Chapter Title: Regression
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Jeon Yeol had always thought that.
If he could live life over just once, how great that would be.
If that were possible, he'd never live in the gutter again.
But now that he was dead, all those thoughts felt utterly pointless.
To put it plainly, Jeon Yeol had been human trash.
As a child, he'd been born into a fairly wealthy family and grown up without a care in the world.
If he wanted something, he got it. If he felt like doing something, he did it.
He thought that was just how life worked.
But around the time he turned twelve, his family's fortunes suddenly declined.
His father's business had gone bankrupt.
Jeon Yeol was still too young back then to fully grasp what it meant for the family to fall apart.
All he knew was that he could no longer do the things he'd taken for granted, and that was what hurt.
It felt like every privilege he'd enjoyed had been stripped away.
That was when it started.
The moment Jeon Yeol began to go astray.
At home, no matter how much he threw tantrums or acted out, they wouldn't buy him what he wanted anymore.
He couldn't do whatever he pleased, either.
So he had to find money somewhere else—outside the house.
That's how Jeon Yeol started extorting lunch money from his school friends.
The classic shakedown.
He didn't even see it as wrong.
He just felt like he never had enough, so he took what he could.
Any kid who refused to hand it over got beaten.
Before long, Jeon Yeol became a terror to the other children. Eventually, he rose to become the king of the school, lording over everyone.
Even after his family went broke, ruling the roost among the kids felt great.
And the money poured in endlessly.
The kids never snitched to adults about the extortion.
Birds of a feather flock together—Jeon Yeol only hung out with other roughnecks who threw punches just like him.
They stayed quiet out of fear of retaliation.
On the day he started middle school,
Jeon Yeol learned to smoke.
One of his crew, a guy named Chan-ho, got him into it.
The first drag choked him up, making him cough like he'd swallowed wrong.
He wondered why anyone bothered with the stuff.
But he kept at it, and soon enough, it wasn't half bad.
From then on, sneaking smokes at school behind the teachers' backs became a highlight of his day.
He picked up drinking around that time, too.
But it wasn't some friend like Chan-ho tempting him into it.
The upperclassmen from the same middle school dragged the first-year toughs up to the back hills for "initiation," beat them with sticks, and then forced booze on them.
Jeon Yeol drank whatever they shoved at him that first night, and his memory went black.
When he came to, he'd beaten every one of those seniors black and blue.
Second- and third-years alike—he'd half-killed them all.
In his hand was a baseball bat caked in blood.
The same one they'd used to whale on the freshmen asses.
He must've felt wronged by the senseless beating.
Jeon Yeol could hardly believe he'd done all that in a blackout.
But after that, whenever he got blackout drunk, he'd inevitably assault someone.
No one at middle school dared mess with him after.
A freshman taking down all the seniors solo in one night? Of course not.
Truth be told, it wasn't impossible.
Jeon Yeol was way bigger and stronger than kids his age.
He was already pushing 180 cm, with broad shoulders, and superior strength and speed.
He wasn't called "Giant" instead of his name for nothing.
Having the run of the whole school at such a young age made his debauched lifestyle even more thrilling.
The wild girls would scramble to join his drinking parties.
They'd compete fiercely for the seat next to him.
A few drinks in, and they'd start stripping on their own.
Home was hell, but outside was paradise.
For the first time, it felt like he'd reclaimed everything he'd lost.
He graduated middle school and entered high school that way.
High school didn't change much.
Jeon Yeol was still infamous for his fists, and he never let challengers off easy.
He crushed all the upperclassmen and claimed the throne just two months into freshman year.
After that, the seniors steered clear not just of him, but all the first-years.
He reigned supreme.
Then, in the second semester of his freshman year, a major incident blew up.
Jeong Seong-min, the second-year boss who'd always resented him, set up an ambush with a bunch of other toughs to take him down.
Run away?
Not in Jeon Yeol's vocabulary.
It was eighteen against one, but he laid them all out and smashed Jeong Seong-min—the ringleader—over the head with a rock.
Jeong Seong-min ended up a vegetable.
And that was the first red mark on Jeon Yeol's record.
After two years in juvie, he got out and skipped the military for public service instead.
His gig was at a community sports center run by city hall.
Even there, he beat up his seniors and constantly clashed with the staff, racking up disciplinary actions.
His service stretched from the usual twenty-two months to twenty-eight.
Once it ended, he just mooched off home-cooked meals until his little sister So Yeol died.
Around then, a serial killer was terrorizing Chuncheon, targeting only girls in school uniforms.
So Yeol was one of his victims.
Two months after her death, the killer got caught.
No more innocent victims, sure—but that hardly brought comfort to the families.
Jeon Yeol's family felt the same. They could never bring back So Yeol.
His eldest sister Ha Yeol, who doted on their baby sister more than anyone, went half-mad from the trauma.
His parents struggled to bear the poverty and the pain of their broken, deceased children.
Jeon Yeol hated that hellhole of a house and ran off to join a small gang.
Two years later, his father couldn't take the creditors' harassment and killed himself.
Six months after that, his mother succumbed to illness.
Ha Yeol lost it completely and got committed.
What came after...
Was a mess beyond compare.
With nothing left to lose, Jeon Yeol went full throttle.
He stole from others relentlessly and crushed the weak.
Not a single bloodless day.
Four years on,
The first alien invasion hit.
Jeon Yeol's village was obliterated in the attack.
The mental hospital where Ha Yeol was interred burned to the ground.
Humanity's history became one long, brutal war with the aliens.
In that nightmare, all Jeon Yeol managed was scraping by with his worthless life.
That was it.
He'd done nothing for his family.
'Hoo... Damn it.'
He hadn't wanted to die stupidly after a trash life like this.
As Jeon Yeol stewed in pointless regret,
⚙ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ⚙ [... Boot complete. System reactivation.]