WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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Chapter 450: That Woman S IV

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* * *

What is a human?

To this perilous, cliff-edge question, Sim Ah-ryeon had held her answer for a very long time.

A human meant Sim Ah-ryeon.

Only herself.

-Woof! Woof woof, woooof!

-...

Back when she was younger. Summer vacation.

There was a puppy abandoned by the roadside, its belly caked with dust. Sim Ah-ryeon just felt like it one day, so she picked it up and raised it.

-A, Ah-ryeon.

-Woof!

-Your name is Ah-ryeon...

Sim Ah-ryeon poured everything into that puppy.

No. Even "everything" fell short.

They slept in the same bed.

Since they couldn't eat at the same table, Sim Ah-ryeon set her own bowl on the floor too and crouched down to eat.

On their walks, wherever no one was around, she didn't walk on two legs but crawled on all fours.

She didn't just draw the puppy toward herself. She offered up her own existence to it as an equal.

Plainly, abnormal.

The phrase "raising a pet like a child" is almost always nothing but hyperbole.

But for Sim Ah-ryeon it was no metaphor, nothing of the sort, just a plain, simple fact.

The people around her looked at her like she was insane, but Sim Ah-ryeon didn't care in the slightest. Something else mattered to her back then.

-Th, this is... Love...

Yes. Sim Ah-ryeon was running an experiment.

On what? On what love is.

What feeling did people point to and call affection? What sort of resonance did attachment murmur inside her heart?

Whether she was a being allowed to love. Herself.

-Hmm. I'm not really sure...

-Woof woof woof!

-I heard somewhere that affection comes from deprivation. Come to think of it, our house. It isn't poor at all.

Maybe I'm just too well-off.

So Sim Ah-ryeon murmured.

And that night, after packing her sleeping bag and easel, she ran away from home with a single puppy as her only companion.

It was summer vacation.

Sim Ah-ryeon spread her sleeping bag beside an abandoned grave on a wild hill and lived there. A public restroom nearby let her steal water.

[Middle Schooler Genius Painter!]

[I'll Draw Your Caricature!]

She covered her costs with her drawings.

Sim Ah-ryeon knew her age and her skill made for plenty of advertising appeal, and she drifted between the local park and the riverside park, earning pocket money.

-Wow. You're really good at this!

-Hehehe. Th, thank you...

-But wasn't this supposed to be a portrait? It looks less like a portrait and more like some abstract piece. Really alien-looking.

-Huh? It, it is a portrait, though.

-?

-?

With the money she earned that way, Sim Ah-ryeon bought dog food.

That raising a single life took a fair bit of hard-earned money was something young Sim Ah-ryeon got to learn.

-Woooof!

The hot summer clouds were drifting by.

Even by her own measure, Sim Ah-ryeon prided herself on having tried about as much as she possibly could.

Whether it was love, she didn't know.

But at the very least, it was certain that she treasured the puppy before her more than any living thing she had met from birth until now.

On the last day of summer vacation.

When Sim Ah-ryeon came back to the tent, she found the puppy dying.

-Whine, whee...

It had probably been hit by a car passing along the mountain road.

The puppy simply loved every sound humans made. Whether a ringtone spilling from a phone, the footsteps of a person, or the gray snorting noise a car left behind, the foolish thing would yip and yelp and dash out as if it were a meaty rib bone.

But this place was dark, and the puppy was so very small, small enough to be hard to spot both before and after being hit...

Maybe, no probably, no surely, that whole chain of cause and effect drew itself in Sim Ah-ryeon's head the moment she saw the dying puppy.

What did Sim Ah-ryeon do then?

Did she resent it?

Did she blame the careless driver?

Why didn't you see the puppy, why didn't you find it even after hitting it, why didn't you rush it straight to a hospital, did you maybe find it and pass it by on purpose because hauling it that far was a bother and a nuisance, or did you perhaps hit it on purpose from the start? Did she hate them like that?

Did she blame herself?

Did she think she should have come back a little earlier, that if she had she could have saved it?

