Chapter 20 — The Hearts Of Humans And Yokai (4)

Two hours or so of romping from ride to ride with Ham Seoyeon, and Shin Hweein had arrived at his insight into amusement parks.

“A small arena for life-experience. One that cultivates patience, then lets you taste, beyond any doubt, the fruit waiting at the end of it.”

“There you go, exaggerating again.”

Ham Seoyeon held an ice cream in one hand, raising it to the corner of Shin Hweein’s mouth as she spoke.
On her head was perched one of the cute little animal-ear headbands they sold at the park.
The very same headband, naturally, sat atop Shin Hweein’s own.

“We’re in the awakened-only line, so the wait’s been really short, you know? For the popular attractions, ordinary people queue up two, three hours, plenty of times.”

“The lines truly were different, then. I’d taken it for a difference in ticket price, so that wasn’t it after all.”

Shin Hweein nodded in understanding, eyed the ice cream that showed no sign of leaving his lip, and shot Ham Seoyeon a glance asking whether this was really necessary.
She would not yield.

“Everyone does this. Look over there.”

He turned his eyes that way, and sure enough, the men and women all around him were behaving as if under some sorcerous compulsion, every one of them feeding something to the other.
If that was the rule of this park, there was no helping it.
Shin Hweein opened his mouth and took a small bite of the ice cream.
At the sweetness of it melting on his tongue, a smile rose to his face unbidden.

“Good?”
“Good. …Just as I remember it.”
“Like you haven’t had it in ages.”
“Today is, in fact, the first time I’ve eaten it. Ice cream wasn’t food my weak stomach could ever have.”
“Ah… eh? Actually? Co—!”

Ham Seoyeon tilted her head, bit into the ice cream herself, and started in shock.
His little prank a success, Shin Hweein chuckled.

“I added a touch of cold to it so it wouldn’t melt.”

“You… you did that for my sake, didn’t you, hm?”

While Ham Seoyeon ate, marveling at an ice cream held cold enough not to melt and yet kept exquisitely soft, Shin Hweein cast his gaze around and considered which ride to try next.
But somehow, every time he turned his head, the people who had been watching them hurriedly looked away, which made it plain that they had, until that very moment, been watching all along.
Ham Seoyeon, licking at her ice cream, caught on to it and let out a sigh, aigh.

“Maybe we’d need a park-wide announcement before they’d settle down? Honestly, what is everyone so curious about.”

“It’s partly because your looks stand out so. Far too much.”

At Shin Hweein’s casually tossed-off remark, Ham Seoyeon went still.
Then she narrowed her eyes at him.

“Buttering me up out of nowhere isn’t going to get you anything, you know?”
“I’d no particular intention of buttering you up…”
“Hmph… ehhh.”

Having polished off the ice cream, cone and all, Ham Seoyeon abruptly hooked her arm through his.
Flustered, Shin Hweein looked at her and protested.

“Isn’t this rather excessive contact, between friends.”
“Right. This is skinship only true close friends, the realest of real friends, get to do.”
“True close friends…”

No matter how he turned it over, this felt closer to a couple’s distance than a friend’s, and Shin Hweein gave the matter serious consideration.
But it was not as if Ham Seoyeon would be lying.
More than anything, the words real close friend had a way of charming Shin Hweein.

“Then it can’t be helped, I suppose.”
“Mm. We’re realest of real friends, after all.”

And so the two of them decided, from that point on, to walk through the amusement park arm in arm.
With the awakened-only privilege there was no need to stand in long lines, and their objective was to conquer every ride in the park.
Both of them, with the nerve they’d built up as sorcerers, could enjoy something on the order of a roller coaster without batting an eye.

“Hmm. When you think about it, this too is a kind of artificially manufactured fear.”

Fixed in his seat and dangling upside down, Shin Hweein spoke with the utmost seriousness.

“It’s only natural for a human being dangled upside down in midair to be afraid. We may call it ‘enjoying the ride’ and so on, but no small quantity of fear is going to be artificially produced. The thought that yokai might feed on it and grow does not exactly sit well with me.”

“Oh, here we go again with that thinking. This is an amusement park run by the Seo House, you know?”

