SRW | Chapter 01

“Kim Jaeyoung, hello.”

“Hello.”

“You haven’t eaten breakfast, have you? This was a buy-one-get-one deal, so I got two of these. Here’s one for you.”

“Thank you.”

What do you mean by ‘buy-one-get-one’? I paid for it, didn’t I? I took the sandwich and forced a smile at the guy who was grinning like he’d won the lottery. I then slumped down in the back seat. In my nineteen years of life, I never thought I’d become someone’s bread errand boy. How did I end up like this?

Not long ago, I was living a very happy life. The youngest son of a chaebol family, untouchable by teachers or police no matter what trouble I caused. Among these snot-nosed kids, it was only natural that I stood at the top of the pyramid. My grades were at the bottom of the school, but that didn’t matter anyway. Once we entered society, all those kids studying hard now would be my slaves. That was the reality and the future ahead, so I didn’t care about living recklessly. But…

‘Soon, the days of  darkness will come.’

Lately, my vision would occasionally go dark, and my heart would race. I closed my eyes to calm my churning stomach. Not long ago, my doctor diagnosed me with a panic disorder. My family was in an uproar. It got even worse when I refused to take the prescribed medication. If pills could solve it, I would’ve taken them already. No matter how much my grandfather raged, it was pointless. These symptoms wouldn’t go away until the root cause was gone.

“Uh, Eunsoo, we need to submit the career counseling plan…”

“…What?”

“The career counseling plan…”

“Ugh, tell me later.”

My limbs were numb, and I could barely breathe. What career counseling plan? I glared at the class president. He was stammering in front of me. When our eyes met, he turned pale and stepped back. The noisy class instantly fell silent. It was as if cold water had been poured over them. Soon, the students started glancing at me and whispering. ‘Poor class president…’, ‘That bully…’, ‘Look at that look in his eyes…’ Normally, I wouldn’t have cared, but it felt unfair because I was in pain right now. Why doesn’t anyone notice that I’m hurting?

“But why is Eunsoo so nice to Jaeyoung?”

“Right. He usually bullies him and calls him names.”

“Did he find out some weakness of his?”

A weakness? Hah, if this counts as a weakness, then sure. I stared at the back of Kim Jaeyoung’s head. He was sitting in the front row with wired earphones, diligently solving problems in his workbook. Then, I slumped onto my desk. Ah, knowing the future is truly a miserable thing. Why, after nineteen years of living without a care, did I have to experience the ‘First Awakening’? No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t understand.

A couple of months ago, I was riding my motorcycle on the outskirts of the city. Suddenly, I felt a lightning-like shock in my brain and tumbled into a bush. The bike was wrecked beyond repair, but aside from some minor bruises, I was perfectly fine. The police concluded that my body had been thrown into the bush before the bike hit the wall, saving my life. I didn’t say anything to the officer who kept looking back and forth between my crumpled helmet and my perfectly fine head. But the truth was, I had hit the wall with the bike and fallen. I kept quiet because I didn’t want my family to stop me from buying a new motorcycle. I survived. That’s what mattered.

The problem was that since that day, I started having strange dreams.

Dreams where the sun suddenly disappeared. A red moon. Monsters killing people. But when I woke up, I couldn’t tell if what I saw was real or just a dream. My whole body would tremble because of it.

In the dream, I was at school. When the monsters appeared, I pushed someone next to me and used the distraction to run to the gym. Since I was stronger and more athletic than the kids who only studied, I naturally took the lead. But after a while, it seemed like we wouldn’t last long without food, so I planned to move to the cafeteria. The plan was to distract the monsters and buy time to escape. That ‘distraction’ was a human sacrifice. Who would volunteer for what was essentially suicide? No one, of course. So I, along with a few kids who followed my lead, drove the ‘unnecessary’ people to their deaths to make the plan work.

