Chapter 20 — The Hearts Of Humans And Yokai (5)

Ham Seoyeon’s face said she could make no sense of any of it.

“Why would a yokai be aiming for you…? The same thing happened back in the Specter Realm, didn’t it.”
“That, much as I’d rather not concede the point, has to do with some karmic debt of mine that even I’m unaware of.”
“What’s that. Is it a woman this time too?”
“…”

Startled, Shin Hweein fixed her with a hard stare, and Ham Seoyeon flushed and shot back.

“Last time it was a woman, so I was just curious!”
“Is that so. For a moment it felt almost as though I were looking at Moa, and I was rather taken aback.”
“Tch — of all the women to compare me to, why her…”

Shin Hweein murmured an incantation in a low voice, enclosing himself and his companions together within a barrier, and as he began to move he gave a brief explanation.

“This time it isn’t. And even from a distance there wasn’t the smallest room to misread it — only hatred and rage. A simple grudge, by the look of it.”
“So last time it really was an affair of the heart, then.”
“…”
“What? Why. What is it.”

He had been under the impression they’d reached an understanding not to raise the last time, and yet, against all expectation, she kept at it.
Shin Hweein let out a sigh.

“Put it down to a connection from a past life of mine. And make some allowance for why I’d rather not go into the details.”
“A past life…?”
“Yes. This is the first time I’ve told you, so keep the secret well.”
“A past life… the karma of a past life followed you into the present? And not just one or two of them, either — ah.”

Mid-mutter, dumbstruck, Ham Seoyeon’s gaze fell suddenly on Shin Hweein’s staff.

“Wait — then don’t tell me—”
“The rest, another time.”
“…Right. Another time.”

At his words she clamped her mouth shut at once and gave a firm nod.
Her sharp insight was something he could lean on, and yet at moments like this it could just as easily be a nuisance.
It was precisely for that reason he’d been all the more reluctant to speak of it, though looking back over how she’d carried herself today, he found himself thinking that maybe it was all right to tell her at least this much by now.

We’re realest of real friends, after all.

The words were too embarrassing to let past his lips, so Shin Hweein murmured them only inwardly, and at just that moment he conveniently noticed a flock of sparrows that had alighted nearby.

“Allow me to trouble you for a moment.”

With a simple bit of sorcery he caught two birds that had drifted a little apart from the main flock, chanted a brief incantation, breathed spiritual power into the pair, and let them go.
And then, rather than departing with the rest of the flock, the two of them settled themselves side by side directly in front of Shin Hweein.

“Oh, that’s—”
“I made them my familiars. So Western magic has its uses after all. Taming a living animal with sorcery is exceedingly difficult.”
“Right — short of brainwashing-class sorcery, it’s hard to lay a hand on. A brief suggestion to nudge its behavior, maybe, sure. But, wow. How did you manage it that fast, just like that?”
“Shall I teach you, too?”
“…That, also, another time.”

Drawing a bead of blood to his finger, Shin Hweein inscribed upon the two sparrows the same sorcery-script he had earlier marked onto the blue bird, rendering them stealthed, then smeared a further trace of his own blood onto one of the pair.

“Seoyeon, just a single drop of blood.”
“U— uhn!”

Despite having raised the whole subject herself, Ham Seoyeon flinched every time her name was called, though not, it seemed, with any displeasure, and she used the little skewer she’d been holding for a while now to prick the tip of her own finger and draw a drop of blood.

“By the way, what is that skewer? Of the mugu (the ritual implements a mudang uses) I know, I’ve never seen its like.”
“Ah, this is my own personal mugu. A stand-in for a sinjangdae, I suppose you’d call it — the spirit-general rod the General descends into. Once she descends, this becomes a great spear.”
“Quite so. Mugu and mugu both, then¹.”

Many a mudang was a jack of several trades, but a mudang who could call a war-god down into herself and fight on the front line had to be rare indeed.
No. To begin with, however he turned it over, she did not seem to be a mudang in the proper sense; it was only that being born into the Ham House had taken an already singular gift and made it more singular still.

Even as these thoughts ran through him, he smeared the drop he’d received from Ham Seoyeon onto the remaining sparrow.

“Ah, this I can guess. You’re going to have them mimic us, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Their forms have been hidden so as to be undetectable; in exchange, only their auras have been set to give off ours. That way we can have them register, in their eyes, that the two of us have slipped out of the amusement park with our forms concealed.”

