WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈

Chapter 23: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (23)

──────

After returning to his secret base, Onik poured water into the cauldron and stoked the traditional stove hearth. It no longer mattered if smoke rose from the abandoned house's chimney.

There was something deeply calming about sitting blankly and watching the firewood crackle.

The knife he had carelessly set beside him caught the flickering firelight along its sharpened edge. The trace of blood on its tip had already dried into a tiny stain.

Hugging his knees as he watched the fire, Onik suddenly realized something.

'Ah, the footprints.'

He had left footprints in the vegetable patch where he had killed the Village Youth Association President.

He had meant to erase them, but his first murder had shaken him so badly that he had forgotten.

He had entered by stepping along the field ridge made of stacked stones in the first place, precisely to save himself the trouble of erasing his tracks...

He could still go back and erase them.

Yet the thought that he should only drifted through his head. It never quite reached the point of making him move.

The prospect felt terribly bothersome, and Onik could not summon any motivation.

After wriggling weakly a few times, he slumped.

'...Whatever. Let it happen.'

If this had happened before his unfamiliar father visited last Chuseok, his first murder would not have left him with this kind of aftermath.

Back then, the lonely boy had not carried this same self-loathing.

Back then, he had only dreamed of a life in which he killed people who deserved to die, people the world would be better without, and received praise for it. If possible, it was a future he hoped to reach someday.

That secret dream for the future was no longer simply a beautiful dream.

It was only the life of a vampire, one who had no choice but to live that way.

It might be the best life available to a vampire who did not want to disappoint his grandfather, but it was terribly far removed from the best life of an ordinary person.

Having experienced his first murder, Onik was certain of his future.

Someday, he would kill another person.

He would not let his first murder be his last.

He would pile up a second, a third, and still more killings, and live a life of killing and killing and killing again until the day he died...

Self-loathing kept raising its head in the boy's heart.

He hated himself because he could not resent his father.

Had the mother he knew only by sight, and the sibling whose face he had never seen, really... really died because of the frightening abnormality within him?

Consumed by anguish, the boy found everything tiresome and rationalized his laziness.

'Even if I leave it alone, I won't get caught.'

By now, the Village Youth Association President would be well on his way to becoming dog food.

'...The hungry dogs probably tore into the exposed, easy-to-eat parts first. His neck meat must have gone into the stray dogs' bellies first. The cut there too.'

Were these not the police officers who had so easily ruled Yo-han's death an accident?

Slumped where he sat, Onik trusted that the police would show the same consistency, in the worst sense, toward the Village Youth Association President who had become dog food.

Since the police officers were so lazy, perhaps it was all right for Onik to be a little lazy too.

The body would not be found quickly, either.

'Grandma Gwi-rye's house is in an area people rarely pass through...'

The mountain lay directly behind the murder scene, but the villagers used another path when they went in and out of the back mountain.

Once prosperous, the village was now threatened with extinction by rapid aging.

The crime scene the frightening boy had carefully chosen in this decaying village lay in a remote corner where people rarely went.

Though it was remote, villagers had passed through it fairly often until last year. Grandma Gwi-rye had lived there until then.

Now it was a bleak corner crowded with nothing but empty, abandoned houses.

Old houses in gloomy colors stood in rows like gravestones, giving the place the feel of a cemetery.

It would have made a fitting setting for a horror movie.

The only person in the village likely to pass through that area was Onik, who was well known for roaming all over the place.

So no one would find it strange if Onik were the first to “discover” the Village Youth Association President's body.

'...Then it would be natural for my footprints, as the discoverer, to be at the scene.'

Leaving the footprints behind had been a mistake.

Still, in the plan the frightening boy had made beforehand, discovering the Village Youth Association President's body had always been a role reserved for himself.

The stray dogs arriving so quickly had been a small stroke of luck.

Even if they had not been stray dogs, the mountain fields and forests were full of wild animals that would bite at a human corpse.

Even wild boars did not turn down a chance to eat meat.

Pumbaa from The Lion King only ate bugs, but that was because Pumbaa was a cartoon character. It was a kind lie adults told for children's innocence.

Anyone who had seen a wild boar violently shake a water deer carcass as it tore away meat would never believe such a lie.

Grandma Gwi-rye's vegetable patch was also open to the sky.

To winged scavengers, the dead Village Youth Association President would make an excellent source of protein.

From the cinereous vultures that would soon leave after wintering there to the countless crows in the forest and the magpies nesting in the village.

All of them were scavengers capable of tearing apart a human corpse.

From the beginning, the boy had planned his first murder with such scavengers in mind.

