WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Chen
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◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈
Chapter 35: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (35)
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Nearly half a year passed after that.
Though the lingering sorrow remained fused with tender memories, Eun-jeong's life had regained its peace.
It was a peace she could never have recovered if the vicious stalker in the blue Porter truck had still been alive.
The death of that beast in human form brought the teacher an astonishing sense of relief and comfort.
That was no mere figure of speech.
Eun-jeong was truly astonished.
‘Peace of mind could come so suddenly.’
Even after the lake of her heart had grown still, sorrow lay thick at its bottom. Yet now, that sorrow gave Eun-jeong the strength to keep moving forward.
Yo-han was dead.
But the innocent love Yo-han had given her, and the image of who he had been, remained whole in Eun-jeong's heart.
That warm, vivid image whispered to her.
Sometimes in dreams. Sometimes from the depths of her unconscious.
“I want you to find the strength to live. Your happiness is my happiness, so please live brightly and beautifully.”
It also helped that the beast's strangely timely death felt like a gift from Yo-han.
According to the police's estimated time of death, the beast had died miserably in a dog attack the day after Yo-han was buried, perhaps even on the night of the burial itself.
The timing was too perfect to dismiss as coincidence.
‘It feels as though Yo-han-ssi protected me one last time.’
That was why Eun-jeong felt less catharsis than warm reassurance at the stalker's death.
She knew this thought was nothing but a fantasy.
Still, it comforted her and gave her strength, so she was half deliberately lying to herself.
Sometimes, a lie one knows to be a lie is necessary to comfort someone.
The same was true when getting through a difficult stretch. She could sort out her thoughts again after she had made it through. It would not be too late then.
A person had to survive first.
Eun-jeong did not believe in God.
Still, she had recently found a new hobby. She watched the YouTube channel of her beloved former student.
Her student moved energetically on the screen, showing off his exceptional talents.
Whenever she watched him, the tangled pains in her heart disappeared, replaced by a warm glow.
Watching Onik brought back the vivid memory of the warmth she felt whenever she hugged her precious student.
‘Hehe. I love our Onik so much.’
The police officer who had wounded the grieving teacher with cruel words had babbled that pain born of love had to be healed through love.
It had come from the wrong person in the wrong situation, but the words themselves were true.
Love did not have to take only one form.
The love a teacher had for a cherished student was love as well.
Lately, it had begun to feel less like a teacher's affection for her student and more like the fondness between family members.
For Eun-jeong these days, Onik's very existence was healing.
Onik seemed to think he was relying on his teacher, but by now, she might have been relying on him more.
At least, that was how Eun-jeong felt.
When she still could not properly set down the weight of her grief, how deeply had Onik worried over her?
‘That thoughtfulness was so touching, and I was so grateful...’
Every little thing her student did seemed lovely to her.
Any teacher's wounded heart would have no choice but to heal if they received endless love and respect from a kind student like Onik.
Eun-jeong had also become Onik's devoted fan as a viewer.
She honestly found videos like the centipede mukbang hard to watch, but she was such an enthusiastic fan that she replayed his other videos over and over.
Yet certain videos gave her an odd tickling feeling in one corner of her mind.
Those were the videos where Onik displayed his skill with bladed weapons using his extraordinary physical abilities.
For instance, there was this one.
「Tactical!」
「Tactical!」
The boy on screen spun like a top and threw a tactical axe.
The axe, hurled with fierce rotation, snuffed out thirty candles in a single flash before burying itself in the target beyond with a bang, striking with terrifying force.
Considerable force remained in the axe's strike even after it embedded itself.
The large target, made from thick, heavy wooden boards propped together in a triangle, shuddered as though it were about to topple over.
The strength and force of it made viewers flinch without thinking.
The first thing to give Eun-jeong that tickling feeling was one of the viewer chats rapidly rising along the right side of the video.
「Whoa, hey. If that hit a person, they'd be dead in one shot, right? Jo Onik, what a scary kid...!」
Eun-jeong frowned when she saw it.
A first-year middle schooler was only showing off his talents. Why did they have to imagine what would happen if it hit a person?
