Chapter 7 — An Audience With The Vampires (2)

The day of the supplementary exam had come at last, or, put another way, the day of the joint operation.

As a matter of course, Shin Hweein had skipped his evening meal the day before, risen before dawn, bathed alone, and settled into seon meditation to gather his spiritual power.

Of all the things his mother had taught him, the one art she had never instructed him in was the cultivation of spiritual power.
Sitting in meditation by himself, he had come to understand why.
To swell a thing that began small took peculiar little tricks, but to swell a thing already vast took no tricks at all, only earnestness and a single-pointed mind.

His mother had surely known how immense his own spiritual power was beneath the veil of his curse.
How she had divined as much, he still could not say.

My native spiritual power… I had always assumed everyone was simply made this way. But it seems it is far greater than I imagined.

He had grasped that for certain only after watching Shin Myeongin and Ham Seoyeon, both of them, like himself, of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses.
The two had been born with abundant spiritual power, and unlike him they would have honed it since childhood, swelling it well past whatever they had started with.
And yet they still held far less than he did.

It was true enough that this was a matter of total capacity.
The spiritual power Hweein could actively draw on was still less than a hundredth of what would be his once the seals broke, so it was nothing to swagger about.
But total capacity was what mattered.
The recovery rate scaled with the size of the reservoir, and his outstripped any other sorcerer’s, and meditation that swelled that reservoir worked the same way.

Moa, too, was quick to take back her offer to teach me what she knew. Since I bear the Indulgence, she said, I will go on absorbing the spiritual power of other beings, so it is better to refine my own through patient, single-handed effort and forge it into one whole than to inflate it crudely.

Hweein concluded his meditation, opened his eyes, and set his spiritual power in order.
Ever since he had dissolved Do Yuna’s power into his own, he had thrown himself into practice without an idle thought, and now his usable spiritual power had grown by about a tenth.

Anyone ignorant of the truth of his power would be staggered all the same: the total might still be modest, yet the growth rate beggared belief.

“Are you finished, young master?”
“That will do. Today is an important day. Do not come near me.”
“Ugh, again?”

Geum Moa had been approaching with the clothes he was to wear.
At his rebuke she stopped short and pulled a face.
He chuckled and soothed her.

“If I should truly find myself at death’s door today, that is when you will step in. From that point on you may roast me or boil me as you please, no?”
“…Sometimes I wonder if you know perfectly well what those expressions mean and use them on purpose, young master. Whether you mightn’t be a worse little beast than I am…”
“So you wish to torment me that badly? Then bear with it, and see what becomes of you.”
“Or is it not so? Do you really not know?”

For reasons he could not fathom, he left Geum Moa behind to brood over some grave thought, dressed himself, then worked his transformation art to change his face and turned back to her.

“How is it? Will I still need your help?”
“It’s absurd how quickly you’ve mastered the transformation art… But will you really be all right with the drain on your spiritual power?”

The transformation art consumed spiritual power not only at the moment of casting but for as long as it was held.
To her concern, Hweein replied that there was no cause for worry.

“Has my spiritual power not grown swiftly under these past days of meditation? And thanks to its purer quality, I feel my recovery rate has stepped up another notch. A simple face-changing transformation I can sustain with ease now.”
“I see… That’s bad news.”

It was news of Hweein’s progress, and still Geum Moa wore a bitter look.
If this had been merely a matter of the Three-Year Pact growing less likely to break, her eyes would not be this genuinely worried for him.

“Does it trouble you so terribly that my spiritual power is growing?”
“When your spiritual power grows, your presence grows with it, young master. You don’t seriously think only the yokai who cursed you can find you, do you? Even leaving me aside, there are plenty of yokai in the world with sharp senses.”
“…Ah.”

Hweein’s eyes widened at her words.
Now that he thought of it, Geum Moa herself had come to find him in his childhood, long before any business of the curse she had laid on him.
A possibility struck him, and his voice turned hard as he asked.

“Have there been others, not the ones who cursed me, who came searching for me?”
“Well, now. Who’s to say.”

Geum Moa caught the intent behind his question and gave a deliberately evasive answer, then put on a look of pure exasperation.

“Is this really the time for the young master to be thinking about such things? Worry about your own body, please.”
“And this wish of yours to lock my power away so it does not grow. Surely that, too, is not for my sake…”
“I said this is not the time. And, you know, I just want to keep you all to myself.”

