WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈

Chapter 66: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (66)

──────

#66.

The day his grandfather left for Seoul, Onik asked his precious teacher a question.

"Teacher! Can I stay at your house until late tonight?"

Eun-jeong felt both sorry and grateful toward the student asking her this.

Of course, she was grateful for his concern. At the same time, though, it was shameful for an adult to make a child worry about them, no matter how extraordinary that child might be.

The teacher nodded, her mixed feelings showing.

"Of course you can."

Onik put on a bright expression.

"Wow! This is exciting! I'll bring dinner ingredients! Let's do a cooking stream! A cooking stream!"

"A cooking stream sounds nice. Let's shop together, too. It wouldn't be bad to show the viewers that part as well."

"Should we?"

The two of them stopped by the town's only large supermarket, operated by Nonghyup, and happily shopped together.

The store closed at six in the evening, so time was a little tight. Still, they had enough time to chat, choose a menu, carefully pick out ingredients, and fill their cart.

「What's this? Why is it closing already?」

Viewers were baffled by the idea of a large supermarket that closed before night had even fallen.

They were even more baffled to learn that the market had a lunch break and operated for shorter hours on weekends.

Onik tilted his head as he looked at the chat on his phone.

"Isn't it already wonderful that they're open on weekends? The people who work at the market need to rest on weekends too! City people have it way too easy!"

The city viewers were thrown into confusion by this remote town's altered common sense.

The menu proposed by the student and accepted by the teacher was Beef Stroganoff with mashed potatoes and roasted vegetables.

For some reason, the rural village supermarket had received a shipment of sour cream, something it hardly ever stocked.

The moment Onik saw the sour cream that had come in that day, his eyes lit up.

"When things like this come in, you have to grab them right away! If you miss it, you never know when you'll get another chance!"

Beef Stroganoff was a somewhat familiar dish to both of them. It occasionally appeared on the elementary school lunch menu.

Of course, the Russian dish made by the rural school's two cafeteria cooks was far removed from the original recipe.

Visually, it looked less like Beef Stroganoff and more like Korean curry with a lot of chunks in it.

Sour cream, essential to the original recipe, was often replaced with whipping cream or omitted altogether.

Onik also picked up two or so heads of baby Napa cabbage.

Since they would be doing a cooking stream at his teacher's home anyway, he wanted to make some fresh kimchi for her to eat as side dishes over the next three or four days.

As they rode in Eun-jeong's car, Onik sat in the passenger seat and chattered nonstop.

"Ah, that's too bad! If I'd known this would happen, I would've prepared some naan dough ahead of time!"

"Naan? Are you talking about bread?"

"Yes! I made some for Grandpa and the village elders once, and since I cook large batches, I can try all kinds of side dish combinations, right? But naan baked on a cauldron lid went surprisingly well with it!"

"Well, Beef Stroganoff is sort of a cream stew with meat and vegetables in it. I guess it would be fine to eat it like curry."

A cream stew with meat and vegetables? If a Russian had heard that, they would have exploded in fury, but the two of them were so used to school lunches that neither saw anything strange about it.

Onik eagerly agreed with his teacher.

"That's right! Later, I'm going to teach the viewers how to make naan in a frying pan! The dough needs time to rise, but the method itself isn't hard! Beef Stroganoff is actually really easy to make too, so everyone watching, try making it after you see me do it!"

Onik had been chattering away when he suddenly clamped his mouth shut.

He had spotted a patrol car parked on the shoulder in front of Eun-jeong's home.

The frightening boy's eyes cooled as he looked at the police officer through the patrol car's windshield.

For once, a blade-like gaze that was not usually directed at people had settled on a person.

It lasted only a moment.

Soon, the boy returned to his previous mood and began chattering again.

Lieutenant Seo Mun-seok, who had once again been waiting for the teacher to come home, watched the two park and enter before letting out a long sigh.

"Dammit. Looks like she's streaming again. Why does she broadcast so often?"

The broadcasts regularly held by the female teacher he considered a malicious complainant and her student had the effect of a powerful barrier spell against a good police officer who only wanted to apologize.

If an argument between a teacher and a police officer went out on stream, another misfortune would surely come down on him.

