Chapter 9 — The Sorcerer Who Masters The Dream (3)

“You can wake her? That’s insane. Wait, that sorcerer can’t really be… No. No, it can’t be that.”

Yun Jubaek grumbled on without end, for no clearer reason than that something about all this rubbed him the wrong way, and yet he followed Shin Hweein into the cathedral all the same.

The priest threw Shin Hweein a sidelong look, his eyes saying plainly that he could have Yun Jubaek thrown out of the cathedral the moment Hweein gave the word.
Hweein only shook his head.

Yun Jubaek was not Ham Seoyeon, nor was he Shin Myeongin.
He was a direct-line scion of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses, one of the men who already held the true reins of the country.
Here, by showing this man his power in proper form, Hweein could draw nearer to the heart of whatever was unfolding in Zone 1.
And now that it was certain the root of it all lay inside Zone 1, Yun Jubaek was the last man he meant to let slip away.

“Her condition hasn’t changed.”

No. Coming to her side to see for himself, he found that in a single day it had worsened considerably.
If this was the state of someone who had lain inside a consecrated space, nursed all the while by the priest and the nun, he had no wish even to picture the state of those left out in the open with no such protection.

Taeju Doryeong was nowhere to be seen, which meant the boy was still inside Do Yumi’s dream, laboring to help her.
But a child who had not yet learned to bend his own power to any kind of order had no chance of distinguishing himself within a dream.

“Then I shall be off.”

“Off? Don’t tell me. Some sorcery that breaks into another’s dream—”

From the tip of Shin Hweein’s finger an auspicious, purple-tinged aura came pouring out.
He had committed carefully to memory the aura that rose when the talisman of Purple Cloud manifested earlier, and now, working Geum Moa’s sorcery, he layered it over the dream sorcery.

Father Lucas and Sister Barbara felt that something was somehow off and tilted their heads, but for the moment, if the outcome was good, all was well, and nothing more needed saying.

A faint smile played at the corner of his mouth as Shin Hweein laid his finger against Do Yumi’s forehead.
In the next instant he felt his own consciousness drawn out through his fingertip, and he conveyed his intent to Geum Moa by a glance alone.
She nodded at once.

“Yes. Leave it to me.”

The image of Geum Moa rushing to him, catching his body as it slumped strengthless into her arms, was the last thing in his memory.

When he opened his eyes the next moment, he had become the attendant who sold ices at a counter in an amusement park.

“…”

“Mister, two vanilla ice creams, please.”

“…”

“Mister?”

It took him a little while to grasp where he was.
The shop he stood in, the place all around it, the woman ordering ice cream right before his eyes.
When she found it strange and called him “mister” again, he finally understood that he had lost his own form and become some unfamiliar man.

Though the woman before him had not.

“Two vanilla, I said. Mister.”

“Two. Understood.”

“Was that… informal speech just now? Huh? What was that? Did I hear wrong?”

Ignoring the woman who stood goggling at him, Shin Hweein turned to find where the ice cream, the ices, were kept, and all that met his eyes was a box heaped with cone-shaped wafers and a machine fitted with a few spouts labeled vanilla, chocolate, and green tea.
When at last he worked out what the machine was, he swallowed dryly.

Surely not.

To lay a snare by sorcery the instant an intruder appeared from outside. Had the one behind this affair truly been so thorough, so scheming?

He stood there hesitating, cold sweat breaking out as he wondered what on earth to do, and the woman’s voice came again from behind him, pressing him on.

“Mister! Two vanillas, I said!”

“…Haaah.”

Shin Hweein clenched his teeth and turned around.
He had no further wish to play along with this farce.

“Do Yumi. Come to your senses already. How long do you mean to keep playing in this absurd little space of yours?”

After all, the one having the nightmare stood right there in front of him.
He had only to pull her out of this place, and it would be done.

“Huh? Mister, how do you know my name? I thought you were strange the second you started dawdling. You’re my stalker! And you really did speak to me like that just now, didn’t you!”

It was the most ludicrous thing Shin Hweein had heard in days.
He swallowed the urge to snort and was about to bring his power to bear on Do Yumi when she suddenly whirled to look behind her and screamed at the top of her lungs.

“Honey! Honey, come quick, there’s a pervert here, a pervert! Hurry, call the police!”

“Honey…?”

“What is it!”

In the next instant, as Shin Hweein arched a puzzled brow, someone came out from behind, leading a young boy by the hand.
It was none other than Kim Hyeonwoo.

“…So it was Kim Hyeonwoo.”

“Look at that, honey, he even knows your name! He really is a stalker, hurry, call the police!”

“Ah…”

While Kim Hyeonwoo, cast here as Do Yumi’s husband, drew out his phone at her demand, the young boy who had come holding his hand looked up at Shin Hweein, his eyes going wide, and let go of the hand he had been holding.

“Uncle!”

The child was, of course, Taeju Doryeong.

Hweein himself, after squaring off against a Do Yumi gone clean out of her wits, found it no small relief to meet a Taeju who still had his head about him, and he waved a hand at the boy.
At that, Do Yumi, watching the scene, wore the look of a cat flung into the void of space.

