Chapter 328.

Where is this?

I looked around. A common, tireless memorial car wandered along the road, and across the asphalt was the funeral hall of a university hospital.

Why am I here?

As if to answer my question, my body walked into the funeral hall, disregarding my will. Then, I realized when I saw the portrait hanging in the funeral hall...

Oh, this is a dream.

And it was also a dream Id actually had in my past life. Suddenly, I was no longer Denburg Blade.

.

.

.

My mother had passed away.

The mortuary was filled with adults I didn't know, and the chief mourner, that hateful human being, was busy greeting people here and there.

"It's okay..."

I could hear people asking my father questions in the distance.

"Ah, its all right...

His voice, emerging from a grief-stricken face as he smiled and answered questions, sounded cracked and stuffy. He appeared to not be okay, and yet still seemingly forcing a smile.

It was despicable.

Did those people know that trash hadn't shed a single tear after my mother died? They probably didn't know... that that human being had never visited my mother when she was admitted to the hospital. There was no way for them to know how my mother and I had been treated at home. No, he wouldnt let them know.

It had already been a while since my mother's mortuary had become their social center, and an unprecedented stage of hahas and hohos. Just being there made me dizzy, and made me want to leave my seat to vomit right away.

It was purely because of my mother that I was standing here looking at those masked monsters. If I werent here, this mortuary likely would have resembled a flamboyant masquerade for medieval nobles. It was at the point of being an insult to the deceased.

Ah, poor mother, who lived her whole life essentially as a maid. This had been the result of enduring all kinds of insults from my father.

Did you want to show this kind of scene to your son? If it was for your son, you shouldn't have died in the first place. You shouldve lived longer than that trashy human being, and lived a long time with his inheritance You should have lived a really long, happy life.

"Now, I'll start the cremation along with the relics of the deceased, the funeral director said.

The chief mourner and the other people began to move. Soon, people picked up my mother's coffin and headed to the crematorium.

An expensive coffin entered a cramped space, a fire broke out for a moment, and then a voice said the cremation was finished.

Saddened at the thought that it was already over, I looked at the clock and saw that considerable time had already passed.

I felt empty.

The expensive coffin and clothes were luxuries she had never enjoyed in her lifetime. The ancestral rite table was so extravagant that it bore no resemblance to her daily life of eating only one bowl of seaweed soup with a few vegetable side dishes and red pepper paste.

It had all turned into a handful of ashes contained in a small urn. To think that urn was my mother... It was so ridiculous, it made me laugh.

"Thank you for coming."

In the distance, my so-called father kept meeting and greeting people to the end, leaving my mother on the backburner No, the expression "backburner" was still too much. She was nonexistent to him. She was just being treated like air.

I lightly touched the window of the compartment that contained my mother's urn, resting on the shelf of the charnel house, and turned around.

It wasn't my mother that I had touched. It was my reflection in the window, with not a single tear on my face, just like my father. If I kept looking at my face any more, I felt I might punch the window out of anger.

Turning around, I walked past the trash and left the charnel house. When I passed by, the guy called Father glanced at me in passing, and didn't even try to stop or talk to me.

Sitting in the backyard in a black suit after escaping, I bit down on a cigarette and lit it. The smoke I exhaled scattered into the sky. I took out my mother's cheap diary, which I had secretly taken, while biting the cigarette.

.

xx Year xx Month xx Day is sunny.

Today, I heard the news that ... had a fight at school and rushed over.

At school, I saw a child with black eyes; my son sitting on the sofa peacefully with a healthy face; a woman, the mother of the child who had been hit; and a teacher.

As soon as the mother of the child who had been beaten by my son saw me, she screamed, and the teacher constantly tried to calm her down.

I had to apologize. Anyone could see that my son was fine, and the other child had worsening bruises, so I had no choice but to apologize.

The mother of the child had been shouting for a long time. She stopped because of the principal, who came over after receiving a phone call from my husband, and an unknown call she received.

First, after taking my son home early, I asked him why he hit the other child. He said I should have asked as soon as I came, and asked bluntly, What use is asking now?

When I heard those words, I realized my mistake, but it was too late. My son must have had his own reasons. But I scolded him regardless, saying that hitting the other child was wrong.

Then my son smiled cynically, locked himself in his room, and didnt come out.

My husband, after arriving home late at night, knocked hard on our son's room angrily. My husband cursed and shouted for him to come out, but our son didnt answer.

Then, my angry husband picked up a golf club and began to hit the doorknob. I was surprised and tried to stop him, but he pushed me, finally broke opened the door, and began to hit our son with the golf club.

Feeling cold, I thought I needed to stop him. I grabbed my husband, but he pushed me while cursing, and after receiving a shock to my head, I fainted.

By the time I woke up, I was in my room. As I left the room, I could see my sons broken door, and my son making coffee with a bruised face.

I asked my son if he was okay, and he gave me coffee with a bitter smile that resembled my husband, asking, "Why did you step in and get hurt like a fool?"