Whenever that extraordinary boy wizard turned on a broadcast and cast an anti-approach barrier with a silent spell, Seo had no choice but to watch himself.

From a police officer's point of view, the boy wizard's magical power, proportional to his subscriber count and live viewers, was truly immense.

'I should keep patrolling and wait for a chance. Hmm, I think the channel name was something like Onik Uncle...'

Seo Mun-seok searched for the teacher and student's current livestream on his smartphone.

Then he put his phone in its mount and played the broadcast. He planned to go see them after it ended and show his sincerity.

If the timing did not work out, he could send a colleague in his place.

Watching an internet broadcast while driving was, naturally, a violation of the Road Traffic Act. Watching one while on patrol was also neglect of duty.

Lieutenant Seo Mun-seok did not care about such trivial matters.

'What does it matter? I'm a cop. It's not like I even want to watch it!'

Police were the ones who enforced the law, not the ones subjected to it.

It would be troublesome if someone filed a complaint, but in this backwater, where people who all knew each other routinely let things slide because it was better to keep the peace, anyone who would make such a complaint was rare.

Only ill-tempered people filed pointless, malicious complaints.

The female teacher currently sharing a warm moment with her student on the phone screen was a prime example.

To the police officer, the smiling teacher on screen seemed like someone with two personalities.

In reality, she was a witch who wore good police officers down, yet the viewers only saw her favorably. He did not like that at all.

Consumed by a sense of victimhood, the police officer drove away down the darkening road.

Onik knew he had left just from hearing it inside the house.

'He's gone.'

Onik swallowed a sigh. He knew well that the police officer and his colleagues had not given up yet.

It was the same tactical retreat he had made again and again since the day Officer Seo Mun-seok first said cruel things to his teacher.

The frightening boy, holding back his hunger for murder because he did not want to become a bad child, sincerely hoped the police officers would eventually wear themselves out and give up.

Still, he had no intention of simply hoping things would work out so conveniently. His teacher was far too precious to him.

Today, Onik's schoolbag contained special items that were not usually there.

'Two GPS trackers, four Bluetooth mini recorders, four power banks, one desk-clock Wi-Fi camcorder, and a manual hand drill...!'

He needed to prepare in advance for the worst possibility.

Onik admired Jo Yang-jin, the righteous assassin and independence fighter, and often looked up information related to assassinations.

This was the first time, though, that he had bought items actual assassins might use to watch a target.

Onik could not decide whether he should be grateful that even a middle school student could order things like this so easily.

Criminals with bad intentions could obtain the same items just as easily...

Onik thought of the original owner of the knife he had used for his first murder, the village elder who had said that a knife depended on how a person used it.

'...It can't be helped. I need to know how often those police officers circle around Teacher, when, where, and how they travel, and what they think about her.'

The GPS trackers Onik had bought were made to attach to vehicles.

They used strong magnets and could be secured anywhere on a car body.

At only 52 millimeters wide, 88 millimeters long, and 21 millimeters thick, the two small trackers were by far the most expensive things Onik had bought.

After attaching one to a vehicle and installing the phone app, it transmitted its location every minute. A single charge was said to last for an average of twenty days.

There was no service registration procedure and no identity verification. All he had to do was pay a usage fee through an in-app purchase.

As a boy, Onik could not help wondering whether this was really all right.

Payment information would remain when he paid the fee, but it still felt far too lax.

The two pairs of twenty-gram Bluetooth mini recorders were just as unsettling.

They could run for sixty hours on their own power, or for around three to four weeks without issue when connected to a suitably sized power bank.

With a high-capacity power bank, they could record continuously for up to ninety-two days.

Lastly, the desk-clock Wi-Fi camcorder was openly a spy camera.

He had bought it to plant in the police station if possible, but it looked like nothing more than an ordinary desk clock.

"What are you thinking about so hard?"

At his teacher's question, as they stood side by side preparing ingredients, Onik snapped back to himself.

The two were broadcasting with a camera set up on the kitchen counter.

"Uh, no. It's nothing."

After vaguely brushing it off, Onik picked up a potato and a kitchen knife.

Whenever he held a knife like this, Onik had to stay alert to the strangeness inside him. Whether he chattered nonstop to scatter his attention, focused on preparing ingredients or something else, or stabbed his own heart over and over with the blade of self-loathing while keeping a bright smile on his face to feign composure, he had to remain vigilant.

