WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ The Police Do a Better Job Than Heroes

Chapter 35

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Life Is Like a Railroad Track (2)

Light City had its back alleys too. More precisely, there was a space people called the "black market."

It wasn't the kind of back alley lit up with gaudy neon signs or thick with cigarette smoke. Nor was it some lawless zone where knives came out and everyone walked around with a pistol strapped to their hip.

"Ohh."

"First time here?"

"Yeah, I guess... something like that."

If anything, Kang Jin-ho thought there was something strangely similar between this place and the weekend festival he'd seen earlier that day. That same rowdy night-market atmosphere you'd find at a tourist spot, maybe.

Shops hawking their wares on every side. Food stalls sending off pungent, mouth-watering smells. Streets packed with people. The noisy, cheerful energy felt about the same, but... if he had to name the difference, it was the quality of the people filling the place.

Muscle-bound men flaunting their scars like medals. Peddlers hawking cheap, illegal amplifiers. Low-rank villains quietly selling stolen goods of dubious origin. A certain rough, boundary-blurring vitality unique to the underworld ran through the alley.

Kang Jin-ho and Eun-yeong walked this street for a long while. They stopped to look at skewers of some unidentifiable meat, and at a strange contraption that looked ready to explode on its third use. Walking like tourists, or maybe like a couple on a date, they kept going.

"Here."

The spot where Eun-yeong stopped was, even within this shabby, tangled back alley, the most rundown and out-of-the-way corner of it all.

Garbage strewn across the ground. A stench that stabbed at the nose. A drunk man relieving himself in the corner of the alley.

"...here?"

"Yeah. This is the place."

Eun-yeong headed inside without hesitation, and Kang Jin-ho sighed and followed.

"What, these punks? You wanna see my dick? Want me to show you?"

As the two of them walked forward, the man who'd been urinating waved a hand and started spouting nonsense.

"Quit bothering me and get lost. Go on! This alley's..."

And then, at some point, his voice cut off.

The moment they'd walked five or six steps into the alley. The dizzying stench, the man making a scene, the filthy, sticky walls, all of it vanished.

What remained was only a black passage, and at its end, a purple lantern swaying faintly in the dark.

"..."

Kang Jin-ho followed behind Eun-yeong, and as he walked, he thought to himself. Had he ever seen a place like this in the game? No matter how far back he combed through his memory, nothing came to mind.

Of course, the "Light City" Kang Jin-ho had built also had a black market. In the game, the black market was a limited-time structure that sold random items, its prices and item quality entirely randomized, which put it fairly low on the priority list for construction.

Still, once in a while it turned up an excellent item at a shockingly low price, or something valuable that couldn't be found anywhere else, so he used to check it every so often... but he'd never imagined a space like this existed inside a black market.

"What are you doing? Come on."

"Ah, sorry. Coming."

He must have stopped walking without realizing it, lost in thought. Kang Jin-ho hurried to catch up with Eun-yeong, and as he did.

"Here."

An old, grotesque tent came into view. Passing under the purple lantern hanging above the entrance and stepping inside, a sharp, peculiar incense smell hit his nose.

"Hello there? Fortune-teller grandma."

The atmosphere inside the tent matched exactly what you'd expect from something called a "fortune-teller's tent."

Talismans covered every inch from floor to ceiling. Bones of unidentifiable animals scattered here and there. An old wooden table sat in the center, and on top of it, a large crystal ball glowing with a murky light.

"What, it's you, Eun-yeong."

An old woman slowly emerged from behind it. She was covered from head to toe in black cloth, but the wrinkles visible through the gaps in the fabric hinted at her age.

She was the one, known only to those in the know, said to be the most gifted fortune-teller in Light City's back alleys. A woman who peered into fate.

"I told you not to come looking for me."

"Aw, but what am I supposed to do when I've got a reason to?"

"...good grief."

The old fortune-teller shot Eun-yeong a sharp glare, then, seeming to give up, sat down at the table where the crystal ball rested.

"So, what is it? What do you want to know badly enough to crawl all the way out to this corner?"

"Nothing much."

Eun-yeong jerked her chin toward Kang Jin-ho, who stood awkwardly off to the side.

