By Zephyria 
There had been no calls or letters from his disappeared mother. Moreover, since his mother had run away to Seoul with a female cousin when he was young, contact with her family had long been severed. Judging by his father’s anger, it seemed that even the people close to them in the neighborhood had no idea where she was. She left no traces behind, nor had she given Kim Si-baek any hints.
He felt hopeless, but there was one single clue. On nights when his father didn’t return home because he was drunk, his mother would hold him and stroke his back, whispering.
〈I’m still sick of fish because I’m so tired of the smell of the sea and the fishy stench I smelled until I was sick of it long ago. I’m just so glad our sons love tonkatsu.〉
〈Where was that?〉
〈The southernmost part of our country.〉
When he asked his homeroom teacher at school where the southernmost part of the country was, he was told it was either Marado or Haenam. Since Marado required a boat, he pushed that back and decided to try Haenam first.
While his father was away, Kim Si-baek called the train station and the express bus terminal. There were no direct trains from Seoul to Haenam, but there were express buses. The problem was the travel time.
〈I’m going to see Mom. Can you handle more than five hours on a bus?〉
He had to persistently and calmly talk to his younger brother, who remained unresponsive, before he could finally make him understand.
〈Are you coming too, Hyung?〉
〈Yes.〉
At the word that he was coming along, his brother nodded without hesitation. Just in case, he put a diaper on his brother and snuck out of the house without his father knowing. For the bus fare, he used money he had slowly skimmed off whenever his father sent him to the neighborhood supermarket to buy alcohol.
During the trip to Haenam, his brother struggled immensely, but they barely managed to arrive without giving up along the way. Carrying his limp brother on his back, Kim Si-baek asked people for directions. His mother’s hometown was by the sea. He would have to go to the coast in Haenam to find her.
However, the small adventure to find his mother ended in futility. It was because people who saw two young children wandering the streets reported them to the police. Kim Si-baek and his brother were taken to a nearby police station, and his father arrived in a fury in the middle of the night.
His father threw a fit at the police station. Even for the time, when there was a strong tendency to dismiss child abuse as strict parental discipline, the police were clicking their tongues behind his back.
〈It would be better for them to be in an orphanage than to grow up under a parent like that.〉
The whispered comments of the police, which he happened to overhear, were a massive shock to Kim Si-baek. His father didn’t love him and didn’t even consider his brother a child, but he was still his father. He thought of it as the fence of a family. And yet, an environment as an orphan without a father was better?
Even after being dragged back to Seoul, Kim Si-baek was immersed in thought.
His brother was a child who couldn’t even go to kindergarten and stayed home all day, but his growth was evident. As his father noticed the features that resembled his own, the violence gradually began to shift toward the younger brother as well. It was likely rage at the truth that this dull, stupid brat was indeed his own child.
When he was home, he could at least take the hits instead, but he was constantly worried that his father might explode when his brother was alone. Consequently, Kim Si-baek made a firm decision. He would run away to an orphanage with his brother. Somewhere far, far away, where his father could not follow.
To do that, he needed money. Kim Si-baek saved money by taking out single bills one by one from the wallet his drunken father would toss aside.
That day was a lucky day.
He had tonkatsu for lunch, received workbooks from his homeroom teacher who told him to study hard, and the owner of a fried food shop, who knew the children’s situation, packed him some croquettes. Feeling the warmth of the croquettes, which kept the tonkatsu warm, he ran in one breath to the old house in the narrow alley.
How happy would he be? How deliciously would he eat? Swelling with anticipation, he opened the rusted door. His brother was nowhere to be seen. Instead, his father was in the yard, smiling broadly while counting a stack of cash.
〈Dad, where’s Si-woon?〉
His father, who would normally have slapped him for interrupting, answered in a surprisingly good mood.
〈You know your distant uncle? Kim Yeong-sik. That man is a eunuch, so he can’t have kids. He said he needed an adopted son, so I told him to take Si-woon. Even a useless, rice-eating parasite like that has some use, after all.〉
It was a name he had never heard before. He didn’t know a single one of his parents’ relatives.
A brother who suddenly vanished.