He knew from experience how quickly a carcass was torn apart when an animal like a water deer was hit by a car.

So it was not the frightening boy who had been lucky. Rather, the stray dogs had been lucky.

They had claimed valuable food before all their competitors.

'...I'll have to catch and kill those dogs soon. They've tasted human flesh.'

Still, he wondered whether he would meet them again.

Had the lead dog not seen that the frightening country boy was a dreadful being who even killed his own kind?

As a slaughtering genius who held strange supernatural power within him, the boy had sensed the fear of the lead dog, a creature he could kill.

The fear in the dog watching him had grown far deeper than before. Some of it must have come from the ominous aura surrounding the boy at the time...

'This is bad. They can't go to another village.'

That was the law of nature.

All other animals chose to flee cautiously from the territory of a predator with overwhelming strength. Even a faint scent carried on the wind was enough to frighten them into running away.

Wouldn't this village, steeped everywhere in the frightening boy's scent, feel like a territory of death to the lead dog?

...Considering the boy's nature, it truly was close to a territory of death.

'If those dogs go to another village and bite someone, how much of that will be my responsibility?'

At the root of it, the blame belonged to the bad city people who abandoned dogs every day, and the public agencies that were lukewarm about culling harmful strays.

But the boy was not free from responsibility either. Letting the pack of stray dogs taste human flesh was clearly wrong.

One worry brought another. The slumped boy grew even more depressed.

Water boiled loudly.

Steam billowed from the uncovered cauldron.

The water had actually been boiling for some time. The boy had only been dawdling because he did not want to move.

With a weary, reluctant sigh, the boy slowly stood and took hold of the knife.

“Ah...”

The boy squeezed his eyes shut.

The moment the knife handle, warmed beside the fire, fit snugly into his hand, the dark and ecstatic sensations he had felt when killing someone rushed back.

Every revived sensation cried out to him.

Hadn't it felt truly good?

You were born to be a killer.

The frightening boy could not lie to himself.

The satisfaction he had gained by avenging Yo-han was only a tiny part of the satisfaction he had gained from murder.

The satisfaction of making his precious teacher safe was the same.

So he could not justify murder in the name of revenge, punishment, justice, or protection.

He had simply been born this way.

The boy, who had stopped halfway through rising as though he had broken down, shook his head a few times and dipped the knife's tip into the boiling water.

So the dried bloodstain would dissolve and disappear.

It was the simplest way for a young killer to destroy the plasma proteins and DNA clinging to a murder weapon.

Shoving the knife directly into the traditional stove hearth would have been more certain, but it would seriously damage the knife's durability.

The young killer did not want to ruin the knife he had used for his first murder.

'Why?'

Even he did not know why. It simply felt as though he should not.

Though he had not developed any particular attachment to the knife.

The boy stood blankly and boiled the knife's tip. It felt like enough time to cook a packet of ramyeon.

He had boiled it long enough that, even if, by some chance, the frightening boy came under suspicion, the victim's DNA would not be detected on the weapon.

After taking the knife from the bubbling cauldron, he went through his ingrained maintenance routine.

He had only cut a blood vessel beneath thin skin, so there was no need to sharpen it again. Once he wiped away the moisture and applied oil, he was done.

The knife that killed people returned to the rack where it had hung before.

The boy's face appeared cut apart in the blade as it reflected the flickering flames.

He looked briefly at the killer wearing his own face, then turned away.

Next, he took off his raincoat and examined it.

He had worn it just in case, but even after checking carefully, he found not a single drop of blood. The boy who killed people had been that clean and skilled.

He folded the raincoat neatly and put it aside. After checking the hems of his pants and his shoes one last time, the boy left his secret base, leaving the traditional stove hearth still popping with sparks.

His grandfather would worry if he came home too late.

Though he had killed someone, the thought he had once held was still valid.

To despair over himself and sink into sadness forever would also be a way of losing to his own abnormality.

It would mean letting his dark impulses hold him back and ruin every moment of the life ahead of him.

He could no longer say his father had been wrong, but he still had a grandfather he respected and loved.

For the sake of his grandfather, who wanted his grandson to grow up strong, the boy had to try to live his life properly.

At the very least, he had to try pretending to live properly.

Walking the familiar road home, the boy did his best to steady his wavering heart...

#

That night, the boy did not sleep.

He knew too well what he would dream of if he fell asleep, and that certainty frightened him.

His extraordinary body was not one that would be worn down by missing a night or two of sleep. The extraordinary boy spent most of his spare time on a single concern.

