WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈

Chapter 49: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (49)

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#49.

Needless to say, you could not enter an international competition simply because you wanted to.

Nor could just anyone enter the national-level competitions officially recognized by the association, where athletes earned the qualifying scores required for international events.

(Though unpopular sports without a domestic association were an exception.)

Therefore, to send a talented country boy to a national archery competition, they first had to enter him in a provincial competition.

The Provincial Office of Education hosted those competitions, while the provincial sports council ran them.

It was the perfect setting for the governor's authority, along with pressure and connections from provincial government officials, to come into play.

But even that could not be arranged just like that.

First, an athlete had to belong to a team and complete athlete registration through the prescribed process.

And registrations were accepted only during a designated period at the beginning of the year.

In other words, they had already missed their chance this year. They would have to wait until at least winter had passed before they could properly get things underway.

There was still plenty of time.

So Legal Hunter, who had decided to work with the officials, first asked his young business partner what he wanted.

“Onik.”

“Yes?”

“Would you have any interest in entering an archery competition? If you took the bow you use to a competition and won first place, I think Master Bowyer would be very proud. Great-Uncle Jo Jeong-ho would naturally be proud too. And it would be a huge help to our channel and business.”

It wasn’t strange for him to suggest an archery competition. Master Bowyer had had enough of the Korean traditional archery association.

To begin with, it was impossible to enter a traditional archery competition with one of Master Bowyer's bows, since he had openly rejected the association's price restrictions in the past.

The frightening boy had already been considering entering international competitions and using his dark talent as a solution to his military-service problem.

By coincidence, his older business partner had brought up competitions. Onik tilted his head, then nodded.

“I've thought about it! But can I compete with one of Master Bowyer's bows?”

“I'll look into that. Anyway, you're interested?”

“Yes!”

“Mm, but you can't enter a competition alone.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I looked into it, and you need to belong to a team. Even if you're only entering individual events, you can't do it by yourself. You have to be part of a team, and a coach or supervising teacher has to go with you. Apparently, you only become eligible to apply once both the athlete and coach are registered with the association.”

“I see...”

“So, if you want to compete, you'd have to transfer to a school with an archery team, one in that city over there...”

“I don't want to!”

“Oh, Onik.”

“I don't want to! I won't transfer schools!”

Legal Hunter had cautiously brought it up in the faint hope that Onik might agree, but his young partner's firm refusal made him droop his shoulders. Just as expected.

There was no way this child would readily accept living away from home. He loved his grandfather dearly and followed his elementary school teacher as though they were a parent.

The frightening boy's feelings about refusing to transfer schools overlapped, in some ways, with those of his peers who put off their homework.

The boy himself knew best.

To avoid causing trouble while being swept up in his pitch-black abnormality within the confines of military life, he had to do something.

Still, it did not have to happen now.

The lonely boy wanted to put off the moment when he would leave his beloved grandfather and precious teacher for as long as possible.

There was an impossible wish in his heart as well.

‘...I wish that moment would never come.’

Of course, even if he went to the city, he would return to his hometown village every weekend.

To see his grandfather and teacher.

And to kill things he was allowed to kill, keeping the dark desire surging within him below dangerous levels.

Onik did not know it yet, but he did not need to worry quite so much about the latter. Legal Hunter had no intention of giving up the profits that came from the shadows of his main profession.

A licensed hunter’s activities were not regionally restricted.

All he had to do was drive out on assignment.

Besides, he needed to travel frequently to keep their YouTube activity going.

“Ah. All right, then.”

Some things could be resolved through persuasion, and some could not. The hunter quickly gave up and grinned.

“I'll solve that problem.”

“...? Solve it? How?”

“That is what I need to find out now. But whatever it takes, there'll be a way.”

The boy was puzzled. He could not understand the confidence on his older business partner's face.

Normally, someone should feel lost when dealing with something they had to figure out from scratch.

But Legal Hunter had someone to rely on.

