Chapter 5 — The Sorcerer And The Mudang (1)

In the dream, he was talking with a truly enormous being.
One against whom he had once staked his life in battle, and who had since grown closer to him than anyone.
A friend, all the same, in whose presence he could never quite let down his guard.

— What is so vexing about that, that you should fret over it like this?

“XX, what would you do, were you me? Which of the two strikes you as the one in the right?”

— Were it me, I’d swallow them both whole and have done with it.

“No, no. One must reckon out right from wrong.”

— But the quarrels between man and man are ever paltry things, are they not. Look at the matter whole, and in the end none of them stray past eating, sleeping, and breeding. If that is so, then for me to swallow them both whole and settle my own eating would surely be no unnatural judgment.

“What you call judgment is, in truth, the abandonment of thought. Take this seriously. Unlikely as I may look, I stand here as a representative of mankind.”

— A tedious and troublesome business, truly. X, hear me well. The only thing that settles a dispute is force. Right and wrong shift as easily as you please with values, circumstance, and standpoint, so how much more arrogant a thing it must be for a third party to render that judgment on another’s behalf. Does X mean, in truth, to set himself up as Sangje?

“That is to deny human society outright. Now and then you really do come out with the sort of thing that gets a man killed.”

— And so, in the end, it comes down to force, I say. And to numbers besides. The more men there are, the louder the voice, and that too is force.

“Sigh.”

— So whichever it be, eat plenty and grow strong. And couple riotously with as many females as you can find, and beget a great many offspring. Then, beyond all doubt, the world will be made one in which X is in the right.

“I don’t recall my own opinion ever once entering this conversation.”

— Khm. And while we’re on the subject, I, too, can take the shape of a female, you know.

“Absolutely. Not.”

And yet the giant friend’s words stayed carved into his mind.

If one had no force, then though one were wronged, one could not so much as argue one’s own righteousness —

If one had force, then even a falsehood could be made into truth, and one could defend oneself by it —

If the world would not bend to one’s will in any case, then —

“I’m… right…”
“Yes, yes. Whatever it is, young master, you’re right.”

Shin Hweein’s eyes snapped open at the voice by his ear.
He looked up at the ceiling. It seemed to be the hotel where they had briefly stayed on coming out of the Specter Realm, but that was not what mattered to him just now.

“…”

He patted his chest, then his head, and confirmed that, though nearly all of the dream had already fled, one single sentence remained vivid, burned into his mind.
Certainty in hand, he heaved a sigh.

“This is a curse.”
“Tch. Found out already? At a time like this, young master, that sharpness of yours is something I could curse…!”

Clicking her tongue as though in genuine regret, Geum Moa held out a basin of water and a handkerchief.

Going through the motions of washing his face all the same, Shin Hweein glared sideways at her in dumbfounded indignation.
Then, remembering that Geum Moa had said she would stay beside him strictly as a handmaid with some little skill in sorcery and nothing more, he let out a sigh.

What he could not make sense of, though, was this: she was not the one who had laid the curse, and yet she was the one put out by it.

“That you did not tell me of the curse, let us grant that much. But what reason have you to be put out by it?”

Perhaps because Shin Hweein had recognized the curse by his own power, Geum Moa explained its workings to him meekly enough.

“As you have rightly guessed, it is a dreadful curse that, through suggestion in dreams, alters a part of one’s memory. And, beyond that, the very pattern of one’s thinking.”
“To hear it spoken of alone is dreadful enough. Indeed, of late I had felt violent thoughts and notions, not my own, beginning to colour my mind.”

Swayed by the word desire the dream had left him with, Shin Hweein had read the situation rather too hastily and pushed Do Yumi to the wall.
It was, of course, also true that Do Yumi, a foolish creature ruled by her desires, had through her reckless actions brought harm upon a number of people.
Yet had Shin Hweein been in a more level-headed state, he would surely have grasped the situation sooner, and so forestalled whatever further harm he himself might inflict on Do Yumi.

Had he not, for that very purpose, devoured the whole of sorcery’s learning under his mother, and after she passed, with Geum Moa’s aid besides?

“Yes. And in just that way, a person grows ever more impatient, ever simpler, ever readier to give themselves over to their desires. Of course, I had no intention of letting you become a beast entirely, young master, and meant to step in at the proper line…”
“…And so? What then?”
“Oh, come, young master. One grows easier and easier to give oneself over to desire, I say…”

Geum Moa pressed both hands to her cheeks and writhed in a put-on show of bashfulness, and at that moment she was, to him, the most terrifying thing in all the world.
However gently she accepted him, even with what looked at times like maternal affection, she was at root a yokai, one who wished to use Shin Hweein for her own ends.

