WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

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◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈

Chapter 25: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (25)

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Once his school life had returned somewhat to normal, Onik asked for his older business partner's understanding before beginning his wild boar hunting in earnest.

“I’ll only catch two wild boars a day for now! I need time to study too!”

Any other hunters who heard that would have found it absurd.

Was this really him asking for understanding? Did he think catching two wild boars a day was easy? Other people could roam all day with drone support and still come home empty-handed sometimes...

Yet for a boy with frightening talent, it was a fair request.

After all, he was confident he could catch far more if he wanted to!

If the frightening boy truly set his mind to it for a year or so, he could probably wipe out the wild boars in the surrounding area.

His sense for finding things he could kill had grown sharper than before.

It was one facet of the dark growth nourished by his first murder.

Legal Hunter welcomed his young partner’s decision with a broad smile.

“Good! That’s how it should be! Our Onik needs to study hard too! It’s a shame, but what can we do? That’s a student’s duty! This uncle will just have to be satisfied with two a day for the time being!”

Catching two a day for a month would bring in a full fifteen million won in bounties alone.

If the carcasses tested positive for African swine fever, there would be an additional reward, so the actual amount would be even higher.

And the bad adult carrying out illegal dealings would naturally pocket several times that amount.

So, unlike what he said, the hunter was not disappointed at all.

‘If this kid just does as I say, I’ll be making over fifty million won every month! He’s a real little blessing! This guy! Jo Onik, you wonderful little guy!’

Back when Legal Hunter had been younger, the wild boar population density in the province had reached its peak, and the threat of disease had been close to its worst.

Back then, he had worked himself to the bone day and night without a single day off, earning around twenty million won a month.

It was a personal record he had reached only once and never again, a glorious story of his exploits he could tell over drinks for the rest of his life. It had been the time when he was called the province’s finest hunter through skill alone.

At the time, he had no additional income beyond the bounties.

That was before he had begun his secret dealings with carcass disposal companies.

Things were different now. With the frightening boy’s wild boars added to his own efforts, his monthly income might exceed sixty or seventy million won.

The thought alone made him happy. Excited, the bad adult rubbed his hands together like a fly.

“If you see any water deer, catch those too! Wild boars come first, of course, but there are bounties for water deer as well!”

“Okay! I’ll do that!”

In this province, the bounty for a water deer was fifty thousand won per animal.

And the bad adult exploiting a middle schooler had long since found a way to earn illicit side income from water deer as well.

Several health tonic shops secretly made and sold water deer soup and water deer bone liquor. If he brought them a water deer carcass, he could easily get two or three hundred thousand won apiece.

The first step in the bad adult and frightening child’s joint hunt was for the two of them to drive along the roads together.

Onik could run tirelessly over any terrain, but moving between hunting grounds on his own two legs still took considerable time.

If he hunted only in the mountains around the village, the game would quickly run out.

A licensed hunter’s range had no regional limits. They only had to avoid restricted hunting areas, such as natural parks, city parks, residential areas, and protected zones.

Hunting dogs could sometimes be subject to travel restrictions because they might carry the virus.

Hunters, though, were free to go wherever they wished, as long as they knew the locations of the disinfection stations in each area.

So the hunter drove at random along mountain roads between promising hunting grounds. Whenever the frightening boy in the passenger seat got a hunch, he let him out there.

“Let me off around here! This place feels good today!”

“Got it! Go, Onik!”

“Onik Onik!”

Finding game was always harder than catching it. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that ninety-nine percent of hunting was searching, and the remaining one percent was actually catching the prey.

As far as Legal Hunter knew, around twenty-three thousand wild boars lived in this province. That worked out to an average of about 1.2 boars per square kilometer.

That might not sound hard to find, but it was not like that at all.

Hunting grounds were basically mountains and wilderness. The rugged, sloping land was full of dips and natural barriers, along with trees and brush that blocked the view.

Imagine drawing a one-kilometer square in an environment like that and playing hide-and-seek inside it, one against one.

How unfavorable would that game be for the seeker?

Even if the seeker unfairly brought hunting dogs along, it would not be an easy contest.

And an average was only an average.

There might be 1.2 wild boars within a one-kilometer square, or there might be none.

You could only know by looking. A Schrödinger’s wild boar, so to speak.

That was why encounters between hunter and prey were a matter of chance.

A single wild boar stayed on one mountain for only a day or two, constantly wandering across a much wider territory.

If someone encountered a wild boar in the same place after a gap of three or four days, they had most likely seen two different boars.

They were basically random encounter monsters.

(Of course, there were occasional exceptions. The wild boars that came to military bases in the Demilitarized Zone to scrounge leftovers were a representative example. They had all been caught and killed now. Officially, anyway.)

Even elementary school students understood the trap of probability. The many mobile games that conditioned consumers through probability-based mechanics had made Korea’s elementary school students tough.

So if a hunter said, “I have to catch at least one of these wild boars every hour,” every other hunter would laugh and answer together.

“You think that’ll happen?”

But Onik was a child who could do it. There was no need to look elsewhere for monsters or supernatural beings.

Legal Hunter deployed the frightening boy, his ultimate weapon against harmful wildlife, by the roadside. Onik gripped his bow and began running without hesitation the moment his feet touched the ground.

‘Honestly, just looking at a map and aerial photos gives me a sense of where I should start searching.’

