Heavenly Demon.
Or The King of the Underworld.
A being with two opposing names that do not go well together.
He was my father.
***
“It was you, right?” It was around three months after Son Jae-won decided on doing ‘the job’ that his father, whom Jae-won highly respected, asked Jae-won a strange question.
Like any other day, Son Jae-won behaved as if he had returned home right after school. He sat in front of the TV with his parents, ate some fruit, and chatted with his parents about this and that.
At the same time, news was airing on TV. All the headlines were related to the ‘hero’ who had recently been shaking up the whole country. A child rapist who was acquitted because of a lack of evidence, a factory manager who was released on bail after discharging wastewater to turn an entire village into a cancer site, and a politician who was accused of murder but let off due to his high office position… Although these issues caused a great disturbance in society at the time they occurred, the accused were let off relatively scot-free. However, those accused who were murdered after not paying their fair share to society now numbered over twenty. This meant that one person was dying every three or four days.
Son Jae-won acted as if these strange occurrences had nothing to do with him without much difficulty because he had already developed the habit of acting ambivalent from an early age.
Neither his mother nor his father seemed to pay any attention to the news as they just talked about what happened at work that day. Then, suddenly, Jae-won’s father suddenly looked at Jae-won and asked the question. It was said in a playful manner, like an immature father who wanted to kid around with his aloof and naive son. It did not seem like a big deal.
However, Son Jae-won felt his spine tingle. “What…are you talking about, Dad?” Contrary to his startled feelings, he let out a smirk without showing any expression of surprise. He wondered what kind of prank his father was playing.
“Really?” But the eyes that appeared along with his father’s smile were infinitely deep and piercing.
“…” In the end, Son Jae-won said nothing.
As the seemingly buzzing family atmosphere suddenly turned cool, Jae-won’s mother, who was cutting some fruit, suddenly screamed aloud and hit her husband’s back with the palm of her hand. “What the hell are you saying?! Don’t make such obscene jokes! Our child still needs to study! Don’t frighten him like this!”
Slap!
“Ah! Wifey, that hurts!”
The pressure that Son Jae-won felt coming from his father’s eyes just a moment ago was nowhere to be found. In its place, Jae-won saw his father being beaten up one-sidedly by his mother.
“Don’t you know I hit you so that it would hurt? You bum!”
Slap!
“Ouch! It really hurts! Where did that gentle and kind Seo Eun-young of the olden days go…!”
“Don’t you know that you’ve made that Seo Eun-young of olden days like this?”
As if she was not satisfied, Jae-won’s mother unleashed another flurry of slaps on her husband’s back. Jae-won saw his father jumping all over the living room to avoid his wife’s slaps. “…” While all this was going on, his gaze wavered as he continued to stare at his father.
***
‘What does father do?’ The next morning, Son Jae-won didn’t go to school. He hid in an alleyway near his apartment building with his hood pressed down. He waited for his father to go to work.
After hearing the eerie words from his father yesterday, Son Jae-won tossed and turned all night trying to sleep.
Jae-won had been proud that he had moved without leaving a trace of evidence. In fact, tens of thousands of police officers were mobilized to solve the ongoing mysterious deaths, and experts such as prosecutors and profilers talked about who the mystery vigilante may be countless times on TV. However, no one had any firm idea on who this ‘hero’ was. The press described the entire situation as a game of hide-and-seek. Son Jae-Won felt that the press’ title was an apt description. The reason he moved while hiding his identity under a mask, avoiding the eyes of society and the public, was because this was the only way he could leave a mark on society without any harm coming to his family.
Some people evaluated Jae-won’s actions as ‘the typical behavior of a psychopath who thinks he is a hero of society’. However, none of this mattered to Son Jae-won. He felt a sense of euphoria in the process of becoming a hero. The process allowed him to realize and feel that he was alive.
Jae-won also felt another emotion whenever he saw the gratitude-filled interviews of past victims, who had received no reparations from society and its laws. Moreover, most public opinion venerated the vigilante as an apostle of justice who brought justice to the wicked, who have not been properly judged by social law.
Son Jae-won objectively felt that he was acting for the populace and gaining popularity. Of course, he did not let a sense of popularity cloud his judgment or steer him towards committing any crimes.
Anyway, while proudly living two separate lives between reality and ideal, Jae-won was terrified to receive such a suspicion from his father. However, he had always felt that he did not truly know his father and wondered about his father’s true identity.
To be honest, Son Jae-won knew very little about his father. Jae-won knew that his father was playful and caring around him, and his father always tried to make time for Jae-won even though he always seemed busy. Exactly what did his father do, where did he always go every morning, and where did his sometimes-sharp insight come from? Jae-won knew nothing at all about his father regarding these questions.
Jae-won was the epitome of an adolescent son who was indifferent to what his father did. Thus, he intended to find out the identity of his father, who had remained a mystery to Jae-won up to now. Furthermore, he also planned to figure out how his father knew about what he was doing.
‘He’s leaving.’ Jae-won saw his father coming out of the apartment’s common entrance. He secretly hid himself in the alleyway while pressing his hood further down his face, concerned that his father might recognize him. However…
‘…is he smiling?’
As if something interesting had just happened, his father smiled and started walking in the opposite direction to where Son Jae-won was. Since his father did not have a car that morning, he would have to use public transport to get somewhere. The problem was that there was no subway or bus stop in the direction that his father was walking.
‘Is he planning on grabbing a taxi?’ Son Jae-won started to follow his father, making sure to maintain a safe distance. After a while, he followed his father to an alleyway’s dead end. His father was nowhere to be found.
