Chapter 10
Chapter 10
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Translator : M.N 1391
Chapter: 10
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Kyung-wan once again realized that the root of all calamities was the mouth, and he blamed his own snout.
It seemed he'd been too loose with his tongue.
Returning to the room, Kyung-wan packed his things under the teacher's watchful eye.
“Serves you right.”
When Cha Hyun-guk mocked him, Kyung-wan replied with a single line.
“Live your whole life as a disgraceful son, then.”
It was meant as a word of admonishment, but the guy's face twisted with emotion. Kyung-wan shook his head in disbelief.
People, it seemed, didn’t change as easily as one might hope.
Upon arriving at his new room, Kyung-wan met a new face.
His name was Jung Eom-moon. But he didn’t seem particularly interested in Kyung-wan.
Like Kyung-wan, he had also been admitted for a long-term stay, but he was a boy aiming to earn certifications and save up points to voluntarily leave the facility in a month.
Kyung-wan had a rough idea of why Director Go had assigned him to share a room with this kid.
He probably wanted Kyung-wan to see someone trying hard to reintegrate into society, hoping he'd feel something and learn a lesson.
But Kyung-wan existed outside the boundaries of Go's imagination.
After briefly introducing themselves, he and Jung Eom-moon didn’t exchange another word.
And so, one day passed. Then another. Fifteen days slipped by.
Though it was odd that Kyung-wan hadn’t spoken a single word to his roommate all that time, it was just as intense that Jung Eom-moon never once tried to break the silence either.
But maybe he just couldn’t take it anymore?
Or perhaps his curiosity got the better of him?
“I heard you got in here for assault, right?”
“How’d you know?”
Jung Eom-moon was a year older than Kyung-wan. But he didn’t seem to care, answering Kyung-wan’s question without pause.
“I overheard the teachers talking.”
“Is that so?”
Kyung-wan's response made it sound like it went in one ear and out the other. After a moment's pause, Jung Eom-moon continued.
“To be honest, I thought you were a thug.”
“I’m not.”
“I heard you beat the crap out of some thugs and that’s why you’re in here.”
“These teachers really are something else.”
So they go around gossiping about stuff like that?
“They don’t talk about it often. I just happened to catch it.”
“I see.”
Kyung-wan nodded indifferently. He thought about it for a bit but concluded that it didn’t really matter.
What difference did it make if people knew or not?
Seeing Kyung-wan fall silent again, Jung Eom-moon brought it up himself, he too had ended up here after beating up a gang leader who had been bullying him.
One day, he’d hidden a knife, and when one of them started hitting him, he stabbed it into the guy’s eye. Then he slashed another one’s face, leaving a deep scar.
He'd poured all the resentment and malice he’d endured into that act.
Hearing his confession, Kyung-wan clapped with admiration.
“Well done.”
“..Well… done?”
“There are probably kids who couldn’t even fight back and ended up killing themselves, right? If more guys like you existed, those bastards who get off on bullying others would decrease.”
Or at least think twice before picking on someone.
There’s a saying that so-called civilized people are ruder than savages, precisely because they know no axe will come down on their head for being rude.
If kids are taught that “violence is wrong” and follow it faithfully, only to be sacrificed by violent peers, is that really just?
Kyung-wan didn’t think so.
To him, that was civilization actively enabling barbarity.
In a world where enduring makes you a Private Yoon, and not enduring makes you a Sergeant Lim, Kyung-wan detested people who used law and order as excuses to justify injustice.
All things, material or immaterial, must serve humanity.
He couldn’t tolerate the idea of those things sitting on top of humanity as its masters.
When tools become masters, they reduce humans to objects and slaves.
As a human himself, Kyung-wan would be no exception to that fate.
And his madness could never accept such oppression.
That’s why Kyung-wan respected Jung Eom-moon’s courage to take revenge, even if it meant stepping outside societal norms.
Some may say revenge can never be justified as justice.
But that, to Kyung-wan, was nothing more than a lazy, uncritical stance that ignored nuance.
Why are revenge stories so cathartic?
Because evil gets punished and justice is realized.
In an unjust world, the thirst for justice finds satisfaction through that vicarious experience.
But Kyung-wan said one thing to Jung Eom-moon.
“But the method was stupid.”
“...Stupid?”
“There were plenty of ways to get revenge without ending up in juvenile detention.”
Jung Eom-moon’s face hardened.
“..What do you know?”
“You know it now, too, don’t you? That there were ways to stop them without ending up in here.”
At that, Jung Eom-moon suddenly exploded.
“There weren’t any! None, damn it! The damn teachers just looked annoyed and kept asking if I was the problem! My bastard of a father ran off with some woman and never came home! My lunatic mother was obsessed with church and kept saying prayers would fix everything! What the hell more was I supposed to do?!”
Watching him blow up, Kyung-wan shook his head.
“That’s not it.”
“What’s not it?!”
“With that kind of mindset, you’ll end up back here again. No, by then, you’ll probably be an adult, so you’ll end up in prison instead.”
“···..”
As the other boy glared at him silently, Kyung-wan pulled his lips up toward his cheekbones in a smile, as if to say: follow my lead.
“Smile. Big and wide. Bastards like that love seeing you blow up with rage. They’ll clap and laugh and mock you. You should do what pisses them off instead.”
At Kyung-wan’s grin, Jung Eom-moon swallowed dryly, as if he’d never been angry at all.
This guy... he’s different.
To him, Kyung-wan offered advice that would be flesh and blood.
