WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Chen
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈
Chapter 116: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (116)
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The fresh-faced middle schooler's joke shattered the lingering awkwardness.
The dark high school boy bristled at the joke, but he was not so oblivious that he failed to realize the cheerfulness was meant to put him at ease.
Even now, Onik's eyes were red, and he was sniffling quietly.
Surely this cheerfulness Onik showed was something he had put on.
Ju-won pouted and grumbled.
“You little punk. Your hyung went through all that trouble worrying about you and looking for you...”
“Really? Hyung was such a nice person?”
“...Why are you doing this to me?”
“Hehe.”
“You're laughing?”
“I like nice hyungs. Please keep being a nice hyung.”
“...”
Ju-won had no choice but to shut his mouth.
It was as if Onik had looked straight into the somewhat embarrassing wish Ju-won had just been turning over in his mind and struck right at it.
At least the awkwardness was gone for the high schooler who had been caught off guard.
Ju-won scratched the back of his head for no reason and jerked his chin at Onik.
“Hey. Aren't you cold dressed like that? You should keep yourself warm at times like this.”
Onik had spread his coat over a rock to make a place to sit, so now he was taking the soft wind blowing from the depths of the winter valley in nothing but a thin layer of clothing.
With him sniffling sadly, he looked even colder.
But anyone with a sharp eye would have found something strange about him.
The strongest middle schooler in town did not have frozen hands. Even as the wind shook his sleeves, he did not shiver or hunch his shoulders.
His cheeks had not gone pale with cold either.
Onik calmly shook his head.
“It’s fine. The strongest in town, Jo Onik, is impervious to heat and cold. Though I haven’t reached the level of being impervious to water and fire yet.”
Sera, sitting beside him, made a confused face.
“Impervious to heat and cold? Didn't you say you weren't before?”
“My inner energy has deepened, so now I am. More importantly, you've been studying? You know what impervious to heat and cold means.”
“Well, our Onik told me to.”
“Ah.”
“Hehe. I'll do anything Onik tells me to.”
They were trading jokes now, but when Onik had first taken off his coat to make a seat, Sera had urgently tried to stop him.
She said he would catch a cold.
Then, dressed more lightly, Onik had shown off his remarkable yang inner energy(?).
Partly to hide the sadness that had made Sera come looking for him.
The proof had been simple.
“Noona. Shall I show you a magic trick?”
“Magic? All of a sudden? What kind of magic?”
“Watch closely. It'll probably seem really amazing the first time you see it.”
Having stirred the idol's curiosity, Onik scooped up a handful of nearby snow.
Snow so coldly frozen that it crunched in his hand.
Then he pressed both hands together around it and rubbed them back and forth.
Sera soon realized something was odd.
“...Huh?”
The snow was melting far too quickly.
An abnormal number of droplets fell in quick succession.
Ordinary people could not melt snow like this. The surface of their skin would quickly grow cold.
“Here, I'll do it again.”
With the valley wind softly blowing, Onik repeated the same thing several times.
Normally, even someone with very warm hands would have groaned that their hands were freezing and hurting.
After doing this, Onik raised his wet hands before Sera's eyes.
“Ta-da! Steaming hands! Look at all that steam!”
“Wow...”
His hands had been giving off steam from the beginning.
But when he spread them wide for her to see, the amount of vapor billowing up suddenly increased.
Even amid the mountain wind that howled through a cold snap with a wind chill of minus twelve degrees Celsius, Onik's hands remained at their usual temperature.
The difference between the cold, dry winter wind and the extraordinary boy's hands was more than forty degrees.
So it did not take long for all the moisture to evaporate.
Once steam no longer rose from them, Onik held out his hands to Sera.
“Noona. Hold my hands and check! Are they cold, or warm?”
“Huh? Your hands? Ah, okay.”
Distracted for a moment by the fascinating sight, Sera obediently took off her mittens.
