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The funeral home was located in the basement of the hospital building. Wreaths of chrysanthemums filled the empty room, spilling out into the hallway. There were many mourners without relatives to attend the funeral. This was because they had been cut off from the family since Kim Deuk-pal was immersed in the organization, but they were not living in poverty.
Every one of them was a gangster. There were mourners from rival gangs, and even rival gangs that were difficult to bring together. Whenever they meet, they fight or have a nervous breakdown, but today, they quietly sipped their drinks and mourned Kim Deuk-pal.
On the second day of the funeral, the mood at the funeral home was as subdued as on the first day. However, the somber mood was quickly overturned when a boy in patient clothes was brought in.
“That bastard! That bastard! That bastard!”
An organization member as big as a bear ran out while hitting the table. Another organization member grabbed the man as he ran out. However, not for the boy’s sake, the eyes that followed him were not good. This is because they wanted to prevent the funeral from being a scene.
The organization members gathered and surrounded the boy Kim Deuk-pal was trying to save. The boy was hideous and unattractive. Thin body, hunched posture, shoulders that hardened so much they were curled and dried. Long bangs that stuck to the floor covering most of the face.
He was to the left of Kim Deuk-pal, who was very strong. When Kim Deuk-pal thought he was dead to save such a boy, organization members reached out.
Kim Dong-soo pushed the boy to the front of the portrait. A boy standing awkwardly in front of the memorial altar stared at Kim Deuk-pal’s portrait and Kim Dong-soo hit the boy with his foot. The boy who swallowed his breath knelt down and made the floor tremble. Kim Dong-soo coldly grumbled.
“Begging!”
The kneeling boy raised his head and looked at Kim Deuk-pal’s portrait as if it had been nailed down. Perhaps he was still unconscious, so he stared at the portrait with a dazed face, and harsh words poured out all around him.
“For God’s sake, my brother crashed to save your face!”
“I’m begging you, asshole. My brother got into an accident to save your ass, and you can’t even see him, his parents, or his nose?”
But the boy couldn’t take his eyes off the scene to see if he heard anything. Stunned, he jerked to his feet just in time to see saliva trickle from his newly opened mouth.
“The body, I have to see it… with my own eyes…….”
Muttering in a low voice, the boy charged to the altar with its flowers. His skinny body leapt to its feet in an instant, and the organization members shouted in panic.
“Get him!”
The boy stomped up the incense burner, shoved into the mortuary, ripped through the chrysanthemums, and dug his nails into the planks. The body was in the morgue, but he was too desperate to think about it. However, the gang members grabbed him and dragged him down.
“Son of a bitch, you have no grace. You disrespect the deceased!”
The gang members pressed down on the boy’s back as they pinned him to the ground. Despite the weight of several large men on him, he struggled frantically to crawl toward the altar where the body would be. He lied and stopped struggling when a sob came from his back.
“He’s dead, he’s dead, my brother.”
These are Kim Deuk-pal’s own men. They weren’t the ones to play with, and they weren’t the ones to cry easily.
Kim Deuk-pal, who was in the boy’s body, made eye contact with the portrait picture thrown on the floor. There was no denying it.
His intuition was right. Kim Deuk-pal is dead. He was driving on the road to stop the boy from committing suicide on a rainy day. However, he had excessive bleeding from a traffic accident.
The surviving soul finally accepted the body’s death.
***
Name: Song Yi-heon. Gender: Male. Age 18 years old. Blood type is A.
That’s all he knew about the boy, at least from the bio hanging on the hospital bed.
Song Yi-heon was strange. He had a comfortable single room, and when he’d been brought to Kim Duk-pal’s ward a few days earlier, hospital security looked for him with batons. The doctors had been unusually kind to him, so it wasn’t like he didn’t have a guardian. However, no one had actually come looking for him. Thanks to this, Kim Duk-pal was never suspected.
“Ugh…….”
A numbing pain exploded in his back as he rolled over. He bit his lip as he pressed a button for the painless injection.
Song suffered a lacerated back and broken ribs after falling from an overpass and was placed in a cast after surgery. When he regained consciousness, he was unaware. However, as he was escorted to the elevator by security, the after-effects of surgery hit him and he fainted. When he woke up with a ring around his neck, he was still in Song’s body.
When the pain eased, he reached out and grabbed a hand mirror within reach. Kim Duk-pal clicked his tongue and studied his face in the round mirror. It was still a face he couldn’t get used to.
“Tsk, tsk, boy.”
He pulled up the long bangs covering his eyes to reveal his bare face. Judging by the pale brown color of his eyes and brownish hair, his white skin was due to a lack of pigment in his body. However, it was Kim Duk-pal’s business.
A Jagoro man is handsome when he has copper-colored skin, an angular lower jaw, and thick muscles, not when he has ticklishly shallow features like Song Yiheon.
“I think I’ll feed my wife and children.”
Not yet aware of his own body, Kim Duk-pal turned his slender jaw from side to side and clicked his tongue like a man.
Kim Duk-pal examined Song Yi-heon’s appearance, but his mind was on the clock. Kim Duk-pal’s body was cremated at the ceremony.
Despite confirming his death, Kim Duk-pal refused to accept burnt body. Not knowing what happened to Song Yiheon’s soul, he would be in trouble if Song Yiheon’s soul returned in the future without a body to return to.
