Chapter 28: The Sin of Being Born

Thud—

“Cough—! Hack, ngh….”

“f*ck, you’re disgusting….”

For some reason, Park Suchang abruptly threw away the hand choking my throat.

The instant my fading consciousness began returning, air rushed into my lungs so sharply it almost frightened me.

Saliva pooled endlessly in my mouth and spilled down my lips as though I had swallowed an entire basket of sour lemons whole.

Clutching my gradually swelling throat, I felt the undeniable proof that I was still alive.

I tried not to cry, but tears streamed down relentlessly like a broken faucet.

The salty trail running along my chin only deepened the misery.

“You should’ve just died instead.”

“…….”

“If I were you, I would’ve killed myself long ago rather than live like that. I’d have been too ashamed to keep breathing.”

Park Suchang rambled on with sentences whose meaning I couldn’t even understand.

Then, bringing along a pale-faced Choi Siram, he busied himself rescuing the remaining hostages.

“Hngh, ugh….”

Unfortunately, it seemed I wasn’t included within the range of Park Suchang’s mercy.

The way he gently comforted crying children while leading them toward the exits looked completely different from the man who had nearly strangled me moments earlier.

Ping— Thud—

Dark bloody bursts exploded throughout the area.

Had the sharp screams not followed immediately after, I might have mistaken this place for some sort of cocktail party.

But tragically, this was no cocktail hall.

Which meant the scene unfolding before me could only be terrorists dying.

“Aaaagh—!”

Each time Kwon Yiyul casually flicked his fingers, the terrorists desperately trying to escape were reduced to slaughterhouse meat in an instant.

Large men, young boys who still looked adolescent—it made no difference.

The hostages, more horrified than during the actual shooting itself, had long since fainted.

Meanwhile, Kim Seokhwan continuously moved between the inside and outside of the department store, transporting the civilians Park Suchang had gathered.

“Ugh, let go. Let go of me….”

“I only kept you alive this long because I thought your nerve was impressive. Turns out you’re nothing special.”

The man begging pitifully had a face that looked like torn rags.

Kwon Yiyul had intentionally avoided killing him, instead leaving him alive just long enough to drown in terror.

“f*ck, it’s not like we wanted this either! Do you know how f*cking hard it is just to survive?! If we didn’t do things like this, our families and relatives would all starve to death! What the hell were we supposed to do otherwise?!”

“Ha. What nonsense.”

Kwon Yiyul sneered at the sobbing man crushed beneath his shoe and slowly applied more pressure with his leg.

Leaving only enough space for him to barely breathe, the man writhed helplessly beneath the collapsed concrete.

“Then who told you to be born that way?”

“…….”

“And if you want to be angry, blame society. Blame the government. Why are you taking innocent civilians hostage and pulling this pathetic hostage act instead, idiots?”

“…Ugh, ack!”

“Seriously, every sentence out of your mouth sounds so stupid I can’t even enjoy talking to you.”

Kwon Yiyul grabbed the back of the man’s head and hauled him upright mercilessly as he twisted desperately for air between the chunks of concrete.

Through the gap in his mask, the man’s trembling eyes were visible.

He probably already understood what fate awaited him.

“P-Please spare me! Y-You’re with these people, right? Then please, say something for me! Beg him to spare me just this once, please!”

Desperate to postpone the death looming before him, the man frantically searched around before spotting me sitting alone nearby.

Perhaps he had overheard my conversation with Park Suchang earlier, because he looked at me as though I were some final lifeline from a fairy tale.

The lingering pain from Park Suchang’s violence hadn’t even faded yet, and now a criminal from the same district as me was begging for salvation at death’s doorstep.

My insides twisted violently.

“Yoon-ah, what? Do you pity him because he’s from the same place as you? Or are you seriously thinking of begging for him instead?”

“…Of course not. Absolutely not.”

“N-No….”

I shook my head.

Despair flooded the man’s face instantly.

It wasn’t as though I’d only witnessed people getting hurt or dying once or twice before.

So why was today especially unbearable?

Once his final hope betrayed him, the man seemed to lose all strength entirely, crying hopelessly as though there was nowhere left to escape.

