Chapter 8 — The Sorcerer Lost In A Dream (7)

In a space without beginning or end, Shin Hweein was falling, endlessly.

The scenery never changed, and he could feel no resistance from the air, so there was no way to gauge how fast he fell.
And yet he could feel it clearly all the same, an absurd, headlong sense of speed.

The age for growing taller is long behind me, I’d have thought. And now, at this stage, am I to dream of growing?

He laughed inwardly at the thought.

A falling dream in one’s growing years might well reflect the aches of growth, but for a grown man it was another matter entirely.

A portent of some ill thing to come, or a vague unease about the future.

By odd coincidence both ran deep in Shin Hweein, so perhaps this was a manifestation of his own subconscious.

— And the dream-demon, no doubt, is making use of that, stretching it out at her leisure.

Sorcery… I cannot use.

With the queen of the dream-demons ruling over this dream, it stood to reason that every one of his abilities had been sealed.

His spiritual power locked away, his body, riddled with curse from the start, ought to have been crying out and collapsing within moments. It was not. Perhaps she had a shred of compassion after all.

Or perhaps she could only block the abilities he projected outward, and could not lay a hand on the spiritual power itself.

Plainly, I cannot summon shikigami either.

He had thought it might still be possible, his spiritual power being intact, but the notion was hopeless.

In this space, every ability he could once command had to be assumed sealed off entirely.

He turned his gaze downward, looking out over the void that simply went on and on without the slightest change.

How long he stayed that way he could not say, but at length his eyes opened wider, and something that had been invisible until now came into view.

It was a thin membrane.

No — that, I must not —!

By instinct he was certain nothing good would come of striking it, but the moment was already past, and the next instant his body collided with it.

In that moment, together with the sound of something crushed inside his head, an unfamiliar scene rose before him.

He saw a sight grown familiar by now, having looked on it several times: himself in his past life.
The figure of himself flying through a world boundlessly beautiful and dreamlike, alongside a lovely young maiden.
The maiden was, of course, the queen of the dream-demons, the same who had earlier worn Geum Moa’s face to beguile him, and the dreamlike world was, of course, the world within a dream.

Such a thing… did happen. Not long after I met her, I was enchanted by her, for she would show me realms of the unknown I knew nothing of even now.

The instant the thought rose in him by instinct, his expression hardened.

Memories he was never meant to know were folding into his thoughts with an utterly natural ease.

Only then did he understand that this was the queen of the dream-demons’ sorcery, worked through the dream, and that unless he tore himself free of it soon, the memories of his past life would overrun him, little by little.

“Ngh…!”

The first memory had not yet settled in his head before the second ‘membrane’ was already in his sight.

Shin Hweein kicked his legs without a shred of decorum, trying somehow to slow himself, only to find that doing so seemed to close the distance to the membrane all the faster.

Just before his body struck it, Shin Hweein realized his mistake.

Within a dream, a single flash of insight or of will counted for more than any small movement of the body. Had he not learned that too, breaking free of the last dream?

So before he ever attempted it, rather than flailing his limbs in self-abandoning despair and picturing the worst, he ought to have believed, and pictured, that by his own power he could master this situation…

— Crack.

‘Why will you not stay with me?’
‘It is because there are many for whom I must take responsibility.’
‘If they were all to vanish, would you stay with me then?’
‘That shall never come to pass. I shall protect them.’

It had to be true, then, that the queen of the dream-demons wished him to recall the memories that touched on her.
For the second memory, too, was a memory of him and her in his past life.
He, who savored strolling through dreams and yet in the end must return to reality, and she, who longed to keep him for her own alone.

She did resemble Geum Moa, and exceedingly so.
If there was one difference between them, it was this: Geum Moa sought to dye his world in her own colors, while she sought to drown him in her world and shut him inside it.
Small wonder, then, that the two of them suited each other so ill.

— Have you begun to miss me too, by now? If you only nod your head once, I will leave off these childish games and invite you into my garden.

“Not in the slightest.”

He answered the dream-demon’s voice in his ear, curt and flat.
The second membrane fell behind him, and the falling began again.
At the edge of his sight, far below, the third membrane waited.

— Yes, well — soon enough you will be nodding at all I say. This time I do not mean to leave you any opening, as I did before.

“That, too, will be naught but your own conceit.”

— No, it shall be as I will. For your dreams will soon be my dreams.

The dream-demon’s presence kept circling him, whispering sweet words into his ear.
For all her confident manner, she was wary of his potential, set on keeping him from concentrating properly.

When he framed it that way, a measure of confidence returned to him, bit by bit.
Before his eyes lay nothing but pitch darkness, and below, the past-life memory awaiting him shimmered as though it alone were his hope.

‘There is a reason the memories take the form of membranes. They must be barring entry to whatever lies beyond. To keep me from reaching for what I must not yet touch, she throws me the past-life memories one by one, driving their danger into me.’

Should he make himself a foothold?
No. There was nothing here to make one from.
Before, he had taken a fragment such as the spear the dream-demon wielded and, by investing it with another meaning, turned it into an eun-jangdo. But she remembered that, and had deliberately scrubbed away every factor in his surroundings he might have controlled.

What was to be done, then? The answer was simple.
He had only to fly within this space.

‘The Shin House holds many winged shikigami under contract. But among them, the one that might lend me its power now…’

In a situation where he could not even summon his own shikigami, he could hardly call upon the family’s.
The ideal, then, was to reproduce a shikigami’s power himself, and he knew well that what mattered in manifesting power within a dream-world was form and symbol.

