Chapter 1 — First Entry Into The Specter Realm (2)

His first impression of the Specter Realm was a vast country meadow.
A thick forest stood far off in the distance, but close by there was nothing at all.
At the very least, no enemies were in sight either, and he supposed he should be grateful for that.

The time of day was not the present world’s. It was evening, the hour of sunset.
At this hour, when the boundary between day and night blurred, the boundary between the present world and the Specter Realm was said to grow thinnest as well, and only now did he understand why the Ember-Blood Gate had been opened to match it.
The reverse was possible too, opening the gate from the present world in the evening, but in that case it became a gate through which yokai came out, rather than one through which people went in.

Moa… was caught in the end, then.

After collecting his wits and casting his eyes briefly about to take stock of things, Shin Hweein realized Geum Moa was nowhere near, and knitted his brows.

He had told her not to do anything strange.
If she so loathed Shin Uin and the stepmother, she should have quietly slipped away on her own sometime yesterday.
From childhood she had possessed skill enough to infiltrate the Shin House’s annex; she had honed her stealth to what could only be called the pinnacle of the art, and had she set her mind to running, no one could have found her.
No. If she set her mind to it now, even now, she could shake off the Shin House’s elite and vanish.
No one could have stopped her, unless his father and the most select circle of sorcerers under his command had been on the scene, and they had not.

…Father.

Did his father know everything that had happened up to today, up to Shin Hweein’s standing of the Gatekeeper Rite?
If he did not know, how could a man be so indifferent to his own child?
If he did know, how could he leave his own child to suffer such humiliation?
Even if he meant to kill his son with his own hand, was it not consistent, for a sorcerer, that no outsider be permitted to defile him first?

His hand clenched in a sudden surge of feeling, and for fear his frail skin would split beneath the pressure, Shin Hweein opened his fist again and let out another sigh.

Enough.

The bond had already been severed by the Indulgence.
And if his father’s will was mingled in that severance, there was no meaning now in trying to mend it again.
Better, instead, to give some thought to how he might survive in this unfamiliar place even a little longer.

Survive? Now that’s a laugh.

After all his carrying-on about being above the concerns of mere life, here he was, throwing a fit because he did not want to die.

Driving off the last of his weak-hearted feelings with a scoff, Shin Hweein leaned on the staff he had planted in the ground and raised himself up.
He might be wretched, but he would not be base.
Yes. Having been given a task, ought he not to carry it out to the very moment of his death?

His birth mother, who had guided him in his childhood, was no longer beside him; neither was Geum Moa, who had filled the empty place his mother left.
Yet in the moment of becoming truly alone, Shin Hweein felt only relief.
Even the yokai aura of the Specter Realm, which was said to wither the body of an ordinary man without spiritual power, or worse, to turn him into a yokai at even the smallest inhalation, felt almost welcome to him just then.

“Shall I move, then.”

He resolved first to leave the empty meadow and try for the forest, and took a step forward.

For all that this was the most active he had ever been in his life, his body had in fact been at its very best for some while now.
The periodic clouding of thought and sight, the throbbing in his joints and the pain in his legs, the searing soreness of his abdomen and the ache at his heart, all of it remained; but at the very least, the prickling in his lungs had eased.
The world was beautiful indeed, when one was not coughing.

“A Rank Seven yokai… huff, a Rank Seven yokai, of all things.”

The Specter Realm was a vast and uncanny space, and the kinds of yokai within it were beyond counting; even a sorcerer who had worked the realm for many years could not claim to know them all.
So the rank that marked a yokai’s threat was set by measuring the magnitude of the power it held, its yokai force, and of course Shin Hweein did not possess so much as the sorcerous implement required to take such a measurement.
A man of his innate spiritual power could read the strength of most yokai without one; but his fatal lack of experience meant he had no idea what level of opponent a Rank Seven actually was.

What famous Rank Seven yokai are there? The Aeshin Bestiary of Marvels says the flame-hound starts at Rank Seven, and the tiger-gate bird is famous for its size and strength. An intelligent dokkaebi would be best, but… among those not recorded in our own house’s chronicles, a nekomata of more than a hundred years’ age, or a land-shark, or a yamachichi would do well, though the Shin House values tradition, so…

In the middle of the thought he gave a small, low laugh.
He had not even the power to subdue (to bring evil to submission) a Rank Seven yokai, and yet here he was, picking and choosing among them; it struck him as absurd.

