Chapter 80. The Bird Trapped in the Egg (3)
“What? Why?”
Jeongheon asked in shock.
Victoria answered firmly,
“My mother used to say that alchemy exists to make people happy.”
“But no matter how much I think about it, helping with this would only create more unhappy people.”
“No way! Do you have any idea how much my wife and I suffered after losing Eunho?”
“Then let me ask you one thing.”
Victoria looked straight at him.
“Did your son really die in an accident?”
“What do you mean?”
Victoria asked bluntly,
“Did your son commit suicide?”
“S-Suicide...?”
Jeongheon’s voice trembled faintly.
He was clearly shaken.
Victoria continued calmly,
“I mean exactly what I said.”
“We did some investigating of our own.”
“And no matter how I look at it, your son’s situation was horrific.”
She began listing what Eunho had endured.
“He slept only four hours a day.”
“He had no real rest.”
“At only fifteen years old, he was forced to study advanced subjects that even adults struggle with and attend all kinds of academic competitions.”
“And after school, he had to spend the rest of his time at academies and lectures.”
“Th-That’s completely normal!”
Jeongheon immediately protested.
“If he didn’t start preparing now, he would fall behind by the time he applied to university!”
“Children these days all do this much.”
“We only did it because we loved our son!”
Victoria looked at him in disbelief.
“And I heard he barely had any friends at school.”
“You two constantly went there and caused scenes, so all his classmates started avoiding him.”
“They said he always walked around with his head down, looking depressed.”
“What use are friends?”
Jeongheon snapped.
“When you think about it, they’re all competitors!”
“We were only worried that our precious son might fall in with the wrong crowd!”
He did not seem to understand what he had done at all.
Victoria stared at him.
“Are you sure any of that was really for your son?”
Jeongheon answered as though the question itself were absurd.
“Of course it was.”
“Do you know how much we loved him?”
“Didn’t you see all the certificates covering his room?”
“Do you know how jealous other people were of us because of them?”
There was not the slightest trace of guilt in his expression.
He looked less like a grieving father and more like a child upset that someone had taken away a shining trophy.
Victoria felt nothing but disgust.
“You never loved your son.”
Her eyes hardened.
“The only people you loved were yourselves.”
“Your child was simply something you used for that.”
“What do you know?!”
Hyeona suddenly screamed.
“H-Honey!”
Jeongheon tried to stop her, startled.
But Hyeona would not listen.
“Do you know how much I suffered from the moment Eunho was born?!”
“I got him into difficult academies in Daechi-dong!”
“I sent him to an English kindergarten!”
“I spent so much money trying to get him into an SKY preparation class!”
Her voice grew shrill.
“If I gave birth to him and raised him, then as our child, shouldn’t he naturally repay us for all of that?!”
Hyeona screamed until her voice cracked.
Then she buried her face again and sobbed.
“Ugh... my money... my effort... my time...”
“I poured everything into him, and Eunho... Eunho...”
“What was so hard about it...?”
“Everyone else does it...”
“That’s why we made him do it too... sob...”
Victoria murmured bitterly,
“So I was right.”
“Your son really did kill himself.”
Deep down, she had hoped her guess would be wrong.
If Eunho had truly died in an unfortunate accident and his grieving parents were simply clinging to an impossible dream because they could not let him go, Victoria could have understood that.
Unfortunately, her suspicion had been exactly right.
“We know we went too far!”
Jeongheon suddenly raised his voice, realizing the situation was turning against them.
“That’s why we came to you!”
“We want to correct our mistakes!”
“We won’t make the same mistakes with the Eunho who is born again!”
“Give us another chance to start over!”
Victoria stared at him.
“And what exactly would you do differently?”
Jeongheon answered confidently,
“The more I think about it, the problem was that we started too late.”
“We only began when he was seven. That must be why Eunho couldn’t endure it.”
“But if Eunho is born again, we’ll start when he’s three.”
“We’ll let him adapt gradually from a younger age.”
“Then nothing like this will happen again!”
In other words, they intended to do exactly the same thing to the cloned child.
Only earlier.
Jeongheon rambled on about his plan before suddenly grabbing Victoria’s hand.
“Doctor, please!”
“Help our family start again!”
“Our cloned Eunho will never commit suicide.”
“No.”
His expression twisted with conviction.
“We’ll raise him so he never does.”
Victoria violently shook off his hand.
Then she glared at him with open contempt.
“Sorry, but I don’t work with murderers.”
“Murderers?”
