WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Natty

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◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈

Episode 29: The Scales of Equivalent Exchange (2)

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Screeeech!

“Ghk... ngh...!”

Reversing my condition did not mean it came without pain. Until my body returned to normal, agony spread through every inch of me.

It felt like a red-hot skewer had been driven through my thigh and stirred around. Blood poured down like a waterfall. The rank smell of a butcher’s market stabbed at my nose.

It had to regenerate. Fast.

I nearly passed out from the pain three times. It was true that when something hurt badly enough, you could bite through your tongue and not feel it.

With a squelch, the wound in my leg began to reverse itself. It itched horribly and felt as though it were being scalded in boiling water. The leg bone, its pale cross-section exposed, stretched out with a crack like pulled clay.

Red muscle fibers swayed like seaweed above it, wrapping around and covering the bone. Veins and bundles of nerves filled the gaps, and finally, pale skin covered everything.

In less than five minutes, my left leg had been restored to the perfect, healthy state it had been in just before being amputated.

“Hah... haa... ngh...”

Cold sweat poured from my forehead like rain. Gasping out trembling breaths, I pressed down on my leg again. I could feel it properly. It definitely moved.

That insane scale really tore my whole leg off.

It said it wanted blood and flesh. It could've taken a reasonable amount of spilled blood, or just a few sliced-off pieces of flesh, like some filial son. Who just rips off someone’s leg?!

That was what made it a ghost story, I supposed. Still, my gamble had worked. From here on, it was a matter of value.

I lifted my head and checked the brass scale again.

『The payment is insufficient. Balance the equivalent value.』

The scale’s human-faced figure delivered its low, unpleasant declaration. When I looked up, the silver coin’s pan had risen off the ground.

Barely.

I had put an entire freshly severed human leg on the scale, and it was not even worth one-eighth of that silver coin.

What the hell kind of silver coin had he received?

Since Choi Seongun had not died, I should not have needed to offer enough of my body to kill me. I had picked my leg because I wanted to complete the transaction in as few attempts as possible, but apparently it would not be that easy.

I picked up the metal shard again.

This time, the other leg.

Thunk! Crunch!

“Nngh...!”

My animal-like groan burst through clenched teeth. My flimsy hope that it would hurt less than the first time shattered completely.

At least once I had drawn blood, the scale tore off my leg by itself.

Cutting off your own limbs was insane. It was practically impossible.

My leg, blood spraying from it like a fountain, rose onto the scale again. The red mass of flesh landed with a wet slap, shaking the scale hard.

『The payment is insufficient. Balance the equivalent value.』

Damn scale. Was it actually broken?

My arm went up.

『The payment is insufficient. Balance the equivalent value.』

I felt like I would pass out before I could regenerate, so I put the blade to my ears and fingers.

『The payment is insufficient. Balance the equivalent value.』

My vision blurred. Choi Seongun, directly witnessing a live gore show of human dismemberment right in front of him, had gone beyond sickened and simply frozen.

Sorry. I’m doing this for your sake, so please bear with it.

Had I ended up in this mess because I was always so picky about gory stories?

Once I got out of here, I would consume every gory ghost story I could find. I never wanted to go through this brute-force bullshit again.

“One... just one more...”

I forced my unfocused eyes wide open and raised the blade again. The silver coin’s pan was almost level. Just a little more. Just a tiny bit more mass, and this insanity would be over.

“Ghk... ngh...!”

I carved into my side. It felt as if I had cut out an organ along with the flesh. A shock-induced cough nearly sent my eyeballs down my throat.

At last, the final piece of flesh landed on the scale.

Creeeak.

Screeeech!

The silver coin’s pan rose slowly, seeming to reach level.

『The payment is insufficient. Balance the equivalent value.』

“...What?”

I froze with my bloody hand stretched out.

The balance had broken. My side of the scale tipped down, only slightly more.

“No. No...”

My mind went blank.

I had calculated wrong. Had cutting into an organ while taking the fourth piece of flesh caused this? Or had the ears and fingers made the values fail to match perfectly?

Nothing placed upon the Scales of Equivalent Exchange could ever be removed before the transaction was complete. The transaction could not be canceled, either. There was only addition.

I could not take back the silver coin, nor could I take away any of my flesh.

Amid the vicious pain and spinning dizziness, my mind began racing desperately.

I had to put something more on the silver coin’s side.

The discarded junk around us could not be used as trade goods.

Choi Seongun’s tattered clothes had no value, and aside from the silver coin, he had nothing else.

Then...

If that was the case...

At that moment, Choi Seongun moved first.

“Nggh!!”

With a strange sound like an animal exhaling, Seongun grabbed the metal shard from the floor.

He could not even bite down on an eyeball to dull the pain. There was barely anything left of his body in the first place. His skin had been burned black, closer to charcoal than flesh, and he was missing a leg, an eye, and several fingers.

But though fear and revulsion showed on his face, there was no hesitation.

The shard pressed down on his relatively intact ring finger.

“A promise with them. With this promise, a knot that binds, a k-knot.”

“Mr. Seongun.”

What was he betting right now?

Black blood dripped from his ring finger. It was a spell I had never heard, a ghost story I had never read, a tale I had never registered.

But Choi Seongun seemed to know what he was doing.

Part of his ring finger was carefully cut away.

A red thread appeared above the pan holding the silver coin.

Screeeech.