That fact must never be allowed to slip his mind, or sooner or later he would come to grief.

“As I have said before, I have no desires to give myself over to.”
“It’s all right. The truth is, even now I have my thralls out hunting down the one who laid this curse on you. And I have a fairly good guess as to who it was… that bastard has crossed the line. Even if I killed him, no one would say a word against it.”

As Shin Hweein flung the words back at her almost in defiance, Geum Moa wrung the handkerchief she had taken back from him as though crushing something in her fury, and answered.
Even as he narrowed his eyes and glared at her, the very picture of pitying her foolishness, Flame-tail bounded up onto his bedclothes and spoke.

— It’s because you keep going around so carelessly giving yourself over that that pervert-woman acts like this. Be careful.

“Just so. The only one I can trust, it would seem, is you, Flame-tail.”

— Wh-what nonsense?! I knew about the curse on you too, and I didn’t tell you about it either, hear?!

That it was a lie, he knew at once.
Flame-tail might have had impressive power from the start, but discernment, it would appear, was something he had been born without.

And among the high yokai of Flame-tail’s rank, there should be no other who would let himself be taken in by a confidence trick like Shin Hweein’s into a shikigami pact…

— Khng!

“Ah. Neuldam is here too, isn’t it. Yes, of course I haven’t forgotten. I trust in you as well.”

— Krrng.

Neuldam, which since the contract had been sleeping snugly inside his robes the whole while, now seemed to have recovered something of its strength, for it climbed up Shin Hweein’s neck and settled atop his head.

Yokai though it was, the softness and pleasant feel of its fur were such that Shin Hweein felt a little of his old childhood regret, at never having been allowed a pet, beginning to lift.

“Now that I think of it…”

Shin Hweein’s gaze turned toward his own breast pocket, more precisely toward the Indulgence within it, faintly glowing.
Even after he had dispelled Do Yuna’s curse, his karma had not been consumed but had risen further, so that he had meant to absolve his own curse next, yet at about that point his strength had given out and he had collapsed. This much he remembered.
Indeed. He had most certainly not used the Indulgence.

…And yet why was his spiritual power greater now than before?
If his usable spiritual power before had been ten, then now it was a good fifteen, at the least.
And what was more, this added five was not power newly freed from what had been bound up in his body’s curse, but power wholly and freshly added.

“That cursed object. It really is no ordinary thing.”

At this, Geum Moa, having only just now pulled herself out of her wrath and back into the present, pointed at the part of his robes where the Indulgence lay and spoke.

“To sense the karma in a human being, and to absolve a curse, is already no ordinary feat. But to trace a curse back along its line and tear out its very source, that, truly…”
“The source? Surely not.”
“Just so. Even you, young master, had guessed the woman would lose her sorcery-power, had you not?”
“Indeed I had. By the Indulgence’s power I made that very woman’s sorcery-power the price of the absolving. I judged it more than enough.”

She was a woman who had twice already laid a curse on the very child she carried in her womb.
If even a little of her power were left to her, she would surely commit some such monstrous deed again. That much anyone could see.

And so, by twisting the structure of the Indulgence, he had meant to make the absolving come to pass according to his own will…
But it seemed he had not yet fathomed the whole of this Indulgence after all.

“And so, then. Where do you suppose all that sorcery-power, torn out as it was, has gone?”
“Surely you don’t mean it has all come to me?”
“It was levied by the Indulgence and offered up to its master, no doubt. My congratulations, young master. Do you feel no other change?”

He did feel it.
He could not put it precisely into words, and its form was still primitive, in want of much further refinement.
But he had come to wield one more hereditary sorcery, of a kind he had never learned, that he could never have learned.
One that may only be wielded by those born with the talent for it.

“I am able to wield the sacrifice-rite. Its ‘efficiency’ is greater than I had imagined. If I refine it well, it will be exceedingly useful.”
“Ahh. So that’s the sorcery that was laid on the servant. If we hadn’t come along saying we’d absolve her curse, that woman would in the end have killed her child, offered the servant up as sacrifice, and restored herself.”
“…Yes. So it had been thus. To curse the servant had been her thrashing about to save her own skin, nothing more.”

The sacrifice-rite was, in essence, a sorcery whereby a sacrifice was offered up to perform a rite.
Depending on the quality of the sacrifice, any wish, however unreal, could be granted.
And Do Yuna had used it, through and through, for her own sake.

