By Zephyria 
〈Is there any reason to be wavered?〉
「Is he not your friend and the biological father of young Yoo?」
〈…….〉
「Goodness, our Teacher Yeo-song’s nosiness is as wide as the Han River.」
Listening to Mae-gu’s cynical sneer, Jeil Heon bit his lower lip firmly. There were many reasons to kill the Smiling Man. He killed Nam Soon-ho. He had slaughtered countless lives. Yoo Jiha was in danger. He was an Aberration. However, there were also reasons why he could not kill the Smiling Man. Nam Hyeon-woo had been a junior he cherished, and he was Yoo Jiha’s father.
Yoo Jiha’s father……. Jeil Heon bitterly swallowed the words he didn’t want to recall. Unless it was an extreme case like his own, it was a natural conclusion for a child to long for their parents. It was the same for Yoo Jiha. Even in a child who believed he had been abandoned by his biological parents, a long-standing longing lingered.
Ignorance is a blessing, but knowledge is a curse.
Jeil Heon had absolutely no intention of telling the child about his biological parents. Furthermore, Mae-gu and Gong Ran-sa, who knew the truth, were not the types to secretly whisper it into the child’s ear. But if, by some chance, the child happened to find out about his biological parents on his own.
Regardless of the reason, would he be able to forgive the man who killed his own father?
The wavering had been disturbing his heart even before the Smiling Man was measured. The person who had erased that doubt was also Yoo Jiha.
〈……In the past, just imagining what my biological parents were like was hard, but I’m okay now.〉
He could not afford to waver when a child, far younger than himself, had steeled his heart to not fear the pain. Even if the child came to resent him upon learning the truth, he would willingly drink that poison.
“Hyeon-woo.”
「Sunbae.」
The Smiling Man, who had been leaning against the backrest of a bench looking up at the moon, greeted Jeil Heon. His right arm, which used to wave gently like in the old days, had already recovered. But looking with his left eye, it wasn’t so. On the surface it sparkled, but inside it was precarious, like a glass bead full of microscopic cracks. It was proof that the wound inflicted by Nam Soon-ho’s Substitute Blade had not fully healed.
Twenty-two long years had passed since the time they last smiled at each other with sincerity, yet the appearances of the two remained unchanged. The Smiling Man—the thing that once bore the name Nam Hyeon-woo—wore a kind smile, just as he had in those days of ignorance.
……Looking at that unchanging appearance, it felt as if the past twenty-two years were a dream and everything had been a lie. It felt as if he were a being closer to human, and he closed his eyes as a distant fragment of the past surfaced: Lee Yeo-jin holding young Nam Jiha’s hand, walking toward him and saying, ‘The uncle our Jiha likes is over there with his daddy, right?’
〈No matter what happens there, I hope you don’t get hurt, Mister.〉
But the cruel reality had begun long ago. From the voice of the child who buried his face in his chest when he couldn’t move immediately after receiving contact from the Measurement Center. From the purity of ignorance, worrying about the wounds of a man who had met a catastrophic end with those close to him, never imagining he was going to kill his own father. From the moment he let go of everything and fled, sheltering only one child.
From the moment Nam Hyeon-woo went mad. From Lee Yeo-jin’s dream.
Jeil Heon opened his eyes and pulled out both the inner ear and the microphone, crushing them under his foot. The conversation would not leak. Absolutely not to the Enforcement Division agents surrounding the park in the distance.
「Didn’t the Management Bureau come to kill or isolate me once Sunbae gave the signal?」
“Don’t you want to know where Yeo-jin is?”
「Honestly, I didn’t think Sunbae would keep his promise. I thought it was just a trick to get out of that situation.」
The Smiling Man’s body tilted forward as if he were about to spill over. A vivid thirst was etched into his bulging pupils, which shimmered with Mad Light.
「Just please don’t tell me that Sunbae killed Yeo-jin. I’ve already planned out the new family plan I’ll achieve with Yeo-jin. Sunbae will adore the new child Yeo-jin and I have, right?」
Instead of answering, Jeil Heon took a wooden locket from his pocket and threw it. The Smiling Man, who caught the paulownia wooden locket, tilted his head at a ninety-degree angle.
