Incarnation of the Malevolent Star - Chapter 74

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

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◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈

Chapter 74: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (74)

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#74.

A day passed.

The anxiety of the bad policeman, Seo Mun-seok, deepened.

And the frightening boy's anxiety deepened even more.

Much of Lieutenant Seo Mun-seok's thinking was twisted, but he still took a certain pride in the life he had lived as a police officer.

It was not as though he had become a policeman out of any great sense of duty.

He had merely sought social standing and a stable job within the limits of his ability.

Still, one could take pride in something without a sense of duty.

Everyone wanted to see their own life in a favorable light, speak well of it, and be recognized by others.

The more exhausting one's daily life was, the more natural it was to feel proud of oneself for enduring it. It was a kind of defense mechanism.

An ordinary strength that let ordinary people keep living without breaking beneath painful lives.

The Service Merit Medal Seo Mun-seok had received after ten years of service sat proudly displayed on a shelf in his home.

That was why Constable Kim's proposal, from a man with a suspicious private life, made him so uncomfortable.

But as time passed, anxiety growing exponentially gnawed away at that discomfort.

Fear pressed heavily upon his mind with every passing moment.

Under that fear, Lieutenant Seo Mun-seok sank into a near-irresistible process of self-justification.

‘Do I really have to see what I'm going to do as nothing but wrong?’

Spreading an AI deepfake video was certainly wrong.

But what if it was a wrong committed as a means of revealing the truth and carrying out justice?

Even if the video itself was a lie, what if the public attention caused by that lie brought the improper relationship between teacher and student out into the open?

What if justice was set right in society once again?

Seo Mun-seok believed it firmly.

‘That two-faced bitch and that disrespectful little student brat are definitely involved with each other.’

Had the middle school brat, who clearly had not been raised properly, not flown into a rage without any manners at all? It was a guilty conscience if ever there was one.

And there had to be a reason the female teacher, who had always worn such a gentle mask, had suddenly revealed her savage nature and started screaming.

Until yesterday, this had remained at the stage of a reasonable suspicion.

But now it had grown into belief.

The bad policeman had been driven to the edge emotionally and was losing his reason. He needed to believe it if he wanted even a little peace of mind.

It was another defense mechanism at work in the bad policeman's mind.

A belief born from wanting to believe did not need evidence.

People were animals that believed what they wanted to believe in the first place.

This was even more so when sleep deprivation and stress had weakened one's ability to think rationally.

The bad policeman in crisis had not slept a wink throughout his night shift the previous evening.

He was the victim, and the female teacher was the perpetrator.

Seo Mun-seok thought of himself as a good person.

At the same time, he was socially vulnerable.

What else could a man be but socially vulnerable when he was a frail little fly, battered from one side by important people and from the other by malicious complainants?

Then, by the same logic, the female teacher tormenting a good and vulnerable man could only be an evil person. She had to be evil.

He thought again.

Had he not experienced enough already? That teacher, Lee Eun-jeong, had a truly awful character.

‘That bitch could sleep with a student much younger than her whenever she pleased.’

Surely he himself was not possessed by some lust demon and trapped in bizarre fantasies.

Was he making filthy suspicions because he was low-class himself? People only saw what was already inside them, after all.

He had seen countless criminals cornered beyond escape sincerely spout every kind of bullshit.

So many that he was sick of it.

They lied to justify themselves, and even deceived themselves with those lies.

A truly astonishing number of criminals believed themselves to be good people, then shed tears of bone-deep injustice during investigations and trials.

That was because they genuinely believed they had been wronged.

It was tiresomely common for them to blame victims, insisting that the victim was at fault.

But exemplary officer Lieutenant Seo Mun-seok could not possibly be like such criminals. Lieutenant Seo Mun-seok had always been on the side that looked at them with a frown.

Just like every other ordinary person in this country.

Seo Mun-seok did not doubt his own ordinariness.

So his thoughts continued to deepen in only one direction.

‘Right. This is for the children too. You can tell ten things from one.

How could a nasty bitch who does nothing but throw her weight around against a diligent policeman like me possibly have a wholesome private life?

We can't let a chillingly two-faced person like this teach children while calling herself a teacher.’

The more evil the image of the female teacher in his mind became, the deeper his sorrow and resentment grew.

Look at him even now.

Though it was only right that he be suspended from duty, he had still been assigned to work.

The local community needed him this badly.

How pitiful was Seo Mun-seok, who, even while facing unjust accusations, was devoting himself to keeping social order as a public official until the very end?

The day and night shifts changed, and it was time for him to go home and rest.

Yet rather than return home, he lay in the second-floor duty room.

He rolled this way and that, unable to find peace for even a moment.

His bloodshot eyes stayed open longer than they stayed shut. He had not even removed his uniform or socks.

The unlit duty room was a place as dark in daytime as it was at night.

In that cramped darkness, where wardrobes and storage cabinets took up a third of the room, the bad policeman trapped in a victim mentality considered what he needed to do.

He considered it with fierce intensity.

The frightening boy, trapped in worry, considered what he needed to do.

He considered it with fierce intensity.