“Surely the Seo House keeps dedicated sorcerers beneath it whose job is to manage the yokai and Specter Realm Gates that crop up in the park. I’ve my complaints about the Seo lot and their money-grubbing ways, but a sorcerous house running an amusement park may, unexpectedly, be quite sensible—”

“Kyaaa—!”

Of course, it was not only that sort of futile reflection that occupied them.
These sorcerers, the lot of them, had to be skipping work to crowd into the amusement park instead, and no matter how special a line they stood in, the moment did come when they had to wait a fair while.
When it did, the two of them, arms still linked side by side in the queue, would fit together one childhood memory after another of their meetings like puzzle pieces, testing each other’s recollection and each other’s impression of one another.
And in the middle of it, naturally, this too came up.

“That’s how I recognized you at one glance. Our General, to be honest, has no particular interest in you.”

“It would be uncomfortable to have the Twelve Olympians taking an interest in me. But… ah, I see. There had been times when I felt a faint dissonance dealing with you. So that was what it was.”

Shin Hweein nodded, satisfied, and Ham Seoyeon, embarrassed by the look of it, fanned at her own face with one hand.

“You’re smiling right now, aren’t you. This is exactly why I didn’t want it found out.”

“No, no. I’m only grateful. It can’t have been a face especially worth remembering.”

“That’s not true.”

Ham Seoyeon contradicted him at once.

“For me it was a good memory, you know. Quite a good one.”

“I see… then I’m glad. It was the same for me.”

Funnily enough, he could not remember exactly what they had talked about back then.
The number of times they had met had been very few to begin with, and even then he had not been alone with her the whole while, so the talk between them could not have run long.
Even so, he remembered clearly that the ease he could never feel with the Shin family, or with the people of the other houses who looked at him as though he were some grotesque insect, had been there, certainly, in his conversations with her.
He had no wish to return to those days, not if he died and was reborn, but that one moment alone, he found, he missed a little.
And when he thought of it that way, something of the atmosphere of that day seemed, little by little, to be settling between the two of them now.

“Next guest, please— wow, a young awakened couple! What a handsome pair, and the two of you look so familiar from somewhere too, our amusement park today is completely—”

A moment later, though, the queue ahead emptied out, a positively over-the-top park employee carried on so giddily their heads were spun clean off, and the atmosphere they’d been building shattered cleanly.
The moment they came off the ride, Ham Seoyeon nimbly hooked her arm through his again, and Shin Hweein, sensing the strange mood about to start creeping back in, quickly proposed,

“Shall we go and eat.”
“Ah— yeah, shall we?”

A beat late, Ham Seoyeon nodded as well.
But the two of them never managed it.

“My lord.”

Just as they stepped onto a less-trafficked path, Leon rose up out of Shin Hweein’s shadow with an exceedingly sour look on his face and addressed him.

“I am ashamed to interrupt while you are enjoying your date—”
“He’s only out playing with a friend, isn’t he.”
“That’s right, that’s right.”
“…You won’t be able to sustain that line for long, I’m afraid.”

Leon narrowed his eyes at the two of them in their matching headbands, walking arm in arm, and under the pressure pouring off Ham Seoyeon, grudgingly nodded in concession.

“In any case, while I was patrolling the area to support my lord’s date, I detected a suspicious sign. I had thought to handle it alone if it proved to be nothing of note, but it seems persons of the Seo House have a hand in it.”

Shin Hweein’s and Ham Seoyeon’s faces creased in distaste in the very same instant.
Ham Seoyeon unhooked her arm and turned the blame, pointlessly, on Shin Hweein.

“This is what comes of you saying odd things.”
“So it really is true. Amusement parks are places where yokai readily arise.”

“What will you do? If my prediction holds, an Other Realm will form within the park before long. The Seo House, at the very least, appears to be moving in anticipation of it.”

As he and Ham Seoyeon had touched on earlier, an amusement park, unexpectedly, met all the environmental conditions favorable to the formation of an Other Realm.
A space conspicuously cut off from the everyday, people’s emotions amplified in every direction.
That alone produced a peculiar sense of dissociation, distinct from reality.
A sufficiently mighty yokai could claim this force for its own, fashion an Other Realm as it pleased, and at the extreme even drag people inside.
If they weren’t careful, the Other Realm to come might be of a scale that made the one the Great-Mouth Ghost had wrought look positively cute.