What he had to call to mind, in other words, was something resembling a human and bearing wings at the same time.

For an instant he summoned the image of a Christian angel, then shook his head and cast it off.
There was no chance the tradition-revering Shin House had bound itself to a shikigami contract with an angel, and even had it done so, the moment that came out, its standing with Christianity would be ruined past mending.

‘In that case… it can only be that one, after all.’

The face of Shin Hweein, having called the shikigami to mind, darkened in an instant.

It was not that anything was wrong with the shikigami itself.
The trouble lay in the imagination of the people who looked upon it.

A few years back, at an international event, there had been a performance featuring a model fashioned after that shikigami, as one of the symbols representing Aeshin.

In itself it had added to the Shin House’s renown. But because the model had been crafted in an ambiguously lifelike form, it left a peculiar revulsion and a grotesque impression on a great many people.

The model had been meant to display the Shin House’s majesty and come home, yet instead it won unexpected popularity, even a nickname, and grew famous. And because the fame came not from the shikigami’s strength or ability, the Shin House folk could scarcely bear how much that nickname galled them.

But a shikigami, too, is a yokai, and a yokai feeds on the awe of the people, on the beliefs and fancies born of that awe, and is in truth transformed by them.
So when it was called by a new and widely known name, the shikigami could manifest with stronger power and fresh possibilities.

‘And this is within a dream. The easier a name is to call to mind, the easier the power comes. Even so. Even still…’

Even as he sank into thought, the third membrane drew nearer and nearer.

Shin Hweein clenched his teeth and, first of all, called the shikigami by its true name and cast the sorcery.

“Loyal of heart and steadfast in principle as a scholar-gentleman, thy form gives ease to the living and guards the peace of the dead! That valor of thine, which devours dragons and drives out evil, shall scatter even these crooked phantoms hemming me about, like the morning mist! Long may that glory live, as thy name proclaims — for ten thousand years (manse)…!”

— Crack.

For all the length and earnestness of the incantation, it came to nothing. Shin Hweein collided straight into the membrane and shattered it.

With no time even to chafe at the failure, Shin Hweein shuddered at the memory pouring into his head.

‘I was right after all. There was no need to look after those creatures. They are arrogant and ignorant, and have fooled themselves into thinking the prosperity of the age is a fruit of their own making, a right that they alone deserve to enjoy.’
‘Even so, I still believe I did what I had to do.’
‘Even if it meant offering yourself up as a burnt offering for the sake of those who know not their own measure?’
‘Yes. This too is one kind of ju. By it I shall not be forgotten in any man’s memory; I shall live on. There is one in the West, too, who left his name and so came to live forever, is there not?’
‘Do you mean to claim that you, also, are the Son of God?’
’Of course not. I am — ’

An instinct-like certainty that he must not hear what came next seized Shin Hweein.
Mercifully, the replayed memory ended there, and the falling began again.

The fourth membrane had yet to come into view.
He could only suppose that, since this was a memory of an importance the others could not touch, his protective instincts were resisting it with all their might.

— You are beginning to mind it too, aren’t you? The outside world has grown frightening, hasn’t it? But it is all right. So long as you live with me in an endless dream, you will be in no danger at all.

Seeing him fail at his casting, the queen of the dream-demons must have judged this her moment, and whispered sweet words into his ear.

— Your body will trouble you no more, and no one will be left to interfere. Just the two of us, happy, living on forever. Is it not splendid even to imagine?

“Within a dream you may alter at your whim, leaning on you and you alone — is that what you mean?”

— That is exactly it!

“And how is that any different from being kept as livestock?”

— Livestock! How awful, to call our honeymoon such a thing!

His falling speed quickened once more.
By now the fourth membrane was in sight, waiting for him: the memory that every one of those who had known his past life had called ‘too dangerous to know just yet.’

But Shin Hweein, unafraid, spread both arms wide.
If he meant to beat his wings, then by all rights he ought to beat them.

— Last time, I hurt you, and my own heart hurt so much I could not sleep a wink. But — if you hurt me, then surely it is all right for me to hurt you back, isn’t it?

Something long and slender came flying out of the darkness and struck him.
First the sensation of flesh being cut, and a hot, burning feeling.
The sound of air being torn followed only afterward.

A whip, then. Truly a weapon befitting a Western dream-demon, he thought, and an inward laugh escaped him.
It was, of course, exceedingly painful, yet pain could not disturb his concentration.

— It really is too unbearable, wounding you with my own hand. I am sorry, I am truly sorry. But it cannot be helped, can it? Because you will not understand me, I have to use another way, don’t I?

Her words rebuked Shin Hweein, but in the lashes that struck him he could feel her impatience.
They climbed in speed bit by bit, swirling about him almost like a storm, until he could scarcely keep his eyes open. And yet the assault, which had the queen of the dream-demons been in earnest would have been more than enough to tear his body to ribbons, stopped at wounds of the flesh and no further.

Was her heart truly so pained at striking him that she could not put forth her full strength?
That was likely a part of it. But there had to be another reason as well.
Just as Shin Hweein had, in the last dream, actively chosen his own death to escape it, she feared that a blow costing him his life might lose him to her forever.

“That will not be enough.”

— No, the time is nigh now! You too will soon come to understand it all!

“It is too late.”

His resolve set, Shin Hweein held his eyes wide open against the fierce lashing and opened his mouth.
To carry his will through and to live, he had sworn he would join hands even with a devil.

“Lend me your wings… Confucian Dragon!”