‘The head of the publicity team will do something.’

Officials were fundamentally creatures of inertia and habit.

Unless it benefited them, they were not the sort to voluntarily take on more work.

Bad adults were quick to read the room.

When the hunter had first been contacted about advertising local specialties, he had sensed it. There was a very high chance that the publicity team leader on the governor's direct task force was suffering badly from performance pressure and work stress.

And such a person was deliberately trying to add to his workload?

That meant he had seen that much potential in the hunter's young partner.

‘He probably had the same thought as me. If a national hero advertises a local specialty, it will sell out everywhere, even if it goes on a department-store tour. The pig farmers will practically hit the lottery.’

The native black pigs, with only a few thousand being raised, would especially become premium ingredients so prized that people could not get enough of them.

The hunter did not really understand it, but people in this country had a tendency to rush at anything that became fashionable as though they had lost their minds.

It was the kind of country where people considered it normal to line up overnight just to eat one meal at a famous restaurant.

With expensive food, taste was not what truly mattered.

What mattered was the belief of the people who considered it precious.

Why had flatfish, once regarded as the finest raw fish, become just another common fish?

Once pork from a specialty breed with limited supply was resold for dozens of times its price, as other trendy products had been, and that even made the news, the premium branding the publicity team leader wanted would be complete.

Consumers would firmly associate it with a luxury product.

And that would only be the beginning.

Every promotion handled by the publicity team leader would benefit enormously from getting in early on a genius boy.

‘Maybe even the governor is interested in this.’

The hunter's instincts were already feeling their way toward the truth.

His intuition had taken the task force's direct connection to the governor as its clue.

Bad adults understood the minds of bad adults best.

So the hunter guessed again.

Perhaps the governor wanted the position of a wise patron who had recognized the young genius's value early on.

‘Heh heh. If I solve the team problem, Onik will be impressed with me, right? The bear does the tricks, but the person earns the money.’

In this case, the officials were the bears expected to perform the tricks.

The bad adult was already in a good mood at the thought of taking credit for someone else's work.

Building his young business partner's trust was extremely valuable to him.

#

Only two days later.

Im Seong-eung, the teacher at Onik's middle school responsible for five subjects, art, health, gender equality and sex education, disability awareness education, and physical education, was left dazed by a sudden phone call.

“Sorry? Where did you say? The Provincial Office of Education's Sports and Health Division? Ah, yes. Inspector, go ahead.”

The caller introduced themselves as an inspector in charge of matters related to school athletic-team coaches, selecting student athletes, running provincial sports competitions, and coordinating national competitions.

Their official ranks, or equivalent ranks in this case, were similar, but there was a real hierarchy between an ordinary teacher at a rural school and an inspector at the Provincial Office of Education.

The inspector naturally held more authority.

It was like how a captain in an ordinary infantry unit could not possibly have the same influence as a captain in the Defense Counterintelligence Command.

Teachers generally earned more, though, and people thought they had it easy during school breaks, so inspectors tended to be prickly with teachers.

The physical education teacher had responded cautiously, only to be left dumbfounded again by what came next.

“Our school is starting an archery team...? And I'm the supervising coach...?”

He blinked, then asked blankly.

“Me? Doing that? Why?”

He taught physical education, but he was not a physical-education major.

At a school in the middle of nowhere, where Lotteria was the hottest place around, having specialists assigned to every subject was nothing more than a dream.

Naturally, he had no connection to archery whatsoever.

The art-school graduate, who was also assigned to teach physical education, had received a distinctly Korean bureaucratic notice out of nowhere: “Congratulations! From now on, you are an archery coach!” He could not help feeling utterly bewildered.

It was about as bewildering as the president of the United States telling the president of Russia, “From now on, you are NATO!”

“Ah, yes... It has been decided... I understand... All right, then...”

After ending the call, the teacher who also taught physical education sat there in a daze for a long while before muttering to himself.

“What kind of bolt from the blue is this...? Can they really do this without asking what I want? Doesn't this violate some kind of regulation?”

