You Have Been Defended [EN]: Chapter 512

“I won’t ask if my guess is right or wrong. Frankly, I kind of hope it’s wrong. If you’ve experienced death once, I can’t even imagine how rotten you must be inside… I introduced you to someone I consider a top psychiatrist, but even they probably haven’t treated someone who’s actually died. How… how do you cope with that? Just thinking about it breaks my heart.”

Kang Min-jae still kept his gaze lowered.

It seemed not because he lacked confidence in what he was saying, but because he didn’t have the courage to look at my bare face beneath the mask, ravaged by death.

“……It must have been hard to hide it, and I think I know why you’d want to hide it, so I don’t want to force it out of you. But the reason I’m saying this is because I want to confirm if you weren’t in the world you originally lived in. That way, I might be able to understand you a little better.”

Kang Min-jae tapped his fingertips together and bit his lip.

He seemed hesitant about how to start.

During his silence, I remained silent as well.

He says he doesn’t want an answer from me, but there’s a way to make things easier by agreeing with him.

But the moment I agree, Kang Min-jae will find it difficult to treat me the same way he used to.

To him, I would become a pitiful being, and it wouldn’t be strange if he felt a strange sense of duty to protect me from mental shock.

Of course, he’ll probably think he’s right even if I don’t answer, but there’s a big difference between receiving confirmation and making a guess.

“If my guess is correct, and you came to this universe right before leaving the prosecution… As I said before, you’ve probably been trying to prevent the trial and error or things that shouldn’t have happened from repeating themselves in this universe. Anyone would do that, or rather, everyone would, and even you wouldn’t be able to resist that temptation. I don’t know which cases you’ve interfered with for that purpose. But you did stop the release of Antrozol Alpha, right?”

“So?”

“Just look at the Antrozol Alpha case. Myung-hwa Pharmaceuticals was delisted because of it, and Lee Jung-chan suffered greatly. Wooshin couldn’t acquire the Geumsan card because of it. So many repercussions. Then, because of the various cases you’ve interfered with, things that didn’t happen in your universe probably started happening to you at some point.”

It was an extremely logical and accurate prediction.

I could tell how fiercely he had been pondering while jokingly asking, ‘You’re an alien, right?’ all this time.

“Moreover, since Wooshin took a big hit from you, they probably recognized you as a bigger threat than in your universe, and you probably started facing huge obstacles one after another. So… from then on, you couldn’t respond to situations with the future information you already knew, and you had no choice but to face them as you did in your universe. So, I think you couldn’t help but become obsessed with preparing more. But in the midst of all that, I had this accident.”

Kang Min-jae paused to drink some water and moisten his throat.

“The reason I’m telling you this, and I’ve been going on and on, is that you seem to be blaming yourself a little too much for things that are generally considered normal, including me and even my grandfather’s situation… Of course, I wasn’t in my right mind when my grandfather died, so I couldn’t gauge your condition then, so I didn’t know at the time.”

I thought I hadn’t shown anyone that I felt guilty about Kang Kwan-woong’s death.

I wondered what caused my seizure, and I guessed that it was because I tried so hard to hide it at the time that it burst out and led to the seizure.

But listening to Kang Min-jae, it seemed I hadn’t hidden it very well.

“Of course, at first, I thought it was just an extension of a general obsession with preparing for all possible misfortunes. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that wasn’t the case. Because, when I think about how the current team… I’m calling them the team for convenience, but you know who I’m talking about, right?”

“I know.”

“When I think about how this team came together, you really didn’t want to include me. And you didn’t even know who my grandfather was. In fact, almost everyone who should know knew. So, I wondered if my presence was quite insignificant to you in that universe. Lee Ye-jin told me that you even forgot I was your intern.”

“……I didn’t expect Lee to tell you that. That’s true.”

To explain a little, it’s not because Kang Min-jae was an insignificant intern.

When I consider my memories at the time, he was my intern more than 10 years ago.

And the internship period is only one month.

Above all, I’ve had many interns over the years.

So, I can’t remember if I haven’t run into them since then.

I didn’t show my face at alumni associations or other private organizations, so I couldn’t meet them in private settings either.

“Anyway, the fact that you succeeded in remembering that I was an intern means that I existed in that universe. I don’t know what kind of guy I was in that universe, but if I was the same guy as I am now… Well, if you had stayed in the prosecution, I don’t think we would have had any contact. I rushed to you as soon as I heard that you had opened your own office, but if you had stayed in the prosecution, I wouldn’t have been able to approach you so easily. Even if I were in the prosecution, I couldn’t go to the same department as you, and once we were assigned, we’d be completely separated, so I quit because I didn’t know when I’d ever meet you. Of course, I would have tried to meet you in private, but you don’t come out to private gatherings… I would have just secretly watched your trials and liked you on my own. Ah, I might have tried to talk to you after the trial, but you would have ignored me. Or you would have said, ‘Who were you again?’”