Did she reflect that she should have raised the puppy more strictly, that she should have made it wary of the world, that the world is not a place that is always only beautiful, that she should have taught it the world turns ruthlessly cruel and cold the instant you least expect it?

Did she wail?

Did she hold the puppy and say she was sorry, that she was wrong to leave it alone, no that she should never have brought it out of the house like this in the first place, or, further back still, that someone like her should never have picked it up at all? Did she regret it like that?

-...

In that moment Sim Ah-ryeon was observing her own heart in the finest possible detail.

Am I sad? What exactly is sadness? What density, what rhythm, what hue does the feeling I call sadness possess?

What is the loss of affection?

What is death.

-...

Obsessively.

Sim Ah-ryeon controlled her own madness for the sake of madness. She watched the pet die, taking enough time for the puppy's death to settle into her heart.

-Mmm.

Sim Ah-ryeon pressed a hand to her chest.

-Sadness... Sadness, sadness.

Sim Ah-ryeon buried the puppy in that abandoned grave where she had slept beside her pet all vacation.

School started up again.

This girl of few words, whom the teachers had once welcomed with delight as a genius enrollee but came to call "a truly strange child" as the days passed, until they shied away from getting involved with her at all, drew on the same single subject the whole new semester.

A drawing of a puppy.

-Sadness, sadness, sadness...

Her classmates had to fight hard not to look at that detestable girl's drawings.

But the more one loved art, the more impossible it was not to look, and among the children who finally steeled themselves to look, a few snapped their brushes in half.

-Ah-ryeon, you...

-Y, yes?

-You, how do you draw so well?

One of her classmates asked.

It was a question that took enormous courage. The trembling lips. Even the tightly clenched fist couldn't fully measure the total sum of that courage.

'Courage?'

Sim Ah-ryeon looked at her classmate with level eyes, but with her head tilted at a slant.

'Jealousy? Jealousy. Jealousy. Hope. Friendship.'

So Sim Ah-ryeon told her. About the kind of summer vacation she had spent.

-Get out here! You crazy bastard, get out here!

A week later, the classmate's parent stormed into the school and threw a fit.

Apparently their daughter had tried to kill a cat behind their backs, failed, and was sobbing her eyes out.

-Some lunatic told my daughter you have to kill a cat to make art! What crazy bastard said that to my girl!

Not really. Sim Ah-ryeon had never said "to make art you need the death of a pet."

The word art itself was still far too distant for Sim Ah-ryeon. The girl had only explained how the color called "sadness" came to be on her palette.

'Anger. Anger... Worry. Sadness.'

Still, that parent's reaction was interesting.

While the teachers stood flustered, unsure what to do, Sim Ah-ryeon stepped up to the parent with quick little strides.

-That lunatic, right now...! And who the hell are you?

-I, I'm the one who thaid it.

-What?

-Ah. I bit my tongue. Um, so. I'm the one who told Ye-eun... The cat. To stop clinging to that worthless thing and just kill it.

-...

-That an artist grows by how far they can sacrifice themselves for the sake of art. So, simply, starting with the cat...

Screams burst out around them.

Sim Ah-ryeon collapsed onto the hallway floor, and ah, so this is what it feels like to get slapped really hard across the cheek, she thought dazedly.

-Ye-eun's mother! You can't! You mustn't!

The next day.

Rumors about Sim Ah-ryeon spread all through the school. A devil who killed her own pet dog for the sake of art. A lunatic no one could ever associate with, who had even egged a friend on to kill her pet cat.

'Jealousy. Malice. Justice.'

Sim Ah-ryeon found it fascinating.

'Human emotion.'

It was endlessly fascinating, this act of peering into her own heart and watching those surging waves.

'My emotion.'

Each time a semester repeated and vacation came around, Sim Ah-ryeon experimented with one of her feelings at a time.

'Beautiful...'

The language of the world's people meant nothing to her either way.

'So pretty...'

The anger they shouted about was not Sim Ah-ryeon's own anger.

The friendship and reputation they said they shared. That was not the nourishment Sim Ah-ryeon's life required.

The overseas trips they said they wanted to take. That was not the journey Sim Ah-ryeon longed for.