Bureaucracies that mechanically carried out whatever the highest decision-maker decided were heavily criticized for their rigidity.

Yet that rigidity was both a weakness and a strength.

The tremendous power and countless benefits produced by that mechanical, predictable execution were so ordinary to modern people that they were hard to notice.

After all, no one thanked the air for existing while they breathed.

An administrative system that operated mechanically according to rules and procedures produced a result, whatever shape that result took.

Even if a few gears did not fit, even if many parts broke and were ground down because of it, it was a merciless machine that rarely stopped halfway.

...Because if it stopped, someone would have to take responsibility.

This was the power of 「Push It Through」, the mighty command spell wielded by the governor with the authority of a vice-minister-level official.

The art-school graduate turned physical education teacher had been forcibly fitted in as a gear that did not even match the machine, and he sank into despair.

Perhaps he would have been better off failing an art-school entrance exam and pursuing world conquest, like a certain Austrian.

Only one person could save this poor teacher now: a country boy born with dark talent.

Of course, everyone had to make a real effort to forget that the boy himself was the cause of this bolt from the blue...

#

The eye of a storm was quiet by nature.

Though great movements connected to him were beginning beneath the surface, Onik's life still flowed like gentle ripples.

Whether that was fortunate or unfortunate for the frightening boy, none of the guests who had come after Truffle Candy were living lives difficult enough to bring them to the brink of suicide.

One day in mid-August, with Liberation Day and the end of summer vacation approaching in turn, the frightening boy roamed through a mountain owned by the clan association with an action camera attached to his chest mount.

He was filming content while hunting.

The hunting itself could not be used as content.

But if they cut out those parts, the rest could be used for broadcasts.

It was the new content they had started at the beginning of vacation, at the suggestion of the editor in Seoul whom Onik called big sis: Herbalist Uncle Onik’s Vlog.

This new content was one of the quiet contributors behind the recent increase in subscribers.

The videos themselves did not get many views. There had been a brief period at the beginning when views rose because of negative attention.

They were only videos of Onik visiting scenic places, admiring pretty flowers in bloom, and gathering wild greens, medicinal herbs, mushrooms, and the like along the way. Most of the travel in between was sped up and skipped through quickly.

The editor and her assistant liked the content because it was relatively easy to edit.

But the content's real value lay elsewhere.

What subscribers found most appealing was that Onik gave away the things he gathered in the mountains through live drawings on later broadcasts.

“North beyond the mountain-♪ Who could live there-♬ Every year-♪ missiles come-♬ flying south-♪ again-♬”

Kim Jong-un lived north beyond the mountain.

Onik had been running while quietly humming a song he had learned at school, with the lyrics altered slightly, when he suddenly stopped and sniffed.

“Ah. Balloon flower.”

The frightening boy's sense of smell was sharper than a dog's or pig's.

Led by the scent carried on the wind, he lightly ran toward it.

Though he carried all kinds of gear and climbed up and down mountain ridges during the hottest time of the year, the extraordinary boy showed little sign of fatigue.

Summer was the season when balloon flowers bloomed.

The ground was steep enough to be called almost a cliff.

In a patch where sunlight fell between sparsely growing tree branches, elegant purple flowers bloomed in clusters.

Onik could sense the fragrance of flowers as delicately as he could smell blood, and a smile naturally rose to his lips.

“Everyone, can you see them? They're balloon flowers. Aren't they beautiful? Grandpa told me that they grow in places like this when birds spread the seeds in their poop.”

Holding onto the edge of a rock that jutted from the soil with one hand to support himself, the boy gently stroked the petals with the other.

“I really like these flowers. They're pretty and they smell nice, but I like what they symbolize too.”

The balloon flower's meanings were hope and eternal love.

The boy who carried an abnormality inside him still dreamed of fated love. A great love that would change him completely, down to his soul.

If such love truly came to him, it naturally had to last forever.