The pan tipped one way, then the other, swaying back and forth before finally stopping.

The scale settled into perfect balance, without the slightest discrepancy.

The human-faced figure opened its mouth wide and released a tremendous metallic roar.

『A fair transaction has been established. Settlement will now begin.』

An intense light burst from the scale. The flesh and silver coin on either pan broke down into red mist in an instant and scattered. The area turned so red that we could not see each other’s faces.

“Ghh, ngh, aaagh!!!”

A scream came from beyond the mist. The sounds of flesh tearing away and reattaching, of wet pools of blood, of bones breaking, all tangled together.

“Mr. Seongun...”

I did not even have the strength to call for him. It would take time for my body to restore even my hunger and mental state to normal. It would also take a while for the pain and terror etched into my brain to align again with a perfectly healthy body.

Even after the mist faded, we were both sprawled on the ground. From my tilted view, the Scales of Equivalent Exchange, having fulfilled their role and returned to the size of a small toy scale, lay rolling nearby.

I feel like I’m dying, but my body is so healthy that it feels even worse.

The settlement was complete, so I had to collect the item. I reached over and felt around the silver coin’s pan until I found the coin. It was old, cold, and heavier than it looked, engraved with symbols I could not recognize.

Please be worth the lives of two people.

I put away the silver coin and paused to steady my breathing until the dizziness eased.

Then there was one more thing.

“Ugh.”

With a sharp sting, the ring jammed on my finger turned black. It had already been a ring that would not come off, so what function had it gained now...?

No, this is not the time.

“...Mr. Seongun?”

Choi Seongun was still lying there. He was not dead, was he? He could not be.

When I anxiously called his name another few times, Seongun’s body twitched. First his arm moved, then his muscles convulsed and his body jerked.

Soon, his body twisted grotesquely as he pushed himself up like a glitched polygon.

There was a person there.

Instead of the blackened, burned form that had not even been half a body, a person with proper skin and flesh, a body and a head, was moving.

“...Uh... ah...”

The cheek and nape on the side without an eye bore cobweb-like burn scars, and his right hand remained a mangled stump with three fingers missing, but he had a form that could be called human.

From his left thigh down, a black, rippling, formless shadow replaced flesh and bone, taking the shape of a leg.

But it moved.

It looked warped, like it might disperse in smoke at any moment, but the leg moved as though it functioned perfectly. Shock filled Choi Seongun’s eye.

“Ah... Aah...”

Seongun made a strange sound as if he were about to cry. With trembling hands, he felt over his body. The burn scars remained, and one eye was still empty, but his body moved.

He was alive.

After touching his healthy leg and shadow leg in turn, Choi Seongun cautiously put weight on them and slowly stood.

He staggered one step forward.

Squelch.

The sound of a whole, proper footstep rang out over the mud. The red marking that had been fading grew distinct again, indicating the steps he needed to take.

“Ah... It moves...”

Choi Seongun murmured quietly, then covered his own mouth. He looked around, stamped his foot again.

Thump, thump.

“It moves. ...Mr. Jaehyeon, it moves...!”

I had not restored him perfectly, but he cried and laughed as though he had gained the whole world. Then he ran over and pulled me into a tight hug.

“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you...”

The remnants of extreme exhaustion and pain weighed heavily on my whole body, but laughter kept spilling from between my lips like I had gone mad.

“Hah... Haha, see? It seemed insane, but it worked. ...I’m sorry. I couldn’t make it perfect.”

“No, no. Really, it’s more than enough. ...Thank you. I owe you more than my life. Truly...”

Our bodies recovered quickly, but for a while, we simply leaned against each other and gathered our emotions and strength. We could afford that much.

The journey afterward was fairly easy.

Just in case, I fed Choi Seongun a Eyeball That Never Sleeps as well, and we followed the red markings at a decent pace.

Fortunately, adding one person did not add another ten thousand steps. More accurately, it added about five thousand.

When I had walked alone, I kept hearing unpleasant sounds and could barely find the energy to continue. With two of us, it quickly became manageable.

Choi Seongun adapted quickly even to his awkward new leg, following along as he asked about recent news.

“So, how did the World Cup go?”

“The World Cup... ended last year, though?”

“What? What year is it now?”

There was a slight discrepancy.

Choi Seongun remembered it having been one week since he fell into the market, but our seasons did not match. It was early autumn now, while for Seongun, it had been early summer.

Our knowledge of the years when the World Cup and Olympics had been held, the singers behind recent hit songs, and movies all differed a little.

...Could the person I had suffered this much to save be some named NPC from a ghost story?

Maybe it was something like a parallel world. There might be another Earth beyond some ghost story. My hypothesis was that Choi Seongun had fallen from that world into Twilight Market, and that after I rescued him, he was being transferred by a kind of dimensional shift to the Korean Earth where I lived.

“If that’s the case, you won’t be able to return to your family. Are you okay with that?”

Choi Seongun, walking behind me, thought for a moment before nodding.

“It’s obvious that looking for a way back wherever you’re going would be better than finding one from here, Mr. Jaehyeon. Please take me with you. I’ll never be a burden or cause any trouble.”

“...I think I might be able to tell you about somewhere you can get help.”

Thinking of a business card that should be sitting safely on my desk at home, I pulled myself up the ladder. My hand caught the manhole cover, and light poured in.

“...Well, welcome to South Korea.”

We returned outside through a drain beside a convenience store.

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