'Could blue ever be prettier than the sky?'

Her journey had no map.

It was an amusing thing. Even in this present age, when humanity had explored every remote and polar region, emotion alone remained dark.

'Could green ever be more beautiful than the tender flesh of a leaf just sprouted in late spring...?'

She busied herself diving only into her own feelings. Into the sea of emotion so vast its shape could not even be traced.

The sea she set out on for her journeys was never abroad but always an inner sea.

Winter vacation ended.

Summer vacation ended.

Winter vacation ended.

Summer vacation ended.

No longer could the young girl find anyone around her who drew better than she did.

-Th, this is so pretty.

The girl spoke with joy.

-Look. Isn't it so. So, so pretty?

But no one answered her.

The one classmate who at least used to speak to Sim Ah-ryeon now and then had already transferred schools a few semesters ago, hadn't she.

-...Ah.

Sim Ah-ryeon was a species that existed on this earth in a population of exactly one, a kind that had split off from humankind, holding a moral system that could not commune with present-day humanity.

-...Mm, well. Whatever. Hehehe.

People found her revolting. Because they regarded her as the same species, they lamented that someone of the same kind as them could be like that.

It was a strange thing.

If she had simply been a different species altogether, a puppy could be pretty and a cat could be pretty. Even a beetle turned beautiful with ease.

Calling a fellow human beautiful, that alone seemed to require some special condition.

-So pretty...

To Sim Ah-ryeon alone, so many things, far too many things, were beautiful.

That was her solitude.

* * *

From the very first moment she met the Undertaker.

Sim Ah-ryeon always found him fascinating and fun.

"Wow! A sea made of human!"

"...?"

"No. Mm. A, a sea pretending to be human? An acting sea?"

"...I have no idea what you're talking about."

The Undertaker himself brushed it off, as if he couldn't understand a word she said.

But the truth was, Sim Ah-ryeon knew.

That he understood, down to the last detail, exactly what she had meant.

'Twitch twitch!'

Of course, she could see so vividly just what emotion the Undertaker before her was feeling.

'Twitch twitch. So cute... Twitch twitch.'

The Undertaker was a truly interesting being.

First, that every time she looked at him he was holding back the urge to kill himself on the spot.

'Suicidal impulse... mm. But patience? It feels a little different from that too. There's patience, sure. But more than that it's... giving up?'

It was strange.

'Giving up on life is something that happens often.'

'But giving up on suicide? Are there cases of that too? Isn't suicide supposed to be the final hurdle people see it as?'

'Giving up on life is easy. Because you can know about life. Because you've experienced it.'

'But... you've never experienced suicide, have you. Usually. The sensible thing is not to give up on suicide but to renounce it. For most.'

'How do you know suicide? How can you truly wish to die and at the same time look down on suicide?'

'Fascinating...!'

After that the Undertaker grandly recited some project or other about developing her ability, but it was none of Sim Ah-ryeon's concern.

The project even ultimately amounted to nailing Sim Ah-ryeon herself to a cross and turning her into a Miko[1] to soak up people's hatred, yet this too was none of her concern.

'He's suffering...!'

The Undertaker's inner feelings, as he explained that project calmly with an endlessly calm face, were the real prize.

Those emotions were, to Sim Ah-ryeon, like treasure twinkling brightly in some shipwreck.

'Why? Why is he suffering? A pang of conscience?'

'Hypocrisy? Mm, but. For hypocrisy the pain is far too distinct! Whoa. Suicidal impulse. Red. Black. Blue. Pretty...'

'He's in so much pain. He's suffocating. So why does he drop me into hell with such a perfectly unbothered face?'

'Why?' 'Why?' 'Why?' 'Why?' 'Why?' 'Why?'

Struck by a baptism of emotions verging on outright violence, Sim Ah-ryeon could barely keep her wits about her.

It was rapturous.

'The suicidal impulse, I've eaten that many times. It's a delicacy, but. Mmm. The worse the suicidal impulse, the more a person's other emotions fade, until in the end the colors all wash out... And the flavor turns the same.'

'Drenched in MSG.'[2]

'But.'