“An Other Realm. Honestly, I’d rather not get involved…”

“Once the matter breaks, things won’t go as we wish. Wouldn’t it be better to just leave the park now?”

Even as Ham Seoyeon said it, she had already, in fits and starts, been pulling a muryeong (a bell used by shamans in spirit-quelling rites) and a small iron skewer out of the little bag she carried.
It was because she was that sort of person that he could not bring himself to dislike her, but… Shin Hweein, too, took the staff Leon handed over and let out a sigh.

“There are still rides I haven’t tried.”
“We can come again next time.”
“Will you come with me again, then.”
“What, were you planning to come with some other girl?”

Shin Hweein sensed instinctively that giving a name like Yun Juna’s here would, at the very least, be inadvisable.
She harbored a somewhat excessive possessiveness when it came to her friends.
So he merely repeated the words of an Aeshin scholar of several hundred years past.

“Gyeoljahaeji.”
“Gisija dangim gijong… hee.”

He who tied the knot must untie it; he who began the matter must bear it to the end.
And so, having ended up committing himself to another outing with Ham Seoyeon, Shin Hweein already dreaded Geum Moa’s reaction when she returned and learned of it. But that was that, and a promise was a promise.

“Shall we move, then.”

“From what I felt as I went around, this place is more or less the Seo House’s inner yard. They will already know the two of you have come to the amusement park, and if we act suspiciously, the odds of being spotted are high.”

“It would be best to move while concealing ourselves under the pretense of leaving, then.”

“As if that would work. This shikigami…”

“It is Leon, my lady.”

“If what Leon says is right, it sounds like a Seo House array-craft is laid over the entire amusement park. But even so, what kind of array-craft would they set across a whole amusement park that operates for ordinary civilians…”

“A moment.”

Shin Hweein tapped the ground a few times with the staff in his hand.
Then, closing his eyes a brief while in thought, he murmured,

“If only I could see a bird’s-eye view of this amusement park…”

“Enter Eulha!”

At that very moment, a boy who had appeared out of thin air landed on the ground and threw up his arms in a banzai.
The fellow was decked out, today as ever, in jeans and a denim jacket, and as it happened Shin Hweein and Ham Seoyeon were both in jeans too, so it looked as though the three of them had come out together for some sort of photo shoot.

“Right on time! I’ve finally finished the analysis on those fellows.”

Those fellows Eulha spoke of meant Shin Jain’s familiars he had swallowed the day before. Shin Hweein could tell that much.

“Right. Come to think of it, those things were birds.”

“Newbie friend, you can’t just send a bird flying off anywhere because it’s a bird. I can control bats myself, but if they get more than a certain distance from me they can be picked up by an array, so…”

Geum Moa had only just stepped out of the picture, and already the Blue-Robed Boy, whose role overlapped with his own, had popped up. Sensing a crisis, Leon tried to check him, but Eulha, as if he had foreseen exactly this, wagged a finger side to side and pushed back.

“This is a new sorcery built by importing Western magic, isn’t it. Think about it: even when those fellows came right up to your noses, the promising young awakened of the Ham House and the Yun House didn’t notice them, so do you really think an array-craft laid out this broadly would pick them up?”

“The power the Seo House is pouring into this amusement park is on no ordinary level. While we’re on the topic, I came here straight from operating in that very West. Even there, you’d be hard-pressed to find an area-wide magic circle managed this thoroughly. I have confidence in my own stealth work, but it was precisely because, in the one-in-ten-thousand chance I was detected, I’d be putting my lord to trouble, that I was holding back, you understand?”

With his closest confidante, Geum Moa, away, the rivalry among the shikigami was picking up pace.
Shin Hweein cut in to put a stop to the two of them and first asked the Blue-Robed Boy for the knowledge he’d extracted from those familiars.

“Take my hand.”

At that, Eulha brightened and held out his own hand.
When he obligingly took the offered hand, all the information the fellow wished to convey flowed, marvelously, into his mind in a single instant.

“This is the jeonsim art, the sorcery of mind-to-mind transmission, used between those whose hearts are in tune. Rather like telepathy as an ability.”

