Chapter 2 — The Fire-Wielding Yokai (5)

The man was an unhappy man.

He could read every heart, yet he never spoke aloud what he learned that way; he ached at others’ wounds as though they were his own, and labored to fill in whatever they lacked.

He was gifted in many things, and what was more, he excelled in every field.

Which meant there were a great many matters he could set right.

Which also meant there were a great many bonds he was obliged to shoulder.

Everyone who came near him came, in the end, to smile; yet the shadows they had carried did not vanish. They lingered, and settled into the man’s own heart.

There must plainly have come a moment after which he could no longer stop himself, no matter how he willed it.

To him all were the same, and so he could draw no distinction. The only one who differed in any way was himself, the one who would try to repay his guilt for peeking into hearts by piling up good works.

The man’s whole life was the work of prettily disguising an empty love and parceling it out to all the world, and many clung to him, charmed of their own accord by a love contrived from glimpses of their hearts in place of any true understanding of them.

That this was not good karma but rather a kind of sin-karma.

That all those many meetings.

That the love he had poured out as though it would last forever, knowing all the while that parting would come, had become bonds that could not be cut, and had bound him to more souls than he could carry.

The man realized this only very much later.

“— My lord, my lord! Are you coming to yourself?!”

— Mi-aeong!

At the voices calling him with such anxiety, Shin Hweein slowly opened his eyes.

A heartbeat before he collapsed, having loosed every last drop of his spiritual power, he had felt death close upon him.
And yet not only was he thoroughly alive, his body seemed in no such terrible condition either.

He had truly come back.

The fact of it stirred him beyond anything he had imagined, and for a little while Shin Hweein only sat there, motionless, drawing one deep breath after another.

— If you’re awake, then get off me already. You’re heavy.

A surly voice, quite distinct from the one that had been calling to him, rang in his ear.

The aftershock of his runaway cast was still in him, his whole body aching.
In honest truth, that this much was the extent of it astonished him; and yet the pain still in his flesh confirmed afresh that everything he had been through was no phantom, and Shin Hweein raised himself up.

The sensation was not of lifting himself from the ground but from a soft pillow.
He turned to look behind him, and what he had been resting his head against was the belly of a black dog.

“…”

— What. What is it. What.

This was plainly the very flame-hound that had been fighting him to the death only moments before, so how had this creature become a pillow for his collapsed self?

That its strength and even its bulk had shrunk after a battle of that severity, that much he could somehow make himself accept.

But what he could not accept was the firm and definite connection he could feel between himself and the creature.

Rotten or not, he was a true-born heir of the Shin House, and his schooling in the shikigami arts had been thorough enough that he knew exactly what he was sensing.

He had fought the flame-hound, lost consciousness, and woken to find the creature his shikigami.

He doubted anyone could make sense of such a sentence on hearing it, and he himself, for the life of him, could not understand what had been done to him.

“My lord, thank the heavens you are safe! This maiden truly thought you were lost to us…!”

But before he could press the flame-hound for the reason of it, the voice that had woken him, Hoa, flung herself at him, breaking off the strange standoff between the man and the dog-yokai.

For all that he remembered her being knocked about a fair bit in the battle with the flame-hound, she looked nearly as immaculate as when he had first met her.
The one difference was that she was still wrapped in the coat he had handed her earlier.

— That loathsome wench—! Yelp!

The flame-hound had begun to grumble something, and Hoa, to his astonishment, kicked it; then she leaned in toward Shin Hweein, her eyes shining.

“Your body seems much eased. The moment the fighting ended, the myodusa came tearing over and licked you head to foot. It seems the little one has taken to you greatly.”

— Meow.

“Goodness. I owe you yet again.”

At the sight of the smiling Hoa, and the little yokai’s face nestled in her arms, Shin Hweein felt something curiously stirred in him.
He had thought human and yokai alike treated him with the same scorn, and yet now that he considered it, here were two who had been kindly disposed toward him from the very first.

…Just like that one.

— Myao!

“You have done me a kindness. The healing this time must have been a great labor for you.”

Shin Hweein bent his head a little to meet the myodusa’s eyes, and gave it his thanks.

By no means could he claim to be wholly mended, of course; but with a little more rest and the myodusa’s healing breath, even the after-effects of the cast would clear.
Which was an absurd thing to say, considering Shin Hweein had cast Flame-Made-Flesh fully resolved upon his own death.

Naturally, this could not be the myodusa’s strength alone.

For some reason he could not entirely fathom, the moment he entered the shikigami contract with the flame-hound, more than seven-tenths of the inflammation on his body had vanished, his usable spiritual power had swelled enormously, and his bodily recovery was now racing ahead on that new momentum.

To put it plainly, the burning bird’s curse had been eased further still.