Awake or asleep, Sim Ah-ryeon hovered around the Undertaker. Go away, you're a nuisance, the Undertaker kept trying to drive her off, but Sim Ah-ryeon clung to him with indomitable will.

'[This] is different...'

There was nothing to be done. She had learned that this kind of "flavor" truly existed in the world. She could never go back to the past where she hadn't known it.

'The suicidal impulse runs th, this deep. And yet. Even the other emotions are vividly alive!'

'Mmm... Not just alive. Strong. Intense. Powerful.'

Even just watching the Undertaker chat for a moment with a passerby on the street, or talk with a colleague, it came through without a single blemish.

Affection. Friendship. Mercy.

Whatever name you put on those feelings, the Undertaker was digesting his emotions ten, twenty times more clearly than ordinary people.

'He cherishes people.'

And yet.

'He deceives people.'

'He wants to die.'

'And yet he lives.'

'He cherishes... me.'

'And yet he torments me.'

A person.

There was no way a person could endure this imbalance.

It was impossible!

The seismic design of the human psyche was simply not sturdy enough to withstand a dissonance worsened to this degree.

But it actually existed.

Total magic! A miracle!

"Haaa, hoooo... Hk, haaa..."

"...Ah-ryeon, you're burying your nose in my back and drooling all over me right now. Could I get an explanation for the reason behind that behavior?"

"Hehehe."

Sim Ah-ryeon was happy.

So she sank into an even happier fantasy.

'What if, what if. What if... Mm. If I took on every torture and every hardship for the Guild Leader's sake...'

'Would the Guild Leader suffer even more than he does now?'

A hundred percent.

She was certain he would.

It was a thing truly hard for Sim Ah-ryeon to understand, but this man treated even her as a "precious human."

He didn't just say it. Out loud he actually treated Sim Ah-ryeon like some lab rat for living experiments, like a tool.

'I want to try it!'

Sim Ah-ryeon's heart raced.

'I want to try it! I want to try it! I want to try it, I want to try it!'

'Let me leave the Guild Leader's side entirely for a few years! Yeah. Because, hoo-ah. That way the Guild Leader will even feel guilt for having neglected me...!'

'Thump thump. Thump thump.'

A time of endurance.

In all her life so far, Sim Ah-ryeon had never put up with anything. If she wanted to try something, she did it right away.

This decision had nothing to do with patience either.

From Sim Ah-ryeon's standpoint, the decision to "wait a few years and taste the delicacy" was no more than carrying it out "right away."

And so, at last.

After several years had passed, the Undertaker came to find her and treated her to a meal.

But the dishes the Undertaker made for her were appetizers at best.

The dish she truly wanted to sample was sitting in the chair across the table.

"Ah-ryeon."

"Y, yes?"

"Why does your healing ability recover properly only when you meet me?"

Sim Ah-ryeon grinned wide.

She had been waiting for this very meal.

So she could tell him smoothly, without her words stumbling much.

"Honestly, the Ten Legs too, if you'd given it your, your full effort, you could have subjugated it alone, couldn't you, Guild Leader?"

A flinch.

At her own words, the Undertaker's emotions began to surge.

"The Meteor Shower too... But you deliberately let other people do the subjugating. Mm, there were victims, you see. After all. People who died too."

With narrowed eyes Sim Ah-ryeon traced that pulse without missing a beat. Lapped it down and drank.

Like scraping out the ice cream left at the bottom of a tub. She jabbed a spoon made of language deep into the Undertaker's heart.

"In other words... It's no different from the Guild Leader killing them yourself. The truth is."

In that moment.

The waves that had begun to rise in the sea finally surged into a raging current. A tsunami.

Emotions in all sorts of vivid colors spread out.

It was beautiful.

It was pretty.

Sim Ah-ryeon couldn't hold back.

So she drove the spoon in deeper.

"Murderer."

"..."

Black.

"Traitor."

"..."

Red.

"Slaughterer."

"..."

Blue.

"Liar."

"..."

The Undertaker's heart was soft.

To other people it might feel as hard as frozen ice cream, but to Sim Ah-ryeon at least it was always a dish ripened to just the right deliciousness.

