Chapter 21 — The Deceiver And The Deceived (4)

“I’ve come back, young master… wait, what is this!”

That night.
Geum Moa came back beaming, took one look at Shin Hweein, blanched outright, and rushed up to run her hands all over him.

“Weren’t you supposed to be out playing with that woman? Then how have you come back having been through this?!”
“Ah. The traces of sorcery show, do they?”
“That’s hardly the half of it, all of it together… hmm? But your body’s actually in better condition than before, isn’t it?”

So saying, Geum Moa went on prodding him for no reason.

“Hmph, the muscles do seem a touch firmer too… hmmm…”
“That will be from training with Yun Juna earlier. Enough fondling, step back.”
“…That woman isn’t at the cathedral anymore, is she?”
“She came all the way to the cathedral, waited for me to return, and went back again after only training. Seoyeon trained with us too.”
“What in the world is training even supposed to mean to that woman. …Hold on. Seoyeon?”

Geum Moa’s eyes sharpened, but Shin Hweein only wore a knowing smile, content to boast that today he and Ham Seoyeon had become real close friends… that is, the realest of real friends.
Geum Moa, naturally, was not having it.

“No, young master. The phrase ‘realest-of-real-friends moves’ is nowhere near enough to cover that…! It’s something more than that, I tell you!”
“I am only just learning a new term and getting used to it; do not pile yet another one on top. And if you wish to hear any more of what passed between Ham Seoyeon and me today, I would prefer that you spoke first.”
“O-oh. That… is a lady’s secret.”

Geum Moa deflected with a teasing look, and Shin Hweein, of course, did not press further.
He only gazed at her with a face touched by regret, then quietly stretched out a hand and took hold of hers.

“Young master?”
“Today, when I held a friend’s hand, I found it gave me no small strength. I took yours thinking it might give you strength as well… if you dislike it, I shall let go.”
“How could I dislike it. I love it, I love it so much…”
“Then it is well. I am glad of it too.”

It was only after meeting Balbal at the amusement park today.
Only after coming face to face with the returned Geum Moa.
That he understood.
That he needed time alone had been an outrageous lie.

From the moment Geum Moa had recognized Shin Hweein, she had thought of nothing but him and moved only for his sake.
Today was no different, and like a fool he had failed to notice it until now.

“But you held hands with that woman too? Don’t tell me. The whole day long?”
“You really do not let me finish a serious word, do you.”
“Hmph.”

While Shin Hweein was muttering, Geum Moa, bold as anything, slipped into his arms.
She must have judged that now was the moment it would land, and indeed, Shin Hweein could not bring himself to refuse, and ended up taking her in.
It was partly the thought that crossed him: if linking arms with the realest-of-real-friend was a thing one did, what was the harm in embracing Geum Moa, with whom his bond ran deeper still.

“This is so nice…”
“It is no great burden to give you this much. Only do not, from here on, do as you did today.”
“Stop. Don’t say it.”

At Geum Moa’s low voice, Shin Hweein found his words choked off.

“Remember the Three-Year Pact, young master.”
“Moa, you…. Today I was off enjoying my leisure with someone else.”
“And that is exactly why you’ve embraced me like this. This much is enough for me.”

So saying, Geum Moa burrowed even deeper into his arms, and Shin Hweein, at a loss, let out a stunned half-laugh.

“Was it not you who flung yourself into them?”
“Yes. And from here on, this is how I mean to do it. To take what I want, of my own accord. If you don’t like it, you may push me away.”
“As if I could possibly dislike it. You are not the only one who holds the other dear.”
“More… please, more.”

To see her begging without standing on any pride at all, she really must have been worn down.
Shin Hweein held her in his arms for a while, soothing her as she had wished; and when at last she had calmed and barely managed to pull free of him to bring out the tea, he finally told her how, at the amusement park today, he had discovered the Seo House’s sorcerous array.

“To think they were up to something so impudent. That’s a high treason all by itself, isn’t it?”
“It was unfortunate. Had we been only a little wiser, we might not have acted at once but waited to seize more decisive evidence, and seen the Seo House punished outright on a grand scale.”
“None of that nonsense, you don’t mean a word of it. The young master stepped in because the thought of leaving Balbal to anyone else’s hand was unbearable, was it not?”

At Geum Moa’s accurate strike, Shin Hweein could find no rebuttal and only nodded.

