Chapter 240
Chapter 240
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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 240
Chapter Title: 100. Evil Yaksha (2)
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He was born in Hong Kong.
During the handover of Hong Kong, he left for the United States and settled there, but unlike other immigrants from mainland China, he didn't particularly try to instill Chinese values or culture in his children.
His parents ran a business in Hong Kong that he never fully understood as he grew up, but it clearly brought in substantial income.
Thanks to that, he knew little of poverty and had no real curiosity about it.
Influenced by his parents, he harbored no Chinese values or ethnic aspirations.
He was educated in American schools, ate American food, and grew up immersed in American culture.
He was an American through and through, and at least while earning his PhD, he never imagined he'd be given any other choice.
Yet the blood flowing through a person's veins sometimes alters their future in ways they never anticipated.
One day, he felt like an outsider drifting through American society.
The familiar world around him suddenly seemed endlessly hostile, insulting, and dismissive.
The trigger was honking at a car that cut him off while driving.
A Black man's face appeared at the other window, hurling racial slurs at him.
He averted his gaze.
The Black driver glared for a while before finally driving off, ending the incident.
It was little more than a minor mishap, but he began to dwell on it seriously, linking it to recent misfortunes—a missed promotion, attacks from fellow scholars on his presentation materials, and his daughter's inexplicable rejection from a private school.
He had long learned to mingle with other ethnicities, resigned himself to the unspoken discrimination and practical limits of being Asian, and accepted it as the natural way of life. But a sudden surge of defiance made all that feel meaningless.
He picked up a ballpoint pen and wrote a single word on his notepad.
(Zhonghua)
It was strange.
He had learned to speak and write Chinese from his parents, but aside from his childhood, he rarely used anything Chinese.
His parents spoke English at home, and their spacious, glamorous, modern mansion held no Chinese decorations, books, or even liquor.
At the very least, they had never deeply taught him the meaning of "Zhonghua."
Yet he thought of the word and wrote it effortlessly on the notepad.
In that moment, he became aware of his ethnic identity—and recalled the contact info of a Chinese spy who had recently approached him covertly.
Turning from an American back into a Chinese was no easy feat.
His wife opposed it, and so did his daughter.
His parents said nothing, but made it clear they would never see him again if he went to China.
Worn out from persuading his family, he went to China alone.
The China he first encountered was more glamorous and futuristic than he had imagined, but soon he began noticing the shabbiness hidden beneath the splendor, along with hastily thrown-together, shoddy elements everywhere.
In China, he met a new woman and started a family.
His new wife wasn't as scholarly as his first, nor did she speak the English he found comfortable, but she was beautiful and affectionate.
However, her Hebei-style cooking was utterly unpalatable to him.
Before long, she gave him a daughter.
Gazing at the pretty baby's face, with its distinct features resembling her mother's, he was able to neatly forget his old daughter, who had told him to get lost in the stinking land of China.
His mission in China concerned Awakeners.
"......So that's what it was."
There was still much left in the documents, but through this man's records, we could understand why the Chinese hadn't used Awakeners to save their entire nation from ruin.
Awakener, in a sense, possessed superhuman power transcending human limits, but they had severely impaired reproductive capabilities.
When India headed toward extinction due to rifts, the Chinese government launched a "humanitarian operation," crossing the border to occupy erosion zones on Indian soil.
Dozens of thousands of Indians still lived in those erosion zones, and a census revealed an bizarrely imbalanced sex ratio among them.
Almost all newborns were female.
The ratio was 82 girls for every boy.
Subsequent Awakener tests showed that mothers who gave birth to girls exhibited Awakener reactions, to varying degrees.
Note that China's criteria for Awakener were lower than Korea's.
In Korea, an Awakener meant someone with powers at least on the level of Cheon Youngjae. China's definition was broader.
Their standard referred to any rift-induced physical changes from contact with the alien pathways called rifts.
By Chinese standards, even Park Gyu could qualify as an Awakener.
Yet all those Awakener mothers gave birth to girls.
Anthropologists say the biggest factor in human population growth is the number of women capable of bearing children, but these girls were unlike normal ones.
They all showed low intelligence, high rates of Down syndrome-like facial distortions, autism, and other mental issues.
The most horrifying truth comes from the man himself.
"Female children born to Awakener women have deficient reproductive functions. In other words, those children cannot develop ovaries and thus possess no fertility. The problem is that these Awakeners, like plague carriers, spread their rift-like influence from the rifts to pure, normal humans. Think of Othello. In that game, you flip black-and-white stones to your color and fill the board to win. But in reality's Othello, flips happen only one way: from normal humanity to Awakener."
Cheon Youngjae muttered as he read the records.
"......So, if Awakeners increase, humanity goes extinct?"
We searched each other's eyes.
It was a shocking claim, hard to accept, but our minds aligned easily.
"That's why they excluded Awakeners even as their country fell apart."
"Typical Chinese. No one is as greedy as them. Preventing Chinese extinction versus resolving the immediate crisis—they chose the former. A choice just like them."
The scientist who called himself the Evil Yaksha.
His mission in China, which revealed the truth to us, was the preservation of the Chinese race.
More precisely,
"They ordered me to create normal children capable of preserving the species from Awakeners."
He was an authority in genetic engineering.
He analyzed genomes, excised segments of DNA, fused them with other species' DNA, observed the results, and achieved successes.
His most famous achievement was creating pigs that reproduced from eggs alone.
Not just parthenogenetic pigs, but ones capable of sexual reproduction.
Mice had yielded similar results before, but his team was the only one to achieve it with pigs, similar to humans.
That accomplishment brought him fame and a professorship.
But the Awakener mutation differed from any variation he had encountered.
