WEBTOON SUMMARY [SPOILERS!]

It all begins with K, a shadow that wore a gentleman’s face and the arrogance of centuries. He moved through provinces pretending to be blond and western, then revealed himself as a different, older thing, 'Georges Balassa,' an upper-level vampire who kept experiments in the basements of mansions, jars of his own blood like specimens, substitutes in place of living people, and a habit of rearranging reality around his appetite. Against every rule hunters swore by, one monstrous mutation made the impossible: a hybrid child. That child, Cheon Jin-rin, was born with the stubborn softness of a man who couldn’t help being humane. Lyudmila, a European hunter with a prosthetic left eye earned in previous wars, took him as her pupil and raised him among the rituals and cruelties of her order. She taught him how to aim a rifle and how to hate what needed to be hated; she also taught him to pity without letting pity ruin the mission. He learned to be precise and kind, which in this world is almost the same thing as tragic.

Song Jeong-hwa’s origin was the other side of a coin. Her mother, a Joseon woman who had worked as a maid in K’s house, survived an atrocity and fled. She raised Jeong-hwa in a single-parent tent of fear and whispered escape routes. When Jeong-hwa was still young she was marked - the Hongmaehwa tattoo, and was trafficked into the black hollows where the desperate are broken and sometimes sold. She slipped by a narrow, ugly mercy: the pimp who kept her alive refused to sell her to men. It saved her body from one fate but not her memory or her trust. She learned to lie because truth would not buy her a meal. Her mother’s vanishing left a wound that ached like an old tooth: she was told she would recognize her father one day, and when she did it was beneath false hair and gentility and the knowing cruelty of a man who made experiments of blood.

Jeong-hwa was not simply a victim of K; she became one of his spoils, turned in the basement room of horrors where he kept living puppets and corpses. After she tried to stab him with an envelope-knife, a desperate blade hidden in a stolen book, K overpowered her. He punished her the way monsters punish curiosity: a transformation that erased the overnight line between human misery and monstrous appetite. When she woke as a vampire, the horror of killing for the first time, the taste of another’s life, taught her a new language of guilt. She cried as she learned she could be both murderer and mourner. She lost herself and kept certain memories like talismans: Jin-rin’s face, the warmth of someone who had protected her.

Cheon Jin-rin loved her in the way quiet men love the sun: absolute, gradual, and without performance. He stood between Lyudmila’s suspicions and Song Jeong-hwa’s muddled honesty, defending her when the order wanted to discard her as wild, lying, dangerous. He gave her a silver knife, hidden in a book groove, meant for a high-level fight where ordinary weapons failed. He told her to run. She didn’t run. She wanted to confront the root of everything - K, and in that confrontation she was badly wounded and then remade into something that was less her and more a composite of all the people who had owned her story. Jin-rin, trying to save her, took risks a man with his heart had no right to take. At the roofline of K’s mansion he fired the shot that finally broke the monster’s ritual hold, the decisive blow delivered in a chaos of bullets and knives.

There's been an argument whether Jeong-hwa bewitched him; the truth was simpler and dire - he helped because he was good, and goodness in this world is a kind of sacrificial currency.

After K’s defeat - the mansion burning, the substitutes collapsing into ruin, the hunters turned their attention to his daughter. Jeong-hwa disappeared from Shanghai and fled to Joseon with a trick that would stain her conscience forever. On the ship she encountered Marisa Biella, a wealthy French noble of Italian descent who had been bitten and infected. Jeong-hwa subdued her during the chaos, absorbing her memories, her taste for champagne and parties, the sunlight of a life she’d never had. She stuffed the real Marisa in a bag and took her identity like a coat. It was not out of malice at first; it was out of a stunned, shameful desire to taste a life that had not been hollowed by hunger. Marisa’s memory haunted Jeong-hwa like perfume; she kept it, and she kept the woman alive somewhere secluded in the mansion she would later call Nammun. But identity theft had costs. The real Marisa was imprisoned until Bayarma, hunting through the decades, finally ended her tragic arc with a bullet that put an end to that stolen life. Jeong-hwa lived on with stolen light and with guilt heavier than any collar.

Back in the ranks of hunters, Lyudmila watched Jin-rin’s loyalties with suspicion, convinced someone had twisted the truth. She tried to end him when she thought he had betrayed the order by saving Jeong-hwa; instead she found herself shot, slain by Xiao Lun, Cheon Jin-rin’s rotund, ferocious comrade who had the martial skill to do what the order could not. Xiao Lun framed Lyudmila’s death as necessary, saving Jin-rin long enough for him to run to Joseon in tears and a ruined, noble conscience weighing every step.

