“My birth father sold me, and my stepfather taught me to kill.”

The first-person narrator of this gripping thriller is a man with no name. The book takes us through the turbulent saga of his life, from being taken under the wing of a crime boss at a young age to becoming a cold-blooded hitman who flitted from alias to alias. When the narrator is thirteen, his father uses his son as collateral to borrow money from a loan shark known as JAE (meaning ash in Korean). When it becomes clear that the father can’t pay the debt, Jae takes the narrator and tells him that he must work off his father’s debt; when the remaining balance becomes zero, he will be set free. So, the boy receives assignments, first seemingly simple ones, then eventually building up to murder—killing debtors, disguising it as accidents, then taking the insurance money.

Finally, there comes a point where the narrator’s freedom seems to be at his fingertips. However, what was supposed to be his last mission ends in a complete failure, and he must now redeem himself in the eyes of Jae. Jae, agreeing to give the narrator one more chance, orders him to dispose of the targets who live in a far and abandoned part of the city known as Sector B. This is a part of the city rumored to be teeming with cannibalistic mutants, people who have turned into monsters after a horrific chemical explosion some years ago.

On the way to this final mission, however, the narrator encounters a mysterious woman called SEO YURI and learns that Jae plans to get rid of him anyway, even if he succeeds in this mission. Insisting that only she can set him free, Seo Yuri offers to help the narrator kill Jae. However, the narrator realizes after murdering his boss that this won’t necessarily set him free; if he was a slave to Jae, now he is a slave to Seo Yuri instead.

Finally, unwilling to keep on living this way, the narrator escapes back to the mountains of Sector B, where he learns the surprising truth that the people living here are not actually cannibalistic mutants but have let the world think it anyway, in order to live amongst themselves—away from the violent, indifferent world. Eventually, the narrator also chooses to live the rest of his life in this nameless existence.