WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

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◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈

Chapter 21: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (21)

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The Village Youth Association President had not wanted to attend Yo-han's funeral.

He did not want to go. The thought made him uneasy and, for some reason, terrified him.

Even he could not say exactly what frightened him so much.

Was he afraid of a god he did not believe in?

Was he afraid the dead man's spirit would curse him or taint him with misfortune?

Or was he simply afraid to face his own sin...?

Perhaps it was all of those things.

Still, he could not stay away. If he did, everyone in the village would surely stop treating him like a person.

Yo-han was someone the elders of this long-established clan village had accepted within the boundary of "us." When a death occurred among "us," every resident was expected to share in the grief and offer condolences.

Suppose he skipped it because things had been a little uncomfortable between them while Yo-han was alive.

That would make him less than human.

After that, people would treat him as though he did not exist at every gathering, celebration, and funeral. It would also hurt his business, where connections and reputation mattered.

It might not be fatal, but it would bring him loss and exhaustion for a long time.

After all, the connections he used for business were not entirely his own.

Take his second cousin, who had become his most important business connection. They were connected through a great-uncle who lived in the village and his father's male cousin, who lived in town.

If his great-uncle spoke badly of him, his father's male cousin would hear it. Whatever his father's male cousin heard would eventually reach his second cousin as well.

At the clan gathering last Lunar New Year, he had already endured a round of dressing-down disguised as advice, followed by public humiliation. He could not let his reputation worsen any further.

Besides, he was the Village Youth Association President.

The Village Youth Association President had duties.

When village residents held weddings or funerals, he had to show his face every day.

Especially at funerals.

Sharing in joy might be optional, but sharing grief and comforting the chief mourners was an obligation.

For those reasons, the Village Youth Association President could not avoid attending the funeral of the man he had killed.

He attended, but he was in the uncomfortable position of being unable to approach the funeral hall where Eun-jeong sat.

Trying to read the faces of the village elders, including elder Jo Jeong-ho, was agony.

He was already losing sleep and suffering from stress because he had killed someone.

So, on the first day of the funeral, the Village Youth Association President grumbled inwardly about Pastor Kim.

‘What kind of funeral lasts five whole days...? It isn't like that many people are coming. Has he lost his mind because his son died?’

The funeral hall was quiet on the first day. Few visitors came apart from the villagers.

While it was still quiet, the fake youth had looked around, sneered at dead Yo-han, and consoled himself with the thought that nothing more than an unemployed nobody had died.

Things began to change on the second day. More and more people arrived.

It was an utterly unpleasant change.

‘Hmph. They're probably all Jesus freaks.’

The fake youth's mind began running through its familiar circuits of hollow self-consolation.

‘People who believe in God are always so dramatic. From what I've seen, he isn't even that great a god.’

To him, Yo-han had to be someone insignificant.

Only then could the guilt tormenting him grow even a little smaller.

Not every life was equal.

Some lives were precious, and some were not.

If the president died, the whole country would be thrown into chaos. If a homeless person died, nobody would care. That was how it worked.

The murderer wanted Yo-han's death to be a worthless death that no one cared about.

Yet as the funeral entered its third and fourth days, it became harder and harder for him to keep consoling himself.

Along with the growing number of mourners, foreigners kept arriving at the funeral hall.

Unlike most of the other mourners, they did not leave quickly. They stayed with Pastor Kim and the bereaved family until the end, doing their best to comfort them.

The Village Youth Association President felt deeply unsettled.

‘What the hell is this? He was just some unemployed bastard helping his crippled pastor father, who didn't have shit, in this backwater. One unemployed bastard dies, and now even whiteys and niggers are pouring in...’

The sight of Pastor Kim's family, Eun-jeong, and Onik speaking fluent English with the foreigners crushed the fake youth's spirit.

It was worse because he could not understand what they were saying. He had a deep inferiority complex about his limited education.

‘Blah, blah, blah. What the hell are they going on about? Isn't it rude to come to a funeral in another country and have conversations only they can understand?’

Had he understood their conversations, the fake youth would have felt even smaller.

Among the foreign mourners were people rarely seen in a rural Korean village, including an Orange County, California Board of Supervisors member, a recruitment chief from the Human Resources Department at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees headquarters, and an investigator assigned to the Congo peacekeeping force at the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services.

They also showed deep concern for the boy who had become even lonelier after Yo-han's death.

“So you're Onik. It's good to meet you. My name is Charles Fraser. I'm a county board supervisor in Orange County, California. Yo-han told me a lot about you.”

“Hello, Mr. Fraser. It's nice to meet you. Did Yo-han-hyung really talk about me that much? If you don't mind, could you tell me what he said?”

“Of course. First, he said you were very kind. He also said you did well in school and sports, and that you were too good to stay in a village like this. Anyone who kept in touch with Yo-han while he was alive would have heard your name at least once. He worried about you a great deal.”

“Ah...”

“I heard you're very good at English. You won prizes at national competitions several times, right? Pastor Kim mentioned it more than once, and Yo-han bragged about it as if it were his own achievement. Is it true?”

“Yes, it is.”

“If you ever think of studying in the United States, I can help you. Yo-han asked me several times to look into it for you.”

“Studying abroad...?”

“Yes. Now or later, whenever you like. If you score at least a six on IELTS, you should not have too much trouble adjusting even if you begin studying abroad in high school.”

“...”

“I can't cover all the costs, but I can make things much easier for you than they would be otherwise. You could stay with a host family. My family, of course.”

“Me? I could stay at your house, Mr. Fraser?”