His conscience did not allow him to take Song Yi-heon’s body shamelessly. If he had to return his body to Song Yi-heon’s soul, would his own soul be allowed to wander through the Nine Heavens, unable to die?
Kim Deuk-pal was too busy holding his head to hear the hospital room door open. When she looked up, she saw a middle-aged woman with her arms crossed, unable to hide her sick expression. Kim Duk-pal, who had been met with a contemptuous look with a straight face, shrivelled his brow out of displeasure when the woman’s lips were opened.
“You don’t even say hello to me anymore.”
Kim Duk-pal stood up from his cast, eager to heal. Unexpected pain sprang from his broken ribs, but he ignored it and folded his back into a ninety-degree angle.
“Good morning.”
The last thing he wanted to do was deal with a woman, especially a woman of his age. As if it wasn’t hard enough, she was Song Yi-heon’s mother, and Kim Duk-pal was tense.
He is polite according to the strict hierarchy in the gangster world, but the problem is that it is Song Yi-heon’s body. In the form of Song Yi-heon, even the strict decency of the gangster world will only cause a backlash. Middle-aged women’s eyebrows move.
“Are you protesting?”
Kim Duk-pal flinched at the sarcasm like a dagger to the head. The woman didn’t like Song Yiheon overexerting himself.
“Are your mother and you both mean to me? Why are you both so desperate to bully me? Why did you spend time there at night? Ha, did your mother make you do it? Do you think that if this reaches the chairman’s ears, the chairman will come to see you? Are you making all this fuss because you want attention?”
The middle-aged woman is not Song Yi-heon’s mother. She’s probably someone hired by the chairman, since she’s so dismissive of Song Yi-heon’s mother, while showing a lot of respect for the chairman.
At that point, Kim Duk-pal straightened up. He didn’t know the story, so he couldn’t say anything, but he judged it wasn’t worth going under.
“I’m disillusioned with your mother, but what’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you? You really don’t know how to do things right.”
The woman, who had poured her heart out, stiffened as Song Yiheon straightened her back. He usually walked with his back slouched so that he was at eye level with her. However, Song Yiheon was taller than her, so when he stood up straight, he could look down at her.
“You, you…….”
The woman was amazed when the person begging for a fierce shot looked down. However, Song Yi-heon, who turned his long bangs, which gave the impression of being gloomy and pathetic, to the side and stared coolly with princely features, could not make the same loud noise as before.
Kim Deuk-pal, who had been in the organization for 30 years, emerged from Song Yi-heon.
“How dare you look at an adult like that? You’re so rude.
However, the woman who made Song Yi-heon big did not easily step down. He stared at Song Song as if to kill her. He chewed his lips because he felt ashamed of his trembling voice like a goat’s cry.
“I’ll send you a driver to get you out of Park, so do as you please.”
The woman handed over the shoulder bag she had carried to Song Song-heon’s chest as if throwing it. When Song Song-heon frowned at the shock of touching the cast, she stepped back without showing her back. As soon as she turned around, she stepped up and left the hospital room. It might have been the last pride, but the door that closed with a bang shook the sky.
“…Her temper is so bad.”
Kim Deuk-pal, who was left, scratched his head and murmured. He was the only person who visited Song Yi-heon a few days after the accident, but he didn’t want to catch up. Rather, if he had suffered from such a woman for the rest of his life, Song Yi-heon was understood to jump off the overpass.
Kim Deuk-pal frowned at his ribs, which caused minor pain, and turned the shoulder bag the woman gave him onto the bed. He thought the bag was heavy, but in addition to underwear and toiletries, several CSAT workbook books and tablet PCs were poured out of the shoulder bag.
“Oh-.”
Kim Deuk-pal found a tablet PC and picked it up first because his smartphone was damaged in an accident. Although he was tutored by a professional instructor in Daechi-dong, he knew how to handle a tablet by listening to Internet lectures on a tablet PC because of the times.
Although it was difficult to acquire newspapers at 47, Kim Deuk-pal confidently opened the tablet case cover thanks to his subordinates who taught him the same content over and over again with patience that they would not have given to his parents. When he opened the cover that looked like a cover, the screen turned on.
“Well.”
He thought it would be handled easily because it was made by the same company as the tablet he used. However, the lock screen difficulty was endured. Kim Deuk-pal hesitated and pressed any number, but failed to touch it hastily after warning he was wrong. He confronted the lock screen without any promise because he was afraid he might not be able to turn it on at all after touching it incorrectly.
In a frustrating moment, Kim Deuk-pal retracted his bangs. The long bangs rose and sank. Half of the face is covered with bangs.
“…What?”
At a moment, Kim Deuk-pal rolled up his bangs and blinked as if he was trying to count whether he saw it properly.
“What is this?”
The LCD lock screen was unlocked. While I looked at the liquid crystal stupidly, the screen was dark again. When the lock screen appeared, Kim Deuk-pal covered his face with bangs just in case. Face ID was released and wallpaper appeared.
“This isn’t even a two-faced man.”
When Kim Deuk-pal grasped the unlocked mechanism, he grumbled and pushed the liquid crystal.
The tablet was neat. The few apps were boring for online lectures, flash games, and webtoons that only children could download. Among them, the diary app stood out.
“That’s why he locked it…….”
He took out an all-in-one table on the hospital bed, leaned his elbow, and opened the diary app. He sat down comfortably and read it in earnest.
Today, a few days after the overpass accident, was December 27, and a recent December 20 page was opened to make the diary easier to write.