The only thing Shin Hweein could presently command was a flame whose very origin he did not know.
And what could he do with it…? Well, his body was rather chilled at the moment, so kindling a fire to warm himself was, at least, within his means.

“Hngh… cold.”

In the end he had to stop and stand again before he had taken many steps.
He swung his staff clumsily about, beating the grasses around him into a clump, and heaped earth in a circle to keep the fire from spreading.
He laboriously squatted down, stretched out one hand, and drew up his spiritual power; faintly reddened, it answered his will and turned to flame.
When he gave a light shake of his hand, an ember drifted lazily through the air, settled on the bundle of grass, and began to send up an acrid smoke.

“Cough, cough! …It had a lot of moisture. Of course it did.”

By rights a fire kindled for the first time had no business burning well; yet because this flame had sprouted from spiritual power, its life-force was strong, and after a brief spell of smoke it caught astonishingly well and grew into quite a respectable flame.
This was the first sorcery Shin Hweein had ever wrought.
It was nothing more than the chance handling of a power he had stumbled into, with no proper sorcerous formula behind it; and yet, watching the flame warm his body, he felt within him even a small flicker of moved feeling.

— Meow.

“Hm?”

He turned his head at the cat’s cry behind him, and a little kitten had poked its head out from between the grasses, from where he could not say.

How long had it been, exactly, since he had thought of nekomata?
And now a cat yokai had genuinely appeared before him.

Unfortunately, though, cat yokai were like most yokai, the sort whose age and power scaled in step, and this creature, by any honest look at it, was indistinguishable from a newborn kitten.
The one redeeming fact was that no malice could be felt from it.

“Are you cold too? Will you sit a while with me and share my fire?”

— Meeoww…

The kitten kept its face poked out of the grass, watching him warily.
Still, it did not retreat. It stayed at the very edge where the flame’s warmth just barely reached, soaking up the heat, and the sight of it was rather adorable.

He had never been able to keep a dog or cat. Coming near one set off an allergic fit of coughing that ruined him, and the impossibility had always been a small regret.
Against a yokai, evidently, that affliction did not occur. A welcome miscalculation.

— Nya.

He had thought that never mind its rank, just to have this little fellow beside him would be a steadying thing, and perhaps the thinking of it had been the mistake.
As though it had warmed itself enough, the kitten gave a short cry and slipped back into the grass.

He had committed its yokai aura to memory; even without the proper sorcery, he ought to be able to track it.
But Shin Hweein quickly put the thought aside.
If they were fated, they would meet again; and if not, this was the end of it.
For one who did not know when he would die, going out of his way to seek new ties would only invite harm.

…And that, no doubt, was the very thought he should not have had.

— There it is!
— Hee hee, I’ll cut off its tail and roast it.
— A noble little creature, wandering out all alone, what nerve!
— Shaaaaak!

He had already been on edge, sensing the approach of low spirits in the area; now from some distance came the faint sound of quarrelling voices, and on its heels a sharp, frightened cat-cry.

Without a doubt, the spirits were after the kitten he had just met, that little thing who had not yet attained the bearing of a true yokai.
Just as men kill men to satisfy their own desires, yokai did the same.
If anything, since a yokai could grow by killing another and absorbing some part of its force, fratricide among them was all the more common.
A powerless yokai whelp would look, to those things, like a meal laid out on the table.

Is this fate, then?

His was a frail body, one that could not be sure even of victory against low spirits, and there was no time now for long deliberation.

Shin Hweein leaned upon his staff and rose, and intoned:

“By the call of Hweein, last descendant of the Shin House. Aengseol. Old Aengseol. Find me the kitten yokai I met.”

At the same time he let a thin trickle of spiritual power into the staff where it met the earth, drew a small pouch from within his robes, and scattered a few grains of millet from it.
It was a basic working among the unique sorceries of the Shin House, used for finding lost things, or, equally, for divination.
He had never performed it before and was inwardly uncertain whether it would come out right, but soon the millet flung into the air arranged itself into a line, pointing him a direction.

At the same time, a girl’s voice, clear as an oriole’s, sounded beside his ear.