Then, as the boy asked, she carefully wrapped her hands around his.
What she felt was surprise.
“They're... warm?”
“Right? This proves that General Winter is beneath the strongest in town, Jo Onik.
That means everyone defeated by General Winter is beneath me too. Including the great Napoleon!
That Corsican was only a loser from an age when Jo Onik did not exist!”
“...”
“I really am fine! I’m not cold at all! So you don’t need to worry about me!”
At those cheerful words, Sera blinked several times before forming a sorrowful smile.
“...But your heart isn’t fine.”
Onik pressed his lips together.
Still holding the boy's hand as he tried to casually look away, Sera spoke softly and sincerely.
“You don't have to pretend to be fine in front of noona.
I know you don't want to make me or other people worry, Onik, but noona still wants to worry about you.
I don't like seeing you try so hard to hide your sadness...”
“Um...”
The smile slowly faded from the boy's lips as he struggled to seem bright.
It had been an effort that could never have worked from the beginning.
Even if he hid his sadness, he could not hide his bloodshot eyes.
With a soft sigh, the boy pointed to the coat he had spread out.
“Shall we sit down first? If we sit here, the rocks around us keep some of the wind away...
I really don't feel the cold, so don't worry about that.”
After that, until Ju-won arrived, the two had not exchanged much conversation.
Sometimes, silence shared together was better comfort than conversation.
But Ju-won was not yet close enough to Onik to share that kind of silence.
And now that there were three of them instead of two, the silence had become somewhat uncomfortable.
So the concern and comfort of the reformed tsundere high schooler had to take the form of clumsy words.
“Hey. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. I told you I don’t feel the cold.”
“No, that too, but... Don't change the subject. You know perfectly well what I’m asking about.”
“I don’t know.”
“Quit lying. Are you really still lying at a time like this?”
“It’s not a lie. Onik really doesn't know. He doesn't know anything.”
“...You little punk.”
Onik shamelessly looked away and denied his sadness, while Ju-won's brow furrowed.
Seeing the two of them, Sera let out another small laugh.
The high schooler’s cheeks reddened at the pretty idol's laughter, and he asked more directly.
Standing on the ice where he could face the kind rural boy, he tapped the hard white surface with the tip of his shoe.
“I mean those two people. The elder who moved to the nursing home, and the elder who passed away last night.”
“...”
“Were they especially close to you, compared with the other elderly people in the village or something?”
The tsundere high schooler lacked delicacy.
He had not lived in an environment that would let him develop it, and naturally, he had never had the chance.
He also had little experience talking with a real friend, so much of the context was missing from his question.
Perhaps his Korean ability, which had barely squeaked into Grade 2, was partly to blame as well.
Still, everyone here understood the context.
Onik, the person concerned, slowly shook his head.
“...No.”
“No?”
“I know what you want to ask... But it isn't like that.
I didn't think of them as especially important compared with the other elderly people.”
“Uh, but you’re still... this sad?”
“They’re all precious to me. All the elderly people who have been in this village since I was little.
Though there are people even more precious to me, like Master Bowyer.”
“...Wow.”
Ju-won let out an exclamation without realizing it.
Sera had been giving him a sidelong look because his words and manner were so lacking in delicacy, but the tsundere high schooler had no time to notice.
‘What is Jo Onik, seriously? How can someone like this exist?’
From Ju-won's perspective, as someone who thought he might not shed tears even if his parents died today, Onik's goodness and tenderness lay beyond anything he could understand.
Sometimes, the world held things that were all the more captivating because they could not be understood.
To Ju-won, Onik's goodness and tenderness were exactly that.
They were a beauty he could not help but be captivated by, and a character he could not help but admire.
Onik sighed and continued.
“Whenever someone leaves this village or dies... Whenever another empty house appears, I feel so sad.
It feels as though cracks split through the world I live in and holes open up in it.”
“...”
“I want to protect this village. I want to keep living here forever.