In Joseon, Jeong-hwa tried to live as Marisa and ran the Nammun Hotel like a queen who had been taught to pretend. She built a life of curated isolation, bringing in painters to capture her every mood. One of them was Yoon I-ho, a young, poor painter who knew the exact angle light had to take to make a cheekbone confess secrets. He was sloppy with his rent and proud with his temper; when Jeong-hwa frightened or appealed to him, he could be furious and tender in the same breath. She frightened him: the night he saw evidence of her true hunger, a burst of violence, he recoiled. He also fell into a strange, sleepless devotion. He camped in the hotel, drawn by the impossible task of painting an old woman's face he could not see in her youth. She permitted him glimpses of her story. He persuaded her to tell it because he believed an old face could only be painted if you knew the life behind the lines. He became the one who would remember Marisa not just as monster but as a woman who had known loss.

Cheol-sun, a hotel employee who had once been a painter like Yoon, fell under Jeong-hwa’s orbit and then under her power. He deserted his own family for the dream of belonging to her; his wife hunted him with flyers, and when rejection came, the gentle, final dismissal she handed him when she told him he must go, he hanged himself in despair. The hotel kept his silence like a bruise.

Bayarma loitered outside the property for years, a thin, scarred old man who had once been younger and clumsy with longing. He and Jeong-hwa had a tacit, war-shaped pact: they would not touch each other, but they would watch and check and keep. He grew to be the hunter who could look at her without being seduced, who mocked the delusions of his subordinates and who kept his own counsel. He watched Yoon and scolded Cheol-sun; he watched Jin-rin’s blood seep into portraits. He protected Song Jeong-hwa in the hard, ancient way of people who have seen monsters up close and decided the world needs more slow loyalties than swift judgments.

Years tumbled. Yoon grew older; insomnia greeted him like a neighbor. He received a mysterious warning note once, the smell of someone trying to push him away from the truth; he tried to escape but failed, and instead encountered Bayarma, the ancient shadow who had loitered around the Nammun for decades. Bayarma became both a guard and a conscience, appearing sometimes as a suspicious old man and sometimes as a propulsive force nudging Yoon to record what he saw.

One of the most terrible discoveries Yoon made, and later passed down in notes, was a portrait that bled into its frame. Behind it was a door. Behind the door was a chamber with a coffin and the remains or the residue of Jin-rin in a state between life and blood, an infected, semi-comatose presence who said “please” like a prayer. It is unclear whether Yoon was dragged into that room only once or more often in fevered fits of curiosity; what is clear is that Jin-rin’s blood remained an active agent, an echo that could pull a living mind into a near-death stupor. Bayarma and Yoon together, hunters of different kinds, sealed Jin-rin’s blood and buried what remained in the small cemetery Yoon and Bayarma created in front of the hotel. They used hunter skill and ritual to ensure it would never again seep into frames and corridors to seduce the living.

Xiao Lun grew old and frail, carrying a woman’s arm as support (perhaps a daughter or a caretaker), and returned at the end to tell Yoon the last oral pieces of the story: the order’s corruption, Lyudmila’s fatal suspicion, the silver knife kept safe for decades to deal with those who are not harmed by bullets. He entrusted the silver dagger to Yoon upon his deathbed, telling him to return it to Jeong-hwa, an act of faith that confused and humbled Yoon, who had never intended to be a midwife of secrets. The new hunter, the one who appeared later wearing wooden crosses and carrying a different creed, wandered in and out of the margins, a reminder that the sects had factions and that not every hunter shared the same morality.

When Yoon finally became the owner of the Nammun Hotel, a change of fate that happened after Jeong-hwa’s disappearance, he ran the place like a man possessed by ghosts, cataloging paintings and secrets until illness took his breath and counted his days. 

He painted Jin-rin and then later, in a tremor of compassion and imagination, he painted Marisa the way she had never been able to be alive: an old woman, aged naturally, warm with the dignity of a life lived without being hunted. He painted the portrait she had wished for, that image of Marisa as an elderly human because Jeong-hwa had always wanted to grant those peaceful years to the life she’d stolen.

The hotel became a museum in 2019 after his death, but before that, in the softening of his years when only a little time remained, something miraculous happened: Song Jeong-hwa returned.

She came because time finally proved inconvenient for her too. In the decades since she had fled Shanghai she had lived with the ache of Jin-rin’s death, with K’s old cruelty gnawing at her, and with the burden of the woman she had imprisoned. She had grown capable of being gentle in corners she could control. When she came to Yoon near the end of his life,  when he had only about a year left, stricken by illness but lucid enough to read and receive letters, their reunion cut the world in two. She told him things she had not told before. She told him that he was the last person who would remember Marisa outside the story, that he had given her a kind of immortality by painting and preserving her.

She paused in front of Yoon’s final painting and saw at last the mercy he had sketched into pigment: Marisa, old and ordinary, a life allowed to end in peace. The sight broke her. Even a vampire who had swallowed decades of guilt could not hold against the quiet proof of age, of acceptance, of a future she had never been brave enough to write.