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# Villain in the Novel – Chapter 3
## Chapter 1: A Friend’s Novel (3)
Park Sang-woo screamed.
The pain of having living flesh torn apart.
This description, which was used far too often, was extremely common in novels where blood and knives ran rampant. The same was true of most of the writing his friend had done.
And if the person experiencing that pain was the protagonist, they would endure it calmly. But if it were an enemy or an extra, they would suffer pathetically, crying and whining in an ugly manner.
But no.
Absolutely not.
“AAAAARGH-!”
Giving in to that pain wasn't pathetic.
It was only natural.
How could it be wrong for a person to surrender to pain they couldn't endure? Anyone who claimed otherwise was spouting nonsense because they had never experienced it themselves.
Unless the pain had been intense but brief.
If enduring that level of pain continuously were something anyone could do, then the great people who endured torture and faced it calmly wouldn't deserve to be remembered.
After all, no one would praise someone as a great person for doing something ordinary.
But wasn't that exactly the point?
One of the episodes that demonstrated Guan Yu's greatness in Romance of the Three Kingdoms was how he calmly played Go while his flesh was cut open and the poisoned bone was scraped clean. Yu Gwan-sun, the sister of the entire nation, was still praised as a great historical figure because she refused to surrender despite enduring all kinds of torture and continued shouting for independence.
Therefore, unless someone was truly extraordinary, it wasn't strange for them to give in to pain.
“AAAAAAARGH-!”
His throat was completely ruined.
He had screamed so much that a large amount of blood flowed from his mouth, as though he were vomiting blood. The pain in his thigh was so severe that he couldn't even tell which part of his throat hurt.
Park Sang-woo collapsed onto the floor and continued screaming for an incredibly long time.
By the time the unbearable pain that had left him completely unable to move had subsided to some extent, the sun had already set.
Even breathing caused a metallic sound to come from his throat.
“Ugh……”
He had tensed his body so much while suffering through the terrible pain that his entire body ached and trembled. Even lifting his arms was difficult.
Only then did Park Sang-woo realize that his entire body was drenched.
He couldn't tell whether it was cold sweat or urine, but he was soaked as if he had fallen into water.
The pain had been so severe that he hadn't even been able to assess his own condition.
‘Crazy…… I have to do this to my entire body?’
He hadn't even finished modifying his right thigh, which he had worked on that day, because he had run out of mana. He had modified only a small portion of it, and the stabilization process, which took even longer than the modification itself, had only just begun.
‘I……’
Park Sang-woo trembled.
Just imagining continuing the modification of the remaining parts made his entire body turn cold, as though all the blood had drained from it.
It was fear.
He had realized firsthand that reading about something and imagining it were completely different from actually experiencing it with his own body.
‘I can't do it……’
His resolve broke.
The moment Park Sang-woo gave up on the physical modification, he fell asleep as though he had fainted.
---
When he opened his eyes again, the sun was beginning to set.
He couldn't tell whether he had slept for almost twenty-four hours or even longer. The terrible pain in his thigh, which was undoubtedly still undergoing stabilization, the pain in his throat that made it impossible to identify exactly where it hurt, and the agony that felt as though his stomach were twisting were the only things he could vividly feel.
He raised his upper body.
His shirt, which had dried stiff and crumpled in the summer heat, gave off a foul smell.
‘My nose is fine, at least.’
Realizing the obvious fact that the parts unrelated to the physical modification were unharmed, Park Sang-woo felt relieved and stood up, relying on his left leg.
“Gnnngh……”
Even that movement caused his previously dried clothes to become damp again.
‘I'm thirsty.’
Park Sang-woo became aware of his intense thirst only afterward.
It wasn't the hellish pain he had experienced during the modification, but the powerful pain in his right thigh was enough to suppress even his thirst.
He thought giving up on the remaining physical modifications had been the right decision.
He would have to endure pain that suppressed even his instinct to replenish the water essential for survival until the stabilization was complete.
And that would happen every time he performed the procedure.
‘I can't endure it.’
His mind probably wouldn't be able to withstand it.
Even now, it felt as though the pain was scraping away at his consciousness. If he let his guard down even for a moment, he would collapse and lose consciousness.
