Chapter 344

“Cryptocurrency?”

Baekgyeong frowned and repeated the unexpected word back to him.

“Encrypted virtual currency. Ever heard of Deepcoin?”

Baekgyeong nodded.

“Then this will be easier to explain. I only found out about it recently. ‘Virtual money,’ of all things. I still can’t understand how some scrap of data you can’t even hold in your hand can be treated the same as dollars. ...Looks like the world runs this way now. I suppose that makes me old-fashioned.”

After grumbling and wandering off-topic for a while, Malcolm finally returned to a tense expression. Lowering his voice as though revealing some major secret, he said,

“The Laptop Jackson sent Angela contains six hundred thousand Deepcoin.”

Six hundred thousand Deepcoin. It was a monetary value that did not immediately register in the mind.

“What’s amusing about cryptocurrency is that its value changes in real time, like stock. Just a week ago, one coin was worth less than fifty dollars. But as of last night, it shot well past four hundred sixty dollars.”

Siron, who had been quietly listening to Malcolm, tilted his head, then pulled his phone out of his pocket with a suddenly grave expression. Watching him from the corner of his eye, Isaac saw that Siron was about to open the calculator app and said,

“That would make it worth two hundred seventy-six million dollars.”

“Hm. In won, that’s nearly three hundred billion.”

At Baekgyeong’s added remark, Siron, who had just been about to type numbers into the calculator, suddenly clutched his lower abdomen and fainted without the slightest warning.

“What the hell! What’s wrong with you!”

Startled, Baekgyeong grabbed Siron and shook him wildly even though his eyes were still open. Siron’s body flopped like paper with every shake. Forcing his limp body upright, Baekgyeong grabbed his cheeks and shook his face from side to side as he shouted urgently,

“What’s wrong with you all of a sudden? Are you hurting somewhere?”

Staring blankly into the air with the dazed look of someone on the verge of foaming at the mouth, Siron suddenly snapped back to himself. He flung off Baekgyeong’s arm as if throwing it away, then abruptly tore off his shirt and beat at his chest.

“Ah, I can’t breathe. Haa, ugh, I can’t breathe.”

“Can’t breathe? Your heart? What’s wrong, exactly!”

Siron, thumping his chest as though someone had died, let out grief-stricken groans and panted as he forced dry tears out of his eyes.

“At Curry King... Ashimi... please... to me...”

“Please what? Ashimi? Who the hell is that?”

“Ahhh... it’s so unfair. Worse than becoming an Omega, this is even more unfair.”

“Yoon Siron, what the hell is so unfair? Say something!”

“There are things like that. Fuck! You’re filthy rich, so you don’t need to know.”

Siron answered in agony, his face showing not the slightest recovery from the psychological blow. Malcolm, who had been watching Siron as he pressed his forehead to the cold car body and struggled to calm himself, narrowed his eyes and lightly clicked his tongue, apparently guessing the reason for the outburst. With a look that said he found it hard to believe, he said,

“I’m no longer sure I should hand over the Laptop to you people.”

Siron jerked his head up. He realized he had acted in a way that could make Malcolm misunderstand him unnecessarily, blinded by greed for wealth. His heart was still a living hell, but he smoothed down the hair he had torn at, pulled the T-shirt he had thrown off like a madman back on, and said in a dry voice,

“I get what you’re worried about, but I won’t touch it. I’m nothing but a corpse without my conscience. It’s just that... personally, something deeply unfair happened to me.”

As he vented his grievance at Malcolm, Siron suddenly hardened his expression. It looked like he did not understand why he had to prove his innocence to this man in the first place.

“No, before that. Why are you trying to hand the Laptop over to us?”

“I’m not giving it away for free. I need another car, and I need a place to hide. I need enough money to live on for at least a year too!”

“You can just sell the cryptocurrency and use that.”

At Baekgyeong’s words, Malcolm looked him straight in the eye and said,

“I do need money, but that doesn’t mean I want to touch that filthy money. I have some vague idea where the money Hybris used to buy up that cryptocurrency came from. I don’t want money like that, and I shouldn’t have it. But I can’t exactly throw money made from someone else’s blood and sweat into the trash either. I can trust neither the government nor myself. So you people handle it properly for me. ...And give my family enough money to live on comfortably for a while too.”

Clicking his tongue lightly, Baekgyeong said,

“Just say it honestly. You want us to become the target.”

He pointed at the Alpha’s corpse, crumpled dead between the tree and the car.

“It’s not that I don’t feel that way at all, but I mean it in a good—”

“I have no interest in taking on a nuisance like that, so go find someone else.”

At Baekgyeong’s refusal, bewilderment spread across Malcolm’s face. Listening beside them, Siron went pale and looked back and forth between Baekgyeong and Malcolm.

“Y-you’re serious? We’re just not going to take it?”

“Yoon Siron. I don’t have three hundred billion, but I’m pretty rich. Everything I have, I’ll—”

“Ah, what does Isaac think?”

Siron’s face burned hot. Before Baekgyeong could continue, Siron hurriedly cut him off and turned to Isaac.

“Couldn’t we keep the coins and use them to compensate the victims?”

Baekgyeong stepped in front of Siron and blocked his view of Isaac.

“Compensate the victims? And how exactly are we supposed to do that?”

