WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Chen
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈
Chapter 68: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (68)
──────
#68.
“Mister!”
At the sudden call from behind him, Lieutenant Seo startled so badly that he could not even cry out.
There had been no sign of anyone nearby. From the moment he drove into the parking lot, he had made sure there was no one between there and the building entrance.
He had been alone even on the road leading here.
Late at night, the streets of an outlying town sank into bleak silence.
After a moment, the policeman, stiff with shock, cautiously turned around.
Only then did he spot the familiar boy he had seen several times before, and finally let out a breath.
“...Whew.”
Two shadows, one long and one short, stretched across the dark asphalt. They stood about four meters from the building entrance.
With the entrance light at his back, the policeman looked down at the boy through shadowed eyes.
“Student, your name is Jo Onik, right? What are you doing here this late? Why aren’t you at home? Kids shouldn’t be wandering around at night.”
There was reproach in his brusque voice.
His gaze on the boy was anything but kind.
He already disliked how the boy clung to that nasty teacher and kept putting up barriers to stop him from getting close to her. The whole situation was suspicious in more ways than one.
‘That cheeky little brat... Don’t tell me he was hiding somewhere, waiting for me to come?’
There was no other explanation unless he had been hiding.
Seo had personally seen that there was not a soul on the sidewalk, not only in the parking lot but even before he turned onto the access road.
He was already irritated enough by that troublesome teacher who showed no sign of forgiving him.
Now some brat kept getting in his way, and it put him in a foul mood.
Onik glanced at the shopping bag in Lieutenant Seo’s hand.
“Is that for Teacher?”
“...Yeah.”
“What is it?”
“Why should I tell you that?”
“Didn’t Teacher clearly tell you before not to keep leaving things at her door? But you brought something again, so I’m asking. Why do you keep doing this?”
The country policeman had fallen deeply under the spell of common-sense alteration, but that did not mean he was incapable of ordinary thought altogether.
Seo and his two colleagues had slightly changed their strategy. They felt that continuing to come face-to-face with a nasty woman might bring calamity down on them.
They had decided to keep leaving small gifts along with letters penned “with care.”
One of Seo’s fellow officers had said this to him in private.
「Hyung. The important thing is to act servile. When women get an excuse, they get desperate to play the victim and throw their weight around.
You’ve wronged me, so from now on, you have to crawl before me. They get a dark thrill from making others grovel like that.」
Seo had listened to his colleague.
「You have a wife too, hyung, so you know this. You can’t take what women say when they’re giving you the cold shoulder at face value.
Even if they say it’s fine, it isn’t fine. Even if they say they’re okay, they aren’t okay. That teacher bitch says she doesn’t want it, but do you really think she means it?」
The colleague, three years younger and one rank below him, declared confidently.
「Of course not! Every last one of them secretly enjoys watching us squirm. So the more servile we act, the more satisfied she’ll be.
We have to know how to serve her. Fawn over her and coddle her.」
Lieutenant Seo also had plenty of experience with so-called women’s language.
For instance, if his wife pulled a sour face and said, “If you insist on doing it, go ahead.”
The safe interpretation was, “Just try it. If you do whatever you feel like, I won’t let you off.”
Going fishing without permission on a day off was nearly suicidal.
And when she asked, “What should I do with this?” she was not asking how to do it.
The only exemplary answer that satisfied a wife standing there with her arms folded was, “Just leave it. I’ll do it.”
And if his wife said, “No? I’m not mad,” then she was very mad.
As the head of a household who had worked hard to keep the peace at home for years, Seo could not help agreeing with his colleague’s reasoning......
「The very fact that nothing has happened to us yet proves that woman enjoys throwing her weight around. Otherwise, why would she have done nothing to us all this time?
Sincerity means consistency. We need to show it quietly, steadily, without fail. Even if she acts vicious, we have to accept it all.」
Every word sounded reasonable.
That was why he intended to show his “sincerity,” even if he felt like he was knowingly letting himself be fooled.
Yet this ignorant child, who did not know what his teacher truly felt, kept interfering. Anger and wounded resentment surged together inside him.
Lieutenant Seo Mun-seok was the one who had openly hurled cruel words at the teacher in the past.
“Why are you acting so full of yourself when you’re nobody?”
He had also threatened to arrest her for obstruction of official duties, and said something with an obvious implication about an old car leaving and a new car arriving.
