WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Chen
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈
Chapter 108: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (108)
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#108.
Lately, Onik had been going hunting twice a day, once during the day and once at night.
There were often exceptions, but that was his basic routine.
During the day, he searched the mountains around the village. At night, he rode farther out in Legal Hunter’s car.
The daytime hunts usually took place early in the morning, as the dawn twilight brightened.
Thanks to the frightening boy who ranged widely through the area every morning, or sometimes before dawn, the elderly people of the ever-aging mountain village had been freed from the threat of packs of wild dogs.
Naturally, the village’s fields and paddies were also far less often torn up by wild animals.
Unfortunately, though, there was a limit to how much he could reduce the damage birds caused to greenhouse farms and orchards.
Magpies, the greatest gourmets among pest birds, and their relatives were formidable foes, difficult even for the frightening boy to eradicate.
The winged forces of evil still controlled the skies above the aging village...
Ever since that particularly warm Christmas Eve, Onik had brought Thunderbolt along every time he went on a morning hunt.
Sometimes, while riding along the forest fire access road, he could get a signal, so he would turn on a livestream for a little while.
There were not many live viewers at that hour, but that was exactly why some viewers preferred these early broadcasts.
The fewer people there were, the more chances they had to talk with Onik.
They were especially popular with people who left for work earlier than most.
(The poor night-shift workers who still had not gotten off work at that hour felt the same way.)
These viewers always complained that the short stretch of forest road on private property was too short.
Today, too, Onik was listening to those complaints.
“Shouldn’t they build more forest roads because of the danger of wildfires...? I know. Thinking about what happened the year before last, they really should build more. But it isn’t easy.”
The province where Onik lived had suffered enormous wildfire damage in the recent past.
They said it had been the worst wildfire since the founding of the government. The burned area had reached a full one hundred thousand hectares.
Still, perhaps it was fortunate amid misfortune.
The wind had only blown from west to east, so the flames had not reached the village near where Onik lived.
But that had only been luck.
There was no guarantee that something similar would not happen again around here.
So Onik carried a worry in his heart.
He worried that one day, some immense death he could not stop might swallow the village.
It was a small paradise already being swallowed by time day after day, even if left alone.
The end of that small but precious paradise could be brought much closer by an unexpected disaster.
Whenever Onik thought of that dark possibility, his heart grew very heavy...
Even now, as a shadow fell over his heart, one viewer asked through a Super Chat donation.
「Why isn’t it easy? Isn’t it just because the forest owners object? But isn’t the land around there owned by Onik’s clan association? Is there some other problem?」
Onik nodded atop the gently swaying saddle.
“Yes. There is. The biggest problem is that it costs a huge amount of money.”
After hearing that, the viewers filled the chat with question marks.
They wondered whether the government was not supposed to cover the costs if the forest owners permitted the land to be used.
“The government does pay a lot. But it doesn’t pay for all of it.”
As the only son of the head family, Onik knew enough about such matters. He shook his head.
“Last Chuseok, I heard the elders of the clan association talking. They said forest owners have to pay ten percent of the construction costs.
The elders said it costs around thirty to forty million won per kilometer?”
To build forest fire access roads of sufficient length, forest owners had to bear costs in the hundreds of millions of won.
No wonder people who owned private forests did not actively step forward.
Still, the village around Onik’s home was in much better circumstances than other areas.
That was because old man Jo Jeong-ho, as the senior elder of the clan association, had stubbornly pushed ahead with building the forest roads.
“As far as I know, our clan association spent about three hundred and twenty million won to build this road that everyone says is too short. I think.”
At the mention of three hundred and twenty million won, the viewers filled the chat with messages saying it was insane.
“That’s not all. Once you build a forest road, lots of thieves come in.
They dig up wild greens, ginseng, balloon flower root, and expensive mushrooms like shiitake, reishi, and pine mushrooms.
Some people without a conscience even tear up the ground around ancestral graves. They’re really awful.”
That was why it was best to install CCTV cameras when building forest roads.
If they wanted to install cameras with wildfire-monitoring functions while they were at it, the burden of the costs grew even heavier.
Since it was difficult to connect electricity, solar equipment was also needed.
On top of that, if forest road construction was done poorly, it increased the risk of landslides.
There had been real cases where soil collapses had occurred because of that.
They were the kinds of rural circumstances city people found difficult to understand.
“So what can we do? Even if you’re sad that the morning livestream is short every time, you’ll have to understand.
Um, I’ll step away for a moment... Hey, I’m not going to pee! What kind of person goes to pee this often?
There’s nothing wrong with my bladder! I’ve got the bladder of the Strongest in Town!”
He could not show the viewers scenes of himself hunting. It was illegal.
Whenever he sensed prey while moving along the forest road, Onik would make an excuse such as pruning the branches of newly planted broadleaf trees and step away for a while.
He explained that he brought his bow every time for self-defense, just in case.
Click.
Onik attached a lead rope to the retired racehorse’s tack and tied it around the base of a nearby tree.
Thunderbolt’s bridle had no bit, so it was safe to attach the lead rope.
“Thunderbolt. Wait here, okay?”
Snort.