There was something good to distract him now.

"Teacher, and everyone watching. Do you want to see something fun?"

"Something fun?"

"Yes! It's my own special potato-peeling technique. You'll probably think it's really amazing when you see it!"

Instead of waiting for an answer, Onik held the knife sideways.

Then he placed the potato on the blade, which lay parallel to the counter.

Ordinary people would have had no idea how he planned to peel a potato like that.

「Onik. Are you trying to mess with us through some real-world online bug again...?」

Onik smiled brightly at the live chat and gently moved the knife from side to side.

The potato, which had begun to shift little by little, met the sideways blade.

At the precarious moment when the uneven tuber seemed ready to fall, Onik gave a tiny flick of his wrist and changed the blade's angle just slightly.

"Hup!"

The blade, now at a faint incline, sliced shallowly into the potato skin with the force of his flick.

Right after that, the knife in the boy's hand began to bob up and down.

With exquisite control of force and balance, he made the potato resting on the blade roll in place.

His motor control was nothing short of miraculous.

Since the blade had already entered the skin, the peel came away as the potato rolled.

"Hup! Hup! Hup!"

Even while watching it live, the potato wobbling, rolling, and shedding its skin in time with the frightening boy's cheerful cries made the viewers feel as if they were being scammed.

The teacher beside him let out a startled "Wow" without meaning to. The viewers reacted much the same way.

「No, this is seriously ridiculous.」

「The more ridiculous thing is that he peels it like that without the skin breaking, and it's all the same width and thickness lol」

「How is this a cooking stream? This is a magic show.」

「Magic show? That's actual magic lol」

「If you scam us like this, what are we supposed to do, Onik...?」

Onik expertly changed the direction in which the potato rolled as he peeled it.

Rather than being peeled, it looked as though the potato were rolling and removing its own skin. The long brown peel dangled downward, coiling on the counter.

Scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape.

A moment later, a peeled potato rested on the sideways blade.

Only the sunken spots where the eyes were still had little patches of peel left.

But the trick was not over.

"All right, now I'll trim off the remaining eyes!"

Onik popped the potato into the air, then shaved off one eye near the bottom with the blade.

As the potato spun in the air after the cut from below, Onik made a series of cuts to remove all the remaining eyes.

He kept the potato at nearly the same height the whole time.

Then, with a stylish upward vertical cut, he split the potato.

The two halves rose into the air and landed neatly in Onik's waiting left hand.

"Ta-da! I peeled it cleanly and split it in half! Exactly in half!"

When the extraordinary boy held the split potato up to the camera, the live chat erupted.

「Ta-da, my ass lol Stop scamming us already lol」

「Co? Ok? Ing? Str? Eam?」

「This kid has ruined my dopamine receptors. Jo Onik has no choice but to take responsibility for me for the rest of my life.......」

「These are the genes of an independence fighter who took up arms...?」

「Onik, your big bro is asking you seriously. Are you some kind of returnee from another world? Did you go to a fantasy world, split a demon king in half, kill it, and come back?」

Satisfied with the flood of praise, Onik set down the knife with a tap and turned to the most important audience member beside him.

"What did you think, Teacher? It was fun, right? Amazing, right?"

"Huh? Ah, yes..."

"...?"

Onik was puzzled by his teacher's strange reaction.

'What? She looks a little flustered.'

She really was flustered. When her student turned to ask what she thought, Eun-jeong had been silently scolding herself.

Then he had asked her a question, so she could not help being startled.

Every time the knife he flicked in his hand reflected the fluorescent light, and every time the lightning-fast vertical slash split a potato...

The teacher, watching blankly, had imagined without meaning to what it would look like if her student swung that knife at something other than a potato.

'I'm insane. Seriously!'

Eun-jeong firmly pulled herself together. She could not think such awful thoughts anymore.

Was he not a kind and precious student who had deliberately stayed with her late because he worried so much about his teacher?

Yet here she was, his teacher, constantly imagining terrible things about him.

The fact that his knife skills were beyond absurd was no excuse.

"Hmm..."

The viewers were saying that Teacher had been so shocked she was speechless.