“Mm. Telepathy can be near-perfectly reproduced by sorcery, they say. Yeomhwa mind-speech can be counted a kind of telepathy, and beyond that, reading another’s mind, or conversely polluting and brainwashing it, can all be brought about by sorcery.”

Right at this moment Shin Hweein himself possessed an eye that could read another’s emotions.
Of course, going beyond a surface-level exchange of thought and feeling to reach down to the foundations of another’s psyche required a sorcerer of truly exceptional rank, and bearing the karmic debt that piled up as the price was no easy matter either.

“Even taking that into account, this is impressive. Faster and more aggressive than mind-speech by far. Thank you for teaching me a fine sorcery.”
“I didn’t really mean to teach you, but whatever, works for me! Here, then.”

A vast mouth abruptly appeared in midair and gaped wide open, and from inside it a single bird with blue-dyed feathers tumbled out.
The familiars Eulha had first eaten had all, surely, been crows, yet the bird itself was far smaller and cuter, and at the same time the ki dwelling within it was, beyond comparison, stronger.

“Remodeling one of them cost me the rest. Sorry.”
“One is enough.”

Shin Hweein extended a hand, and the bird gave a soft pororong, a little chirping cry, and alighted on his fingertip.
He extended his spiritual power to inspect the creature’s state, then nodded.

“It is far more enhanced than when it was a crow, but in this state it’s still a touch unreliable.”
“Eek.”
“What did I tell you.”
“But it is decidedly interesting. I can use it in a different way from a shikigami. For instance, like this…”

A bead of blood welled up at Shin Hweein’s fingertip.
With it he inscribed a tiny character upon the bird’s body, and in that instant, though every one of them was watching the bird, it clearly and unmistakably dissolved into the air and vanished.

“This is?”
“Stealth-sorcery. Something I learned from Moa, along with disguise-art.”

More precisely, what he had taken from her by way of the Indulgence, he supposed.

“A Western familiar is plainly structured differently from a shikigami. They tame a pure creature with magic and bind it to obey them, so although their combat strength is low, it’s much easier for them to blend into the surroundings. Marrying that with Shin House shikigami-arts so it can take in spiritual power and sorcery and grow, for my middle elder brother’s talent, one cannot help but applaud.”
“Even so, the root is still close to a natural body, so its presence is faint. And unlike a yokai or a shikigami whose innate individuality is already vivid, it can be easily transformed by sorcery.”
“That’s exactly it. The applications will be very wide.”

And just like that, in the few days the Blue-Robed Boy had invested, the ability became Shin Hweein’s.
From here on, if he developed it in his own way, he ought to be able to put it to far more useful work than even his middle elder brother could.

“Will you mind if I take this fellow for my own?”
“Of course not. Everything of mine is my lord’s.”
“Good lad.”

Shin Hweein patted Eulha’s head and once again began to tap the ground with his staff, focusing.
Watching this, Ham Seoyeon asked, half-anticipating the answer,

“Don’t tell me. It’s already up in the sky?”
“That’s right. So you noticed.”
“The General told me. Honestly, you can’t see it at all?!”

Seeing Ham Seoyeon’s astonished face, Shin Hweein gave a knowing smile and quietly closed his eyes.
Though his eyes were certainly closed, a quite different scene was projected across his sight.
A scene as if a bird were looking down upon this amusement park from above.
He was sharing senses with the blue bird that had taken off into the sky.
The blue bird drinking in the panorama of the park went unnoticed and undisturbed by anyone.

“Good. That’ll do.”

Having gathered enough information, Shin Hweein opened his eyes.

“I’ve analyzed the array-craft. From here on, I’ll tell you what route we should move along.”
“How do you manage that?”
“It seems I, too, have some of that array-craft talent the Seo House is said to have.”

Replying to Ham Seoyeon’s question with a sly smile, Shin Hweein added,

“I’ve also a rough idea of where the matter will break out. The target, most likely, is me.”

“The Seo lot are going after you right now?”

In an instant Ham Seoyeon’s expression turned fierce, but Shin Hweein resolutely shook his head.

“I meant the yokai’s target is me.”

It was, for example, the same kind of thing as the North Sea Dragon Princess coming for him back in the Specter Realm, only now it was about to happen here, in the present world.
Just as Geum Moa had feared, the stronger his ability grew, the more yokai were beginning to seek him out.