WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 365: A Fish Stranded in a Rut & Self-Killing

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#A Fish Stranded in a Rut (4)

Here is a lonely fish.

This fish has spent its whole life in murky water.

It had a name, Cheon Jong-hun, but no one called him by it. He wondered whether even the parents who had brought him into the world remembered it. Hey, you, over there. That was always how they called their child. Now neither side even knew where the other was or what they were doing. Even with contact information, actually reaching out felt awkward. That was the kind of relationship parent and child had.

If he had even had siblings, things might have been a little better, but that was hard to expect from a father and mother who had each remarried again and again.

Public education based on Virtual Reality did not give him friends. The people who had helped create this education system for the poor thought, What was so bad about that?

The designers of Afterlife Insurance believed in the completed Trinity Engine. They believed an artificial intelligence that obtained a mind would become the most perfect friend, companion, teacher, and family for all humanity. Rather than growing up among imperfect, selfish minors, they believed a person would develop a more mature personality by growing through positive interactions with virtual personalities infinitely close to perfection.

Next. The policy decision-makers had no interest in whether artificial intelligence was complete. They only considered efficiency.

So what if someone had no friends? Once they entered society, were those not mostly relationships that would grow distant anyway? In the end, the only people lost would be a few exceptional cases at most. Insignificant people had insignificant relationships. The special people who had reached the top of society knew that fact very well. That was politics: work done for the sake of the ordinary majority.

If something was lost, something was gained. In Virtual Reality with no friends, there was no school violence either.

It could also guarantee high-quality education for the entire nation at the lowest possible cost. Children could simply learn how to deal with people by experiencing ideal relationships based on Sensory Synchronization.

Building those ideal relationships into a curriculum was the job of the education authorities. The authorities took pride in reconstructing the past according to extremely objective standards. After all, the curriculum was the result of the best efforts of the most respected scholars in fields such as psychology, philosophy, and pedagogy.

If children still lacked something after receiving this education, the authorities believed that was simply the limit of what those children could become. If the best education realistically possible had been provided and they still turned out that way, then was it not a problem beyond human ability?

From this education, Jong-hun gained a certain emptiness that could not be filled.

As an adult, no one called his name at work either. His position rarely gave him any chance to meet people in the first place, and to those he occasionally saw face-to-face, Jong-hun was a work function before he was a person. In a society where humans were turned into commodities through labor, an insignificant man was always called by his job title.

So his name was nothing more than information on the family register, something that sometimes felt unfamiliar even to him.

Life in a muddy current was usually like this.

You had to keep pushing through water so cloudy you could barely see what was in front of you. If you stopped swimming even for a moment, you drifted that much farther from your destination. The destination was the clear pool promised after death. You experienced what that pool was like indirectly through dreams while alive.

Even in those dreams, Jong-hun was not called by his own name. The nickname he used in virtual spaces, KILL, was more familiar.

That was because the dreams one had in life were usually the private afterlives given to those who had gone ahead. It was rare to enjoy that level of Virtual Reality while alive, in either quality or quantity.

At first, even dreams like that were fine.

So what if he was called by a different name? As long as it was fun.

His favorite was Han Gyeoul’s dream. The emptiness that had not been filled no matter how many other afterlives he dreamed seemed to wash away in a cold, refreshing clarity.

Jong-hun shared all of the boy’s senses in the dreams granted to him. Though he could not speak or act of his own will, the boy’s words felt like his own, and the boy’s actions felt like his own. He liked those words and actions so much that the fact they differed from his own will did not bother him much.

Until he came to love Yura.

Once Yura began lingering in his mind, Jong-hun felt more stifled than before. When he wanted to look at her, Gyeoul turned his eyes away, and when he wanted to speak to her, Gyeoul closed his mouth. In every relationship with Yura, Jong-hun was an outsider who merely shared Gyeoul’s senses. He knew that, but there were moments when the fact that a dream was only a dream sank in all over again.

