161. When Dawn Finds Us 2

The researcher’s eyes gleamed with a manic light behind his glasses.

“Still just a normal human? Huh?”

Cheon Geon-young remained silent until the other person, in his impatience, repeated the question. Choi Jae-seong seemed desperate for an answer.

“Did you observe me?”

“Until you were twenty, intermittently.”

“If you answer my questions, I’ll tell you. Cooperate if you want even one of your curiosities resolved.”

Choi Jae-seong fiddled with his lips with his cuffed hands, then suddenly calmly placed both hands on the table, indicating he was ready to talk. Oh Gi-cheol fanned himself with a file as if he hadn’t anticipated this situation.

“First, tell me the project’s name.”

“Gaia named that project Galatea.”

“Gala, what?”

When Oh Gi-cheol, who was fanning himself, asked, Choi Jae-seong narrowed his eyes.

“Galatea. In Greek mythology, the beautiful statue Pygmalion sculpted, and the goddess breathed life into. The ideal itself.”

“Always with the fancy names...”

Oh Gi-cheol waved his hand dismissively, urging him to continue. Cheon Geon-young recorded the name of the project he had been involved in. Despite it being a name he desperately wanted to know, he felt no joy.

“Is it true that it was a project to create perfect espers?”

“We wanted ability users who could freely use physical superpowers without suffering pain. Espers who didn’t need guides and were independent.”

Choi Jae-seong’s dreamy eyes, chasing an ideal, made Cheon Geon-young uncomfortable.

“The researchers called the beings who would reach that noble stage ‘Galatea.’ Because we were sculptors ready to revere them. Of course, we were brilliant sculptors.”

Choi Jae-seong rummaged through the documents with his cuffed hands and then pointed at one page with his finger. Cheon Geon-young read the document with his eyes. It was a report stating that, after researching one of the ‘outsiders,’ their physical structure was the same as humans.

“Are you talking about beings like the ‘outsiders’?”

“If they can do it, it’s only natural that we can too. Earthlings aren’t inferior. We can’t be seen as inferior to outsiders from another dimension.”

“Was the project born out of an inferiority complex?”

“Among the researchers, yes. For those funding it, it was a matter of efficiency.”

Choi Jae-seong bent his thumb and forefinger to form a circle, indicating money.

“How much do you think it costs to train one esper? What’s the value of the equipment they use until they die? Society raises espers with astronomical sums of money and sends them to the field. But they die easily. Dying to monsters, sure, let’s accept that. That’s what they were raised for, after all.”

No guilt or remorse could be found on Choi Jae-seong’s face. He wasn’t hiding those feelings; he genuinely seemed to believe that espers were born for that purpose.

“But dying from rampage... It’s incredibly futile. If they can’t overcome their limits and poof explode, the investment costs also poof fly away.”

“Oh, come on.”

Even Oh Gi-cheol, who had little interest in the treatment of espers, clicked his tongue. Choi Jae-seong did not budge his opinion, despite the audience’s reaction. He used the momentum to pull his chair forward. He glanced at the CCTV once, then whispered as if confessing a secret.

“The world needed espers who wouldn’t explode. Any rational investor would put their money into showing that possibility.”

Cheon Geon-young didn’t want to lose his composure in front of an Orca researcher. But the more he spoke, the more he felt a pain as if his inner self was being carved with a sculptor’s chisel.

It wasn’t out of self-pity. He hadn’t grown up as an esper. Having grown up outside, he was able to avoid such training.

But Yoon Tae-ha must have received it. Brainwashed into believing something more important than her own life, hearing absurdities like ‘it’s okay to get hurt because wounds heal quickly,’ and being eroded by the potential to harm others, she must have gone through that.

“Friendship and love with a guide? That’s no different from a lottery ticket. What if the strongest esper’s beloved guide is a terrorist? The world would be destroyed. Conversely, if his beloved guide is a police officer, the world would be peaceful. Do you want to live in such a world?”

“This is like treating them worse than a watchdog.”

“If you could only raise a dog by putting a hundred-million-won leash around its neck, no one would raise a dog.”

Oh Gi-cheol shook his head in disbelief.

“Who’s the police here? The one who kidnapped innocent people and killed them, making sure their bodies couldn’t be found, is all talk!”

“Prophets are always persecuted.”

Cheon Geon-young stared at the monitor with eyes as dry as a desert.

Oh Gi-cheol, who was sitting next to him, realized that the young man who was skilled at hiding his emotions had reached a limit. He had never seen such an expression on him. It was the face of someone bound to this place by a sense of duty.

After briefly staring at the cover of the document next to him, Cheon Geon-young opened his mouth.