Shin Hweein quietly instructed the sparrows to steal out of the amusement park, quiet and unseen, and then rejoin their flock.
He watched the pair take his meaning, beat up into the air in a rush of wingbeats, and depart, then turned and gave Ham Seoyeon her instructions.

“Right — let’s hurry, then. Follow in my footsteps.”
“Wait — just from grasping the layout of the park through a bird’s eyes, you’re cracking the Seo House’s array-craft?— huh?”

Sensing that Shin Hweein’s figure was melting away into thin air with utter naturalness, Ham Seoyeon hurried after him, stepping into his footprints to move.
To her it felt much like the way Old Aengseol, within the Specter Realm, would grasp the laws unique to that one space, conceal her presence, and short-cut the distances she crossed; or, closer still, like moving by leaping across space through compass-sorcery.

“Wow, wow… are you a genius?”
“Yes. There are other reasons, too, of course.”

When he’d first wrenched the talent for space, array-craft, and barriers out of the youngest son of the Seo House, he had thought it far less impressive than Do Yuna’s sacrifice-rite. Yet now, meeting a properly worked Seo-House array-craft head-on, he found it nothing so trifling.
The brilliant gift of a direct line, steeped and refined across the long years of an illustrious house, had met Shin Hweein’s own genius and germinated, and now it was rebuilding his very understanding of the concept of space from the ground up.

“This way.”
“Mm.”

In an amusement park so thick with people, the presences around them were thinning out, little by little.
Feeling as though she were walking on the underside of the world, Ham Seoyeon murmured quietly.

“This too is array-craft.”
“Toying with space is the Seo House’s specialty. From what I can tell, judging by the park itself… most likely there’s an Other Realm under Seo House management in here. Not merely a pocket-space. An Other Realm proper.”
“That’s impossible. An Other Realm is a space sustained by the yokai force of some mighty yokai.”
“Yes.”

Shin Hweein flicked a pebble on the ground with his staff, settling it onto a particular spot.

“There’s a high chance they’re holding a yokai inside it.”
“…That’s—”

At words so hard to credit, Ham Seoyeon’s voice trembled.
To manage an Other Realm was a thing altogether different from managing a Specter Realm Gate.
Keeping a Specter Realm Gate from running wild was glorious work, but to neglect an Other Realm, or to use one… that was a sin.

“Couldn’t it be a shikigami?”
“Keep a shikigami strong enough to fashion an Other Realm single-handed summoned without pause, and bear the spiritual-power cost on top of that? Even for a direct-line member of the Shin House, it would be next to impossible.”
“Then, as you said before, by the impure feelings rising up in the amusement park…”
“Honestly, that was half in jest. In an amusement park the outpouring of good feeling vastly outweighs the bad. But it seems the Seo House has worked its array-craft so that even emotion can be sifted out and gathered. That, in fact, is what let me find the seam in the array-craft at all.”

If one could strain out only the impure feelings, and if there were a reason to strain out impure feelings and pour them into a yokai,
then an amusement park, through which tens of thousands of fresh people passed every day, was the perfect place for it.

“Still — there’s no proof yet…”
“There’s another reason I suspect it. They’re making ready to seal a yokai away in a pocket-space.”
“What?”
“We’ve arrived.”

Shin Hweein snapped his fingers.
As though sweeping aside a curtain hung before their eyes, the sight of the gathered Seo House sorcerers rose into view.

“…!”

— They’re coming. From here on, don’t make a sound.

When sorcerers appeared all at once at a distance of less than three jang (roughly nine meters), Ham Seoyeon flinched and clutched at the sleeve of Shin Hweein’s robe.
The sorcerers, though, gave no reaction at all to the sudden arrival of two awakened bearing spiritual power impossible to ignore, shikigami in tow no less.
Their eyes were fixed solely on the enormous crocodile that had revealed itself overhead.

“This is absurd. How could a yokai like that — it doesn’t look like a natural occurrence!”
“It had some other target, surely. We barely managed to draw it this way.”
“It’s at least Rank Four. Backup?”
“None. Isn’t this exactly why we’ve been piling up yokai aura in this place?”
“Tch — there’ll be heavy casualties again.”
“Even so, we can’t let a prize like that slip away. Activate the array!”