With Grandpa. With the people precious to me. With all the elderly people who are here now...”
“...Ha.”
“But it’s impossible. It’s a dream that can’t come true, a story with an ending already decided.
I already know how this story will end. I’ve known for a long time...”
“Uh... W-well, that can’t be helped... The elderly people are all getting older.”
“That’s right. It can’t be helped. Everyone is getting older. Even at this very moment, they’re growing older.
I can’t stop time from killing people...”
For a moment, Ju-won wondered whether he had said something wrong.
Onik was smiling.
It was a sad smile filled with a grief that did not suit his age.
“I know that, but I try not to think about it normally.
I try to stop what I cannot stop, and protect what I cannot protect.
It makes me happy. It lets me cover reality with a dream for a while.”
As could be expected of a middle schooler who read far more than the tsundere high schooler with a Grade 2 Korean score, Onik's words were deeply suggestive.
Yet they were as intuitive as they were suggestive.
The boy Jo Onik was a little Don Quixote in an aging village.
Ju-won unconsciously held his breath.
“Even if new residents move into the village, they can't replace the people who used to live here.
If an old empty house is fixed up into a new house, the house that stood there before is left behind as only a memory...
It’s like that for me, but even more so for Grandpa. That’s why it’s such a big problem. Grandpa’s world is becoming empty too...”
The lonely boy's listless lament.
“I think that if I work hard, I might be able to stop this village from disappearing.
But the village that remains that way won’t be the village I know now. It won’t be the village Grandpa knows either.”
And the final end of the village the lonely boy wanted to protect would be parting with his grandfather.
‘...When Grandpa leaves this world, the village I want to live in will end there.’
Onik knew.
When that day came, he would never be able to endure life in this village.
Everything that made up the village would stir his longing for Grandpa...
Whenever an elderly villager died, it shattered Onik's daydreams.
And made him think of his grandfather's death.
He could not help it. His grandfather, too, would someday be killed by time.
‘Even if Grandpa lives to be a hundred, it won't be enough for me. Even if he lives to be a hundred and twenty, it still won't be enough. I wish he would stay alive until the day I die.’
But that could never happen.
Onik did not want to give words to the parting that would certainly arrive someday.
He could not bear to.
‘It hurts this much just to think about it.’
In truth, Onik's grandfather understood this feeling of his grandson's to some extent.
How could he not?
Whenever one elderly person left or died in the aging village, his grandson became visibly dispirited and depressed.
At those times, Onik would furtively watch his beloved grandfather's mood as well.
How could the old man not find the sight of his grandson painful?
That was why Jo Jeong-ho wanted to send his grandson to Seoul all the more.
The more farewells his grandson accumulated with the elderly people who had cared for him, the more depression would fill his daily life.
It would pile up and pile up until one day, his depressed hours became longer than his hours without depression.
A day would come when the village gave his grandson more sadness and helplessness than joy.
That dark day would surely arrive.
So before it happened, before it became too late, the old man wanted his grandson to go to Seoul and build a new life in a new environment.
He wanted his grandson to move toward a brighter future.
He wanted him to begin reducing, as early as possible, the place this village and Jo Jeong-ho himself held in his heart...
It was not as if Onik did not understand his grandfather's feelings.
“In the end, I’ll leave this village and live somewhere else. Grandpa wants me to do that too.
I hope that day never comes, but what can I do? Like I said, it’s something I can’t stop.”
Perhaps that hated moment was closer than he thought.
It was as though the flow of time, which no one could defy, the absolute law of this world, was telling the boy:
You must leave this village.
It has been decided.
That is your fate.
“Still, until then, I’ll do my best to protect the village while I live here. Even if days like today, when I wake from the dream, become more and more frequent.”
The tsundere high schooler hesitated before asking.
“Why?”
Onik smiled as he answered.
“Because it’s a dream I can only dream now, happiness I can only feel now, and memories I can only make now.
