WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

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◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈

Chapter 11: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (11)

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Old Jo Jeong-ho could not refuse his wounded grandson's request.

「I had meant to tell you after you'd grown a little more, but...」

He had kept silent about his son and daughter-in-law because he feared the story would leave a fresh wound in his grandson's heart.

To the old man, his daughter-in-law's death had simply been an unfortunate accident.

The stillbirth of one of his twin grandsons had been the same.

To connect those two deaths to supernatural forces was nothing more than irrationality.

The old man knew well about the nightmare his daughter-in-law had supposedly suffered. His son, who had fallen into strange beliefs, had talked the old man's ear off about it.

But a dream was only a dream.

If dreams could affect reality, the old man should have been swallowed by nightmares and died long ago. The aged veteran had spent more than half his life dreaming of jungles, too many nightmares to count.

He did not know why such an illness of the mind had come upon his upright, intelligent daughter-in-law.

That was not to say he dismissed illnesses of the mind.

Veteran Jo Jeong-ho had seen countless comrades suffer from them.

Those comrades had not been cowards. They had been anything but weak.

An illness of the mind was a deadly, invisible poison, capable of breaking even the strongest soldier. The old man knew that very well.

Still, the illnesses his comrades suffered from had understandable causes.

His daughter-in-law's illness had no such cause.

At least, that was how it appeared to Jo Jeong-ho.

It had only been a single night's nightmare.

His reason simply could not understand how such a deep illness could take root in one nightmare.

So he agonized.

‘How am I supposed to explain something even I, an adult, can't understand to my young grandson?’

His daughter-in-law's illness had been the primary cause that drove his worthless son to abandon his kind child and wander the seas.

And the state of mind that let his son abandon his child for so little a reason was another madness the old man had no confidence he could make his grandson understand.

In the end, all he could offer his grandson was an explanation he himself could not understand.

Do you understand?

You were abandoned for such a ridiculous reason.

Reduced to its essence, it became such a foolish story. How dumbfounded and heartbroken would his grandson be to learn that the circumstances behind his lonely life were such a mess?

Others might see it as a comedy, but to the one living through it, there could be no greater tragedy.

It was a cruel tragedy, a wretched absurdist play.

Even so, the old man thought they had reached a point where he could no longer put off the story.

His kind grandson had begun asking whether it was his own fault.

If he left him in the dark, the good-hearted boy would surely keep looking for the cause within himself.

Facing his grandson, the old man did his best to hide his weariness.

「Your father came and went again, so it would do you more harm to remain unaware now... I'll tell you what happened around the time you were born, and what is wrong with your father that he wanders about while leaving you behind.」

The account of the past that the old man gave his grandson, after opening with those words, had been pared down by the aged veteran's razor-sharp reason. He left only the objective facts and cut away every excess.

Had his comrades heard it, they would have said their sergeant still had not shaken the habit of delivering rigidly formal briefings.

The old man believed this pared-down account would help his grandson.

He had deliberately omitted the superstitious talk of a conception dream about a terrifying star and the terrifying thing conceived from it, seeking to minimize the harm that such obviously absurd beliefs might cause his young grandson's tender mind.

But that was not what happened.

With his sharp mind, Onik inferred even the parts his grandfather had deliberately left unsaid, and his heart grew more unsettled than ever.

‘I really am a strange child, aren't I?’

Onik loved killing living things far too much.

And the more he killed, the more his abilities to kill other things developed in abnormal ways.

‘There really is something wrong with me... isn't there?’

Perhaps his mother really had died because of him.

Perhaps there was something unknowable within Onik, something that had killed his mother and, not content with that, had mercilessly devoured the sibling born alongside him.

Onik had long known there was something abnormal about himself.

That was why the truth his grandfather told him pierced his young heart as sharply as a dagger.

‘It hurts.’

The resentment in the boy's heart toward his father had now lost its way.

He had begun to think the actions of the father who felt like a stranger to him might have been natural.

Having lost the person he could blame, the boy suffered alone for days.

Then whose fault was it?

‘Mine?’