“Un… cle? How does our Seonwoo know that stalker? Wait. That means, ah—”

“What.”

“This is a dream.”

It must have been that Do Yumi, the master of the dream, had felt the discrepancy.
All at once the scenery around them began to warp, the world starting its slow collapse from the edges inward.

But more than that, Shin Hweein’s eyes flew wide in shock, because Do Yumi had just called Taeju Doryeong by name.

As has been said again and again, a name is itself a sorcery.
This child, who had died nameless in his mother’s womb and had thereby taken on the identity of a taejagwi, was meant to gain his own proper sanctity and be transformed by entering into a contract with Do Yumi, who herself would by then have become wholly a divine spirit, become a mudang.
It was then, Shin Hweein had thought to himself, that a name might be given to the boy.

And yet here, of all places, in a dream. And worse, in a state where Do Yumi had fallen into a vast delusion and believed, without a shadow of doubt, that the boy was a son she had borne to Kim Hyeonwoo. She had carelessly gone and given him a name.

Knowing she had lived a life with no thread of connection to sorcery, he had until now looked rather generously on her ignorance, but this once there was simply no looking past it.

‘The easiest means I had is now blocked. I meant to use Lyl’s power to draw Do Yumi straight out into reality—’

Until a little while ago that had indeed been his plan, but the situation had changed.
Doing so would amount to Shin Hweein forcibly erasing the very dream Do Yumi was dreaming, and she would then forget every memory she held inside it.
Among them, of course, would be the name Do Yumi herself had given to Taeju, and as a matter of course the child would lose the name he had just received.

The one who gave a name, forgetting that name.

The sorcerous implication, needless to say, was the worst possible.
It was a binding very nearly the equal of a curse, with the further danger of weakening Taeju’s power.
It meant Do Yumi might have to give up ever becoming a taeju-mudang.

‘Truly, an endless run of troubles…’

While Shin Hweein ground his teeth, the world that had melted away entirely rebuilt itself.
Fortunate, perhaps. He had become once more the same mister selling the same ice cream at the same counter of the same amusement park.
Before him now stood Do Yumi, just then queued up to buy ice cream.

In haste, Shin Hweein spoke.

“On break. One moment.”

“Eh? No, mister, just two of those ice creams for me, vanilla—”

“On break.”

“Hey, hold on a second!”

He hurriedly cast off the cap and apron he had been wearing and bolted out of the counter shop.
He had half expected to be driven from the dream the moment he left his post, or to have the dream rewind on him as it had a little while ago, but fortunately neither came to pass.

‘What is to be done from here.’

He sighed and walked the area around him.
The dream’s subject being Do Yumi, the amusement park as a whole was rendered rather well, but the farther one moved from her consciousness, the more slipshod the details became.
Even so, this was a fine thing.
Compared to the time he had locked horns with Lyl, the place was not overflowing with things bent on killing him, and on that count alone it was, to him, very nearly heaven.
As a bonus, perhaps because he had become wholly another person, he could walk freely about on both feet, without his staff.

“Uncle!”

“Ah, good fortune.”

As he walked alone, savoring his free pair of legs, a familiar young boy’s voice reached him.
Shin Hweein took Taeju Doryeong, no, Seonwoo, into his arms as the boy ran to him, and patted his back.

“That must have been a hard time of it. How did you keep out of Do Yumi’s sight?”

“Mom… Auntie’s with that man right now.”

“I see. Do you like the name?”

Young as he still was, the child seemed to grasp what the question meant.
An apologetic look crossed his face, but Seonwoo nodded carefully all the same.

“Mm. I… I’m Do Seonwoo now.”

“Do Seonwoo, not Kim Seonwoo.”

“Mm.”

“It means that, in the deepest part of his heart, the boy already knew he was not Kim Hyeonwoo’s son. A way forward may yet be in sight. That is fortunate.”

At the word way, the boy’s face, which had been about to darken, brightened a little.
Fidgeting, he asked,

“Can I… can I stay as Seonwoo?”

“Of course you may. Is it not a precious name, given to you by the one who will be at your side all your life? You are Seonwoo. You shall go on being Seonwoo, henceforth and always.”

“Hihi… Uncle!”

At those words Seonwoo grinned wide and held him tight.

He was not yet of an age for such things, and yet Shin Hweein, somehow feeling that the boy was like a son of his own, was struck through with a sudden tightness in his chest.

Would a day ever come, even for him, when he would have a child of his own.
Was there even a woman who would bear him such a child.
Geum Moa? Or perhaps Lyl?

The affection those yokai bore him was beyond doubt, but it was precisely because he knew its depth that he could not, in any easy way, bring himself to accept it.
At the very least, so long as the suspicion went undispelled that what they saw through him was not the whole of him but someone else, it was, in all likelihood, beyond reach.

“Uncle, I like you. Much better than that man.”

“It is kind of you to say so. It would seem Do Yumi did not manage to render Kim Hyeonwoo as he truly is.”

“No, he’s really like him. That’s why I don’t like him. While he liked Mom, he liked Auntie too.”