Because I need to leave this precious village, this time that will never return... as memories that are at least a little more meaningful and beautiful.”
“...”
“A person who does not dream because they are afraid of waking up is the same as a person who does not live because they are afraid of dying.
At least, that’s what I think. We have to do our best in the moments we are given, even if the end has already been decided.”
“You...”
“You just shouldn’t completely forget that this is only a temporary dream.
Then, when you can no longer have this dream, the shock won’t be too great. That’s enough.”
Onik finished speaking and smiled brightly through his red eyes.
Ju-won thought Onik was truly dazzling.
Sniff.
A quiet sob came from beside Onik.
Onik gave an awkward smile.
“Oh, come on. Why are you crying, noona?”
The kind boy reached out and wiped the tears from the much older noona's eyes.
They looked like affectionate siblings comforting each other through hardship, and Ju-won once again felt both his greater and lesser jealousies at once.
But more than jealousy, he felt sympathy for the lovely sadness of the rural boy whose heart was empty.
“Sniff.”
In the end, Ju-won sniffled too.
Like the tsundere he was, he struggled desperately not to cry, but it was truly hard to keep his blinking eyes from spilling tears.
Seeing Ju-won like this, Onik looked even more troubled.
“Oh, come on... What am I supposed to do if hyung starts crying too?”
“Crying? Who is? I’m not crying yet.”
“Your voice is shaking, so that isn’t very convincing...”
“It’s just your imagination. It’s because the wind is blowing.”
“Okay... Let’s say that’s true...”
“If that’s true, then it’s true. What do you mean, ‘let’s say it’s true’? You always have to add one more annoying thing.”
“Yes, yes. Jo Onik was wrong.”
The rural boy shook his head and stood up with a “Tch!”
Then he stretched his arms and legs in an obviously unnatural stretch, pretending to be lively as he turned to face his hyung and noona.
“Since we came all the way here, let’s make a short video before we go! Hyung and noona, film it together! We’ll use whichever one turns out better!”
Ju-won looked dumbfounded.
“You’re still looking for a chance to make content in a situation like this?”
“Because it’s a situation like this, I have to work harder! This is part of protecting the village too!”
“...What are you talking about?”
Onik, with red-rimmed eyes, only grinned once and mimed filming with his hand.
If the dark high school boy had done it, people would have cursed him for being creepy. But when the pale, fresh-faced middle schooler did it, it somehow looked cute...
‘Damn it. What am I thinking?’
Grumbling inwardly, Ju-won took out his phone and turned on the camera.
Sera was already filming.
Just as expected of someone who had said she would do anything Onik told her to do.
Seeing her now, she strangely looked like a fan holding a camera up to their favorite celebrity.
Ju-won asked Onik.
“So, what are you going to do?”
Onik answered as if he were judging something beneath the ice.
“Do you know ice-striking fishing?”
“Ice-striking fishing? What’s that?”
“As expected, weak city people don’t know... Ice-striking fishing means catching fish by striking a rock with a bang!”
“...? How do you catch fish by striking a rock?”
“You make a huge noise and stun the fish.
Sound hits harder underwater than it does in the air. The speed of sound itself is faster.”
“What do you mean, the speed of sound is faster? Sound moves at a different speed underwater?”
“...Hyung, you really need to study.”
“What are you even saying...”
“Anyway, usually you strike a partly submerged rock with a sledgehammer to stun the fish...
But when the ice is thick like it is now, you can just hit the ice hard. Then the fish float up and drift beneath the ice.”
“But we don’t have a sledgehammer now. What are you going to break the ice with? Ah, I guess you can just pick up a rock or something?”
“No?”
“Huh?”
“I’m the strongest in town, Jo Onik. So I’m just going to do this.”
“What do you mean, do this... Hey! Wait!”
Ju-won had been puzzled for a moment, then he saw what his younger friend was doing and was horrified.