This seemed to have happened because the flame-hound was apparently of its retinue, so that he and Shin Hweein, having entered a contract and become a single fate-bound body, brought the burning bird’s curse into collision with its own will to safeguard its retainer, and the two had cancelled each other in part.

If the flame-hound had known beforehand that things would fall out this way, then to save Shin Hweein’s life it had taken upon itself the colossal disadvantage of sharing in his curse and had offered itself for the contract of its own accord.

Which made the matter very strange indeed.

“Loyal flame-hound, how is it that you, who would not hear out a single word of mine, who set yourself to kill me out of hand, are now my shikigami?”

— Shikigami? Don’t talk rot. Why on earth would I be your shikigami. I’m only lending you my strength for a little while.

Glaring and huffing at Hoa, who had kicked him, the flame-hound bared his teeth at Shin Hweein’s question.
Shin Hweein nodded at the creature’s still-hostile manner, and yet, said he, but —

“In my eyes, just now, it appears so.”

It was only natural that, having spent the very last of the spiritual power that had always filled his body, and even fainted from it, Shin Hweein’s flesh, now without the least resistance to spirits, should have a great many foul things press themselves into him.
What was more, this was the Specter Realm, the dominion of every¹ gwoe and gui there was².

Though his body had been a dying one even while alive, to wandering spirits it would have looked a tempting vessel, and it would have been no wonder at all if thousands, tens of thousands of such spirits had gathered about him.

And yet his body and his mind had remained whole, whether by some miracle or because someone had stepped in and guarded him.

If anything, on waking, Shin Hweein had realized that the abilities he already carried within him were now strengthened.

The spirit-eye (the eye that sees souls) was, they said, no more than the basic furnishing of any sorcerer; yet now to his spirit-eye, things ordinary sorcerers could not see were showing themselves with the utmost clarity.

By way of example: the cord of fate now newly tied between himself and the flame-hound was just such a thing.

— Hmph. Your eyes may be passable, but it’ll do you no good. A makeshift contract like this one I can break off any time I please. Your body just now is a complete wreck, isn’t it? The instant you cross me even a little, everything ends — everything.

“This worthless cur, daring to threaten my lord…!”

— Don’t call me a cur, you fox-of-flame slut!

While the flame-hound and Hoa snarled at each other face to face, Shin Hweein was thinking fast.
By this exchange it had become plain enough: the flame-hound had offered up the shikigami contract precisely to save him.

If that was so, then the contract must have been formed at the very moment Shin Hweein loosed all his spiritual power into flame, or in the heartbeat directly after.

There are many sorts of shikigami contracts, but the one thing common to them all is that they require the caster’s spiritual power.
As it happened, his whole body had been turned to flame just then, and the flame-hound drew on a fount of the same root as his own, so the contracting itself would have gone very smoothly indeed.

“Yes. I have been very much in your debt.”

— Ah, well, that I’ll grant. If it weren’t for the one, I would never have come into so much as a makeshift contract with a feeble human like you!

“The one.” That must mean the burning bird.
That he had entered a contract with this beast for that bird’s sake…?
When only a little while ago he had declared he would kill him for that bird’s sake?

Setting his questions aside for the moment, Shin Hweein narrowed his eyes and went on.

“Since I have received so great a kindness, I cannot go on calling you ‘flame-hound’ forever. First, then, let me have your name.”

— Don’t have one. Call me what you please, so long as it isn’t ‘cur’.

That this flame-hound had originally been a creature of considerable rank, that much he could see plainly.
It seemed, however, that for sorceries outside the one it wielded itself, a certain naïveté still lingered in the creature.

Smiling faintly at the thought, Shin Hweein spoke again.

“Then from this day on, let your name be Flame-tail.”

— An entirely too-easy name. Still, it’ll do. I don’t care what you call me — wh, what?!

The moment the flame-hound accepted the name given to him, a dazzling light arose and enveloped the two beings.
It was the moment when Shin Hweein, with the contract-formula handed down within his house, succeeded in writing over the temporary shikigami contract, one formed purely by the creature’s own will, with one wholly his own.

— You, y-you, this is —!

“Heh. It was my first attempt, and I was nervous, but it appears to have taken.”

At the flame-hound’s reaction, or rather Flame-tail’s, Shin Hweein let a perfectly unguarded laugh escape him for once.

As had been said again and again, the Shin House was the foremost house of the shikigami arts.
From the manner of contracting to the efficiency of the shikigami to the strength of the binding itself, everything was of a grade quite apart from the other houses.

Shin Hweein had, at last, brought off his first successful practice of the Shin House’s shikigami arts.

— What is this, what — how can a contract be changed by a mere name?! I can’t dissolve it of my own will anymore!

“Howsoever it began, we are now bound together. Should we not labor, then, with one heart? Since we have laid our names one over the other and divided our fate, henceforth do not speak so lightly of contracts.”