A stack of cash that suddenly appeared.
〈…….〉
An ominous premonition, similar to the morning his mother disappeared, stirred in his chest. When he pressed further for news of his brother, he was slapped in the face. The tonkatsu and croquettes in his arms grew cold.
Every time his father left the house, he desperately searched the home and rummaged through his father’s belongings. He struggled to find any trace of the distant uncle named Kim Yeong-sik, even lifting the floor linoleum. He finally managed to find a contact number in an old notebook hidden with dust under a wardrobe.
He called, but there was no connection. Kim Si-baek took out the money he had hidden to run away to the orphanage and headed to the address written in the notebook. The address was in Samcheok, Gangwon-do.
〈Kim Yeong-sik? I wonder… it’s been about seven years since we moved here, right?〉
At the address he had barely found by asking around, a strange family lived instead of Kim Yeong-sik. After hearing the situation, the homeowner helped him look for the whereabouts through a real estate agency. He learned that Kim Yeong-sik was a previous owner, but the phone number the agent had was the same as the one Kim Si-baek knew.
The homeowner forced some pocket money into his hand, telling him to take the Saemaeul train home, so the return journey was comfortable. However, his heart would not find peace. His father didn’t even know that his young son, who was only an elementary student, had gone to Samcheok alone. Kim Si-baek covered himself with a blanket and cried silently all night.
There was only one means left. To ask his father again. However, since it was obvious that if he pressed for answers, he would be slapped first and get no answer as always, he had to wait for a time when his father was in a good mood. For a while, Kim Si-baek became a “good son” and watched his father’s moods.
〈Si-baek! Si-baek! Something terrible happened!〉
One winter day, after he had fallen asleep from exhaustion while waiting after preparing the snacks his father liked. As soon as it dawned, a lady from the neighborhood urgently knocked on the door. The boy, who opened the creaking door in a half-asleep daze, heard the news of his father, who had not returned home.
The previous night, while stumbling up a narrow and steep hill in a drunken stupor, his father had tumbled down the stairs. And he froze to death.
The bundle of money that had made his father so gleeful was nowhere to be seen. The neighborhood residents, who had usually pitied him, chipped in to barely cover the funeral, but the funeral hall was utterly bleak. Far from Kim Yeong-sik, who had adopted his brother, no one came. The end of the father, who had reigned like a tyrant in the house, was this hollow.
The adults who saw him crying alone at the funeral comforted him, saying, “Even a child of such a degenerate father grieves,” but it wasn’t his father’s death that made the boy weep. The way to find his brother had vanished forever.
Kim Si-baek entered a small orphanage run by a cathedral quite far away. At the edge of society where children who had lost or been abandoned by their parents arrived, Kim Si-baek felt a sense of stability for the first time in his life. He gained older brothers, sisters, and younger siblings. They were children he could call a new family.
Pi Min-hyeong had been abandoned in front of the orphanage as a newborn, and Seo Gae-un arrived holding the hand of a grandmother with a bent back. A child who was discovered by police on the market floor was given a new name, Yang Eun-ho, taking the surname of the Mother Superior. Lee Han-gyeol entered after losing both parents and drifting between relatives’ houses.
They were precious siblings. Nevertheless, the memory of his ‘brother’ tormented him like a nail driven into his head. He missed Si-woon.
Meanwhile, among the orphanage’s sponsors, there was a philanthropist whose hobby was fencing. Thanks to that, the children of the orphanage occasionally visited the fencing center or tried it out. Kim Si-baek’s talent was discovered quickly.
The excited philanthropist provided generous support. He began training immediately and entered a middle school with a fencing club. Although it proceeded regardless of his own intentions, fencing was truly interesting.
However, even after stepping forward as a fencer, the memory of his brother remained engraved in Kim Si-baek’s core like a scar that would never dull or disappear. Even as his small body grew tall and lean, firm muscles attached, it remained an unchanging, old scar.
His coach, hearing his worries when he became particularly depressed on his brother’s birthday, gave him playful advice.
〈If you can’t find your brother, why don’t you just become famous? Then maybe your brother will recognize you.〉
〈How do I become famous?〉