WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈

Chapter 20: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (20)

──────

The police concluded that Yo-han's death had been a simple accident.

Two days passed from the initial report and investigation of the scene to the release of his body.

His body bore marks as though a pack of stray dogs had bitten him, but his protective gear had been so sturdy that his body had not been damaged.

#

Pastor Kim conducted his second son's funeral himself.

For all five days of the funeral, his face remained pale. He looked as though he might faint and collapse at any moment.

Even so, his posture was always reverent, and his bearing never faltered.

Onik felt as though some unseen strength were holding Pastor Kim up.

To a boy grieving for an older friend he loved like a brother, the source of that unseen strength in a clergyman could not be Mr. God.

Whether Mr. God truly existed was something beyond the boy's understanding.

But even if He did exist, Onik thought that helping Pastor Kim now was nothing but deceit.

‘If He wanted to help, He should've done it sooner. Before Yo-han hyung died...’

He had let Yo-han die, only to help Pastor Kim stay on his feet in his grief.

That could never be called comfort. At best, it was cruel mockery.

So the unseen strength had to come from Pastor Kim himself.

It had to be his own strength. Whether it was faith, or a father's determination not to show weakness before the child leaving him.

Onik thought again.

It would be better if a god like Mr. God did not exist at all.

If Mr. God was truly omniscient, omnipotent, and the creator of everything in the world, then Satan, too, was something Mr. God had created.

And everything Satan did had to be part of Mr. God's plan. An all-knowing god would have known, from the moment He created Satan, everything His creation would go on to do.

In other words, He wanted to do bad things, but didn't want people cursing at His main account, so He made another one.

Then He created an AI bot that could act on its own and take the blame for that account.

...At least, that was all Onik could think at the time.

‘Then Mr. God is just a god causing trouble with a second account. What is that? I hate it...’

And that was not all.

The one who had made Onik a strange child, caused the deaths in the delivery room of both the brother who should have entered the world with him and the mother whose face he knew only from photographs, and made his father leave...

All of it became an omnipotent being's plan and actions.

He did not want a god like that.

Mr. God was a god Onik could never like.

Onik pitied Pastor Kim for praying to such a frightening god.

Pastor Kim was reading from the Bible.

He looked down at the coffin in the grave, surrounded by mounds of freshly dug earth. He was holding his sorrow down so tightly that it only made him seem sadder.

“Listen, I tell you a mystery. We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will rise imperishable, and we will be changed. When this perishable has put on the imperishable, and this mortal has put on immortality...”

After the pastor finished reading, the mourners took handfuls of dirt and cast them toward the coffin in the grave.

Among those seeing Yo-han off on his final journey were, unusually, several foreigners.

There were not many, but they were remarkable people who had taken long flights solely to attend the funeral, come to a country where they could not speak the language, then traveled all the way to this remote burial ground.

Even to a child, they seemed to be people who must have shared no ordinary bond with Yo-han in life, and with his father, Pastor Kim.

Pastor Kim must have arranged a longer funeral for these people and his third son.

The villagers who had accompanied the funeral party still stole glances at those with unfamiliar features and skin colors, apparently unsettled even as the service neared its end.

But someone cast dirt before even those with such special ties. It was the deceased's lover, teacher Lee Eun-jeong.

Pi-deuk, the eldest, who had come from Busan, and Philip, the third, who had come from America, yielded the first turn to Eun-jeong.

Eun-jeong did not know them, but Pi-deuk and Philip knew all about her. Yo-han had often spoken to his brothers about Eun-jeong while he was alive.

Pastor Kim's turn was set for last. It had been his own wish.

“Sniff... sob... Yo-han...”

Seeing his teacher weep from the corner of his eye, Onik felt like crying too.

He had thought he had cried all he could after hearing that Yo-han had died, but seeing his teacher's tears fall one after another made his eyes burn again.

There seemed to be no end to the sorrow of sending someone precious away.

‘My heart hurts so much.’

At that moment, Onik turned over the meaning of death and killing in his mind.

To kill someone was to give this kind of grief to the people who held that person dear.

There were certainly people who had to be killed, people the world would be better without, people who deserved to die.

But even their deaths could bring great sorrow to someone.

But...

‘If they gave this kind of sorrow to others first, and if they didn't kill someone who deserved to die... If they killed an innocent person only for their own benefit, then shouldn't they be prepared to die too? Even more so if they don't repent.’

A cold feeling settled in Onik's chest, which had been filling with grief.

The reason he did not think that anyone who brought great sorrow to others had to die without exception was the influence of his grandfather, whom he respected.

His grandfather, a war veteran, carried memories of killings he was proud of and killings he was not. Even more than half a century later, he still reflected on the latter with regret.

So even if someone had caused others terrible sorrow and pain, it was wrong to say without exception that they deserved to die.

Otherwise, his beloved grandfather might also become someone who deserved to die.

Death could not be undone.

What could not be undone should never be done carelessly.

“...”

