WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈

Chapter 38: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (38)

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In rural villages, feeding a guest before anything else was simple hospitality, and welcoming visitors with a meal was etiquette every head family ought to observe.

This custom of entertaining guests had been passed down since ancient times. In old clan villages, it was practically common sense.

So, the moment Truffle Candy’s members began unpacking in the guest room and their producer-manager did the same in the servants’ quarters, Onik and his older business partner began preparing lunch.

Naturally, that was where the filming began.

“Three, two, one!”

“Hello! An intense fragrance that seeps into your daily life! A gentle sweetness that melts in your ears! Truffle Candy is here to greet you!”

“I’m the leader, Se-ra!”

“I’m So-rin, the second member!”

“I’m Ye-seul, the third!”

“I’m the cute youngest, Mi-na! Please show us lots of love, everyone!”

The moment Truffle Candy finished their formal greeting and shouted their slogan to the live viewers, Onik and the Hunter abruptly leaned into frame.

“Viewers! The Truffle Candy noonas haven’t eaten yet. What do you think we should do?”

“Obviously, we need to serve them a meal first! On the honor of Uncle’s head family and the pride of this Tiger Chief, I declare that leaving hungry guests hungry is a disgrace to our village!”

“That’s right! A disgrace! So, the first meal our mountain stronghold family will share with the noonas is! Ta-da! Native chicken baeksuk and sake lees karaage!”

“Uncle! I’m looking forward to it today too! Please make it really delicious! I’ll work hard at whatever you tell me to do!”

“Leave it to me, Chief!”

Other streamers might have begun cooking with a dressed chicken.

But the identity of 「Onik Uncle and the Hapless Chief」 was far removed from such urban conveniences.

If they were making baeksuk, it began with slaughtering the chicken.

While the Hunter’s wife handled the camera, Onik and the Hunter entered the coop and caught ingredients that were still full of life.

There was, of course, a striking difference between them.

“Yah!”

Onik easily snatched a chicken out of the air as it fled with vigorous flaps of its wings.

His hand moved faster than the eye, both precise and deft. The hen that had leapt from its perch found itself caught exactly by the wing joint and began squawking noisily.

“Yah!”

When Onik gave another shout, a second chicken landed neatly in his free hand. It was so smooth it almost seemed unnatural.

It was less like the boy had caught the chickens and more like they had flown into his hands of their own accord.

The Hunter, on the other hand, had to make several failed grabs for every chicken he caught.

He was not pretending to be hapless. This was simply normal.

That unvarnished difference was one of the things viewers enjoyed about 「Onik Uncle and the Hapless Chief」.

The chat filled with laughter, admiration for Onik, and teasing directed at the Hunter. Truffle Candy’s members also clapped and laughed.

“Wow! Onik catches them so easily! That’s amazing!”

“I’m good at catching things, right? Lotte Giants players should catch balls this well too!”

“Ahahaha! What was that?”

“It’s my little wish! I’m a Busan Seagull! Even though I’ve never been to Busan!”

“Really? I like the Hanwha Eagles!”

“The Hanwha Eagles? Then we’re enemies!”

“Pfft! Enemies? Really?”

“Yes! But I’ll still cook for you!”

“That’s a relief! Thank you!”

“You’re welcome! Grandpa always said everyone needs to eat well!”

The boy’s lively, playful commentary made it easy for the guests to join in and go along with the broadcast.

Onik himself was also being considerate of them.

He did not know Truffle Candy’s circumstances, but he was smart enough to guess why that day’s guests had wanted to appear.

“Onik! Isn’t that hard to hold?”

“Not really. Do you want to hold one?”

“Huh? Huh? No! I’m not catching it! Don’t give it to me! No! Stay away! Save me!”

“Come on, you won’t die! It’s just a chicken! Try it! This is all experience, experience!”

“Aaaah!”

The instinct to secure screen time was something every idol acquired.

Even while screaming, Ye-seul, the third member, caught the chicken the boy handed her instead of running away.

Following the rural boy’s instructions, she gripped its wing joint firmly, turned her head away, squeezed her eyes shut, and stood there without knowing what to do.

