WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

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◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈

Chapter 40: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (40)

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Before the members of Truffle Candy went to bed, the producer summoned Se-ra through a messenger app.

「Come outside without letting the other members know. Let's talk for a bit. I'll be waiting outside the front gate.」

Right. There was no way he would let this slide...

Swallowing a sigh, Se-ra made a suitable excuse to the younger members and slipped away.

What the producer wanted was exactly what she had expected.

"You had no drive all day. Your mind was somewhere else. Do you even intend to seduce that Jo Onik kid?"

"...What if I don't want to?"

"Hah. You think you can say no? This is something the management division head ordered."

"I can still refuse."

"How badly do you think you'll get chewed out when we get back? It won't just end there, either. If the management division head takes a dislike to you over this, you could be stuck with awful schedules for a while. There's no telling if something even worse might happen."

"Don't worry. I'll be the one getting chewed out. I'll be the one who suffers, too. I won't let you or the other members get hurt because of it. The management division head hates being defied by subordinates. If I openly resist, all that anger will fall on me."

"Does that sound like something you should be saying? How would I possibly stay out of it just because you say so?"

"Why don't you look at it the other way around? If a scandal broke out involving a minor, a first-year middle school boy at least ten years younger than me... Of course I'd suffer terribly, but depending on how I handled it... the company would have to find someone responsible to burn alongside me. Why aren't you worried about that?"

"You..."

Se-ra stressed the words “depending on how I handled it.” It was an open warning that the twenty-three-year-old idol was prepared to self-destruct.

Rather than serve as fodder for the company's controversy marketing, even if it ended her career as an idol, she would sink her teeth into the company with the last of her spite.

She would feed those trash reporters all the stories they could want and set the agency on fire.

She could even step forward and cause the scandal herself.

And if that happened, could someone as low-ranking and hands-on as him really expect to get away unharmed?

"Ha."

The producer rubbed the space between his brows with his thumb and forefinger, as though dumbfounded.

"I was wondering what you were thinking about all day. You were secretly sharpening a knife just to make this kind of threat... It doesn't suit you..."

"..."

"But with that much venom in you, this is all you're going to do? I don't get it. If I were you, I'd just shut my eyes and do what I was told. Like the management division head said, all you'd have to do is lightly rub your body against a boy with little resistance to women. You could stand close and let him catch a hint of your feminine scent. What's so difficult or extraordinary about that?"

"You saw him yourself. Onik is a good kid. Even without doing something like that, I want to become a noona Onik will want to see again."

"Oh, for fuck's sake. This is ridiculous. There's money on the line for those people. Do you really think they'll just hand you another chance to appear? That channel's subscriber count is shooting up like a rocket every time they wake up. Nine times out of ten, this is your first and last chance."

The producer shook his head, looking at the idol under his care with all the exhaustion of a working adult whose mind was full of self-preservation.

"Keep your word. You deal with the aftermath as much as possible. I can't handle the management division head's hysteria. This has nothing to do with me."

"...Don't worry. I won't go back on my word."

As she answered, Se-ra felt a black impulse surge up within her.

'If I really can't take it anymore, maybe I'll just kill myself.'

Struggling not to show it, Se-ra spoke with a mask of perfect calm.

"If you have nothing else to say, I'll head inside first. The girls will think it's strange if I'm gone too long."

"Ugh. Pathetic girl... Fine. I'll have a cigarette and go in."

Turning his gaze into the distance, the producer waved a hand as though he could not be bothered.

That was why he did not see Se-ra's expression collapse the moment he turned away.

But the frightening boy did.

That weak, depressed face, heavily shadowed by death.

#

Onik was sitting alone at the desk in the room across the hall, absorbed in his studies, when he suddenly pricked up his ears and tilted his head.

He had heard the front gate open and close.

'Hm? Who could that be at this hour?'

What Onik heard was the sound the producer made after summoning Se-ra and going outside first.

The producer had tried to be quiet, but that was nowhere near enough to escape the frightening boy's hearing.

There was only so much one could do to muffle the hinges of a large traditional gate.

