As the tense atmosphere finally settled, Ji-hwan pressed his lips together and hesitated for a moment.
What he was about to say was no different from throwing his life away in this merciless Night City.
A grotesque regenerative ability that rejected implants completely while stitching his broken body back together on its own. If the world ever found out, it was obvious that megacorps like Biotechnica, the kind that conducted bioweapon experiments, would try to capture him no matter what astronomical price they had to pay.
For Ji-hwan, with not a single piece of chrome in his body, it was a secret so dangerous he could be sold alive before he could even resist their firepower.
But Ji-hwan silently studied the two people standing before him.
Even if it was ten years in the past, he knew the Aldecaldos family’s fierce loyalty and the way they operated from the countless times he had watched them through a monitor.
More than anything, he wanted to believe in the goodwill of the people who had not mocked his desperate struggle to save the mother and daughter, and who had instead reached out a helping hand.
Unable to explain what he knew of the future, Ji-hwan decided to stake everything on his own instincts. In a low, heavy voice, he carefully spoke so only Saul and Mitch could hear.
"The truth is... my body rejects machines, but... it has the ability to regenerate itself."
At Ji-hwan’s calm confession, Saul and Mitch’s eyes went wide as if they might pop out of their sockets. Only then did they understand that Ji-hwan’s body really had no chrome at all.
"Of course, this ability doesn’t seem free. Weirdly enough, my hunger seems to hit faster whenever I recover... Anyway, that’s why... I needed a secluded place where I could test my body in all kinds of ways."
Ji-hwan shrugged as if it were nothing and continued.
"I wanted to find out how far this regenerative ability can go, how I can make it grow... and if I do it right... maybe I can live in Night City like everyone else, making an honest living without a single piece of chrome."
Saul, still in his worn leather jacket, froze as if struck by lightning, and Mitch was equally speechless.
Then Saul asked in a strained voice, disbelief barely contained.
"Do you even realize what you’re saying? If we sold you to those bastard corpos right now, we’d have enough eddies to live comfortably for the rest of our lives. So what kind of guts do you have to spill a secret like that to strangers you just met? What are you trusting us for?"
At Saul’s sharp question, Ji-hwan scratched the back of his head and answered.
"I just... thought neither of you were bad people."
"What?"
"My instincts just told me that."
At that, Saul and Mitch were left staring at Ji-hwan in silence.
A guy who would bet his life on nothing but a hunch in a lawless place where betrayal was everywhere.
"Hah... damn."
At a loss for words, Mitch scratched his half-shaved head with his rough metal prosthetic and exchanged a look with Saul.
His expression seemed to say, What the hell kind of guy is this?
Saul, too, pressed a hand to his throbbing forehead and let out a long sigh.
A body that couldn’t take even one piece of chrome, the stubborn determination to walk straight into a toxic dump just to test it, and on top of that, a pure, stupid trust that he could stake his life on other people. Saul finally gave up on the strange, unreadable man who had suddenly appeared before them and nodded reluctantly.
"Haa... fine. I get it. If you’re really that set on it, I won’t stop you anymore."
"Thank you. Then please tell me where that place is."
Ji-hwan gave Saul and Mitch a light bow, then headed straight for the scrapyard in the direction Saul had pointed out.
Yes. Let’s see exactly how far my ability can go in the middle of this garbage heap.
No matter how badly his bones, muscles, and organs were destroyed, if he pushed himself to the brink of death, his body would inevitably regenerate into an evolved form. Then there was only one answer.
From that day on, Ji-hwan went out to the wasteland of contaminated land on the outskirts of the Aldecaldos camp and started running like a madman.
When he finally arrived, his eyes were fixed on the middle of a desolate, reeking scrapyard in the Badlands.
It was a land of death, where all kinds of chemicals and toxic waste illegally dumped by corporations had piled up into mountains, belching out a yellowish miasma visible to the naked eye.
Ji-hwan hesitated for a moment, then roughly tore off the old dust mask covering the lower half of his face.
Then he drew a deep breath of that maximally polluted, poisonous air.
"Hup...!"
In an instant, Ji-hwan’s eyes bulged as if they might burst.
"Kuhk!! Cough! Ugh...!!"
