Hiding a House in the Apocalypse-Chapter 159.2: Longing for Home (2)

Hiding a House in the Apocalypse-Chapter 159.2: Longing for Home (2)

The Chinese military had always been a dark stain on my plans—looming like a shadow across every contingency.
They were professionally trained soldiers, obsessed with drones more than any other army in the world, and above all, they were still technically enemies at war.
Fortunately, they hadn’t flown drones or opened fire within my territory—but there was that one massive brawl with them in front of John Nae-non’s tomb.
I also knew that Heo Jong-chul, currently getting barked at by Kim Daram’s husband, once tried to trade nuclear weapons with the Chinese. And there were credible suspicions that the Chinese remnants had been transporting supplies and personnel via submarine on a regular basis.
Even if they hadn’t directly harmed me, they were a group that couldn’t be trusted.
And now, here it was—right before my eyes: the infamous base of the Chinese remnants.
It was clearly a well-constructed fortress.
Observation towers, bunkers, electrical equipment placed with military precision.
Just a glance was enough to tell that for four years, they'd been living with death hovering over their heads—scraping by with limited resources while preparing for a South Korean assault.
Beyond the gentle bay, sunlight shimmered on the ocean’s surface, stinging the eyes. The armored vehicle I rode entered the Chinese encampment.
Just as Jiang Shuying had raised the Five-Star Red Flag, I’d mounted a Taegeukgi on my armored car.
Chinese soldiers holding familiar firearms stared at me and my companions.
What stood out most was the number of civilians—almost as many as there were soldiers.
Had they brought them from China?
Or were they locals?
Among the younger women, many held or escorted children.
And, as expected, one of the onlookers was someone I recognized well.
“Yo, Park-sunbae.”
Cheon Young-jae smirked as he gazed through the narrow window.
A Chinese Hunter holding a Qinglong Yanyue Dao.
Baitou, was it?
He was still there, with that same trademark blade and that same tightly coiled pose, glaring at us like he was itching for a fight.
“...Well, worst case, I die.”
I was prepared.
I’d told Cheon Young-jae several times he didn’t need to come, but he was stubborn as ever—and somehow ended up tagging along.
A Chinese military police officer ordered the vehicle to stop.
As we halted, a familiar face emerged from the crowd.
Jiang Shuying.
Still elegant. Still poised.
But the moment she appeared, both civilians and soldiers subtly stepped back.
As if trying to create distance.
Jiang Shuying approached us without hesitation, clearly used to this reaction.
“Welcome, Hunter Park,” she said with a smile that curled at the eyes.
There was something a little more familiar in her tone than at our first meeting.
I opened the door.
Every Chinese gaze zeroed in on me—so sharp it burned.
A ripple of murmurs passed through the crowd.
I caught the derogatory word for Koreans, bangzi, thrown around more than once.
“...”
It didn’t matter what they said.
Even if bullets flew, I was ready to face it.
We had killed more than a few Chinese soldiers in the last battle—and if you go back further, we’d sacrificed plenty of them in past missions.
“Don’t let it get to you,” Jiang Shuying said.
Despite her cold exterior, there was a strange delicacy to her.
I thanked her for the gesture and pushed through the throng, walking toward a low hill.
She led us to a small villa with a wide-open view of the sunlit sea.
Seeing the guards exhaling foggy breaths on post, it wasn’t hard to guess—this was where the leadership lived.
She brought us to their commander.
“This is Ma Huaping, commander of the Reconstituted Unified Korean Peninsula Group Army.”
At first glance, he didn’t look like a soldier—more ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) like a warm uncle.
“Just to be clear,” he said, “I’m not ethnic Korean. Not even part Korean. I’m Han Chinese.”
In fluent Korean, he introduced himself.
His rank was Da-jiao, roughly equivalent to a colonel.
On the way to his office, Jiang Shuying filled us in on his background.
A classic elite from the Chinese nobility. Studied in the U.S. during his youth.
But when his faction lost out to political rivals, his career nosedived. He got sent on hardship posts.
