Chapter 85
Chapter 85
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Translator : M.N 1391
Chapter: 85
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It hurt, and it was humiliating enough to bring tears to his eyes. The bastard’s fists were on a level that sheer grit and stubbornness could never endure. With every blow, his mind went hazy, and a terror rose up in him that he might actually be beaten to death. When had he ever been beaten like this before?
“Tell your grandpa this. If he wants his grandson to live looking up at the sky with his head held high, he’d better watch how he conducts himself.”
“Waaah! Waaahhh!”
He patted the back of the sobbing young man and, as if offering words of comfort, said this.
“Hey. Still, you’ve got someone who’s alive and can apologize, don’t you? The descendants of someone like Noh Deok-sul, who’s already dead? They’re probably still busting their asses trying to launder their family records even now.”
If it was hard enough to apologize or atone for karma while alive, how much worse was it for someone already dead? In the end, that karma had no choice but to be borne in full by the descendants.
And so those descendants, not out of fear of being pointed at by the public but simply to survive, had no choice but to diligently erase their ancestors and falsify and scrub their own family trees.
They say there’s no guilt by association? Institutionally, maybe. But realistically, was that really possible?
Noh Deok-sul’s grandson? Yeah, no deal.
Noh Deok-sul’s great-grandson? Yeah, not hiring you.
What insane entrepreneur or politician would associate with people like that? To trash their corporate image? To toss their political career into the garbage?
Is there anyone who knows the whereabouts or actions of Noh Deok-sul’s children or descendants?
This was precisely why the descendants of widely known traitors clung desperately to their vested interests or, at the very least, emigrated abroad. For them, vested interests weren’t simply about wealth and glory, they were about survival, about putting food on the table.
To be ashamed of an ancestor’s karma and to repay it so that it wouldn’t be passed down to future generations required a level of great sacrifice and effort, like Jesus carrying the cross on his way.
And those who actually displayed such a spirit of sacrifice were truly few.
“Waaahhh!”
Even under the comfort of a psychic who wielded black smoke, the young man only cried. When it hurt this badly, would any of that talk even register?
Regardless, the psychic assailant left him with these words.
“I hope that the next time we meet, I’ll be able to say I won’t lay a hand on you anymore.”
The police arrived belatedly, but the assailant shrouded in black fog had already vanished without a trace.
= = = = =
“You bastard! You said my grandson would be safe!”
Faced with a face like a malevolent demon, Heo Dong-se bowed his waist.
“Who could have imagined there’d be another one like that old man?”
The former coup commander, seemingly exhausted even from anger, collapsed heavily onto the sofa with his aged body.
“He said… he said he’d come again. That if my grandson was to live looking up at the sky with his head held high, I’d better watch how I conduct myself…”
“You can’t give in to threats!”
Heo Dong-se emphasized it. The bastard’s intentions were obvious.
The former coup commander’s voice rose again.
“Don’t just say it can’t be done, bring me an alternative!”
Heo Dong-se bowed and promised that he would. And he would keep that promise without fail.
The former commander reflecting on his past?
Reflection done only with words wasn’t reflection. That idea, that empty verbal reflection was something only Japanese right-wing forces did, was already deeply ingrained in the public. If they wanted to avoid being branded collaborators, an apology absolutely had to be accompanied by compensation or actions equivalent to it.
But that was impossible. For the prosperity and survival of their descendants, if nothing else.
Heo Dong-se and his comrades joined forces once more to prevent the spark of this madness from spreading to them as well.
Psychic contractors who had been preparing to leave the country were called back. Even that wasn’t reassuring enough, so more psychic contractors were hired.
There was no way the contractors would miss an opportunity like this. This job wasn’t an assassination but the protection of the former coup commander’s grandson, which reduced legal risk, but they doubled their price.
The client seemed determined to catch that guy called Graphite.
Graphite. Black smoke.
The successor of Black Noya.
This assailant called Graphite, who appeared just three days after Black Noya’s death, was already infamous among the public as a villain following the Death Reporter.
Judicial authorities were getting headaches. After the Death Reporter, then Sandman, and now this Graphite guy too?
At least it was fortunate that Sandman’s existence wasn’t widely known. Unlike the Death Reporter or Graphite, who dealt with matters bound to become social issues, Sandman appeared to have acted out of personal resentment. And aside from that one case, there were no other activities to speak of.
The police had already grasped the full picture of the Sandman task force assault incident and began tracking down the woman the investigator had raped, starting inquiries into those around her.
But when investigators actually tried to summon them as witnesses and question them, they ran into an unexpected obstacle.
“Why won’t you do it?!”
“I’m not helping that bastard.”
At the investigator’s words, Kyung-wan turned his head aside primly, to the point that anyone watching would feel disgusted, and replied.
Who the “bastard” was was obvious. He meant the investigator who was both the victim in the Sandman case and a rapist.
“How is catching the criminal helping that guy?!”
“If you catch the criminal, won’t that shameless bastard file a civil suit? And this country’s legal system, which doesn’t recognize vigilante justice, will definitely side with that guy. Then the person who finally did a good deed could end up financially ruined, right? I can’t watch that happen.”
“You little shit! You call that an argument?!”
“Hey, Investigator. Watch your mouth.”