It also served as a way to push aside his other worries and sadness.

'The fact that the Village Youth Association President killed Yo-han hyung... Should I report it?'

Naturally, the recording would be difficult to use as evidence. It could put Onik himself under suspicion.

But the remaining evidence, excluding the recording, would be enough to reveal the truth.

He could put the dashcam memory card back in its place, then use the other evidence to make an anonymous report somehow.

Onik had always been interested in murder cases, so he knew many ways to erase metadata from photos and videos.

But actually doing it came with many burdens.

First, Onik did not trust the police.

'...If the police officers had done their jobs properly, I wouldn't have had to do something bad.'

He could not report it to the police substation in town or the police station in the city. They were all bound by local connections.

As the senior-line grandson and heir of the main lineage, Onik could not help knowing how a closed society worked. He attended clan gatherings several times every year and listened to the adults talk. How could he not know?

So reporting it became much harder. He would have to get the evidence to an investigative agency at least at the metropolitan-city level if he wanted any hope of a proper investigation.

That was right.

Not that an investigation would happen, but that he could hope for one.

The police were an organization that had to find someone to take responsibility if wrongdoing came to light. Onik, who watched the morning and evening news with his grandfather, knew this well.

There was no reason police in a metropolitan city would turn their backs on police in a small town. Broadly speaking, they were from the same region.

Even police all the way in Seoul might be the same. Broadly speaking, they were part of the same organization...

'If it were only one murder case, that would be easier.'

The boy thought hard.

'But this began when the Village Youth Association President stalked Teacher, and the police officers didn't do their jobs properly...'

If the truth came out, the police's reputation would take a severe blow. It was the kind of matter that could greatly damage public trust in the police.

So there was some chance that even police in a large city would try to bury the case.

Onik had seen many news stories like that.

And if the police did investigate, there was a good chance they would investigate the anonymous informant too.

It would be the same if the matter became public through a tip to the media. An anonymous informant who was difficult to trace was bound to seem suspicious and stir people's curiosity.

All of that was burdensome for Onik, who had become a killer by killing a killer.

No matter how well he erased the metadata from the photos and videos, it would be hard to feel safe.

If the evidence went to somewhere like the National Forensic Service, clues Onik had failed to notice could come to light.

Even so, it was something he would have to willingly attempt and a burden he would have to accept if he wanted to secure full justice for Yo-han...

But one final, heavy burden remained for Onik.

That burden was...

'...The Village Youth Association President's parents.'

The dead Village Youth Association President's elderly parents had been kind village elders to Onik.

And they truly were kind elders.

One only had to look at how they worried over their child when he was severely beaten by the village's most senior elder, without taking their child's side.

Onik could not help considering the possibility that these kind elders, crushed by compounded shocks, would sicken and eventually die.

'They already have so many health problems. They take lots of medicine too.'

An elderly couple in their mid-seventies with many underlying illnesses.

Losing their child alone would already be fatal to them.

Master Bowyer showed how harmful the grief of losing a child could be to one's health.

What would happen if they also learned that their child, who had died an unnatural death, had killed someone?

The victim was none other than Pastor Kim's second son, Yo-han. Kind Yo-han, who, like Pastor Kim, had always helped everyone in the village, and whom everyone had always trusted.

Yo-han, whom no one regarded as a stranger.

Their child had been jealous of Yo-han and murdered him. It would not end with mere shock.

The elderly couple would truly no longer be able to hold their heads high in the village.

'Because they raised their child wrong...'

Even in Seoul, where the idea of neighbors being like family had long been forgotten, the families of violent criminals whose identities became known often could not live normal lives.

If it was that bad in Seoul, how much worse would it be in this aging village and the surrounding area?

In the end, the old, sick couple would lose even the precious everyday life they had known all their lives in the village and the region.

That would bring them terribly close to death in body and spirit.

...In the end, killing someone meant bringing immense sorrow and pain to the people precious to that person. Even if that person was terribly bad.

Even a killer who deserved to die had family and people precious to them.

The boy who had become a killer by killing a killer felt even more dejected.

'Even so... The Village Youth Association President was someone who had to die, someone the world was better off without. He tried to kill me too when I cornered him.'

If the frightening boy had not killed the Village Youth Association President, his precious teacher would have remained in danger.

Perhaps even his beloved grandfather would have been endangered.

Could anyone guarantee that a killer who had already killed someone would not harbor a dark desire for revenge against the village elder who had beaten him?

Even so, thinking of the pain the elderly couple would suffer because they had the misfortune of having such a son made the boy hurt as well. All the more because it was a parent's love for their child.

