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Chapter 3
The reason was simple.
Patients who came to the endoscopy department made frequent trips to the bathroom. And by frequent, I mean very frequent.
Each patient used the bathroom dozens of times, so no matter how much she scrubbed, scrubbed, and scrubbed again, she could never seem to finish cleaning it.
Every day, as she scrubbed the toilets, tears would well up in her eyes.
[May we have your attention, please? The cleaning staff member assigned to the fifth-floor endoscopy department is requested to attend to the men’s restroom immediately. Once again—]
At the sound of the announcement booming through the corridor, Cheonga grabbed her hair in frustration.
It meant someone had made another awful mess in the bathroom.
But I just finished scrubbing the toilet ten minutes ago!
So much for an undercover investigation. All I’m doing is scrubbing toilets all day!
Clutching her mop, she marched toward the restroom with grim determination.
There was nothing particularly special about the reason Cheonga had been assigned to the fifth floor.
The other cleaning staff probably didn’t want to work there.
Ah, or perhaps the previous cleaner had spent all day scrubbing toilets, suffocated from the stench of shit, and fled.
That was probably the truth.
She was thinking along those lines as she rounded the corner toward the restroom.
The end of her mop, which had been swinging vigorously back and forth, suddenly plunged deep into something soft with a muffled thunk.
And then—
“Urgh?!”
She watched, as if in slow motion, as something toppled over from the other side of the wall.
A white coat fluttered through the air, about to come crashing down on the floor—or rather, on top of Cheonga.
“Huh?”
The person falling toward her was a man who appeared to be a member of the medical staff.
Even though a medical mask covered half of his small face, his expression was unmistakably troubled.
Cheonga instinctively twisted her body to avoid him. With nothing left to lean against, the man crumpled to the floor with a heavy thud.
“Whoa?! Are you okay?”
Cheonga grabbed the man, who was doubled over, and shook him.
With a trembling hand, he clutched his lower abdomen—or rather, the area just a little lower than that.
He grimaced and muttered through clenched teeth.
“W-what the hell… you?”
The man’s hand seized the hem of Cheonga’s clothes. His face twisted in pain as he stammered.
“Y-you… shit… you bastard. Cheonghwa…?”
Cheonga’s expression instantly stiffened. Meanwhile, the strength gradually drained from the man’s fingers as his voice trailed off.
Cheonghwa?
Frowning deeply, Cheonga examined the unconscious man.
The mask made his words somewhat muffled, but he had definitely said Cheonghwa.
Who is this guy? How does he know the Cheonghwa faction?
Cheonga’s hand shot out and flipped over the name tag attached to his chest.
Professor Min Yushin, Department of Gastroenterology
A professor?
Cheonga looked up and surveyed her surroundings.
Since this was the area around the professors’ offices, where ordinary visitors weren’t permitted to enter, there was no one passing by.
She fixed her gaze on the corner, then felt around the man’s back pocket and pulled out his wallet.
Both his identification card and credit card confirmed the name Min Yushin.
It had taken her less than a minute to check all of this with just one hand.
Of course, her other hand had been checking his pulse. She couldn’t let someone die because of her own mistake.
His pulse was slow, but thankfully within the normal range.
His pupils—she quickly flipped back his eyelids to check, but since he’d already lost consciousness, it wasn’t easy to tell.
Finally, the most important area: his groin.
Thankfully, there didn’t seem to be any bleeding, but…
Cheonga squeezed her eyes shut and reached toward the man’s injured area.
“Hmm…? Ah? Oh!”
Her fingertips trembled as she felt around the waistband of his trousers.
The size of what she’d grabbed was alarming. Apparently, the state of his nether regions wasn’t looking good after being struck by the mop.
Her hand, which had been feeling around his groin, jerked away in shock. The area seemed to be swelling a little more every time she touched it.
This is… Isn’t it bad if it swells up this much?
Her eyes darted anxiously between the man’s face and his lower body, her expression growing increasingly pale. A sudden thought flashed through her mind: if she left him like this, something terrible might happen.
Emergency! This is an emergency!
Cheonga hurriedly slipped both arms beneath the man’s armpits. Bending her knees halfway, she began dragging his body along the floor.
“Gaaah! What the hell?!”
He was incredibly tall, but did he really have to be this heavy?
Cheonga had greater stamina and physical strength than most women. Even so, dragging Min Yushin was no easy task.
She could get a rough idea of why just from the firm latissimus dorsi and pectoral muscles pressing against her hands beneath his armpits. The man had looked slender, but he actually had quite a lot of muscle mass.
Of course he was heavy!
As she strained to pull him along, her lower back began to tremble.
What do I do?! This is bad…!
