Our protagonist wakes up three days later in the hospital, the only survivor of a massacre that claimed 24 lives at Inwang Mountain, leaving only Zeha and mutilated bodies in its wake. Zeha can’t remember any of it, even when suspiciously well-dressed detective Kim Soo-hoon asks, revealing that similar killings have popped up across the city in the days since. So Zeha returns to the mountain, looking for his own answers, only to meet the man that was once Beom Rock. His name is Haru (the character inspired by Jimin), and he is an ancient guardian of the gateway between the world of humans and the world of beom. Haru helps Zeha remember what happened at Inwang Mountain three days prior…
Zeha did journey to Inwang Mountain with Hupo, the mysterious man with glowing eyes who is revealed to have a haircut like David Bowie in Labyrinth. Hupo tells Zeha the story of his family, as promised: Zeha’s father was a beom and his mother was a shaman, tasked with guarding the gateway between the beom world and the human world. (It’s unclear if she took Haru’s job or if they were co-workers.) Every year, on January 16th (also the day of the massacre), Zeha’s mother would sing a song opening the gate for a short time. She fell in love with Zeha’s dad and allowed him to stay. They had Zeha, and lived happily for a short while… until Hupo came along. Hupo is a beom. He murdered Zeha’s parents and, years later, has returned to do the same to Zeha… but not without getting something from Zeha first. Zeha has shaman blood running through his veins, Hupo tells him, which means he can use the song he learned from his parents as a child to open the gate again.
Zeha sings the song, and unlocks the gate, also unlocking Hupo’s powers, in the process. (They have been out of his reach for 4,000 years because of “a damned mutt like you,” he tells Zeha.) Hupo uses his superhuman strength and claws to slash Zeha to the ground, leaving him for dead. He assembles with his beom friends—who, notably, are not all tiger-like, but resemble many different kinds of animals and creatures—ready to continue the war between beom and humans.
In the shadow of the mountain, days later, Haru attempts to give Zeha comfort. “Let’s go, my dear child,” Haru tells Zeha, still reeling from the recovery of his memories. “Let us hunt the beom.”
I’ve only recently started reading webtoons, so struggles I have with this story could be issues with common story structures of the format, or general webtoon media illiteracy. I disliked the non-linear storytelling, which jumped back and forth between points in time because of Zeha’s jumbled memory, but not in a way that worked for me in terms of either building suspense or character development. I would have like to see more world-building done in these opening chapters. The promotion around 7Fates has teased how beom can blend into the human world, and there’s brief mention of that here, but for the most part we stay so tight on Zeha, who spends most of his time in the hospital or in his memories in these opening chapters, that we don’t get to explore Sin-si much yet. Hopefully, we’ll have more opportunity in future episodes.
More positively, I continue to love the scroll-driven structure of webtoons, which fully immerse you in the world of the story without any edges. REDICE Studio, known for webtoons like Solo Leveling, produced the webtoon, with “co-planning” from HYBE and WEBTOON, and the artists use the format well, immediately playing with the distance between reader and character as Haru’s hand moves towards the reader (e.g. becoming larger and larger) in some of the opening “frames.” Rather than tapping us, however, the finger is revealed to be touching Zeha, both an introduction to the character and a blurring of the line between Zeha and reader, marking us as on this journey together. Narratively, I love the supernatural stakes of this world, and am excited to meet the other characters who can help Zeha, give him a found family, and continue to complicate our understand of what is monstrous in this world.