“Well, we’d have to find a fair and conscientious way.”

With a face that said he could not bear to entertain Siron’s nonsense, Baekgyeong replied,

“Do you even know how to trade cryptocurrency?”

Siron clamped his mouth shut and rolled his eyes. Baekgyeong pinched his cheek hard and shook him as he scolded him.

“Ah, ah, that hurts!”

“Yoon Siron, our brains aren’t enough for this. We’re already drowning as it is. Nothing’s been solved yet, and we can’t go making even more work for ourselves.”

After forcibly prying Baekgyeong’s hand off, Siron glared at him with a wronged expression.

“But... we can’t just dump all of this on Warden Malcolm.”

Isaac, who had been listening quietly, intervened with caution.

“Siron is right. It’s dangerous for Malcolm to keep the cryptocurrency. We can’t allow criminal funds to make their way back to Hybris, not even by accident.”

A brief silence followed. Still looking reluctant, Baekgyeong said,

“And if we hold onto the Laptop and it gets destroyed? Then all the cryptocurrency in it is gone too.”

“We won’t be the ones keeping it.”

“Then who?”

“There is a suitable person. But information is shared on a need-to-know basis, so I won’t reveal the identity right now.”

All three of them stared fixedly at Isaac. A few seconds passed, and a low sigh escaped from both Siron and Baekgyeong. Baekgyeong dragged a palm down his face and said,

“Only one face comes to mind.”

“Who exactly is it?”

Malcolm asked with a dubious look, but no one answered. He changed the question.

“Is it someone trustworthy?”

Siron answered,

“She’s a righteous person. And she’s not someone who would use cryptocurrency for private gain.”

Besides, she was already rich enough. And like them, she had every reason to resent Hybris. But they could not reveal Anna’s identity to Malcolm. Anna might even already know Malcolm’s daughter Angela Knox through People Who Overcame Grief.

Feeling much lighter at the thought of dumping the problem onto Anna McCarthy, Baekgyeong said,

“Hand over the Laptop. Three hundred billion won. We’ll be taking it for now.”

They wrapped the Alpha corpses tightly in plastic and shoved them into the trunk. Then they set the vehicle on fire, erased the traces around the scene, and headed to the reconstruction site. The body that had gone stiff in the same state it had died in hours earlier, and the body killed in the car crash, were moved into a deep underground pit that had already been dug. Thick gravel covered the bottom in preparation for the concrete pour. Before long, once concrete was poured over it, this place would become the foundation floor of the building’s basement level.

Baekgyeong and Isaac found shovels nearby and dug the bottom down about two meters. They buried the bodies there, covered them with soil, and spread gravel evenly over the top. Using water drawn from the main supply, they washed away the bloodstains splashed around the site, then wiped over the remaining traces again and again. It was horrifying that Baekgyeong was getting more and more used to disposing of corpses, but he had no time to think deeply about it.

After that, the two men returned to the hotel, washed up, checked out, and moved to a secluded vacant lot nearby, where they climbed into a parked vehicle.

The inside of the car was already full of people. Siron was in the driver’s seat. Malcolm Knox lay in the middle of the cargo space that had no seats, and on his left sat his wife Hannah Knox and his daughter Angela Knox. Angela’s three children were seated opposite them, and a brown Chihuahua had burrowed down by the children’s feet, whining as it begged to be held.

While Isaac and Baekgyeong were disposing of the corpses at the construction site, Siron had parked the car in the lot and waited for the Knox family.

Isaac took the passenger seat. With nowhere suitable to sit, Baekgyeong reluctantly opened the rear door, climbed into the cargo space, and squeezed himself down beside Hannah Knox.

“Bambi! Don’t bark, no!”

Sure enough, the moment Baekgyeong climbed into the cargo space, the Chihuahua, barely bigger than his palm, started barking.

“You’re still loud as fuck.”

At Baekgyeong’s indifferent remark, Hannah gave an embarrassed smile and apologized.

“I’m sorry. She’s frightened because the surroundings are unfamiliar.”

Even if they were not making a racket like the Chihuahua, the entire Knox family was frightened. Anyone would be, after suddenly coming into possession of wealth they had neither wanted nor were capable of handling, while someone was still chasing them to take it back.

Gripping the steering wheel again for the first time in a while, Siron took a deep breath, started the engine, and slowly pulled out. Leaning back against the car, Baekgyeong swept his gaze over the faces sunken in the dim darkness. His eyes lingered especially long on the face of little Joshua Knox. The child resembled Jackson and Angela evenly. But he would live his whole life without ever knowing who the man was that had given him half his blood.

Looking for traces of Jackson Cliff in the child’s face, Baekgyeong thought, What does a parent’s love for a child even mean?

It was impossible to believe that Jackson had been a man so full of fatherly love that he would steal Hybris assets and pass them on to his young child. Then again, even Baekgyeong’s mother, who had been as cold as an ice wall, had built a psychiatric hospital for the hopeless son who did nothing but make her life miserable, and had tried to drag the existence of Alpha into the light even though she knew how dangerous it was.

A crushing fatigue struck him all at once. Baekgyeong closed his eyes. For the next four hours, they were all supposed to ride together to a secluded farmhouse on the outskirts of New York State. Without even having time to exchange proper introductions, the car carrying nine people and one Chihuahua headed for New York State.