— That is no kitten. It is dangerous. You must hurry. Light your flame, and walk.

Aengseol, properly Old Aengseol (the tongue of an aged oriole), was a yokai with a gift for catching out men’s secrets and finding lost things.
The Shin House was an illustrious name renowned for its shikigami sorcery, and across the generations had bound many kinds of yokai; among them were any number who had contracted to lend a portion of their power to every soul in whom Shin blood flowed.
The basic chapter of the house’s unique sorcery consisted precisely of drawing upon the powers of those yokai.

It really works. Though by rights one is supposed to describe what one is looking for in detail, to raise the success rate. Old Aengseol is a kinder yokai than I had been told.

But if it was not a kitten yokai, what on earth was it?

Even as he wondered, Shin Hweein began walking in the direction the millet pointed; the grains hovering in the air were offered up to Old Aengseol and vanished from the spot.

— Then I shall be off. Next time, not grain. Macarons or cake would be nicer.

“…Yes, I shall take that under advisement.”

The times had changed, true. But that even a yokai who received offerings should covet the sweet pastries of the West…

He remembered that, long ago, when he had heard Geum Moa was buying cakes and cookies for herself in town from time to time, he had once said to her that, as the attendant of a tradition-keeping house of name, was it not somewhat unbecoming to indulge so eagerly in things Western?
After that she had obediently shifted her tastes to yakgwa and tanghulu¹, and to sweets with green tea in them and the like, and he recalled how he had nodded, satisfied.

Moa, by now, must be… no. This is no time to be thinking of her.

He breathed a thin sigh and once more set his staff forward.
Then, remembering Old Aengseol’s parting words, he conjured a small flame at his fingertip; and in that instant the meadowed scenery around him melted away, and in its place appeared withered and twisted trees and a brown earth so saturated with yokai aura that the aura had taken on visible form, lying along the ground in a thick fog.

“…!!”

He could not believe his eyes for a moment and turned his head; behind him, the green meadow still stretched on, undisturbed.
This was his very first entry into the Specter Realm, and yet, foolishly, he had been trusting in his two eyes alone. A fortunate thing, that he had caught it before something worse befell him.

— Myaa-ohng!

In the next moment a yokai that gave the cry of a kitten leapt into his arms.
Only after he had barely managed to catch the creature did Shin Hweein realize Old Aengseol had been right.

“So it was a myodusa, then.”

— Nyaa.

The myodusa, a snake yokai with the face of a kitten fixed upon it.
It possessed a remarkable gift for healing men, and long ago there had been not a few popular shrines and temples that served the myodusa and made offerings to it.
But as the years passed and civilization advanced, the myodusa, with no means to defend itself and only its exceptional healing power to recommend it, became easy prey for ungrateful men, and after suffering greatly the creatures retreated, in the end, deep into the Specter Realm, just as the other gentle yokai had done.

Even within the Specter Realm a myodusa was hard to find, the very picture of a rarely-encountered yokai; and possessing as it did the uncommon power of healing, those who desired one were beyond count.
Designated Special Rank Six, a sorcerer who had the good fortune to contract one would never want for a livelihood again as long as he lived.

— If we stew that thing, we shall have a thousand years of vigor ahead of us.
— A human? A living human! Another meal added to the table!
— That human, with the spiritual power overflowing out of him, is mine. Mine!

…And now, by the look of it, the yokai wanted the myodusa just as badly as men did.

There were scratches and gashes here and there across the myodusa’s body; with no combat ability of its own, the poor creature had clearly had a hard time fleeing the yokai who pursued it.

“I shall hold them off. Flee from here.”

— Mya!

He had said it knowing he could not win even against low spirits, and the creature, as if to refuse him, gave an irritable cry and burrowed into his coat.

The myodusa’s healing power was, it seemed, the genuine article; feeling a faint vigor return, little by little, to a body wearied from long walking, Shin Hweein at last let out a sigh and planted his staff against the ground.

“Very well. Then let us try to survive together, you and I.”

If he had been alone, he could have died with a quiet mind; now even that was denied him.
Fate, it seemed, was a fearsome thing.

So muttering, Shin Hweein once more raised a flame upon his palm and hurled it, without further ceremony, at the low spirits.

His first battle in the Specter Realm had begun.