It was love the deprived boy had never received.

So Onik thought for a long time.

'But Pastor Kim and Teacher should know the truth, shouldn't they...?'

The scales in his heart did not easily tip to either side.

After worrying and worrying, the boy looked at the brightening dawn sky and made a decision.

With an uneasy heart, he made his decision.

#

The frightening boy did not tell people about the Village Youth Association President's death until the afternoon of the second day. He did so only after checking the tattered state of the corpse once more.

The boy did not make the report himself.

Instead, he led the village elders to report it to the police. He was not confident he could properly act like a child frightened after seeing a human corpse while speaking to the police.

The village elders were different from the police.

They knew the boy had suffered a string of sad events recently. Even if the distressed boy only looked blank, they understood on their own.

Hadn't the boy already been as depressed and dark as he could be?

The residents only clicked their tongues and pitied him.

“Goodness... Of all people, Onik had to see something like that. What are we going to do?”

Everyone was shocked by the Village Youth Association President's sudden death.

But they did not find the death itself impossible to understand.

Not long after gathering for Yo-han's funeral, the residents gathered again at a funeral hall. In front of the grieving chief mourners, they loudly declared that the country was responsible for the Village Youth Association President's death.

They blamed the township chief, cursed the county governor, and condemned the provincial governor. The city people who abandoned dogs were naturally cursed along with them.

“Something that was bound to happen finally happened. We should've caught and killed all those damn rutting dogs long ago, but they just sat there whining about the budget. Is that damned budget more important than a human life?”

“The law is worse than the budget! Some animal-protection law or bullshit-protection law says you can't even shoot the damned dogs their owners abandoned! Animal cruelty, my ass!”

The dependable police officers who kept this area safe did not betray the frightening boy's expectations.

After a perfunctory autopsy, the police concluded that the Village Youth Association President had died in an attack by stray dogs.

Even if the police had shown unusual diligence, the result likely would not have changed.

With the decisive wound having vanished into the stray dogs' stomachs, there were no clues left to reveal the truth.

In other words, the frightening boy's first murder had come very close to a perfect crime.

That day, the news briefly reported the Village Youth Association President's death.

With so many deaths in the neighborhood, anxious elderly people even suggested that perhaps they ought to call a shaman and hold a rite.

“I think some evil's settled over this village.”

Of course, old Jo Jeong-ho was a man who kept his distance from such superstition.

Still, as his grandson's only guardian, he could not help developing negative thoughts about this aging village.

'This really isn't a good environment for Onik to grow up in.'

It was a village where a child who had only just entered middle school had to see the remains of someone mauled to death by dogs.

The terrible sight still flickered before old Jo Jeong-ho's eyes.

After hearing from his grandson that there was a corpse in a remote corner of the village, he had gone to see the Village Youth Association President's remains.

Dogs had torn at the remains, birds had torn at them, and countless other animals had torn at them too, leaving them ripped open, spread out, and scattered in every direction.

Old Jo Jeong-ho had seen deaths comparable to that only in the jungles of Vietnam.

The old man himself, a war veteran, was all right.

But when he considered how his grandson must have felt seeing that awful sight, his heart ached fiercely as a grandfather.

His grandson had grown strong, so he did not show any sign of being shaken on the outside. But how could his heart truly be all right?

The tender child had been wounded when his father left, then could not help grieving again after losing the hyung he had been close to...

'I want to send him to a big city... To Seoul, if possible.'

It was not the first time he had considered it. It was simply more urgent than before.

Kind Yo-han, who had played with his grandson and helped him get to school, was no longer in the world.

Buses still ran through the village, so there was no immediate problem getting to school. But the number of daily bus runs would clearly keep decreasing as time passed.

From six daily runs to five, from five to four, from four to three...

Even six buses a day was not a lot, yet the bus company running the route had been complaining of losses for years.

The year before last, it had even stopped service for about a month, demanding budget support.

Getting to school was not the only problem.

In every way, it was truly not a good environment for a child to grow up in.

'Where did I put the veterans association's contact information...?'

Old Jo Jeong-ho had stopped attending the veterans association long ago.

In fact, he and his fellow veterans had been quite close.

But after the veterans association was designated a legally recognized veterans organization and began receiving billions of won in government money, he found the fights over who would become branch president and who would become central president unbearable to watch.

Some pathetic men had even brought money to the central president, saying they wanted to buy the branch president position. After seeing that, old Jo Jeong-ho had become deeply disillusioned and stopped going.

Still, if he wanted to find a boarding house in a big city with no connections, somewhere he could trust to look after his grandson, few places would be as helpful as the veterans association.