Goodness, how could anyone fail to recognize this? Because they lacked the ability? Truly, she thought, she was a blessed and chosen gourmet.

"People often call me those things. But, in truth, I don't think they're words that suit me much... I think. Because."

"..."

"Because those are all... All of them are titles for the Guild Leader's sake, aren't they?"

"..."

"Isn't that right, Guild Leader?"

Silence settled in.

Then suddenly, a trickle.

Without a sound, a tear ran down the Undertaker's cheek.

"...!!"

Sim Ah-ryeon shot to her feet. Crash, bang, clatter! Because the motion was far too clumsy for a human, the chair toppled over, and Sim Ah-ryeon's legs went over with it.

But Sim Ah-ryeon didn't groan. As if even the time to groan were too precious, she got right back up and went to the Undertaker.

And she took the Undertaker's face in both hands. The tear that had run down his jawline now pooled along the creases of her fingers.

Sim Ah-ryeon flinched, startled, and drew back her left hand. Then she frantically licked the Undertaker's tear gathered shallowly in her palm.

"...!"

Inside her head.

"...!! ...!!"

Gunpowder went off, pop pop pop.

'I want to die. Suicide. Impossible. Giving up. Challenge. Renouncing. Despair. Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I want to die. Disgrace. Shame. Self-blame. Guilt. Relief. Pride. Love.'

In a flash, the tear in her palm ran dry.

'More.'

Where did it go? Where is it?

'More.'

Sim Ah-ryeon forgot even to breathe. She only searched for the source where she could taste this tear, this paint, this fireworks display.

So she licked. His cheek. Even catching it in her palm to drink felt like a waste, so she just sucked down the flowing tears as fast as they flowed.

'More. More. More. More. More.'

The heart, the head, no the very existence of the human called Sim Ah-ryeon writhed in rapture.

'More from here.'

To do that?

'Ah!'

Only then did Sim Ah-ryeon shudder as if struck by lightning. She understood.

Until now she had never been able to grasp why on earth mixing tongue with tongue became "an expression of affection."

It seemed too cliché.

But no. It was, if anything, exact. Because rather than catching and drinking tears, pressing lips together was a far, far deeper way to draw close.

It seemed humanity up to now hadn't been complete fools after all.

So Sim Ah-ryeon kissed him.

"...!!"

Pop. Pop pop, pop... paaa...

Before her eyes, things burst into every shade and color.

'What is this? Guild Leader? What is this feeling?'

It was a delicacy.

'What is it, what is it, what is it? What is it?'

Sim Ah-ryeon didn't stop the kiss. She didn't stop thinking either. The former was easy and the latter was not.

Because it was a feeling Sim Ah-ryeon was truly tasting for the first time.

She couldn't put a name to it. No. She wondered whether she might be the first human ever to experience a feeling like this.

'Sorry. Sorry. Joy. Love?'

She wanted to find out. With a heart far stronger, beyond any comparison, than the one she'd had that summer she choked the puppy's throat.

'Love. Love, love, love? Love?'

Sim Ah-ryeon was clever.

'Ah.'

So even as she went on kissing the Undertaker, she could tell.

'This. Maybe.'

'Maybe it isn't the Guild Leader's emotion...?'

Sim Ah-ryeon listened closely to the sound of her own heart. Her eardrums had already gone numb, but luckily the vibration in her chest could be felt through another path as well.

'My emotion?'

Sim Ah-ryeon stopped the kiss for a moment and stared at the Undertaker's face right up close.

The pounding didn't stop.

'Love?'

To Sim Ah-ryeon, the man before her, only the man before her, was so very beautiful.

'Love.'

That was her love.

Footnotes:

[1] Miko is a Japanese shrine maiden; the line uses that Japanese-flavored otaku register rather than a plain priestess term. Here it means a priestess set up to take on the public's hatred and curses.

[2] MSG (monosodium glutamate) is widely used in Korean internet slang as shorthand for something cheap, artificial, and one-note in flavor; here it describes how a suicidal person's other emotions "all wash out" into the same dull, oversalted taste.

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