"Our rookie here is currently in a pre-awakening state, so he doesn't really know what his ability is. I was so curious about it. Could you take a good, deep look for me?"

"Huh. So you came to have someone's background dug up for you."

The old fortune-teller clicked her tongue and abruptly held out a withered hand.

"Nothing in this world comes free. Payment."

"Here."

Eun-yeong twisted her body slightly, cleverly angling herself so Kang Jin-ho couldn't see, then pulled something out from inside her coat and pressed it into the old woman's palm.

The moment she glanced at it, the fortune-teller's wrinkled eyes trembled sharply. From where Kang Jin-ho stood, he had no way of telling what exactly had been handed over, but it was clearly something enormous, enough to shut the stubborn old woman's mouth.

"...fine. Let's have a look, then."

The fortune-teller swallowed hard and laid her hand over the crystal ball at the center of the table. In an instant, her once-clouded eyes flashed a bright purple.

This was the old woman's power, one that let her peer into another person's fate and grasp the essence of what lay within them. Her gaze swept down over Kang Jin-ho's body and mind, searching for the source of the power hidden inside.

But.

'There's nothing here I could even call a superpower...'

The fortune-teller's brow furrowed. A typical ability user should have given off a clear flow of ether, or some distinct clump of energy, but she couldn't find any trace of that in the young man before her. He felt closer to an ordinary, perfectly healthy civilian.

But if Eun-yeong had paid a price that large, there had to be something.

Her power reached deeper. Toward something more private, something meant to stay hidden.

"...huh?"

And then, it stopped.

A person freezes when confronted with something they can't believe. When what they've just perceived is too much to accept, they need a little time.

"..."

That was exactly the fortune-teller's state right now. She had seen it. She had seen something that shouldn't be able to exist.

Karma. Sin accumulated. Nearly 500 million lives.

The fortune-teller saw the karma piled up behind Kang Jin-ho. A cold, mechanical number stacked so high it was almost impossible to accept.

"...uh, uhh..."

But what truly stunned the fortune-teller wasn't the staggering number itself.

The fortune-teller didn't know Kang Jin-ho. She had never seen his face, never heard his voice, never even heard his name before.

Think about it.

Someone whose face she didn't even recognize, someone she'd never once laid eyes on, had apparently killed close to 500 million people.

The first question that came to mind would be obvious.

How? When the entire world's population didn't even reach 10 billion?

How could someone kill 500 million people and not become famous for it? How could someone kill that many people and still be alive? How could someone commit that much evil and still wear a smile that shameless?

To begin with, how does a person even kill a number like 500 million?

Her wrinkled hand barely managed to keep its grip on the crystal ball as her thoughts raced.

To begin with, she knew of no human who had killed more than 500 million people. No such person had ever existed in the history of Earth.

Which left two possible scenarios.

First. That man could manipulate people's memories. He'd carried out a continent-scale massacre, then erased that memory from everyone.

That would explain why she, along with everyone else, had no memory of this butcher at all. A planetary-scale memory manipulation ability could make that possible.

Second. That man was old. Not just old in the ordinary sense. Assume he was old, unimaginably old.

No human in Earth's history had massacred over 500 million people. Even broadening the scope to war crimes, no such person existed.

But deaths in the millions, or tens of millions... there were a few cases of that. It wasn't something you could call impossible.

Suppose, then, that all the monsters who had carried out "massacres" throughout history weren't actually separate people. Suppose they were all the same person, surviving generation after generation by changing only face and identity, and that was how he'd managed to kill hundreds of millions without ever once getting caught...

The fortune-teller's thoughts stopped there.

Either way, it was dangerous. Dangerous enough that she wasn't even allowed to keep thinking about it.

Reason told her to stop right there. Cut off all interest, act as if nothing had happened, and go back to how things were.

But instinct, the way of life she'd built peering into fate all these years, made her mouth move anyway.

"You..."

The fortune-teller spoke, her voice trembling, the words coming out haltingly.

"Who... exactly are you?"

"...huh?"

Sensing the heavy shift in the air, Kang Jin-ho pressed his lips shut and started thinking hard.

However he looked at it, that old woman had clearly gotten the wrong idea about something, badly.

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