The fallout was swift and merciless, just as Jack had designed.
Park Ji-hoon's rescue from the river was not a redemption story; it was the first line of his public obituary. The police found him shivering and incoherent on the bank, remnants of the "V"-stamped pills scattered like grotesque confetti. The two fleeing suppliers were picked up by a patrol car a few blocks away, their stories colliding and crumbling. The anonymous tip to the reporter blossomed into a front-page scandal: "Heir Apparent's Son in Drug Bust Near Suicide Spot – Political Future Sinks in River." The connection to the "suicide spot"—the riverbank near where other troubled youths were known to gather—was a poetic touch the media adored.
At school on Monday, Park was a non-person. His empty seat in class 2-1 was a monument louder than any protest. Whispers didn't even follow him; they simply flowed around the void he left. His aura, had Jack seen it that day, would have been a collapsed star—a dense, lightless point of utter ruin. The System's 98% vengeance rating felt coldly accurate.
But the silence in Jack's own head was the new enemy.
The 92% integration warning pulsed like a second heartbeat. Min's memories were no longer archives to be accessed; they were the foundation of his present. He'd wake up with a phantom taste of the cheap instant noodles Min ate when his parents worked late. He'd feel a reflexive flinch at a raised voice that wasn't aimed at him. The line between executing a plan and experiencing the school hallway was blurring.
And the emotions… they were the worst. After the river, a profound, soul-crushing fatigue had settled into Min's bones—their bones. It wasn't the physical exhaustion of the swim, but the emotional hangover of a trauma that belonged to another boy. Jack, the killer, knew how to compartmentalize pain, to turn it into fuel for the next job. Min's pain was a swamp, and Jack was sinking into it.
[System: Host consciousness remnants are surging. Integration management is required to prevent identity dissolution. Suggest engaging with a memory core not yet assimilated: 'The Incident with the Dog.']
Jack, sitting in his room after another day of haunting the school halls, frowned. The Incident with the Dog? He sifted through the memory stream. It surfaced: a rainy afternoon from two years ago. A young Min, walking home, found a shivering, injured puppy in a cardboard box in an alley. He'd smuggled it home, hidden it in his closet, nursed it with stolen bandages and food from his own dinner. For three days, he had a secret friend. Then his mother found it. She hadn't yelled. She'd just sighed, a sound of pure inconvenience, and taken the puppy to the pound while Min was at school. He'd never known what happened to it.
The memory was a lance of pure, helpless grief. It wasn't about grand betrayal or violence. It was about a small, quiet kindness being treated as a nuisance. The core of Min's loneliness.
Why this memory? Jack thought at the System.
[System: This memory represents a pivot. It is the moment the host learned that care leads to loss, that vulnerability is punished. It is a psychological keystone. Fully integrating it will stabilize the merged psyche by resolving its foundational trauma. Or it will break it. Proceed with caution.]
It was a risk. But the current instability was worse. Jack closed his eyes and stopped fighting the memory. He let it wash over him, not as a observer, but as the boy.
The smell of wet fur and antiseptic. The frantic, grateful licks on his hands. The terrifying joy of having a living thing depend on him, trust him. The hollow dread when he opened the closet to an empty space and a note that said "Taken care of." The silence that followed, so much worse than any scolding.
Tears streamed down Jack's face—their face. A sob, raw and ugly, tore from his throat. It was Min's sob, from a wound two years old. But Jack felt the撕裂. He felt the killer's icy resolve and the boy's shattered heart warring in the same chest.
When the wave passed, he was left gasping on the floor. Something had… settled. Not peacefully, but definitively. The sharp edges between "Jack's mission" and "Min's pain" were still there, but they were now housed in the same structure. A grim, painful synthesis.
[System: Integration level stabilized at 94%. Identity coalescence progressing. Primary operational consciousness can now be defined. Define now: Are you 'Jack,' 'Min,' or a new designation?]
Jack-Min lay on the thin carpet, staring at the ceiling. He was neither. The killer's purpose was now filtered through the victim's pain. The victim's desire for justice was now armed with the killer's skills. He was the shadow in Da-wool's painting. He was the wailing silence after the suppressed scream.
"Call me Jin," he whispered, the name forming from nothing and everything. A new sound. A new mask for the merged thing he had become.
[System: Primary designation updated: 'Jin.' Greetings, Jin. Continuing with Vengeance Protocol.]
The relief was immediate. A pressure he hadn't fully acknowledged lifted. He was no longer a ghost possessing a corpse. He was a new entity, born in a river of trauma and retribution.
And his work wasn't done. The list remained.
Target 2: Choi Seung-min. The lieutenant, now masterless, a wounded animal full of impotent rage. His physical threat was neutered by his ankle, but his bitterness was a toxin.
Target 3: Lee Min-ji. The social predator, now prey in her own jungle, scrambling to salvage her reputation.
Target 4: Mr. Kim. The coward, whose inaction was a different kind of violence.
Target 5: The Parents. The architects of the emotional void.
The System pulsed with a new directive, cleaner now, filtered through the consolidated will of 'Jin.'
[System: Proceed with systematic dismantling. Priority: Targets 2 and 3. Their fates should reflect their crimes. Seung-min traded on physical intimidation. Min-ji traded on social poison. Recommend poetic justice.]
Jin sat up, wiping his face. The grief for the puppy was still a fresh ache, but it was his ache now, a part of his engine. He thought of Seung-min, whose entire identity was his strength and proximity to power.
A plan for Seung-min formed, cruel in its simplicity. The boy was clinging to his spot on the school's reserve wrestling team, a last shred of identity. Jin used his enhanced digital skills to access the team's physio records. He created a false, but convincing, medical report suggesting Seung-min's ankle injury was a chronic, congenital weakness, exaggerated by steroid use—a whisper he'd planted in a coaches' forum weeks prior. He anonymously emailed it to the head coach and the school athletic board, citing "concern for student health and team integrity."
The next day, Seung-min was called out of class. He returned white-faced, his massive shoulders slumped. He'd been cut from the team permanently, and put on a "health watch" list that mandated random testing. His aura, when Jin saw him later, had shriveled into a tight, grey ball of shame and lost future. The bully who used his body as a weapon now saw it as a traitorous, useless thing. His physical world had been amputated.
For Min-ji, the approach was more surgical. Jin didn't need to spread more rumors. He simply gave truth a megaphone. He compiled a dossier: screenshots of her cruelest messages (extracted from old phone backups Min had unconsciously stored in the cloud), timestamps of her lies, and anonymous testimonies from two of her now-estranged former friends—guilt-tripped into cooperation with carefully applied Cognitive Whisper nudges about their own complicity. He packaged it not as an attack, but as a "concerned awareness campaign" and used a bot to flood the social media feeds of her entire social circle. It wasn't a public post; it was a targeted, intimate bombardment.
The effect was instantaneous and total. Min-ji's social capital, built on manipulation and gossip, evaporated overnight. She became a pariah, a walking example of the poison she peddled. She stopped coming to school within a week. The System registered her social and psychological annihilation as complete.
Two down. Their punishments fit their crimes: the loss of the core asset they had abused.
But as Jin walked the halls, a husk named Seung-min limping past him, a void where Min-ji used to giggle, he felt no triumph. Only a cold, grim satisfaction. And beneath that, the echo of Min's question: Is this any better?
The silence in his head was no longer fractured. It was a unified, wailing silence. And it was his. He was Jin. And his harvest was only half-reaped. The teacher and the parents awaited their turn in the field of his justice.