No one else at the same police substation felt the danger as keenly as Seo Mun-seok did.
If something happened, he would be the one to suffer the worst of it.
He had to earn the teacher’s forgiveness......
“Ha...”
Scratching at the side of his head irritably, the lieutenant waved at the boy as if shooing away a fly.
“Student. Kids shouldn’t stick their noses into adults’ business. Adults will handle adult matters, so stop worrying about it and go home.”
“No! Teacher is being stalked again. How can I pretend not to know?”
“Stalked? Where’s the stalker?”
“Are you really asking because you don’t know?”
Answering a question with a question, Onik stared straight up at the policeman.
Eyes blacker than night reflected the face of the uniformed stalker.
Under that ominous gaze, which made him strangely tense, Seo Mun-seok gave a dumbfounded laugh.
“You’re saying I’m a stalker?”
“Yes!”
“Does that make any sense? I’m a police officer. Do you even know how many years I’ve worked as one?”
“Even if you’re a police officer, you’re a stalker if you stalk someone! What does how long you’ve been a police officer have to do with it?
“If you work as a police officer for a long time, does stealing stop being stealing? Does killing someone stop being murder?”
“I was only going to hang a gift on the doorknob and leave! I don’t have any improper feelings toward your teacher. Your wonderful teacher says she doesn’t want to see me, so I came quietly and planned to leave quietly! I only meant to deliver a letter apologizing for what happened before, as a police officer. Why is that stalking?”
“Repeating things someone doesn’t want is stalking! You don’t have to see their face for it to be stalking!
“Calling or sending letters again and again without the other person wanting it! Leaving unwanted things at their house over and over! Lurking around and making them feel unsafe! That’s all stalking!”
“You...”
“How can a police officer know less about this than I do? That’s why you didn’t do your job properly before! I don’t think you’re qualified to be a police officer!”
Onik’s point-by-point, fact-based argument and his expression full of frustrated disbelief left Seo Mun-seok speechless, and fury rose in him.
‘I’m already angry enough from suffering like this while being ignored by that nasty woman...!’
Right now, he was not a police officer but a thief with a guilty conscience.
The teacher’s “true feelings,” which he believed he understood, were hard to explain to an ignorant boy.
Unable to logically refute him, the enraged Seo Mun-seok berated the boy who had delivered the message.
“Tch. What a rude little brat! I wonder who taught you to act like this.”
“My grandfather, the village elders, and my schoolteachers! Looking at you now, I think they taught me better than you were taught!”
“This little punk, just because I’ve let it slide...!”
“Do you want me to be polite? Then you should have been polite too!
“You couldn’t refute what I said, so you brought up my manners and said bad things about the people who taught me. Is that how someone who knows manners acts? I don’t think so!”
“I’m an adult! You’re a child!”
“So what? My grandfather told me that manners are something people owe each other regardless of age!
“Children have manners they must show, and adults have manners they must show! And my grandfather is more of an adult than you are, Mister Police Officer!”
Even in the darkness, Onik could see the policeman’s face turn red. The boy paid it no mind and continued firing back.
“My grandfather also said nothing in this world is a given! Everyone has to uphold what they should uphold before they’re treated as the kind of person they ought to be!
“A father isn’t a father if he doesn’t act like one, and an adult isn’t an adult if he doesn’t act like one!”
There was a frightening implication in old Jo Jeong-ho’s teaching.
Nothing in this world was a given.
Even a father only became a father by acting as one.
In the same way, anyone only became a person by living as one.
The old veteran carried memories of killings he was proud of and killings he was not.
The killings he was proud of were not sinful killings. They were punishments for people who had given up being human.
There were people in this world who could only pay for their sins with death.
It was a defense mechanism veterans often had in any country and any war, or one their countries encouraged them to have.
The veteran’s grandson was slowly absorbing that teaching in his own way.
By constantly doubting and examining himself.
“You...!”
The bad adult, consumed by a sense of grievance, had kept growing strangely tense under the child’s cold gaze. In a burst of anger, he finally said things he should never have said.
“You insolent brat! Who do you think you are, sticking your nose into your teacher’s affairs like that? You’re acting exactly like that woman’s... something!”
“That? What do you mean by that?”
“Gigolo!”
Onik’s eyes widened.
It was insulting to both his teacher and himself.
Gigolo. An old-fashioned word from a bygone era, one children these days barely knew.