The Hunter’s wife laughed as she captured it all on camera.

With one hand now free, Onik spoke clearly to the viewers.

“Okay! Then here, perhaps for the first time in Korea, we’ll do chicken-neck-twisting ASMR! If I show you directly, we might get demonetized, so I’ll only let you hear it!”

Onik squeezed the neck of the squawking chicken, silencing its cries. Then he brought its neck close to the microphone, out of frame.

“Yah!”

Crunch!

A chilling sound rang out between his two hands as he twisted it like a wet rag.

The sound went straight into the microphone, and a flood of loyal viewers responded with tinkling donations and third-party TTS messages.

「It’s back. Jo Onik’s specialty. Otherworldly ASMR.」

「Jo Onik, scary child. Period period period. Exclamation mark.」

「Now I need to pee whenever I hear him say yah.」

「I’ve thought this for a while, but Jo Onik looks way too cheerful whenever he kills something.」

Onik flinched at the final message and quickly controlled his expression.

He turned the neck back to its original position, took out a small knife, and opened the dead chicken’s carotid artery.

Flap, flap.

The chicken’s body, disconnected from its brain, kept kicking its legs and twitching its wings.

A chicken’s body did not immediately die just because its head was twisted around or even removed.

That was why Onik had turned the neck back. He did it out of consideration for the Truffle Candy members, who would not be used to seeing something like this.

‘If I do it this way, it’ll look more like a living chicken is bleeding. It should be a little less horrible for the noonas from Seoul. But I still have to drain the blood.’

The late-career idols, treated as though they had been cast out of their rank, were still screaming freely.

Always wary of his own strangeness, the boy did not forget how easily city people could be disturbed.

It was something he tried especially hard to keep in mind while streaming. Striking off a head and letting the blood gush out was something he could do when cooking alone.

After hanging the dead chicken upside down from the wall, Onik faced the camera.

“Since we’ve done ASMR, I’ll slaughter the rest of the chickens quietly!”

Twisting a chicken’s neck when slaughtering it was the method of amateurs. Skilled people simply opened the artery cleanly from the start.

A body whose heart did not stop immediately, even without its head, was, in other words, a body that would move on its own and push out more blood.

That, along with their small size, was why chickens were easier to bleed than other animals.

The frightening boy understood this instinctively, without anyone teaching him.

Though they were thoroughly unnerved by the dead chickens flapping and twitching, the late-career idols almost instinctively kept talking to the rural boy at the center of the stream, filling the airtime as they did.

It was the desperate survival instinct that all obscure idols possessed.

“I thought native chickens were usually raised free-range. Not here, I guess?”

“Our village used to raise them free-range too! But we can’t anymore! There are too many feral dogs now!”

“Ah...”

“Even when we keep them in a coop like this, the dogs dig holes under it or rip open the wire and take them away! City people come all the time and abandon dogs beside the roads. The damage from that is awful!”

At the boy’s words, every Truffle Candy member condemned “city people.”

All while desperately looking away from the wall where chickens hung in a row.

“Ah, I feel so sorry for dogs that get abandoned like that! I’ve seen videos a few times where they desperately chase after the car their owner is in, get exhausted, fall farther and farther behind, then finally stop. It really broke my heart...”

“If they can’t take responsibility until the end, they shouldn’t raise one in the first place! What are they even doing? It’s awful!”

“Anyone who takes care of a living creature needs to be prepared from the beginning! There are too many people who adopt pets with no preparation at all, just because they want to feel good right then! Don’t you think so, Se-ra unni?”

“Huh? Ah, yes. That’s right. They’re bad people.”

The viewers in the chat also joined together to criticize irresponsible pet owners.

‘This isn’t bad.’

As the group’s leader, Se-ra occasionally and discreetly checked the viewers’ mood through her phone. She felt a little relieved.

‘...No. It’s much better than just not bad. The atmosphere is better than I expected. Much better.’

This was not Truffle Candy’s first appearance on a personal internet broadcast channel.

They were in a position where they had to eagerly seek out and appear even on poorly equipped stages at small cultural events hosted by local administrative welfare centers. So they gratefully accepted invitations from channels averaging barely over ten thousand views.