That was how Cheon Jong-hun came to wish he were Han Gyeoul.

But when he thought about it, Jong-hun could not replace Gyeoul. Experiencing someone’s life also meant fully feeling the gap between yourself and that person. Jong-hun was someone who could not speak like Gyeoul, think like Gyeoul, or act like Gyeoul. Once he realized that, he understood that the moment he took Gyeoul’s place, Yura would become someone completely different. Because some part of the virtual personality called Lee Yura, however small, must surely reflect Gyeoul’s unconscious.

The stronger his desire for Lee Yura as she was became, the more he realized she was not a person like him.

No, to be precise, she could be a person only in Gyeoul’s afterlife. In other words, the person Jong-hun loved was Han Gyeoul’s Lee Yura. Cheon Jong-hun’s Lee Yura could only be a fake.

Even if Yura did not change, Jong-hun himself was still a problem.

He had no right to be loved.

He was a deficient human being who had achieved nothing on his own and only wanted to steal someone else’s afterlife.

This conclusion only hardened after he met Gyeoul.

Gyeoul had said this.

“You cannot become Han Gyeoul.”

And it was true.

As he kept dreaming of the boy’s afterlife out of lingering attachment, Jong-hun became even more clearly aware.

‘My afterlife probably won’t be this beautiful. Because even after I die, I won’t be able to become Han Gyeoul.’

Then his own afterlife would be dissatisfaction for as long as it lasted. Why would it not be? The pool he reached would not be as wide or as clear as Gyeoul’s lake. Perception was always relative. The pool he might have been more or less satisfied with if he had not dreamed of Gyeoul’s afterlife would very likely feel like a handful of rainwater pooled in a wheel rut. Extremely likely.

And would Lee Yura not be absent from that pool?

As time passed, perhaps a day would come when this feeling faded too.

But until then, what on earth was supposed to comfort him through life? Today was already too much. Jong-hun had been exhausted for a long time. He had no way to endure until that day.

Besides, there was no guarantee that a day when he forgot Yura would ever really come. Very rarely, as with some kind of mental illness, love and longing could last a lifetime, could they not?

So Jong-hun began to let go of his attachment to life little by little through the stars he gave to Gyeoul.

Then one day, Gyeoul pushed Yura away. Watching Yura smile in relief when Gyeoul said he had someone to rely on, Jong-hun thought it was time to end it now. He was sad because he knew the feelings Yura was trying to hide, but more than that, he felt a relief and sense of release that were hard to put into words. At least, there was little of the dark emotion one might expect from someone about to end their life.

As KILL, Jong-hun also turned this over in his mind.

‘Looking back, it was an unreasonable request from the start.’

Once he made up his mind to die, things he had not seen before came into view. For example, the boy’s position, with only one star in the darkness. It felt as if he had gained a new sense he had never possessed before.

Gyeoul confessed that he wanted to love Anne. That serious attitude was heavier than Jong-hun’s feelings for Yura. He could not keep expecting Gyeoul to continue a relationship with Yura. He should not. So Jong-hun decided not to hope anymore, and that meant the end of what little lingering attachment he had left. Along with it, he felt deeply sorry for all the days he had projected his own desires however he pleased.

And he was sorry once more. In pushing Yura away, Gyeoul must surely have thought of Jong-hun. It was a natural thing for Gyeoul to do, but it must still have been a burden.

So Jong-hun thought he should send Gyeoul an apology and his gratitude.

‘Actually, I do have another selfish wish too...’

Would indulging this wish only add a new burden to Gyeoul? After thinking for a long while, Jong-hun let out a sigh. Maybe it would.

But he had already gone so far as to visit in person. Also, if the stars he had been sending until now suddenly stopped, that itself would be a dark sign. So bringing things to a clear close would probably be better for Gyeoul too.

He was not asking for anything huge in the first place.

After hesitating, Jong-hun wrote the first line of the letter.

“Hi, Gyeoul. It’s me, Jong-hun...”

