Nothing Has Changed
Nothing had changed.
After the Hunter Association people left, Jeorg Wooyong and his mother sat together on the sofa in silence.
"I'm sorry, son. I was coming back from the market and those people were waiting right outside the door. I didn't want to let them in, but when I opened it to come inside, they just followed me. I told them to leave, but they wouldn't listen…"
"No, Mom. You did fine. That wasn't your fault."
How was she supposed to stop a pack of burly men who had come determined to force their way in? Jeorg Wooyong had no intention of blaming his mother. She looked at him carefully.
"Son. What are you going to do?"
He didn't answer. A hunter. Was going back to that really the right call?
And for the Republic of Korea, of all things?
If it had been just him, he would have unleashed a stream of curses and headed straight for Daejeon. But he had his parents to think about too.
"I was going to talk it over with Dad when he gets home."
"Alright. Let's do that. Are you hungry, son? Mom'll make you some crab stew. I saw it was cheap at the market today."
His mother went to prepare dinner. Jeorg Wooyong sat blankly on the sofa, thinking and thinking for a long time.
Around half past six, the door opened and his father came home.
"Honey, I'm back."
A man in his fifties. Blunt, upright, rigid. The terrifying father who, when Jeorg was little, never let a mistake slide and brought the switch down hard. Even now, Jeorg still wasn't entirely at ease around him. But precisely because of that, the hard problems and the difficult ones were the ones he could bring to his father without hesitation.
"Oh. You're home?"
"Mm. I'm back. Smells good."
"It's crab stew."
His mother said it while glancing sideways at his father. From that look alone, his father seemed to sense that something had happened.
"What's going on?"
His mother looked at Jeorg. His father looked at him too.
Under both their gazes, Jeorg sat still in his chair for a moment, then broke into a small smile.
"Let's eat first, then talk. I'm starving. That crab stew looks good."
Not yet.
He still needed to think.
After dinner, the three of them gathered on the living room sofa. Jeorg calmly told his father everything that had happened that day.
"Government people. Hunter Association people came and asked you to work for Korea again?"
"Yes."
His father's face twisted with anger.
"You should never have let those people in!! Why did you let them inside!!"
His father's rage swung toward his mother, and Jeorg quickly cut in.
"It wasn't Mom's fault, Dad. She said they just pushed their way in."
"No manners, those bastards! Who do they think they are, walking in here talking about hunters and whatever the hell else!!!"
His father seethed for a long while, then drew a deep breath and forced his emotions down.
"So. Wooyong. What do you want to do?"
Jeorg couldn't answer right away.
"They say there are a lot of benefits, Dad. They'll pay off the loans. There's a direct line to the president, so if anything unfair or hard comes up, you can call and get counseling right away."
He wanted to leave immediately. Jeorg Wooyong was already sick to death of this country.
"They say they can contact Mom and Dad's workplaces and arrange tax benefits. Quarterly performance bonuses too. And separate from all that, when you go to a bank or a local office, you don't have to wait — the branch manager comes out and handles it personally."
But his parents were different.
They had lived their whole lives here.
Their connections, their property, their entire history — all of it was rooted in this place.
Asking them to leave all of that behind and just pack up for Daejeon was hard.
"They say I get a lot of benefits, but Mom and Dad get even more. They really hammered that point. So… I'm torn."
He laid it out honestly.
He looked at his father.
"What do you think, Dad?"
The man who used to say you only became a real person after going to the military.
The father who spoke with pride about the student protests of his youth.
A man you couldn't claim was free of authoritarian, thick-headed old-timer tendencies.
What would he say?
His father was silent for a long time after Jeorg's words.
Then, suddenly, he smiled — a bitter, hollow smile.
"Wooyong."
"Yes."
"Do whatever you want."
It was unexpected.
Be loyal to your country. It's still your homeland — you should devote yourself. He had braced for some stale line like that. But his father didn't say it. His father was looking at him. More precisely, at his fingers.
"When you were little. You remember how you were famous in the neighborhood for playing piano?"
Jeorg didn't remember. Had he been famous for that?
"Was I?"
"You were, you little shit. You played well. Brought home certificates from the academy and everything. Those certificates are still tucked away in a corner of Mom and Dad's wardrobe."
His father quietly took Jeorg's hand.
His eyes were red.
The eyes of a rigid man who had never once in his life shown himself crying were red.
"And that kid came back with his fingers like this. This country did that to you. And then they hide behind double-compensation bans and whatever else… day after day, dodging and ducking responsibility…"
His emotional mother had already been crying for some time. Unlike her, who grabbed a tissue and blew her nose with a sharp honk, his father did not cry out loud. But somehow that only made it worse.
