Chapter 12 — The Sorcerer And Hotenshi-no-Kami (5)

They passed through the Specter Realm Gate and came out in Hwa-guk.

“Truly, we have crossed nations in a single stride.”

— Uwagh, the strength’s gone right out of me…

In Hwa-guk there was no need to fear being seen by others, nor being caught by the Hwa-guk Onmyo Bureau or the Association of Shinto Shrines.
The Specter Realm Gate was fixed inside the Hotenshi-no-Kami Shrine, and within its precincts, the interior of the shrine itself, flowed the breath of the god who guarded the place, making outside surveillance impossible. In a sense the precincts could be likened to a domain shaped by one of the high-tier yokai of the Specter Realm.

“Ah, but the shamusho (the building where shrine business is conducted) has working electronics and Wi-Fi, so set your mind at ease!”
“So you live and sleep in the shamusho. Then I take it there is no risk of visiting guests photographing us.”

Even as he said it, Shin Hweein cast his gaze across the precincts.
Whether by good fortune or otherwise, there did not seem to be a single worshipper present.
Since the Gate was suppressed by a divine body housing a god’s spirit, the Specter Realm Gate they had emerged from sat naturally near the honden (the main hall) in which that divine body was enshrined, and the haiden (the worshippers’ hall) stood directly before their eyes.
Which was to say, the shrine was truly not very large at all.

“…You aren’t telling me you’ll be denied your proper reward because the mission wasn’t properly completed, are you?”
“Master, you worry for me? In truth, the head office may never have expected me to complete it properly in the first place.”

The deaths of the three the radicals had sent, and their decapitation besides, had no doubt given the man much to think about.
At the slight subdued note in Guji Mochizuki’s voice, Shin Hweein clenched his teeth.

“You say that, and now I worry all the more.”
“Looked at the other way, unless they pull off some absurdity like shipping me abroad like this, there’s not much they can do. Don’t worry. We may not look like it, but this shrine has held its ground for several hundred years. Did you think I just take it lying down? This time too, I made sure to receive the Onmyo Bureau’s sorcery up front, in payment.”

Now that the man mentioned it, pursuing criminals naturally required the pursuer to wield ‘gate’-handling sorcery as well, which Hweein had simply taken for granted. But Guji Mochizuki was a subcontractor’s subcontractor, so that was not necessarily a given.
The man had instead made it a condition of taking the mission, and dutifully learned the Onmyo Bureau’s sorcery.
He laughed that although it had landed him in the bothersome position of having to draw up a contract, in exchange he had secured his own safety, one stone striking two birds.
At those words, the man who until now had looked nothing but a brute-strong fool seemed rather different in Hweein’s eyes.

“Big Bro, you, you moron!”

Just then a girl in a red hakama-skirt and white upper garment came bursting out of the office within the precincts.
By her dress she was unmistakably a miko¹ (a Shinto shrine maiden), and her skin, a healthy sun-tanned brown if less so than her brother’s, left no doubt she was Guji Mochizuki’s younger sister.
Hweein had broadly expected as much, but it seemed Mochizuki was likewise not someone who tanned his skin on purpose, then.

“If you’re bringing guests over, I told you to tell me beforehand! And where in the world are you bringing them in from, with guests, don’t tell me, Koreans?!”

She was speaking Japanese, of course, but just as entities possessed of spiritual power could communicate easily in the Specter Realm, her words too came through naturally.
And in truth there was no need even for that. Shin Hweein, who as a child had had nothing to do but study, had picked up the Jin-guk and Hwa-guk tongues to the level of cultured fluency.

“No, Mari, that’s not it…”
“Don’t treat me like a child in front of guests, you cretin!”

At the sight of the miko firing words at her brother machine-gun-fast, Shin Hweein furrowed his brow and leaned in to whisper to Geum Moa.

“Is it not said that a younger sister sees her older brother as handsome?”
“Even if he were handsome, she might still hate him, might she not? And there is, after all, a limit to how far that bias can stretch. The guji must be sufficiently lacking.”
“Of course. A kumiho indeed. Spins lies without so much as a blink. No refinement at all, none whatsoever.”

— Quite. There’s a reason a fox-of-flame is called a fox-of-flame.

Leon and Flame-tail, it seemed, had found common ground in the meantime, and were ganging up to insult Geum Moa.

“My present! You forgot about that too because you were bringing guests, didn’t you! One look and it’s obvious, you got your head turned by that pretty lady over there and just…”
“No, that’s…”
“The present is safe. Pray do not worry yourself, little miko.”

Because if he left it alone, Guji Mochizuki was going to go on being beaten by his sister.
And because, on top of that, a full-blown brawl looked liable to break out between the shikigami, Shin Hweein stepped in between them and spoke in Japanese.
The reaction that came back, however, was strange.

“Wow, super-ancient noble-style speech…”
“Ancient…”

At the wound thus inflicted, Shin Hweein closed his mouth.
The younger sister, flustered, bowed her head in apology, then raised it and addressed him in fluent Korean.