Therefore, he had to hurry back.
To the filthy Blue Orphanage.
If he wanted to survive.
With that thought, Park Sang-woo walked desperately. He kept walking and walking, somehow managing to reach the orphanage without collapsing and dying on the street.
And then he was beaten.
On his way, he had entered a bar's bathroom and filled his stomach and quenched his thirst with tap water. After that, he barely managed to reach the orphanage, where the director beat him.
Whether the director thought he had run away or not, Park Sang-woo didn't know.
The part of his thigh that was undergoing stabilization broke and burst the moment he was struck. He lost consciousness from the terrible pain, and when he came to again, he had been thrown into the storage room.
A towel had been roughly wrapped around his broken leg, where the flesh had split open.
Just as it had been when the director's furious kicks sent him crashing into the stairs, leaving him on the verge of death.
It was an action that clearly conveyed the meaning: If he died, he died. If he lived, he lived.
That was the value of an orphan like him, one of countless others.
The preciousness of human life?
Value had always been relative, and the value of an orphan who possessed nothing had always been at rock bottom. It had been the same in his previous life, when society was stable. In this place, where monsters and superhumans roamed freely, it was naturally even worse.
He already knew this fact.
He had been reincarnated with the memories of his previous life as an office worker and was now living as an orphan in a world like this. How could he not know?
He had experienced it firsthand, too.
“……Heh heh heh.”
The area wrapped in the blood-soaked towel hurt terribly. He was thirsty, and his stomach was so empty that it felt as though a hole had been punched through it. Yet for some reason, laughter came out instead of groans.
So he laughed.
“Heh heh heh.”
He didn't know why.
Park Sang-woo laughed for a long while as he tried to draw in and absorb mana. It was the only thing he could do right now.
The amount was as tiny as a speck of dust, but it gradually accumulated according to his efforts.
He ignored his thirst, pain, and hunger and continued working.
How long had he been doing that?
Regardless of his determination or willpower, Park Sang-woo once again felt his eyelids growing heavier than a thousand-pound weight. He made a vow.
If he survived without dying like this and opened his eyes again,
he would return pain greater than what he was experiencing now, no matter what it took.
To the director.
Without fail.
Park Sang-woo firmly engraved that vow into his soul, as though carving it into its very depths. Unable to endure any longer, he lost consciousness peacefully, as if falling into a restful sleep.
Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, he didn't die and opened his eyes again in the storage room.
His mind was much clearer.
Of course, there was a strong possibility that it was merely an illusion.
Otherwise, he might have gone insane from exhaustion caused by thirst, pain, and hunger.
In truth, it didn't matter which was the case.
Park Sang-woo stared blankly at the ceiling like a corpse while absorbing mana out of habit, striving to grow stronger even a little faster. As he continued, he felt that something was different from before he had lost consciousness, so he turned his head.
There was tap water in a large bowl someone had brought, and the plate that had clearly contained food held only traces of it. The person who had brought it couldn't have eaten it, so someone else must have come to check on him and eaten the food.
‘It doesn't matter.’
Park Sang-woo struggled to raise his upper body and drank the water. Then he lay down again like a corpse and gathered mana.
As the water he had consumed spread throughout his body, one of the three pains tormenting his mind and body disappeared: thirst.
With his thoughts moving more smoothly than before, a burning heat appeared in his eyes as he stared into empty space.
He remembered the vow he had made before losing consciousness.
‘If I made a firm vow, I should keep it.’
It seemed like he might be able to do so.
‘I'll tear off tiny pieces of flesh one at a time and sprinkle salt on them. I heard that salt prevents bleeding through osmosis and also has a disinfecting effect.’
So that he would suffer for a long time.
‘And if I scrape away his teeth, I can directly touch the nerves, so that should be extremely painful.’
He should enjoy it.
There were enough teeth, so he would be able to torment him for quite a long time.
‘Is there somewhere I can get hydrochloric acid? It would be excellent to fill a small tank with hydrochloric acid and put his leg inside.’
He had plenty of time, so he would be able to come up with torture methods better than the ones he had thought of just now.
Park Sang-woo smiled.
