Chapter 9 — The Sorcerer Who Masters The Dream (1)

Confucian Dragon.

…Its proper name was Manse the Human-Faced Bird-Beast.

A spirit-beast not of Confucianism but of Daoist and Buddhist legend, where it had often shown itself: a human face borne upon the body and wings of a bird.
They called it Manse, “ten thousand years,” for the length of its days, and tradition held that it drove out the foul airs of tombs, so that in the ancient burial-sites of Aeshin too one could sometimes find its figure painted upon the walls.
In the Shin House as well, when rites were performed at a grave or a gut (a Korean shamanic ritual) was held to console the dead, Manse’s name was often woven into the incantations.

‘But the effigy that turned up at that international event had its proportions blown out willy-nilly from nothing more than the tomb-mural depictions of Manse. The body wound up as thick as a Western dragon, and the wings, instead of a bird’s feathered wings, looked rather like membrane.’

To make matters worse, the official cap perched on its head made it look like a traditional Aeshin bureaucrat, so that despite having nothing whatever to do with Confucianism or with dragons, it acquired the humiliating sobriquet of Confucian and Dragon.

The Shin House was thrown into a great fluster by the affair.
They went to the unusual length of borrowing even the strength of the mass media to publicize the facts: that the Human-Faced Bird-Beast had no relation to Confucianism, and that it was not a dragon but a bird.

And no wonder.
Confucianism is the religion that symbolizes the Aeshin Royal House, and is there not the saying jabureo goeryeok-nansin (that the founder of Confucianism did not discourse upon strange forces and disorderly spirits)?
The dragon, too, had been an emblem of the royal house for generation upon generation; and for Manse the Human-Faced Bird-Beast, the very representative of goeryeok-nansin, to find itself suddenly mistaken for a yokai that symbolized the royal house, well, they could hardly sit still.
They even mounted a movement to call it the Daoist Sacred Bird in place of Confucian Dragon, though of course it came to nothing.

The general public, knowing little of sorcery, could not so much as arrive at the thought that the Confucian doctrine upheld by Aeshin’s royal house, a great power of sorcery, denied the uncanny at its very root.
The majority understood the powers they wielded not as denying the uncanny but as something closer to dominating it.

And so in the end the appellation Confucian Dragon settled in completely, and an unforeseen effect arose from it.
Confucianism, which denied the uncanny, paradoxically took the Human-Faced Bird-Beast into its own ambit, and so granted that creature too a power akin to the one the figures of the Aeshin royal house possessed: the power to deny other manifestations of the uncanny.
Likely the name Dragon, trailing after it, had a great deal to do with forging that deeper link to the royal house.

The Shin House, once it had grasped this, gave up any further attempt to correct the name Confucian Dragon.
The royal house, for its own part, came to know of it only belatedly, and a collision arose between the two over it… but that fact is of no moment now.

“—Ha. To think it actually succeeded.”

What mattered was that Shin Hweein’s two arms had been transformed into great membranous wings.
And that the power of the Human-Faced Bird-Beast lodged within them had begun to negate the uncanny, which was to say, to negate the queen of the dream-demons!

His rate of descent grew gradually gentler.
Each time Shin Hweein beat his wings by way of experiment, the darkness about him, and even the whips that had been thrashing him, began to melt away, and the queen of the dream-demons cried out as if shrieking.

— Wh-what on earth is that!

“Do not ask me. I too am vexed.”

When he had pinned his hopes on Manse’s aid through an incantation laid down with such painstaking care, the creature had not so much as stirred.
And now, at the name Confucian Dragon, the power had manifested at once, and not in feathered wings either, but in membranous ones.
Even though it was a power he had himself called forth, he could not stem the sense of humiliation; yet since he had been saved by it, neither could he say a word against it.

Without doubt, in the waking world he would not be able to borrow Manse’s power so easily as this.
Still less, being no high-rank shikigami-arts master, could he draw a yokai’s power into his own body and transform part of his own flesh by it. That was truly a thing possible only within a dream.

“But this is enough. Beyond this, whenever I have need of you, I shall seek you out and confirm it!”

— No!

Vowing in his heart never to forget the present sensation, Shin Hweein beat his wings again and again.
Upward, and further upward.
As the authority of the Human-Faced Bird-Beast issued forth, as though to shake off the force that had been pressing him down from above, his body slipped free of the pressure and began, little by little, to rise.

— Do not go, you must confirm it! Living on knowing nothing at all is stifling for you too, is it not? This dream has done no more than reflect your own heart!

“It is stifling, of course. But to cast off everything one has put on simply because one feels stifled, and to do whatever one pleases simply because one feels closed in, would that not make one not a man, but a beast?”

— No, that is your rightful due!