「There’s even a cute talisman attached. Is there a note inside telling me where Yeo-jin is? Do you really think I’m so scared that I wouldn’t be able to tear off a measly talisman like this?」
“You’ve grown a long tongue since becoming a monster. Just check it right now.”
「Ahaha! Haha! Sunbae has become half-monster and now you’re just spouting useless words! Fine, fine! I was always the good junior who listened to Sunbae. I always smiled because Sunbae said it suited me.」
The Smiling Man laughed excitedly and tore off the talisman. Because of that, one joint of his finger burned and snapped away in an instant, but he didn’t care and opened the lid of the wooden locket.
「What is this. A piece of an Aberration? Why on earth would you…….」
The eyes of the Smiling Man, who had been muttering indifferently, bulged. He sensed it. He had no choice but to sense it. Just as humans can detect another’s presence with their naked eye or senses, it was natural for an anomaly to detect another anomaly.
The Smiling Man—Nam Hyeon-woo—knew that his wife had been a Bearer. Lee Yeo-jin, who had sworn revenge against anomalies, had mixed the Essence of an Aberration into her body. She had a waveform unique to a Bearer mixed with an Aberration. The Smiling Man knew that waveform.
As Lee Yeo-jin mixed the Essence of another Aberration and was reborn as a new Aberration called an Aberrant Mother, she became indistinguishable by the measurement instruments made by humans. However, the Smiling Man was an Aberration. Just as no human would fail to recognize an acquaintance just because they changed into new clothes, the Aberration distinguished the mixed waveform.
「…….」
The Smiling Man’s eyes, which had been wandering blankly, rolled back. He analyzed his own waveform, which had changed subtly from a moment he couldn’t even remember. It was there. This Aberration’s waveform. Lee Yeo-jin’s waveform.
「Ah…….」
There is only one reason why an Aberration’s waveform changes. Devouring.
「Aaah…….」
Old memories, which he had forcibly suppressed and buried deep within because he couldn’t handle them himself, scattered.
〈Hyeon-woo, your way is not right.〉
His wife, who had held onto him with a pale complexion.
〈Hye… Hyeon-woo…….〉
The Aberration, whose reason had been crushed and could barely utter a single name, became jumbled and turned into Lee Yeo-jin. The Aberration he had devoured. The Aberration he had devoured and killed.
「Aaah……! Aaaaaaaah!」
Because he had been corrupted with a smile mark as his signature, the Smiling Man’s expression had never once collapsed, but now his smile crumbled. The thing that had gone mad and become an Aberration wailed, cursing itself for being unable to go even further mad after killing and eating its own wife.
The void behind his back tore open wide. The thing, from which Contamination flowed heavily, swallowed the collapsed Aberration and crumbled away, and Jeil Heon looked toward the direction of Pilgyeongdang for a brief moment before leaping beyond it.
A mad Aberration and the Aberrant Realm it had contaminated. Either one was bound to be dangerous, but there was no hesitation in Jeil Heon’s step. He had known it was dangerous from the start. If he had intended to tuck his tail and retreat, he wouldn’t have fled with Nam Jiha twenty-two years ago.
Passing through the Dividing Mist that separates reality and entering the Aberrant Realm, Jeil Heon quickly searched the surroundings. The gloomy sky was murky with pitch-black smoke from something constantly burning, and a foul, gamey smell of burning protein and grease floated in the air. Heat shimmered at every door of the endless corridors connecting grey concrete buildings, and coffins entered in sequence along a conveyor belt.
Jeil Heon identified the nature of this space, which was strangely and exaggeratedly twisted. It was a crematorium. Surely, a place that crudely imitated the Bukmangsan Crematorium where Lee Yeo-jin and Nam Hyeon-woo had first formed their bond.
‘……Not good.’
The area was sweltering from the heat of the cremation furnaces that operated without stopping. He broke a metal-frame chair in the waiting room to find something that could serve as a weapon. The Aberration melted into him was a goblin that had lost its reason to the pain of being burned. It had a bad compatibility with fire.
Bleeding onto the metal frame, Jeil Heon walked down the corridor. What was the rule of this Aberrant Realm? The Eight Phases Mental Hospital had formed its own rule as a mental hospital because the Smiling Man had contaminated it along with the Hospital Director and then abandoned it.
Just then, an Aberration that had been scraping together cremated remains poked its face out.