Trying to make less noise had only drawn the boy's attention more.

After all, how many people who sneaked in and out of a house had nothing to hide?

Half curious and half wary, the boy left his room and learned the identity of the person outside the wall through the presence of things he could kill.

'The servants’ quarters are empty... So that must be the man they call their manager.'

His official position was producer and manager, but the unwritten policy of Truffle Candy's agency was to introduce him publicly only as their manager.

They had to pretend producers and managers were separate roles if they wanted to look even a little less like a shitty small-time operation.

Onik did not find the man particularly likable, but that did not make him suspicious either.

He was standing quietly against the wall, so perhaps he had come out for some air.

The man carried the smell of a smoker, along with the faint scent of an unlit cigarette. He might have been planning to smoke one soon.

'...Should I go back?'

Just as Onik thought that, someone came out of the guest room and headed toward the front gate.

With the reflexes of a born killer, Onik slipped into the thick darkness, then looked puzzled when he recognized Se-ra heading outside.

'Yu Se-ra noona?'

If not for the strange sensations he had felt from her now and then as they played together from afternoon to evening...

If not for those, the boy, who had a deep interest in love that overcame something, would first have considered the possibility that this quiet meeting was a tryst between lovers.

But that could not be it.

Even while they had all been having fun, she had repeatedly grown dark when no one was watching. That was not something one saw in a person who was happily in love.

The sensations the frightening boy felt from the twenty-three-year-old idol were dark and strange.

They reminded him of harmful magpies that had eaten pesticide in orchards or greenhouses, fallen to the ground, and were slowly dying.

Onik was a boy who gained a secret satisfaction from killing things.

But killing something that was already dying was not nearly as satisfying.

It was a kind of killing closer to incomplete combustion.

Even when killing a magpie, it was far more enjoyable to kill one struggling desperately to live.

'Not everything that's alive is alive in the same way.'

After their greedy sampling, the magpies that pecked at pesticide-covered fruit, fell down, gasped, and waited for their end seemed to cry this to the orchard owners and the frightening boy.

「Kgh, kill us!」

「It's already ruined here, isn't it? The fruit is all ruined, right? Killing us won't solve anything, will it?」

「Yeah! Keep putting pesticide on the fruit! We'll wreck your farm and die anyway!」

「Pissed off? Too bad! We're leaving first! If you want to take it up with us, then follow us!」

There was no way the magpies truly thought like that...

But people who were angry or crushed by despair could not help feeling that way. To orchard owners whose crops had been damaged, magpies were evil itself, with wings.

In any case, putting such magpies out of their misery gave him noticeably less satisfaction.

The frightening boy's dark instincts whispered the reason from somewhere in his unconscious.

What you killed was not a life that was whole and sound.

A life doing its very best to survive was the most fully alive.

Only when you killed something like that would you gain the greatest satisfaction and growth.

Since experiencing his first murder, Onik's sense for the differences between things that were alive in different ways had expanded further.

Until now, he had not had a chance to properly feel that expansion.

He knew that his sense of death had reached farther in many directions, but to know exactly how far it could reach, he would have to experience it for himself.

Today, one such experience came to the boy.

Whenever the twenty-three-year-old idol felt suicidal urges, the frightening boy perceived the shadow of death cast over her.

As her longing for death rose and fell, the sense of her being alive that the frightening boy felt also rose and fell.

It was the first time in his life that he had experienced such a phenomenon.

It was the first sensation he had ever felt from a living thing, from someone he could kill.

With the intelligence his dark talent had given him, the frightening boy made a guess.

Why did that noona keep drawing closer to death, then moving away from it?

There were no obvious external factors.

That meant it might be caused by something inside her.

If the cause were physical illness, there was no reason for her condition to swing so drastically.

Then perhaps the problem lay in her heart.

Okay. Suppose her heart kept calling death to it.

Then surely that sick heart contained a desire to end her own life.

Come to think of it, it seemed very similar to the symptoms of depression that he had heard about.

After reaching that conclusion as naturally as water flowing downhill, the boy thought:

'I’m curious! If I get the chance, I'll ask her myself!'

