The First Judgment

In the spring I turned ten, my mother and father took my hand and led me out of the park. The memory is only a blur now, but I remember that the laughter was bright, and the sunlight warm.

I didn't know it then — that it would be the last happy memory of my life.

Screech — crash!

It happened right before my eyes. A red sports car plowed into my parents, and they were flung into the air like jointed dolls with the joints snapped, bodies bent into shapes no living person should take.

We had been on the sidewalk. The sidewalk of a park. A sports car doing two hundred kilometers an hour had come and struck us as we walked.

My parents and my little sister died on impact. I lived only because I had stopped for a moment to retie my shoe.

Murder in broad daylight. The man behind the wheel was the third-generation heir of a corporation everyone in the country knew by name, drunk and high, and he had simply run pedestrians down in the middle of the day.

Even then, I still believed. However much money and power a man possessed, wasn't this a nation of laws? I thought the law would judge him. I thought the law stood with the weak.

I was young enough to mistake the law for justice. I know better now. The law does not stand with the weak. It stands, thoroughly and without apology, with the strong and the powerful.

They fielded a lavish defense, and among the lawyers was, of course, one trading on the old courtesy once reserved for former judges. When that bastard stood in court, he even wept. He was repentant, he said. He was sorry.

All of it was nothing but a play staged to lighten his sentence. I saw it plainly. The moment the trial ended, he walked out of the courtroom smiling.

The result? Obvious enough. Money and power bought him a short term and a suspended sentence besides. They did put up a substantial compensation deposit to shave the punishment down, but all I received was a jar holding my parents' ashes. My uncle, my legal guardian, took both the insurance money and the deposit.

Not only the deposit. Along with it, my uncle took my life.

The place I lived was not a home. I grew up in a room like a storage closet, so narrow that a boy of ten could stretch out his legs and touch the walls. I ate scraps. I wore torn clothes pulled from donation bins.

Abuse — and not only the emotional kind, or the economic. From the day I began living with my uncle, being beaten was ordinary. However carefully he tried to hide it, abuse like that is bound to come to light. Child protective services and the police came whenever a report was filed. There were perfunctory inspections. There was never any real measure taken to protect me.

There couldn't be. Every one of them had already taken my uncle's money.

At first I couldn't understand it. Even with a large deposit in hand, spending on that scale would have been a heavy burden for an uncle sunk in drink and gambling. Was a mere nephew — a child he thought useless — really worth the investment? Only much later did I come to see the reason I hadn't known then.

My uncle, or rather the monster wearing my uncle's skin, had wanted my mother. Not as family. Not as a brother wants a sister. He had harbored an ugly lust for her. Something in him was twisted past mending, and so it was almost natural that he hated the father who had taken her, and hated me, the child born between them.

He had never been able to lay a hand on my strong father. Instead he spent that hatred on his offspring — on me, a child as fragile as a child can be.

The abuse and the torment did not stay inside the house. Beatings at home left my body mottled with bruises. I was skin and bone from never eating properly, and between the torn clothes and the smell, my classmates looked at me the way people look at an animal. My ruined body made them call me a cripple. At lunch they upended my tray. In the halls they stuck out a leg and sent me sprawling.

School? The teachers? They looked away, and the violence went on. At first it was only the level of a prank. But thrill and cruelty are a race that can only run toward the extreme, and their beatings finally left me unable to use my left leg as a leg should be used. A school-violence committee was convened, of course. Only the attacker and the victim had traded places.

One of the perpetrators was a National Assembly member's son. It hardly needs saying. Every law, and every notion of justice, is put to work ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠for money and power. All of it was made into my fault, and so I was expelled. With a body more broken than before, I walked a road that sank deeper into hell.

Without even a high-school diploma, I started working at a convenience store. I dragged that inconvenient body through twelve-hour days, seven days a week, on my feet the whole time. Minimum wage? Breaks? Labor law? None of that existed for me.

