WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Potter
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◈ Hiding a House in the Apocalypse ◈
Chapter 25: Remnants (1)
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According to the foreign-word transcription rules announced by the Ministry of Education in 1986, foreign names were supposed to be written according to their local pronunciation.
I did not follow those rules in China, for several reasons.
At the time, I had no intention of learning or understanding their language.
We were unwelcome guests, and we had come with no intention of being welcomed.
Our purpose was not to save China.
The government had ordered me to collect data: the types and behavioral patterns of Monsters emerging from high-intensity Rifts, the changes occurring around those Rifts, and especially their effects on humans.
As a result, we found every excuse to avoid the battles they desperately needed, choosing only the regions and battles we wanted.
The vast experience and data we gained there later helped greatly with Korea's defense. It also helped turn me into a doomer.
There was someone in China named Ma Won-gap.
They had been an ordinary resident of an Erosion zone. Then they saw a Monster pass right by them without showing any hostility, achieved a great enlightenment, and, as people who achieve great enlightenment tend to do, founded a new religion.
The name of that new religion earned great ridicule from the Chinese people I worked with. They said it sounded like something a jobless shut-in who spent all day watching xianxia or martial arts stories would come up with.
But contrary to their mockery, the Church of Myriad Streams Returning to the Source[1] spread rapidly through the Erosion zones, following a path much like the cults that had brought down the Qing dynasty.
Among the Hunters dispatched from Korea, there were cohorts that had killed more cultists than Monsters.
Defender might have been from one of those cohorts.
Now Ma Won-gap, the religion they founded, and all its followers had burned away in the flames of the apocalypse. But things that burn tend to share certain traits.
Like trees in a forest, which do not flee but stand their ground and wait to burn.
Someone I knew had that same flammability.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Artillery fire sounded in the distance.
Again?
The radio said they were negotiating.
Two years and two months had passed since the war began.
There was still no word from Kim Daram.
When I checked the temperature outside, it was minus five degrees Celsius.
Maybe because of last year's worldwide nuclear war, it felt colder than usual.
I got up inside my heated tent, washed my face, and prepared a meal.
Breakfast was half a head of cabbage I had harvested recently.
I roughly chopped it up and tore off pieces with my hands as I ate.
Before the war, I could never have imagined making a meal out of cabbage. But after growing sick of canned and preserved food, it was a reasonably fresh seasonal treat.
As I filled my stomach with loud crunching, I surveyed the area through my binoculars.
Another group of refugees was passing through the golf course, heading south.
Was that the direction where the sniper mother and daughter lived?
Gunfire might start soon.
After eating, I took a light patrol around my territory to aid digestion.
Nothing seemed out of place.
Maybe it was too early to say, but wouldn't today be another peaceful day?
Unlike our quiet neighborhood, Seoul was in the middle of a civil war.
A war that would change the fate of the Republic of Korea was holding millions of civilians hostage as both sides rained fire upon one another in a bloodbath.
The civil war had not been entirely bad for me.
At least in the short term, it was good news.
Once the civil war began, refugees still appeared, but those damn Pioneers vanished completely.
The Pioneer Corps was under military control. Had they been dragged off to the battlefield?
Oddly enough, though, there was almost no talk about the civil war in the community. Every now and then, someone would upload a proof photo because a shell had landed near their home, but that was all.
Before the civil war broke out, the board had been nearly flooded with talk about it. The change was like night and day.
The direct cause was probably the silence of the journalist who had been feeding us information from Seoul. But at this point, the civil war was not really a subject we needed to discuss.
It had already happened, and there was nothing we could do about it. More than anything, the civil war was too close to our grim reality.
No matter who won, who took power, or who seized Seoul, the aftermath would shake up our lives.
And in a very bad direction.
Was that why?
The community bloomed with cheerful, trivial stories unrelated to the civil war.
It was an unspoken agreement to turn away from reality.
I joined that collective avoidance by posting meaningless things too.
SKELTON: (SKELTON Sound) SKELTON's Beatbox 23
Then, amid those dull days, a huge event occurred that shook the entire board.
Big things were done by big names.
DragonC, one of the Four Heavenly Kings of the board and a former webtoon artist, announced a new series.
DragonC: I'm planning to start my latest work, “The Remant.”
DragonC's latest work, The Remnant, which meant leftovers or remnants, was, in short, the story of us doomers.
Like anyone who entered the world of creation and made it their profession, DragonC was preparing a final masterpiece that would make DragonC immortal. For its subject, DragonC had chosen the last remnants of humanity, those soon to die or disappear.
That alone would have been enough to turn the entire board upside down, but DragonC went further.
As if putting into practice the idea that art reflected reality, DragonC posted an announcement seeking community members for major and supporting roles.
DragonC: “The Remnant” Casting Notice
1. Must possess a personality and background worth turning into a story.
2. Bonus consideration for having family or neighbors, along with episodes involving them.
3. Women preferred.
4. Looks don't matter even if you're ugly. I'll adapt that myself, so please refrain from bullshit.
“...Heh.”
The moment I saw that announcement, a satisfied smile spread across my face for the first time in a long while.
How could it not?
These were practically conditions made for me.
Except for numbers three and four, of course.
I had a personality and background worth turning into a story, neighbors, and countless episodes.
I was currently branded an unpopular user and scraping along, but if I could appear in DragonC's newest work, my standing on the board might rise. I might even become immortal too.
My personal information, Park Gyu's personal information, was top-secret. But what did that matter when the country had fallen apart?
Without a moment's hesitation, I compiled a new top-secret file and sent it to DragonC.
