Survive Through Worthlessness 1
Chiiik—.
Pork belly fat sputtered over the hot grill.
The smell of meat browning to a crisp filled the living room, the kind of ordinary, peaceful dinner scene that made any Korean go weak at the knees.
Smell.
If you asked me, my unusually sensitive nose was the only answer that mattered.
"Bro, slow down on the meat already. There won’t be any left for me. I’m starving after dance practice."
My younger sister, Ha Minyeong, jabbed my side dish plate with her chopsticks and snapped at me.
I forced the meat in my mouth down with a chewed-up scowl.
"Then grill your own. Why the hell are you sticking chopsticks at your brother, you little idol brat?"
"Ugh, Mom! Oppa’s calling me an idol brat again!"
I kept my usual tone and behavior as much as possible.
Originally, just like any other siblings, Minyeong and I hadn’t exactly gotten along.
"Son, what kind of way is that to talk to your sister? And Minyeong, you watch your mouth with your brother too."
My stepmother calmly scolded us while cutting the meat with kitchen scissors.
A perfectly normal sibling squabble.
A perfectly normal mother stepping in to mediate.
Just another argument like always.
I stuffed another piece of meat coated in ssamjang into my mouth and kept glancing between the two of them.
Under the light of the dining room lamp, my sister’s jaw moved smoothly as she chewed, and my stepmother’s hand was steady and natural as she wrapped meat in lettuce and lifted it to her mouth.
Chewing meat, swallowing, tasting, digesting.
All perfectly human physiological functions.
They weren’t eating cockroaches or mice.
Maybe they were just maintaining these "shells" by taking in nutrients from human food.
After all, they’d copied the host’s memories and biological habits perfectly.
If anything, that fact made me even crazier.
If they’d been ripping into raw meat or dragging out disgusting tentacles, I’d have screamed and run for my life.
But this perfectly normal daily life had me tied up so tightly I couldn’t move.
I had to find proof that these people were aliens by scent.
I needed to catch them by the smell on their bodies naturally, but...
Clink.
I dropped my spoon on the floor.
Under the table.
Then, as if hurrying to pick it up, I shoved my nose between Minyeong’s legs.
It was a filthy move, but for now it was the best I had.
Sniff, sniff.
I caught the smell of her pussy quickly.
Hup.
Just as I thought...
It smelled thickly like the mildew reek you got from a bathroom.
Exactly the same scent of mold I’d caught from my stepmother’s body earlier.
Could the mildew in the bathroom actually be a byproduct seeping out of their crotches?
Jesus. They really do seem like aliens.
I sat back up straight before anyone noticed.
For the moment, I’d secured a crucial piece of evidence.
"Oh, right. Mom."
My sister, chewing on a lettuce wrap, suddenly spoke up.
"You know the main dancer unni at our agency? Unni Yujin."
"Yeah, of course. That girl who’s supposed to be an amazing dancer?"
"Yeah. But she’s been really weird lately. Her personality just flipped overnight. She used to be super picky and sensitive, but a few days ago she suddenly started wandering around grinning like an idiot... and her dancing’s lost all the detail it used to have. It’s like the shell is still Yujin unni, but the inside is somebody else."
My throat locked up.
The pork belly halfway down my throat got stuck in my esophagus.
I hurriedly grabbed my water glass and gulped it down.
The inside is somebody else...
That’s you people she’s talking about, you bastard.
"Kek, keck!"
Choking on my food, I burst into coughing fits. Minyeong looked at me like I was pathetic.
"Can’t even drink water properly? You pig."
Clicking her tongue, she turned back to my stepmother.
"Anyway, I think I might be able to beat Yujin unni and take center at this month’s evaluation."
"Really? Then all your hard work will have paid off, sweetie. If you get center, Mom will buy you a handbag."
My stepmother smiled brightly.
I looked at the two of them with tears pricking at the corners of my eyes.
That was when it hit me.
A faint sense of wrongness scraped across my nerves and slid away.
"Ah, right. Minyeong, Mom just..."
My stepmother opened her mouth as she picked up a piece of garlic with her chopsticks from the edge of the grill.
She hadn’t even finished speaking.
Minyeong quietly took the tub of herb salt from the corner of the table and set it down beside my stepmother’s plate.
“……”
I held my breath.
My stepmother hadn’t said a word about salt.
She hadn’t even looked away from the garlic, and Minyeong had been chewing meat while staring at her phone.