The thoroughbred, who had received a new name from a new owner, quietly accepted the owner’s hand scratching its mane and withers.
The owner still carried a dreadful presence, as far as the horse could tell...
But Thunderbolt had grown used to him over time and no longer showed fear.
A tracking device had been attached behind the saddle in case of emergencies.
It was the very device Onik had secretly attached to a police car before.
Even if Thunderbolt somehow broke the rope and ran away, the extraordinary boy’s ability to cross rough ground would let him catch the horse quickly.
Though there was no reason for Thunderbolt to run away in the first place.
“...”
Before turning away, the frightening boy needlessly tapped the tracking device, which held memories for him.
‘It reminds me of when I showed Teacher the clock.’
The round wall clock Onik had taken from the break room of the town police substation long ago.
The old commemorative clock, with the name of some police chief whose term of office he did not know printed on its face, had been hung on a wall of the secret base in an abandoned house at one edge of the village. Onik had treasured it there ever since.
Not long ago, he had shown it to Eun-jeong too.
He had invited his precious teacher into the secret base that had always been his space alone.
‘Honestly, I was a little scared. I was afraid the way Teacher looked at me might change...’
When he invited Teacher, Onik did not put away a single one of the treasures in his secret base.
Not the knife made to kill people.
Not the axe that had chopped open a wild boar’s head.
Not the staff sling that hurled a broken leaf spring.
Not even the other objects that could kill living things.
He left all of them on display as they were when he opened the door of the abandoned house.
Compared to those grim displays, the spy camera and Bluetooth recorder he had recovered from the police substation at the beginning of winter were nothing more than junk.
Of course, Onik had been afraid then.
Teacher had treated him even more warmly after hearing the truth of the two killings, but he could not know for certain.
There was not a zero chance that glimpsing fragments of something ominously abnormal in a young killer’s treasure room would change the color of her gaze toward that young killer.
Even so, Onik showed Teacher his secret base exactly as it was.
Because... he wanted to be understood, even a little more.
Lonely because he was frightening, the boy took a risk because of that loneliness.
He firmly believed in the warm promise Teacher had given him on the day he had felt the greatest fear of his life.
「No matter what our Onik has done, there will never be a time when Teacher dislikes you.」
「As long as Onik wants it, Teacher will stay with Onik from now on too. This is a serious promise from Teacher. You believe Teacher, right?」
Teacher told him to believe her, so Onik believed.
And Teacher did not betray Onik’s trust.
#
「So this is it. The clock you secretly took down so you could put the desk-clock camera in its place.」
It was a day when the aging village and the mountains around it lay thick beneath white snow.
Invited into her student’s secret base, the schoolteacher gazed for a long time at the old commemorative clock with a white face and black rim.
Onik watched Teacher’s expression from the corner of his eye, his heart trembling with anxiety.
But he could find no dark or negative emotions in her.
It was the same even when she saw the old Japanese military bayonet, a blade made to kill people.
「Ah... So this knife is the one...」
After hearing its identity and history from Onik, Eun-jeong flinched and her shoulders trembled.
But what came next went beyond Onik’s expectations.
In the quiet stillness, where only the ticking of the second hand could be heard, the schoolteacher stood silently with the well-sharpened blade reflected in her eyes. Then she breathed out a long breath, scattering white vapor.
After that, she asked her student a question.
「Onik.」
「Yes?」
「Could Teacher hold this knife for a moment?」
「Uh... Yes! Go ahead! It’s very sharp, so please be careful not to get hurt!」
「Okay.」
The teacher carefully lifted the single-edged bayonet from the wall with both hands. Then she was slightly startled by the heavy weight of the weapon that had killed people and drunk their blood.
「...It’s heavier than it looks.」
「Is it? It’s around seven hundred grams.」
Compared to modern bayonets, it was nearly twice as long and more than two and a half times as heavy.
If it were just a little longer, it would enter the realm of a proper one-handed sword.
Eun-jeong held the heavy blade in one hand.
It was a grim, single-edged straight sword that did not feel natural in the schoolteacher’s grip, no matter how many times she adjusted her hold.
‘Onik swung this knife? This heavy knife... To avenge Mr. Yohan. And to protect me.
Back then, Onik was much smaller than he is now...’
Through the weight of the knife in her hand, Eun-jeong could add a sharper sense of reality to the scene of that day she had imagined until now.
Was it not natural for someone truly grateful for something to want to understand that thing better?
The teacher clicked the knife back into place and smiled at her student.
「Our Onik really is amazing, all over again.」
「...Yes? Why are you saying that all of a sudden?」
「Even if I had a knife like this, I don’t think I could protect myself.
If a frightening person rushed at me right in front of my eyes, I think I would throw the knife away and be too busy running...
The courage to face someone who has killed people head-on is not given to just anyone.」
「Uh...」
「I’m glad I can get a better sense of the kind of fight Onik went through.
That day, thank you for fighting for Mr. Yohan, for Teacher, and to protect yourself.」
Onik could not fully accept the gratitude his precious teacher gave him again.
Because Onik himself was one of the most frightening people of all.
Even so, the time he spent with Teacher that day remained another warm memory for him.
