episode_0021

At that age, there were times when children rebelled against the principal or threw tantrums.

However, if anyone was disciplined even once in the witch hag’s ‘punishment room’, they would become as obedient as a docile lamb.

It wasn’t a punishment cell with any grand facilities. It was just a small bathroom about 6.5 square meters.

However, the door was slightly modified to lock from the outside, so it was a terrible place for children of that age to be locked in until the witch got them out.

It is more painful than you might think to spend a day or more in a dark, small, closed room, without a single spoonful of food, relying on the very slightest light seeping in through the cracks of a closed door.

Some children suffered from claustrophobia and depression.

The girl had also been put in the witch hag’s punishment room. Up to five days.

Even if it was just for a day, I lost all sense of time and became plagued by the fear that something would jump out of the constant darkness.

On the second day, I had hard, lumpy stools that didn’t stick as if I was constipated, and the smell was really bad.

On the third day, I started to suffer from auditory and visual hallucinations. I would chew my fingernails and pull out my hair because I was so hungry. I would see visions of food in front of me, and when I reached out to it, it would suddenly change shape and a bloody ghost would come at me, laughing.

On the fourth day, I started having diarrhea. I had not eaten anything, but my stomach hurt continuously. My body was losing water, but no salt was coming in, so I became dehydrated.

By the fifth day… I wanted to just sleep forever.

As this situation repeated itself, there were no children left who could rebel against the orphanage director.

There were many times when there was no particular reason for the witch hag’s corporal punishment. She would just catch people’s eye, or she would not like it, so she would strike them, and when she could not endure the corporal punishment and developed a ‘broken leather bag’, she would quietly disappear.

The oldest child in the orphanage, the ‘son of a bitch’, said that the missing children were buried in the mountain behind the orphanage. He said that he would run away from here and that he would be happy if he left this place, but he disappeared on the second day.

I couldn’t tell if he had really run away from here or if he was in the back mountain.

The ‘idiot’ who had been following him around was dragged away by the witch while crying. He hasn’t been seen since.

As this kind of life repeated itself, the girl suddenly became curious.

‘What am I living for?’

‘If I keep working like this and being punished by the witch hag, will I disappear too?’

When these thoughts kept coming back to me, I suddenly felt so sad that I felt like the world would fall apart.

I hated the witch hag, and I resented my parents who gave birth to me, even though I didn’t know their faces.

‘If I could just disappear, wouldn’t I have to think like this anymore?’

I would fall asleep every night with that thought in my mind.

Then one day, in the early morning of winter.

The girl suddenly woke up. It wasn’t because she had any urge to go to the bathroom, nor was it because of the old woman’s cough. It was as if something was calling her.

As I tiptoed outside, trying to avoid being caught, I saw a black plastic bag thrown away beyond the orphanage’s painted green bars.

Suddenly, the bag rustled and moved on its own. The girl was startled at first, but then she was embarrassed by the little hands and feet sticking out of it and wriggling around.

As I approached stealthily, I saw that there was a baby inside the bag.

The baby was still alive. The gap between the bars was wide enough that even a skinny person like me could have squeezed through up to my shoulder.

‘Please don’t let the witch hag catch you!’

The Witch Hag certainly wouldn’t want another orphaned child, but the girl didn’t want to leave this baby she had found to die.

It was the first time since the punishment room that the girl rebelled against the director.

The girl carefully placed her index finger on the handle of the bag and pulled it towards her. She carefully moved the child away from the iron bars so that he would not brush against them, and finally held him in her arms.

During this series of actions, the child did not cry even once.

At that moment, my heart sank and I shook the baby gently. Slowly, the baby opened its eyes, looked at the girl, and let out a babble that sounded like laughter.

The baby was so small that it could fit into the arms of a girl who was so skinny from not eating properly.

Perhaps if the girl hadn’t woken up,

If your baby suddenly starts crying,

If the witch hadn’t let go of her guard at the orphanage for a moment,

The life of the abandoned baby, whose blood had not even been wiped off, would have lasted until morning at best.

‘Could it be that I was alive for this encounter?’

The girl and the child met by a series of coincidences that made them think that way without realizing it.

In that fateful encounter, the girl felt an indescribable thrill from the baby’s gestures and footsteps touching her face.

The next day, the director beat the ‘bitch’ up badly.