“Let’s face facts. You got bullied because you were weak. And ignorance is weakness. Now that you’ve studied and learned a lot here, if you could go back to that moment, would you do the same thing again?”
Jung Eom-moon gave a slight shake of his head.
It was the age of the internet.
Just gathering evidence and reporting it to the police, or even to a journalist, could’ve turned it into a big enough issue to escape that bullying.
And not just escape the situation.
He could’ve given those bastards a taste of financial retribution.
As someone about to be tossed into the capitalist jungle, the idea of monetary payback hit harder than the satisfaction of a punch to the face.
Kyung-wan continued.
“So not knowing is the real crime. Whether you’re the one getting hurt or the one doing the hurting.”
Conscience follows intelligence.
As the informatization of society accelerates alongside capitalism, creditworthiness becomes more and more crucial.
In such a society, if you don’t realize that damaging your own credibility is the same as gnawing on your own flesh, then you also won’t realize that keeping your conscience clean is the most basic and effective risk management strategy.
Money, power, and reputation all go hand in hand.
Do something to lose your reputation, and your money and power take a hit too.
That’s an undeniable rule of the human world.
Any system that defies this principle will inevitably become corrupt and eventually collapse.
With his anger subsiding and feeling slightly embarrassed, Jung Eom-moon asked Kyung-wan,
“If you know all this, then why are you in here?”
“Pffft!”
When Kyung-wan suddenly burst into laughter, Jung Eom-moon looked at him in confusion, and for some reason, a chill ran down his spine.
Meanwhile, Kyung-wan became acutely aware of just how hypocritical he was.
Stupid method, huh? Was it really stupid?
If Jung hadn’t resisted the way he did, wouldn’t that thorn have remained in his chest forever?
And how might that have shaped or distorted the rest of his life?
There’s a reason the concept of trauma exists.
Kyung-wan had momentarily forgotten that everything has two sides.
Who’s to say?
Maybe the entire sequence of events that led Jung Eom-moon to this detention center was exactly what allowed the current version of him to exist.
One thing’s for sure: humans don’t grow without hardship.
And that’s also why humans don’t change easily.
They only change through trials, but human nature is to avoid hardship whenever possible.
So how could people possibly change so easily?
What Kyung-wan had called a “smarter method” was, ultimately, asking for help, from society, from someone.
It was an efficient and clever way.
But was it truly a way to overcome the hardship?
At least from Kyung-wan’s perspective, his advice had been more about evasion than confrontation.
And it wasn’t something that someone like Kyung-wan, who lacked the courage to face life’s hardships head-on, should have said to someone who had actually dared to take action in their harshest moment.
Even if that action was merely the product of a self-consuming rage.
Kyung-wan compressed that long train of thought into a single word.
“Stupid?”
“···..”
Jung Eom-moon might not have known everything, but he was now absolutely certain of one thing:
Kyung-wan was a damn liar.
= = = = =
Relationships flow like water.
There are those who remain like rocks in a stream, but at least in this juvenile detention center, people came and went constantly.
Jung Eom-moon left.
Lee Cheon-soo left.
Kang Won-rae left.
And finally, the day came when Kyung-wan was to leave.
Director Go called him in, an unusual gesture.
“You’re leaving tomorrow.”
“I’ve eaten well and slept comfortably all this time.”
Kyung-wan gave a deep bow, and Director Go chuckled dryly.
“I’ve seen kids who felt stifled in here, but none like you. Didn’t the cramped room feel suffocating?”
“From a cosmic perspective, Earth is nothing but a speck of dust, and humans are less than that. Whether it’s a cramped cell or a Gangnam Tower Palace, it’s all just dust.”
“When did you develop such a cosmic worldview?”
Director Go chuckled and returned the banter.
He’d somehow come to enjoy this lunatic kid’s Zen-like dialogues.
Kyung-wan replied,
“Whether you're lying in a prison cell, in a suite, or sprawled out on the street, in the end, it’s all a matter of the heart. Once you're warm and fed, everything else depends on your own greed.”
It was the kind of talk one wouldn’t expect from a boy his age.
Director Go sighed with a touch of sorrow.
“Are you really going to become homeless? I told you, go join a temple instead.”
“Yeeeeah, sure, sure.”
It was obvious he was replying just to shut him up.
Director Go shook his head.
Their connection ended here. He had no plans to do more for him.
The kid had been bold and amusing, but never particularly likable.
“Then get going.”
“Okay.”
“And don’t be a burden to others.”
That was the one thing Director Go always wished for the kids who left this place.
Once Kyung-wan left the office, Director Go looked over the journal Kyung-wan had kept for the past two years, starting from the most recent entries.
—These punks in juvie all seem to have screws loose or are mutant hybrids of goldfish. You repeat something, and they still don’t get it. Do they need a beating to remember anything?
—My back hurts from sitting all day. But the damn teachers keep telling us to sit down. Don’t they know how bad that posture is for your spine?
—Some roommate jerk bitched at me for doing a handstand, so I cussed him out hard. I let it slide when he ogled half-naked girl groups and jerked off secretly in the bathroom at night, and this is how he repays me?
—The teachers in this facility are wonderfully cold. Everyone just does their job and respects boundaries. What a clean, ideal human relationship.
—The director keeps bugging me to take this test or that one. It's annoying as hell. What use is a certificate if I’m just gonna be a hobo? Seems like he hasn’t let go of his hopes yet. Should’ve put that hope into his hairline instead.
“This little bastard…”