Chapter 154. Family, and Family (3)
The moment those words left Victoria’s mouth, her chest suddenly split open.
Blood burst out.
At the same time, her body began rotting in several places, rapidly turning into a corpse.
Yukgap screamed in horror.
“Aaaaaagh!”
The decaying Victoria slowly raised her head.
Her skeletal jaw moved as she shouted at Yukgap with resentment filling every word.
“No.”
“I died because of you!”
“Because you were fooled by Alpha’s little play and started believing you were a real person!”
Yukgap burst into tears like a child and apologized over and over.
“I’m sorry!”
“I’m sorry!”
Alpha clutched her stomach on the monitor and laughed at him.
[Hahahaha!]
[Did you really think a weapon could become a real person?]
[My sixth friend is so innocent.]
As if following her lead, Archons began gathering around him.
Every one of them looked at Yukgap with contempt and accusation.
Then their voices crashed over him like a wave.
“That’s impossible.”
“Everything about you was fake from the beginning.”
“Your hands have been soaked in blood all this time.”
“And yet you dreamed of ordinary happiness?”
“Don’t you think that’s rather contradictory?”
“You should have simply remained a weapon.”
“That would have been better for everyone.”
“Indeed.”
“Can you imagine how shocked the original’s family must have been when they met you?”
“You left them with a wound they can never erase.”
“Hahahaha!”
“Idiot!”
“You absolute idiot!”
“Look at all the people suffering because of the choices you made.”
“From beginning to end, you did nothing but cause trouble while chasing fake memories.”
Their murmurs tore into Yukgap’s mind and body like blades.
Surrounded by the Archons, Yukgap collapsed to the floor.
“Th-That’s...”
He wanted to defend himself.
But no words came.
More precisely, he did not know what he could possibly say.
Because he could not deny that everything they were saying was true.
“Murderer, murderer, murderer, murderer, murderer!”
“Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake!”
The failed test subjects inside the flasks opened their mouths and shouted in Yukgap’s own voice.
Murderer.
Fake.
Those words hammered endlessly inside his skull.
The tightening chorus made it difficult even to breathe.
“So you’ve been using my face all this time because you wanted to take my place?”
Someone calmly walked toward him from the center of it all.
The voice was familiar.
So was the face.
“Y-You...!”
A man with Yukgap’s exact face.
Speaking in Yukgap’s exact voice.
But his eyes were filled with nothing but contempt.
Yukgap recognized him immediately.
“I’m your original.”
“The real Kim Changi.”
As though applauding Yukgap for figuring it out, the man readily gave his name.
That was Kim Changi.
The real original.
Unlike Yukgap, the fake.
Simply standing before Kim Changi made Yukgap feel infinitely small and pathetic.
Kim Changi glared at him with disgust.
“You make me sick.”
“It wasn’t enough that you stole my face and memories and used them to kill people.”
“You even shamelessly went to my family and pretended to be me!”
“I-I’m sorry!”
“I’m really sorry!”
Yukgap apologized again and again.
But Changi remained cold.
“Apologizing doesn’t erase your sins.”
“It doesn’t undo the murders you committed while wearing my face.”
“And you can’t become me and fill the empty place I left in my family.”
Then Changi’s form and the entire surrounding landscape began twisting like clay.
Everything melted together.
Before long, it became an enormous mouth looming over Yukgap.
The mouth spoke in everyone’s voices.
Or perhaps in the voice of no one at all.
“No. 6.”
“Your very existence is a sin.”
The words pierced straight through Yukgap’s mind.
He collapsed and let out a weak, broken cry.
“Aaaaah... Aaaaaah...”
He could not deny it.
Those words were true.
He was nothing but a sinner.
A fake who had dared covet the place of the real one.
The enormous mouth laughed at him with hatred.
“So hurry up and fall into hell.”
“Though I wonder if a fake like you even has a soul capable of going there.”
“Aaaaaaaaaagh!”
Yukgap screamed and shot upright.
An unfamiliar hospital room filled his vision.
He panted heavily and looked around.
Apparently, everything until now had been a nightmare.
“Yukgap!”
“Are you awake?”
Victoria hurriedly checked on him.
Yukgap stared blankly at her face before cautiously asking,
“Victoria?”
“Where are we?”
“The Herrington Convent.”
“Your gunshot wound wouldn’t heal, so we brought you here.”
Only then did Yukgap begin piecing together his memories.
He had thrown himself in front of No. 2’s bullet to protect Victoria.
Remembering that, he looked over his own body.