Kang Min-jae scratched his cheek.

I’m curious about how Kang Min-jae lived in my previous life, but I didn’t have anyone to ask, so I just speculated.

It seems Kang Min-jae thought about it in a similar way to me.

“Anyway… So, from your perspective, I’m probably a guy who would have been loafing around Taekwang, but suddenly met you, lost my grandfather, and had an accident. Ah, the reason I thought my grandfather might not have passed away in that universe is because if he had, the fact that I’m his grandson would have been a bit of a rumor. Sorry if he did pass away.”

Kang Kwan-woong did die in my previous life.

But it wasn’t in the same way as in this life.

He lived a long life, and from the perspective of the bereaved family, there’s no such thing as a good death, but everyone said it was as close to a good death as it could be.

So, Kang Min-jae wasn’t the protagonist of a tragedy, and of course, he didn’t become famous.

Even if he had become famous without my knowledge, I wouldn’t have had the 余裕 [leeway/capacity] to pay attention to a former president who had lived a long life and died, and with whom I had no personal connection, so I wouldn’t have known anyway.

“When I thought about all that, I predicted that your thought process would have been, ‘Kang Min-jae experienced too many tragedies because he met me.’ And I thought that guilt must have grown very large during this accident.”

Having finished speaking, Kang Min-jae finally glanced at me.

I affirmed by not answering.

But conversely, I hoped he wouldn’t take this as an affirmation.

I couldn’t help but affirm because of my conscience, which didn’t want to lie, and the checkmate situation where I couldn’t refute his logic, but if possible, I wanted to say no.

“But even if all of this is true, I don’t think you did anything wrong. Not just me, but everyone.”

“Are you trying to comfort me by bringing this up?”

I was dumbfounded.

Of course, I didn’t think Kang Min-jae brought it up to blame me, saying, ‘Why did you drag me in and change my life when I was living well?’

But I guessed that he was speaking to satisfy his curiosity, or to inform me of his questions and ease his mind.

But conversely, he’s saying these things for me?

“……Comfort? Should I call it comfort? I just thought you were missing something, so I brought it up. I thought you might feel a little better if you knew what you were missing……”

“What am I missing?”

“You told me that time, if you knew your grandfather was going to die and couldn’t stop it, that’s wrong, but what’s wrong with me, who didn’t know anything? So, you mean you think it’s wrong to know but not be able to stop it.”

That’s right.

As I readily nodded, Kang Min-jae replied as if he had been waiting.

“But you can’t say it’s wrong even if you know. Because you only know, you don’t have the superpower to prevent it from happening. Like being able to change the thought process of those involved in the incident, or hypnotize them so they can’t even think about it, or something like that.”

I can’t hypnotize, but I do have superpowers.

As I didn’t answer, Kang Min-jae widened his eyes and asked.

“……Do you have superpowers?”

“No.”

I didn’t want to lie, but I really couldn’t say this.

This is not because of my greed, but for the sake of the relationship between Kang Min-jae and me.

How many people can live saying only the truth in every moment?

Kang Min-jae might not even want to open his mouth in front of me, so I’m never going to say this.

“Exactly. And if the future has changed as I said before, then you’ve ended up being the same as everyone else. Of course, you’ll have a little more information than other people. But at least for events that didn’t happen in your universe, you’re the same. You’ve become someone who’s experiencing this event for the first time, just like everyone else. You don’t have any ridiculous superpowers, and you don’t have super strength. But how can you prepare for that in advance? You’re still human, right? Maybe you’re not a god……are you?”

Kang Min-jae asked cautiously.

If I were a god, Go Sang-jun and all the guys who made a significant contribution to his kingdom’s construction would have ruined their lives long ago.

Is that all?

The moment Kang Min-jae ran into the dump truck, I would have stopped time, or used super strength to fly the dump truck far away.

Above all, my mental health wouldn’t have hit rock bottom like this.

“I wish I were a god.”

“Exactly. You, me, Bong-joon, Jong-hyun, we’re all the same humans. But we don’t think you have to prepare for everything like you do. Of course, it would be great if we could, but we know we can’t. So, if something happens because we didn’t prepare, we just… just give up once. It’s a light setback. We just do a moderate level of reflection, thinking we should think a little more deeply next time. But your setbacks and reflections aren’t light or moderate. That means you’re carrying an unreasonably large burden, just because you have a lot of information you encountered in that universe.”

