WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 164: The Past, The Season When Roses Wither

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This anger was mine.

Chairman Go Geon-cheol glared at the pill bottles in his hand. Psychotropic medication. His attending physician had diagnosed the tyrant with severe impulse control disorder. His brain function was already damaged, and ordinary methods would make recovery difficult. Treatment would only be possible through a combination of symptomatic situation staging, surgery, and medication.

"What a joke."

The Chairman threw the pill bottles into the trash. One after another, bottle by bottle, as if carving a vow into himself. He could not rely on methods like this. The Chairman thought, Attending physician? In the end, he was just another stranger bound to me by contract. I will not let anyone else sway my mind. I will not let anyone else handle my heart.

This anger was mine. Killing it, wiping it out, must be my role alone. It must be my struggle. A thorny path to reclaim everything I had lost. I am my own master. I am the master of myself. Even if I fail, that failure will be mine as well. I will not go on living a meaningless life as a self that is not me.

Who in the world thinks they can judge me, and by what standard?

Who dares call me insane?

The normality they speak of is nothing more, in the end, than a generalization of the masses, those dogs and pigs.

I am the only standard. The only one who can evaluate my life is me. I alone have the right to assign value to myself, to people, to this world, to every last thing under heaven.

The tyrant knew enough. He also knew that diagnoses of mental disorder were based on deviations from a social average. It was unacceptable. The tyrant was human. A human could not be measured by the yardstick of dogs and pigs.

One mistake had been enough.

Becoming one woman's slave by choice had been enough.

Go Geon-cheol had snorted the moment the doctor brought up Virtual Reality as a medium for situation staging.

If it was not real, it had no meaning. Floundering around inside an insubstantial illusion was the worst form of existence. An insubstantial illusion. Insubstantial feelings. His past body's entire life had been swayed by a love he had believed existed, so how could he willingly step into another illusion?

What a laughable world.

The real was rare, buried and lost among countless fakes. That was why the world was made only of fakes. Fakes were louder, noisier, and flashier than the real. The tyrant, who was real, had nearly vanished while trapped among fakes. He had thought those things were real. Those had been naive days. Without even knowing ignorance was a sin, drunk on a waking dream, he had fluttered like a butterfly through a fleeting, fragrant delusion. Until a razor-edged spiderweb, reality, the weight of truth, tore apart his wings and his hope.

Ten billion beasts pretending to be human.

Trash that longed for worthless illusions and betrayed reality. No matter how dazzling or stimulating they were, an illusion was only an illusion. A world that vanished when the power was cut. A fabrication where whoever held capital could exercise absolute control. Therefore, every beast was reduced to capital. It was opportunity cost. Money provided every human opportunity, every possibility.

Ah, life had to be economical. Because that was the only fierce way to exist. The tyrant made a boiling sound.

The boiling feeling was anger.

It was better to fail than entrust one's fate to others. He had vowed that this was life, but the Chairman was a tyrant. He could not tolerate failure. Failure would be defeat. It would be that woman's ultimate victory. She was no longer in this world, yet even after killing her, Go Geon-cheol had not been able to feel victorious. Because this anger, the stone rolling around inside his chest, was that woman's ghost to begin with.

The tyrant murmured.

"I will reclaim myself."

Anger was a rightful feeling. It was his feeling. Escape was no different from declaring defeat. It was the same as shouting to this false world that he had lost. Ha! How could he possibly do that?

The daughter asked her father.

"I don't understand what you mean. How long do I have to stay here?"

"Until I tell you to leave."

Go Ah-young looked at her father with sunken eyes. It was patience, suppressing many emotions. The tyrant did not like it. That thing had never gone mad with anger. If she had poured that anger out instead, perhaps she would have been a little more lovable....

'Love?'

The Chairman felt nauseous. Love that thing? How could he even think that?

When she resembled that woman so much.

It was not only a face made disgusting by its resemblance and beauty. From the little expressions, habits, tastes, speech, and voice, he felt the half of his daughter's genes that she had inherited from that woman. He could not believe he had once loved that thing. No, what he could not believe was the substance of that feeling. He could not separate the feeling of cherishing her because she was his child from the feeling of cherishing her because she was the fruit of that woman.

Yet Go Geon-cheol knew, in the end, that he had to love Go Ah-young.

Because that was one victory he had to seize.

'That thing is half of that woman, and also half of me, Go Geon-cheol.'

Therefore, whether Go Geon-cheol's feelings toward Go Ah-young were love or hatred was a war between the woman, the root of all evil, and the tyrant. A desperate struggle. If he hated her, that woman won. If he loved her, then things would finally be set right for the tyrant. Seeing his ex-wife in Go Ah-young was an illusion pressing down on reality. An illusion. A fleeting obsession, ghost, torment, regret, and self-harm that dared try to rule existence....