.

Below that, due to an old tear mark, the ink was smudged and couldnt be read.

It was really foolish. Really...

Cigarette smoke entered my eyes and blurred my vision, but no tears flowed.

It was really foolish.

I chewed on the cigarette filter. Emotional things werent my cup of tea.

* * *

After my mother's funeral, I went back to my own rented room near my high school and turned on the computer. The room was a place where my mother had begun to live independently after being hospitalized.

When I turned on the computer, my message box was full. Ever since my mother was hospitalized, I had never turned on the computer properly, so it was natural that things had piled up.

One of the reasons was that there had been no way to check the messenger I used because it was made with a self-made tool, so it couldnt be linked to a mobile phone or another computer.

-Lactose Intolerance: Huh, younger brother?!

As soon as I logged into the messenger, Lactose Intolerance responded.

-Crow: Who's younger than you? We don't even know each other's faces.

When I sent a message saying don't make me laugh, Lactose Intolerance replied, bold-faced.

-Lactose Intolerance: Since I joined the messenger first

-Lactose Intolerance: I'm older than you

-Lactose Intolerance: You joined later, so you're younger than me. Whats the problem?

I snorted and sent a message.

-Crow: Show your ID.

-Lactose Intolerance: Ayy, what ID. Arent we both Korean?

-Crow: Who says I'm Korean?

-Lactose Intolerance: Isn't your ID card Korean?

I wrote Don't make me laugh in Filipino, and Lactose Intolerance said he was actually Brazilian in Cantonese. In response, I asked why a Brazilian was speaking Cantonese in Portuguese.

In fact, these were all meaningless conversations. It was clear that dozens of proxies were used to log into the messenger. Even if he spoke fluent Korean, there was no guarantee that he was Korean.

-Carbonara: Oh, what's going on? Crow is here?

-Carbonara: Didn't you quit being a hacker?

Suddenly, Carbonara greeted me happily using my nickname Crow.

-Crow: Ahh, it's been a while since I last had someone I wanted to kill.

-Crow: I'm going to become active again.

My messenger was full of smiling onomatopoeia.

-Lactose Intolerance:

-Carbonara: lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol

-Carbonara: Lactose Intolerance, why dont you laugh the usual way using ? It doesn't look normal.

-Lactose Intolerance: I accidentally pressed the Korean/English switch in the past, and now hes asking where Im from :D

-Carbonara: Anyway, who else are you going to bury?

Carbonara asked me a question.

So far, I'd never really tried to bury anyone. It had just been practice to bury my damn father.

For practice, I had just caused a mafia uprising in Italy. I had tried to drive a wedge between the Yakuza and the Triads, and had also broken into the CIA's servers and sold information to an anonymous person at a high price.

For reference, the mafias still hadnt noticed that someone had intentionally triggered the uprising. On the side of the Triads, they thought it was American gangs who had done it, and the CIA suspected an internal spy.

The fact that I had done such things was also something that even among these messenger groups, Lactose Intolerance, Carbonara, and I'm My TOP didnt know.

What was funny was that Carbonara thought I was Indian, I'm My TOP thought I was CIA, and I didn't know what Lactose Intolerance thought.

-Crow: Does anyone have a zombie computer at Moronz headquarters?

Moronz was a famous office program company, and zombie computers were computers that had fallen under hacker control.

-Carbonara: Wait, Moronz headquarters? Who would have such a dangerous thing in a place full of monster hackers?

Lactose Intolerance responded to Carbonara.

-Lactose Intolerance: Me! Me! I have one! I have one!

-Carbonara: Are you crazy?!

He was seriously crazy. To think he had planted a virus at Moronz headquarters, which was impossible for most hackers due to their impenetrable firewall. If you were tracked back and caught, you would get a sentence of a few hundred years.

I told 'Lactose Intolerance...

-Crow: All right, that's good. Keep it well and pass it on to your descendants as an heirloom.

-Carbonara : lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol lol

-Lactose Intolerance: So mean

I looked in the mirror and distorted my lips to try to laugh at the boring joke. But in the mirror, I had an expression of disgust.

I managed to endure my desire to throw the mirror away, and covered it so it couldnt be seen. In the future, there wouldnt be any reason for me to look in the mirror except for shaving.

-Carbonara: So what do you need? I'll give it to you cheap.

I told Carbonara that it was fine and sent a smiling emoticon.

Would I be able to laugh when I destroyed him?

* * *

Reporter Lee sighed as he chewed on some eundan, looking at the reflection of his face in the LCD computer screen after not having been able to go home for three days.[1]

It was good that he had gotten to be a reporter for the city division the way he wanted, but the articles he wrote kept having to be made according to his superiors taste, so he didn't feel like living these days.

It would have been nice if a scoop had dropped out of nowhere, but there couldn't be such a convenient thing in the world.

Thinking that way, he spit out the