The moment he inhaled, his airway clamped shut, and pain from the toxic air—so deadly and destructive it couldn’t even be compared to the CS gas training he’d gone through in the military—rushed up from deep inside his lungs.
"Uwaaek-!!"
Ji-hwan collapsed on the spot and coughed up a handful of bright red blood. Tears welled in his eyes from the horrific pain, as if his esophagus and alveoli were melting away.
What the hell... I had no idea the air outside was this badly polluted.
As Ji-hwan kept hacking up blood-tinged coughs, he thought of the Aldecaldos camp only a few kilometers away.
If the wind changed and this horrible poison drifted that way, it would be a disaster.
The camp where Saul and Mitch were staying... I should move them somewhere safer as soon as I can, even if it’s later.
Breathing hard, Ji-hwan roughly wiped the blood from his mouth with trembling fingers.
His lungs were screaming as the poison burned them from the inside, but in his eyes there was no surrender—only a beastlike stubbornness.
There was no way I could install an artificial lung like those guys. Then... I’ll just have to force my organic lungs to adapt to this damn air.
He grabbed the rope again and got back up.
Without putting the mask back on, he faced the poison gas head-on and silently started dragging the tire while running.
"Ghh... Hah...!"
The more he ran, the more the toxic air tore at his lungs, crushing his chest with a pressure that went beyond his limits. Every breath dragged blood back up through his esophagus and filled his mouth with a metallic taste.
But Ji-hwan never stopped moving.
Whenever his lungs reached the point where they were so full of blood he could no longer breathe, Ji-hwan would drop to the ground like a beast and violently vomit up a bright red clot.
"Kuhk! Cough... hack!!"
As he lay there, soaking the ground in blood and gasping, a bizarre change began to take place in Ji-hwan’s body.
Sssss
A faint red steam rose from his body. The survival instinct of a life pushed to the edge forcibly awakened his regenerative ability, stubbornly stitching back together lungs that had truly been melted by the toxic substances.
As Ji-hwan panted harshly, he could feel that every time the recovery finished, breathing became just a little easier than before. It was obvious his lung cells were repeatedly being destroyed and rebuilt, developing resistance and evolving to overcome the poisonous environment.
I was right. This insane method... wasn’t wrong!
The moment the recovery ended, Ji-hwan grabbed the rope again and ran forward.
When he couldn’t breathe, he coughed up blood; when he recovered in a haze of red steam, he ran like a madman again.
That self-destructive training continued all day in the middle of the scrapyard. By the time the sun began to set and darkness fell, Ji-hwan’s broad upper body and face were already completely smeared with the dark red blood he had been vomiting up over and over.
When he returned to camp, the Aldecaldos people who saw his condition were horrified and covered their mouths.
He looked like a demon, his whole body drenched in red blood. But Ji-hwan ignored their shocked stares and wordlessly walked into the tent assigned to him.
Exhaustion and the massive drain on his energy sent a hunger through him so intense it felt like his entire stomach was twisting inside out.
Ji-hwan staggered over to the table and picked up the ration bar Saul had given him that morning for training.
It was a dry lump packed with insect protein and cheap synthetic meat.
He tore open the wrapper and shoved it into his mouth. The disgusting texture and fishy taste hit him like he was chewing sawdust or cardboard.
"... Haa, this tastes like complete shit..."
Frowning hard, Ji-hwan grumbled as he forced himself to swallow the paper-tasting energy bar, all to refuel his body.
The moment the last bite went down his throat, the tension left him and a wave of sleepiness close to unconsciousness crashed over him. Still wearing his blood-soaked outer layer, Ji-hwan collapsed onto the old cot like a fallen tree and passed out.
And so the first day of that brutal training, where he melted his own lungs down to break past his limits, came to an end. After that, the days passed, and for a full week he spent every day vomiting blood dozens, even hundreds of times, before collapsing.
Surprisingly, by the time a week had passed, Ji-hwan’s lungs no longer spilled blood.
To confirm it, he spent the whole day running at his limit with the heavy tire strapped to him, and all that leaked between his lips was a little blood mixed with a shallow cough.
His body had finally adapted to that vicious chemical waste and poisonous smoke.
His internal organs, which had been repeatedly destroyed and restored while venting red steam, had at last overcome the Badlands’ poison and evolved to fit the new environment.
