Chapter 21 — The Deceiver And The Deceived (5)

“Perhaps this is the very same principle behind it. Even before Lyl’s curse was broken, my bond with her already let me handle dream sorcery.”

Sitting up in bed and working his spiritual power back and forth for a long while, Shin Hweein arrived at last at that conclusion.

If the Indulgence was, at its core, a thing that levied a sinner’s power and talents without condition, then this newly-gained gift had taken a different shape.
A bond formed with another by way of a curse, and out of that bond a fresh potential had budded inside him.

There was still the matter that he had to perceive the subject for the gift to work at all.
But once a point of contact was made, the talent could be cultivated from the ground up.

“Thanks to the past-life memory Lyl called up for me, I can grasp it and handle it far more deeply now.”

“And here you used to mind so when I let you dream your past-life memories — yet now your thoughts run on nothing but the new gift you’ve gained.”

Drawing the energy back out of his hand, Shin Hweein finished washing his face in the basin of water Geum Moa had brought, dried himself with a towel, and answered.

“It is time I knew what I needed to know. Why these monsters lunge at me as though I were their sworn enemy unto the heavens, why they seek my death — only once I understand that can I respond as befits.”

“And have you understood it, even a little?”

“Hm. At the very least, I now see I need not weigh out each of their reasons one by one.”

“Just so. There can hardly be any other reason in creatures whose whole purpose in life is slaughter.”

Until now, a flimsy bond made by a curse had been worth so little that he had held back, ever so slightly, in his judgments of them.
Now that he could be certain of his own judgment, that alone would change a great deal.

Rising from the bed, Shin Hweein changed his clothes and let out a sigh.

“And now… I had best look in on Neuldam’s condition.”

“Shall I make ready to subdue it, just in case?”

“My heart is uneasy. If by some chance the yokai-orb’s influence has turned it aggressive, in the end the one who comes to harm is Neuldam itself…”

But to do nothing and leave matters be was even further out of the question.

His mind made up, Shin Hweein drew his own blood out onto the table and began to inscribe a sorcery-array.
It was an array he had become able to draw only now, thanks to the wealth of array-craft he had gathered on his recent excursion to Hwadam Amusement Park.
This one could catch any sign of strange behavior in Neuldam before it manifested, and bind it fast.

“With you drawing your blood like this all the time, I really must cook you something good for it. Would you prefer oysters? Or eel?”

“Oysters I will grant you, but eel seems to be aiming at a slightly different purpose.”

“Tch.”

Even if she fed him such a thing, it would come to nothing…

Just then, someone knocked at the door.

The only one who would come looking for him at this hour of the morning was, of course, Father Lucas, who lodged in the room next to his.

“You’re up, brother.”

“Have you come to check the day’s schedule? I can spare some time for baduk today.”

“No — the truth is, it’s been a while, but the Cardinal called me in; he has a commission.”

“My.”

Shin Hweein checked the state of the sorcery-array still spreading across the table and asked the priest.

“Is it urgent?”

“Mercifully not. He proposed we discuss the commission over lunch.”

“Then that will do.”

He nodded and went on completing the array.
The priest, having shut the door behind him, drew up a chair near the table and settled in to watch.

“So you can handle this kind of magic too, brother. Why, that’s a magic circle, is it not?”

“It is a sorcery-array.”

“In that case — what, then, is the difference between sorcery and magic?”

“Feeling, I should think.”

Such magic as he knew came only by way of the familiar-magic he had learned himself, which Eulha had taken in hand after analyzing the magic his middle elder brother had studied in the West and remaking it in his own fashion.
He could not, in truth, speak of it with any certainty.

“It is finished. Moa — best you make ready as well, just in case.”

“But of course.”

“Father, may I trouble you for a prayer?”

“And, ah — what exactly is this situation?”

The tangled state of affairs behind the shikigami’s rampage Shin Hweein laid out in one simple sentence.

The shikigami has eaten something that does not agree with it.

And as he set about drawing Neuldam out of the subspace storage, the priest, plainly flustered, took up his own position.

“It will be all right. Saint Timothy will look after us. All the more so since this is a cathedral.”

“Is he the patron saint of troubled adolescents?”

“No, of stomach ailments.”

The explanation seemed to have landed a touch off the mark somewhere.

Shin Hweein cast a doubtful look at the priest even as he opened the subspace storage.
He had opened it directly above the tabletop, so that if Neuldam’s condition had turned strange, it could be bound at once…!

— Kurrrr…

But Neuldam slipped out of the storage, settled itself prettily on the table, and slept on with such a contented look that anyone could see it at a glance.

Instead it was the sorcery-script inscribed across the whole of its body that drew the eye, the very script calling upon Samshin Halmi to look after the shikigami’s growth.
The script was flashing fiercely, and as it flashed, one could watch it grow fainter, little by little, in real time.

“Hmm… brother, is this something dangerous, if it all gets erased?”

“No, it is not.”

The fur that had been blue as lightning was now stained a shade darker, and its bulk had grown a good two times over from before.
Confirming both, Shin Hweein shook his head with an expression of relief.