There was no way Onik, who had been harboring this curiosity, would simply watch Se-ra, the object of that curiosity, leave.

The moment the twenty-three-year-old idol stepped through the large front gate, the frightening boy sprinted like a feline predator, planted a foot on the wall, and vaulted over it.

The other side of the wall bordered the vegetable garden.

「Tap!」

The sound the frightening boy made as he cleared the wall and landed was so soft that it was practically silent.

If the tiger from one of Sopa Bang Jeong-hwan's children's stories had seen that movement, it might have asked first, "Could you be the younger sibling I was separated from in childhood?"

Long stalks of corn stood in a row along the northern edge of the vegetable garden.

The late-maturing glutinous corn, nearly ready to harvest, was spaced wide apart, but in the dark night, it made suitable cover for the boy's silhouette.

Cute little cabbage plants were growing in the vegetable garden where potatoes had been harvested about two weeks earlier.

So nothing stopped the boy from peering beyond the garden through the tall corn stalks.

The producer and the twenty-three-year-old idol came into view.

'I expected it, but the atmosphere doesn’t seem good...'

If he had only intended to eavesdrop on their conversation, he would not have needed to climb over the wall.

But simply hearing their words had its limits when it came to feeling that sensation.

The frightening boy watched and listened closely from beginning to end as the producer and the idol had their brief meeting and conversation.

"You saw him yourself. Onik is a good kid. Even without doing something like that, I want to become a noona Onik will want to see again."

Hearing Se-ra say that at one point in the conversation, the frightening boy quietly scratched his cheek.

'I'm not really a good kid...'

The boy liked praise, but what was not true was not true.

If she had said it in a cheerful mood, he would have smiled and happily accepted it.

But hearing someone call him good in the middle of such a serious, dark conversation made him feel strange.

His conscience pricked him.

'She’s the one who’s a good person for saying something like that.'

Though he was young, Onik watched the news often with his grandfather, so he knew what he needed to know.

Listening to the conversation between a working adult worn down by company life and an idol outside the mainstream, he understood the whole situation without difficulty.

Once he understood, something familiar began to feel unfamiliar.

It was the internet broadcasting he had been doing.

'For me, broadcasting is half about earning more money and being a better grandson to Grandpa, and half about practicing how to distract myself in front of people... But for someone else, it can be an opportunity they have to cling to this desperately. That makes me feel kind of strange.'

The conversation between the producer and the idol ended.

The shadow of death abruptly deepened over the idol's crumpling expression as she turned away.

"..."

Back in his room, Onik resumed studying.

But he could not concentrate as well as he had before overhearing their conversation.

Then he sensed someone he could kill coming out into the yard. It was inevitable that Onik would look outside again.

The person who came into the yard and blankly looked up at the sky was Se-ra, so Onik opened the door and stepped out once more.

This time, he intended to completely satisfy the curiosity that had followed him since afternoon.

#

"Noona. Are you thinking about suicide?"

"...!"

Se-ra was so startled by the boy's question that, for a moment, she even forgot to breathe.

Her eyes went wide, and she forgot to breathe. The frightening, clever boy needed no further answer.

"So you are?"

The boy glanced at her, his eyes holding a pitch-black gleam as they swept over Se-ra's face.

His gaze only rested on her briefly before moving away, yet Se-ra felt goosebumps rise over her skin as she met it.

At the same time, her heart began to pound wildly.

What had stirred her heart was her survival instinct, which had briefly touched something beyond an incomprehensible veil. But her mind could not recognize that fact.

The human brain could not easily distinguish between the many emotions that made the heart race.

With her heart still racing and her mind blank, Se-ra only managed to speak again after a long while.

"How... how did you know I was thinking about suicide?"

"Um..."

Onik hesitated slightly, as though troubled, before answering.

"I just had a feeling."

"A feeling?"

"Yes, a feeling. From the moment we met, I could tell you were actually feeling very depressed and thinking very bad thoughts."

Meeting Se-ra's eyes again for only a moment, the frightening boy smiled gently.

Footnotes:

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