Onik had rolled up his sleeves and clenched his fist.
“Hey, hey, hey! Are you crazy? You’ll get hurt!”
Sera was frightened too.
“Onik? Isn't this too much? That ice looks really thick...!”
Onik let out an “Ah, honestly” and smiled again.
Then he answered not with words, but with a shout and action.
“Yah!”
The boy jumped lightly in place, then drove down his fist with all his strength and body weight behind it.
Immediately afterward, his fist flashed down with terrifying force and shattered the ice with a deafening crash.
“Bang!”
Sera's scream was buried beneath the sound of breaking ice and splashing water.
So was the gasp from the dark tsundere high schooler.
The camera shook once. The vibration beneath Ju-won's feet traveled up his legs and into the hand holding it.
Then droplets fell in quick succession.
The spray that had shot sharply upward as the ice broke came down under the sunlight, creating a tiny rainbow for a brief moment.
“Wow... That’s incredible...”
Ju-won could not close his mouth.
“Crazy. That’s seriously crazy...”
Once he saw the cross section of ice Onik had broken, “crazy” was the only word that came out.
Several white cracks had shot out in every direction from the place Onik's fist had struck.
It was a terrifying mark, as if he had struck it with an iron mace instead of a fist.
Sera stood frozen with both hands over her mouth.
Meanwhile, Onik alone remained calm as he thrust his arm into the hole he had made.
Lying on his side over the ice and reaching in nearly to his shoulder, he was seriously fishing with his bare hands.
“What kind of monster are you?”
When Ju-won asked, Onik pretended to be sulky. It was another expression hiding his sadness.
“Monster? That’s rude. Though it is true.”
“...What? Why aren’t you arguing with me for once?”
“Because I really am a monster.”
Saying a frightening truth that no one would believe as though it were a joke, Onik pulled his first big catch onto the ice.
“Heave-ho!”
The fish the frightening boy had caught was an introduced masu salmon as large as his forearm.
It lived only in very clear streams, and among the fish that could be caught in a high valley like this one, it was exceptionally large.
The place Onik had broken through was a lower pool where the valley water gathered after flowing down.
So he could freely pick out and scoop up the fish drifting beneath the ice.
Masu salmon, masu salmon, masu salmon, masu salmon...
And more masu salmon.
Masu salmon lived in small groups, each with a leader, in the deep pools of clear valley streams.
Sometimes there were only three or four, sometimes around ten.
Onik pulled out his wet arms, shook off the water, and grinned.
“Ta-da! Six big masu salmon! We’re adding spicy masu salmon stew to dinner tonight!”
“Hey, you...”
Ju-won pointed at Onik's hand.
“Your hand’s bleeding.”
No matter how frightening a boy he was, he could not punch through thick ice without getting hurt.
The skin around every knuckle that stood out when he clenched his fist had been scraped away.
Onik brushed it off.
“This is fine. It’s only a little scraped up.”
But Sera hurried over and touched Onik's injury, looking as though she might cry again, so Onik had to make a troubled face and reassure her.
Ju-won thought to himself.
‘Didn’t this guy just want to punch something with all his strength because he felt so frustrated inside?’
Maybe Onik had wanted to strike time itself rather than the ice. The cruel time that brought unavoidable death to the aging village.
Later, as they headed back with six masu salmon threaded onto a branch, Ju-won suddenly asked Onik to do something strange.
“Hey. Jo Onik.”
“Yes?”
“Try shouting, ‘Status window.’”
“...What? What’s that?”
“Don’t know? You don’t have to know. Just shout it first. Status window!”
“Uh... Status window? Is that right? Do I say it like this?”
“Yeah. Do you see anything now?”
“...? No.”
“You really don’t?”
“What am I supposed to see?”
“If you don’t see anything, that’s fine. I just wanted to check, just in case.”
“...?...???”
Onik could not understand it at all.
Footnotes:
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