This was a secret anguish he could not even share with his grandfather.

No, it was something he could not discuss with anyone he knew, an agony that belonged to him alone.

After suffering over it for a long while, the boy shook his head.

‘Having something wrong with you and being at fault... aren't those different things?’

The frightening boy had not wanted to be born this way.

To hold him guilty for a tragedy caused by something he had not chosen, something he had been born with despite never wanting it, would be far too unfair and absurd.

That did not mean it could be called his parents' fault, either.

That would be just as unfair.

How could his mother and father have known? How could they have known the child they would bear would be this strange and dangerous?

If it had been a physical illness or disability, they could at least have diagnosed it beforehand with this test or that. But the frightening boy's abnormality was nothing like that.

The boy had simply turned out strange after being born, and his parents had simply found themselves with a dangerous child.

No one was at fault.

Because no one was at fault, the boy could not settle his anguish through the easy act of resenting someone.

#

Onik gazed quietly down at the wild boar he had killed and the piglets frozen to death beside it.

The boy stood motionless as a still life, sealed within a time of his own.

He did not know it himself, but there was something about him that was reminiscent of his father, who had sat like a stranger in the dark room.

The thoughts that followed one another through the boy's mind went on so long that the white steam rising from the spilled organs and flowing blood had already vanished.

Blood had spread widely across the frozen winter ground. Dark red frost was beginning to form around its edges.

The joy and fullness he gained from killing something had faded, and his usual emptiness returned.

At that moment, Onik felt repulsed by himself.

Ever since hearing his grandfather's story, self-loathing had taken root in Onik's heart.

"I wish I'd been born a normal child..."

It was not as though he had never wanted to be normal like other children.

Onik knew the dark desire within him, forever urging him onward, was dangerous. Whenever it turned toward his grandfather, he recoiled inwardly in disgust.

It was true that he secretly dreamed of a future he could not tell anyone about.

But at the same time, he wanted to become someone who could look at his grandfather without any discomfort.

He could not look at the people precious to him with a clear mind, including the grandfather he loved most in the world.

He could not rest easily in their embrace.

And because of that, he sometimes made them feel hurt or worried them.

Those things made young Onik depressed every time.

The practice of distracting his mind whenever he looked at people was becoming more effective by the day.

But it was only a stopgap measure in the end.

That was why the lonely boy had longed for normalcy for so long.

Once, that longing had been no more than a gentle ripple on the pond in his heart.

Now, strengthened by his rejection of himself, it had transformed into an intense desire.

Every deficiency that left him lonely came from his own abnormality. If it were possible, was it not only natural that he would want to cast that abnormality off?

...If that were possible.

‘I can't.’

He had tried to endure.

He had made a fierce resolution, restrained the dark urges that constantly whispered blood-red fantasies, and struggled desperately to become a normal child.

He had even stopped the trivial game of killing ants and endured for seven whole days and nights.

Then the boy realized once again how dangerous it was to do nothing but endure and suppress those dark urges.

During that time, his grandfather had thought his grandson simply wanted to be alone because he was depressed.

He had thought the boy was avoiding people because his heart had been deeply wounded.

He never imagined that the grandson who refused even to attend the school he loved so much and shut himself away in the room across the hall had confined himself because he could not bear to see the possibilities of murder growing stronger each day.

When that difficult endurance reached its seventh day, the boy experienced a moment that made his heart drop.

‘How could I feel this way toward Grandpa...?’

Worried because his grandson kept skipping meals, his grandfather brought home wood-fired pizza and seasoned fried chicken when a market was held some distance away.

Toward this grandfather, Onik felt a deeply blood-red pull.

It was an urge more intense than anything he had ever felt toward anyone other than his grandfather, or even a feral dog.

Shocked, the boy broke the resolution he had made so fiercely.

That was the day he first went out on a nighttime outing.

After spilling blood several times during that nighttime outing, where no one could see him, Onik was able to return to school the very next day.

His grandfather, unaware of the reason, finally worried less.

That was why his grandfather still did not stop Onik's nighttime outings. He believed his grandson simply went out alone to get some air.

