Je Mun-jae was never a gifted writer. He was a survivor with decent timing. He rose in the drama world by plagiarizing his own students. When the fraud began to surface and his debts metastasized, what finally pushed him underground wasn’t shame but No-ja, also called Lao-tzu, real name Kim Young-geun, a loan shark whose business model involved dismemberment, dogs, and knife scars carved into his own face like trophies. Lao-tzu looked less like a man than a warning.
Je Mun-jae erased himself. Under the alias Cha Hyun-woo, he forged documents and constructed a shell corporation with a Hong Kong subsidiary, nominally for tax evasion but truly to vanish inside paperwork. He fled to Namchon, his father’s hometown, a remote island village in Jeolla Province where people watched without asking and remembered without speaking. There he lived for ten years without leaving the house. Food arrived by delivery. His body moved only on a treadmill. His mind existed entirely online. Through the window he watched the same villagers pass again and again. He never spoke to them. He never confirmed they were real. During this isolation he trained his body obsessively, practicing boxing techniques learned years earlier from his abusive father, back when fists were the only language he was allowed to speak.
That training had begun after middle school, when Je Mun-jae was nearly beaten to death.
As a boy in Namchon Middle School, Je Mun-jae had been introverted, observant, and skilled at writing. He joined a writing club that functioned less like a creative space and more like a pressure cooker. Han Jung-pil ran it with charm and malice, obsessed with appearances and humiliation, lying about his mother’s status while spreading rumors about everyone else. Shin Eu-tteum tried, often futilely, to be decent. Park Ji-woong saw more than he admitted. Kim Sung-pyo pretended to suffer from a rare disease when he was actually autistic and medicated. Lee Geum-seok was kind, closeted, and terrified of being known. Hwang Dae-jun watched quietly, absorbing more guilt than he could carry. Oh Ki-wan hovered on the edge, volatile, violent, and strangely attentive.
During a writing assignment, Je Mun-jae submitted a piece that excluded the names of his fellow club members. The omission was deliberate and small, driven by a childish desire to impress his father after being caught stealing adult videos. That single act detonated everything. Rumors spread. Other students’ secrets were pinned on him. The bullying escalated from whispers to orchestration, culminating in Je Mun-jae being struck with a blunt object and hospitalized. The school closed ranks. The village looked away.
Over everything loomed the reservoir legend. Every ten years, a blood-soaked student ghost was said to appear, carrying corpses. People swore they saw figures near the water, moving bodies, holding blunt tools. Han Jung-pil fed the legend, weaponizing it to isolate Je Mun-jae further, until he himself was later arrested for attempted murder and fraud, taking partial truths to prison. What no one understood then was that the ghost was never a myth.
It was Oh Ki-wan.
Oh Ki-wan had been abandoned at Sotae Amusement Park before Je Mun-jae was born. Briefly adopted into Je Mun-jae’s family, he was discarded when the “real” child arrived. Je Mun-jae’s father left him at the park like an inconvenience that cried too loudly. Afterward, Oh Ki-wan was adopted again by a man who turned out to be his biological father, a relationship defined by sexual and physical abuse so constant it flattened Oh Ki-wan’s emotional range into numb endurance.
When Oh Ki-wan read Je Mun-jae’s middle school writing assignment, the story of abandonment mirrored his own life too precisely to endure. At Sotae, during a confrontation years later, seeing Je Mun-jae cry shattered the control he had built. He assaulted him without killing him, returned home, burned his father alive, staged the death as accidental, and disappeared. On his arm he inked the origin of everything: Sotae-91.
He became Field Mouse.
Inspired by a fairy tale about a mouse that becomes human by eating fingernails, Oh Ki-wan decided humanity itself was a forgery. He began watching Je Mun-jae from afar, studying his decade of isolation, his routines, his habits, his psychological tics. From this surveillance grew the House of Field Mice, a charity on paper and a machinery of identity theft in practice. The organization stole identities from criminals, killed them, and redistributed those lives to the poor and abandoned under constant observation. Oh Ki-wan believed, with terrifying sincerity, that a kind fake was better than a rotten original.
When Je Mun-jae finally stepped outside after ten years, he discovered someone else had already become him. His name was in use. His records were altered. Fingerprints and social security numbers no longer matched. “Je Mun-jae” attended church, joined charities, and existed cleanly. The real one was reclassified as a criminal and hunted by police.
As he tried to understand what had been stolen, Je Mun-jae was pulled back into the gravity of his past. He blackmailed former classmate Ahn Kyung-hwan, now a lawyer, for alumni lists, only to learn Ahn had conspired with Field Mouse from the beginning. Ahn was later killed by Oh Ki-wan himself. Je Mun-jae’s former lover Song In-joo died in a targeted car bombing. His uncle was assassinated for knowing the truth. Witnesses vanished. Detective Park Soon-yong, demoted but relentless, was murdered by reporter Hwang Tae-bok, a planted informant. Park’s successor, Kim Min-woo, another alumnus, inherited a case soaked in lies. Lao-tzu continued the hunt until he was accidentally stoned by Go Ju-yong in a grotesque mistake and later killed in a firefight by the mercenary Kim Sang-soo, who methodically erased organ smugglers and loose ends.
Class reunions exposed what had almost happened long ago. Four students had once planned to murder Je Mun-jae. Han Jung-pil had orchestrated it. Park Ji-woong had known. Lee Geum-seok had witnessed the body being moved to the reservoir and lived with the guilt. Oh Ki-wan had been the executioner who disappeared. Lee Geum-seok, long broken after being outed, later revealed that his lover Hwang Dae-jun had committed suicide under the weight of what they had seen and failed to stop.
The chase ended where everything began. Je Mun-jae was taken to Sotae Amusement Park. Oh Ki-wan, legally dead and everywhere at once, offered to sell Je Mun-jae his name back in exchange for the debt he still carried. In the struggle that followed, Je Mun-jae shot and killed him. As he died, Oh Ki-wan asked whether Je Mun-jae recognized himself in the memories they shared, whether the pain ever truly belonged to one person.
Afterward, Je Mun-jae confessed his plagiarism and returned the money to the students he had stolen from. He wrote a new, original novel called People Without People. Field Mouse was officially remembered as an innocent victim. The welfare facilities he built continued to operate, benevolent on the surface and surveilled beneath. Hwang Tae-bok was arrested. Survivors like Kim Sung-pyo and Eu-tteum cooperated quietly. Lee Geum-seok visited Je Mun-jae and spoke of the outing, the guilt, and the suicide that followed.
In the end, Je Mun-jae understood what the story had been circling all along: how violence is inherited, how good intentions rot when enforced by brutality, how identity is less a fact than a negotiation, and how victims and perpetrators often share the same face, separated only by timing.