“I’m Mochizuki Mari, fourteen years old, working as a miko at the Hotenshi-no-Kami Shrine. My brother has caused you a great deal of trouble.”
“Shin Hae, Third-Rank Sorcerer. Guji Mochizuki has been of considerable help to us, so you would do well to praise him a little more.”

At Shin Hweein’s words, Guji Mochizuki’s eyes lit with emotion.

“Master…!”
“Master?! You, you cretin, have you got any awareness of being a guji of the Hotenshi-no-Kami Shrine, or not?!”

Watching the man be set upon by his sister yet again, Shin Hweein resigned himself to defending him no further.
Instead, at a glance in her direction, Geum Moa drew a parcel of cosmetics from inside her clothes and stepped forward.

“There you are, pretty miss. The cosmetics you requested.”
“Yes, y-yes?! Big Sis, you’re far prettier than me…! And these are…”

Mochizuki Mari picked up the cosmetics, which Shin Hweein could not for the life of him tell apart, and inspected them one by one, then gave a delighted shriek.

“All super high-end brands! How did Big Bro even know to buy these!”
“Ahem. Mari. Your big bro has at least this much taste…”
“It was our master who, having said he was much indebted to Guji Mochizuki, prepared these. Modest though they are. Are they to your liking?”

Before the man could so much as boast, for once, at finally getting a chance to win points with his sister, Geum Moa cut him off with the bald truth.
As Mari quietly glared at her brother, Shin Hweein, no longer wishing to watch the farce, declared firmly.

“Wherever it may be, let us go inside. I would hear of Hotenshi-no-Kami.”

Mochizuki Mari led the party to the kyakuden (the hall for receiving guests), graciously brewed green tea herself, and served it.

“Forgive me. It is but a humble tea…”
“Tea-leaves roasted by your own spiritual power, are they not. Far too precious a thing to set before uninvited guests. Then, with thanks.”

Shin Hweein set aside his mask and took up the teacup.
Before doing so, of course, he did not forget to alter his face to match the photograph on his identification card.
The moment he did, Mari and Guji Mochizuki both wore awkward expressions in unison.

“Erm, Master. I’m sorry to say it, but if you use sorcery within the precincts, we know about it automatically…”
“My apologies, Sorcerer Shin Hae. I should have told you beforehand.”

That a sorcery he had concealed even from the direct-line heirs of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses, barring exceptions like Ham Seoyeon, should be detected here outright.
That they said nothing about Geum Moa likely meant his own training was still insufficient.
Blaming himself, Shin Hweein dipped his head slightly to the two of them.

“Forgive me. It is my habit, customarily, to conceal my face. I am well aware that to do so where a god’s gaze reaches is no proper courtesy, but I beg your indulgence.”
“Yes, of course.”

Even as she answered politely, Mari was once again shooting glares at her brother.
The kind of look that wanted, very much, to demand of him just where on earth he’d dredged up such a suspicious guest.
That she refrained was owed, no doubt, entirely to the expensive cosmetics-gift she had already accepted from him.

“Then, Master, from here on I’ll tell you everything that’s been passed down to us about Hotenshi-no-Kami.”
“Up to where?”
“All of it.”
“All of it?!”

Sitting opposite Shin Hweein with his back drawn straight, Guji Mochizuki smiled and addressed his sister, who wore a look of utter incomprehension.

“Mari, you still don’t get it? From Master, you can feel a breath very like our god’s, can’t you.”
“I live every day feeling our god’s breath, so saying that now doesn’t really…eh?”

She had been bluntly objecting when she broke off, turned to Shin Hweein, and her eyes went saucer-wide.
Realizing only now, she stammered, uh-buh-buh, and clamped a hand over her own mouth in alarm.

“Yes. That’s just it. It was strange precisely because it blended in around us with no sense of incongruity. I really can feel a breath very like Lord Hotenshi-no-Kami’s…Why?”
“That’s what I brought him here to find out. Well, was I right or wasn’t I, taking on this job and going over to Korea?”
“I’m scared, Big Bro.”
“It’s all right. My bond with Master is unmistakably of great fortune.”

That her saying she was scared was no lie was clear.
She edged quietly away from Shin Hweein and tucked herself in behind her brother as though seeking his shelter, and at the sight of her, Shin Hweein let slip a single thread of laughter.
If she was fourteen, she would still be in middle school.
In fact, that she had so far carried herself stalwartly as their hostess had felt almost too adult of her. Only now was he seeing something a little more in keeping with her age.

“First, Lord Hotenshi-no-Kami is said to have crossed over from Korea long ago. As I’ve already told you, he was a hito-gami, a human who held the powers of a god within his human body. Those who don’t know better dismiss him as no more than a somewhat strong sorcerer, but you can see that’s a lie from the fact that shinju and miko serving other gods cannot so much as set foot near our shrine.”
“From Aeshin…I see. So that is why the two of you were fluent in the Aeshin tongue.”
“Yes. It’s our god’s homeland’s language, so we acquire it as essential cultural literacy. When the Association of Shinto Shrines handed down my orders this time, they used that as their pretext as well.”