His deep thoughts showed even at the table, making old Jo Jeong-ho, who was eating with him, worry.

“Onik. Is something wrong? You barely seem to be eating.”

“Uh, no. It’s nothing... Don’t worry about it, Grandpa.”

Onik hated telling even the smallest lie to his grandfather.

That was why his attempt to brush it off as nothing carried an awkwardness that showed through.

Old Jo Jeong-ho knew his grandson well. He could not fail to notice it.

The old man studied the shadow cast over his grandson's face.

It was a new shadow, different in color from the familiar shadow that the past sometimes cast over him.

‘He’s been like this ever since I went to Seoul.’

As far as the old man knew, nothing particularly serious could have happened in the past day or two.

His grandson, an excellent student, had always been doing well at school. In both academics and relationships, his grandson was truly exceptional.

It did trouble him that Onik did not seem to consider friendships at school especially important.

But that was not entirely a bad thing. It meant his grandson would not suffer over problems with friends.

The old man did not know why, but it seemed that his grandson had drawn some kind of line between himself and the other children.

As a result, Onik's friendships seemed less like relationships where they played together and more like relationships where he humored the others by playing with them. The boy always seemed to stand one step away from the groups of schoolchildren and watch them.

Of course, it would be another matter if that led to him being excluded.

But according to what the homeroom teacher had told him, his grandson was the most popular child at school, someone everyone admired.

‘She said everyone was desperate to play with our Onik.’

The teacher had not spared her praise. She said she had no idea how much easier things were because Onik always kept everyone grounded.

That was the advantage of a rural school with few students.

Communication between teachers and guardians was far smoother than in the city.

There was no problem with his grandson's broadcast, either.

Jo Jeong-ho was an elderly man comfortable with technology, and he always kept up with his grandson's broadcasts.

As far as he knew, there had been no accident or issue that could have made Onik uncomfortable.

So the old man naturally reached the wrong conclusion.

‘...Then, in the end, was it my trip to Seoul?’

If Onik had guessed the true reason his grandfather had gone to Seoul, it would make sense for him to look troubled by the fear that he might one day have to live apart from his grandfather.

‘Though I didn't gain much from this trip to Seoul, either.’

He could not expect to be full after one spoonful, but the veterans' association event he had attended for the first time in a long while had fallen far below the expectations of an old soldier living in the countryside.

‘To think the infighting had become that bad... In the past, even if we belonged to different factions, we at least had the manners to respect each other as comrades.’

There were still comrades like those from the past.

But it was true that even those comrades had not been free from factional conflict.

The disputes had wasted much of his time during this trip to Seoul.

Should he say something to his troubled grandson?

After hesitating, the old man decided that if they were going to talk, it would be better to make proper time for it later.

For now, it was only a guess. And even if his guess was right, he needed to prepare Onik mentally beforehand.

Unaware that his grandfather was having such a misunderstanding, Onik worried.

‘What if, instead of reporting it, I make a recording and release it on my broadcast? If I explain Teacher's situation clearly to my viewers, then say that someone sent me the file I’m listening to now anonymously...’

Then most viewers would surely think this.

「It’s obvious. One of the other police officers at the same substation leaked it. They couldn't bear to watch their colleagues behave like that anymore.」

「How rotten must the police station be for someone to tip off the victim this way? They must have thought there was no chance of proper punishment if they reported it through official channels. Everyone knows the local media are all in on it too.」

「It’s not like Korean police being corrupt is some new thing lol. Nothing surprising lol.」

Onik could practically see the live chat from that moment.

But that carried risks too.

Whistleblowers in this country had a high chance of being treated unfairly.

Especially in authoritarian, closed organizations like the military or police, exposing and retaliating against them was treated as a matter of course.

...No matter how much people criticized it, reality did not change.

So once the broadcast went out, the police would surely carry out an intense internal investigation.

The provincial police agency, thoroughly humiliated, would not be satisfied until it identified who had made the recording, how they had done it, and what route they had used to leak it.

The important people at the police agency would undoubtedly be furious.

Onik watched plenty of news and read many books. He understood the way the world worked as well as most adults did.

「When something like this happens, you should try to resolve it internally first! Is the internal-affairs office there just for decoration? Why are you ignoring a perfectly good chain of command and doing this nonsense?」

「Fine, he secretly recorded his colleagues. But why throw it out into the open right away? This is driving me insane!」

「Find him! You have to find him! This is a matter of organizational discipline! We can't create a precedent where someone breaks rules and procedures because he's drunk on his own self-importance, then gets away with it! If we do, this will happen again someday! Every time it does, the people above will have to take the blame!」

「I don't know which bastard you are, but don't think nothing will happen after you ruined my path to promotion like this... I've already got nothing left to lose. I'll make sure to destroy you at least.」

The boy's imagination was remarkably detailed. It was the result of adding his broad knowledge of current affairs to the realities of closed societies and his distrust of the police...

If police burning with such rage deliberately set out to investigate internally, the frightening boy would not be safe.

First of all, the desk-clock spy camera he had secretly installed was a problem.