Now somewhat accustomed to the poison, Ji-hwan stopped in the middle of the sinking sand and stood still.
Then, with his bare face and not even the old dust mask on, he drew the contaminated air deep into his lungs once more and quietly closed his eyes.
A week.
For some, it might have been a short span of time, but for Ji-hwan, who had to endure the searing pain of flesh melting and blood pouring out with every breath, it was a hell that felt like eternity.
Honestly, there had been countless moments when he wanted to throw down the taut rope and collapse into the sand right then and there.
But whenever he felt like his mind was breaking under the pain of suffocation and torn muscles, Ji-hwan remembered.
The helplessness and fear of death he had felt when he’d fallen straight from the sky into the filth of Night City without even knowing why.
The utter shame and humiliation he’d felt in front of those Raffen Shiv bastards, who treated him like cargo and shoved him into the trunk of a cramped, stinking armored truck like a dog or livestock headed for slaughter.
And the empty, dull eyes of the people inside that camp with no light at all, who had already lost every last shred of hope and were simply waiting for death.
In the midst of that horrific, irrational malice and violence, what had ultimately kept Ji-hwan’s sanity intact was warmth—warmth from people.
Girl Amy and her mother Rachel, who had reached out their small, trembling hands through that fear and handed him rebar to help him. What had kept him from giving up in that helplessness was the fragile but stubborn warmth of people who banded together to protect others even in that blood-soaked hell.
I have to get stronger.
Ji-hwan’s tightly shut eyes snapped open, and a colder, fiercer light than ever before burned in them.
If that kind of desperate situation ever came again, he would never again rely helplessly on someone else’s sacrifice or a lucky break.
He would forge this cursed body, with not a single piece of chrome in it, into something tougher and more savage than steel, and this time he would tear apart that irrational malice himself and protect them completely.
"Hoo..."
Ji-hwan spat out the last of the thin, fishy blood in his mouth, tightened his grip on the slack rope once more, and silently started running back toward the barren wasteland.
Where Ji-hwan headed, now fully adapted to the poison, was the front of a massive wall made of tangled concrete ruins and solid rock standing tall in one corner of the scrapyard.
This time, Ji-hwan was hesitating deeply over something.
Unlike forcing his lungs to adapt to poisonous air, this time he would have to inflict pain that was nearly self-mutilation entirely on himself.
"Hoo..."
Letting out a long breath, Ji-hwan bit down on his blood-caked lip and muttered,
"Yeah, let’s do it... I’ve held on this far."
Steeling himself, Ji-hwan squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, clenching his fist with a beastlike shout.
Then he threw a full-force bare-knuckle punch at the solid rock wall and smashed it down with a thunderous impact.
Kwaang!! Crack!
The collision between hard rock and fragile human bone sent a chilling rupture echoing through the scrapyard as the bones in Ji-hwan’s fist shattered alive.
"Gghh...!!"
Ji-hwan dropped to one knee, clutching his shattered hand and gasping through the pain.
The moment a thin red steam began rising like a mirage from between the broken knuckle pieces, Ji-hwan gritted his teeth and stood again.
Thud!Kraack!!
"Aaaagh!!"
Even while screaming, Ji-hwan kept smashing the rock wall again and again with his broken fist.
When his fist was completely reduced to pulp, he clenched his teeth and lifted his leg, mercilessly kicking the wall with his shin instead.
With a sharp crack, the leg bone snapped and rolled to the ground, but once the red haze stitched it back together, he got up and kicked the wall again.
And so Ji-hwan kept using the wall as a sandbag for that horrific training, deliberately breaking and regenerating his own bones.
It was a way to constantly destroy and rebuild his organic bones and muscles, pushing their density beyond the limit so he could fight monsters harder than steel with nothing but his bare body.
How many times had his bones broken and been stitched back together in a single day?
Before long, Ji-hwan had become a shura haunting the rock wall, completely forgetting even to return to camp.
Whenever his body hit its limit and he seemed ready to collapse, he stuffed one of Saul’s paper-tasting Easy Beef energy bars made from cricket insect protein into his mouth.
"This really tastes like shit..."
He grumbled, refueled, then collapsed into the dirt and fell asleep. When he woke up, he went right back to using the wall as a sandbag, trying every kind of strike he knew as he continued that insane training.