So how had she known, as if they shared one brain, that my stepmother wanted salt and timed it so precisely?
Hive mind.
That reptilian doctor’s words flashed through my head.
[You can think of their minds as one, divided across many bodies.]
They were putting on a show called "family" right now, but in reality they were nothing more than one huge mass of mold exchanging live data through an invisible neural network.
It wasn’t telepathy or some superpower. They just knew because they were one body.
If my right hand itched, my left would scratch it without needing to be told.
"Oh, thank you. How did you know Mom was looking for salt?"
My stepmother smiled and spoke with a completely natural line, one a "human mom" might say.
Almost like she’d noticed my suspicion.
No—had this been a trap from the start?
There was no reason to leak that Yujin’s shell had stayed the same while the inside had changed.
And right then, stupidly enough, I’d been startled and let out a fake cough.
"Huh? Because Mom always dips her meat in salt, duh."
Minyeong answered just as naturally, with the line of a "human daughter."
Chills crept over my skin.
Because I realized even this conversation was just a live-generated excuse to lower the suspicion of the "human me" sitting at this table.
"But, Mom and Minyeong..."
The instant I spoke absentmindedly, both pairs of eyes turned to me at once.
Two emotionless, black, still gazes stabbed into my face.
For a moment, it felt as if the air in the living room had frozen solid.
I quickly twisted my expression and dunked a piece of pork belly into the herb salt.
"Pork belly is best with salt, right? Haha. Damn, this meat’s so tough. Mom, next time change butchers."
I made my tone as rude and worthless as I could, like a jobless older brother who didn’t know his place.
At my grumbling, the strange tension in their eyes loosened little by little.
"Eat what’s given to you, you punk. You don’t even contribute a dime for allowance."
My stepmother clicked her tongue and shook out some lettuce.
I let out a quiet breath of relief inside.
If they’d caught on that I’d figured out what they were, by tomorrow morning my corpse would be compost, feeding the mold.
"Son. Do you really not want to come work at Mom’s company?"
My stepmother set down her chopsticks and got back to the point.
"We’re expanding the data center on a huge scale this time, so we’re hiring. It’s simple work, so even you can do it. You’d just... manage nodes in the server room."
"Nope. I don’t know the first thing about computers, so what server management? I can barely play ROL."
I sighed in annoyance and scraped my rice bowl clean.
I had to prove my worthlessness.
"And this whole thing smells like a pyramid scheme. Mom, watch out for investors these days. Those reptilian bastards—apparently there are tons of scam artists among them. I’m going to the PC bang, so give me this ten-thousand won."
At my flawless declaration of uselessness, my stepmother let out a long sigh.
"...Fine. If I put someone like you in there, the system would probably just bug out. Forget it. Go rot in PC bangs for the rest of your life."
Bug.
The word that came out of her mouth was oddly chilling, but on the outside I only snickered and held out my hand.
"So, about that ten-thousand won. A man’s gotta eat. I’ll do all the dishes before I leave."
Dinner ended.
My stepmother pulled a fifty-thousand-won bill from her wallet and tossed it onto the table before going into her room, and my sister flopped onto the sofa and started watching Chinese TikTok.
Clatter, clatter.
I stood in front of the sink wearing rubber gloves and scrubbed the grill clean.
While I worked the detergent into the grease, I listened to the sounds of the living room behind me.
— Hahaha! Damn, that bastard’s hilarious!
A variety show was on TV, with some famous comedian doing physical comedy.
— Hahahahaha!
Suddenly, my hand, which had been working up suds with the dish soap, stopped dead.
My stepmother’s bedroom door was open.
Her laughter came from inside the room, and my sister’s laughter came from the living room sofa.
And those two laughs...
They burst out with perfect timing, not off by even a tenth of a second, and stopped with perfect timing too.
Like a stereo speaker test.
A grotesque dissonance, with two bodies simultaneously outputting the same signal of "this is funny" from one brain.
— Puhahaha!
My shaking hand turned on the faucet.
Whooooosh—.
I desperately erased that spine-crawling laughter with the sound of cold water beating into the sink.
Monsters wearing the most perfect human shells, invading my territory under the name of family.
I held my breath and glared at my pale face reflected in the stainless-steel basin, shining like a mirror.
Damn it. If they smell like mildew, then they really must be Flowers...
While I washed the dishes, my stepmother went into the bathroom to shower, and my sister went to her room.
Whoooosh—
Once I made sure the shower water was running, I carefully approached my stepmother’s suit jacket hanging on the coat rack in the living room.
I need more solid proof.
I’m not the type who goes by rumors.
More like the type who has to stick his spoon into the shit himself to know whether it’s really shit or soybean paste.
Rummaging through my stepmother’s pocket, I found a second phone.
It was a work phone with Samsung Pay installed, something she apparently used for delivery payments now and then.
Taking advantage of the overlap between the sound of the toilet water and Minyeong’s TikTok, I quickly switched the screen on.
Thankfully, it wasn’t fingerprint-locked, just a pattern lock.
After drawing the Z-pattern my mom always used, the home screen appeared.
Project: 'Flower Bed' - Node Synchronization Status
On the screen was a grotesque spreadsheet-like table.
Cold sweat streamed down my spine.
My fingers trembling, I scrolled down the list.
No. 998,901 / Ha Minyeong (F, 21) / B-grade Host / Synchronization Complete
No. 998,902 / Lee Suyeon (F, 40) / A-grade Host / Synchronization Complete
My sister’s and stepmother’s names.
It was real. These bastards really were parasitic aliens that had eaten away the shells of my family and sat themselves inside.
Holding my heart as it threatened to burst, I kept checking the next fields.
This is a death note.
A list of the people who had become Flower hosts.
The first thing I did was look for my own name, just in case.
My name wasn’t on the million-host list.
Instead, I found it in the reserve waiting list.
No. Reserve Candidate 1,232 / Ha Jinwoo (M, 26) / F-grade Host (worthless trash)
The moment I saw the words F-grade (worthless trash) beside my name, I almost laughed out loud.
Even in the eyes of the aliens, I was a useless, jobless loser with no damn value.
Yeah. Since I’m worthless trash, there’s no need to waste one of those precious million slots infecting a guy like me.
The survival strategy I’d intended had fallen perfectly into place.
Just as I was about to breathe out and power off the tablet,
a red line in the "remarks" section beside my F-grade evaluation forcibly caught my eye.
Summary of Remarks Report
The subject (Ha Jinwoo) has no value for colony linkage due to insufficient intelligence and physical capability.
He is to be disposed of as an obstacle to the remarriage of No. 998,902, Lee Suyeon.
After arranging a meeting between No. 998,901, Ha Minyeong, and A-grade host Namgung Seongtae, he is to be disposed of.
"......Huh?"
Shiiit... disposed of? My stepmother’s remarrying? And Namgung Seongtae?
Namgung Seongtae was my friend.
My nerdy friend who worked as a researcher at a state defense institute.
— What’s Seongtae oppa been up to lately?
Now I knew why Minyeong had suddenly asked about Namgung Seongtae a week ago.
Damn it.
After setting up a meeting between Namgung Seongtae and Ha Minyeong... I was going to be disposed of?
My breath caught in my throat.
Dispose of
Physical disposal, turned into nutrients.
It took less than a second to understand what that meant.
These bastards had never planned to let me live in the first place.
Because I was useless, instead of infecting me, they were just going to throw me into a meat grinder and use me as fertilizer to grow their mold spores.
A single tear rolled down and fell.
From the worthless man who got scolded every day, I’d thought I’d finally become part of their family.
A family that could laugh together, grumble together, and shove each other around like normal people.
After coming back from that trip, my stepmother and Minyeong had started paying attention to me, who’d once been treated like a transparent ghost.
I really thought I’d finally become family.
When I asked for allowance, they’d glare at me, but still fish money out of their wallets and hand it over.
Looking back, the change in our family relationship had been far too huge to ignore.
Damn it...
My fist clenched tight.
They’d been watching my face all along.
I was just an extra whose role was to introduce A-grade host Namgung Seongtae. Nothing more, nothing less.
I lifted my trembling head and looked at the wall clock.
11:15 p.m.
Rule 7. Just pretend not to know and live.
They’d said if I pretended not to know, they’d let me live!
But even if I pretended not to know I was an obstacle to them, I was still doomed to be disposed of.
Click.
Then I heard the bathroom doorknob turn.
At the same time, my sister’s bedroom door creaked open, and her neck rotated seventy degrees toward me.
"Oppa."
Something wearing my sister’s shell stared at me with empty, emotionless eyes and parted its lips.
"What’re you looking at?"
I was secretly reading the Flowers’ classified list right now.
The tablet in my hand felt slick with sweat, like it might slip free and crash to the floor at any second.
The calmest home in the world had turned into the most horrifying hunting ground.