Ch.566Chapter 21. Blood Pack (26)

Human trafficking is a method of obtaining emergency funds that those in desperate need of money choose as an extreme option.

“I urgently need money, so please buy my kidney for 100 million won!”

“……”

“Even my liver would be fine, please!”

“This isn’t a snack shop, why would a hospital buy your kidney or liver…”

Going to a hospital and trying to sell your organs won’t work; they won’t buy them, and within legal boundaries, no matter how many organs you try to sell, you won’t get paid.

“Damn it, money…!”

“Need money? Here’s 2 million, here’s 3 million.”

“Ah…!”

However, in the illegal market, each organ already has a standard price.

If someone needs to sell part of the body their parents gave them—organs that would cause all sorts of inconveniences to live without—how desperate for money must they be?

“May I ask what you need so much money for?”

“Well, I took out a loan for stocks.”

“…Well, good luck recovering.”

A situation pushed to life’s edge.

“But you know, selling organs is a one-time thing. There’s a way to make money continuously.”

“Continuously?”

“Yes. Selling blood.”

“Blood… is worth money?”

“If we buy it, then it becomes money, doesn’t it?”

Haeguneul has been trafficking humans by exploiting this survival instinct.

Not organs.

They’ve been periodically collecting and selling blood.

They gathered blood from various places, stored it in containers, and sold it.

‘Business is all about gradually expanding.’

Seeing the potential profit, they built a factory.

They gathered the poorest people in the Korean peninsula and, using fear, a little money, and the sweetness of capitalism, secretly built a factory underground in Hwanghae Province.

The homeless, those with bad credit, people drowning in private loans.

“Ugh, this blood smells like alcohol and cigarettes. Will this even sell?”

“We’d be better off getting blood from those fitness freaks over there.”

“…Should we?”

But soon Haeguneul began to consider economic efficiency.

[Healthy blood flows through a healthy body, and healthy blood becomes money.]

For reasons like freshness issues and other factors, they began looking for blood that would bring in money.

Those people.

“Aaaagh!”

“Fi-fire suddenly!! Outside too!!”

“Get out quickly!”

“Shut up, you commie!”

The men who rushed outside were frantically searching for a way to survive despite the fire.

They looked like prisoners who had just escaped from jail.

“…Well, they’re all muscle men. Are they ability users?”

[Not ability users, more like they’re paid to exercise.]

The peculiar thing was that they were all men.

And they had ‘two’ Taegeuk watches on their wrists.

One was a management Taegeuk watch, while the other was more of a health monitoring smartwatch than a Taegeuk watch.

[Health management is essential if you want to regularly extract blood. Hmm.]

I looked once more at those fleeing from underground, desperately escaping the flames.

All with black hair.

From young adults to middle-aged men, with an age range so wide they could be called the MZ generation.

“Come this way! The flames are weaker here!”

“Run faster! Do you want your family in South Korea to hear you’re dead?!”

“You fool! Your wife is already having an affair with a South Korean gym guy!”

“Shut up!”

And most of them were speaking with North Korean accents that sounded like something from movies.

“…North Koreans?”

[They’re the most suitable people for extracting blood cheaply. Easy to control with money, power, and violence.]

Their speech seemed slightly corrected after living in South Korea for a few years—like North Korean defectors invited to speak in North Korean dialect but occasionally using South Korean words and expressions.

“How did you know about this place? I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

[We found out during our investigation.]

I answered Black Taejo’s cautious question as carefully as possible.

[It’s not just plastic surgery clinics that make people bleed a lot. While we were dealing with Batori, the Tavern Owners spotted some of Haeguneul’s execution squad heading north.]

“…You had suspicions?”

[In the sense that nothing Haeguneul does would surprise me, yes.]

I did know about this.

The North Korea-related storyline was from the “original” story.

But that was knowledge I had as a reader; it would be inappropriate to say Do Ji-hwan or Goblin knew about it.

[I had suspected they were doing even worse things, so this is somewhat of a relief.]

“I understand what you mean.”

Black Taejo smiled bitterly while touching his shoulder.

“So on one side they extract blood with syringes using Western medicine, and on the other side they use cupping therapy…”

[There’s cupping, and then there’s using organisms.]

I pointed to the napes of the men wearing white clothes.

[Do those look like cupping marks to you?]

There were long red lines visible on their bodies.

They looked like traces of insects crawling inside their bodies, or marks of electricity burrowing into the skin from electric shocks.

[Leeches?]