At Kyung-wan’s icy expression, the heat that had rushed all the way up to the investigator’s scalp cooled in an instant. Just who had he hurled that profanity at? Realizing he’d gotten too heated, the investigator steadied his breathing and tried to persuade him calmly.
“This is a serious challenge to judicial order! If we leave it like this, the country will become a complete mess!”
At that, Kyung-wan replied indifferently while picking his nose.
“Seems to me that judicial order and the state of the country stopped making sense the moment a so-called investigator raped a rape victim again.”
“...”
“Don’t waste your energy on pointless things. Go investigate properly on your own.”
With a blank expression, Kyung-wan flicked the booger he’d picked far away and continued speaking to the investigator, who had been struck dumb.
Realizing there was absolutely no answer here, the investigator stood up.
As the investigator turned away, Kyung-wan called out to his back.
“Next time you come, bring some fried chicken. Have some sincerity. If you use someone else’s time, don’t you know how you’re supposed to act? Haven’t you ever lived in society?”
“Ugh, fuck!”
“Detective Kim! Detective Kim! Calm down, let’s go!”
When the investigator, his clothes metaphorically flipped inside out, tried to turn back toward Kyung-wan, a fellow investigator hurriedly grabbed him, inwardly panicking, Does this guy have anger management issues or what? Unable to shake off his colleague, the enraged investigator left, and Kyung-wan returned to solitary confinement.
As he was about to settle back into his repeating routine, a voice echoed in Kyung-wan’s mind.
[Hello.]
“Yeah, hi. But why do you always talk to me only when I’m about to sleep?”
[I thought it would be less of a bother.]
Kyung-wan nodded in understanding. After all, to others, he’d look like a lunatic talking to empty air.
The voice continued.
[Honestly, I didn’t expect you to help Black Noya.]
“I’m not so heartless that I’d turn my back on a resentment-filled old man who didn’t have long to live.”
[True. If you were the kind of selfish person who only thought of yourself, you wouldn’t be sitting quietly in prison like this.]
“It’s not really like that. Once you get used to it, this place is comfortable enough.”
Lying down with his arm as a pillow, Kyung-wan chatted idly with the voice for a bit before asking,
“Are you Vigilance?”
[Um… yes, that’s right.]
“I didn’t expect you to answer so honestly.”
[You already suspected it and didn’t tell anyone.]
That was true.
Kyung-wan nodded.
From what he’d heard from Kim Jun, the Vigilance investigation was making little progress. They had thoroughly searched routes for traveling between the U.S. and Korea, as well as the internet, but all they could find were contact networks and illegal entry methods of international crime organizations, not even the shadow of an organization called Vigilance.
Sure, there were plenty of dark web routes and undiscovered channels, but it was hard to believe Vigilance was a deep-rooted, massive organization capable of using all of those.
If it were a vigilante group with that kind of power, it would have been active long ago. Why reveal itself only recently?
There was only one answer. The ability to build a human network that crossed the Pacific using a method that completely avoided existing investigative nets.
He didn’t know how strong the voice’s abilities were, but it could form human networks without triggering any existing wiretaps or surveillance. The fact that it could precisely connect telepathic abilities to Kyung-wan was proof of that capacity.
The voice changed the subject.
[By the way, how did you do it?]
“Do what?”
[Transferring… a psychic ability to someone else. Passing it on, right?]
“Weren’t you watching and feeling everything through the channel?”
[I was barely holding onto consciousness so I wouldn’t pass out.]
The voice recalled the storm of sensations from that moment. When the fierce flow of S-particles surged back through the channel as if to tear it apart and spread widely across the Republic of Korea, it even felt a refreshing catharsis.
It had definitely used its own channel as a medium, yet even now, recalling the memories and sensations, it couldn’t understand how such a thing was possible.
Kyung-wan answered.
“It was because that old man’s obsession was incredible right up to the end, enough to create a seed. If his will hadn’t been that strong, he never could have turned S-particles into a seed.”
What Kyung-wan had done was simply this: through telepathy, he conveyed the intuitive technique of projecting intent so that all of the S-particles the old man possessed would be compressed, then combined the resulting seed with the heavenly net he had created. The psychic seed itself had to be created directly by its owner, there was no other way.
And once intent was projected, the S-particles naturally carried a certain degree of the original owner’s traits. As a result, whoever inherited them would be influenced by those traits and awaken a similar psychic ability, much like how people tend to follow paths laid down by those who came before.
Kyung-wan understood this through the concept of path dependence. There was a duality to it: the inheritor could awaken a powerful ability easily by inheriting one, but they might also lose the potential for a unique ability that could have been their own.
[So it depends on the person’s will… Then there’s no way to forcibly pass on a psychic ability?]
“It wouldn’t be easy. You’d have to use brainwashing or threats, but there’s no guarantee that someone with willpower weak enough to fall for that could even create a seed. And you’d also need a medium psychic to pass the seed along.”
[So for now, that means only you can do it.]
“Who knows. The world’s a big place.”
Kyung-wan didn’t overestimate his own power. The world was vast, and human greed for power was endless. Somewhere, even now, unethical psychic experiments using humans, like those infamous wartime units, could be taking place.
Ignore research ethics, and technological progress accelerates.
Sensing the nuance that he understood humanity’s ugliness, the voice fell silent.