After home and after school, society abused me too, this time through the owner. Why? If a disabled hire displeased him, he had only to not hire me. Why take me on at all, only to abuse me like this? The reason was simple. Money. He had made a special hire of a disabled worker so he could collect a government subsidy, and I was used for that single usefulness.

Home, school, society — the world did not protect me. Those who had everything smiled as they stepped on me and walked on, and the law and the justice that were supposed to stand with the weak stood entirely on their side.

And I understood. In this world, the weak are not people. They are things to be used up. I was nineteen, an age that ought to have been full of dreams, and there was no hope left in my life. Still the storage room where I could not stretch out, the stink of rotting wallpaper, the damp that choked the breath.

But.

...Endure.

I endure. Why? I could climb to the roof this moment and throw myself off, and end this sickening life.

I won't run. Someday — someday, if a chance comes...

I will not do something weak, like killing myself. Why should I be the one to die? I was not the one who did wrong. They were. So I endure, however I can. I endure and I endure, and when I am given a single chance, I will seize it and collect the price of every sin they committed against me. Because the law and society will not do it, I have to. Judgment, upon them.

"So endure..."

I force the spilling tears back down my throat. Even if a time comes when those tears dry up and fall no longer, I will endure, and endure again, so that I can seize the chance granted like a miracle. That is the reason I go on living. That is the strength that lets me push through this thorn-choked road of penance.

But today, enduring is hard. Because—

The congratulations my family gave me on my tenth birthday rose, faint, through the dark of memory. Today was my birthday. More precisely, it would be, thirty seconds from now, once midnight passed — my twentieth birthday, a day no one would congratulate, filled only with curses, resentment, and hate. On this night the loneliness and the pain pressed closer than usual, and I curled in on myself.

And then.

Tick!

The moment midnight passed and the hour became twelve, the world went black. It was not a power outage. It was not only the things before my eyes that vanished. Everything around me was swallowed by darkness, as if existence itself had been erased.

I couldn't breathe. In a black space that opened without end, a place I could not name, I looked around. Until a moment ago I had been in a cramped storage room, thick with damp air and the smell of mold. What came at me now was only an emptiness strange in its completeness, and a silence that frightened me.

What is this?

I blinked. In the dark, a shape showed itself, faint.

Shhhhh—

Little by little it gathered into a complete form. What I saw was one table and two chairs, and beyond them a man in a suit, turning through documents.

"...?!"

Astonishingly, he had no head. No — more precisely, he had no face. In the space where a face ought to have been, a single question mark gave off light.

Am I trapped in a nightmare? Or have I finally lost myself, and gone mad?

"Mr. Han Seungwoo. That is correct, isn't it?"

The being looked at me as he spoke. The voice was utterly ordinary, clerical. But the air that belonged to him alone stirred the unknown, and fear. I knew, with perfect clarity, that this was not a dream but reality — and that the being before me was one before whom an ordinary person could only bow.

"...Who are you?"

But what I felt was not fear. An encounter with the unknown. Might this be the miraculous moment I had been hoping for? Hope rose in me, and longing with it.

Perhaps he read that feeling. The question mark ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠tipped briefly from side to side. Then, at once:

"Mr. Han Seungwoo. Age twenty. Parents dead in an accident. Living with his uncle. Disability resulting from child abuse and school violence. Victim of unlawful labor exploitation at a convenience store. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠And so on."

He recited my past without expression, listing every one of those horrific things as flatly as a grocery list. I did not answer. The being, as if my question held no interest for him, went on turning through the papers alone, and only after a long while did he open his mouth again.

"Severe. A textbook priority placement from the non-preferred life group."

Non-preferred. The word was certainly right. My life had been wretched enough that anyone would shake their head at it — hell itself.

And then—

Snap!

The being flicked his fingertips, and the documents scattered into the air and fell into order, as if files were spreading themselves across a transparent table.

"I'll explain briefly. Through a priority placement from the non-preferred life group, Mr. Han Seungwoo has been selected as an Awakener alpha tester. Well — to put it precisely, you may think of it as a kind of preferential program for those facing especially difficult social circumstances. Like the benefits the state extends to newlyweds, or support for multi-family housing."