A long-term assignment in North Korea—a punishment, really—ended up becoming the turning point that allowed him to rise and lead the remnants today.
As the term Unified suggested, this group wasn’t a formal military unit. It was a ragtag assembly of infantry, special forces, and survivors from sunk warships that once invaded Korea.
An aide handed Ma Huaping a tablet.
He glanced at the screen, nodded, then looked at me.
“I’ve reviewed everything. We’ll proceed as you requested.”
His aide then led us to a vacant room.
Three metal cases were set on the table.
They looked serious—each marked with prominent Chinese warnings.
Inside, laptops.
The aide swiftly powered on all three at once, then asked us to turn away briefly while he tapped out commands on the keyboards.
Soon, everything was ready.
He said something in Chinese to Jiang Shuying.
She nodded and pointed at one of the laptops.
“You’ll be using this one.”
I wasn’t a cryptographer, but the synchronized boot-up of all three machines suggested some sort of secure key system.
Now, the long-coveted data—desired by Hunters all over the world—was in front of me.
Honestly, my heart was pounding.
Even if the updates had stopped years ago, this was the record of a nation that had fought harder—and died flashier—than any other.
If this doesn’t make you excited, you have no business being a Hunter.
Because hatred includes curiosity, too.
“You may begin,” she said.
The screen displayed a standard digital archive labeled as Class-2 Confidential.
There was an index, a table of contents—you navigated by clicking on keywords.
Everything was in Chinese, but interpretation wasn’t a problem.
The system had built-in translation support for minority languages, just like you'd expect from a nation that once claimed to be One China.
Of course, given their open ambition to annex North Korea, Korean was one of the supported languages.
But the translation was sloppy.
Clearly, it had been run through a basic machine translator and manually edited afterwards.
Honestly, half of it made no sense.
I could have gone through it with Cheon Young-jae, but we’d only been given two hours.
In that time, we had to find exactly what we needed and get out.
“...”
Given the situation, it was time to play my hand.
I called out to Jiang Shuying, who stood near the door.
“Ms. Jiang.”
“Yes?”
Her presence here was obvious.
She was here to help—but mostly, she was here to see what we’d search for.
Tracking interest through search data—classic big-tech intelligence strategy.
“I have a question.”
I wasn’t hiding anything anymore.
If we lose the next battle, New Seoul is finished.
It might not be total annihilation like the Lighthouse, but it would be the death certificate of what’s left of Korea.
“Do you know about the monster that destroys radios?”
Her softly glowing eyes flickered.
“Screamer,” she said.
So it does exist.
“You don’t know it?” she asked, puzzled.
“...?”
“I mean, you’re the Professor, aren’t you? How can you not know?”
Has this woman lost her mind?
I said I didn’t know—because I didn’t.
I calmed myself before replying.
“I’ve been inactive for a while.”
“What? Someone like you, the Professor, inactive...?”
Cheon Young-jae signaled me with his eyes.
I got it.
The cool, collected Jiang Shuying was suddenly babbling like someone had personally wronged her.
“How could someone with the Golden Fleece just leave the field? They should’ve forced you to stay!”
So she was a Professor cultist.
Not bragging, but back in the day, I did have a few fanatics who idolized me.
Mostly big, hairy Western guys—but I’m sure there were tall, model-type women too.
My personal taste leans toward fit, athletic Latinas with beach volleyball vibes, but sadly, I never saw my type even after scouring the States.
Anyway—I was fairly famous once.
Famous enough for a total stranger to come to my house to kill me.
It’s kind of amazing those ties still linger.
“In China, we call it the Screamer Ghost.”
She now spoke with careful sincerity, eager to tell me what I wanted to know.
And I welcomed it.
Sometimes she’d slip into Chinese without realizing, but it didn’t interfere much.
To summarize: yes, a monster that disables electronic equipment exists.
More precisely, it disables wireless devices.
“First sighted in Hebei. Actually, we discovered it earlier—but with the country split into a dozen factions, we had no way to announce it. It shows up during large-scale offensives. Emits strange frequencies that overload and destroy all receiving devices.”