Onik's eyes darted around awkwardly at the strange atmosphere. Then he decided to just move the stream along.

"All right, now we'll start cooking properly! This is really easy, so everyone, try following along at home!"

Beef Stroganoff occasionally appeared in school lunches because its preparation was that simple. Food made in large quantities had to be easy to prepare.

From the perspective of cafeteria workers who wanted their jobs to be even a little easier, the dish's country of origin did not matter.

This also matched the demand for recently popular cooking streams.

As prices rose and consumers' purchasing power weakened, more people were trying to cook for themselves. Showing difficult dishes to people like that would not have been a smart choice.

"All right, while the potatoes are boiling, I'll prepare the beef!"

The knife spun in the cheerful boy's hand.

It was a flashy rotation, like an advanced pen-spinning trick, with continuous changes in grip and angle.

It was a difficult feat of dexterity that he performed casually while looking at the camera.

(This, too, had become an unconscious form of "distracting himself.")

By now, even if someone wanted to stop him because it was dangerous, Onik had done too many extraordinary things for anyone to feel he would have an accident.

The reflected light from the spinning knife blade caught the teacher's eye once more...

"I'm using sirloin, but tenderloin or another cut is fine too! If you're using a tough cut, it would be good to pound it quickly with the back of your knife before slicing it, and once you've sliced it, season it lightly with salt and pepper-"

As a cook, Onik's hands were truly fast and precise.

When viewers watched the replay, they barely needed to speed through the ingredient-preparation stage.

His ingredient prep was simply done in a rapid flurry, and that had two beneficial effects for a cooking stream.

First, it was enjoyable to watch because it was practically a performance in itself.

Second, since ingredient preparation ended so quickly, an already easy recipe felt even easier.

The second point was one reason viewers came up with the meme, Scammer Jo Onik.

When they tried it themselves, it took longer than expected and was a little more bothersome than expected.

Onik himself happily accepted the new nickname his subscribers had given him.

Still, being compared to Bob Ross, the American painter and archmage, felt unfair to him.

Bob Ross openly used magic and said, "Isn't it easy?" That was a real scam, unlike Onik's easy recipes...

"Once you've diced the beef, add butter and cook it quickly. Use plenty of butter like this, because we're going to use that butter to sauté the mushrooms and onions, then toast flour to make a roux! For two hundred grams of beef, one serving, two big cubes of butter is about right!"

The meat cooked in the buttered frying pan with a sizzle.

Onik did not bother stirring the meat. Shaking the pan was enough.

Meat and butterfat surged like waves, but nothing escaped the pan.

As the savory scent of beef spread, Onik did not pause for even a moment in talking with his viewers.

"What? We aren't Western barbarians, so aren't we using too much butter? You're worried about calories? Then exercise after you eat! Our teacher works really hard, too! Right, Teacher?"

"Ah, yes."

"Wanting to eat delicious food isn't greed, but not wanting to exercise after eating is greed! Exercise, everyone! People who do high-intensity cardio don't have to be so afraid of dietary fat! You still need to limit refined carbohydrates, though!"

The teacher really had been working hard at exercising.

More specifically, she had been building her stamina ever since being stalked by a fake young man who was fifty-six years old.

She could not trust the local police.

No, it had gone past being unable to trust them. Lately, the police themselves had begun to feel dangerous.

That was why she needed to build even more stamina, if only to protect herself in an emergency.

In other words, this was exercise for survival. She was not doing it for soft reasons like health or maintaining her figure.

For the same reason, Eun-jeong avoided outdoor exercise. Exercising outside always came with a lingering sense of unease.

It was difficult to live in this remote town with the same big-city assumptions.

Instead, she had spent a substantial amount of money on a proper rowing machine.

She was building her strength through bodyweight exercises, including burpees, along with dumbbell exercises.

Yet the sense of safety she gained through exercise and improved stamina was less than a speck of dust compared to the safety she felt when her most precious student was beside her...

The strange thing was that every time Eun-jeong had a terrible thought that made her feel deeply sorry toward him as a teacher, the sense of safety his presence brought her grew even stronger.

'Why on earth?'

Eun-jeong could not understand her own heart at all.

Footnotes:

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried