Inevitability - 5
There was a time when I would stare endlessly toward the setting sun.
A raging fever and pain like being pounded all over by hammers. Skin so ruined that strangers took it for plague. After enduring a day of pure hell, once the agony ebbed even a little, I could hear the voices around me.
Fatherless bitch. Plague-ridden bitch. Vile bitch. Leper bitch. The names they called me were beyond counting.
Even if I forced my pain-dulled body upright, I could never run to Mother for comfort—not while dodging those stares of loathing and contempt.
— If only it weren’t for you, damn girl! Get out of my sight, you little bitch!
Dodging flying liquor bottles had long since become second nature.
Why does Mom treat me like this? What did I do wrong? If I just keep going to her, maybe she’ll love me. Maybe she’ll finally look at me.
That was the empty wish of a child.
A child born of rape. The marriage prospects ruined because of that child. A life destroyed. The vicious gossip that always trailed after her because of the child.
She was my mother, yet she was never a whole person; she poured every scrap of her hatred onto me.
I only learned the reason recently, and I almost wish I never had. If I had lived without knowing, if she had not died because of me today, I would simply have gone on hating her forever.
Thoughts of Mother hollowed out my chest.
A childhood in which even my own mother refused to love me. In the end I could only keep staring, helpless, at the place where the sun went down.
When. At what hour. On which day.
— Haha. You’ve been waiting for me, haven’t you?
I never dreamed Uncle Dang Geoho would come.
— I brought a fun little toy back from Sichuan.
— What do you want to eat? I’ll buy you anything you like.
West of Daeheung County. Uncle Dang Geoho, arriving from Sichuan with the sunset at his back, was the single ray of light in my childhood.
He felt like a father. I even let myself imagine he might truly be my real dad. His presence alone held up the fragile frame of those early years.
— I’ll come again next time. But you have to take the medicine I gave you every single day.
With a gentle smile he would always stroke my hair, promise another meeting, and leave.
The martial arts he taught were grueling; the medicine he ordered me to swallow was bitter. Still I took it without fail, terrified that if I stopped I would never see him again.
I never knew that medicine was the root of every torment I suffered.
“Dang Hwarin……!”
The man who had always promised to return now stood right in front of me. Dawn had already broken; more than ten years had leaped across the years to place him here.
Not as the light that once helped me endure unendurable trials, but as the architect of every single one of them.
The ugly man tried to flee into the deepest shadows, as if the light itself terrified him, only to be blocked by me.
What is this feeling? Betrayal, resentment, rage—no single word can contain the tangle. Yet one thing is certain.
Today the knot that binds us will finally be undone.
“Spare me.”
Dang Geoho yanked the throwing knife from his seared arm and begged Dang Hwarin for his life.
“When I said those same words to you more than ten years ago, what were you thinking?”
Uncle, please save me. Please treat me. It hurts so much. The pleas little Dang Hwarin had once sobbed out in agony now returned, laced with pure fury.
“I know a hundred apologies would never be enough. Even if I claim it was for a greater cause, I still performed those monstrous experiments on a child. Do you think looking at your suffering never tore at my own heart?”
He kept his head bowed, clutching his chest, arranging his face into a mask of shared sorrow.
“…….”
Hwarin’s steps faltered for a heartbeat. Taking that as victory, Dang Geoho lifted the same tender expression he had worn when she was small and spoke again.
“I thought of you as my own daughter. No matter how much you suffered, I always made sure you would not die. I only ever gave you trials you could endure. That is why you have grown into the remarkable woman you are today.”
The words were smooth enough that someone else might have believed them.
“Bullshit. I guess the other bastards you murdered never counted as your children.”
Hwarin was not the girl who could be swayed by honeyed lies.
“……Tsk.”
In an instant the mask slipped; only raw, ugly hunger glittered in the man’s eyes.
“You pathetic piece of shit.”
She looked at him with pure disdain. Had she still been the child who stared endlessly at sunsets, she might have fallen for the act. Not now.
She had not become a Dokin because of Dang Geoho.
She stood here because she had met one man.
Because that man had reached into the darkest abyss and pulled her out when she was already falling.
Without him she would have been just another corpse rolling in the dirt.
Poison qi gathered in Hwarin’s hand as she stepped in front of the man whose knot she meant to cut free.
Sensing death, Dang Geoho’s face twisted with urgency.
“You were different from those others! You were special to me! Don’t you remember how hard I worked to leave you with happy memories? The dolls I bought you, the sweets I fed you! The man you once called Father! Are you really going to kill me?”
Hwarin’s hand paused for a single breath.
Not because she was moved. Only because every precious scrap of her childhood had just been revealed as the carefully staged plot of this vile creature, and the knowledge hurt.
She lingered in that brief sorrow, nothing more. The ending would not change.
Dang Geoho seized the sliver of hesitation.
“Die!”
He yanked a small case from his robes and thrust it at her.
The lid burst open; three hidden weapons shot forth. Hwarin tried to retreat, but the distance was too short. All three sank into her forearm.