The kitchen of the abandoned house, dark even during the day.
Sitting side by side before the traditional stove hearth they had lit, teacher and student drank carefully brewed Korean stewartia tea and chatted quietly.
The burning firewood crackled and sometimes snapped sharply, sending sparks into the air.
Within the fire, sticky bubbles of pine resin forced their way through the gaps in the growth rings, making sizzling sounds and soft hissing noises as air escaped.
The flickering firelight, like a wavering sunset, dyed Teacher’s face a different color as the boy gazed up at her from nearby.
The color was different, but the feeling was not.
After opening his treasure room full of secrets to Teacher, the frightening boy felt great relief at the way she still treated him gently.
Through that, the boy, lonely because he was frightening, was accepted by Teacher a little more than before, exactly as he was.
For a boy who always had to struggle to hide his ominous abnormality, it meant a great deal.
The lonely boy dreamed an impossible dream.
That someday, someone would appear who completely understood him and accepted him.
#
“That’s all for today’s morning livestream. Viewers, thank you for being with me. See you again later. Bye.”
The irregular early morning livestream he held alongside hunting ended at the end of the forest road.
Onik smiled brightly and scratched Thunderbolt’s neck.
“All right, shall we run slowly now? Let’s do well today too, without getting hurt, okay?”
Thunderbolt snorted and lightly shook its head.
The final stage of a morning hunt with Thunderbolt was usually riding through mountains with no paths.
Naturally, when he first tried this difficult riding, Onik had not ridden Thunderbolt himself.
Instead, the boy of monstrous strength ran ahead holding the lead rope while the lightened Thunderbolt ran behind him.
The first step in teaching a horse to jump obstacles was desensitization.
As the word implied, it was the process of making sure the horse was not startled by new objects, sounds, or movements in its surroundings.
After desensitization, the second step was to weaken the horse’s instinctive aversion to obstacles.
One exercise involved laying rails across the ground and making the horse step over them.
Another involved setting up a series of low obstacles and making the horse overcome them.
In the latter case, the spacing between obstacles could be adjusted to create variation.
Only after those processes could one move on to proper show jumping.
Onik thought he could complete all that training through mountain riding alone.
If riding instructors heard Onik’s idea, they would be bewildered and try to stop him.
「What kind of reckless thing are you saying, Onik...? Stop doing dangerous things...」
But it was also a plan that premodern Jurchen people would have nodded at.
「You are a boy who knows something. Are your parents perhaps Jurchen?」
For nomadic peoples of the old Manchurian lands, riding through rough wetlands and harsh mountain ranges was as ordinary as daily life.
And this was not only true of nomadic peoples.
The elite cavalry of modern European powers also possessed mobility in mountainous terrain.
A well-bred and well-trained horse could descend a steep slope of around eighty degrees.
It could also clear a drop of more than two meters in a single leap.
In other words, whether there was a path or not was not especially important.
Even the Italian army of World War II, renowned for losing every battle it fought, had cavalrymen skilled enough to cross a low ledge on horseback without difficulty.
It was only that the skill did not help much in battle.
(It was still cool. If you were going to lose anyway, should you not at least look good doing it?)
So Onik’s plan was surprisingly realistic.
If a horse rode through nature as it was, desensitization training would happen automatically.
The calls of mountain birds and the fluttering of wings.
Unfamiliar scents swept in by the rushing wind.
Trees that restricted the horse’s view, and fallen leaves covering the ground.
For a riding horse born and raised in an artificial setting, all of them were unfamiliar and new stimuli.
Its aversion to obstacles would fade in much the same way.
The thick and thin tree roots sticking out along the route could easily take the place of rails laid down by people.
When passing over uneven ground, steep slopes, or streams filled with round pebbles, a horse learned to finely adjust its balance and spring.
They were sensations difficult to acquire by running only on level, even tracks.
There were obstacles to jump over everywhere.
Even without special training, horses could lightly leap from a standstill to around a person’s waist height.
There were only three kinds of horses that could not do that.
Horses that had not fully grown. Horses that were too old. Or, if neither was true, horses with some kind of disability.
So all he had to do was remove the psychological resistance.
Onik spent exactly twenty days on the process.
For twenty days, he ran ahead of Thunderbolt and lightly hopped over every obstacle they met, showing the horse how it was done.
Only then did he begin riding Thunderbolt through the mountains.
Of course, they were still at the stage of walking slowly or carefully trotting.
Thunderbolt had not yet grown used to traveling over difficult terrain and overcoming obstacles while carrying a rider.
It would take at least half a year of effort before they could ride in a convincing way.
Coordination between horse and rider was extremely important in rough terrain.
With every passing day, horse and rider understood each other better.
Onik liked that Thunderbolt responded more and more delicately to the signals he gave.
“That’s it, good job. You’re such a good horse, our Thunderbolt.”
Receiving gentle praise, Thunderbolt made its way down the winding mountainside as the young rider guided it.
Toward the boy rider’s small and precious paradise.
The world of the retired racehorse, which had known only how to run on tracks, grew wider day by day in proportion to the time it spent with the extraordinary boy.
Footnotes:
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