"Your son Kang Min-ho has come to report, General!"
After these words, Min-ho counted to three in his head and stepped forward, already knowing a response would come from inside, but a second later he had to stop. Because the reply he expected did not come.
Based on years of experience, whenever Min-ho came to his father's house to report, exactly three seconds later his father's voice would come from inside and invite him in.
If this report had been about an unexpected hunt, Min-ho would not have reacted to the delay. After all, his father was human too and could have been lying down or in the toilet at that moment. But today was February 1st.
He had not moved faster than usual while climbing the mountain to retrieve the fish. There was definitely a problem.
"General!"
"I am entering!"
"I will enter your private space without authorization in three seconds, General. Please respond!"
That final sentence was a reflection of Min-ho's patience, forged through years of training. Even though he knew something inside was wrong, his training held him back for a few more seconds.
After finishing the countdown, Kang Min-ho did not hesitate and shattered the door with a shoulder charge, throwing himself inside.
When Kang Min-ho saw the flying dust obscure his field of vision, he relaxed his nerves and stepped back outside, placing the hunting axe in his hand beside the fish.
The moment Min-ho broke the door and dust filled the room, he knew that there had been no movement inside this room for a month.
Whatever had happened, there was no longer any point in rushing. He needed to follow his father's teachings and assess the situation calmly.
Once the dust cloud completely settled, Min-ho entered and calmly scanned the room with his eyes.
The way the bedding was folded, the arrangement of the furniture, and the cleaned ashtray all indicated that the General had left the house of his own will and had personally tidied everything before leaving.
When the folded bedding was examined carefully, the duvet cover appeared almost perfect, but upon closer inspection, there were exactly fourteen wrinkles, and these wrinkles spread particularly toward the lower left corner of the folded duvet. More specifically, there were four imperfections in the upper left corner and ten imperfections in the lower left corner.
To an ordinary person, the duvet would look perfectly folded, but to Min-ho's eyes, there were numerous pieces of evidence that this duvet had been folded by his father.
Clearly, the person who folded this duvet was someone obsessive and trained enough to learn how to fold a duvet flawlessly, but for some reason, when raising his left arm above shoulder level, there was a brief irregular movement. Most likely, due to a past injury to the anterior deltoid muscle, the anterior deltoid could no longer reach its maximum extension.
At that moment, Min-ho recalled the small scar on his father's left cheek. Although his father had never spoken about his past, thanks to the forensic training Min-ho had received, he knew that the wound on his father's face was caused by shrapnel and dated back approximately fifteen years.
From the fact that the edges of the wound were not sharp but irregular, and that the burn marks around the wound edges were small, it was easy to tell that it had not been caused by an incendiary bomb.
Fifteen years ago, there were only three possible ways for a military general to suffer a shrapnel injury.
The first was the incident recorded as the ROKS Cheonan case; a South Korean ship being struck by a torpedo and sunk. The problem was that the torpedo hit the ship from below at an angle of 56 degrees, and in the initial explosion, the sections other than the lower hull of the military vessel remained intact. In other words, the upper bridge where general level officers would be located was not directly affected by the explosion.
Even if the powerful vertical energy released by the torpedo explosion had truly shattered the upper bridge, the injuries left on the people on the bridge would have progressed from the feet upward toward the head. Even if the General had luckily left his post at that moment, the shrapnel produced by the explosion of the torpedo with the serial number CHT-02D used in the attack would have caused much sharper scars, and the burn marks caused by frictional energy would have been much larger.
The second possibility was being injured during a missile test along the border line, but that possibility was not realistic at all.
The third possibility was North Korea's bombardment of Yeonpyeong Island. Before the bombardment, the South Korean military was conducting missile tests on that island, so the likelihood of a general being present there was high. The munition used in the bombardment was 122 mm artillery ammunition, which matched the scar.
When Kang Min-ho briefly closed his eyes, a map of his father's skeletal and muscular structure appeared before them. There was another scar similar to the one on his face, located near the armpit. Because of this, when his father raised his arm and it reached shoulder level, a brief irregularity appeared.
Because Kang Min-ho was not someone who talked much, not even the General knew that his son possessed such deductive ability. Without realizing it, Min-ho was keeping a major secret.
At that moment, Min-ho's eyes reached the envelope lying on the table. He calmly opened the envelope and read the note his father had left behind.
The instant he read just the first line, Min-ho felt fear, an emotion he had lost many years ago.
[Dear my son Min-ho
As far as I understand, you will find this letter exactly one month after I write it. Hahaha.
I am not dead; I was invited to work for an organization called the SCP Foundation, so do not worry about me.
But I have one last mission for you, soldier: look through my journal and find information about your mother and your sister there. As far as I know, they should be living in Seoul. Because of that, I asked a friend of mine for a favor to secure you a letter of acceptance so you can enter Seoul National University.
Go there and start living your own life like an ordinary man.
Farewell.
By the way, the acceptance letter is inside my journal]
The handwriting was the General's, but nothing else looked like him.
Kang Min-ho furrowed one eyebrow, tilted his head to the side, and repeated the "hahaha" in a cold voice.
He had not laughed for the past thirteen years, nor had he ever seen his father laugh, so he felt a bit surprised. But when he brought the letter closer to his eyes to examine the handwriting more closely, he looked at the distribution of the ink and became certain that the letter had not been written under pressure. In other words, his father had truly written this.
(Author's note: I think I over detailed the wound analysis. When I looked up, I had already reached a sufficient word count for the chapter. Because of that, I deleted some of the medical terms and evaluations and continued writing the scene. Anyway, thank you for your careful reading.)
(Author's note 2: For about a week now, I increased my daily publishing chapters number from one chapter a day to two chapters a day, but the reader statistics dropped to a terrifying degree. The book's numbers have never fallen this much before. Because my motivation is gone, whenever I look at my computer and want to write the continuation of this chapter, I just feel lazy. I think I'll take a short break, maybe about a week. When I come back, I'll either continue writing, or I'll delete the novel and, after doing some editing, share it on Webnovel as original content. At least, contracted authors get regular promotion opportunities. By the way, there are about eight readers who read the chapters I post every day and make their presence known either by leaving comments at the end of the chapter or by sending power stones. I want to thank them very much, and I also apologize.)