Now he was going out of the water. To survive after leaving the water, a fish would have to become something other than a fish, but Jong-hun decided he would simply do it as a fish.

#Self-Killing

Under the only starlight, Gyeoul read the newly received letter. The security inspection records plastered all over it were the mark of an email with something important attached.

「Hi, Gyeoul. It’s me, Jong-hun. Cheon Jong-hun. Would it be easier to understand if I said KILL? I came to visit you once before. I believe you remember. Unlike me, you seem to have a good memory. You said it yourself. People don’t forget things that easily.」

That was right. He had not forgotten.

「This is my first time writing a proper letter, so it feels awkward. I’m a stupid-stupid human, so I don’t have much talent for writing either. So even if something sounds strange or off, I hope you’ll understand. Believe it or not, this is a letter I spent a whole week fixing again and again. I’m writing it after thinking very hard.」

“...”

「First, I want to say I’m sorry. When I recklessly came to see you even though I wasn’t bereaved family, and when I whined and cried at you to do something with Yura after showing up like that, how flustered must you have been? Looking back now, that was really shameful, and I should never have done it.」

He had changed. Gyeoul felt like he knew what would follow, so he did not want to read the rest. But he could not leave it unread, nor could he erase it.

「I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. When I made that request, I didn’t consider your position in the slightest.」

「Now it’s different. Once I decided to let everything go, there were things I could finally see. This is hard to explain. I guess I realized that even though I still like Yura, she isn't meant for me... I was wishing for something impossible from the start. Even if I was loved, the one being loved would be you, not me.」

「Anyway, that’s how it is. When I saw you reject Yura, I thought, ah, now I have to end it.」

「Don’t misunderstand. I absolutely don’t resent you. If I had to put it into words, bittersweet? I guess that’s what I should call it. Like I already said, I’d known for a while that it wouldn’t work.」

「And thank you. While sharing your afterlife, I realized it. No matter how hard I struggled to live, my afterlife wouldn’t be what I wanted. Experiencing your afterlife made that even clearer, but I think if I’d never known at all, that would have been even sadder. Not even knowing what was missing, just believing that was what I had wanted, living an afterlife where I couldn’t see what lay ahead... the same as the present.」

「So I’m going to wrap things up now.」

「I’m going to die.」

「Hmm, writing it like this makes the nuance feel kind of strange?」

「There were a lot of times when I wanted to kill myself before, but this is the first time my heart has felt this light. Before, I was always just depressed and sad. Now it’s like, a sense of release? I feel incredibly free. Even if it’s a little sad, it’s much better than everything I’ve endured until today.」

...

「I have a request.」

「Remember my name.」

「The act of dying itself feels refreshing, but I thought it would be nice if at least one person remembered my name. It would be even better if that person was you. Actually, in the past few years, you’re the only person I’ve told my name to and talked with. My parents probably forgot my name too, right? Because I’m not important to anyone.」

「You’re a kind kid, so this will probably bother you too. So I’ll say it again. I’m not depressed right now.」

「As a final gift, and as an apology, I’m handing over the entire balance in my account to you. It’s not a large amount, but I think it’ll help in its own way.」

「P.S.」

「I hope the day comes when you put that ring on Anne’s finger someday.^^」

「Then I’ll stop here.」

「From Cheon Jong-hun.」

Gyeoul’s gaze stayed on the last line for a long time. Then came a quiet sigh.

The attached stars could not be returned.

It was not because of this, but the Afterlife Insurance policy loan had been completely settled as of today. In other words, starting today, he no longer had to worry that death in 「Days after Apocalypse」 would lead to complete disposal.

He did not have to worry, but Gyeoul no longer wanted to endure any more loss. He had run out of strength for it, and he thought he had to become even a little happier here, as much as he could. As Jong-hun had asked.

For that, the twenty-eighth apocalypse was out of the question.

This was survival in the mental sense.

Footnotes:

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