— What do you know?! Why on earth did I make a contract with you in the first place…!

“Let us hear that reason now.”

Shin Hweein seated himself cross-legged beside Flame-tail, who was barking and barking with all the rage his little body could muster, and pressed him for his explanation.
Whether it was only his own feeling, even Hoa, who up until that moment had been locked in a nerve-war with Flame-tail, now seemed to be staring at him with an exasperated face; but Shin Hweein, who had died and come back, and who had won from it a new sense of the worth and bearing of a life, had no shame in him at all.

— You, you brazen creature!

“So, then. You who set out to kill me would not, of a sudden, have taken pity on me and formed a contract. You said just now that without ‘the one’ you would never have done it. What, precisely, is the connection?”

— …Ngh.

Realizing that at this moment, struggle as he might with the power he had, he had no force left to overturn the contract, Flame-tail let his tail droop and nodded.

— What I first set out to punish you for was this: a human bearing horrific sin-karma was running rampant while wielding even the one’s power.

“You still seem not to understand me… first, let me ask. Who is the one?”

— The one is the one who, long ages ago, saved me. It had been gravely wounded then and was in seclusion, but it braved the danger to save me.

“…The figure of a great burning bird, am I right?”

— You villain, so you do remember the one after all. You liar!

With an expression that mingled hatred and curiosity in equal measure, Flame-tail glared at him and, plainly disgruntled, slapped at the ground with his tail.

“I only glimpsed its form, faintly, the moment I gained the use of this fire. What exact bond there is between it and me, that I do not know.”

— A pity. Were it certain the bond is an evil one, I would have burnt up my own life this instant and ended you with it.

At this Shin Hweein let his shoulders drop in disappointment.

“In the end, then, you do not know either. Why feign knowledge so uselessly?”

— S-silence! At any rate, I kept you alive, didn’t I?!

Snorting in temper, Flame-tail spat a small flame from between his teeth and pounded the ground with his forepaws.

— The moment my fire met yours, your wretched scream came through to me clearly — and I thought, perhaps there might be some misunderstanding even with the one, and that if I killed you off on my own without the one’s leave, perhaps I’d catch hell for it. And so I thought I’d better keep you alive and bring you up before the one, and I bound a temporary contract to keep your life’s thread tied!

What was this?
That Flame-Made-Flesh should have had such an after-effect?

Mouth agape at the disgrace of having had his inmost circumstances laid open before the flame-hound, he turned to look at Hoa, and she was shaking her head firmly.
It seemed it had happened because the two of them had wielded fire of utterly identical nature.

Even so, the shame of it…!

— And then, ignoring this dutiful tenderness of mine, you went and forced a collar onto me! Because your spiritual power is no bigger than a rat’s tail, I, bound to you, can’t return to my proper form for the time being!

“My apologies. By birth I had rather more spiritual power than this, but to keep my life-functions going I have no choice.”

— Just how many sins did you commit in your past life, that you are slathered all over with curses laid on you by exalted beings?!

“That, I too would like to know. The road ahead will not be an easy one. Lend me your aid.”

“Ah.”

— You, you wretch — !

As though he longed by any means to give him a thrashing, Flame-tail lifted a forepaw that had grown, by comparison with how it had looked in battle a little while ago, rather charmingly small; but the creature, now demoted to the rank of a shikigami, could no longer do any harm to his master, Shin Hweein.

A shikigami-contract formula whose command-hierarchy ran this thoroughly top-down belonged to the Shin House alone, and it was for this reason too that the Shin House could keep many powerful shikigami in service without disaster.

— Indeed, you really are an evil-doer. But your free-running pleasure shall not last long. The one, who had entered a long slumber, will have opened its eyes again from this affair!

“Just so.”

Having lifted a curse and drawn power from its layer, and having even taken the one’s retainer the flame-hound as his shikigami, it was only natural that the party who had laid the curse upon him would catch wind of it.

Of course, he had always intended that someday he would meet that bird face to face and have it out with it; he had only hoped to have a little more time before then…

Smacking his lips on a small, bitter taste, Shin Hweein asked.

“Well, then. When, do you think, am I likely to meet ‘the one’?”

— Hah! So you, too, are afraid of the one! But it is already too late — at the most generous estimate, in five years the one will have found you out!

At this Shin Hweein fell silent for a moment, then confirmed it once more in a steady voice.

“Five years?”

— Five years! Perhaps faster by a year or so!

“Very well. For at least these next four years, I trust you, Flame-tail.”

— Gyaaaaaaah! Don’t call me that!

In the moment when Shin Hweein, youngest son of the head of the Shin House of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses, had completed his first Gatekeeper Rite with success, and accomplished his task…

now it was time to receive that reward.