They did so as long as there was not something seriously wrong with the channel.

One thing Truffle Candy’s members, Se-ra included, always feared when appearing on internet broadcasts was the viewers’ chat.

No matter the channel, there were always people among the viewers who seemed to enjoy wounding others with cruel words.

Around Yu Se-ra’s heart, the knife-like words those vicious people had thrown at her remained stuck like thorns, oozing rusty water.

「○○, where did you dig up another nobody idol group?」

「Seriously, can’t you book fresh girls instead of these expired plastic-surgery monsters? ◇◇ So disappointing.」

「XX, you idol bitches call that dancing? Even if my cat danced, it would dance better than you bitches moving like wooden dolls crippled by beriberi. Just quit already!」

「I don’t know who they are, but if they’re on a bottom-feeder stream like this, it’s already over for them lol. So pathetic lol.」

「They’re probably failed room-salon hopefuls who’ll disband soon and start doing donation-rank streams, calling rich men Chairman while throwing their hips in every direction. They’ll do it anyway, so go practice now.」

Even when they appeared on streams with unusually clean chats, there would always be scattered messages that hid malice between the lines.

Ordinary people might think they could just ignore that much.

They could simply stop paying attention, so why look at it and stress themselves out?

But that was only an option for people with healthy minds.

For someone who smiled on the outside while their self-esteem crawled along the floor, someone suffering from compulsive checking born of anxiety, it was terribly difficult to brush aside people insulting them as though it meant nothing...

To make matters worse, idols had jobs that required them to watch people’s reactions.

For Se-ra, the current chat was so clean that she could hardly believe it.

‘How can the chat be this decent?’

After thinking it over, Yu Se-ra felt she roughly understood why.

First, the central figure leading the stream was a boy with very special qualities.

‘The only son for three generations in the family of an independence patriot,’ the ‘grandson of a national merit recipient,’ a ‘minor’ from a ‘grandparent-grandchild household.’

Each of those was the kind of quality that gave a streamer what people called immunity from criticism.

If anyone carelessly threw cruel words at a child like that, other viewers would curse them out, and that still would not be the end of it. They could be branded the worst kind of bastard in every online community and dragged through the mud.

The culture among this channel’s viewers could not help but be clean from the beginning.

On top of that, Onik gave viewers a dopamine rush far more often than other streamers did.

Both viewers and guests were too absorbed in what Onik was doing. They might empathize with the guests, but they had no room to think of saying cruel things.

That was true right then.

Onik, who had been dressing chickens with such inspired skill that he looked like someone who had worked at a meat-processing plant for thirty years, proudly held up an egg he had found inside a dead chicken’s belly.

“Wow! Everyone, look! I cut open its belly, and there was an egg! It’s the freshest egg in the world! Where could you find a fresher egg than this? I took it out before it could even lay it!”

A string of TTS messages immediately followed.

「Humanity is sorry. Period period period.」

「He saw that and immediately made a joke about it being the freshest egg in the world. Onik really is built different.」

「The chickens we usually eat are probably all like this too, right? Seeing it this way makes me feel a little guilty. Sob sob.」

「But chicken is so delicious. Eggs too. No matter how sorry I feel, I can’t stop eating them. Period period period.」

「Humans are just bad. But we’re those humans.」

After listening to those messages, Onik continued his broadcast-savvy nonsense.

“Do you feel sorry for the chickens? Hmm, now that I hear you say it, I think I feel a little sorry too! Then should we pray for a moment? For the chickens who will become our food today, and for the chick that never got to be born!”

Onik set down the knife and gestured brightly. Though he was not looking anyone in the eye, the gesture was not awkward.

“Noonas, come here! Chief too! Hurry! Let’s gather and pray together! Make a circle, make a circle!”

The rural boy’s bright energy, pouring out without pause, was pleasantly contagious.

(The true reason the boy chattered without pause, filled his mind with new thoughts, and scattered the focus of his awareness through lively actions... was a dark secret known only to the frightening boy himself.)

Truffle Candy’s members had been half horrified by the raw slaughter before them. Yet they quickly caught the boy’s energy, laughing softly as they gathered in a circle.

