Chapter 56 - The Experimental Facility
12 min read ·
* * *
How could he possibly forget that number? He'd lived under it for so long, without so much as a name of his own. Hyeon-yul looked at the researchers. The moment he said he was a test subject, the entire atmosphere changed. Their protective suits concealed their faces, but he could sense the difference in their gazes.
“...A test subject?”
Someone finally spoke. Then came more stares, examining him intently as though he were a manufactured product.
“Yes. Apparently, they considered me a successful test subject.”
“...Successful?”
“How did you succeed?”
“But he just... looks like a human being.”
The murmurs began with one or two people, then gradually spread. He looked like a human. That particular observation inspired a torrent of comments.
“Young man. Is what you're saying... really true?”
“Why would I come all this way just to lie to you?”
Hyeon-yul raised an eyebrow. Judging from the atmosphere, none of the researchers assigned to him in the past seemed to be here. He rolled up his left sleeve.
REX-03333.
The identifying number was still branded clearly on his arm.
“If I survived from childhood all the way to adulthood, surely that counts as living a fairly long time?”
“W-would you give us a chance?”
“Yes, that's right. Give us a chance!”
“What sort of chance?”
Hyeon-yul asked the question without changing his expression.
“There must be some flaw in your body, somewhere. I... no, we could examine it and fix it for you.”
“We could refine you further and correct any instability.”
The researchers abandoned the neat ranks they'd so carefully maintained. Some were even edging toward him. He was glad he couldn't see their faces. The sight would probably have destroyed what little appetite he had left.
“I'll ask one last time. Does anyone here know me?”
Hyeon-yul repeated the question and waited. They were doing nothing but wasting his time with pointless chatter.
“If anyone who knew you were here, they'd come running immediately! You're a masterpiece!”
“Exactly! You're absolute perfection! With this, humanity can take another step forward!”
The researchers sounded almost reverent, showering him with praise. They called him remarkable, flawless, perfect. Every word fouled his ears.
“Is that so?”
Hyeon-yul adjusted his grip on the dagger. His gaze sharpened as it passed over them.
“W-what are you doing?”
“What do you think? If none of you knows me, I suppose you'll have to die.”
Hyeon-yul began walking toward them. His steps were light, but the atmosphere shifted. He looked ready to devour everything in his path.
“S-st-stop!”
He ignored them. Without any apparent effort, he seized one researcher by the protective suit and slit the material open with his dagger. A human face appeared beneath it.
“So that's what you look like. Strangely enough, you look almost human.”
Hyeon-yul spoke as though he were seeing a person for the first time. The man whose eyes met his began trembling uncontrollably. It felt as if a wild beast were standing directly before him. The mouth that had been so active moments earlier went rigid.
“I always wondered what was behind those suits you wore. What did you look like? What expressions were you making? I thought about it countless times and imagined all sorts of things.”
Perhaps these people had also been test subjects just like him. Perhaps they had done these things out of revenge, unwilling to suffer alone. Or perhaps they weren't human at all, but members of some entirely new species. His mind had once chased one absurd explanation after another, because imagining such things was the only way he could endure.
How could human beings inflict so many things on other human beings, things that no person should ever do? Yet the truth was simple. They were human.
“I had all kinds of thoughts running through my head. Strange, isn't it? Now only one remains.”
Hyeon-yul lowered his gaze and seized the man by the throat. The researcher couldn't even struggle. The killing intent bearing down on him was overwhelming.
“Monster or not, I'll kill every last one of you. Leave no survivors. Wipe you out completely. That's all I can think about.”
Hyeon-yul's eyes curved in a smile as the man's face turned a deep blue.
“If you want to call it revenge, then revenge it is. But I don't have some grand ambition to avenge everyone who died. I'm doing it for myself, the person who lost his memories and even his original name because of you. It's rather irritating, you see.”
“W-wait a moment! Don't get so worked up. This is a time to think rationally.”
“I'm only going to kill those involved in this business. I have no intention of touching your families or anyone else. How much more rational could I possibly be?”
He could go much further, but he had chosen not to. He could make them suffer far more, yet he had no intention of crossing that line. He was offering them relatively painless deaths. What could be more reasonable?
“Aren't you the ones behaving irrationally right now?”