In the cafeteria, the cafeteria lady and some students were hiding. My first thought upon seeing them was, ‘Great… more mouths to feed.’ The food was limited, and it wasn’t clear when help would arrive. My first cruel instinct was to cut down the number of mouths, by any means necessary. By that time, I and some other students awakened to ‘strange powers.’ It was like a superpower to fight the monsters. When I looked around, no one had awakened a stronger power than what I had.

From then on, I began what you might call ‘control.’ Those who didn’t obey my orders were starved, beaten, or killed. Killing people was only hard the first time. After that, it was as easy as squashing ants. At first, I didn’t think I was that inhumane even though I was a delinquent. But gradually, I felt the dream version of myself merging with my real self.

I got into a fight once at night. If the police hadn’t intervened, I might have killed him. Just like in the dream, I couldn’t control my impulses. It scared me. I tried to stay awake, keeping my eyes open, or playing games late into the night. But it happened every time without fail. At 1 A.M., I’d lose consciousness like a blown fuse. It felt like someone was forcing me to see the dream.

In the end, I died. Brutally, at the hands of a man named Cha Yuhyeok who came to save people. Cha Yuhyeok was righteous but merciless to trash like me. I was beaten to near death by the people I had enslaved and then thrown to the monsters. One of Cha Yuhyeok’s comrades fed me a strange drug as the monsters tore me apart. Because of that drug, I didn’t die for hours, even as my limbs were ripped off and my insides spilled out.

The cause of death was ultimately a heart attack.

‘Eunsoo! Sun Eunsoo! Sweetie! Snap out of it. Are you okay?’

That night, my family woke me up as I screamed in my sleep. I woke up hyperventilating. It took me a while to realize that it wasn’t the real me who had died, but the me in the dream.

I thought I wouldn’t dream anymore since I died, but now the dream showed me Cha Yuhyeok from an observer’s perspective. He was different from someone like me from the start. He was a righteous guy who had received the Brave Citizen Award five times for catching a pickpocket or saving a child who fell onto subway tracks. Even when the days of darkness came, he kept saving others. It was hard to save even himself. But as betrayals and hardships piled up, he eventually realized: “Not everyone is worth saving.”

He was a hero to good people but a devil to trash like me. He didn’t even have to try to become a leader. He was naturally revered as one as the group he led grew rapidly. The powerless people wanted a strong ruler. They say heroes are born in troubled times. Cha Yuhyeok was exactly that hero. Watching his life, I realized he was the ‘protagonist’ of this world.

But why am I being so nice to Kim Jaeyoung when he hasn’t even been mentioned until now?

Because after awakening, he became my subordinate. He followed my orders without question. Seeing him kill people with a smile made me wonder if he might be even crazier than me.

On the day I died, Kim Jaeyoung went to loot a nearby mart with some kids and arrived late at school. There, he found nothing left of me. Not even a body, just a necklace lying on the ground. As he stood staring at it, Cha Yuhyeok’s group captured him.

Cha Yuhyeok killed all those who had oppressed people under me, but he couldn’t kill Kim Jaeyoung. The reason was simple: ‘The weak and good people’ didn’t want Kim Jaeyoung to die.

But Cha Yuhyeok wasn’t entirely comfortable with letting Kim Jaeyoung live. He eventually decided to banish him from the group. Kim Jaeyoung knew it meant death, but he accepted it without protest. The people tearfully saw him off. The next day, a pile of corpses was found. They were the people who had bid farewell to Kim Jaeyoung. All of them had committed suicide. When Cha Yuhyeok realized Kim Jaeyoung was behind it, he flew into a rage.

Kim Jaeyoung went to my family and pleaded how brutally Cha Yuhyeok had killed ‘Sun Eunsoo.’ Wait, how close were we for him to do this? I didn’t understand Kim Jaeyoung’s actions. My family had originally been planning to join forces with the military to restore Seoul, but they mobilized all their resources to take revenge on Cha Yuhyeok for killing me.

‘Why are you going this far?!’

The one who opposed attacking Cha Yuhyeok was my grandfather. He was the only one in the family who didn’t trust Kim Jaeyoung and was hostile toward him. But he was just a powerless old man lying in a hospital bed.