‘It’s a problem if I remove it, and a problem if I don’t.’

If the clock that had been there disappeared, the police uncles would naturally become suspicious.

Then, once they confirmed that none of the substation staff had ever purchased that clock, they would inevitably begin to trace its origin.

Many Korean parents said:

「My child doesn't study, but they're smart.」

Korean police were like that.

Sometimes they failed to do their jobs properly, but once they actually began working, the investigative ability of police in this country was not something to take lightly.

Their homicide clearance rate, which always exceeded 90 percent, proved it.

Sometimes they arrested innocent people, as they had Yoon Seong-yeo, but things had improved greatly compared to the past. Of course, one was not supposed to ask the rude question of whether this really counted as improvement.

As a frightening boy with a profound interest in murder, Onik could not possibly be unaware of the extent of the Korean police's investigative ability.

If police like that deliberately carried out an internal investigation, could no one possibly consider that the suspiciously vanished desk clock had been a spy camera?

Of course not.

To assume that no one would consider that possibility when there was a Wi-Fi router sitting right beside it was to think the police in this country were truly stupid.

‘Police uncles aren’t stupid.’

And Onik was not stupid either.

If the police examined Wi-Fi connection logs and data transmission records with the telecom company's cooperation, the end of the route those packets had traveled would naturally lead to the frightening boy's own home.

But leaving that clock that was not really a clock in place would be equally dangerous.

‘Should I swap it with another desk clock that looks similar and try to fool them?’

That was the most realistic option he had.

Before releasing the audio recording through his broadcast, he could replace the clock, retrieve every recording device he had hidden here and there, and hope the police uncles did not sense anything strange.

In the end, too much depended on luck, which made him dislike the method.

He could not simply keep praying to Uncle Cthulhu up in heaven.

And even if the method succeeded, it would not erase the possibility that the police uncles, after receiving severe punishment, might resent Teacher even more and try to harm her.

Like the fifty-six-year-old Village Youth Association President, who had been severely beaten and humiliated before the villagers, whose pent-up resentment erupted and who ultimately killed someone.

The tears full of injustice that the Village Youth Association President had shown before he died.

Those tears had been a clue that allowed Onik to guess at the resentment he had carried.

‘That was when I learned it. An ordinary person with selfish resentment can become a shameless murderer.’

The lonely boy who remembered Yohan's death wanted his precious teacher to become one hundred percent safe.

He did not want to leave even the smallest possibility that the bad police uncles might harm Teacher later.

He did not even want to imagine a future where his precious teacher's spirit died from the shock of the fake video being spread, or where she committed suicide altogether.

The boy's thoughts about the crossroads he had considered before Yohan's gravestone were still continuing in the present...

‘I don’t want to kill anyone.’

He wanted to kill so badly.

At the same time, he wanted not to kill even more.

Within him existed both the burning thirst of a lost person wandering through a desert, and the conscience of a vampire who did not want to drink another person's blood no matter how thirsty they were.

The grim craving, which felt as though it might flood beyond control at any moment, disgusted him deeply.

The dark abnormality nestled inside him constantly whispered in impulses the color of dark red blood.

Onik could put into human language this whisper that clung to him even more thickly than the sexual urges of growing boys.

「You know, don’t you? The one hundred percent safety you want can only be gained through murder.」

That was right. He knew.

Onik was only avoiding the answer that had already been decided.

He wanted to delay his second murder, the moment he became a worse child than he already was, for as long as possible.

He kept cutting away the dark impulse crawling up from within himself with the blade of self-loathing. He was only continuing to search for a way that would not require him to kill anyone.

A way for Teacher to become one hundred percent safe without killing anyone.

A way that would leave no future trouble connected to the bad police.

The ominous impulse that crept through the darkness borrowed Onik's knowledge and reason to mock him.

「There is no such way.」

People whose lives had fallen into the abyss constantly chewed over the past.

Trapped in the past, they endlessly cursed and hated everything that had hurt them before.

Their hearts sank deeper and deeper into darkness that way...

The police officers who had ruined their own lives would not be exceptions.

Unless their lives became happy again, there was little reason to think their hatred for Eun-jeong would lessen.

Hatred that would only grow, and grow, and grow.

This was what ordinary people were.

It was what human beings were, as understood more deeply each day through news, reading, and constant thought by the frightening boy who admired ordinary life and wanted to become ordinary himself someday.

Even in the middle of such agonizing thoughts, Onik still had to go to school.

If he skipped school, he would make both Grandpa and Teacher worry.

‘The police uncles in town could do something bad while I’m at school, too...’

Filled with worry, Onik set out for school, then suddenly stopped in front of the village hall.

A blue Porter truck was parked in the open space before it.

This Porter truck, which had belonged to the Village Youth Association President who had become dog food, had a new owner now.

Uncle Jongsik, who grew pears, was its new owner. In reality, though, it was used almost like a shared village vehicle.

Onik stared quietly at the vehicle that always reminded him of his first murder.

“...”

A fragment of leaf spring wedged beside the truck bed caught the frightening boy's eye.

As if by magic.

As if it had been fated.