“Now, pray silently in your hearts to whichever god you believe in! If it’s Buddha, Buddha. If it’s God, God. If it’s Allah, Allah! Though, does anyone here believe in Allah? Chief! Do you believe in Allah?”

“Of course not!”

“I knew it! Um, anyway, I don’t believe in any god yet, but I’ll pray to Uncle God because he’s the god I know best out of all of them! I’ll say it out loud, since the viewers need to hear too!”

So-rin, Truffle Candy’s second member, raised her hand high.

“Teacher! I have a question!”

“What is it?”

“Why do you call God ‘Uncle’?”

“Ah, that? I told you already! I don’t have a god I believe in yet! So I’m not God’s child yet, and since I’m not his child, it would be rude to call him Father. And because it’d be rude to call him Father, I call him Uncle! What do you think? Logical, right?”

“Hahahaha! Yes, yes! That’s right! It really is logical! Onik, you’re such a polite child! You deserve lots of praise from noona!”

“Thank you for the praise! I’ll keep being polite!”

So-rin clapped happily, as though her earlier unease had been a lie.

The smiles around Ye-seul and Mi-na’s eyes and mouths also deepened.

“Lo-gi-cal? And polite? I feel really strange right now. I feel like a two-eyed person dropped into a village of one-eyed people.”

“I really want to argue with him, but I can’t... Why does this make sense? Why can’t I refute it? Is it because, now that I hear it, he’s right?”

The viewers in chat either burst into laughter or strongly agreed with Ye-seul and Mi-na.

What Truffle Candy’s members had hoped for was progressing smoothly.

Guests appearing on internet streams like this often failed to blend naturally with the stream’s own atmosphere, seeming out of place or awkwardly adrift. Considering that, this appearance was going very well from the start.

Se-ra, the leader, felt deeply relieved by that.

‘Really, what a relief...’

Amid it all, Onik pressed his palms together in prayer.

“Then I’ll begin!”

“Yeees!”

“Uncle God! Today, we’re going to make baeksuk and karaage with the chickens here! But an egg unexpectedly came out too, so we’re thinking of frying it as a bonus! But I feel kind of sorry! So I’m asking Uncle God to look after the souls of the chickens, and the chick that was supposed to be born! Though it might have been an unfertilized egg, so maybe it was never supposed to be born!”

“Pfft!”

“Um, after reading Genesis, I don’t think Uncle God is the kind of person who would care about the soul of a chick that hasn’t even been born yet! But Pastor Uncle said God has infinite love, so I’d like to ask anyway! If the chick is born up in heaven, please take good care of it with love!”

“Hahahaha!”

“That’s all! Always be at peace in heaven! This has been Onik, the Chief, and the Truffle Candy noonas praying! Amen!”

“Amen!”

It was truly an otherworldly prayer.

Yu Se-ra watched the younger members getting along with the rural boy as if they had truly come to have fun rather than to film. A faint smile formed on her face.

If things kept going like this, it felt as though they would make a warm video they could replay again and again after returning home, something that might soothe their hearts.

Then the warmth growing in Se-ra’s heart was suddenly struck down by a surge of depression and went out at once.

“...”

Depression rose without warning and swallowed her thoughts.

Lately, Se-ra had been experiencing this pathological depression more and more often.

This time, guilt toward the rural boy was the trigger.

‘To a child so kind and pure... how could I...’

If she finished filming and left without anything happening, the management division head would call her in and drive brutal verbal blades into her.

She could not be sure that the producer-manager would simply leave her alone until filming ended, either.

If the management division head became angry, the producer would also get chewed out.

‘If I take the blame, I can give the producer the excuse that I stubbornly refused to listen...’

Then Se-ra would have to bear the management division head’s hysteria alone.

In the end, Yu Se-ra’s thoughts reached their inevitable conclusion.

‘Ah, I want to kill myself.’

Caught in the urge to end her own life, the leader of the late-career idol group lowered her gaze.

Onik glanced at Se-ra and tilted his head for the second time.

The new realm of awareness opened by his first murder kept whispering something to the frightening boy.

Footnotes:

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