She knew, rationally, that it was something people could say casually.
Still, her affection for Onik ran so deep that she frowned on instinct.
The seed of discomfort planted in her then grew little by little each time she watched other videos with similar qualities.
「Look at the veins popping out on that kid's forearms. Is he really a first-year middle schooler? At this point, he's scary...」
「If I fought that kid, I'm confident I'd cough up blood after one punch.」
「If I ran into that kid at night holding an axe, I'm confident I'd piss myself.」
「I'm confident I'd shit myself even if I didn't run into him.」
「Then you're just someone who shits their pants.」
The words appearing in the chat kept bothering Eun-jeong.
Certainly, if she set aside the image of him as her precious student... what remained was an extraordinary boy who seemed capable of easily beating an adult in a fight.
‘If I didn't know Onik and ran into him at night, and he was holding something that could hurt someone depending on how he used it...
I might really find him a little scary...’
A knife, a bow, an axe.
Onik handled every tool that could be classified as a weapon with astonishing skill.
The boy's skill was so remarkable that even people working in related fields and experts who occasionally appeared among the viewers could not stop admiring it.
Given the nature of the internet, there were surely plenty of people falsely claiming to be industry workers or experts.
Yet some described things in enough detail that they could not possibly have been fakes.
That feeling became even stronger when others from similar fields joined them in the replies and seriously exchanged opinions.
Above all, famous YouTubers well known in the relevant fields sometimes appeared in the chats and comments.
Like this.
「Treasure Fish TV: Wow, Onik Uncle's fish-filleting skills are no joke! His sashimi knife work is at a completely professional level...」
「He finishes the oroshi cuts in no time, peels the skin off in a flash without tearing it even once, and even the speed and precision of the wrist snap when he draws the knife for usuzukuri are fantastic!」
「I don't think Uncle's skills fall short at all compared to any of the renowned sashimi masters I've met!」
「If I ever go fishing at a nearby reservoir, I'd like to meet him! We can't eat sashimi from freshwater fish, though!」
Those comments had been left on a video where Onik excitedly broke down several live fish brought by his older business partner.
Some viewers regretted that he did not yet have the know-how to vary the thickness according to the texture of the ingredients.
Still, everyone agreed that his knife skills were astonishing.
In the same video, the so-called Hapless Chief and the viewers requested various challenges.
「Uncle! This time, slice it to five millimeters! Huh? You need to look at a ruler to know how much five millimeters is? Okay, wait just a bit!」
「Wooow! Look at what our Uncle sliced, everyone! Five millimeters, five millimeters, five millimeters, five millimeters! Every piece is exactly five millimeters! Challenge complete!」
「Next, four millimeters! Let's try four millimeters!」
「This time, three millimeters!」
「Skipping two millimeters and going straight to one!」
「One millimeter! One millimeter! One millimeter! One millimeter! How is this even possible? Uncle! How did you do this?! It's so thin you can see straight through it!」
「Thank you for the ten-thousand-won donation! But, uh... You want us to do the same challenge that the master sashimi chef did on TV before? Put a cucumber on tofu and cut only the cucumber?」
「Uncle, can you do this? I think the TV station might've faked it, but first, I need to see whether we even have tofu and cucumbers.」
「Wooooow! It works! It works! Oh my God! Not every master on TV was fake!」
「Viewers! Our country's terrestrial broadcasters were unexpectedly, truly unexpectedly, still honest! Please watch with confidence!」
Accepting the final challenge, Onik cleanly cut only the cucumber through a combination of near-artistic control of force and a deft pulling cut.
His knife moved smoothly, without a trace of hesitation.
His business partner, the Hapless Chief, brought the tofu close to the camera and made a ridiculous fuss that did not suit their large frame.
Even when they gently pulled at it, not a single hairline crack appeared in the tofu. It showed exactly how precise Onik's knife work had been.
The chat was flooded with shuddering reactions.
Onik only stood with his hands behind his back and smiled brightly as he watched.
