Memorize it, you crazy bastard.
And so, two hellish weeks passed.
Sentenced to vocabulary drills, Ian had to memorize words every waking hour, from the moment he opened his eyes until he finally went to sleep.
His schedule was more grueling than that of most students preparing for major exams, all because Kyle stayed glued to his side throughout the day with a smile on his face. As if showing up at his door at eight o’clock sharp every morning were not enough, Kyle’s madness extended to shoving a fountain pen into his hand and quizzing him on vocabulary even during their brief meals.
Ian had no choice but to realize one thing.
This bastard is enjoying this.
“Hm? You misspelled that one.”
The bite of walnut pie Ian had barely managed to take suddenly felt like gravel in his mouth.
Even Shu, who had been lingering nearby, had disappeared at some point.
Assuming he had gone off on another errand, Ian set the pie in his left hand back on the plate and looked up. His appetite was already gone.
Even when he had been adopted overseas and forced to learn English, things had never been this spartan. Schools in Korea drilled English into students from an early age, and Ian had been an excellent student, good enough to rank near the top of his entire school. He had never quite overcome the barrier when it came to speaking, but he could translate well enough, so learning the language had not been particularly difficult.
Shettian, however, was another matter entirely.
He had only just learned the alphabet, yet now he was expected to memorize hundreds of words every day. It felt as though his head might explode.
Being dropped into a place he had never even heard of was absurd enough. Having to sit there memorizing words like ‘dog,’ ‘sword,’ and ‘food’ made it even more ridiculous. If they were going to give him some miraculous ability, they could at least have included listening and writing along with it.
Considering the half-baked nature of the ability and his ruined throat, perhaps this was simply heaven’s way of telling him to shut up and grind away at rote memorization.
Unlike Kyle, who wore a smug grin, Ian’s wrist was beginning to ache.
With a soft rip, he tore a small strip from the sheet of paper in front of him.
He dipped his fountain pen so deeply into the inkwell that it was practically drowning, quickly scribbled something down, crumpled the scrap, and tossed it onto the table.
Kyle tilted his head and picked it up.
Mold, centipede, darkness, fog, death
Five clumsily written words stared back at him.
Kyle blinked at the seemingly random collection.
“What’s this?”
So far, Ian had only memorized nouns. Predicates in Shettian were extremely complicated, so Kyle had started him off by making him memorize vocabulary first.
I learned it that way myself, so I was fairly confident in the method. And he’s keeping up better than I expected.
Is there some connection between them?
Certain that Ian could not have written them down for no reason, Kyle hummed thoughtfully and began trying to decipher the pattern.
In reality, Ian had simply picked the most negative words he had learned so far.
If he could have said what he actually wanted, he would have written something far worse, but unfortunately, Kyle had yet to teach him any curse words.
“……”
Disappointed, Ian twirled the fountain pen once between his fingers.
Then something caught his eye.
Kyle’s cheek.
He was resting his chin in one hand, staring intently at Ian’s scrap of paper.
Come to think of it, what does that say?
Among the black letters tattooed across his cheek in jagged, uneven strokes, Ian did not recognize a single word.
Lost in thought, he stopped spinning the fountain pen and gripped it properly.
Kyle happened to have lowered his head, giving Ian the perfect angle.
Much of the lettering was smudged and rough, almost like graffiti, so Ian copied down one section that seemed relatively intact onto the torn scrap of paper.
At the scratching of the pen nib, Kyle suddenly raised his head.
Their eyes met.
“Why?”
There were two moles near the end of his eyebrow.
They were so small that Ian probably would not have noticed them without looking closely, but the way they sat neatly side by side made him wonder whether those, too, had been tattooed there deliberately.
He had never looked at Kyle with any real interest before, so seeing his face this closely made it seem oddly unfamiliar.
The problem was that every time Kyle opened his mouth, Ian wanted to punch him.
But setting that aside and simply observing him, Kyle had a distinctly cold appearance. Sharp monolid eyes slanted upward at the corners, and his nose was sleek and sharply defined.
Ian tried to imagine what Kyle looked like when he was not smiling.