“This sorcery is set to be erased only once the shikigami, still an infant, has finished all of its physical growth. Which is to say — the script is performing its role just as it should.”

“Then there is no particular problem?”

“Probably not. But still… however I turn it over, it is astonishing.”

He had seen it for himself yesterday, so he knew.
The spirit contained within that yokai-orb had been on a scale beyond anything he could begin to measure.

He could not say how long that Other Realm had endured.
But the orb was the crystallization into which every last spirit-current within it had been concentrated, and had it gone awry, half the Capital might well have collapsed.

And yet Neuldam, having swallowed the thing whole, had not gone into a rampage at all, but was digesting the lot of it.

“Not the lot of it, perhaps. It seems to have absorbed only as much as it could and gathered the rest into a single point within its body. …Just like the inner-core (the crystallization of qi) that long-lived yokai are said to form.”

“Truly so. Of course it can’t compare with a real inner-core forged through hundreds, or thousands, of years of cultivation — but even so, it’s remarkable. Some folk try to forge an inner-core all their lives and never manage it, and this little fellow simply gulped its master’s possession down…”

Geum Moa’s gaze, fixed on the peacefully sleeping Neuldam, was not particularly kind.

The yokai-orb was something Shin Hweein had won, after all.
For it to be swallowed up whole without so much as the master’s leave was, to her, who set Shin Hweein’s authority above all else, no doubt unforgivable.

But this was well enough.

“It was a thing I never meant to send outside in the first place. If it could be safely disposed of, I thought, that would be best. And now my shikigami has solved that very problem and grown for itself in the bargain — is that not a fine thing?”

This was not, moreover, something just anyone could have managed.

Only Neuldam, still young, its growth potential laid wide open and reaching to a remarkably high ceiling, could have digested it.

Likely Arong, who devoured anything and everything and made it his own power, could have managed it too.
Though in truth he was already growing fearfully quickly even now.

And since the rascal had eaten his fill of high-grade yokai corpses yesterday, this was the best that could be done for the balance of force among the shikigami.

“Shall I, for the time being, offer up a prayer to Saint Michael, that he might rescue this wicked devil?”

“That is an exorcism prayer. Stop it.”

To use the spirit-current drawn from the yokai-orb to grow its own body, and to set the inner-core fully into itself, it would have to sleep a good while yet.

Shin Hweein stroked the rascal’s fur gently and put it back into the subspace storage.

“I look forward to when Neuldam wakes.”

“It must be given a proper scolding, oh yes.”

“It is still a child. Go easy on it.”

But as Shin Hweein was gathering up the blood of the sorcery-array from the table, Father Lucas, with a sly nonchalance, set a baduk board down upon it.

“You mean to play now?”

“Once it’s noon I’ll hear the Cardinal’s commission and set off straight after, so we’ll have no chance to play in the evening either, will we? This is the only opening.”

“Did losing to me chafe you so?”

“At chess, of course, I have every confidence!”

“At janggi I can hold my own too.”

He remembered that when first he had played the priest, they had quarreled over which to play, chess or janggi, and compromised on baduk in the end.

Shin Hweein shook his head in protest even as he sat down opposite the priest to play.

And then the door was flung open and Sister Barbara came in.

“Sorcerer-guy! What kind of trouble are you stirring up, keeping people from the Great Houses coming round all the t—… wait, why are you walking around without your mask, you’re making it weird!”

The sister had come in loud and brazen, only to take one look at him and start back, scandalized, turning her back on him outright.
At the sight of it Shin Hweein wore a look of utter exasperation.

He had felt no further need to hide his face after revealing his identity to Father Lucas, so within his room, at least, he had been going about bare-faced.
And now here she was, having barged in without so much as a knock or a scrap of courtesy, scolding him for it.

“Brother, she is at a tender age these days; please be lenient. Astonishing as it may be — what she’s doing right now is her version of being shy.”

“It seems I shall, by and by, need a serious talk with the sister too…”

“S-serious talk about what?!”

While the gallery carried on noisily, Shin Hweein put on his mask, rose to his feet, and addressed her.

“So — which of the Great Houses has come, and who is it? Surely it isn’t the Seo House?”

“Huh, you’ve gone and crossed the Seo House too? It’s not the Seo House that’s come today — it’s the Shin House.”

“The Shin House…”

Shin Hweein’s brow furrowed.

In a certain sense, was that not an even more uncomfortable visitor than the Seo House?

“Shin Uin — has he ferreted it out at last? Or is it Shin Jain?”

Either way, he could only meet it with composure.
Had he not already braced himself?

What was more, after the several events he had passed through of late, even were his opponent a First-Rank sorcerer, the prospect of standing against him no longer struck him with simple dread.

It would have been even better had Neuldam been awake, but there was nothing to be done about what he did not have.
What he lacked, he would make up for with sheer bearing.

“Let us go.”

Drawing Arong, thinned into a fine mist, invisibly about his body and folding Flame-tail to his chest, Shin Hweein took up his staff.

At the uncommon force of his bearing, the priest and even the sister were taken aback and hesitated.

“Uh… should I just send them packing?”

