NOVEL NEXT Chapter 1 - No, It Was a New Beginning
Chapter 1 – No, It Was a New Beginning.
Episode 1.
On the rooftop of an abandoned six-story building. Youngmin woke up from a light sleep.
His head was foggy and his nose stung. The result of sleeping exposed to cold wind and chill.
His body felt sluggish from the drop in temperature. Youngmin instinctively felt uncomfortable about not being in 100% physical condition.
The discomfort was brief; as soon as he noticed the scenery below the rooftop, his mood began to improve.
His brain, gradually awakening from sleep, clearly recognized the situation, and the adrenaline and endorphins released in response to visual stimuli began to awaken his sluggish body.
In the middle of a bustling downtown area where roads spread like spider webs.
But ‘bustling’ no longer existed.
Street lights and trees broken here and there. Buildings rarely lacked scorch marks from fires.
That wasn’t all. The central road had been decorated with blood, its long body adorned in beautiful crimson instead of the usual gray.
‘The color is still red.’
Blood turns dark brown as time passes.
It seems the infected had a feeding frenzy there last night.
He pulled out a cigarette from a half-empty pack and lit it with a lighter that was almost out of gas.
Chik, chiiik. Whooo…
Looking at an infected person wandering aimlessly in search of prey while dragging its intestines, Youngmin thought.
‘The world has become such a nice place to live.’
Some might say the world has ended.
[Planet, Earth. Purpose Change Day 21.]
For him, who had always been a misfit in society, this was truly a better world.
He inhaled the cigarette until the filter was about to burn up, then tossed the butt over the rooftop.
A small transgression he would never have committed before.
The ember in the cigarette butt fell on the head of an infected wandering below, burning a few strands of long hair before dying out.
‘Grrrr…!’
Long hair. Youngmin suddenly shifted his gaze to the lower body. He could see the heavily swollen waistband.
The face of the infected looking up at the rooftop after being hit by the spark was quite pretty. Pretty enough to arouse desire even in his dulled morning state.
Tsssk!
He bit off a piece of his rough, chapped lips and licked the blood that seeped out.
As the taste of blood filled his mouth, his dulled senses became increasingly clear.
Youngmin aimed at the infected with his fingers shaped like a gun and playfully shouted.
‘Bang.’
The face that had maintained its beauty even after infection turned to mush.
He had committed an act equivalent to murder, but it didn’t matter.
Because the world had ended.
In a world where law has disappeared, murder is not a crime.
In this world, criminal acts are merely acts.
A world where the unnecessary modifiers that had constrained him lost their meaning.
As he walked vertically down the exterior wall of the building, Youngmin repeated to himself once more.
‘What a wonderful world.’
The world that had been only terrible transformed into a beautiful and happy living space a few days ago.
That day’s events replayed in Youngmin’s mind.
***
‘Believe in God! Then we can be saved!’
Listening to the blindly dogmatic sermon lacking both logic and persuasiveness, typical of a small church in a rural town.
As a child, Youngmin would often wonder:
How many humans has God killed?
When he asked such questions, the pastor’s answer was simple.
‘You are possessed by Satan’
Under the implicit protection of his devoutly Christian parents, the pastor beat Youngmin mercilessly, like a dog on the hottest days of summer.
‘Demon, be gone! Holy Spirit, come upon this sinful being!’
For an ordinary child, this would have become a nightmare remembered for a lifetime.
Perhaps it would have settled as trauma, affecting the child’s personality development and becoming a lifelong wound.
But Youngmin felt nothing at all.
From the very first frame of his brain’s memory film.
Because he had always thought of himself as someone who didn’t belong in this world.
‘Kyaaaaaah!!!’
A high-pitched scream full of rage. Following the slapping sound, Youngmin felt a burning sensation on his cheek as if hot metal had been pressed against it.
‘Again! Again! I told you not to do that!’
Youngmin was always a head taller than children his age, and when he was young, he couldn’t control his impulses and would often resort to violence.
On days when calls came from kindergarten or school, his mother would abuse him.
Was it returning violence with violence?
He understood. By his parents’ standards, he was too terrible a child to discipline with love.
‘You pest! Oh, God! Why did you let such a demon come into the world through my womb…!’
Curses that no mother should utter.
But young Youngmin, instead of being hurt, thought to himself:
‘I’m not a pest but a hunting hawk. A fierce warrior and a cold-blooded leader!’
In a book Youngmin had read, ‘hunting hawk’ was a nickname for people like him.
It was his long-standing habit to drift into idle thoughts when receiving his parents’ verbal abuse and negative emotions.
As more time passed, he reached an age where he could think philosophically about ‘what is life.’
For Youngmin, life was not particularly happy.
A life without family or friends, receiving only hatred.
Times of restraint and patience forced upon him, without fulfillment or satisfaction.
That’s why, as Youngmin approached elementary school graduation, he would occasionally think:
‘Should I stop holding back?’
He wanted to see.