They lacked the power to do more than pierce skin, yet that was enough. The poison they carried raced up her arm in a heartbeat.
Poison against a Dokin? She yanked the needles free as though they were nothing and stared at him in utter disbelief.
“You thought this would work? Poison on a poison human, you fucking idi— huh?”
Her body swayed.
“Hahahaha!”
“W-what did you do?”
“Ordinary poison would never touch you! But the venom of the Thousand-Year Centipede is another matter entirely! Even if you barely managed to stabilize your poison core, you will never control a dose twice as strong as everything already inside you!”
He had emptied every last drop he possessed. Anyone in the Murim would drop dead on the spot. Victory was already his.
“Uuugh!”
Just as he predicted, Hwarin clutched her chest and sank to one knee.
“I’ll take your corpse if nothing else! I’ll dissect every organ, every drop of blood, and craft a brand-new Dokin from the knowledge!”
Even a perfected Dokin had limits. Soon she would lose consciousness, thrash with fever. She might try to hold on, but she would fail.
Dang Geoho swallowed his glee and waited for her to collapse.
“Ahh…….”
Hwarin closed her eyes and toppled.
No matter the path, the last one standing is the victor. Smiling in triumph, he stepped toward her fallen form.
“Ghk!”
In the blink of an eye Hwarin rose and seized him by the throat.
“Did you enjoy the show?”
She smiled the smile of the true victor down at the man now gaping in shock at how thoroughly he had been played.
“What?!”
“Dang Geoho. You’re trash right to the very end.”
“H-how? Your body should never have withstood that!”
He stared at her with wild eyes. The body he himself had designed could never endure such venom. Becoming a Dokin earlier had been pure chance; this time it should have been impossible.
“It’s possible because of the most precious person in my life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“None of your business.”
“KRAAAAAAAAGH!”
Every drop of poison Dang Geoho had spent more than a decade forcing into Hwarin’s body now poured back into his own.
Fever. Breathlessness. Rashes. Itching. Muscle agony. The marrow-deep pain she had never been able to put into words—he felt it all in a single compressed instant.
“Does it hurt? That’s exactly what I lived with.”
“S-spare me…… I can still help the Dang Clan…….”
If he lived he could restore lost techniques, raise more Dokin for the clan.
“So fucking what.”
Hwarin snorted. The Dokin experiments would end with her. No more victims. Like cutting out rot, like squeezing pus from a wound, the source of every torment had to be erased.
“I…… created you…….”
She looked down at the man still struggling to meet her eyes and spoke with a face full of pure rage.
“Get the hell out of my life.”
She poured the most vicious poison she possessed—resentment and fury made liquid—through the hand locked around his throat.
“Ghk… ghk…”
Ending him was almost too easy.
She injected only a fraction of the Thousand-Year Centipede venom he himself had fed her; a single choked scream and his life snapped.
Hwarin released the man she had waited more than a decade to seize. Perhaps the grudge ran too deep. Perhaps the fury burned too hot.
With nothing left inside her but ashes, she looked down at the origin of every suffering in her life with flat indifference.
The worst human she had ever known.
If he had done one single good thing, it was this:
“Yunho.”
He had set her on the path that led to the best man she would ever meet.
She turned her head toward the place where Kang Yunho had fallen.
“Yun……ho?”
The spot where he had lain held only a blood-stained pile of clothes.
“Yunho!”
Hwarin sprinted for the stable where Kang Yunho had collapsed.
Where had he gone? How had he vanished? She had told him to run the moment he got the chance. She scanned the horses; none were missing.
“Yunho!”
Had he slipped away in secret? Or had Demonic Cultists taken him?
“Kang Yunho!!!”
Under the dark night sky, like a sailor who had lost the stars on a windless, pitching deck, she called his name in raw panic.
Where had he gone?
Where in the world had he gone?
Had he not seen she was winning? Had he truly abandoned her and fled?
No. Impossible.
Even through the poison invading her body, even when blades flashed before her eyes, she had refused to fall—yet now her heart threatened to shatter.
The strength that had carried her this far began to leave her legs. Then a brilliant sunrise struck her full in the face.
“I’m over here, so stop looking and come help me already!”
“Huh?”
She turned toward the light.
“If you’re done, quit spacing out and give me a hand!”
Far off, Kang Yunho was calmly untying the ropes that bound the captives, one by one.
“You absolute idiot! You scared the hell out of me for nothing!”
He had never disappeared. He had simply been doing whatever needed doing, the way he always did.
Hwarin watched him help the captives as if nothing at all had happened and finally let out a long breath of relief.
“Hwarin! These injuries are really bad!”
“Wait! I’m coming!”
Before she went to him she glanced once more behind her at the dead past.
The child who had once stared helplessly at the western sky no longer existed.
That child had become a woman who now ran toward the man who had once reached out his hand for her—smiling, ready to help.
Hwarin turned her back on everything that had been and ran to him.