And time passed.
---
Kim Ja-sung let out a sigh as he looked over the bustling elementary school playground.
The spacious playground was crowded with people preparing for the mana aptitude test. A staircase had been placed against the cargo bed of a large truck carrying the testing equipment, while people who looked like scientists were inspecting the devices.
The test had become widespread, so they were probably staff members rather than scientists. Assuming someone was a scientist simply because they wore a white coat was a prejudice.
‘Prejudice isn't good.’
After briefly escaping reality, Kim Ja-sung shook his head and returned to it.
‘Is that horrible bastard finally leaving the orphanage?’
He was happy, yet uneasy.
Everyone in the orphanage acted cautiously and kept quiet, but no one was unaware of the monster's position.
One day, the director, whose name was hardly worthy of being associated with trash, suddenly disappeared. In his place, a subordinate who was clearly covered in bruises and had been left mentally shattered by fear became the director.
Something extraordinary had happened.
The children who sensed the change worried about what had happened and how far its consequences would reach.
Of course, they were worried because they feared they might become victims.
That was why everyone noticed.
Two orphans had been given the privilege of sharing a room and were exempted from all labor.
The new director was even afraid of those two children.
There wasn't a single fool who didn't understand how they should behave after seeing that.
Even if they didn't know what had happened.
‘Fuck, of all people……’
Unfortunately, Kim Ja-sung was the exception.
One dawn, while everyone was sleeping deeply, Kim Ja-sung woke up thirsty and headed to the kitchen on the first floor.
Just as he was drinking water and preparing to leave the kitchen, he heard a sound coming through a slightly open window.
The director's desperate screams.
At first, he thought he was imagining it.
After all, the director was an all-powerful tyrant who ruled over everything in the orphanage.
The law and violence legitimized his rule.
Kim Ja-sung believed that such a tyrant would never scream as though the world were ending. So he slipped outside through the kitchen's back door.
Because he was curious about what the sound was.
‘I must have been crazy.’
He genuinely regretted it.
The screams weren't an illusion.
The faint screams continued without stopping. The fool who had surrendered to his curiosity discovered that the source of the screams was the underground storage room as the sound grew louder with every step he took.
When he approached, he found that the person screaming was, as expected, the director.
It was satisfying.
The children of Blue Orphanage exploited those weaker than themselves, just as they had witnessed and learned through experience. But they hated the director, who had taught them that method through firsthand experience.
Most of them.
No. All of them.
That was why the director's screams coming from the underground storage room were enjoyable.
At first, anyway.
While listening with pleasure, Kim Ja-sung suddenly became curious about why someone as vicious as the director was screaming so desperately.
At the same time, his imagination, which had grown vigorously like a sprout, began forming something concrete. Only then did Kim Ja-sung feel fear.
The screams stopped.
[Run away-!]
His reason and instincts issued powerful warnings, but his body, crushed under the weight of fear, remained frozen. No, he couldn't move.
Immediately afterward, the door to the underground storage room opened.
Considering the fear Kim Ja-sung had felt at the time, a demon or monster should have emerged.
But what came out was a nine-year-old child with such pale skin that his veins were clearly visible.
It was a familiar face.
He was a child from the same orphanage who frequently attracted attention by vomiting blood, as though he were suffering from a terminal illness.
He was so frail that even the children who enjoyed stepping on the weak to feel superior avoided him. He was the orphan who had made them bet on when his corpse would need to be removed.
When Kim Ja-sung saw that child smiling brightly beneath the cold moonlight, his body covered in red, he lost consciousness.
He prayed that everything was a dream.
Then he woke up at his usual time, in his usual place, and went through the same day as always. He thought it had been a remarkably realistic dream.
But it wasn't.
After dinner, while lying on his bed and idly waiting to fall asleep, he was summoned by a staff member.
There, he was told to stop begging for money and take charge of cleaning the underground storage room.
That underground storage room.
“Ugh, fuck……”
Recalling the sight of the storage room he had believed was part of a dream, Kim Ja-sung struggled to suppress his nausea.
It was hell.
The place that should have been filled with all kinds of miscellaneous objects had become a small world dedicated to one being.