He was curious about what scene would unfold if he stabbed the pen in his hand into the neck of his desk mate who looked at him with contempt.
Whether I go to prison or not, my life will inevitably be unhappy.
Then shouldn’t I commit everything I’ve wanted to do and then go to prison?
There was only one reason he didn’t.
‘How was school today, my puppy?’
Grandmother.
The only one who loved and understood Youngmin, the only family member in the world.
Grandmother was the only person who didn’t condemn Youngmin’s uniqueness as a mental illness.
‘Youngmin. Do you want to kill something today too?’
‘I want to hunt.’
‘But people don’t like it when you kill just anything. So let’s make one promise with grandma.’
Grandmother taught Youngmin what he needed to follow to live as part of this world.
‘If you do bad things, the police officers will take you away and say, You rascal!’
Rule 1. Do not commit criminal acts unless there are grounds for extenuating circumstances.
‘You shouldn’t cause friction with your neighbors.’
Rule 2. Do not treat humans as objects for satisfying desires without justifiable reason.
‘If you’re curious or don’t understand something, ask this grandma.’
Rule 3. When making decisions, ask for others’ opinions and include them in your basis for judgment.
Just as even a fierce dog wags its tail to the owner who feeds it.
The advice from his grandmother, who uniquely made him feel affection, was deeply imprinted in Youngmin’s mind.
Even after his parents died in a mysterious accident and he no longer lived with his grandmother after turning 20.
To the extent that it remained as three rules he must follow, becoming the behavioral principle that suppressed his impulses.
As an adult, Youngmin didn’t get a job or work like others.
‘If I experience workplace stress, I’ll definitely explode.’
Instead, he opened an internet café with his parents’ death insurance money.
It was a simple judgment that he wouldn’t have stress if he acted as the owner.
Gwangmyeong City on the outskirts of the metropolitan area.
A shabby mixed-use commercial building with a motel at the top and an adult store with red windows on the middle floor. The third floor.
However, Youngmin didn’t know that self-employment stress was no less than employee stress.
‘Customer. Please smoke in the smoking room.’
A middle-aged man with an appearance truly fitting the onomatopoeia ‘keum-cheok keum-cheok’ (heavy footsteps).
A troublesome customer whom Youngmin had nicknamed ‘pig bastard,’ who had been occupying a seat for three days without leaving, taking care of all his basic needs there.
Despite the stacks of cup noodle containers and rice bowls starting to emit the stench of food waste, the pig bastard seemed unbothered as he puffed on his cigarette.
Perhaps it was the karma of setting up an internet café in a cheap commercial building because the death insurance money wasn’t enough.
His internet café had an unusually high number of troublemakers.
Youngmin laughed softly as he looked at the pig bastard.
A shabby building with a mentally ill owner attracts customers with trash personalities.
There couldn’t be a more appropriate use of the phrase ‘birds of a feather flock together.’
‘Should I kill him?’
The wooden skewer from the hot bar that the pig bastard had eaten and discarded caught his eye.
What kind of fluid would a human eyeball spurt when punctured?
Clear vitreous humor? Red blood?
Just as he thought this was a perfect opportunity to resolve something he had been curious about for a long time.
Youngmin caught his right hand that had been slowly extending.
Instead of bothering to stop the little pig from smoking, he left the PC room.
‘I got too excited. Let me go smoke a cigarette.’
Though it was a shabby shopping complex, the area in front of the building was a non-smoking zone.
It was a neighborhood where everyone ignored the rules and smoked on the street, but Youngmin walked to a smoking area ten minutes away.
Rule 1. Do not commit criminal acts unless there are grounds for extenuating circumstances.
Strict law-abiding was a kind of compulsion.
To prevent a needle thief from becoming a cattle thief.
But today especially, it was irritating.
Even walking down the street was an ascetic practice that tested Youngmin’s limits of patience.
A cheerful kindergartener bumps into his leg and runs away.
A noticeably beautiful woman brushes past him, leaving a sweet perfume scent.
Impulses that surge up suddenly and the rules that suppress them.
Normally, these would have been minor stimuli he could easily ignore, but today they were particularly hard to endure.
Youngmin suddenly thought.
‘How long can I hold out?’
A life of nothing but restraint and patience, like a nun confined to a convent.
A bland life detached from freedom, liberation, and pleasure.
Youngmin had a premonition.
Though he was binding his impulses with his grandmother’s rules, someday the thread of patience would surely break.
Ignoring the rules and not thinking about the future.
He would fully indulge in his exploding impulses.
Therefore, life itself was like a time bomb for Youngmin.
Youngmin pondered once more.
How long could he hold out?
Not much longer.
But Youngmin didn’t know.
That his life of restraint and patience would end in a different way.
Bang!
Suddenly a gunshot rang out.
**** 【BANG!】 ****
[Notice to all living beings on Earth.]
[We hereby announce that as of the current time, Earth’s validity period has expired!]
[Your habitat, Earth, has been destroyed!]