He could not picture it clearly.
It was too rare a sight.
“What’s this? When did you learn a curse like this? Was it Fred?”
Perhaps bored by Ian’s silent stare, Kyle lowered his gaze to the scrap of paper and muttered.
Apparently, he was reading what Ian had copied.
“But does Fred even know how to write in the old tongue?”
“……”
I copied it from your cheek.
Ian had assumed the tattoo probably did not say anything pleasant, but having an outright curse written across one’s own cheek was something else entirely.
There had been people like that even in the modern world, but most confined their tattoos to their bodies. It was rare to see someone tattoo something like that directly onto their face.
Ian shook his head.
What an absolute lunatic.
Kyle burst out laughing.
“You copied it from my cheek, didn’t you? My god. Don’t write that anywhere else. You could start a knife fight with something like that.”
Then why the hell did you tattoo something that could start a knife fight on your face?
Kyle apparently failed to notice Ian’s expression darkening.
After offering that utterly useless warning, he merely kept laughing.
After another hectic day, Ian finally found a measure of peace when he returned to his room and closed the door behind him.
Memorizing hundreds of words was bad enough, but what irritated him even more were the handful of people who had recently started hovering around him.
He was not so oblivious that he failed to notice the glances they kept sneaking in his direction while pretending to talk to Kyle.
At first, they had been busy avoiding him as though he were some kind of insect.
But after seeing him every day for more than two weeks, their curiosity seemed to have gotten the better of them.
In a sense, things were proceeding exactly as Claude had intended.
Ian, however, could not have cared less about their curiosity.
Clutching his head, which was packed full of countless unfamiliar words, he trudged toward the bed.
Of course his head hurt.
He had spent the past two weeks brutally cramming an entirely new language into it.
The room was filled only with warm air and the soft crackling of firewood, as though someone had heated it in advance.
He was tired enough to fall asleep immediately.
Ian blew out the candles near the bed.
Only the faint glow leaking from the fireplace remained, dimly illuminating the room.
Listening to the wind rattle the window, Ian lay down.
He strained his ears, wondering whether that strange, unidentifiable sound would seep in again like it had before, but there was nothing beyond the window except the intermittent rattling of the frame.
Perhaps it was because he had spent the entire day surrounded by noise.
Now that he was alone in the silent room, drowsiness came over him together with a flood of thoughts.
The most recent memory Ian could clearly recall was from around the time he had returned to Hong Kong.
The last thing he remembered was receiving a newly activated, old-fashioned cell phone and having a long conversation with his older brother, whom he had not seen in some time.
But he could not remember exactly what they had talked about.
Nor could he remember what he had done afterward.
It felt as though something might break through the fog surrounding those memories at any moment.
Yet in the end, all he could confirm were a few scattered facts.
There was roughly a year missing after that.
During that missing year, he had killed someone.
And then he had taken his own life.
A faint light flickered at the foot of the bed.
The shadow wavering across the ceiling seemed almost to be whispering something.
Ian stared at it in silence and once again asked himself the question he had turned over countless times.
Why did I die?
I had decided that, if nothing else, I had to survive.
Because dying like that would have been too unfair—because of that reason alone—I trampled over other people’s lives in my place and made it this far.
By the time I realized something was wrong, I was already sinking into the mire.
I wanted to go back, but when I turned around, there was nowhere waiting for me.
I spent my entire life struggling without ever finding memories I wanted to treasure, people who were precious to me, or even something I genuinely wanted to do.
Even though I knew where it would all lead in the end.
“……”
At some point, while thinking about those things, he must have fallen asleep.
He thought he might have dreamed briefly, but he could not remember what the dream had been about.
Was it because he felt safe here?
Ever since arriving in this place, he had been sleeping surprisingly deeply.
At first, that had been because of the drugs.
But by now, he knew that nothing was being mixed into his food anymore.
The rattling of the window briefly pulled him from his shallow sleep, but his consciousness soon began to sink again.
At the thought of Kyle inevitably showing up to knock on his door at eight o’clock sharp, Ian let out something between a sigh and a breath.
Creak.
It was an extremely faint sound.