- Graduated first in the 13th class of Guard, a Hunter training institution
- Former S-rank Hunter, the highest rank before the level system was introduced
- Active in the Beijing area of China for five years, callsign: “Professor”
- Made a major contribution to discovering the mechanism behind Mutation-induced changes
- Fucking strong
- Also has neighbors, including a cute young girl
...
When I sent the application by message, I had no doubt the leading role was mine.
I was so confident that, aside from the provocative subject of the Defender siblings, I could fill every blank on the form.
The reply came a minute later.
Wasn't that too fast?
No, maybe DragonC had been so moved by my glorious career that they contacted me the moment they saw it.
Message from DragonC: Is this a joke?
“?”
SKELTON: It's not a joke. It's real.
Message from DragonC: You expect me to believe that bullshit? Even an elementary schooler could write something butter than that.
SKELTON: It's “better,” not “butter.”
Message from DragonC: Aren't your weird headers and “butter” your only distinctive traits? Anyway, thanks for applying, but don't make shit up.
SKELTON: (SKELTON Wronged) No, it's really true.
Message from DragonC: Don't push it. You don't have a single thing worth putting in a story.
SKELTON: I'm actually a woman...
Message from DragonC: Want me to block you?
My appearance fell through for questionable reasons, but I was not the only one rejected.
Countless users failed the casting process, including several people I knew well.
Defender: With a personality like mine, you could give me at least a supporting role, right? Don't you think?
Defender was also very eager to appear in The Remnant, but DragonC, true to someone who had serialized work on a major web portal, followed content-rating guidelines and tended to avoid provocative material other than school violence.
By those standards, Defender was obviously out.
Still, perhaps Defender had kept pestering DragonC, because DragonC publicly humiliated them in an uncharacteristic move.
DragonC: Defender keeps sending me DMs, but I can't put you in it. If you appear, the genre changes.
Defender: Into what genre?
DragonC: A psychopath thriller. No, maybe splatter horror?
Defender: T_T
Naturally, after DragonC dealt Defender a blow, Defender sent me a message.
Message from Defender: SKELTON. It'd be a big problem if I revealed that I'm a woman, right?
SKELTON: Is this the little sister?
Message from Defender: Did you miss me?
SKELTON: Where's your brother?
Message from Defender: That brother wants to be in the comic. I don't even read his comics. Honestly, DragonC. His comics are fucking boring, aren't they?
SKELTON: It's true that they're boring.
Message from Defender: Right?
Defender might be strange, but Defender would not reveal their identity.
Revealing Defender's little sister meant throwing away one of the killer siblings' trump cards: operating as a male-female pair.
Anyway, unlike Defender, whose chance to appear in The Remnant was permanently blocked, I still had one ultimate trump card.
I had even written it in the casting application I sent DragonC: the sniper mother and daughter who lived southeast of me.
If I took a photo with them and sent in a somewhat touching story, wouldn't DragonC respond?
Strike while the iron was hot, so I immediately contacted the sniper mother and daughter.
“SKELTON? What's up?”
“Can we meet for a moment?”
“Meds, got?”
“What medicine?”
“Morphine, fentanyl, stuff.”
They said even a dog that spends three months around a schoolhouse could recite poetry. The sniper's Korean had improved considerably too.
It could hardly help improving when their daily work was listening to radios and walkie-talkies from the rooftop of a building.
“SKELTON!”
The daughter welcomed me.
It felt like we had not seen each other in a while, though we might see each other soon.
Christmas was not far away.
“SKELTON, what did you eat today?”
“Cabbage.”
“Cabbage? What's that?”
“Primitive kimchi, basically.”
“Primitive kimchi?”
I was smiling contentedly as we talked when the mother cut in.
“Meds.”
“If no meds, no meet.”
“Just one second. Click, photo. Okay? Chocolate!”
The transmission cut off.
The operation had failed.
It could not be helped.
Drugs were a last resort for surgery or unbearable pain.
Even I had acquired them with difficulty, and I only had a small supply. I could not hand them over so freely for some trivial reason.
Still, could that mother and daughter make it through this winter properly?
Food was one thing, but surviving two Korean winters was no simple matter.
In any case, my ambitious webtoon appearance ended in failure.
* * *
Three days later.
It was the day a fighter jet passing over my head was hit by a missile, shattered in midair, and crashed to the west.
DragonC announced the protagonist of The Remnant.
Surprisingly, it was someone I knew well, one of the few people from the community I had met in person.
DragonC: The lead of “The Remnant” has been decided: Kyle_Dos!
Kyle_Dos.
He was active on the board often enough, and his reputation was not bad. He also belonged to a friendly clique with Anonymous848 and Anonymous458.
But that was about it.
There was nothing particularly unlikeable about him, but no great strengths either.
When I met him in person to collect the Capsule, he had been an ordinary Korean man in his early thirties.
He was definitely not a Hunter, nor was he a trained soldier.
What could possibly have made him special enough to move DragonC's heart?
The answer was in a post Kyle_Dos wrote himself.
Kyle_Dos: Actually, I picked up a wife recently.
The story began not long after I collected the Capsule near the air-raid shelter.
With one worry off his mind, Kyle_Dos, like the experienced doomer he was, conducted intense patrols around the shelter every day, refusing to tolerate even the smallest change.
Then one day, it happened.
Kyle_Dos remembered it as late spring.
He encountered something he had forgotten, yet always thought about.
A woman.
Young, attractive, and above all, in need of protection.
The process by which Kyle_Dos, with his agreeable personality, and an attractive woman met by fate, awkwardly grew close, and ultimately became one possessed not only all the virtues of a universal story, but also the potent pheromones that stirred a lonely man's fantasy.
Footnotes:
[1] Church of Myriad Streams Returning to the Source: The name echoes a grandiose Chinese martial-arts and cultivation-story phrase, “all streams return to one source.”
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