The Weight of a Life

An offering from someone I could not name.

No. Not someone nameless. Not anymore.

“……!”

For an instant my heart slammed so hard it felt as if it would tear. It was only a system message, and still the breath locked in my throat.

Karma — those figures — had always been something I received. This time was different.

Thud. Thud.

Something beat against my chest. Not a sensation boring into skin. Grief. A scream. Pain. And, swallowing all of it, a quiet gratitude.

The voice rang from the center of my chest. As if his last breath had been left inside me, the name Kim Seonghun pressed a single ripple into my soul and stayed there.

Through it, I understood. The years crushed under a wrong that could not be undone. The scream he had never been able to explain to anyone. In a despair where he could reach for no one’s hand, the last thread of hope he had seized was me.

He was dying. But that death was not a tragedy. It was a whole devotion, everything he had laid down before someone’s salvation.

I never took his hand. I never even saw his face. And still I knew, beyond any doubt. He was a man who had wanted to live. Only the reason to stay alive had run out, and so he had given what remained as a gift.

I could feel him now. His warmth. His voice. The years he had endured, and the wind on the roof that last day. The bitter taste of the medicine he took, and the silence of a social feed where no one ever came. And the hope he had felt from me.

“……Kim Seonghun.”

The first time I had ever put his name in my mouth. It was not a simple donation. It was an entire life, held out toward me — the whole of a gratitude.

The weight of the life he had died to pass on rose from my fingertips, from my heart.

“Yes.”

I would not forget. I would remember in his place. So that no one could ever again say they did not know the wrong that had been done to him.

His existence was not merely 10,000 Karma. It was a will one life had entrusted to me. And so I had to answer that will, and that thanks. I had no other choice.

“…….”

No. It was not Kim Seonghun alone.

One person’s offering. One life, raising a ripple.

Slowly, I closed my eyes. And I heard the whispers.

It was weeping. Words of thanks, and the last whispers of lives already broken.

My eyes opened.

Inside the news company, it was still pandemonium. The guards were down. Reporters and staff, come running too late, poured screaming into the corridors, the stairs, the elevators.

Through it all, the Eye of Judgment screened the guilty from the rest.

My foot drove into the floor. In the same instant, at a speed that seemed to erase him, a man lifted into the air — and the wall took him with a wet, final crack. He was the one who had once written columns mocking victims. The one who had made a toy of the truth with the words false victim.

I caught a woman mid-flight. She had been running hard enough to lose her shoes, and I closed the distance in a single step. I wrenched her arm and slammed her into the floor. The floor split, and her head broke with it.

This was not my judgment alone. Behind me, dozens of eyes were watching with me.

“Aaaagh!”

The screams went on, and among the crowd still trying to flee, the Eye of Judgment kept opening.

Too many. Far too many parasites in the parasites’ nest.

I did not question them one by one. There was no need to hear what they had to say. What they should have said was the last line of those articles, and that line had already come after countless lives were trampled. So I was judging those many lasts in their place. And with the judgment, the offerings began to rise again.

These offerings were not like the ones before. Know us, they said. My voice. My family’s. The voices of those who were wronged. They wanted justice done. So what they sent was not a donation, but the trace of their own grievance.

In their place, I judged one more sinner. The impact shook the hall — because this was not one person’s revenge. It was a judgment moved by the memory of thousands, of tens of thousands.

The blows landed, and the judgment went on. And with it, truths that had died inside memory were waking again.

Some twenty million citizens of the Republic of Korea were watching. A judgment unlike the lying press — one that showed nothing but the truth.

The uproar from below carried all the way ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to the top floor. To the president’s office.

“…….”

“…….”

No one spoke. But these were people who had held power — the power of the press — through every upheaval the world had thrown at them, and they moved faster than anyone.

Click.

President Song Muyeol’s hand found the panel hidden beneath the desk.

“The rooftop exit we built for press conferences is bait. This is the real one.”

“Then the staff……?”

“They stay and hold the line. We’re the head of this company. If the head falls, the press falls. If the press falls, this country is truly finished.”

Inside Song Muyeol, a journalist’s mission he had discarded long ago came back to life. Not for the sake of telling the truth. For the sake of saving his own neck.

“No matter what happens…… we survive. We have to.”

“Hold them. Whatever it takes. We’re the hands that move this country.”

With those words, the three of them flung themselves into the passage as it yawned open. Emergency lights stuttered overhead, and they took the narrow steel stairs at a dead run.

Caught, and we die. No exceptions. We have to get clear. We have to.