Fellow veterans who had shared life and death in the same unit and on the same battlefield were more trustworthy than blood relatives beyond the seventh or eighth degree.

If no suitable person could be found, the old man might take his grandson to Seoul himself.

He was less financially secure than before. His useless son had stopped the remittances that had already been irregular and inadequate since last Chuseok.

The old man had all kinds of thoughts about his son.

'Could that bastard have met an untimely death somewhere? Who knew the precious child I had late in life would cause me this much worry...'

In any case, moving to Seoul together was still a problem of money.

Though old Jo Jeong-ho was a respected elder and experienced farmer in this village, in the city he would only be an ordinary old man with no special skills.

He was more worried because the news said it was hard these days to find even a simple security guard job.

It was the shadow of an era with ten million elderly people.

If he was sending Onik to Seoul, shouldn't he send him to the best school district possible? A school district that would draw out his clever grandson's potential to the fullest.

The old war veteran belonged to a generation that considered school districts extremely important. When he had been a student, attending a prestigious high school had been essential to getting into a prestigious university.

The five major public high schools.

And the five major private high schools.

The best of them all was Gyeonggi High School.

So many Gyeonggi High students went to Seoul National University that people envied them, saying they bore the KS mark, using the school's traditional K initial for Kyunggi and the S from Seoul National University.

The old man recalled the distant past. Those faded days when everyone in the village gathered for a feast if someone was accepted into a prestigious high school.

He had not been the guest of honor at such a feast. That was why he regretted it so much.

'When President Park developed Gangnam, one of the things he worked hard on was dragging the prestigious high schools outside Seoul's Four Great Gates and moving them to Gangnam.'

Old Jo Jeong-ho vividly remembered the uproar from that time.

That was precisely why he had tried to find boarding first rather than moving to Seoul with his grandson.

With his circumstances, he could not afford housing in the top school district. These days, he had heard that monthly rent in that neighborhood exceeded one million won. They asked for deposits of one hundred million won too.

He also had to account for education costs besides living expenses. It was a neighborhood with fierce competition, after all.

When the old man learned the average amount spent on private education in the top school districts, he had been deeply shocked.

'Have parents these days gone mad? No wonder young people don't have children.'

On top of that, if he did not want his grandson to feel inferior among the children of wealthy families, the money he would need to spend on Onik would not be insignificant.

Finally, he had to somehow set aside at least the first university tuition payment.

But...

'I still have to do it. If there is no other way.'

It was meaningless to ask whether something was possible when it had to be done. At least, that had been true on the battlefield the war veteran experienced.

He had also considered sending his grandson abroad to study.

But America was too far away and too dangerous. He was also considering the emotional risks.

'Isn't that a place where they turn even perfectly normal people into mass shooters through discrimination and bullying? They say drugs are everywhere there these days too.'

Old Jo Jeong-ho knew about the business cards Onik had received and the offers to study abroad.

A man named Fraser had politely greeted him and given him a general explanation through Onik, and after the funeral, the female teacher had sent him a detailed explanation through a messenger app.

He was grateful to the late Yo-han, to Fraser, who had offered kindness without asking for anything in return out of friendship with the deceased, and to the female teacher, who had sincerely counseled him despite being consumed by grief.

But speaking the language was not all that mattered when it came to studying abroad.

The grandson old Jo Jeong-ho knew had a great deal of emotional instability.

Leaving everything else aside, he was a child who still could not properly meet other people's eyes.

What would happen if such a child were thrown into the middle of an unfamiliar culture? There would certainly be people who saw him as easy prey and tried to bully and torment him.

Of course, Onik would not be weaker than such mean peers.

The old man could not even imagine his grandson being physically overpowered by them.

'Unless he beat every one of them to a pulp instead...'

That was right. That was what worried him.

He feared that, in his emotional isolation, Onik would turn every person who came at him into pulp, then go completely astray and become a thug, or perhaps get shot.

Besides, America these days was not the America of old.

Since some madman became president, had it not become a rougher place than before in many ways?

To the old war veteran, American society as a whole seemed more backward than it had been during the Vietnam War.

If he sent his gentle grandson somewhere like that, he would surely not sleep peacefully for even a moment from that day on.

“...It's bitter.”

The liquor he drank for the first time in a long while at the Village Youth Association President's funeral tasted sharply bitter. Normally, he would not touch alcohol, determined to live a long time for his grandson.

As he ran his fingers over the empty glass, the old man silently continued worrying about his grandson's future.

Footnotes:

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