Unable to flatly deny his guess, Geum Moa hurried to add more.

“I still hate you, all right? Always trying to think the best of everything the instant there’s even a shred of possibility. That mushy, soft-hearted streak is exactly like the master from your past life!”
“Dear me. It seems I’ve made the Three-Year Pact even harder on myself.”

At the sight of Geum Moa retreating with a feeble show of anger, Hweein burst out laughing.

He would have liked to spend a little longer with her, but their contact had already gone on too long.
Those preparing for an important rite did not even speak to others for days on end.
He waved her further back and crossed to the table.

“…You’ve still got some time. Shouldn’t you go back to your meditation?”
“That would be well enough, but I believe what I did for Flame-tail and Neuldam I owe to Arong as well.”

— Kyu?

Knowing he was being summoned, the bear cub Arong appeared at the level of Hweein’s shoulder.
The manner of it was peculiar: a faint mist that had been scattered around Hweein’s body suddenly drew together and clotted into the shape of a small bear.

“You really mean to bring that thing along… Can you handle him?”
“Could I, in a head-on fight, handle the deputy of the vampires’ chieftain?”
“Impossible.”
“Then I must do everything I can. Can I afford to hang back, fretting over what may come after?”

— Kyuing.

Whether the two of them were having a grave conversation or not made no difference to Arong, who fawned on Hweein and played up his cuteness as though that were his one and only mission.
The last word bound into him had been the Three Bears song’s “such a cute little baby bear.”

But in truth the thing was no baby bear.
It was a naty, a yokai forged by binding, through sorcery, the empty image that countless people had agreed upon.
Given strong, firm conviction, a naty could shift into any shape unbound by form, and could absorb anything.
Seen one way, they were the ultimate form of a yokai grown strong on human fear.

Closer to a phenomenon than a being, closer to a sorcery than a shikigami, a thing like that should have been beyond even the celebrated direct line of the Yun House to bind in a shikigami contract.
And yet the Shin blood running in Hweein had made it possible.
At least, that was how Hweein himself thought of it.

“There are many proprietary shikigami arts in the Shin House. Of them, do you recall the most unstable one, the one that rears an outstanding shikigami in the shortest time?”
“Hm? Ah—”

As Hweein spoke, stroking the bear cub, Geum Moa, who had been locked in a staring match with him, paused in thought a moment, then nodded.

“It’s predation, isn’t it? The art that has the shikigami devour anything bearing power, be it another yokai or a cursed object, and so swell its own abilities.”
“That’s right. To be precise, the Hungry-Ghost Dominion.”
“But I’ve heard it’s such a cruel art that, with all the wild assortment of energies forced into the shikigami, it can’t keep hold of its identity as a yokai and is bound to run wild. So in practice it’s only ever inscribed on a shikigami you mean to burn through in a single use. Falls to the rank of a hungry ghost, just as the name says.”
“Knowing that, look at our Arong here.”

The yokai naty: a thing whose roots could not be traced, formed of nothing but branches sprawling every which way, of rumour, yokai aura, and spiritual power.

They had crumbled before the examinees because their lack of roots made them shift too easily.
But, comically enough, it was thanks to that very weakness that Hweein had managed to capture one of them, and into the creature he had carved the firmest root imaginable.
A name. Arong.

“Ah, you can’t mean—”
“Indeed. A being whose only flaw was having no root now possesses a root that nothing can shake.”

In the Shin House’s shikigami arts, what mattered above all else was the name.
The simplest sorcery, and yet the most powerful: the one that defined and bound a single being as its own discrete self.

And having received his name, Arong, no matter how greatly his form changed, would never again lose his self as a shikigami.
The name had been given by his master, Hweein, and that name fixed the relation between the two of them.

“Then surely you don’t mean to inscribe the Hungry-Ghost Dominion on him?”
“Other yokai have their root in their form and their habits. Their names cannot escape that frame either. But what of Arong? The only thing that binds him is the name I gave him. No matter how his form or his habits change, that name does not waver. And if that is so…”

Then perhaps Arong, having no root-form to begin with, could swallow anything without losing his identity, without ever running wild.
And perhaps a shikigami art the Shin House had devised as a short-term, blaze-of-glory weapon could now produce, through Arong, the strongest shikigami of all, one that would never destroy itself.

When he gave that thought voice, even Geum Moa’s expression turned tempted.