Of course, she herself surely had no idea what it really was.
At first, in her wish simply to be rid of the child, she would have done nothing more than blindly draw her sorcery-power into her womb.

But foetus and mother share a single vital force, and Do Yuna’s attempt to be rid of the child had been, in the end, no different from putting her own neck in a noose.
Yet far from repenting at having committed so unnatural a thing through sorcery, Do Yuna laid a curse on another, the servant, declaring all the while that she wished to live.

For no other reason than to steal another’s vital force, and survive.
To kill one person and save one person. This was the sacrifice-rite at its most fundamental.

But the younger sister, Do Yumi, with the aid of the taejagwi, had spirited the servant away and put a stop to it.
She could not endure to watch her elder sister go on living happily with her brother-in-law, blithely setting another person’s child aside as though it were no concern of hers.

Even if, at the end, it should come to her killing her own elder sister with her own hands.
Even if it should come to a child slain by its own mother taking, in turn, the life of that mother.
Deceiving even the taejagwi, and herself besides, into believing that, since she had not directly meant to kill her sister, it would be all right.

Father Lucas thought the curse rested upon Do Yuna. Had he poured his holy power into Do Yuna, then she would, of course, have gained vitality and been delivered from the curse’s effects — but the child, having lost the very tether of the mother who had been sharing in the bearing of the curse, would have lost the last of its own vitality and died. … So that was the true face of the curse-absolving.

At this, Shin Hweein glanced at Geum Moa out of the corner of his eye and asked her.

“I would have the precise reason. It cannot be that she laid the curse merely because she dreaded the bearing of the child.”
“You already suspect it, young master, do you not? Of course. It was another man’s child. The truth is that the very moment I set foot in that house, I caught the scent of a male other than her husband’s, and twigged.”

He had asked in the hope that there might be some hidden reason, one that might let him understand Do Yuna even a little.
But just so. It would have been better not to have asked.

“Since you have seen the taejagwi, you will surely know it already. This not being her first time, it must have been all the easier for her. As for why Do Yumi acted on the matter so very quickly, most likely it was because, the previous time, she herself was caught up in it as well.”
“…”

When Shin Hweein only held his peace and said nothing further, Geum Moa let out a sigh, tapped at her phone a few times, then turned the screen she had found toward him.

What she had brought up, when he took it and looked, was an internet news article from a full ten years ago.
It told how, in an apartment where two teenaged sisters and their mother had been living together, there had been a fire. The mother had died and the sisters had survived, but from the shock the elder sister had miscarried.

Who had set that fire, there was no need to ask.
The mother of the two sisters had certainly not died of burns, nor of suffocation.
She had been offered up as a sacrifice.

“At a teenaged age it would, I grant, have been a daunting thing to bear a child. Yet even so, to make of one’s own mother, for the sake of one’s own surviving…”
“This Do Yumi too has had a hard road of it. The parent she might have leaned on, her elder sister killed, and on top of that bound by a forced contract that she might say nothing of any of it, with even her elder sister’s dead child clinging to her as a taejagwi, tormenting her.”

No real name had appeared in the article.
There had been no mention either that sorcery was involved.
This was a matter that had taken place in Zone 3 and, by good fortune, had slipped beneath the net of the State Sorcerers’ inquiry.

Ten years. That taejagwi, for ten whole years from then on, without even bearing his mother a grudge…

In spite of having been slain, in his past existence, by his own mother through that very same curse, he remembered the figure of the taejagwi, weeping desperately, crying that he had to save his mama, that he had to save the child… his little sister.

And his own figure too, the one who, certain that all of it was Do Yumi’s sin and falsehood, had not granted the boy’s words an atom of worth.
The scene at that moment clung stickily to the inside of his head and would not come loose, and Shin Hweein could only grind his teeth.

“To devour two of her own blood, one above and one below. Quite the piece of work that bitch was. Are you sure you’ll be all right leaving her be?”
“Why should I not be all right. … The rest of her life, surely, will be hell enough.”

What he wished for was only this: that the child, born at last, might live out its life.
That, miserable as the immediate state of things might be, it might not give up, but survive, and in time come to know happiness.

… It was selfish.

That he should entertain so hypocritical a thought, knowing full well it could never become a happy place for a child to grow up in, disgusted him.
Forcing himself to break off his ruminations at that, Shin Hweein abruptly raised his head.

“This will not do. The way my thinking is muddying is not to be borne. Here I sit, tormenting myself over matters already concluded. I must hurry and absolve this curse first of all.”
“Tch. It would have been so much nicer if you’d just let it pass and forgotten about it.”

