Hiding a House in the Apocalypse-Chapter 178.1: Journey (1)

“What? A trip?”

In this day and age, taking a trip isn’t much different from traveling in the Middle Ages.

You have to risk your life.

Unlike the Middle Ages, we know most of the world—and we also know that most of it has been destroyed.

A pilgrimage to holy sites or a scenic tour like in the past? Out of the question.

Your partner matters too.

Woo Min-hee is by no means a good partner.

Though she’s mellowed out a little, she’s still unpredictable, impulsive, and cynical about everything. Being around her doesn’t lift your mood—it drains you. She’s what people call an “energy vampire.”

Cheon Young-jae is having a fit over her constant visits to our office, but honestly, I’m not thrilled about it either.

But despite all those cons, there’s one magic word that can still move me.

Curiosity.

“Don’t you want to go see my daughter?”

An irresistible offer slipped from my junior’s lips.

“Daughter? As in your daughter? A girl you gave birth to?”

“Yup.”

Woo Min-hee answered casually, with a perfectly honest expression, not a hint of deception.

“Really?”

It’s been five years since the war started.

The world has changed a lot.

Most of those changes were for the worse, but the people who survived are proving in various ways why they managed to [N O V E L I G H T] stay alive.

I, too, have grown by leaps and bounds.

Especially on the inside—I’m proud of how much I’ve developed internally.

“Can you give me just a little time to think?”

In other words, I no longer bite immediately at every curiosity-laced hook someone dangles.

First thing’s first—investigation.

“Huh? Director Woo has a kid...? This is the first I’ve ever heard of it.”

Song Yoo-jin, who served under Woo Min-hee since our days at the Incheon lab, wasn’t just clueless—she was actively skeptical.

“I mean, if she had a kid, wouldn’t there be like... I dunno, photos? Or at least the occasional question about how the kid’s doing? There’s never been anything like that. Seriously.”

Even with Kim Daram, who has a notoriously antagonistic one-way relationship with Woo Min-hee, I tried a more diplomatic approach.

Like this:

“I’m just asking, but... do you think there’s any chance Woo Min-hee has a kid?”

“No.”

Madam Kim Daram, likely future election winner, rejected the idea flatly.

“Look at her personality. Do you really think she’s the type to have a kid that isn’t even hers?”

“...Guess not?”

“You probably think I’m just bad-mouthing her again, but it’s the truth. Woo Min-hee loves herself too much to raise someone else’s child. Do you think a person like that has any love to spare for a kid?”

“She could probably give them candy?”

“Ah!”

After getting kicked out by Kim Daram, I went to see Gong Gyeong-min.

It’s still awkward between us, but we’ve risked our lives together before.

“What?”

Even the one person I trusted most reacted strangely.

“What are you talking about? You suddenly call me up and I think we’re going to discuss something important, and then you come out with this nonsense.”

“She really doesn’t have a kid?”

“You think you make a kid by yourself? Ever since she came to Jeju, Woo Min-hee’s always been alone. She didn’t get involved with anyone. If she had, there would’ve been rumors. And anyway, she already dated more than enough back in her youth.”

“Is that so.”

“What? You hear something weird?”

“No. It’s nothing.”

“Since we’re on the topic—there are rumors that Woo Min-hee’s recently had contact with Kang Han-min.”

“With Kang Han-min?”

“I thought those two were done for good. But, you know, life’s unpredictable. Feels like something’s about to change soon, so be careful. Everything looks fine now, but in this world, you never know when things will go sideways.”

People say Gong Gyeong-min doesn’t actually have much real power.

Even back in Jeju, the Committee—made up of his juniors—constantly kept him in check, and he lost most of his people.

So the information he can gather is probably limited.

But the fact remains that Woo Min-hee, who once flaunted a long history of romantic conquests, has shown no interest in relationships since her mid-to-late twenties.

It’s understandable.

After seeing that hellscape, whispering words of love about tomorrow is only possible if your heart is numb—or if you’re incredibly strong-willed.