Seeing the same thing, Eun-jeong felt the itch in one corner of her mind grow stronger.
Without Eun-jeong even noticing, the flow of her thoughts changed.
At some point, the teacher had begun considering the possibility that the beast who drove the blue Porter truck had been murdered by someone.
As she had already gone over in her mind, the timing of the monster's death was too uncanny.
The day after Yo-han was buried.
Or perhaps the night he was buried.
‘Was it really nothing more than coincidence? Can I just dismiss such perfect timing as coincidence?’
Her distrust of the police fed the suspicion until it swelled.
The police had ruled the cause of death of the fifty-six-year-old man who claimed to be young as dog bites.
But considering the negligence and carelessness they had shown when determining Yo-han's cause of death, could the man's cause of death not have been different from the police's conclusion as well?
The teacher's mind recalled another clue related to it.
‘Thinking back, they said there were signs that stray dogs had bitten Yo-han-ssi's clothes too.’
If Yo-han had died without wearing protective gear, his body could never have remained intact.
The beast who had tormented the teacher might have been the same.
Perhaps his body had become food for dogs on a cold day only after he died.
The possibility that there had been another true cause of death remained entirely open.
Considering the police's work ethic, it would likely remain open forever.
Eun-jeong had heard from others that it was Onik who had reported the death of the beast in human form to the police.
Onik had also been the first person to tell her about the death.
At first glance, there seemed to be nothing strange about that.
Onik had been the first to discover the beast's body, so what was strange about him being the first to tell her about it too?
Yet when she thought it over carefully, a faint sense of unease raised its head.
‘How could he have been... so calm?’
They said the body of the fifty-six-year-old man who claimed to be young had been found in a horrifying state.
It was not just anyone who had said so. Old man Jo Jeong-ho had told the teacher a few days later.
「Even in Vietnam, I rarely saw a corpse so horrible. Onik may not show it, but he must have been very shocked. I know you are having a difficult time, but I earnestly ask that you please look after him.」
Eun-jeong did not know exactly what the body had looked like.
But a pack of stray dogs had torn into it, and even an old war veteran had called it horrible, so it could not have been an ordinary sight.
Still, after seeing the gruesome body, Onik had reported it to the police, then told the teacher of the beast's death shortly afterward.
It was considerate of him toward the teacher who had suffered from stalking.
Did it not mean his care for his teacher ran so deep that, even after witnessing a frighteningly bloody scene, she was the first person he thought of?
No matter how true that was, his calmness was so extreme that it felt unnatural.
It was more composure than a child who had only just graduated from elementary school, no matter how mature he might be, should have been able to show.
Onik's message to her had used his usual tone and contained only the facts.
The teacher could not sense any emotional disturbance in it.
That was still true when she read it again now, nearly half a year later.
‘...’
Yes.
This calmness suited a hunter more than it suited a boy.
Onik was an extraordinary boy who seemed capable of easily killing even an adult man if he held a weapon.
(Perhaps he would not even need a weapon.)
If someone asked whether this extraordinary boy had a motive for murder, she had no choice but to say that he did.
First, there was Yo-han. Second, there was the teacher herself.
Therefore, the chance that the boy had killed the beast was not zero...
When her thoughts reached that point, Eun-jeong suddenly came to her senses in shock and slapped both her cheeks.
“...Have I lost my mind? What am I thinking right now?”
The Onik Eun-jeong knew was far too kind a child.
His mind and body were exceptional, but his heart was white as a snowy field and gentle as silk.
And yet she, a teacher, was piling dark imaginings and leaps of logic onto circumstances without evidence, then placing the resulting suspicion on her student.
What an immoral and absurd thing to do.
This time, she truly was playing at being a clumsy Sherlock Holmes.
The teacher squeezed her eyes shut and apologized to her student in her heart.
‘I'm sorry, Onik. Your teacher was wrong.’
With that sincere apology, Eun-jeong cut off that train of thought firmly, guilty for having entertained it.
Even so, the suspicion she had once held remained in a corner of her heart as a small ember.
An ember so small and weak that even she could not recognize it...
Footnotes:
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