"Why? When you get so angry every time you see me, what possible reason could you have...?"

"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Do not interfere with my thoughts!"

Go Geon-cheol roared.

"Why? Why? Whyyy? Because, you fucking bitch, you are my possession! Because you are my child! Your life! Your existence! Everything you think belongs to you! Do you think any of it could have existed without my permission? You exist by my permission! Your face, your body, every strand of your hair! They were my decision! I permitted you! You are here because I gave permission!"

"...You're right. But half of it would be Mother's permission."

"Youuuu!"

The Chairman turned violently red.

"How dare you! In front of me! You! Speak of that woman!"

"I only stated a fact."

The daughter watched her father run wild. There was a liquor bottle nearby. She knew it would fly at her. That was his habit. But it did not. He grabbed it and panted, tried to throw it, tried to drink it, ground his teeth while hesitating, then threw it into the trash. What did this change mean? To Go Ah-young, wondering about it was no more than a stopgap for escaping the immediate reality. Her father's inner world, the effort of trying to empathize with it, she had given up on those long ago.

'I couldn't bear it.'

She was human. Humans had limits. Once, she had tried to understand her father. She had tried to comfort him. But when every attempt and every bit of pity ended in frustration, the daughter had wept and given up on love. Because the more deeply she loved, the deeper the wound became.

Empathy was a knife without a handle. A person who empathized with sadness became sad. A person who empathized with pain was hurt. When it was not accepted, only the one who tried to give their heart shed tears.

The daughter lowered her head.

The father glared at the liquor bottle he had thrown away.

The escape from reality held inside the glass bottle sloshed temptingly in the trash.

He had to be fiercely angry. If he turned away from reality because it hurt, then to the tyrant, that itself was a moment of defeat. He did not permit himself weakness. Yes. It was a matter of permission. Every value in this world came from his own evaluation, and unless it had a relationship to himself, it had no meaning.

Now the father glared at his daughter again. He swallowed the hot surge of rage. Because anger, too, was only proof of defeat. He endured. He had to endure. Trembling all over, the Chairman had to overcome dozens of crises before he could open his mouth.

"You may leave for today."

"..."

"I will call you again. I hope you act more prudently then."

The daughter stood silently. She bowed deeply, out of courtesy rather than sincerity.

Watching that slender back turn away, the tyrant repeated it to himself.

I must love that thing.

He knew it well enough in his head. That the child who had been lonely and afraid in the snowy garden that day bore no responsibility. That he ought, even now, to embrace the cold, terror, and tears of that child who had shivered while clutching the hem of the father who should never have come. That the child was still frozen alone in loneliness.

Yet every time he saw her face, his insides turned over.

What the fuck kind of dogshit was this?

Now the Chairman was furious with himself.

No, from long before, the ultimate direction of all anger had been his own anger itself. It was only that every moment of anger felt new and unfamiliar. A fate out of his hands, a soul out of his control, this heart that had hardened like stone and boiled with a thick, rumbling crackle.

There was a kind of satisfaction that came from blaming someone.

Anger was alive in itself. Alive, it wandered endlessly in search of a scapegoat. So reasons could be found anywhere. Wasn't a reason something that appeared once you stuck it on? There was no reason for loving someone. There was no reason for hating someone either. Anger was that kind of feeling. The only nourishment needed for hatred to grow was hatred. Hatred alone.

'I need something real. Something real. Something true to nail down this worthless reality.'

The Chairman slammed his head onto the table. Something that was neither a groan nor a sob squirmed beneath his throat.

Self-hatred ate away at time.

Beep.

A light came on in the line connected to the secretarial office. The Chairman preferred analog. So the light was truly there, and the phone was an object with substance. There was no room for the virtual to intrude on his reality. He could not tolerate that infinitely weightless lie.

Even if all of it was only a matter of perception. Because the tyrant himself had assigned that value to it.

"What is it?"

When he pressed the button and asked, a restrained voice came back.

[Special Secretary Kang Young-il is here. Shall I let him in?]

"At this hour?"

The Chairman checked the time. While he had been writhing in torment, the time had passed midnight.

Still, that bastard was one of the few real things. Very dirty, but real trash was better than a fake human. He was trash who knew what truly had value and had thrown away flimsy hypocrisies like morality and conscience for its sake.

"Tell him to come in."

The tyrant permitted an audience.

The loyal son of a bitch entered the room. His expressionless face was a mask for a son of a bitch panting with its tongue hanging out.

"Judging by the state of you, I suppose you finished everything?"

At the Chairman's question, the special secretary, a former intelligence agent, answered in proper posture.

"Of course. Those people will never again do anything to upset you, Chairman."

The loyal hound showed restrained pride in what he had accomplished.