"..."

"Of course, an Awakener alpha test is a program beyond any comparison with benefits of that sort. It is a qualification to awaken roughly a year ahead of everyone else, and to make use of the system in advance."

He went on, unruffled.

"Think of it as preparation for what comes after the Great Cataclysm, and as a kind of test build for constructing the optimal system. Participation is not mandatory, of course..."

He broke off and turned through the documents again.

"If you refuse, I will send you back to a life worse than the bottom. As if nothing had ever happened."

"Then if... if I accept this, what happens?"

Perhaps he felt the obsession in me — the certainty that I could not return to what I had been. For the first time, he gave off something like a faint smile. He had no face, of course, so I could not tell whether he had truly smiled.

"It's simple. You will obtain a special power. How you use that power is yours to decide. For one year, we will gather the information we require through you, the tester, compile it into data, and carry out a perfect Great Cataclysm."

I didn't hear the rest. I could obtain a special power. That single sentence went on ringing through my mind like an echo that would not die.

"It doesn't matter... how I use that power?"

"Of course! What we need is not how the power is used, but the process of change that its use produces."

This was the chance I had been waiting for. The only way to carry out the revenge I wanted.

"Then... what do I have to do?"

My voice shook. Not from fear. From joy, from rapture — from the fullness those feelings brought. And to that question, he answered shortly.

"You have only to choose. Whether you will accept this power, or go back."

"I'll do it."

My voice was firmer than it had ever been. What would become of me a year from now — none of that mattered. What mattered was that a chance for revenge had come. For that, even if the being before my eyes was something worse than a devil, even if it meant offering up my soul, I would not hesitate.

"...I see. Very well. Awakening will begin."

No special rite was required, and no time. The instant the words ended, light surged up out of the infinite dark.

Fwaaaaah!

The light was so fierce I had no choice but to shut my eyes. In the next moment a thrill wrapped my whole body, and I felt the thing that was me twist out of shape.

A sound like machinery rang at my ear. And in the next instant—

Crack!

Pain surged through me as if my body were being snapped apart. Bone, muscle, nerve — torn and twisted. But I did not scream once. Pain is an environment I know. At home, at school, even at the convenience store where I still worked, I was beaten all the time. So I took the pain without a scream and without resistance. Unlike the past, though, I felt no helplessness in it, because that twisted body was being built again.

Muscle drawn taut. Pain boring down into the marrow. The sensation of joints finding the places where they belonged. And at the last, the leg that had felt like a lifelong burden returned, perfectly, to what a leg should be.

No — to more than that. I quietly closed my fist. It was solid. A sensation I had never once possessed in all the years since I was born.

It was certainly something one could call a miracle. But that was not the end.

With those messages—

Flash!

I opened my eyes. The world before me had changed. I was no longer in the space of a moment ago, but back in the storage room where not a single point of light came in. And then—

Clack. Creeeak—

The lock set on the outside released, and the door opened.

"You little bastard..."

A thick reek of alcohol rolled in. In the light seeping through the doorway stood a man in his forties, hair a mess, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠nose flushed red. My uncle. In his hand was the aluminum bat he picked up whenever he needed something to take his anger out on. Dented all over with the traces of violence past, it was the history of my pain made solid.

"I feed you and give you a place to sleep, and you dare turn those eyes on me..."

The usual pattern. He would start the beating because he didn't like the look in my eyes, then carry the lecture and the violence on together, muttering that this was why you don't raise a black-haired beast. But today, that pattern had no choice but to break.

Kang!

The aluminum bat that had dealt me pain for so long snapped in two — from nothing more than my raising a hand to block.

"Wh-what...?!"

Even through a heavy drunk he seemed to sense that something was wrong. His eyes went wide as he muttered and stumbled back. Above the head of my uncle — no, above the head of this beast — a number hung in the air.

That figure was proof that the thing which had sounded in my ear a moment ago — the Eye of Judgment — was working as it should. And it was also the mark of something else.

"You're... the first."

The mark of the first target of my revenge.