"This country, son. Not a drop of oil, no natural resources — a peninsula nation with nothing but people. Because all it had was people, it ground people down to grow. And once it grew like that, it should have treated the people it ground up properly. But look at it. It never changes. Son."
His father stroked the empty space where Jeorg's finger should have been.
"In my day, a lot of people died in the military. Died in the most absurd ways. But we still had faith. We suffered like this, so by our sons' generation it'll be different. The country will change a little, we thought. We were growing so fast back then — of course there were growing pains."
At last, a single tear slipped from his father's eye.
"But nothing has changed. Makes you wonder why we suffered so hard. Dad can lose a finger. I'm old and washed-up. But not you. Not my son's fingers. A young man comes home hurt like this. Those piano-playing fingers got blown off because of this country, and this is how they treat you? That's not right."
Jeorg felt as if something had struck him. His head dropped.
"I'm sorry, son. Our generation should have built a better country. And it turned out like this."
His father stopped stroking Jeorg's hand.
The man who had always seemed endlessly like an old hardass wiped his eyes.
"So do whatever you wanted to do. Mom and Dad will follow. We go with whatever's good for our son. This country has no right to demand patriotism from you again. So do what you want."
That was the end of his father's words.
He took Jeorg's mother — who was nearly wailing — into the bedroom.
Left alone in the living room, Jeorg stared blankly at the floor.
But nothing has changed.
His father's words drove into a corner of his chest like a cold nail.
Why hadn't it changed?
Why had this country never changed?
The questions were there. No answers came back.
Jeorg fidgeted with his phone.
He was watching NewTube.
NewTube was flooded with hunter talk.
The market value of Magic Stones. The brilliant future Elixir technology would bring.
And endless chatter about how high-level Korea's hunters were, and what a massive strategic loss it would be to send them to other countries.
"Treating hunters with the same heavy-handed approach as before won't maintain the status quo anymore. That's what I'm saying. We need to promise better treatment. Why was Stray Dog even created? We have to examine the root causes."
"Stocks related to room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductors are soaring."
"The American side is saying that Magic Stones from low-level monsters will bring revolutionary changes to the medical field."
He listened to every kind of talk there was.
People who were worried.
People who were hopeful.
People who were afraid.
And people furious that America had taken the lead in shaping this market order, along with people outraged at the Stray Dog hunters who had fled to the US without a shred of loyalty. After staring blankly at NewTube for a long while, Jeorg set his phone down and let out a sigh.
"Fuck it. Maybe I should just go."
His parents had already given their blessing. Going to Daejeon was the right call no matter how he looked at it — and yet he still hesitated, for a reason.
"All my friends, everyone I know, is in this neighborhood. Just up and leaving for Daejeon like that… I don't like it."
It wasn't as simple as he'd expected.
It meant leaving everything he'd grown used to behind.
On top of that, Daejeon still wasn't fully developed. He'd heard American companies were pouring in right now, expanding all kinds of facilities.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood he lived in now had solid infrastructure of every kind.
Stray Dog?
Or Korea?
Korea, clearly conscious of Stray Dog's new recruitment drive, had put forward a pile of conditions that didn't look like much of an economic loss. What was he supposed to do?
After tossing and turning for a long time, Jeorg picked up his phone again.
He opened a community he frequented.
He browsed for a long time, but nothing looked particularly useful. The people here seemed just as confused. Some took a hard line and said to just leave Korea; others said it was still the place they'd lived, and walking away overnight was hard.
Opinions were split.
Then, in the middle of it all—
A link caught his eye.
Jeorg clicked it. A post from a new community site appeared in front of him.
That was the title.
Jeorg carefully scrolled down.
And the further he scrolled, the harder his face set.
Jeorg slowly worked through the comments.
And below them was a screenshot of a broadcast news graphic.
It was an illustration of the deceased hunter Seo Yeongcheol — and the fingers of Seo Yeongcheol, collapsed and being loaded onto a stretcher, were oddly forming a C-shape.
Index finger and thumb held close together, as if signaling something small.
Jeorg knew exactly what that gesture meant.
An insulting hate-sign from women's communities, loaded with the claim that the average Korean man's penis measured 6.9 centimeters.
And beneath that were more captured comments.
Jeorg couldn't take any more and put the phone down.
If he kept reading, he felt like something in his head would snap.
In one motion, he scrolled the post all the way to the end.
The last line the poster had written caught his eye.
Jeorg's eyes locked on those words.
For nearly ten minutes.
He stared at the line in silence.
The next day.
"Dad. Mom."
Jeorg walked up to his parents as they prepared for work and said one thing.
"Let's go live in Daejeon."