They were better than anyone at judging themselves without illusion. They had joined hands with a prostitution broker and leaked an underage victim’s identity, dressing it up as news. They had stolen a suicide note from the bereaved and run it as a fabricated interview. They had covered a chaebol heir’s drunk-driving crash by floating the suspicion that the victim had been drinking, and taken an enormous price for it. To bury a politician’s sex crime, they had painted the victim as a woman who seduced men into a trap.

They knew those sins would end in death. So they ran.

“A little farther and it’s the outside exit! Hurry!”

A little farther. Just a little farther, and the way out. But that was when it came.

A vast detonation, and the shock of it. A red flash cutting straight across the middle of the secret passage. And above all else — a red eye, as if it saw through everything.

“…….”

Caught in that eye, the three of them could only freeze, prey that had just seen the predator.

There was no end to it. Charges without a floor and without a bottom. They were not journalists.

Parasites — no. Monsters. Monsters who had sucked on someone’s despair and called the result a promotion, who had sold someone’s tragedy and lived in luxury on the proceeds.

“S-stop!”

One piece of trash broke the frozen silence with a shout.

“W-we’re…… journalists……!”

“What did we even do wrong? This is the Republic of Korea! We have freedom of the press!”

“Calm down. In the course of telling the truth there may be…… a certain amount of exaggeration, but…… it was for the public good!”

It had always been like this. Freedom of the press. A passion for truth. A duty to society. They hid behind those words, and behind that shield they used the pen as a knife and manufactured victims without number.

But to me—

……I could hear the voices of the people they had done this to.

Offerings, pouring in. Not worthless trinkets worth a single point of Karma. They were the last fragments of lives. People who had died without a name. People buried by society. Their sincerity, their memory, their weeping — no one had ever stood in for them — came to me through what they offered.

There was no reason to hesitate.

Flame bloomed as I reached out, fire transmuted from qi.

“W-we’re the press! If you kill the press, this country will—”

“Stop flapping that disgusting mouth. Your excuses and your justifications don’t work on me.”

All I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠could see was a single truth, through the Eye of Judgment. And the result of it—

“W-wait……?!”

Already too late.

The same flame I had passed in judgment on Kwon Ayeong caught and spread.

“Aaaagh!”

He thrashed, trying somehow to shake it off, to put it out. He could not.

“Gyaaaaaah!”

Among the pains a human being can feel, the pain of burning is one of the worst. And Judgment’s Flame, drawn out of qi and transmuted, was the kind that would not die even if you denied it water and air. I had turned the heat as low as it would go, so he would be consumed while he was still alive — the most hideous pain there is.

First the skin. Then the flesh. Then muscle, nerve, and the organs within, burning down in their turn, and the fire took the body of the man they had called Chief Writer — a title that had never fit him.

“Aaaagh!”

The editor-in-chief, startled by that awful sentence, broke and ran. He would not get away. I was on him at once.

“Hhk—?!”

I twisted his arm. More precisely, I drew it out, slowly. First the sound of the bone leaving the shoulder. The ligaments parted. Then the elbow joint bent the wrong way. Skin began to tear, and the sensation of veins ripping out of the meat traveled straight into my hand.

“Gyaaaaaaaaaaah!!”

He bucked and screamed. My strength did not let him go. I pulled harder. At last it tore. Bone came free, flesh split, and blood leapt like a fountain.

“Aaaagh— gyaaaaaah!”

The scream broke out of him like the howl of a beast. I did not stop. I took the other arm the same way, slower still. I lifted it above the shoulder and stretched it. His joints shrieked as they ground. I peeled those joints away as quietly as stripping off a leather glove.

The fivefold dismemberment. One of the punishments once reserved for those who committed treason against the state — the body torn apart while its owner still lived, a sentence meant to ruin both pain and mind.

He twitched. Twitched again. The agony of limbs being rent had already taken his reason. I stepped in close to the jerking body, seized a handful of hair, and hauled him up. I set my hand on the brow soaked in blood, and I broke the neck. Flesh and bone gave, and the head came away.

“Aaaah! I was wrong, I was wrong! Please, please spare me!”

Song Muyeol, the president, having watched the second judgment, rushed in and caught the cuff of my trousers.

But.

“Did you ever once grant a victim’s request to take an article down?”

“Th-that’s…….”

“A demand for a correction, even after the story was exposed as a lie?”

“…….”

“A request from a victim, from a bereaved family, not to expose their identity?”

“…….”

“Not a single one. So why should I listen to you?”