But Onik, a top student in Korean language, could not have failed to know its meaning.
He was an exemplary student who had not only read all one hundred selected classics in World Masterpieces for Elementary Students, but had also finished more than twenty recommended books for middle school students this year alone.
Savage sparks flashed in the frightening boy’s eyes, blacker than night.
“...Mister. Do you think that’s something you should say?”
Even as his heart clenched tight and a strange chill ran down the back of his neck, the lieutenant felt sadistic satisfaction when he saw the boy’s sharp reaction.
The resentment that had been building inside him spilled out in a childish, malicious form.
“What, did I hit a nerve? Seeing you overreact like this, there must be something to it.”
As if there could be.
A Buddha’s eyes saw Buddhas, and a pig’s eyes saw pigs.
This was, in truth, a low-minded suspicion that reflected the policeman’s own character, one he had formed while watching the broadcasts on patrol.
‘He’s a middle school boy, right at that age... Even if he’s her student, isn’t it suspicious for a young woman to bring a boy his age into her home this late?
‘It’s inappropriate!’
The bad policeman hoped the suspicion was true.
He imagined that two-faced teacher, who acted coy before others, becoming caught up in a scandal with her underage student and falling into ruin in an instant.
The satisfying fantasy briefly brought joy to the officer who was “unfairly” suffering because of her.
He also imagined arresting such a teacher himself.
It was only a fantasy born of rage, so there was no need to consider whether it was realistic......
People believed what they wanted to believe.
With a bad heart, the bad policeman hurled even crueler words at the boy, trapped in twisted confirmation bias.
All while thinking the growing chill at his nape and the trembling in his hands and feet came only from anger, excitement, and resentment.
The twisted adult’s pride could not accept that he was shrinking before a middle school student in the lower grades.
The bad policeman’s stubborn pride gave even more fuel to his misplaced anger and agitation.
#
The windows of the apartment building where Eun-jeong lived had poor insulation and soundproofing.
The cheap-looking window frames were thin aluminum, with gaps that always let drafts in whenever the wind was strong.
As befitted an old building in an outlying town, the windows had single panes of glass.
There had probably been shoddy work from the construction stage. Wasn’t that common enough in this country?
This home was one of the rental units provided by the Korea Land and Housing Corporation in place of official housing, through an agreement with the provincial office of education.
It would have been nice if the corporation had repaired it, but the provincial office of education had not provided the budget for that.
It was only a rental, after all, and not housing owned by the corporation.
The teacher, who had been watching her student through a gap in the blinds, was therefore able to overhear almost all of the conversation between her good student and the bad policeman just outside the building entrance.
She did not need to raise the blinds or open the window with a creak.
All she had to do was bring her ear close to the gap where the wind came in near the edge of the frame.
Holding her breath, quietly.
The cruel words the policeman had spoken before, which Onik had overheard with his ear against the door, had only been a muttered monologue, words rolling around in his mouth.
They had also been spoken beyond the unit’s front door, not a window.
This time was different.
The conversation came through the window, not the front door, and neither the policeman nor the boy spoke softly.
As it continued, both of them raised their voices.
The moment the policeman said something that should never have been said to the boy, rage surged through Eun-jeong so fiercely that her vision spun.
It felt as though the thread of reason in her mind had snapped.
‘How dare he... Who does he think he is, saying that...!’
The teacher was angrier over the insult to her student than over any insult she had suffered herself.
Her good student was not a child who deserved to hear such filthy words from a bad adult!
When she came to herself, Eun-jeong found that she was racing down the stairs.
She did not stop.
She flung open the building entrance and strode out, making the officer who heard her turn toward her on instinct.
Then, glaring fiercely at the bad adult whose face instantly fell, she pointed into the darkness of the night.
“Get out. Now!”
There was no fear in the teacher’s heart as she shouted sharply.
If the policeman tried to hurt them, she intended to make him bleed even if she had to bite and tear at him.
Even if she died in the process, she did not care.
At that moment, rage flowed through her veins in place of blood.
The student was truly startled when he saw his teacher’s expression.
He had been slowly sinking into murderous intent as he listened to the filthy words insulting someone precious to him, but the shock was so great that the intent vanished all at once.
The boy glimpsed murderous intent in his teacher’s face.
In the face of the teacher who had always been gentle and kind.
Footnotes:
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