Anyway, after asking around people familiar with Woo Min-hee and the Jeju situation, I didn’t get any satisfying answers.

And then the promised day arrived.

“Senior. You ready?”

Woo Min-hee showed up.

I was a little surprised.

Instead of her usual office look and white coat, she was wearing combat gear.

“Shall we go?”

Her gun, covered with an excessive number of colorful patches, was swinging at her side.

Attached to the muzzle was a character plush known to be a symbol of so-called “menhera.”

“...”

No doubt about it.

It was her old gun from back in active service.

*

It wasn’t so much a trip as a mission—more like reconnaissance.

No vehicles. No typical support.

Just the two of us.

We walked through the ruins of the city on foot.

No people. No monsters. Not even zombies on the streets.

It was a completely abandoned, deserted cityscape.

“Over there. That apartment is our first checkpoint.”

When I first heard her briefing, I had assumed Woo Min-hee had entrusted her child to someone else.

Whether or not the kid exists, if we’re assuming she really has one, then it’s easy to conclude she would’ve left the child in someone else’s care.

Back in her prime, Woo Min-hee had been a queen behind the scenes—wielding overwhelming presence and influence.

If she’d offered someone security and a future in exchange for raising her child, not many would’ve refused.

Naturally, she would’ve secured an A-grade bunker, well hidden somewhere in Seoul or its outskirts.

But the problem is—there are too many locations she wants to visit today.

Six, to be exact.

I’ve heard of quintuplets in foreign news, but sextuplets? I doubt it.

Unless Woo Min-hee is a cat or some rodent, she’s still human.

Having six kids in one go is impossible.

Even if we allow for the unlikely scenario of her having two sets of triplets, that still requires two pregnancies.

Considering the consistent testimony from her Jeju days that she had no children, the window of time for her to have had a kid is very limited.

So the chances of her actual child being at these checkpoints are slim.

The place we arrived at had once been labeled a luxury apartment, but now it was an abandoned wreck.

Not a trace of life.

What on earth could she want here?

“Building 101, Unit 1902... right?”

She had the specific apartment number saved on her phone.

Step, step...

Even if there are no signs of people, you always need to be alert in ruins.

You never know when or where an ambush might come from.

Not just humans—mutations and zombies are also major threats in tight spaces.

Click—

I raised my axe in one hand, supporting the handgun in the other as I ascended the narrow, dark emergency stairwell.

Staying silent during a mission—then and now—was always her style.

She only opened her mouth once we reached the 19th floor.

“What’s here?”

It wouldn’t be a child.

No matter how cold-blooded a person is, no one would leave something as vulnerable and exposed as a child in a place this abandoned, this visible.

When I asked, Woo Min-hee blew a puff of air through her bangs and casually replied.

“Hobby.”

So it wasn’t a child after all.

The door was open.

More precisely, it bore clear marks of being forced open long ago—those traces remained, half-faded under the dust of time.

As the door creaked open, the faint smell of rot brushed against my nose.

The kind of stench that comes from a corpse left untouched for over a year.

I raised my weapon and carefully stepped inside, recalling the various corpses I’d seen back in China.

“Don’t worry. No one’s here.”

Woo Min-hee said with certainty.

And she was right.

Inside, in the living room, were dried-up skeletons—black stains left behind from when flesh had yet to fully decay.

Four bodies.

“One, two, three... four.”

“This?”

They weren’t killed by looters.

The neatly arranged bodies, the random liquor bottles, the sealed windows with plastic sheets to trap the smell, and the remnants of burned charcoal.

Suicide.

Two of them appeared to be children.

“As you can see.”

Woo Min-hee, now covering her mouth with a mask, calmly scanned the scene with eyes full of cold curiosity.

“They likely died about a year after the war started. To be precise, during the period when the shelter system was implemented and everyone was being herded into bunkers.”

She bent down and picked something up.

A LEGO toy. A knight on horseback.

It probably belonged to one of the children, lying between the bones presumed to be their parents.