Frustrated with himself, Onik thought he was like a vampire.

In a film he had seen, a vampire was a monster that could never let anyone discover what it was, always had to drink blood in secret, and could never be truly understood by anyone until the day it died.

Had it not been for his grandfather, who always treated him with unchanging love, and for Yo-han and his teacher, who cared for him deeply even while dealing with troubles of their own, the lonely and struggling boy might have sunk into a deeper swamp of depression and taken his own life.

Elementary school students could commit suicide, too.

If anything, children could take their own lives with less hesitation than adults because of their young age.

"...Haa."

Onik shook his head.

It seemed he should head back.

The deaths of the piglets, so small they were like lumps of flesh, had touched some switch inside him. Even if he killed more things that night, he would be left with an aftertaste even less satisfying than usual.

The wild boar's carcass would be handled by the feral dogs that came to the scent of blood. Winter was a hungry season not only for wild boars, but for feral dogs as well.

Hungry dogs never let an opportunity like this pass.

「Squelch」

As the boy took a step, a sticky sound came from the sole of his shoe. Blood hardened by the cold had mixed with snow and clung to it.

The lonely boy trudged along the cold, lonely mountain path and returned to his secret base.

Because of the gleam of his bloodstained axe and its dangerous scent, animals that sensed the frightening boy's presence fled in terror from far away.

So the lonely mountain path remained lonely to the very end.

Having returned from the mountain earlier than usual that day, Onik slowly lit a fire in the traditional stove hearth of the abandoned house.

He scooped a great deal of snow into the iron cauldron above it.

The hand pump froze in winter, so he would melt the snow, warm the water, wash his hands and shoes, clean the raincoat spattered with blood, and wipe down the axe.

Had snow not piled up, he would have had to pump water somehow or go through the trouble of fetching it.

Once he had soaked the whetstone, sharpened the axe blade, oiled its newly sharpened edge, and hung it back up, the cleanup was finished.

Then the lonely boy stared blankly at the fire.

He did not leave the traditional stove hearth until the fire had burned through all the firewood and gone out on its own.

Even after leaving his secret base, Onik did not feel like going home. He wandered through the dim village along its sparsely lit dirt roads.

After walking aimlessly for some time, Onik heard two familiar voices raised in an argument.

‘What is this? At this late hour?’

One belonged to the President of the Village Youth Association, and the other to Kim Yo-han.

Nights came early in this remote mountain village. At this hour, both men should have been at home, finishing their day.

It was just as unusual for Yo-han to be angry.

Onik had never heard of Yo-han getting angry at anyone before. His father, Pastor Kim, was just as slow to anger.

Curious, Onik listened in on their conversation.

His hearing was so sharp that he did not need to risk being discovered by getting closer.

"Stop following Eun-jeong-ssi around! How did you even find out her address and go there?! And how did you get her new phone number?!"

"I asked someone who would know, didn't I?"

"Who was that person? Tell me!"

"Why should I tell you that?"

"Because I'm reporting it to the police! It's a personal information leak!"

"Tch, this is what outsiders are like. You're going to report someone to the police just for giving out a home address and phone number? Go ahead and try. You think reporting it will do anything?"

"Ha, your baseless confidence is really impressive! We'll see whether you can stay that calm at the police station!"

"Me? Why would I go to the police station?"

"Don't you know stalking is a crime? Eun-jeong-ssi has already filed a complaint, so the station will be contacting you soon! Reflect on what you've done and prepare yourself!"

"What are you talking about? How is it a crime for a person to follow someone because they like them?"

"This is unbelievable, really..."

"Look who's talking! I'm the one who's dumbfounded! What are you to that woman that you're interrogating me like this? Are you her husband?"

"...We have feelings for each other!"

"So you're not married yet, right? Then what right do you have to come between me and that woman? I've still got a chance too, a chance!"

Having run into a wall of barbarity and shamelessness, Yo-han let out a frustrated groan, unable to form words.

Listening nearby, Onik felt his mood sour as well.

Footnotes:

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