Shin Hweein laughed shortly at that, and beating his wings yet more fiercely, he turned back to her.

“In the short life I have lived, I have seen that even what seems wholly and entirely my own has, mingled into it, not merely my share but the shares of others. How much more so with a past life I do not know. Why, even you, this very moment, are demanding your share and pestering me for it, are you not?”

— Pestering… Pestering, you say… Ah, aaaah.

That, it seemed, had truly been a wounding remark.

When the whip-strikes ceased, he supposed she had given up trying to hinder him.
But in the next moment the darkness all about him crumbled down, and a world filled to the brim with red and pink wrapped itself around him.
He still could not tell up from down, but the pressure that had been bearing down on him from above was gone, and there was no longer any need to beat his wings so ferociously.

And yet Shin Hweein felt a discomfort at the strangely sweetish heat that pervaded the whole space enfolding him.
Wondering what it was, he raised his head, and there.

A huge face, an immensely huge face of the queen of the dream-demons, large enough to rob him of any sense of perspective, was looking down upon him.
Though the sight was enough to summon up dread, her beauty, without a single blemish, only beguiled him in return; and he feared that great authority of the dream-demon.

— You can have no idea how many wounds you have given me.

Looking him full in the face with pink pupils in which even sorcerous power could be felt, she opened her mouth.
Her voice echoed throughout the whole space, laden with authority, fastening its grip upon his very soul and inscribing her will across his whole body, which could not resist it.
Shin Hweein, who had only just managed to shake off that pressure by the power of Manse the Human-Faced Bird-Beast, clenched his teeth and answered.

“Have I not said that it is only natural I should not know?”

— And so I meant to tell you of it gently, and to refrain from asking after the sins you bore before. I even went so far as to tell you it would be enough if you would only love me.

“That is exactly what is wrong. Why do you cling so to the relation that came before? Relations may be built up anew, and as one does so, surely one will come, in time, to accept even the you that was before—”

In that instant a hideous pain and a burning heat spread through his belly.
Lowering his head, he saw a hole blown clean through his middle, and what had made that hole he could not begin to say.

— I shall no longer go gently with you. This place is no longer your dream, but mine. You shall not be able to change the world as you please, nor to die at your own pleasure and so slip away.

“…If this be your dream, then the matter of reviving my memories. Have you given that up?”

— No. Only, until the moment you yourself beg me to let you regain them, I shall trouble you. A little.

So, just as he had thought, that earlier remark had been a misstep.

It was natural enough that Shin Hweein, the list of women he was acquainted with having only lately been updated from a mere two to three, should not know by what words a woman is wounded.
But still.
She would likely not have her anger soothed even were she to hear the reason.
Rather, she might fall into another fit on learning that, his blood-kin mother apart, the woman he had known longest was Geum Moa.

“Cough.”

While he was minding his own words and conduct toward her, this time a hole was bored through his chest.
It seemed that even with the wings of the Human-Faced Bird-Beast upon him, to negate the queen of the dream-demons’ power at its root was beyond him.

— I had thought first to tear off those hateful wings. However weakened you are, you remain yourself. You ever take me by surprise. But—!

Twice in succession, holes were bored through both of Shin Hweein’s shoulder-joints.
It seemed she meant to cut away the very parts of his body that connected to the wings.
But whether by the Human-Faced Bird-Beast’s power, or by the power of the dream that would not let him die, the flesh began to knit itself back the moment the wounds appeared, and soon he was returned to perfect soundness.
The cruel part was that the pain inflicted on each part of his body still remained, tormenting him.

— It hurts, does it not? I am sorry, truly sorry. But what am I to do, when I hate you enough to do this? When your memories return you may be angry with me, and yet I believe that in the end you will hold me in your arms again.

“In the end… meaning, then, that you are not looking upon the me of now.”

It was agonizing.
He had lived a life dyed through with sickness and curses, and had known many an agonizing experience before this; but to receive, one-sidedly, pain inflicted for the sole purpose of causing him pain was by no means an easy thing.
In this very moment too he had to clench his teeth against the agony of having his two legs slit and torn, though where or how it was being done he could not tell.

And yet, set beside the queen of the dream-demons’ attitude toward him, even that scarcely felt agonizing.
With that great face, with that overwhelming beauty, however many honeyed words she poured over him and however she sought to seduce him, what meaning could it have?
So long as it was not turned upon the him of now, it was as good as empty.

— I am looking at you. Only I can stand face to face with the whole of you. Forget the feeble things that refused you and cast you out. I shall never give you up. Never.

“That which you believe—”

As if resisting the pressure bearing down upon his head, Shin Hweein declared in a steady voice.

“is an illusion. Just as the you whom I see is.”