“Yes. My wife would welcome a child Yo-han cared about. We wouldn't charge you anything. I live in Irvine, and it isn't a bad place to study abroad. The environment is good, it's safe, and many Asian people live there.”

“Um, thank you. You've only just met me today, but you're being so kind... But I've never really thought about studying abroad... I think I would be very sad if I were far away from my grandfather. America is just too far away.”

“You are still very young to be separated from your only family. And it would be difficult for your grandfather to come to America with you, considering his age and the fact that he cannot speak English.”

Onik hesitated for a moment at that.

His grandfather was not completely unable to speak English.

The old war veteran had not forgotten all the basic conversational English he had learned in Vietnam.

Still, Onik had no intention of studying abroad, and his grandfather's English was far from enough for life in America, so he simply nodded.

“Yes. I'm sorry.”

“There's nothing to apologize for. I mean that there's no need to rush.”

Though he was from another country and had a different skin color, the county board supervisor smiled kindly despite his grief.

“Take your time and think about it. Even if it isn't about studying abroad, contact me anytime if you need help with life in America later on, or if you ever need a letter of recommendation for work. I'll leave my business card with you and your teacher.”

“...Thank you again for your kindness. I don't know whether I'll ever need to contact you, but I'll treasure your card. I'll think of it as a gift Yo-han-hyung left for me.”

“All right. I hope you can get through this... It's sad, but what can we do? God has already taken him. The Lord will have sent him somewhere good. He was a truly kind young man.”

“Yes. Please don't be too sad either, Mr. Fraser. Hyung would want that.”

Conversations much like this were repeated several times.

The mourners from many countries also held long conversations with Eun-jeong to comfort her.

Watching from a distance, the Village Youth Association President felt uneasy and intimidated.

All this time, he had consoled himself by privately calling Eun-jeong a whore with terrible taste in men.

But as he watched her calmly converse with whiteys in English that sounded as natural as a native speaker's, it felt as though all the lies he had used to deceive himself were collapsing in real time.

Naturally, Yo-han must have built friendships with those people by speaking that difficult foreign language with them too.

As the thought occurred to him, the Village Youth Association President suffered even more.

The inferiority complex he had believed had disappeared with Yo-han's death raised its head again.

‘He was supposed to be... just some useless unemployed bastard...’

The truth in his heart, buried beneath layer after layer of self-hypnosis and lies, kept jutting out sharply and stabbing at the murderer's mind.

You only killed someone because of your inferiority complex. You did nothing more than murder a man younger than you, better than you, and better-looking than you because you were jealous.

What made him even more miserable and anxious was Onik's strange gaze, which kept falling on him and lodging there.

That was right.

It was a strange gaze.

Perhaps it was his imagination, but Onik's eyes seemed to hold a dark, frightening light he had never seen before.

‘Why is he... looking at me like that?’

Onik was a boy who found it difficult to look directly at anyone.

He might meet another person's eyes for a moment, but he never held their gaze long. Usually, his eyes slipped away within three seconds.

Yet that boy kept staring at him now, often and for long stretches.

It was the kind of direct gaze that set every one of his nerves on edge.

Naturally, the murderer remembered the moment he had panicked in front of the boy.

He had taken trellis twine from the communal storage shed to load into his car as a murder weapon. When the boy caught him, he had desperately improvised an excuse and fled the scene.

‘Could... could that kid suspect me?’

Cold sweat beaded across the murderer's forehead.

His head spun, his stomach churned, and his heart pounded wildly. He felt much as he had on the night he killed Yo-han.

‘It's fine. It will be fine. He's just a kid. So what if he suspects something? Does he have proof? The only thing he saw was me taking the trellis twine. That proves nothing. He can't do anything with that.’

He had retrieved the trellis twine he had stretched across the road, and the body would soon be buried beneath the ground.

Besides, the police were basically a group of civil servants slow to act and unwilling to admit their own mistakes.

They were also a group that had to find someone to hold responsible the moment they admitted a mistake.

They would never reopen a closed case based on nothing but an accusation from a child with no evidence.

Especially when the person under suspicion was him, someone they had known well from the beginning and who had recently boasted about his friendship with a “good elder.”

So it would be fine.

The fact that the Village Youth Association President was a murderer would remain buried forever.

The fake youth calmed himself that way, but when Onik called him about half a day after the funeral ended, his heart dropped into his stomach.

“O-Onik. What is it?”

“Hello, mister. There's something I want to ask you about Yo-han-hyung. Could we meet alone for a little while tonight?”

“Alone? Uh, what are you curious about? Something about Yo-han... that you need to ask me?”

“Yes.”

“Then what is it?”

“I'll tell you when we meet. Um... I'll wait in the vegetable garden behind the house of Grandma Gwi-rye, who passed away last year, at nine tonight. Please make sure you come.”

“Why should I? I wasn't close with Yo-han, and I don't, I don't have anything to say!”

“You have to come. No matter what. Otherwise, you'll regret it.”

“Re-regret it? Me? What would I regret?! What are you even talking about? Keep this up and I'll scold you! I'm really going to get angry!”

“I'm sorry, but I'll hang up now, mister. Even if you call, I won't answer, so please don't call. And don't try to find me before our appointment.

You wouldn't find me anyway. I'll be hunting in the mountains until then.”

“Hey, hey! Onik! Jo Onik!”

“Then I'll see you later.”

Onik abruptly hung up on him. It was rude behavior the boy had never shown an adult before.

Already on edge with anxiety, the murderer's legs gave way, and he collapsed to the ground.

Footnotes:

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