“Where’d he go…?” Son Jae-won was thoroughly confused.
***
Whenever he had spare time, Son Jae-won followed his father. Each time, his father would walk out of their apartment’s communal entrance with a smile on his face and disappear in the same dead-end alleyway. Although he wondered where the hell his father went, Son Jae-won could not find any traces of his father’s whereabouts.
‘Father is probably testing me.’ Belatedly, Son Jae-won realized that his father was playing a prank on him. The smile that his father always made before he left for work was a kind of sign that a prank had begun. In other words, this was just another game of hide-and-seek.
So, Son Jae-won decided to tail his father closer. Even though his father already knew that Jae-won was tailing him, Jae-won felt an inner competitive fire brewing within himself. However, every time he pursued his father, he encountered the same dead-end with the same results.
Jae-won’s feeling of frustration continued to pile up. He later discovered the one thing that was out of place. ‘Wait. There’s always some kind of strange ash on this wall, right? Does this have anything to do with father’s disappearance?’
As if leaves had been collected and burned, the ash had piled up below the wall. So far, Jae-won had ignored this detail as if it was nothing special, but he belatedly recognized that the ash may contain some hidden meaning and secret.
Thus, Jae-won hunched down and touched the ash pile with his hand. ‘… huh?’ He felt his vision spinning and became unconscious.
***
“@$&^%$&*…?”
Son Jae-won’s surroundings were noisy. Feeling dizzy, he forced his eyes open while barely holding down his nauseous stomach. He was seemingly suffering from severe motion sickness. And what he saw…was a group of foreigners looking at him with a sense of curiosity in their eyes.
They seemed to be a large family, an old couple and six children were constantly talking about something.
“What are you saying…?” Son Jae-won did not know what the hell they were talking about. He had never told his family, but Jae-won had been very interested in languages at one time, so he studied hard and mastered at least nine different languages. Moreover, he had listened to a wide variety of languages here and there. However, not only could Jae-won not understand what the family members were saying, but he also could not even recognize what language they were speaking.
Additionally, the natural red-green hair and verdant-colored eyes, which did not seem to be dyed or produced artificially, did not look like those of any people on Earth. All this made Jae-won feel eerily insecure. Moreover, they had a terrible stench. Maybe it was because they had not washed properly in a few days, seeing as their faces were caked in dust, full of wrinkles, and littered with dark spots.
Son Jae-won raised his upper body, trying to figure out where he was. He did not know if these travelers accidentally rescued him from the alleyway or if he was kidnapped. Regardless, Jae-won was intent on finding out what happened.
However, Son Jae-won soon faced the most confounding moment of his young life. “What…is this…?” The place he was lying in was like a shabby stable or a pigsty, a place that was hard to think of as a home. Through an open hole without a window, Jae-won saw a blood-red colored sky.
***
‘I…arrived at a place other than Earth.’ A full month had passed since Son Jae-won was rescued by the strange family of foreigners. At least, that was the conclusion he came to.
‘Damn it! What kind of screwed-up fictional world did I end up in? What kind of world is this?!” Jae-won found it difficult to wrap his head around what had happened to him. He was trying to tail his father, but he suddenly fell into a strange world where he could not even communicate with its inhabitants.
However, while learning the language and customs of this new area with the help of an older gentleman named ‘Ghel’ and his family, Jae-won had no choice but to accept the fact that he was in a completely different world from Earth.
Everything here was drastically different from modern Earth. Nobles existed, and kings ruled the land. It was a class-based society that looked like Earth’s past medieval era. If one simply focused on this point, one might have concluded that one arrived in the past. But this place was very different from Earth.
Gods existed. It was not just a realm of belief in a god. God truly existed, beings who oversaw all the mysteries of the world, brought miracles at set times, showed their dignity to the inhabitants, and received tributes.
‘Does it collect tributes as a price for protecting the land where the humans inhabit, blessing the cultivated crops to grow, and granting protection so that civilization can flourish?’ Son Jae-won could not quite comprehend how or why a god would do such things in hopes of a reward. However, once he accepted it as this world’s common sense, he no longer lingered on the matter.
Perhaps the gods they were talking about referred to a mutant human being with abnormal powers. What Son Jae-won really wanted to know was what his father was doing and what his father was trying to show him.
‘I’m certain that I’m here because of father. He must want to show me something. But what the hell is he thinking?’ Son Jae-won had already assumed that his father was an existence beyond what he previously assumed. Perhaps the existence of the ‘god’ that the people here talked about was his father, or someone related to him. So, Son Jae-won tried to learn about the gods through Ghel and his family.
“No. That’s disrespectful. The existence of a god is a sacred thing that should not be put into words recklessly. If I try to explain god’s existence with human words, I will not gather faith, and god will punish me.” Ghel forcibly covered Son Jae-won’s mouth and trembled in fear as if a thunderbolt might fall from the sky at any moment.
‘How crappy are the gods of this world that all human beings react like this?’ Talking about gods seemed to be taboo, so in the end, Son Jae-won had no choice but to wait for the day of sacrifice, when the god or gods were said to appear and collect their tribute.
On the day of offering, Son Jae-won heard a shocking statement. “What? The offering this time around is ‘Sil’?” Seeing Ghel’s family grieving, Jae-won asked what was going on and received a surprising answer. For a moment, Son Jae-won could only remember the ancestral rites that took place a long time ago, during a very uncivilized period of world history, which he had learned at school. He thought of human sacrifice.
This world seemed far crazier than Jae-won had first imagined.