“Wait.”
“What happened to me?”
“If I get hit by one of No. 2’s bullets, regeneration should be impossible.”
“I heard about that from No. 5.”
“So we cultivated genetic material from someone with genes similar to yours and used it to restore your regenerative ability.”
“Someone with genes similar to mine?”
“Does someone like that even exist?”
“...”
He was a chimera biological weapon.
There should not have been anyone with genetic information similar enough to his.
Then what had they used to treat him?
For some reason, Victoria suddenly fell silent.
Instead, two familiar figures calmly approached his bedside.
“Y-You two...”
They were the parents he had met in Jeongseon.
The father.
The mother.
Both were looking at him with concern.
Only then did Yukgap realize what Victoria had meant by similar genetic material.
“I’m sorry, Yukgap.”
Victoria apologized sadly.
“But there was no other way to save you.”
Apparently, while he was unconscious, Victoria had contacted the parents in Jeongseon and used their genetic material to treat him.
“Excuse me, young alchemist.”
“Could you give us a little privacy?”
“There’s something we really need to say.”
The old couple cautiously asked Victoria.
Understanding their intention, Victoria nodded.
“Of course.”
She quietly left the hospital room.
Now only Yukgap and the elderly couple remained.
What was he supposed to say?
An awkward silence settled between them.
Eventually, Yukgap slowly opened his mouth.
“I’m sorry.”
“Victoria may have already told you, but... I’m not your son.”
Every word became harder to say.
Simply being in front of them made him feel guilty.
But he had to tell them.
He could not give them false hope.
He did not even have the right to do that.
“Your son, Kim Changi... is already dead.”
“I’m... something created using your son’s biological information...”
“We already knew you weren’t our son.”
His father spoke first, wearing a gentle smile.
Yukgap froze.
“What?”
The elderly couple looked at him and carefully continued.
“We already knew Changi was dead.”
“We saw his body ourselves.”
“We’re his parents.”
“No one can fool a parent’s eyes.”
“We realized long ago that you weren’t the real Changi.”
Yukgap could only stare at them.
“Then why...?”
Why did you welcome me like that?
He had so many questions.
But the shock made it impossible to finish.
Even so, the couple understood what he meant.
“After Changi died, whenever we saw men around his age, we would sometimes imagine we were seeing him.”
“Turning into an alley.”
“Making kimchi.”
“Walking down the street.”
“We kept seeing traces of Changi everywhere.”
“Every single day, we wondered if our Changi might open the shop door and come home.”
“Maybe our son hadn’t really died.”
“Maybe he had just gone somewhere far away, and someday he would return.”
“Sometimes we would stop working and just stare at the door, waiting for it to open.”
Their voices were calm.
But beneath them was a grief so deep Yukgap could not even begin to imagine what they had lived through.
“We know it was foolish.”
“But that’s what parents are like.”
“People say that when a child dies, parents bury them in their hearts.”
“We couldn’t even do that.”
“If we truly buried Changi in our hearts...”
“It felt like we would be admitting that he was gone forever.”
His father’s voice trembled with longing.
Then his mother, her eyes red, gently took Yukgap’s hand.
Warmth naturally passed between them.
“Just once.”
“We wanted to see our son one more time.”
“We wanted to feed him.”
“Pack him some kimchi.”
“Spend a little time together.”
“That was all.”
The elderly couple looked at Yukgap with endless affection.
“Then you came to us.”
“You, with our Changi’s face and memories.”
There was nothing in their eyes except pure love and longing.
Yukgap could not speak.
“We didn’t care that you weren’t the real Changi.”
“Just having you there made it feel like our Changi hadn’t completely disappeared.”
“That alone made us so happy...”
“We couldn’t bring ourselves to push you away.”
His father shouting that there was no way his son could have died.
His mother hugging him tightly and sobbing.
Those moments were still vivid in Yukgap’s mind.
“After you left, it felt like we had lost our son for a second time.”
“Every day was frightening and painful.”
“So even if it was only once more...”
“We wanted to see the person who had our son’s face.”
His mother’s cheeks were already wet with tears.
For just a moment, Yukgap felt jealous of his original.
If all this love had truly belonged to me...
If I had really been their son...
Then I could have accepted all of it without hesitation.
Overwhelmed by emotion, Yukgap lowered his head.
But no matter what else happened, he was not shameless enough to accept something meant for another person as his own.
“Thank you for saying that.”
“But I can’t become your son.”
“I was created in an Abraxas laboratory.”
“I’m... a weapon.”