“No. I have resolved no longer to run. Lead the way.”

“O-okay.”

The sister, fidgeting, drew herself together with a face of resolve and went on ahead.

Father Lucas gazed at the baduk board on the table with deep regret, then shook off the lingering wish and rose to his feet as well.

But to put the conclusion plainly, taking up a battle-stance had been pointless.

“It has been a long while, young master.”

“…You, then. The butler.”

A neat suit buttoned all the way to the wrist-cuffs, conveying strictness and diligence at once; hair gone snow-white and combed cleanly back; an old gentleman with a comforting air about him.
The man who had served as steward of the main house since the time of the previous head, who had stood guard over the Shin House through all of it, had come to find Shin Hweein.

Hweein plainly still had his mask on, yet the butler addressed him from the outset as “young master.”
It seemed he had come already knowing everything.

“Has the head of the house sent you?”

“No child calls his parent by that name.”

“I am living as an outsider just now.”

“Even so — he is your parent.”

“Hahh.”

This stubborn-grained butler had, even back when Hweein could not so much as carry himself properly, demanded of him without fail the dignity becoming the son of a great house.
The two of them being on warm terms was, frankly, impossible.

To put it kindly, he was at least a cut above those others who had despised Hweein or treated him as a tumor, in that the butler had always treated him as a member of the family.
But.

In those days, when even drawing breath had been all Hweein could manage to stay alive, the butler had demanded strict etiquette of him while knowing full well the state of his illness, and to Hweein’s eyes he had looked like nothing but a wicked man bent on tormenting him.
There was a reason that even now, the moment he laid eyes on the man, the breath caught in his throat.

“What brings the butler here. Shin Uin… hmph — does it concern my brothers?”

“His lordship the head has informed only this old man about the young master. Will you sit a while?”

“…I shall. The butler, sit as well.”

“Thank you.”

Hidebound to the last, the butler had stood from the moment he stepped into the receiving room, and only after Shin Hweein had taken a chair did he himself sit down opposite.

For the record, the priest and the sister, who had come in armed and ready to strike the foe down at Shin Hweein’s side, seemed so overpowered by the stiff atmosphere the butler conjured that they had frozen on the spot, unable to move.

“First — allow me to congratulate you on your recovery. This old man always believed that the young master would, one day, prove himself.”

“So — that tormenting was, in truth, faith in me. Thanks to the butler, several points of etiquette still cling to my body even now, long after I’ve left the house.”

“Haha — a fine thing.”

Of course, in any true sense his recovery still lay far off.
But to those who had only ever seen him laid out in his room, his present state could not but look like a miraculous rebirth.

“Are you finding your stay here without inconvenience? If you wish for a place to safely hide yourself away, this old man has a house of his own that he can lend you.”

“This place suits me. The butler will know my relationship with the Catholic Church is amicable. We are of mutual help.”

Displeased by something in the words, the butler let out a low murmur of disapproval and nodded.

“Is that so. But it does the direct line of the Shin House no good to lodge for long under another power either. If your stay is to be a long one, then it would be best to move elsewhere after a—”

“It shall not be much longer. You can see it for yourself, can you not?”

“Might your meaning be… would the butler be permitted a brief discourtesy?”

“You may.”

At Shin Hweein’s leave the butler at last opened his spirit-eye, took the measure of him, and soon let out an exclamation.

“So the affliction that plagued you was the price of a talent of the rarest kind. If this old man may say so, your rate of growth is profoundly astonishing, young master. It may be that his lordship will name you the next head of the house.”

“Out of the question. The matter has, as I understand it, been settled upon Eldest Brother.”

And in truth, the seat of head of the Shin House he did not want, even were it handed to him.
After his mother’s passing it was a place with only enemies left in it.
What would change now if he were to become head of the house?

…Though with Shin Myeongin he had patched things up, a little.

“Haha — nothing has been settled. While his lordship still stands strong and steady, who would dare raise the matter of succession? Nor is there any rule that says the eldest son must inherit. One has only to look at the Yun House to see as much.”

“Hmph. Who can know what is in father’s mind. Even if he should truly set me as head, he would have to persuade me first before he proclaimed it.”

“His lordship thinks always of the young master. Pray take that to heart.”

“…Surely you did not come to mediate between us. Your business?”

“This.”

The butler, abandoning for the moment any further effort to persuade him, set a single mask upon the table.

It was a mask whose spirit-current had been gathered into an astonishingly composed stillness, and yet for all that carried something of ill omen about it.
At a glance it bore a face like a Hwa-guk oni, two ox-horns sprouting from its brow…

“This is.”

Grasping its identity at once, Shin Hweein’s mouth fell open.

The butler wore a contented expression as he spoke.

“His lordship sends it as both an apology and a coming-of-age gift. Now do you see why this old man brought up the matter of the next head?”

It was a mask wrought from the severed head of the great yokai, Ushi-gozen.

The whole of her spirit-current had been compressed within it, and the working, possible only for a Master Sorcerer such as Shin Yuhyeon, had been carried to completion.
The thing now gave off, it must be said, an aura more chilling than she had borne in life!