It had to remain unchanged until the day he died.

That was why the boy who wished for eternal love liked balloon flowers.

“Ah. They're growing so well. Maybe I shouldn’t dig them up? It feels a little wasteful...”

Though he was deep in mountains without a signal, the boy continued speaking to his viewers.

If he kept his mouth shut and did nothing but gather things, the video uploaded later would be far too boring.

Herbalist Uncle Onik’s Vlog received fewer views than their other content, but there were unexpectedly fans who preferred it.

They said it was nice to leave on without thinking too much, then zone out and relax.

A substantial part of that soothing effect came from the country boy’s innocent remarks, delivered more calmly than usual.

“...All right.”

After hesitating as he looked at the flowers, Onik made up his mind and reached behind his waist.

The folding entrenching tool hanging from his harness belt, from Legal Hunter's tactical collection, came free to serve as a hoe.

“Wow, they're thick.”

The tuberous roots that appeared one after another under the boy's digging were all impressively thick.

He had left the young balloon flowers alone and dug up only the mature ones.

Not a single fine root was damaged despite his rapid use of the rough tool, solely because of the extraordinary boy's remarkable dexterity.

Even the rocks embedded deep around the roots were no obstacle to the supernatural being in the shape of a boy.

Considering that herbalists who found specimens this large in terrain this rough usually spent at least an hour digging up a single root, it was clear how uncanny the boy's speed and technique were as he finished gathering them in only a few minutes.

Onik brought the balloon flower roots close to the camera one by one, turning them around to show their shapes in detail.

“Look, everyone. These should all be at least ten years old. The competition for the drawing later is going to be intense, isn't it? It might be even fiercer than when I gave away that big reishi mushroom...”

Wild balloon flower roots gathered in Korea were expensive products, costing at least 150,000 won per geun, or 375 grams.

If they were long-lived balloon flower roots over six years old, there was no fixed market price.

The products were rare even if someone wanted to buy them, and even when they were available, there was no reliable way to verify whether they were truly wild or even grown in Korea.

Even when both were Korean, it was difficult for non-experts to distinguish cultivated roots from wild ones.

They used the same seeds. Cultivated balloon flowers were grown in fields using seeds taken from the pods of wild plants.

That was why even herbalists did not often try to sell long-lived wild balloon flower roots on the regular market.

Consumers were too suspicious, and disputes easily arose.

So they contacted people they knew and sold them through personal trust.

(Usually, regular customers had already placed reservations. They told the herbalist to contact them immediately when one was dug up.)

But what Onik gathered was different.

The gathering process was recorded on video, and afterward he showed the detailed shape close-up.

Once they received the item, people could compare it with the video to confirm it was genuine.

Whether it was medicinal mushrooms or balloon flower roots, he gave away wild products that people normally could not find even with money, or could not trust even if they did find them. Naturally, that contributed to the growth of subscribers and live viewers.

“Mm... There are seven roots altogether... These are very precious, so... I'll give one to Grandpa first, one to Master Bowyer, one to Teacher, one to the boss, and then...”

After thinking for a moment, Onik nodded to himself.

“This time, I should give one to Pastor Kim too. Sorry, but I’ll only raffle off two roots. I’ll do it in two separate rounds.”

Once he announced something like that, the number of live viewers rose noticeably until both drawings were held.

The editor in Seoul and her assistant were diligently tracking how many viewers drawn in this way became regular viewers on Onik's behalf.

It was still early, so there were few useful metrics to refer to.

‘I hope the retention rate is high.’

Onik had decided he needed to earn more money to help people who wanted to die.

As one way of making money, his YouTube channel had to grow far bigger than it was now.

The reason he had decided to give Pastor Kim one root was, first of all, because he wanted him to be healthy.

Master Bowyer had already shown him how weak parents could become after losing a child.

And Onik also had something he wanted to discuss with Pastor Kim.

It was about something he had felt he needed to think about more when he spoke with Sera.

Footnotes:

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