The boy stood among the villagers and threw dirt into the grave.

The handful of dirt felt heavier than it truly was. It was the weight of grief felt by a boy made lonelier than before by Yo-han's death.

The dirt fell onto the coffin lid with a soft rustling sound.

He had turned away gloomily and taken only a few steps when his teacher embraced him as he stood with his head bowed.

“Come here, Onik.”

Her arms held him tightly, warmly.

Their warmth stood in sharp contrast to the cold air hanging over the burial ground.

When the sound of his teacher sniffling clung to his ears, fresh tears finally welled in Onik's eyes, which had remained hot with unshed tears all this time, then rolled down and fell.

Onik embraced his sobbing teacher in return.

“Teacher...”

He wanted to comfort her, but he did not know what to say.

So the best he could do, his lips moving without words, was tighten his arms around her.

The dark impulse that always rose whenever someone held him did not interfere with the teacher and student's embrace, at least not at that moment. It could not overcome the boy's sorrow. Nor could it overcome his wish to comfort his precious teacher.

Lastly, there was someone else present who stirred that dark impulse.

Onik looked directly at that person.

The person who had lingered uneasily at a distance throughout the funeral was Jo In-cheol, the Village Youth Association President who was no youth in this aging village.

The Village Youth Association President looked as gaunt as Pastor Kim. The skin beneath his eyes had darkened from however many nights he had gone without sleep.

He paced and could not stay still even for a moment. He seemed deeply anxious and terribly on edge.

Like a baby, he even bit his nails.

The dark instinct, the root of Onik's extraordinary talent for killing things, whispered to the frightening boy's soul.

That fake youth killed Yo-han.

‘I have to check. One last time.’

He could not be rash. Death could not be undone.

Until the very end, he had to do his best to remain a good child.

For his beloved grandfather. For his precious teacher. And for himself.

The Village Youth Association President flinched.

The Village Youth Association President had been secretly watching Eun-jeong, as though spying on her, when his gaze met Onik's. His body trembled. Confusion, worry, and fear rose to his face.

Onik looking directly at someone was strange in itself.

The longer their eyes met, the clearer the emotions on the Village Youth Association President's face became.

The reason for his confusion was simple.

Why was a child famous for being shy looking at him like this?

Anyone in his position, not only the Village Youth Association President, would naturally have wondered the same thing.

But worry and fear were different. They were closer to the reaction of a guilty thief.

If that was not it, then why would he worry about a child, and what was there to fear?

A dark gleam entered the frightening boy's eyes.

#

The day he first heard of Yo-han's death.

Unable to believe the news, or perhaps unwilling to believe it, Onik hurried to the accident scene.

He had not heard the exact location, but there was only one road leading from the city through the town and into the village.

With Onik's mobility, finding the place was not difficult.

Police tape had been set up at the accident scene, but no one was guarding it.

Only the yellow warning tape fluttered noisily in the cold wind.

One of the four plastic barriers holding up the tape had been blown over by a gust of wind.

Yo-han was not there, of course. He had been taken to the emergency room immediately after he was found in cardiac arrest.

The motorcycle had already been removed as well.

But several places had been outlined with crime-scene marking spray, including where Yo-han and the motorcycle had been, while blackened, dried bloodstains and shattered pieces of plastic remained untouched.

Though Lunar New Year had passed, it was still winter in the mountains.

When Onik saw the blood on the frozen ground, he felt as though all the blood had drained from his heart.

A trail of bloodstains.

And yellowed grass, killed by the biting cold, bearing traces of something heavy pressing it down.

Onik's sense for death was closer to a supernatural ability than a human talent.

So he could easily picture Yo-han crawling desperately across the ground despite his injuries.

It made his head swim just to imagine it.

It must have been a painful end.

What had been in the direction Yo-han crawled?

A small rectangle had been drawn in that direction with marking spray.

‘It must've been his smartphone...’

Despite an impact powerful enough to send Yo-han's motorcycle over the guardrail and make it roll this far, Yo-han had not died instantly.

He still had enough awareness and will to try to call for help himself.

‘This is strange.’

Onik had often ridden on Yo-han's motorcycle. He knew how fast Yo-han usually went.

He also knew Yo-han's personality. Unless something had been truly urgent, he would not have sped recklessly along a dark road.

Just the fact that Yo-han and the motorcycle had rolled this far made something seem very wrong.

Onik's eyes then swept over the area around where the smartphone had fallen.

There were subtly too many stones around the place Yo-han's hand had ultimately failed to reach.

‘These are unnatural too.’

They were scattered so messily that most people would not notice them at a glance, but Onik was different.

If he had been born in the Joseon era, Onik might have competed to become the finest stone fighter in all eight provinces.

That was why he could easily understand what the scattered stones meant.

...This was the work of a very unskilled stone thrower.

A stone thrower with skills so pitiful they were unbearable to watch had interfered with Yo-han.

Onik read the direction from which the stone thrower had thrown stones the night before. Following it brought him to an unpaved road used as a farm track.