[Yes. They sucked blood using bloodsucking leeches. Truly amazing Korean pride.]

Blood spilled during plastic surgery or extracted through Western medicine was merely “cheap.”

[The kimchi premium applies to medicine too.]

Although Haeguneul seemed to be actively countering by sending execution squads, they were actually trying to cover up by not sending people to the most profitable locations.

[We should really thank Dr. Choi Woo-sik. Thanks to his inferiority complex toward Korean traditional medicine, we were able to discover this place.]

But we extracted information from Choi Woo-sik.

[A place that extracts blood from people based on traditional Korean medicine. They used ability users to dig underground without anyone knowing, built facilities inside, and hired blood bags to extract blood using cupping and leeches.]

The product manufactured in this factory is the ‘Blood Pack’.

And this place should be called the Blood Factory.

[Haeguneul’s chairman probably didn’t know Choi Woo-sik was aware of this. It wasn’t his area of responsibility.]

“How did he find out?”

[He discovered it himself due to his inferiority complex toward traditional medicine.]

Viva, K-medicine.

[His half-brother became a traditional Korean medicine doctor and was making enormous money managing blood bags, while he was making pennies cutting the skin of ugly people and collecting blood.]

As everyone knows, doctors are a high-earning profession.

It gets complicated when discussing private practice or pay doctors, but in reality, plastic surgeons generally earn more than traditional Korean medicine doctors.

This world is different.

“Oh, long acupuncture needles, good!”

“Is this Korea’s CheongSimHwan…? How much? 2 million won? Oh, very reasonable price! …Per pill? Wow, that’s good!”

A world where traditional Korean medicine doctors earn several times more than general practitioners, and a small traditional clinic in the provinces makes dozens of times more revenue than a plastic surgery clinic near Gangnam Station in Seoul.

[Seeing the top 10 students from the college entrance exam all trying to get into traditional Korean medicine schools, it’s fascinating how amazing things become when you just put a ‘K’ in front.]

And the same applied to the dark side of this ordinary world.

[The ‘Korean Blood’ identified by the Syndicate. There’s a huge price difference depending on the extraction method.]

“Extraction method…”

[Blood extracted with Western methods like knives and needles goes for a few million won per kimchi container, but blood extracted with cupping therapy costs much more per bottle than an entire container.]

“Is that real?”

[That’s what they say. Since it’s extracted in a way suited to Korean physiology, the added value you can get from using Korean blood is supposedly much greater.]

No statistically significant data had been produced.

But there must be a reason why cupping blood is dozens of times more expensive in the market.

[If regular blood costs as much as anti-inflammatory painkillers, blood from cupping and leeches costs as much as health supplements or diet herbal medicine.]

“……”

[I guess comparing it to medicine prices doesn’t work for an ability user.]

“I’ll look into it later.”

Beyond Haeguneul’s business acumen, consumers pay that much because they believe it’s worth it.

For instance.

If using regular Korean blood in Hungary resulted in a miraculous birth rate of 17% ability user newborns among test subjects.

Using Korean blood extracted through cupping and leeches might result in about 37%—roughly one in three—being born as ability users, which would bring tremendous monetary value.

“But brother, regarding blood extracted through cupping or leeches. Isn’t that usually black blood or bad blood?”

[You’ve answered your own question. That’s ‘usually’ the case.]

Quite paradoxically, Haeguneul is meticulous in this aspect.

[Selling rotten blood would make money, but selling clean blood would earn several times more. If they know this, they’d naturally develop technology to get higher prices.]

“Is that why they keep those former North Koreans underground, making them just work out and extracting their blood?”

[It’s not just working out, but the extraction method is different, as I said. Ah, here comes the factory owner.]

Splash, splash.

From within the flames, a writhing black form revealed itself.

The form was a snake much larger than the black iron Jindo dog that Black Taejo had previously summoned, with a body length easily exceeding 20 meters.

“Ugh.”

Not a snake.

A colony of leeches had become a single leech.

“This, this. How troublesome, really.”

On top of the leech colony.

“I don’t know how you discovered this place.”

A black-haired young man wearing a light blue gown was glaring at us with his arms crossed.

“But now that you’ve attacked Haeguneul’s Hwanghae factory, which brings in tens of trillions in annual revenue, I assume you’re prepared?”

“…Could that be.”

[Yes.]

The most fundamental background of how Haeguneul can dominate the Korean peninsula.

[An S-class villain whose records were erased.]

Villain name: ‘Black Leech’.

[An S-class villain secretly brought to Korea from abroad.]