I picked up the kitchen knife. The cheap blade that was still my only weapon. And I cut.

The first stroke grazed the top of his big toe, paper-thin. Skin peeled like a scrap of paper. Red blood welled, and he trembled at the tip of his foot and swallowed his breath.

“Ngh…… nngh……!”

The second toe. The third. The fourth. The fifth. Without a tremor, precise as a cook slicing meat thin, I pared them away. Blood ran in strings from the flayed toes, and when the nerve endings lay bare—

“Gyaaaaaaaah!! Please! Please, stoppp!!”

He screamed. I did not stop. Just as he had never stopped, back then.

This time I took the flesh from the top of the foot. Slowly. Thinly. The edge kissed the fat beneath the skin and passed on, and the pain of living nerve drove him out of his mind.

“Aaaaaagh!! Hhk…… hhhhaaagh……!!”

I moved to the left foot. He tried to yank it back in panic and only slipped on a floor wet with blood and tears. I pared the toes of that foot the same way. Layer by layer, the flesh curled up as it came away, and his eyes rolled, mad, as he retched.

Then the knee. From shin to kneecap, thin slice after thin slice. I felt bone, tendon, and nerve catch on the edge, one after another.

“Agh, agh!! Aaaaaagh!! Kill me, please just kill meee!!”

“Death is quick. But you’ve never ended anyone that easily, have you?”

“Because of the articles you ran, the victims never climbed out of the pain. Not for the rest of their lives. Like a brand.”

The blade climbed toward the thigh. He howled and twisted his whole body. Every time skin was carved away he tried to faint, and I kept his mind awake. So he would feel all of it.

“The truth hurts. But you counterfeited even the truth, and sold the pain.”

I pared my way up from below the abdomen. From the flank to just under the breastbone, as if skinning him. Blood poured. Flesh sagged and hung. All that remained was the last of it.

“Grrk…… grrrk—!”

I set my foot on his shoulder and brought the knife back to him, slowly, beginning again at the toes. The resistance had visibly thinned. The screams had stopped coming. Only the eyes shivered.

From the toes, up the calf, the thigh, the abdomen, the chest — past the heart, and at the last along the jaw, across the lips, until the edge drew all the way to the brow.

The blood-soaked body finally folded to the ground. The president who had held the company, the editor-in-chief, and the chief writer with them. With those three, judgment on the parasites’ sanctum came to an end.

The place of judgment sank, for a moment, into silence. But that silence was soon replaced by a baptism that broke over it like a detonation.

Offerings, pouring down. This was not rage. It was conviction. A blessing given to me — and an oath — by those who carried a wrong, so that I might do justice in their place.

And the offerings were not the end of it.

More viewers than last time, and a higher resonance — enough to gain Karma on the order of a million and a half.

“…….”

The judgment was over. I did not leave at once.

“……Come out.”

Because I already knew there was one more presence in this secret passage.

Footsteps. Slow footsteps.

The scene of judgment stank of blood. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Into that slaughter — a place no ordinary person could have brought themselves to approach — someone was coming.

Unkempt hair. A beard left unshaven for a long time. Under eyes swollen red and raw, dark circles lay thick. Less a living survivor than a ghost that had just crawled out of death.

He dragged a limping leg. In one hand, an old, worn notebook. In the other, a ballpoint pen running dry. He was the precise opposite of every monster I had been looking at until now. The reek of blood around us, the burning corpse, my hands and my knife stained red — none of it gave him fear.

He stopped in front of me on that limping, difficult tread, and at last he opened his mouth.

“……A brief interview. Would that be all right?”

The words stopped my breath. Even now, the notebook and pen in his hands were aimed at me without a tremor.

Was he not afraid of me? Not afraid of death? No. That didn’t matter.

This man was a reporter. A real one.

A blue figure above his head. One thousand five hundred and thirteen of virtuous Karma. The price of a heavy sincerity and a sense of duty that only someone who had walked toward the truth at the risk of death could carry.

“……Why did you come?”

I asked from simple curiosity. He answered, calm.

“Because someone has to…… leave you in the record. Because someone has to find out what the truth is.”

Everyone else had run. People who had shrieked and made excuses in the face of their own deaths. People who had hidden behind the name of the press and become monsters. But this man, unlike them, had walked here himself. As a reporter. As a person. To leave the truth behind.

I could have turned my back and left, right then. I didn’t.

“Then…… write it down.”

Because I was facing him. Not the hundreds of maggots who only wore the title of reporter, but a real one. And this meeting might be the only chance I would have to make my name known. My existence. My goal.