Meanwhile, on a sand dune far away overlooking the desolate scrapyard, Panam’s eyes went wide as if they might burst when she witnessed the bizarre phenomenon happening to Ji-hwan’s body through binoculars.
From Ji-hwan’s leg and crushed fist, which had just been smashed apart by kicking the rock wall, thick crimson steam was rising like a haze, and the bones were being stitched together in real time.
At that shocking sight, Mitch Anderson, lying beside her, nodded.
"Yeah..."
Then Mitch lowered his voice and added in a heavy warning to Panam and Scorpion.
"Saul and I made a promise to that guy. What he can do with that ability is never to be leaked outside our family. If the corpos ever got wind that a pure flesh-and-blood body with no chrome could do that, he’d be dragged off to a biolab alive in no time."
At Mitch’s serious warning, Panam hugged her arms tighter inside her red leather jacket and pouted, offended.
"Tch. Who do you think you’re talking to? You think I’d do some rat-like crap like that? Who’s gonna snitch?"
True to her nature, hating corporate rules and valuing nomad loyalty above all else, she snapped back, irritated at being suspected of selling out a comrade’s secret.
At Panam’s sulky grumbling, Mitch’s previously stiff expression loosened and he let out a snort of laughter.
Scratching his half-bald head with his bare hand instead of his rough metal prosthetic, he answered with easy charm, like he was soothing a pouting little cousin.
"Yeah, yeah. I know. Our hot-tempered lady’s got loyalty for days."
"Ugh, the way you talk. Makes me want to punch you."
Panam snorted in exasperation and muttered, but her youthful face already held something more than caution now—a strange sense of kinship and alliance directed at Ji-hwan.
As the light bickering died down, the three of them turned their attention back to the scrapyard below, where poisonous smoke drifted through the air.
Far away in the middle of the barren wasteland, Ji-hwan was still smashing and kicking the rock wall without pause, mercilessly destroying his own body.
Crack!Thud!
He broke, tore, and bled, only to immediately stitch himself back together in a haze of red steam.
In this horrific Night City where everyone else bought steel strength and bullet-dodging reflexes with money, this was the insane path chosen by a man completely denied the benefits of machines. It was a brutal, self-destructive training method that forced his body to the edge of death just to awaken its survival instinct.
On the hill, the three of them watched Ji-hwan through binoculars with hard, fixed expressions, and gradually a strange sense of exhaustion began to replace their shock.
Crack!Thud!
The horrifying sound of flesh and bone being crushed against the rock wall rang vividly through the smoke and all the way up to the barren hill.
Even to them, that training method didn’t look normal at all. It looked like something only a cyberpsycho’s madness could come up with.
Everyone else paid eddies to lie in a ripperdoc’s chair and get steel skeletons implanted under anesthesia, but that man was swallowing searing pain while fully conscious, constantly destroying and rebuilding his organic bones and muscles to push their density beyond the limit.
"He’s really... one stubborn lunatic."
"At least it’s a good thing he’s not a cyberpsycho."
Panam, in her red leather jacket, hugged her arms tightly and swallowed dryly.
Even the sneering remark she’d made at first about him gnawing off his own flesh had long since vanished.
Scorpion, who usually kept silent, also spoke heavily, his brow wrapped in a brown bandana and his face filled with deep awe.
"That’s not madness. He’s... tempering his bones like steel just to survive."
"Scorpion’s right."
Mitch Anderson nodded, stroking his rough jaw with his metal prosthetic.
"But if he keeps that up, he’ll starve to death before his body ever turns into iron. No wonder Saul got worried after he didn’t come back for days and sent us out."
Ji-hwan’s super-regenerative ability, which forcibly restored his damaged body, inevitably burned through enormous amounts of energy like fuel.
The paper-tasting Easy Beef energy bars he occasionally chewed while resting would be nowhere near enough to sustain that beastlike recovery.
Mitch adjusted the large duffel bag on his back and jerked his chin toward the hill below.
"Let’s go. Training’s fine and all, but first we need to feed the guy properly."
Meanwhile, Ji-hwan, breathing hard in front of the rock wall and waiting for his shattered bones to finish mending in a haze of red steam, noticed the presence of three people stepping through the dust behind him.
When he snapped his head around, he saw Mitch, Scorpion, and Panam—the Aldecaldos family—standing there.