The ground had likely been even more frozen at night than during the day, so it was difficult to find the unskilled stone thrower's footprints after so much time had passed.

The harsh wind blowing over the dry ground had scattered plenty of dust too.

Still, dry grass had been pressed down here as well, and broken stalks lay about. A few remaining footprints also caught Onik's keen eye.

And then...

‘Tire tracks.’

There were many sunken spots in the unpaved road where water pooled.

When mud in such places froze while wet, then thawed under sunlight and wind during the day before freezing again at night, the repeated cycle created swollen clumps of earth that crumbled easily.

The tire tracks crushing those clumps were clearer signs than footprints.

Remembering the distinctive features of the tire tracks as he went, Onik found countless cigarette butts.

He picked one up and drew in its scent. It was a familiar cigarette smoked by someone he knew.

‘He's not the only person who smokes these, but...’

There was only one person likely to be on this quiet farm track at this time.

That person was already on the list of suspects in the boy's mind.

His suspicion had now moved one step closer to certainty.

Onik clenched his fist and blamed himself.

‘I... should've been a little more suspicious then.’

The moment Onik regretted was when he had seen the Village Youth Association President gathering steel-core trellis twine.

As he ran here, he had recalled again and again and again the Village Youth Association President's suspicious behavior at the time.

This was the memory that had immediately come to him when he heard that Yo-han had died in a motorcycle accident at night.

But Onik's regret and self-blame were too harsh.

Onik was a child who always tried to turn away from the possibility of murder when it came into view.

What he saw became temptation, and if he did not resist it, he felt as though his mind might be taken away and he would do something frightening at once.

Was that not why Onik always restrained and guarded himself?

Even when sharing a meal with his grandfather, he hated himself for feeling dark temptation at the sight of something as simple as chopsticks...

That was why he was practicing how to cut off his impulses, either by deliberately scattering his thoughts or by mercilessly cutting at his own heart with the blade of restraint sharpened by painful memories and self-hatred.

It had been the same when he saw agricultural trellis twine loaded in the blue Porter truck.

The boy, frightened of himself, instinctively turned away from the possibilities of murder pressing into his sight.

This was a reflex Onik had carved into himself through bone-deep effort. With effort that had half become instinct, he stopped thoughts that tried to flow toward murder.

There was another reason he was being so harsh on himself.

Onik had thought of the Village Youth Association President as an ordinary person.

Onik himself had been a strange child from the moment he was born.

Because of that strangeness, he had unwillingly killed his mother and brother, and had also been abandoned by his father.

That was why Onik wanted to become an ordinary person.

Because of this wish, somewhere in his unconscious mind, he had divided himself and ordinary people into two separate kinds.

Ordinary people were people without the strangeness he had.

In other words, people without murderous impulses.

Black and white.

Onik was black, and ordinary people were white.

Onik bit his lip, feeling low.

‘No. All the murders on the news can't have been done by people like me. Ordinary people can feel bad impulses too...’

Of course, Onik understood with his head that the Village Youth Association President might harm his teacher. Stalking was that kind of crime.

If he could harm the teacher, he could harm someone else.

Even so, he did not fully feel in his heart what he understood in his head. The gap between his conscious and unconscious minds limited his thinking.

The Village Youth Association President had been a good person to Onik, at least...

The moment when consciousness recognized the unconscious was always strange.

It was the moment when one discovered a part of oneself one had not known was there.

The division in Onik's unconscious was, in the end, a sorrowful distortion of reality born from his longing for normality.

As a reaction to his fierce self-hatred, he had idealized the ordinary person he wished to become someday.

More beautifully. More purely.

No matter how mature he was, Onik was still a child.

He was too young to bear his self-hatred. There were many hollow places in his heart, so it was easy for him to idealize what he longed for.

The greater the lack, the more there was to fill.

No matter how pathetic an adult the Village Youth Association President was, he was still an ordinary person better than Onik himself.

These self-deprecating feelings lay deep in Onik's unconscious. They were founded on a cognitive dissonance at odds with reality...

‘Because I'm a vampire. I have to endure bad impulses for my whole life, and never let anyone find out what I am...’

The only good vampire was a dead vampire.

Because of this self-hatred, Onik had missed his chance to save Yo-han.

In the end, the frightening boy hated himself even more.

One layer of self-hatred piled onto another.

The boy who hated himself went up to the road. He was looking for another trace left by the murderer.

This time, he had to search around a little, but eventually he found it.

Small black fragments caught in the sharp, rough edges of an old guardrail.

The guardrail posts in the opposite lane bore the same traces.

When he picked up the fragments and rubbed them between his fingertips, their texture was familiar. It felt very much like the plastic coating on agricultural wire trellis twine.

The frightening boy's extraordinary senses detected that texture with remarkable sensitivity.

“...”

Onik looked up at the high sky and let out a white breath.

There was no god who loved people in the frightening boy's world.

Footnotes:

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried