flatworms, mollusks, annelids, arthropods, and vertebrates.

Baekgyeong’s mouth parted silently. He stared at the monitor for a long time, dazed, before he finally gathered himself and searched the terms sponge and cnidarian. And he understood exactly what the dictionary definition of “animal” actually meant. In short, animals were every living organism except bacteria, fungi, amoebas, and plants.

But Andy had clearly said Spencer’s password system wasn’t limited to animals alone, but used classifications of plants and animals—kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Which meant the possible candidates were every living organism on Earth.

“Fuck!”

Baekgyeong shouted a single word and urgently called the hospital director. But the only reply he received was a reprimand—that Andy’s condition had rapidly deteriorated and he was now under restraint. A rage like flame raced up to the top of his skull, a fury that made him want to destroy everything around him, but he forced himself to calm down, thinking of Siron.

At this rate, searching for the password might waste days—no, months. And he couldn’t afford to lose that time. But Baekgyeong’s resolve proved meaningless, because Spencer’s USB drive didn’t even give him the chance to lose time searching.

[Security Warning]

This device is protected by a password.

Remaining attempts: 9

If the correct password is not entered, all data will be permanently deleted.

Baekgyeong sat in front of the laptop, unmoving, not even breathing, glaring at the screen as if interrogating it. A long time passed before he gasped for breath, lungs burning, and raised a trembling hand. Just before he slammed the laptop down, he forced his hand to stop, leaned his elbows on the desk, and clutched his head.

“Fuck, Yoon Siron. Please, Yoon Siron. ...Just come stand in front of me.”

It felt like his heart was being ripped apart by panic. A sudden, unbearable need to see Yoon Siron surged through him. He opened his tightly shut eyes and forced himself to breathe, trying to anchor his collapsing mind. After what felt like a seizure finally eased, he stared at the screen with bloodshot eyes and spoke to himself.

“Get it together. I’m the only one in this entire world who can save Yoon Siron. I have to be the one to fix this.”

He had assumed the password attempts were unlimited. But there were only ten chances. He had already wasted the first one without even valuing it. The first keyword he had tried was “hippopotamus,” chosen because its pronunciation was vaguely similar to Hybris.

Crossing out the note where he had written the prime numbers corresponding to the first letters of the hippopotamus’s classification, Baekgyeong widened his scope and browsed through reference pages. There were people in the world who regarded the most monotonous tasks as something sacred—people who conscientiously and systematically arranged the order of nature.

He downloaded datasets from the International Mammalogy Society, the Ornithology Society, the Ichthyology Society, and many others. Then he opened the New York Times and quickly skimmed all of Spencer’s articles.

Her last article from earlier this year appeared to have nothing to do with Gezar or alphas. He checked her social posts from 2014, but there were no concrete details such as a pharmaceutical CEO raising a green iguana.

In the end, Baekgyeong began working backward by geographic association. The Helso Swamp Lizard that inhabited the Sekreta wetlands of Helso State; the Balkan Lynx native to the region where the Bazelli family’s homeland Albania was located; the Helso Quail, the official state animal; the American Alligator. He selected and input several from the countless species available. But even after all attempts combined, he had already used six tries. Every time he pressed Enter, the same security warning appeared.

Only then did despair lift his head.

Could it be... the chihuahua the Somora Prison warden kept?

After consideration, Baekgyeong decided the possibility was worth testing. And he lost another attempt.

“Fuck. Only three left.”

Trying to infer a password from the thought patterns of someone he had never met and only knew from fragmented records was impossible from the start.

More importantly, Spencer might not have followed Andy’s system anymore. Instead of fusing biological classification with prime numbers, she could easily have used something like TodayForLunchWasCheeseburger.

He needed to reset his thoughts. If the password couldn’t be cracked, the last three attempts should be given to Isaac. The burden of failure had to be shared.

Baekgyeong’s thoughts drifted toward the brown-haired man who was being used to transfuse Isaac. He checked the time. It had already been seven hours since the transfusion began. He hadn’t noticed daylight fade while focused on the password; the house was now completely dark.

With a light headache, he rose and entered the room. From inside the wardrobe came the faint sound of Liam snoring, while Isaac was breathing more comfortably than before. The donor, in contrast, was breathing too slowly, as if he needed oxygen support.

Baekgyeong removed the needle from the man’s arm and applied a pressure patch. The man too would die soon if he did not receive a transfusion himself—but Baekgyeong no longer wanted to be the one to take another person’s life. He looked down at the man’s corpse-like face, chest rising with thin, shallow breaths, then turned away.

Returning to the living room, he sat once more before the laptop. He decided to search for other leads first. There might still be something he had missed on Spencer’s Twibber—especially older posts from before 2013.

After scrolling for some time, he suddenly stopped. It wasn’t something she wrote, but something she had reposted. It was an excerpt from an article about a biologist who disappeared while studying Asian elephants—someone whose research on genetic distinctions among elephant populations had substantially advanced conservation of endangered subspecies.

Baekgyeong could not look away. It seemed unrelated to alphas at first glance, but the tiny piece felt like something he needed to fit into place. Trying not to hope—trying not to expect—he combined the password and entered it. And impossibly, the password window disappeared, replaced by the file explorer.

“...This actually worked?”

His mind went blank as he stared at the screen. He had been expecting failure; it made the change difficult to accept.

“Why Asian elephants? What does that have to do with Hybris?”

Did this Isaach person keep an Asian elephant as a pet? The more he uncovered, the more lost he felt.

Baekgyeong repeated Yoon Siron’s name under his breath, grounding himself. Time was passing even now. The drive had opened like a miracle, but like drinking seawater to quench thirst, if there was nothing useful in Spencer’s files, her work would be worthless to him.

He scanned the folders with tightly-coiled anticipation. The root contained three folders and two memo files. The drive capacity was 128GB, with 117GB in use. Spencer had clearly been terrible at organization.

There was no neatly labeled “Hybris Summary” file. Just countless saved site addresses, recordings, images, miscellaneous information, piled without order.

She had interviewed many people and saved the recordings. But only a few had been transcribed into text; he would have to listen to each one manually. The interviews with Gezar Bazelli were the same—he would need hours to check them all.

He had no idea what to watch, what to listen to, where to begin. Staring out at the dark ocean through the gap in the curtain, he turned on the lights. Time slipped by without mercy. He could not sleep tonight.