The reason was that the poor girl had been needlessly eating more mouths. In front of everyone holding their breath, the girl rolled around on the ground several times.

My limbs were swollen, my nose was broken, and I had difficulty breathing. My heart was pounding in my ears, and blood was entering my eyes, making half of my vision red. When I breathed in, I heard a strange, hee-hee-like sound.

It seemed as if the witch would make the girl disappear at any moment.

The girl crouched down.

‘Am I going to die like this? Am I going to just disappear and leave my child behind?’

At that moment, the baby who had been holding her breath cried loudly. For a moment, a halo of light appeared from the baby that was visible to the eye, and the surprised grandmother stopped her hands for a moment.

And, as if resonating with the child’s cries, a halo of light appeared from the girl. The girl was bewildered by her first awakening. However, soon, a [status window] naturally appeared in her head, and she realized that it was [mana manifestation].

The girl’s mana and the baby’s mana met and blended together as if they were mixing with each other.

“Awakened? Even two?”

The old hag muttered. Those, no, a little more, this is quite, finally my chance, the old woman who had been babbling incomprehensibly transformed in an instant.

“Are you in a lot of pain? Just wait a moment. I’ll call a doctor.”

The girl’s attitude towards the ‘bitch’ had changed drastically. It was as if she had become the most caring grandmother in the world.

The director picked up the girl and the baby and rushed to the hospital.

After that, the girl’s life changed completely.

The girl no longer had to go out looking for cans, scrap metal, or scrap paper like other children. She stopped knitting.

The director always greeted the girl with a smile.

He even went as far as to get a baby bottle and a container of formula milk from somewhere and handed them over to the girl, leaving her with some earnest requests to take good care of the baby. He even packed her various parenting books.

“I’m a little busy, so you take care of the baby.”

And the director would make phone calls here and there, laughing out loud, and occasionally glancing at the girl and the baby with a kind smile.

It was a completely unexpected situation.

With a mixture of bewilderment and relief, the girl gave the baby a bottle.

‘It’s okay, it’ll be okay.’

Raising a baby wasn’t easy for the girl either. She had to be fed often, put to bed often, and checked on often.

‘We will be happy.’

It was hard, but the girl persevered. Just watching the baby grow up made her smile.

Time passed. The director became frighteningly gentle. Although life didn’t change, the number of times he hit the children decreased significantly, and the number of children disappearing disappeared.

The girl and the child grew up well, and the child always followed the girl around, calling her older sister.

And then one day, when the girl’s secondary sexual characteristics began to appear and she began menstruating.

A strange man came to the orphanage.

The director met him barefoot and introduced the girl and the child to him.

“Okay, say hello. I’ll be seeing you often from now on.”

“Oh, hello. You guys are really cute.”

The strange middle-aged man smiled brightly and patted the girl and the child on the head.

“He said he would adopt you.”

“Please take good care of me in the future, my lovely little ladies.”

Somehow, I felt like those eyes were evaluating a pet, not a person.

Occasionally, the old woman would cast a suspicious glance at the grown girl and the child… the girl’s younger brother.

A plausible example would be the look of someone looking proudly at their savings account.

A look of anticipation as the piggy bank’s belly is cut open.

The girl noticed the reason for the gaze.

… had to run away.

cry.

The sound of something breaking.

The wretched hag’s shriek.

Lights turn on here and there in the orphanage, and cries spread for the girl and her younger sibling.

A man’s angry roar.

The girl woke up her sleeping younger brother with an innocent face, grabbed his hand, and ran. Using her mana, she ran with all her might. She didn’t look back.

Looking back, it seemed as if the witch’s claw-like hands were about to strangle my neck.

I ran and ran again.

The girl, holding her hands together so they wouldn’t part, walked with her younger brother through the dark streets of the night.

My heart felt like it was going to burst, and the dark alley without a single streetlight reminded me of a punishment cell.

The road was so dark and scary that they couldn’t see even an inch ahead of them, but the two children, who had no name and no possessions, just ran away.

‘I’m going to live.’

‘You and I will live happily ever after.’

At least the countless stars floating in the night sky served as landmarks.

‘Let’s name [our] after that night sky. You are the [galaxy] where the stars shine in that sky, and I am the [universe] that embraces my younger sister because I am the older sister.’

‘[We], let’s be happy.’