I didn’t think the burden I was carrying was small.

But I never thought it was too much either.

Because from the moment we, a mere collection of a few individuals, decided to bring down the old and huge evil that is Wooshin, I thought it was natural to bear a large burden.

And even if this collection thinks of me as their representative, it’s only natural that I, as the representative, will have more to bear.

So, I didn’t think this was a burden I didn’t have to bear.

“Preparing for everything is impossible at the human level in the first place. That goes beyond the realm of preparation and means controlling all possible variables that can act. How can you achieve something that’s impossible in the first place? Let’s say there’s a human who sets a goal to fly in the sky with their bare body right now. That human works hard for years, but in the end, they can’t fly with their bare body. So, they seriously despair, saying they didn’t achieve their goal. Do you think that’s natural?”

“……”

“You, I respect you. Prediction abilities close to the level of a prophet, knowing all the variables, etc… These are, of course, one of the many reasons I respect you. But when I went to your office to ask you to accept me, I didn’t even know you had those abilities. I was just respecting you because you had many admirable qualities, and then I just respected you a little more because that respected person did this and that. The first time I felt respect for you was when I was an intern, and that time would have been the same in both your universe and this universe. You didn’t have any future information then.”

I’m not desperate to be respected by Kang Min-jae.

But listening to him, I felt like I understood a little.

The reason I projected myself onto the case-bound book was because of its specialness.

So, I was unconsciously intoxicated with the special me.

Whether it was a desire for recognition or whatever.

Because I’m special, I thought I should know how to do a little more than others.

“Even if you can’t control all the variables, you’re still an amazing person. It’s amazing that you’ve come this far. Of course, I think it’s natural to reflect on being more careful because you set a goal to successfully complete the special investigation. But it should end there.”

I felt like I had been hit.

The reason I reflected on myself so harshly was because I thought the act of trying to make something imperfect perfect was the cornerstone of development.

I’ve lived that way.

It wasn’t different in my previous life either.

So, even when I eventually failed and died, I thought it was because my efforts were insufficient and I hadn’t made enough progress.

I regretted every careless moment in my previous life and tried not to repeat it this time.

To avoid failure, you must identify all variables and block them from affecting your work.

Isn’t that obvious?

But was that such a foolish idea that it could be compared to someone trying to fly with their bare body?

“The moment you have the desire to control all variables, you’ll feel success like failure. You won’t be satisfied in any situation. You’re the only one who demands that level of perfection from you. You’re our team leader, but we don’t expect that. It’s not that we don’t expect it because you’re not capable of it, but because it’s the same as thinking you can fly with your bare body in the first place. Rather, someone who sets such an unattainable goal is disqualified as a leader. How can I entrust my future to such a fool?”

“……”

“Even if there are other people around us who know future information like you, and even if there are more of them than you think. I don’t think there are many people who can do what you do. You already have enough over power. It’s too much to be greedy for super power. The future has changed because you changed the world, and you’ve finally come to face the future the same way as everyone else. It’s not because you lack ability. It’s so natural.”

And ridiculously, at this moment, four years after starting this life, I finally realized how bloated my ego had been.

Kang Min-jae was right about everything.

I was trapped in a sense of elitism, thinking that I was a very special human being just because I knew some information about the future.

I ran wild with greed, and as a result, I changed the future I knew.

So now, the perks of my second life have become insignificant.

I’m not as special as I used to be.

But in order to maintain the specialness that is the basis of my elitism, I set a standard that seemed ethical at first glance, that not a single person should be harmed.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s okay for people to be harmed.

But harm is always something you have to accept, and you should be grateful if you’re not harmed, but I took it for granted.

I made the mistake of considering it a failure if there was harm, even if the result was good.

I didn’t even realize that I had a sense of elitism, and I tormented myself over the fall of my specialness, thinking that people should naturally feel sorry and guilty.

It was an expression of greed and arrogance, wanting to achieve something great, but at the same time, not wanting to lose anything.

I wasn’t deceived by my stupid self.

I was just so stupid that I thought I was being deceived.

The very idea that I could prepare for everything was arrogant in the first place.

I just went back in time a little, and I was so proud that I had a superpower that I lived as if I could prepare for everything.

I am a very small being in the face of the vast flow of life, and just a greedy fool struggling not to lose anything.

I was pouring more than 7 parts of alcohol into my Gye-yeongbae [a traditional Korean drinking vessel, implying excessive drinking].