"...You guys?"
Ji-hwan asked in surprise, his face caked with dried blood. Mitch walked over with his usual easy grin and dropped the heavy duffel bag at Ji-hwan’s feet.
"Saul was worried sick, so we came to check on you, and here you are, beating the hell out of yourself, breaking your own bones and all. Here’s the ‘food’ and water Saul packed for you. Eat something before you keep going."
Ji-hwan’s pupils widened slightly.
He had only been indebted to them for a few days, yet they had come all the way out to a poisonous scrapyard because he hadn’t returned for a while and even brought him food. Their tight-knit loyalty hit him hard in the chest.
Panam seemed to feel awkward at Ji-hwan’s dazed, moved expression, so she huffed and snapped at him with a pout.
"Hmph! Don’t get the wrong idea. You think I came because I was worried you’d starve to death? I didn’t want to come to this stinking dump, but Saul kept nagging me to go, so I had no choice but to run the errand!"
At the transparent tsundere-like concern hidden in her grumpy, rough complaint, Mitch and Scorpion both let out helpless snorts of laughter.
Ji-hwan, despite the awful pain stabbing through every bone in his body, also lifted his blood-smeared lips and gave a small, pointless grin.
"...Thanks. I really was about to starve to death, honestly."
In this dreadful gray Night City, they were the only people who could share body heat, the only family that truly felt human. Staggering forward, Ji-hwan took the water and food from the duffel bag.
After filling his empty stomach with the solid food and water Mitch’s group had brought, Ji-hwan turned back toward the massive concrete rock wall, silently carrying the rough but warm support of their encouragement behind him.
And then several more days slipped by without mercy.
"Kraaaah-!!"
Crack!Thud!
At first, every time he struck the rock, Ji-hwan’s fragile bones shattered and collapsed.
But at some point during that endless, self-destructive training of breaking and regenerating his own bones without pause, the terrible impact sound echoing through the scrapyard had changed strangely.
Kwaang!! Clang!!
It was no longer the sound of human bones being crushed.
It was a heavy, chilling impact, like a solid iron hammer colliding head-on with a massive boulder.
When Ji-hwan, having struck the rock wall with all his strength, drew back his fist while breathing hard, blood still dripped from the torn skin on his hand—but his eyes were shining.
"It didn’t break."
Just as he said. For a normal human, that impact would have reduced the bones to powder, but Ji-hwan’s fist bones and shin bones, buried beneath blood-soaked muscle fibers, were intact without even a single crack.
This was no longer just a super-regenerative ability that restored a broken body to its original state.
It was the result of [Evolution], a body awakened to its extreme survival instinct during the process of restoring its skeleton, compressing the density of its bones beyond the limit.
How many days had he spent striking rock with his fists? At some point, Ji-hwan realized his field of vision had clearly risen.
Back when he lived an ordinary life in 21st-century Korea, he had been around 170 centimeters tall.
But even without measuring it exactly with a tape, things were different now. His build and skeleton had broadened and hardened beyond comparison, making him look easily over 175 centimeters tall.
Ji-hwan clenched and unclenched his blood-crusted fist and moved on to the next stage immediately.
To support this enlarged frame and produce real destructive power, he had to tear down and rebuild the muscles all over his body to their limit.
He dug through the trash mountains and dragged out heavy scrap metal.
The first was an industrial washing machine. Ji-hwan lowered his center of gravity and pushed it across the sand, and his whole body’s muscles took the load. But before long, his body adapted to the strain.
Without hesitation, he kicked the washing machine aside and kept raising the difficulty.
He moved on to a container packed with scrap, and then stood before a heavy sedan with its wheels buried in the sand.
The mass of the sedan, whose engine and body had both been turned to scrap, was overwhelming, but Ji-hwan pressed both hands against the rear of the chassis without a moment’s hesitation.
"Hup-!"
Kreeeeek
With a shout, he exploded the muscles throughout his body. Slowly, the motionless sedan began to slide forward.
At the same time, the muscle fibers in his back and thighs couldn’t withstand the load and began tearing apart with sharp pops, blood bursting through his skin in several places.
But Ji-hwan’s steps never stopped.
After that, muscle rupture and regeneration repeated endlessly until he collapsed.
And so, several more weeks passed.
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