Tears in her eyes, Cheonga summoned every ounce of strength she had and dragged the man toward the endoscopy department, where the medical staff were gathered.
With every step, sweat poured down her face.
“Please, help me!”
Cheonga finally dragged the man to the entrance of the endoscopy department and managed to call for help. A nurse passing by in examination clothes stared at them and cried out in shock.
“Oh my goodness, Professor!”
A shriek rang through the corridor.
The nurse rushed inside the endoscopy department and shouted something. In an instant, medical staff came pouring out.
Cheonga gasped for breath, her face scrunched up in distress.
Both her hands were still gripping Yushin’s limp, unconscious body, which lay sprawled across the floor.
“H-he suddenly collapsed in the corridor!”
“Get a stretcher! Contact the CPR team!”
“H-he fell and hit his… his vital parts on my mop!”
“Oh my goodness!”
She might have gotten the sequence of events a little mixed up, but she’d conveyed all the important information.
A makeshift transport bed was soon brought over, and the medical staff expertly supported Min Yushin and began transferring him onto it.
“Careful! One, two, three!”
Even while unconscious, Yushin grimaced and curled up in pain, apparently suffering quite a bit in a certain unfortunate area.
I’m s-sorry.
Cheonga apologized silently to him. Then she hurried back toward the professor’s office she’d been cleaning.
Another announcement requesting that someone clean up the restroom echoed through the hospital corridor.
I’m coming, I’m coming!
Cheonga grabbed the mop lying on the floor and hurried toward the restroom. As she did, she made a phone call.
[Woooow! Good morning, sunbae!]
The person who answered was Police Sergeant In Yeonhui, a member of the Information Analysis Division under the Central Police Agency.
“Yeonhui, I need your help!”
[What is it? Is something interesting happening?]
From the excited voice coming through the phone, Cheonga could practically picture Yeonhui’s big eyes sparkling with curiosity.
“Name’s Min Yushin. Thirty-three years old. Professor of gastroenterology at Boksan University Hospital. Dig into his background for me. It’s urgent.”
Cheonga recited the information she’d just seen on his identification card.
The busy tapping of a keyboard on the other end suddenly stopped. A moment later, Yeonhui burst out laughing.
[What the heck? Where did you manage to find such a catch?]
A catch?
The hand that had been vigorously scrubbing the toilet with a brush came to a halt. Cheonga protested in a troubled voice.
“It’s not like that. He’s suspicious.”
[Why? There’s nothing suspicious about him. He’s got a respectable job and lives in a really nice house. He just seems like a rich kid who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.]
Despite Yeonhui’s explanation, Cheonga’s suspicion only deepened. She stopped scrubbing the toilet and lowered her voice.
“I’m undercover at the hospital right now, and the moment that guy saw me, he asked if I was from the Cheonghwa faction.”
There was a flurry of noise on the other end, as though Yeonhui had straightened up in her chair.
[Seriously? The same Cheonghwa that made our narcotics task force chase its own tail? He just suddenly asked you that out of nowhere?]
“Well, I did… hurt him a little. He urgently asked if I was from Cheonghwa right at that moment. I’m undercover as Park Bokseon, so it’s not like he was calling me by my real name.”
[That makes it even more suspicious!]
“Right? Anyway, one of two things is certain. I’ve got a really strong feeling about this.”
Silence fell between them for a moment.
Yeonhui never dismissed Cheonga’s instincts as mere intuition.
Cheonga had graduated at the top of her class at the police academy and was a weirdo who had memorized entire records of past investigations. Combined with her hands-on field experience, she was essentially a human supercomputer packed with an extraordinary amount of information.
And her conclusions consistently pinpointed the right answers before even the system’s predictions could catch up.
The problem was that Cheonga herself couldn’t properly explain how she arrived at those conclusions.
She would simply announce the results of her internal algorithm with phrases like, Something feels off, or I smell a crime.
As a result, most people simply assumed that Inspector Kim Cheonga had a good sixth sense.
But Yeonhui was different.
This isn’t some stupid hunch! It’s high-performance forensic computation happening inside her brain, the kind even AI can’t keep up with, you idiots!
Without wasting another second, Yeonhui began following Cheonga’s instincts and digging into the man’s background.
[Okay. I’ll look into him some more. So far, all I can tell is that there’s a good chance he’s exempt from military service… or something like that.]
“Exempt from military service?”
[He’s thirty-three and already a professor. That’s impossible unless he was exempt from military service.]
“Oh, right. He looks perfectly healthy, so why would he be exempt? Anyway, got it. I’m counting on you!”
By then, Cheonga was gazing at the toilet she’d scrubbed until it sparkled, a smile spreading across her face.