Hyeon-yul turned his gaze to the others, who recoiled in horror.
“This is... a great leap forward that could transform humanity!”
“Yes! A leap forward!”
“If you wanted to take that leap so badly, why didn't you experiment on yourselves?”
Hyeon-yul sneered and tightened his fingers around the man's neck.
“Did I ever once tell you I cared about this supposed progress? Did any of the people you killed, any of the people you carved apart, ever say they wanted to become part of that great leap?”
“...Ghk.”
“Just what are you trying to justify? Something noble? You and I are nothing but murderers.”
Hyeon-yul made no excuses. The idea of being lumped together with them was revolting, but it didn't change the fact that he was a killer.
“...Young man. Do you even understand the nobility of this work? Do you know how the empire became an empire?”
A voice came from farther back. The speaker sounded brave enough, but he was still just a coward shaking inside his protective suit.
“I'm not interested.”
Why should Hyeon-yul listen to lofty speeches about the empire? The Poison King, the Red Witch, and now these researchers kept bringing it up. He was sick of it.
“The empire created the powers we now take for granted.”
“Is that so?”
The claim might have horrified anyone else, yet Hyeon-yul barely reacted. The empire had created their powers. What difference would knowing that make to him?
“How many sacrifices do you think it took before everyone could possess those powers? How could you call something of such value ignoble?”
Hyeon-yul laughed. He tightened his grip, and a sharp crack came from the man's neck. The body went limp.
‘Once their necks are broken, they can't say a thing.’
He tossed the corpse aside and stepped forward.
“What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?”
He couldn't begin to understand their questions. He appeared in front of the man who'd spoken and stabbed him through the chest. Blood sprayed, but his movements looked as natural as breathing.
“Why are you the one asking that question? I truly don't understand.”
“...The empire trampled other nations with that power.”
The man's ragged breathing fogged the inside of his visor.
“So because the empire did those things, you think that gives you permission to do the same. Is that what you're telling me?”
“You... must become a blade aimed at the empire.”
“I don't care about that nonsense. Let me answer in terms you can understand. Since you did those things, I'll do them to you.”
Hyeon-yul smiled. Dark energy coiled around the dagger in his other hand, sinister even to look at. Yet the researcher stared at it with awe.
“W-with that power, you could reach the very heart of the empire.”
To the man, the last sight of his life was unbearably beautiful, like black flames that could burn everything away.
“...You must set everything right again.”
Hyeon-yul offered no answer. He swung his arm in a broad arc. A thick swath of darkness sliced sideways through the air, and countless necks were severed at once. Blood shot upward and fell like rain.
Without so much as blinking, Hyeon-yul smiled.
“You haven't changed a bit. Not back then, and not now.”
The researchers seemed incapable of recognizing that test subjects were people. They simply used any means necessary to obtain what they wanted. That was why those he had cut down were villains.
Hyeon-yul looked at the bloodstained test subjects. What difference was there between them and him? His body had been ruined by drugs, and he couldn't survive even a single day without medication. Were they the same?
After using darkness to remove the blood from himself, he took out his phone.
“Doctor.”
<Did you... find it?>
“No. It isn't here either. But I found two people. I'm bringing them home.”
<Hyeon-yul.>
“Later. I'd like to talk about it later.”
<All right. Come back quickly.>
He ended the call and looked at the two test subjects. Even Jeongmin might not be able to save them.
Hyeon-yul himself had simply been swimming through the ocean until he happened upon a lighthouse. Some stroke of fortune, a whim of the gods or something like it, had allowed him to survive. These people kept calling him complete and perfect, but how was he truly different from the two before him?
“If you can't endure it, don't force yourselves to hold on.”
Hyeon-yul said the words as he wrapped them in shadow.
“There's no hope simply because you manage to stay alive.”
To them, he was the future they desperately imagined. Perhaps he was a fantasy they clung to because they didn't know what awaited them if they endured the pain long enough.
“I've lived through it. The world out here isn't much better than the place you came from.”
He looked at the laboratory he had swallowed in darkness.
“But if you still want to live, endure a little longer. There may yet come a moment when you can feel happy.”