Perhaps a wiser judgment had indeed been open to them today.
Laying the Seo House’s plot out beneath the heavens, and, though they could not have toppled the whole house, making Seo Jingang, the head of the Seo House, pay a fitting price; that ending might have been within reach if the strength of the Shin House and the Yun House, and the Royal House besides, were gathered together.
But Balbal, drawn out by the bond with him, would surely, if left as he was, have torn the Other Realm to ruin and burst out to make of countless lives his victims, and in such a moment Shin Hweein could not have dared to leave him be.

“You did well. The Seo House have been cunning beyond words from old times. Had we not stormed the place there and then, you can be sure they would have hidden themselves still more carefully the next time. You did the best you could.”
“To hear it from you eases my heart somewhat.”
“But if it wasn’t Balbal who got you either, then what is all that mind-discipline sorcery left so thickly on your body?”
“That was from meeting Seo Jingang, the head of the Seo House.”

When Geum Moa heard that Shin Hweein had imitated Balbal, feigning to show an opening, and had taken Seo Jingang’s sorcery dozens and hundreds of times over, she wore a thoroughly appalled look.

“A scheme even a yokai of a few hundred years’ standing would shrink from putting into practice. And against the head of one of the Three Capital Houses, no less… are you not even afraid?”
“Of course I am afraid. But that much fear I have lived with since I was a child; there is little new in it.”

Speaking calmly, Shin Hweein brought his teacup to his mouth and let out a satisfied haaaa.
The tea-leaves dried by spiritual power at the Hotenshi-no-Kami Shrine were delicious no matter who brewed them, but the cup was at its sweetest and finest when Geum Moa was the one to brew it.

“I cannot fathom why Yun Juna dislikes things this sweet.”
“Because she’s a child. Quite unlike the young master.”
“I am a child too. I dislike pain, and dislike hardship.”
“Hehe, but disliking things doesn’t change once you’re grown. Even then, what one dislikes one dislikes all the same. But of those who dislike the same thing, some try to overcome it, and others try only to avoid it blindly. Which kind are you, young master?”
“Who can say.”

Recalling what had happened today, Shin Hweein softly closed his eyes.
Undeniable bonds from a past life had begun, one by one, to coil into a noose and tighten about his throat.
Would he remain a coward and be strangled in the end, or…

“It seems I’d best sleep tonight and think it over tomorrow.”
“Shall we sleep together, then? It’s been a while.”
“I have no memory of ever taking the bed with you.”
“Tch. I should have played up just how hard a time I’d had today…!”

And so, having changed into his sleeping clothes, just before lying down in bed, Shin Hweein made one more check with Geum Moa.

“Moa, do you know of Honwondorae?”
“To some extent. I hadn’t expected the young master to get tangled up with that lot already, though. Why do you ask? They shouldn’t be a threat for some time yet.”
“Seo Jingang asked me whether I knew of Honwondorae.”
“A-ha.”

At his words, Geum Moa burst into laughter.

“What a brazen man that is. A head of the Three Capital Houses who, far from guarding Aeshin, has gone and added his name to the very organization trying to topple Aeshin, and as if even that weren’t enough, the moment the sorcery laid upon Honwondorae’s name comes undone he goes about brazenly bandying it about…”
“I would like your counsel. Should the Seo House be wiped from Aeshin for Aeshin’s sake? And how could they be wiped out?”
“That question is gravely mistaken, young master.”

Geum Moa, smiling thinly and rejecting his question, laid him down upon the pillow, then quietly stroked his head and spoke as though in a whisper.

“What the young master ought to be thinking of is not Aeshin. It is the young master alone, and no one else. The young master is the world, after all.”
“There you go saying such things again.”
“Should the Seo House be wiped out for the young master’s sake? Of course they should. Not only the Seo House. The Shin House, the Yun House, the Royal House, every last one of them ought to be wiped out. Are they any different from the Seo House? Anyone is the same. All of them…”

Carrying on, Geum Moa grew impassioned, then let her shoulders sag and smiled awkwardly.

“I’ve spoken too much of old things. Sleep now. We’ll talk of what is to come little by little, by and by. At least for the time being, the young master has nothing he need worry about…”

Her smile looked so excessively sad that Shin Hweein meant to offer her some word in reply, but unhappily, before he could, a sleep he could not bear came down and blew his consciousness clean away.
Perhaps the standoff with Balbal had taxed his body beyond what he had imagined; or perhaps, this being the first time he had broken a curse by killing its source with his own hand, some side-effect he had not been able to imagine had now come for him…
In an instant, he had fallen into sleep.

When he came to himself, he realized he was wearing the shape of his past life.
Before his eyes yokai swarmed, and at his side stood Lyl, the Queen of the dream-demons.

“This… is not a memory that actually took place, is it.”

— No. I have only added the smallest of alterations. Only so that I might guard your mind.