“That’s… that’s a very interesting idea, you know?”
“Isn’t it? Perhaps the military, too, hoped to keep mounting bigger and bigger weapons onto naty in much the same way. Modern media in particular makes it dreadfully easy to sway great numbers of people with rootless rumour, does it not? Every fresh rumour they could weave around a naty might grant the creature a new ability, swell its yokai aura further and further. An idea only Aeshin’s military could conceive, and an operation only they could carry out.”

Of course, because of that fatal weakness, it would be hopelessly difficult to deploy in the field.
Save in the case of Hweein’s Arong, who alone had been given a proper name.

Having delivered his lecture, Hweein wore a faint smile, finding the whole matter genuinely fascinating.
But Geum Moa was preoccupied with something else entirely.

“Young master used an English word again, just like that…!”
“How long do you mean to be startled every time I use an English word?”

Did she truly believe, even now in the twenty-first century, that he was some hidebound clan elder still clinging to isolationism?

Hweein shot back in exasperation, and Geum Moa fixed him with a stranger look still.
He gave up the verbal sparring, ignored it, and reached for the cinnabar mirror-stone ink he had water-strained through the night, mixed his blood into it, and stretched his hand toward Arong.

— Kyukyuit!

With no inkling of the future bearing down on him, the creature was simply playing up his cuteness.

“Everyone… you’ve all arrived as you should.”

It was early evening, the sun beginning to set, in a warehouse district on the outskirts of Zone 3 of the Capital, the appointed rallying point, with no civilian homes nearby.
The examiner from the Yun House looked over the examinees.
This time, unlike the day they had been dropped abruptly into the Specter Realm, they had come wound tense and prepared with every measure they could manage.

But more imposing even than his stern bearing was the column of identically uniformed military sorcerers ranked behind him.

“Allow me to introduce myself properly. My name is Yun Jinseong. I am a Lieutenant General in Aeshin’s Spell Army, and I serve as commander of its 1st Corps. These are members of the 1st Corps under my command. They hold an independent operational mandate and ordinarily move on my direct orders, a special-operations unit. The unit’s designation and the exact roster are of course classified, but depending on your performance today, some of you may yet earn the chance to learn them.”
“Oooooh…!”

Hweein only just managed to swallow a snort.
Even a flawless operation from Rank Three and Rank Four examinees made becoming a military sorcerer a vanishingly slim prospect, to say nothing of being recruited into a special unit personally commanded by a Corps commander.

And indeed the sorcerers in the ranked column, few though they were, gave off a presence of at least Rank Two.
Rank Two among them was a different order of thing entirely from the equivalent rank outside, whether in sorcery itself or in sorcerous implements.

“I shall expect great things.”

And yet, for some reason, even as Corps Commander Yun Jinseong worked the examinees’ enthusiasm to its peak, his gaze seemed pinned squarely on Hweein.

The impulse came over him to take a half-step sideways and test whether the gaze would follow.
But if it actually did, that was a thing he had no confidence he could weather just now, so for the moment he did his level best to feign ignorance.

“Uncle Jinseong! Thanks so much for the cooperation today!”

And then, shattering the air thick with anticipation and tension all at once, in came someone, none other than the Shin House’s pampered jewel, Shin Myeongin, and friends.

The examinees, finding the likes of Ham Seoyeon, Father Lucas, and Sister Barbara, each a personality of her own, stepping out into the middle of a serious operational briefing alongside Myeongin, opened their eyes wide.
Yun Jinseong, meanwhile, knit his brow.

“This is a military operation. I am not cooperating with you. I have granted you the privilege of cooperating with this operation as a favour to your father. Do not be mistaken. The same goes for the rest of your party. If you cannot follow my command, leave now.”
“It’s fine, we came knowing all about it, didn’t we! Uncle Jinseong, just relax and leave it to us! Especially the handsome priest here, total exorcist!”
“…”

Shin Myeongin trampled the Corps commander’s authority underfoot.
The rest of the party, ostensibly her allies, wore expressions that said they wanted nothing more than to put some distance between themselves and her.
The examinees were thrown into confusion.
And at the head of the special-operations column, a bespectacled handsome man whose face had visibly brightened the instant he spotted Shin Myeongin now agonized over whether or not to step forward and greet her.

Hweein was just beginning to wonder whether this operation would actually function as planned when it happened.

“Ugh, my stomach… ugwoaeaack!”

BOOM!

One of the examinees, right in the middle of the group, exploded, spraying blood in every direction.