There were no DNA changes.
No significant differences between a child with Kang Strongmin-level potential in Korea and a normal one without powers.
They couldn't explain why beasts mutated despite identified mutation factors, let alone solve human mutations with zero clues. It was like finding a needle in a haystack.
He dove into the task with enthusiasm at first, only to sink into deep darkness.
"How do you produce results without a cause? Monsters, these alien entities, form and exist by principles utterly unlike humans, beyond our imagination. The moment I saw the records, I realized this wasn't a problem I could solve alone. It's like bringing a shotgun to catch fish in deep water."
The Chinese hypocrisy toward so-called "defectors" was as domestic engineers who crossed to China with rosy dreams experienced: no middle ground.
They started with local wives, penthouses in Beijing and Shanghai, fat stacks of yuan. But as time passed without results, party overseers applied pressure.
The pressure came in countless forms, the worst being the threat of stripping economic comfort.
"That house you're in? Yes, Professor's house. It's rented specially for committee members. You might not know, but we pay the landlord directly. If you leave the committee, we take it back—for the next member."
Facing an unsolvable task, drowned in extreme stress and despair, his only solace was his beautiful wife and the daughter growing tall like her.
The girl was nearing six.
She attended the finest kindergarten in Beijing, mingling with elite children of similar status.
He could endure pay cuts, but losing the house and living among ordinary folk he had never known or cared to know terrified him more than monsters.
At the precipice, like others in his shoes, he betrayed his conscience.
"......That's when we started forcibly harvesting eggs."
With calm confession, he listed his sins.
They were beyond individual crimes.
Countless lives were forcibly taken, experimented on, discarded.
For the grand cause of preserving humanity, small sacrifices were fine.
Within the party, factions clashed fiercely: use Awakeners or not. Top leadership backed the latter but showed strong interest in their power.
He was the key to resolving the deadlock.
"Truth is, I barely used any properly. Just faked it. Most were patched with random samples, inserted as data without verification. I padded the numbers like that. Of course, I fudged some for good measure. Junk data, but they were satisfied. Piles of data looked like progress to those brutes."
Thus, countless children were conceived.
Few reached birth.
Some were dissected for more data, others preserved in formalin, still others incinerated in medical waste bags.
He produced nothing real in the process.
He merely built a tower of sins on lies.
His fame and betrayal of America bought him time, but as China's situation darkened and frontline demands for Awakeners grew, suspicion resurfaced.
One subordinate, a accomplice, betrayed him, siding with the pro-Awakener faction and exposing his crimes.
Cornered, he saw his beloved daughter's test results.
A simple Awakener scan showed she had Awakener aptitude.
Seeing it, he thought of his other homeland.
There were his parents' seaside California mansion, the campus where he taught, friends of all races without barriers, free-spirited vibes, cameras blind to faces, and freedom.
With long-honed deceit, he spun his final lie.
"I presented research data claiming species preservation via Awakeners was possible. Over eight years, the pinnacle of my falsehoods—an unassailable tower of lies. Right after uploading part to the server, I took my family aboard a ship to Taiwan."
War broke out that day.
The smuggling captain lingered off China's coast for days.
Sailing into a sea packed with warships, like a red-hot frying pan, was suicide.
Life on the cramped smuggling boat was miserable.
Food was awful, water filthy and smelly.
No proper washing, toilets over the side.
He shielded his young, beautiful wife with an umbrella during hers, but crew swarmed the deck each time, leering greedily past it.
In those endless horrors, his daughter fell ill.
High fever, chills, delirium, even periodic seizures—a grave condition.
He demanded the captain set sail, but was ignored.
Finally, he yelled for the first time in his life.
"My daughter is dying!"
The captain snapped back curtly.
"And the people you killed?"
"......"
"Thousands. No, tens of thousands."
The captain smirked, showing his wanted profile and crimes on a phone.
"Sticking instruments into little girls not even grown to harvest eggs? And now what? My daughter is dying?"
The captain turned away.
"I keep promises to those who do. But whether an Evil Yaksha like you deserves to say that is doubtful."
Soon after, his daughter died.
Her body was weighted and dumped into the sea.
His wife's mind broke; she wandered nightly calling for their girl and vanished under a full moon.
He remembers nothing after.
The captain dropped him in Incheon, calling it the best he could do.
Having lost everything, he gazed at this unfamiliar Korean land.
"......"
He had nothing.
Here, he was a total foreigner, a resident of the enemy nation Koreans called "Chinks" with disgust.
On his first day in Korea, he witnessed Koreans mobbing and lynching people called Joseonjok.
Of course, he wasn't an ordinary Chinese.
He had vast research data.
Bargaining with the Korean government using it could secure a comfortable life.
But he didn't.
It was a tower built on others' blood.
That tower deserved to crumble.
Thus, he entered the apocalypse's vortex not as a honored defector, but as one mere outsider.
As death neared, he scavenged a phone from a corpse and learned of Failnet.
There, he heard his second homeland—thought perished—still lived.
A smile touched his lips.
It was a year and a half after arriving in Korea.
Using a crude computer and phone he assembled from parts, he uploaded his final data to Failnet and spread word on a board for hidden Chinese survivors that he had posted the records.
"Thus, I cast my final bait. I hope whoever sees this record shares the blood flowing in my veins."
"And the final conclusion: No normals are born from Awakeners. At least not in the countless samples I observed. Yet erosion breeds Awakeners, and those Awakeners erode surrounding normals into more Awakeners."
"In short, humanity's extinction is inevitable."
That was the Evil Yaksha's final record.
No—a single other line ran across a blank image without page numbers, faintly inscribed.
- For my wife and daughter, who departed first.