The voices of the sorcerers shouting their various commands carried over, but Shin Hweein’s eyes stayed fixed solely on the crocodile yokai beating its wings in midair.
The creature, in turn, was looking only at him.

— Found you at last… I have waited for nothing but the moment I might kill you and lick the flesh from your bones.

A crocodile, muttering tardily in a barbaric voice with scarcely any intellect to it.
Perhaps it was a voice the others could not hear, one that reached Shin Hweein’s ear alone.

— Many were gnashing their teeth for the chance, but to no one else — to me, to me the moment came. You must have hidden yourself somehow, but did you truly believe that, with a body like a half-rotted corpse, you could escape me…!
— How rude. As it happens, this is vastly improved.
— Pwaha, pwahahaha!

Stung into a reflexive retort by half-rotted corpse, Shin Hweein nearly spoke the creature’s name aloud and caught himself.
For it was said that this one, on nights when the full moon rose, devoured those who spoke his name and gathered up their bones.
The name of the yokai resembling that crocodile, drawn from the folklore of the Philippines, was Balbal.
A yokai said to eat the corpses of those not yet buried, or to appear before those soon to die and wait for their dying, and bound up as he was with the very concept of death, his strength was, naturally, of no small order.

— Hae, do you know what that thing is?
— Give me your hand.

Shin Hweein took the hand Ham Seoyeon discreetly extended toward him and at once invoked the sorcery he had learned from Eulha only a little while before.
When he transmitted in a single instant Balbal’s name and the cautions attached to it, the creature’s habits, and how to deal with him, she too at once lifted her eyes to the sky.

— Today’s the full moon.
— Then it would be best to kill it before the moon rises.

The trouble lay in what the sorcerers now facing the creature were doing.
While laying every manner of sorcery on Balbal to throw it into confusion, they were trying to herd it in a particular direction.

“Hurry! There are limits to the energy we can pour out! We have to get him inside quickly!”
“What about the second team? Is the entrance open?”
“Making it ready, sir — almost there! Hurry, get him over!”

To outward appearances the attempt was working well enough, the creature seeming to drift along after the sorcerers. But.
Shin Hweein glared at the Seo House sorcerers with the look of a man watching fools.

They don’t even know what they’re up against, and they simply follow the orders they’ve been handed. This is very ill.

Balbal possessed the power to hypnotize as well.
Those who used hypnotic arts generally bore some resistance to mental-class sorcery too, and if an enemy cast a mental sorcery first, they could turn it back, weakening that enemy’s mind in reverse and laying hypnosis on him with ease.
Even between two of comparable skill, the one who, watching the other and unable to bear it, threw the first sorcery would in effect be the one to lose.
The way the creature seemed, just now, to be snared in the Seo House sorcerers’ spells and moving to their intent might in fact be a ploy, letting the mental sorcery they layered upon him build, only to throw it all back in a single instant.

— The corpse… Hand it over…

“Corpse? Don’t tell me this thing’s a corpse-eater.”
“I feel I’ve heard something of the sort somewhere… Mightn’t be a bad idea to throw it a single laborer.”
“A little more! The Other Realm’s entrance is open!”

That smile playing about Balbal’s hideous mouth. Could it truly be that they couldn’t see it?
But Shin Hweein made no move to stop them, for it was only now that he had grasped where it was they meant to lure Balbal.

— It’s an Other Realm. They’re trying to drag the yokai into an Other Realm.
— So it really did exist… What will you do? Are you going to step in?
— My guess is, they mean to lock the yokai inside the Other Realm. There’s no telling how many yokai they’ve shut up in there that way. It will be exceedingly dangerous.
— Mm. I can’t even begin to imagine.
— But we, too, have grown rather strong by now.

Turning to Ham Seoyeon with a hardened expression, Shin Hweein conveyed his will by mind-speech.

— An amusement park, which ought to make so many people happy — we cannot let dangerous yokai lurk on its underside, much less let them go on fattening yokai by feeding on people’s hearts. Can we now?

While the two of them paused there to speak, on the far side of the gathering the gate of the Other Realm swung open.
A good several dozen sorcerers, convinced they had Balbal safely under control by mental sorcery, were leading the creature into the Other Realm.

— The last course of the day looks like it’ll be a real thrill.

At Ham Seoyeon’s quip, Shin Hweein gave a short laugh and held out his hand to her.

— Let’s go.
— Let’s go.

Hand in hand, the two of them threw themselves into the Other Realm before it could close.