“…I see. That, I think I understand what you mean.”

Where shall there be sound, if hand does not meet hand.
Do Yumi, it seemed, had taken it for nothing more than her own one-sided love, but from what Seonwoo said, Kim Hyeonwoo too had carried some measure of feeling for Do Yumi.
Greedy for both sisters, he must have behaved as though he were leaving the door ajar for Do Yumi as well.

…It was not a story he had any particular wish to know.

“Enough talk of that kind of trash. For now, let us think how to wake Auntie without losing your name.”

“Can’t you just shake her awake?”

“Then Auntie will forget your precious name.”

“But this is… a dream.”

“It seems that the moment she realizes for herself it is a dream, she simply forgets that much of it, and then dreams the same dream over again.”

A dream, then, that could by no means be woken from by one’s own power.
Said aloud and set in order, this, surely, was the very thing one calls a nightmare.
What manner of dream-demon his adversary was making use of he did not know, but it was no low rank.

“Then… then what do we do? Auntie… at some point she realizes it’s a dream. And then it goes back…”

“…A rather elaborate construction, then. She was not, it seems, fool enough to be wholly unaware that sorcery had been laid on her.”

“Ah.”

It was about then that the two of them were spotted by Do Yumi.
Catching sight of Shin Hweein holding Seonwoo in his arms and talking with him, Do Yumi quickly took on a look of dawning realization, and at once the scenery began to melt, the world collapsing along with it.

“Somehow… so it really was a dream…”

The sound of Do Yumi’s voice, wistful and sad in his ear for no good reason, grated on him thoroughly.
All the more so because in the very next instant that same voice was placing an order with him for two vanilla ice creams.

“On break. One moment.”

“Mister, you’re skiving off in the middle of your shift, aren’t you? Don’t be like that, hurry up and give me my ice cream.”

“On break.”

“What’s so hard about it? Why won’t you sell ice cream to a customer standing in line? Mister, are you stupid?”

Shin Hweein briefly considered hurling a flame-shot and burning Do Yumi to a cinder, but with the heart of a saint he pressed it down, endured, and turned around.
He thought only that her reaction might be a touch different if he gave her the ice she wanted; he was by no means being goaded by being called stupid.

‘Ice cream… I have surely seen it. Not the kind sold at an amusement park like this, but in my childhood, at a gathering of the household, I remember my younger sister with a store-bought one in her mouth.’

The cone-shaped wafer heaped to one side served, no doubt, as the vessel, the ice cream held inside it.
Shin Hweein, of course, had never once entertained the thought of eating anything that cold, he would have lain abed two days at the very least, and it was for that very reason that he remembered all the more clearly the shape of the ice-cream cone Shin Myeongin had been eating.

‘This. Like so.’

The several spouts and push-buttons on the machine looked to him like ancient artifacts beyond all interpretation, but fortunately a push-button labeled “vanilla” sat visible at the top.
By a miracle he arrived at the right answer, that the ice cream came forth from the spout, from the look of the thing, and holding the cone beneath it, he pressed the push-button firmly down.
Whereupon the ice cream piled up in a straight line, and the moment it rose a touch past the height of the cone, it toppled and soaked his apron.

“Hm…”

“…Mister, were you joking, or were you serious? Is this your first day on the job?”

“That, at least, is one done.”

“It is not done, all right? No, mister, come out from there a moment!”

Enraged that Shin Hweein would try to pass off something falling short of a saleable product, Do Yumi came running into the counter shop and took up a cone herself.

“Ice cream’s made like this, like this!”

She held the cone beneath the nozzle and pressed the button, that part was the same, but, turning the cone deftly, she piled the ice cream round and round, high.
When at the proper moment she lifted her hand from the button and raised the cone, there stood completed an ice cream more appetizing by far than any Shin Myeongin had once licked with such relish long ago.

“…Well done.”

“Naturally. I worked I don’t know how many part-time jobs! On account of my damned older sister, somehow holding a household together and shouldering its livelihood, oh, the trouble, the trouble I went to, while that wretch of a sister of mine… eh?”

And then, sooner than he had imagined, the moment of the world’s collapse arrived.

“This… is a dream, isn’t it.”

Shin Hweein watched a single tear roll down from the eye of Do Yumi, who in the midst of her impassioned speech now broke off and stood there sighing, and his eyes brightened at the thought that perhaps he had found a clue.

“Tch, this is so embarrassing. If that man found out about something like this, honestly…”

The woman muttered whatever she muttered, bent her head deeply forward, and let out a sigh.

That man. Her attachment to Kim Hyeonwoo, still unbroken, seemed no ordinary thing.
Could this too be turned into a key for his strategy.

The instant after the thought, the world collapsed entirely, and Do Yumi stood once more outside the counter shop, ordering from him two vanilla ice creams.

“Mister, two ice creams, vanilla…”

“Understood.”

For the moment, at least, Shin Hweein nodded with confidence.
Whatever might come, first he would carry out this damned order to perfection, and then, in earnest, send up the signal-fire of his counterattack.