The dead prey had been a pair. A husband and wife who did not love each other. They had also been gamblers who had exploited their child for money. A pair of lunatics who were useless themselves, yet carefully leeched off their child, sucked the marrow dry, blew their entire fortune on an investment that was obviously a scam, and then, still not satisfied, dared try to blackmail the tyrant using the illegal transaction as leverage.

'That brat was an idiot too. Idiot, idiot, idioooot bastard! A stupid fool like that wouldn't be a waste even if he died a hundred times! Ignorance is a sin! Ignorance is sin!'

A stupid little brat who had been tricked by one line saying his younger sibling was sick, and had even put up his own afterlife as collateral.

When the tyrant thought of him, he felt heat bursting inside.

How could he waste himself like that?

How could he be so uneconomical?

The child in question had only thought that whether it was true or not did not matter, that his already dead life could end whenever it had to, and that he did not want to become a long, lingering regret in his sister's life while neither dead nor alive.

Even if the Chairman had known the truth, he would still have been angry.

"Why did you come in person?"

The Chairman growled.

"What, did you want praise?"

The hunting dog was not hurt by the blade of sarcasm.

"I heard you needed a stimulating experience."

"And?"

"The ones who blackmailed you were only that couple, as far as I could tell. The remaining children knew nothing. Even so, I thought it would be safer to dispose of them all at once, but before that, I thought I needed to ask you one thing."

"What?"

"The daughter of the couple who died this time... Han Ga-eul, was it? That woman seems quite decent."

"Appearance is only skin."

"I know. You are that kind of person, Chairman. You even turned away Miss Park Ga-hee, did you not?"

"Park Ga-hee? Who is that?"

"You don't know? You called her fairly often until recently."

The tyrant barely remembered. That arrogant woman who had asked him to call her by name the next time they met. Yes, that had been her name. He felt nothing. She was only a doll from a past time that had passed. A half-hearted woman, not fake, but not real either.

"I paid that woman compensation. That was the end of it."

"So she was nothing special."

"She wasn't. So."

The Chairman brought the conversation back to its starting point.

"What about that bitch named Han Ga-eul?"

"She severed ties with her parents some time ago. No, it seems the parents left first once money came in. Since then, Han Ga-eul appears to have been struggling to keep her two younger siblings alive. Though her income so far has been so poor that she has never actually helped them."

"So?"

"If you took that woman into your arms, would it not be extremely stimulating?"

The hunting dog wore a cold smile.

"Physically, it would be incest, but legally, you would be strangers. That is the relationship between you and that woman, Chairman. On top of that, she must have a desperate lingering attachment to you, or more precisely, to your body. Those eyes, that situation... Would it not be entertainment worth enjoying once?"

"..."

"How many hyenas are after you, Chairman? I could not discuss this over communications, so I came to see you at this late hour. When I checked with the secretarial office, I heard you were not asleep yet. I apologize if I disturbed you."

Hmm. The tyrant sat in his chair and laced his fingers together. Tap, tap. His moving fingers were his swaying heart. He disliked it, and he liked it.

"Bring her here once. I will decide after I see her face."

At the Chairman's permission, the special secretary smiled.

"That woman is very lucky."

Otherwise, she would have died.

But the Chairman did not expect much.

It had only been a short while ago that he had believed the delusion that changing his body would change his life. What use could a connection tied to the body's past be now?

More than that, his heart was drawn to the liquor bottle he had thrown away.

It was a vicious temptation.

============================ Author’s Note ============================

#Hey, what was that name again?

I've been feeling very depressed lately, so for a change of mood, I went to see Director Makoto Shinkai's new film, which has been the talk of theaters lately.

A lot of the director's signature sensibility, the kind that shoves love into the gutter and leaves it there, was gone, but it was still a good movie. It was fun. I liked it.

There was none of the... that... what was it... nuisance behavior in the theater that so many people had warned about.

But it was still a little disappointing.

I thought it would fill my childlike innocence...

Even when the comet appeared, I had really high hopes...

#Q&A

Q. Kushihiru: @Author, judging by the story so far, this game seems like an entertainment game full of childlike innocence with no dreams or hope... You did say the clear condition is when the possibility of humanity's extinction is judged to be 0%, but I don't think anything about vaccine research for the virus(?) has come up separately... Was there perhaps a part where it was mentioned in the story?

A. First, Plague Immunity was briefly mentioned as an obtainable skill. And even aside from that, within common sense, you can assume vaccine research is naturally underway.

Q. LewdDemonF: When will the physical book full of childlike innocence come out? A masterpiece like this needs to be put on the shelf for picture books.

A. As I said before, I don't know the exact timing either. It will come out when the time comes, I guess. Honestly, I don't have much expectation for the physical book... When signing the contract, I just thought of it as fanservice.

Footnotes:

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