Thanks to his natural talent and powers of perception, the young hunter’s map-reading skill had already reached an exceptional level for his age.

By simply tracing contour lines and waterways on a map, he could estimate where various animals might have left tracks, and where their habitats and hiding places were likely to be.

It was the sort of lofty ability that hunters could only glimpse after spending a great deal of time pursuing game through the wilderness.

Of course, Onik was not the only hunter capable of it.

The problem was that there were many places animals could travel easily but people found difficult to reach.

Onik did not care about any of that. He could freely cut through paths forbidden to people as he pursued his prey.

‘Oh, tracks.’

Not long after entering the hunting ground, the young hunter found tracks hidden beneath dead grass.

Or rather, it was closer to saying that he instinctively sensed traces of something he could kill there.

‘Wild boar tracks. Looking at the direction, they seem to have been made this morning.’

The boy looked diagonally up the sunlit ridge. The small, closely spaced tracks led that way.

Legal Hunter had picked Onik up on his way home from school.

That meant it was not a good time to catch wild boars. Since they were nocturnal, wild boars made hiding places in thick brush during the day and rested there quietly.

They searched for food after sunset and returned to their shelters when the sun rose. That was their basic pattern.

So a hunter pursuing wild boars in broad daylight needed to distinguish tracks made in the morning from tracks made in the evening.

Anyone who could not tell the difference would be better off giving up on hunting without dogs.

At some point, the tracks the boy followed began to form an uneven spiral around one spot. A smile appeared at the corner of the frightening boy’s mouth.

‘It started making flower tracks here.’

When a wild boar found a suitable place for a shelter some distance away, it circled widely before approaching it.

It was carefully examining the surroundings, possible dangers, and escape routes for an emergency.

Seen from above, the tracks made during this process looked as though someone had drawn a flower. That was especially true when the tracks lay across white snow in winter.

That was why hunters called them flower tracks.

The wild boar shelter that Onik found had been made in brush that felt especially cozy under the warm sunlight.

The boar had camouflaged itself thoroughly. Unless someone had exceptionally sharp eyes, they would not know it was there even if someone pointed right at it.

‘It’s only going to rest here for one day before leaving, but it’s amazing that it puts in this much effort every time.’

He liked it more because it was a life struggling so hard to survive.

The harder a living thing struggled to live, the greater the frightening boy’s satisfaction when he killed it.

The wild boar was hiding very well in the hollow it had dug, almost like a sniper lying prone in a ghillie suit.

That was why hunters who found flower tracks usually made a noise on purpose.

They could roughly guess the location but could not know it precisely, so they wanted the wild boar to sense a predator approaching and flee on its own.

Onik had no reason to do that. His innate sense had pinpointed the prey’s location exactly.

The outline of the animal beneath the covering of fallen leaves and brush was clear, as were the locations of its two eyes, the only vulnerable points on its large head.

The boy quietly nocked an arrow on his high-draw-weight bow and drew the string in silence.

Then...

「Twang!」

The sound of the bowstring was faster than the arrow.

So the animal sleeping soundly snapped its eyes open before the arrow reached it.

Still, just as it reflexively tried to leap up, the sharp arrowhead scraped past its eye.

The angle was poor, so it did not lodge there. But the soft, delicate eyeball had already burst.

「Squeeeal!」

The beast that had lost its left eye screamed like a pig at slaughter.

A shelter dug into the ground had its advantages, but it also had its drawbacks. There were only so many directions it could flee, which made it easy for a hunter to fire where they expected it to emerge.

「Thunk!」

A second arrow immediately drove into the animal’s body. Onik had aimed for the vital spot just below its ear, behind the burst eye, waiting for the writhing animal to expose its side.

The wounded beast had no way to react to the arrow rushing in from its blind side.

The wild boar stiffened, blood streaming from it, before soon collapsing as if it had crumpled. Then came the convulsions of approaching death.

The frightening boy savored the beauty of the pouring blood and the faint tremors of a life fading away, feeling dark satisfaction and a tingling heat.

The satisfaction itself was dark, and its aftertaste was dark as well.

“That’s a good start.”

After the chilling tingle faded, the boy tried to shake off his dark mood with a positive murmur.

What else could he do? This was the fate he had been given.

Onik retrieved the bloodied arrows and wrapped them in waterproof cloth. Ministry of Environment officials would have been horrified, calling it a risk of spreading the virus, but he had no choice.

‘Each handmade arrow is expensive...’

Once the hunt was over, he would just have to disinfect them thoroughly at a disinfection station. Onik did not want the pig farms near the village to suffer either.

From there, the young hunter caught a total of two wild boars and five water deer before meeting up with his older partner.

It took less than two hours.

On the first day of his partnership with Legal Hunter, the boy had secured a total of 750,000 won in bounty money.

Until the forty-sixth day of their partnership, his daily average earnings never fell below that amount.

Then, when the morning of their forty-seventh day arrived, the young and old hunting duo knelt side by side before Jo Jeong-ho.

A small Vita 500 box containing thirty-seven million won in cash lay before them like an offering.

Jo Jeong-ho looked at the two with stern eyes.

The bad adult who had tempted his grandson somehow felt as though he could hear the old man’s inner voice.

「Are you trying to persuade me with money over a matter concerning my grandson? Are you trying to insult me?!」

Footnotes:

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