Sympathy.

The sense of debt I felt toward someone from the same district.

The sudden flood of emotions made it impossible to think straight.

It felt as though every trigger inside me was being violently pulled.

Kwon Yiyul stopped tormenting the man and instead observed my reaction carefully.

His reptilian pupils, split vertically like a predator’s, pierced directly through the thoughts I had barely managed to hide.

“I think being born itself is a sin.”

“…Hngh, sob….”

“That’s just how human life works. Poverty is a sin if you treat it as one, and ignorance is a sin too. Even if someone commits crimes because life is unbearably difficult, that doesn’t become a perfect excuse.”

“…….”

“So if you want to resent something, resent yourself to death. I’ll kill the rest of your pathetic leftovers too, so you won’t be lonely on your way out.”

Kwon Yiyul sliced a finger through the air.

The man’s head exploded like a fountain, creating another pool of blood.

Far more people had died during the gunfire earlier, yet somehow the blood spreading around this man seemed even larger.

Even from this distance, blood from his body flowed across the floor until it reached my fingertips.

Just before touching me, the thin stream of blood split into five smaller lines, creating the illusion that the man was still reaching out to me for help even after death.

I stared silently at the blood shaped like five fingers before my body suddenly convulsed.

“Ugh, ngh….”

‘I think being born itself is a sin.’

Kwon Yiyul’s voice refused to leave my head.

The bloodshot eyes of the dead man stared at me from his twisted neck.

An unbearable guilt settled over my shoulders like blocks of lead.

“Ahhh… ah….”

‘Poverty is a sin if you treat it as one, and ignorance is a sin too.’

Suddenly, the dead man’s face overlapped with Yoon Heesung’s.

Of course it did.

They both had the same deep reddish-brown eyes.

The dead man’s cold stare twisted as though condemning me.

Yoon Heesung, who had died cold upon the battlefield, returned and clung to my feet, whispering into my ear.

It’s your fault, coward.

Hypocrite. Loser.

What makes you any different from them?

You kept running away because you were afraid of suffering, afraid of losing something.

“No, no….”

At some point, the corpse had crawled beside me and latched onto my pant leg.

I knew it was only a hallucination, yet instinct violently rejected reason.

Yoon Heesung’s whisper, once so faint, grew louder and louder.

Like blaring music, screams echoed endlessly.

Begging voices.

And sometimes, Yoon Heesung himself pleading with me for help.

“No, no, no!”

The entire world turned into a sea of blood.

The tiny universe inside me collapsed.

‘Humans are all malicious by nature. The only difference is whether that malice is directed toward me or toward someone else.’

Who was it?

Who had once said those words to me?

As my consciousness flickered dimly, I desperately searched for the owner of that voice.

Too many things had happened to me in too short a time.

If I remembered someone’s voice this clearly, then surely it must have been someone I had shared meaningful moments with.

Who was it?

Who possessed such a gentle voice?

“At this point, it’d honestly be better to just gather them all together and burn them alive.”

While I trembled violently with my head in my hands, Kwon Yiyul looked at me with that same radiant smile and asked,

“You think so too, don’t you, Yoon-ah?”

The corpses of refugees from my homeland were scattered all around us.

Even if I didn’t personally know them, they were still people I might have crossed paths with someday.

‘Being born is a sin….’

I already knew this incident would worsen people’s perceptions and prejudice against refugees even more.

I could already imagine how many refugees would suffer discrimination and corruption because of today.

Of course, that didn’t mean these people were innocent.

But where in the world did flawless people exist?

Who could possibly live without a single stain?

“No….”

No matter how I thought about it, this was wrong.

Being born could not be a sin.

Just as people cannot choose their fate, they cannot choose their birth either.

Just as perfect people do not exist, no one chooses their own origins or birthplace.

No one.

Which meant Kwon Yiyul’s premise itself was fundamentally wrong.

No one—not even a god who created the world—had the right to tell people who spent their entire lives enduring discrimination that being born was their sin.

If you were not the one who suffered through it, then those words should never leave your mouth so carelessly.

“No, no….”

Like a broken cassette tape, I repeated the same words over and over until my consciousness finally snapped.