In the next moment the dream-demon’s face that had filled the whole sky was gone without a trace.
He truly believed that her existence was, in effect, as nothing.

The wings of Manse the Human-Faced Bird-Beast, which since being dragged into her dream had failed to play their part, shone at last with a dazzling light and began to erase the scenery round about.

A world filled entire with her desire and her delusion.
Even the very air, swelling up from every quarter of the space, carried a mighty authority that sought to allure him through and beyond his own curse.

— You cannot do this. You cannot make it as if it had never been!

In the empty air her face appeared once more.
The world that had been crumbling down was restored, as though a recording were being played in reverse, and rose to contend against the air-currents struck up by Manse’s beating wings.

Well.
She was, after all, in name the queen of the dream-demons. She could hardly retreat at this much.
But her existence could no longer stir up any disturbance in Shin Hweein’s heart.

“No. It can be done. I have decided so.”

His own dream or another’s, what mattered was one’s own will. This Shin Hweein knew.
In this moment, the seed of a possibility that had been planted within him through the bond with the queen of the dream-demons broke into bud.
A power closer to authority than to sorcery began to take on form.

— It… cannot be.

A certain perimeter, centered upon him, came under its influence and warded off the air-currents and attacks that swirled in from every side.
The first to perceive it, naturally, was the queen of the dream-demons.

— That is my power! How are you wielding my power?

“By your grace.”

— Then you have, in effect, acknowledged the fated bond between you and me! Your attitude is contradicting itself!

“Who has said there was no fated bond?”

His wing-beats grew ever fiercer.
It was in part because the authority that wielded dreams had begun to show forth its full majesty, and in part, no doubt, because he had by sheer practice grown accustomed to beating his wings with a human body.
But more than anything, it was because Shin Hweein’s heart, in dealing with the queen of the dream-demons, had been firmly resolved.

— But you—!

“It is that the form of the bond has changed. From the moment we stand face to face with one another, the bond has already come into being; how am I to deny it? Looking it over carefully, if it is an ill-fated bond, I shall undo and dissolve it; if it is a good-fated bond, I shall build it a layer higher.”

— Ill… fated…?

Her offensive, which had continued without cease even as she spoke, came to a sudden halt.

He braced himself, not knowing what attack might come next… and abruptly a great drop of water fell upon his head.
Thinking that, had he not budded the authority forth, his whole body would by now have been drenched, he raised his head again, and.

She was weeping.

It had been a teardrop.

— My heart feels as though it shall break apart…

At her tearful voice, a sigh escaped him of its own accord.

To what tune was he to dance?
Had she instead been an enemy bent only on cruel torment, his heart would have been a good deal easier.

“…From what I hear from Moa, you are the queen of the dream-demons. But with a heart as weak as that, are you fit to command the dream-demons?”

— Do not speak of that woman…

So perhaps he did need to learn from someone the way of dealing with women.

When his attempt at a word of encouragement only set her weeping the more bitterly, Shin Hweein clutched at his head.
Even as he fought her he had felt it: this was, from the beginning, one whose heart was not particularly hard.

However great the spiritual power Shin Hweein bore within his body, and however distinguished the house of his birth, he was no more than a fledgling who had only just earned his Third-Rank sorcerer’s certification.
And she was no ordinary dream-demon but the queen of the dream-demons; had she chosen to, there would have been any number of ways to make him suffer the more.

‘Of course, even what she did do was hideously agonizing.’

By human reckoning, what she had done was enough to count her a sworn foe past the reach of any reconciliation.
But by the reckoning of yokai it was no more than a fairly heated quarrel of feelings, and Shin Hweein knew this now.
What was truly agonizing for them, more than any pain inflicted upon flesh or upon mind, was to be forgotten as a being; so much, he was dimly coming to understand.
That was why she had responded all the more violently to the Shin Hweein who did not recognize her.

— We — we are not an ill-fated bond, never.

“Have I not said it? Whether the bond is ill-fated or good-fated is something we settle from here on. What would you have it be?”

— I do not want it to be an ill bond…!

“Then for the present, come down here. As things are, it would be hard even to wipe your tears for you.”

The storm that had been raging died down.
The pink-tinged world vanished without a trace, and before long the bare, desolate space had returned in its stead.

Only, that, just now, sat a very little the easier upon his heart.

Shin Hweein glanced downward, confirmed that the barrier blocking off his sealed memories had been firmly built up far below, and laughed shortly.

“Uwaaaah!”

“Yes, yes. I am sorry for having spoken so harshly.”

And then, receiving into his arms the dream-demon who had appeared right before his face and flung herself into his embrace, he raised one of his arms, returned at some point to its original form, and patted her gently upon the back.

Even without wings, he was no longer falling.
Perhaps it was, rather, because he had no wings, that it was so.