Shin Hweein ignored the witch’s murmur, drew the Indulgence forth, and gripped it.
At first he had been swept along by the dreadful artifact’s power and nothing more, but through using it again and again he had come, just a little, to understand it and to wield it.

It was thanks to that, too, that he had been able to make Do Yuna, and not himself, the target of the Indulgence’s invocation.
Given that the price it took was the spiritual power and the inherent power of the sorcerer who had cast the curse, the Indulgence had surely been made for just such a use from the very first.

Who made it, and how. …And by what reason it has come, of all places, to my own side. There is much I shall have to look into.

Shin Hweein softly closed his eyes and called the Indulgence into operation.
Here too, at first, it had not even occurred to him that he might choose for himself which curse to absolve. But when he thought it over, the Indulgence had, from the start, seemed to choose for him the very curse he most desperately wished to be free of.
That which oppressed him from the nearest place of all… above everything, he had wanted to undo first the bandages that had wrapped his entire body.

And now.
There were, of course, many grave maladies inside his very body, ceaselessly consuming his spiritual power, that he could not but absolve sooner than this…
Even so, he chose the freedom of his mind.

Absolve me of the curse that breathes wicked impulse into me.

The instant the Indulgence spilled out a dazzling light and enfolded him, just as before he had seen the figure of a burning bird, this time the figure of a pale, beautiful man, his whole body wrapped in a pitch-black overcoat, rose into his mind.

— What’s this, you really did come back? Well, well. And on top of that, to have undone even a part of my curse. You’ve some ability left in you yet, it seems.
— But what to do, what to do. Much as I’d love to drop everything and rush over, you see, the Clan keeps me terribly busy…

Unlike the bird, which had only seethed with a vague wrath, this man perceived Shin Hweein’s existence quite clearly, and even seemed to be speaking with him, as it were, in real time.
From the moment he had learned that great beings were tied to him by curses, Shin Hweein had been braced for as much. And yet even so, his hair stood on end.

— Ah, yes, that will do! I’ll send a deputy over before long. In my stead, you can play hide-and-seek with that child. Fun, won’t it be? If you’re caught, you die, so hide yourself well, well.
— And if you survive, and come all the way through to me, I promise, I, at least, will help you again. Generous, am I not? A friend like me is rare.
— Oh, that’s going to be such fun. Then, if by some chance you survive, see you again. Friend.
— …What? Wait, surely this is —

The man, who through all of it had seemed to be speaking down to him in lordly ease, abruptly raised his voice in a flicker of alarm, and at that very instant the Indulgence’s light grew fiercer, and he was gone.
The reason for his alarm could be easily guessed.
It was that, in absolving the curse, the rebound had torn away a portion of his power as well, and brought it to Shin Hweein.

“…Just so.”

Half-freed of the dull headache and the impulse that had, knowingly or not, been driving him into haste, he felt a marked clearing.
And in the midst of it, with a kind of impulse toward a realization, Shin Hweein extended a finger out into empty space.

And then, though no wound had been made, a single drop of blood welled up at his fingertip and fell, plop, then floated up to drift in the air, and at his will moved this way and that, changing its shape freely.

“Oh my, young master. That power is…”
“Yes. I think I know now just what manner of being the man was.”
“Egh, so it really was him.”

It seemed Geum Moa knew indeed, for her face screwed up in disgust.
If he were to absolve a further portion of the curse the man had left, then it would be made certain, but even with this alone he could guess well enough.

“A vampire. True-blooded, of the West…”

What in heaven’s name could his past life have been, that yokai East and West alike had laid curses on him?
A man could only sigh.

“And not just any. The first of them. Young master, of all things, you have set yourself against a fellow who, even to this day, exerts a troublesome influence over the whole world.”
“You speak as though it were someone else’s affair.”
“Well. Were you, young master, only to say the word, I give up, all I should have to do is kill the fellow and vanish with you, and that would be that.”

Seeing Geum Moa speak as though killing the progenitor of vampires were nothing at all, Shin Hweein was struck afresh with a kind of horror. Yet still no thought arose in him of taking fright in advance and fleeing.

“There shall be no giving up on my part. See to it that you cling to my side to the very end.”
“…ngh.”
“Your answer?”
“Of course, my young master…”

— Gigolo.

“What was that?”

— Ding-dong

Just as Shin Hweein’s eyes flew wide at Flame-tail’s words, words the creature had surely spat out without the least idea of what they meant, the doorbell rang.

Sensing a powerful déjà vu and heaving a sigh, Shin Hweein once more pulled on his mask.
The visitor’s identity was, of course, Father Lucas.