“What’s its effective range?”
There weren’t even sketches of the thing—let alone photos.
Which meant one thing.
It was theoretically plausible, but no one had ever truly seen it.
Just like the meatball-type I found in Seoul.
Before those, the caterpillar types had been observed countless times.
“It’s massive.”
“Give me a ballpark.”
“There was one incident where everything within a 3-kilometer radius was fried.”
“That’s... not a regular monster.”
Just as I thought.
The Rifts were evolving to eliminate humans more efficiently.
What I encountered was a General-type—but clearly, there were other monsters engineered to wipe out people in different ways.
To the Rifts, the Lighthouse must’ve been a major nuisance.
We’d been fooling them for ages using their own mechanics.
If we ever develop machines that can do what the Awakened do, maybe humanity won’t even need to fight anymore.
Anyway, the Chinese logs had exceeded my expectations.
This was the sacred data once restricted to the ruling elite—and now, it had flowed right into me, unobstructed.
“...Jesus. I heard about nuclear attacks, but a hydrogen bomb too? And it didn’t even flinch?”
Cheon Young-jae wasn’t as emotionally invested as me, but he still groaned with shock throughout the reading.
The most disturbing part was a monster that appeared in a Chinese virtual reality game called Hudie Zhi Meng.
According to the logs, the last surviving player connected to a final mission where everyone died in a way no one could explain—and no logs were left behind.
To someone like me, who loves the internet as much as the real world, that was chilling.
Before we knew it, the two hours were up.
The laptop shut down by itself.
Access denied.
“...”
I had what I came for.
I even had a potential countermeasure.
Maybe—not certainly—but maybe, this could help us survive the next battle.
Still, life’s a matter of sowing and reaping.
Where there are good seeds, there are bad ones too.
“I heard you fought our soldiers in Seoul,” Jiang Shuying said coldly the moment we left the room.
“Yes.”
I was honest.
“You killed some of them too, right?”
Cheon Young-jae shot me a nervous look, but I didn’t see the point in lying.
I nodded.
“It was unavoidable.”
She stared at me with icy eyes, then smiled faintly.
“You really are the Professor.”
Again with the Professor.
“Just like the rumors—you only speak the truth.”
Cheon Young-jae stared at me.
“...”
I ignored him.
Fortunately, Jiang Shuying had exactly zero interest in Cheon Young-jae.
For once, I was genuinely thankful to the gods that he wasn’t her type.
Soon, she relaxed and asked in a soft voice:
“Could you briefly explain what you learned in there?”
Fair request.
Killing me won’t bring their soldiers back, and the supplies they need would be lost.
Still, this information wouldn’t be good news for her.
I looked into her luminous eyes.
“It might not be something you want to hear.”
She smiled faintly and nodded.
“That’s fine.”
So I told her the truth.
About the Chinese scientist who fled to Korea and left a trail of desperate records in John Nae-non’s server.
It wasn’t a light tale.
In some ways, it spelled humanity’s extinction.
“...I knew it.”
She was Chinese, after all—she seemed to already know part of the story.
I asked her:
“You’re Awakened, aren’t you?”
She looked at me.
“Yes.”
“I heard China doesn’t use Awakened.”
“We didn’t. But I was there when you were awarded the Golden Fleece.”
“You mean...”
“If I’d Awakened before the war, they would’ve sent me to a camp.”
So, timing really is everything.
Just a moment’s difference changed her entire fate.
“Anyway, now that I know the truth—I guess I can’t go home.”
“Home?”
She nodded and looked out the window.
In the sunlight, a submarine floated on the West Sea.
“We’re planning an evacuation to the mainland.”
“To China?”
I asked, slightly shocked.
China had collapsed.
That place was monster territory now.
Only Hainan remained untouched—but that was aristocrat land.
Just like Jeju, Chinese nobles wouldn’t want refugees tainting their sanctuary.
I told her:
“You know the mainland’s already—”
“I know.”
She smiled sadly.
“But still... it’s home, isn’t it?”

Chapter 159.2: Longing for Home (2)