A space designed to inflict pain, like hell, though certainly not in a good sense.
And the person meant to experience that pain was the director.
While Kim Ja-sung gradually withered away as he cleaned up the ‘fragments’ left behind by the torture, the only remaining staff member naturally became the director.
It was around that time that the orphanage's operations began revolving around the two children.
Since he had naturally realized that his encounter at dawn had not been a dream, Kim Ja-sung couldn't even dare to make eye contact with him, unlike the other children who continued acting as they normally did.
While managing the torture room like a slave whose tongue had been cut out, rumors began spreading quietly.
The pale orphan had caught someone's attention in the slums and become their successor.
No. Apparently, the pig who shared his room was actually a remarkable beauty and had been chosen as the gang leader's concubine.
All kinds of rumors spread.
Naturally, the rumors were far from the truth. Their source was the envy and fear held by the other orphans.
Kim Ja-sung, who possessed a level of fear far beyond that of the other children, gradually wasted away while living like a mute.
He knew the truth.
But it wasn't something he could easily talk about.
He had seen pieces of flesh torn apart by human hands underground. There was evidence that made him unable to think otherwise. While stopping the bleeding from the director's thigh and wrapping it in bandages, he had seen marks that looked as though they had been gouged out by human fingers.
Tiny ones that appeared to belong to a child.
There was no need to say who came to mind when he saw those marks.
Of course, he didn't think anyone would readily believe him even if he spoke. And as he watched the director gradually approach death, he also felt his own life was threatened, so he kept his mouth shut.
Because he didn't want to die.
Then, a week ago, after the dead director had been completely dealt with, he continued living as though he were dead himself until he found himself standing in this place today.
“It's finally over……”
Soon, that monster would show a positive reaction through the aptitude-testing equipment loaded onto the truck.
There was no way the result would be negative.
It was impossible for an ordinary nine-year-old child to possess the grip strength needed to tear apart the flesh of an adult man's thigh.
Not without manipulating mana like the superhumans called heroes or villains.
Therefore, just like the same-aged orphan who had previously tested positive, he would leave for the elementary school today.
True liberation.
Then why was he feeling uneasy?
As Kim Ja-sung watched the ten-year-olds standing in a long line and taking the test one after another, he couldn't understand why he felt anxious.
Naturally, positive reactions were not easy to obtain.
One child, forced to abandon his dream of becoming a hero because he lacked talent, collapsed onto the cargo bed of the truck and began crying bitterly.
His parents hurried up, comforted their crying child, and brought him down.
“Fuck……”
Remembering himself three years earlier, Kim Ja-sung smiled bitterly.
He hadn't even been able to cry.
He had prayed more desperately than anyone, but even after confirming that he had no talent, he was so afraid of the director watching nearby that he rushed down as though fleeing.
And when an orphan of the same age tested positive, he had felt nothing but envy.
That was still true even now.
Back then, he had felt as though he could sell even his soul if he could only receive a positive result on the aptitude test.
Although there was no one who would buy the soul of a cheap orphan among countless others.
While thinking about this and that, he escaped his anxiety. But Kim Ja-sung, now deeply depressed, turned his attention back to the testing process.
Among the children desperately hoping for the opportunity to become heroes, there was already a monster who had seized that opportunity.
Pale skin and a severely emaciated body.
His appearance was such that no one would find it strange if he suddenly lost consciousness and collapsed. Yet as he stood still, waiting for his turn, his posture was as straight as bamboo.
Unlike the other children, who were extremely tense, he remained calm.
He looked less like someone who had come to take the test and more like someone who had come to watch.
Perhaps because of that, his presence stood out.
People's gazes gathered on him.
“Ah……”
The number of children who had taken the test increased quickly, but there still hadn't been a single positive reaction.
Then it was the monster's turn.
For the first time, a green light flashed through the lamp that had shown only red.
It was a positive reaction.
At the first positive result of the day, a complicated mixture of admiration, anger, longing, and jealousy spread throughout the playground in sounds that were neither loud nor quiet.
Those conducting the test examined the documents and began spreading the information.
Amid the people moving busily, Kim Ja-sung somehow felt that the monster was tired.
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