He slowly raised his gaze and surveyed the experimental facility. He needed to find out what information had been kept here. He approached a computer, which required physical keys. His darkness searched the bodies until it found them. There was a first key, a second, then a third. Only after inserting all three did the machine begin to work.
An immense quantity of information filled the computer. Hyeon-yul scanned the data. For the moment, what he wanted to know was the purpose of the experiments. The rest could wait. His gaze stopped at one name among the many reports: Choi Ara. His eyes moved slowly as he read. What had the research been intended to accomplish? He soon found the answer.
‘Ah. They were experimenting to save a child.’
Asan wasn't foolish enough to believe that the dead could simply be brought back to life. Hyeon-yul himself had been subjected to similar experiments, so the revelation wasn't especially surprising. Still, why had Asan gone to such lengths? It was hard to understand.
‘...So did the empire kill that child?’
Children weren't supposed to be killed. He knew that much. Whatever else he thought about the matter, it made him faintly uncomfortable. Why had that child needed to die?
* * *
“Doctor.”
Hyeon-yul returned to Jeongmin's house and handed over the materials he'd recovered from the experimental facility. The information would surely be useful to him.
“Here you are.”
As he passed the documents across, Hyeon-yul looked at Jeongmin and wondered briefly whether he himself would behave like Asan if the doctor died. He immediately rejected the thought. The dead couldn't be brought back.
‘I hope the doctor doesn't die.’
Whatever else happened, that was what he wanted. He hoped Jeongmin would live longer than him, even after Hyeon-yul himself was gone.
“What's wrong?”
“Nothing.”
Hyeon-yul shifted his gaze to the two test subjects. They would probably die. Every test subject he'd brought here before had died. He knew he would remain the only survivor and suspected that would never change.
Jeongmin suddenly looked apologetic. Hyeon-yul always had trouble understanding that expression.
“You know that whatever happens to those two, it won't be your fault, right?”
The doctor said something like that every time Hyeon-yul brought a test subject home.
“I'm not expecting anything. Truthfully, I don't know how to feel whether they live or die. You're the one who shouldn't torture yourself over this.”
“I suppose I have to get used to it.”
Jeongmin adjusted his glasses and smiled gently.
“You say that every time, but you never seem to get used to it.”
“It's just... difficult.”
Jeongmin touched the corner of his eye. Every time he failed to save someone, the knowledge lodged like a thorn in his chest. He never became accustomed to it. When would he?
“Sometimes I find it strange.”
“What do you find strange?”
“How was I able to save you? I wonder about that every time this happens.”
“That's true. I'm curious myself.”
Hyeon-yul had been in terrible condition back then, his entire body on the verge of falling apart. He'd reached out to Jeongmin for help.
“Listen, Hyeon-yul.”
“Yes?”
“Do you still remember nothing about your past?”
Shock therapy was an absurd idea, but some people did recover lost memories after a traumatic experience. It was never a method anyone should deliberately attempt. Nevertheless, Hyeon-yul had visited an experimental facility today, and what could have been more traumatic for him than that place?
“No. I still can't remember. All I have are memories I never want to recall, memories I wish I could erase. But those are the ones that refuse to disappear.”
His gaze deepened without ever catching fire. He was like a log whose flames had long since burned out.
“I want to know who I am. But sometimes I wonder what good it would do to find out now. I can never become the person those people remember.”
Jeongmin had no answer to those matter-of-fact words. He knew better than anyone what kind of life Hyeon-yul had endured.
“Even so, I hope you never give up hope.”
“I won't.”
“Good. Go on home and get some sleep.”
“Have pleasant dreams, Doctor.”
Hyeon-yul bowed his head and vanished. Jeongmin watched him go and released a long breath. Seo Hyeon-yul wasn't his real name. It was a name that he and Hyeon-yul had created together. He hoped that one day the young man would recover the name he'd been born with.
“Oh, Hyeon-yul.”
Hyeon-yul's voice suddenly sounded beside him. It might have startled someone else, but Jeongmin didn't even flinch.
“Yes?”
“You're moving tomorrow, right?”
“Yes. I'm moving tomorrow.”
“All right. Keep in touch.”
“I will. Good night.”
Jeongmin waved toward the place where Hyeon-yul had disappeared, his gaze lingering there.