Lyl answered as though she had been waiting for the question, and pointed ahead.
Of course, even before her gesture, Shin Hweein had already noticed that Balbal, the one who had died today, was there.

The yokai pack Balbal belonged to were every one of them creatures that carried death in their wake, every one of them unable to bring their power to bear before the past-life Shin Hweein, and every one of them, even so, glaring at him in resentment.

“My body really does feel a little freer. As though I had come back into the past myself.”

What was free, of course, was only his mouth; in truth his body was moving along the course his past self had once traced.
Unfurling a sorcery on a scale the Shin Hweein of the present could not even conceive of, he shut them inside a barrier, and they roared in chorus and poured out the full of their strength to break it.
A force that seemed the very shape of death filled the inside of the barrier so densely that the weaker among them dropped one after another…

“That would only be godok (the curse-by-poison-vessel).”

The past-life Shin Hweein, unbelievably, breathed power into them and brought them back.
His hand dissected with care the death-bringing aura peculiar to that breed of yokai and, on the precise opposite principle, breathed new life into the yokai themselves, and it was so exquisite that even Shin Hweein, who was now embodying that art, felt his skin prickle.

“You.”

Shin Hweein’s mouth opened of its own accord.
It was a memory of his past life.

“The aura you possess is too peculiar to live alongside humankind. I am truly sorry, but I shall have no choice but to limit your environment.”

Ah. So that was how it had been.

This was the very moment in which a resentment born of utterly simple grounds, needing no knowledge of any deeper reason, was made.
Before a past-life self who alone held back hundreds of yokai of Rank Four and above, the yokai could not dare voice complaint; for the moment, they had no choice but to nod. And who, then, was to bear the indignation that rose from it?

“Forgive me. But this world is one in which all live together, is it not? If each yields just a little to the rest, we can all of us be happy. So I beg of you.”

The clamor of the yokai did not seem to reach his ear.
To kill them outright might in fact have been easier, but he could not have dared to do so.
His sympathy with the very concept of life was excessive, and however wicked a life might be, however threatening to other lives, to him it was the same life all the same.
Even though, of those very creatures, he could not bring himself to face a single one head-on.

— I curse you —.

In the midst of it, only Balbal’s voice came in clear at his ear.
No. Perhaps it came in clear only to the present Shin Hweein, and not to his past-life self.

— I will have my revenge upon you, without fail. I will break your neck and lick the flesh and bones of you clean!

“Well, then.”

His past-life self, who of course did not hear that voice, only soothed them in a sorrowful tone, his isolation of them now perfectly accomplished.

“Hundreds of years may pass, or thousands, and the world may change yet again. By that time you may have mended your habits, and come to hunger after something other than the deaths of men. Blossoming flowers, perhaps, or lovely clouds, or the rising sun and the song of birds. I pray for that day to come. And because I believe in it, I would let you live.”

And he turned and walked away.
The monsters, locked into an independent world that lay somewhere between the Other Realm and the Specter Realm, set once more to slaughtering one another as though they had not heard his words, until in the end only the strongest of them remained.
Of course, that one was Balbal.

…The same sort of thing, in all likelihood, was happening in every corner of the world.

“This… was my doing?”

As everything slowly grew hazy and fell to ruin, Balbal’s malice and the aura of death alone remained clear, drifting in the empty air.
That alone went on giving Shin Hweein, with peculiar intensity, both a stimulation and an inspiration.

— What think you of it?

“It seems he is one who fails to grasp where he stands.”

To Lyl’s quiet question, Shin Hweein answered with a flat finality.
He reached a hand into the air and drew the aura of death in.
Striving to bring back as fully as he could the feel of how his past self had handled sorcery, analyzing it, handling it freely, and even as he did, he let out a long, drawn-out sigh.

“I had not hoped to find that the me of a past life was such a fool.”

— One whose field of view is too wide is bound, by that very fault, to lose certain things. Pray do not, on the strength of seeing only this, regret your past life entire.

“Lyl…”

Shin Hweein, with desperate effort, held back the question that was about to spring from his mouth.

“I thank you. Through your care I was able to scrape this off before any sediment could settle.”

— That you have understood is joy enough for me. In that case…

“Hm?”

— Th-then, in that case, now…

Lyl, even as she wore a bashful look, edged little by little closer to him as she asked.

— Now, may we too be called the realest of real friends?

“…”

For a moment Shin Hweein stood without finding any reply, but in the end, as she wished, he gave her his arm.
And, waking from sleep and realizing that he could now handle, however slightly, the power of death, he thought to himself that he might have done a little more for Lyl than he had.