“Let’s start with the criteria for being selected as a test subject.”

“At first, it was conducted on people rescued after being trapped in dungeons. At that time, we hypothesized that when a rift opened, power that couldn’t be explained by this world’s laws seeped into the body, turning people into espers. So, we thought people who stayed in special places like dungeons for a long time might have bodies different from ours, and...”

“But it failed, didn’t it?”

Choi Jae-seong gave a wry smile.

“Let’s say it didn’t achieve great results.”

“Who was targeted next?”

“Dimension travelers. Or their children.”

Cheon Geon-young’s fingers, which were typing, paused for a moment. This was the first time he had heard that his parents were such beings. Neither Chairman Cheon, his parents, nor his uncle had ever mentioned it.

“People who have been to other worlds through gates. Sometimes, there were reports of them transforming into ridiculous beings like mages or spirit callers. So, we thought their children would have a higher chance of becoming Galateas than ordinary Earthlings.”

“Who came up with the hypothesis?”

“Who do you think? The one we all know. Professor Yoon Jeong-hoon was the first to suggest it. He was also the one who initiated the project with his own granddaughter as the core test subject, it was all Professor Yoon...”

“Yoon Tae-ha?”

Cheon Geon-young, who had maintained his composure, interrupted Choi Jae-seong. Choi Jae-seong scratched the tip of his chin with his finger as if to ask if there was a problem.

“Yoon Jeong-hoon’s only direct descendant would be her, wouldn’t it? Is there a problem?”

“You’re saying Yoon Jeong-hoon’s granddaughter was also a test subject in the same project as me?”

“That’s right.”

Oh Gi-cheol pressed his temples with his fingers as if he had a headache. Cheon Geon-young’s thoughts stopped. The moment the hypothesis, which had been on the border of speculation and doubt, became a fact, all he could think was that he wanted to see her.

“It’s unrealistic for a project of that scale to be launched without proof. Yoon Tae-ha is indeed Professor Yoon Jeong-hoon’s descendant. You can tell she’s special just by her ether affinity. Of course, you wouldn’t know that since you don’t have Yoon Tae-ha’s information.”

The dense blue blades covering a wide lake came to Cheon Geon-young’s mind. And the embarrassed smile she wore after he mentioned her high affinity.

Did Yoon Tae-ha know she was the daughter of a dimension traveler? Or did she grow up not knowing, like him? Why did her parents put their daughter through this? Were they like his grandfather, treating their own blood as mere components?

There were moments when she didn’t face things directly. Scenes where he felt something was amiss.

The night she blamed herself for improper guiding while explaining. Yoon Tae-ha had once talked about unverified experiments, saying she didn’t want to die in a lab. Even after discovering she was immune to fire and could even use it directly, Yoon Tae-ha remained silent about her secret.

The heavy voice advising him not to let information about his constitution leak out lingered in his mind. When she received Moon So-eun’s absurd phone call with a pale face, and when she talked about the training where he aggressively pushed her, injuring her right arm...

She wore an expression of an invisible, festering wound.

She had memories that he didn’t. It was a wound from those memories. The connection between them became clear, but Cheon Geon-young couldn’t be happy. This wasn’t how he wanted to feel a sense of kinship.

“Professor Yoon Jeong-hoon was a devoted researcher. Who could throw stones at a scholar who put his own bloodline on the list first?”

He hadn’t taken a child from a woman with no ties and used them as a test subject. The old man who had been kind to Cheon Geon-young was the kind of person who would involve his own granddaughter in such things.

Thinking he was an easier adult to deal with than his grandfather was a foolish mistake. How easy must the world have seemed to Yoon Jeong-hoon, with Cheon Geon-young, who had no memories, in the palm of his hand? Cheon Geon-young wanted to tear up and burn the childhood memories where he had positively evaluated him.

If you had been beyond that gray wall I looked up at with wonder. If, instead of admiring the beautiful blue hydrangeas, I had asked once what lay beyond this wall, would anything have changed? At least, perhaps the time we met could have been brought forward.

He believed that only hatred could be drawn from the past. But now, he found regret in the past. It was the feeling that he should have met her sooner.

“How did Cheon Geon-young get involved in the project?”

Oh Gi-cheol, who had been engrossed in the story, forgetting the heat, couldn’t hold back and interjected.

“I understand Professor Yoon Jeong-hoon personally sought out Chairman Cheon Seong-beom. He had heard information that there was a descendant of a dimension traveler among Chairman Cheon’s grandchildren.”

“How did Yoon Jeong-hoon acquire that information?”

“He wouldn’t tell me that much. I only received the information necessary for the research.”

“Damn it,” Oh Gi-cheol muttered, spitting out the words.