“Not everyone left for the shelters willingly. Some people had a hunch.”

She lowered her hand.

“That no good future awaited them there.”

“...”

“So they ended their lives first. At the time, there were lots of complaints from neighbors about the smell. But with elevators barely functioning and the apartments soon to be abandoned anyway, no administrative resources were spared. They were just left here like this.”

“But a scavenger did come by.”

The door had already been forced open.

The spot where the wall-mounted TV had been was now just a hole, and every drawer had been pulled out and emptied.

Woo Min-hee scoffed coldly.

“Most people flee at the smell of corpses. But those guys—they’re real scavengers. They’re drawn to it.”

I looked at her and asked,

“Are the rest of the places you’re heading to like this?”

I was getting that feeling.

Woo Min-hee raised her head just slightly, meeting my eyes with a sidelong glance.

With her elegant, Western features, her profile was definitely more striking than her front view.

“Yeah.”

She nodded slightly while casting me that side glance.

“Why are you looking for places like this?”

By now, I was genuinely curious about her goal.

Kim Daram’s hurled all kinds of insults at her, but “necrophiliac” wasn’t one of them.

There had to be a reason.

“...I just want to see it. What a family that took their own lives looked like. I’ve seen pictures, but it’s different seeing it in person, right?”

She clearly didn’t want to talk further, so I said nothing else and followed her to the next location.

Again, it was the remains of a family that chose suicide over entering the shelters.

A scavenger had come through here too, but probably not as thoroughly since a nest of infiltrator-types had once been nearby—now cleared out.

This family had been well-off.

There were all kinds of musical instruments. Broken picture frames held photos of a happy family taken all around the world.

Woo Min-hee stared silently at one of those photos for a long time—a family unknown to her, and she to them.

She finally broke the silence.

“There was a time... when I thought what these people did was the right choice. I mean, think about it. For people who lived this well-off life, being thrown into a shelter packed with low-class strangers... That’s not an easy adjustment. In more affluent neighborhoods it was less common, but in mixed areas, group assaults weren’t rare. Not to mention kidnappings or rapes.”

She brushed her fingers across a photo frame.

A family photo taken in front of a tilted Pisa tower, like from some Mgu-themed home.

When she touched it with the sharp point of her prosthetic finger, the aged wire holding it up gave out and it crashed to the floor.

Naturally, neither she nor I made any move to put it back.

She turned away.

“But, you know, senior...”

She looked at the bodies gathered in the small room.

“...I think differently now.”

I felt like I understood what she was trying to say.

“You never know what might happen in the future. Yeah, most of it will probably be bad. But even in that future, people will live. They might even laugh. That’s just how I feel these days. Five years after the war began.”

So that’s where this is going.

“Being alive is just another way of saying you have possibilities.”

I nodded, agreeing with her.

That’s something I, Park Gyu, have proven myself.

I sealed myself in the pit of despair, but eventually I brought down the enemy I’d longed to defeat with my own hands.

Had I given up then, my corpse would’ve been discovered by some future person or space traveler—no soul left to be saved.

“Living’s better.”

Woo Min-hee looked at me.

She smiled.

“Right?”

She stepped out of the house.

“Let’s stop here for today. Sorry for dragging you to see weird stuff.”

“No, it’s fine.”

Then, almost like a passing thought, she murmured:

“...If only my family had been even half like you, senior.”

Woo Min-hee’s family was said to have died during the war.

Ignoring evacuation warnings, they stayed home and were obliterated by the nuclear strike’s aftermath—at least, that’s what I knew.

Apparently, it wasn’t true.

But between us, long explanations don’t exist.

She and I are still separated by a distance that can’t be closed.

Maybe we’re both being cautious.

Maybe the pain and scars carved into our bodies have left us with caution as a lingering wound.

There’s one important question left.

“My child...”

Woo Min-hee spoke as she descended the dark stairs.

“...is in Jeju.”

Her steps had become noticeably lighter.

The journey had only just begun.

That’s what it felt like.