Guji Mochizuki smiled wryly as he said it.
He must have been laughing at the fact that everyone with sufficiently trained spiritual power and sorcery can communicate across languages, and yet they had used the language pretext to try to dispose of him.

“Outwardly, Lord Hotenshi-no-Kami is said to have come into conflict with the government of Japan. In the course of it he defeated a great yokai known to every soul in Honshu, and fought and bested onmyoji of the still-Onmyo-ryo era. Those stories survive.”
“I see…”
“Among those deeds, what caused him to be revered as a god is that, having lost his struggle against the government and fled, he settled in this land. He saved the people of our land who were suffering under its calamities, and shut a great many Specter Realm Gates that had run riot across the region, ending the chaos. Which means that even those who don’t know the details acknowledge that Lord Hotenshi-no-Kami possessed the power to control Specter Realm Gates.”
“So that is the reason Guji Mochizuki was able to enter the Specter Realm alone.”
“Correct.”

No wonder, then.
Remarkable as Second-Rank ability was, it had struck him as strange that Mochizuki should be sent in solo on a mission of this sensitivity.
The truth was that Guji Mochizuki, setting aside the side-eye he drew for serving a deity of foreign extraction, was in every other respect outstanding, entirely the kind of figure who could carry out a solo operation without raising any sense of incongruity.
To Shin Hweein’s eye, the man’s only faults were his middle-school-puberty inner thinking and the bright-yellow dye-job that broadcast it.

“But Guji, if it is certain that Hotenshi-no-Kami was of Aeshin origin, is it acceptable to enshrine such a being in Hwa-guk as a god?”
“And why not? Wherever his origins lay, he protected our land, and left his divine body in our land. We worship him as a god of Japan who safeguarded Japanese soil. There is nothing at all problematic about it.”
“The Association of Shinto Shrines is simply jealous because, for all that we are small, our god-power is overwhelmingly superior to those rootless little shrines. They use our god’s Korean origin as a pretext, wanting to be rid of us as a thorn in their side.”

Mari, peering out from behind her brother’s back, still wary of Shin Hweein but not about to miss a chance to bad-mouth the Association of Shinto Shrines, added the supplement.
Shin Hweein nodded quietly.
At that point Guji Mochizuki picked up his own teacup, took a sip, set it down, and the look in his eyes changed.

“What I’ve told you up till now is the outward story. From here on is the story only we, the inheritors of this shrine, know. Will you hear it?”
“If you would tell it…I would hear.”
“Good. Hotenshi-no-Kami is not actually the true name of our god.”
“What did you say?”

Mochizuki shrugged.

“I told you, didn’t I, little finger? That’s literal. What our shrine enshrines is no more than his little finger. Hotenshi-no-Kami is simply the name we give to that little finger of his, treated as a deity.”

It was an outrageous story.
And the new possibility that rose at the same moment into his head only tangled his thoughts further.

“I’m sorry, but his true name, even I do not know. They said that should an ordinary mortal come to know it, he would die. I find that easy enough to accept. After all, with no more than his little finger, he has kept the peace of this whole region for several hundred years.”
“…Continue. I will hear.”
“He did not intend to fight Japan. Honestly speaking, I doubt all the heavenly gods descending in concert could have stood against him. But he was the sort who came to Japan precisely to prevent such strife in the first place.”

And then, without warning, the man’s story began to turn into something that felt, even to Shin Hweein, faintly familiar.

“What he wanted was only peace. So much so that he would not even fight against yokai. The great yokai I told you he subdued earlier, that one too. The record clearly states that he had merely wished to be its friend.”

— But that one betrayed our master’s will.

Quiet enough that Guji Mochizuki could not hear, Geum Moa spoke in a voice meant for Hweein alone.

— A true betrayer. And the one who shamelessly survived even after that is here, in this land, lying low and recovering his strength. That is why I told you the land of Hwa-guk was dangerous.

“…Master?”
“I would hear more.”

Sensing the abrupt gravity in Shin Hweein’s expression, Mochizuki addressed him, and Hweein shook his head as if to say it was nothing.
But everyone present could feel that the atmosphere had shifted.
To speak of someone, that act alone makes it easier for the subject to sense it and come.
And if the one being discussed is a being of great power, all the more so.
Feeling the flow of spiritual power in the area growing slowly rougher, Mari, her face stricken with fear, clutched tightly at her brother’s back.

“The record…says that he was betrayed.”

Guji Mochizuki continued, more carefully now.

“Even so, fearing for a world that would lose him and fall into confusion, he secretly cut away parts of his own body, just before dying, and left them behind. One of those, the little finger, is what we enshrine here.”

— Truly, well hidden. It must have been a high-grade working indeed. Had it been known that any part of our master’s body remained, more than a few yokai would have come tearing in to burn this whole land to ash.

His head felt as though it might split with pain.
He wondered whether it was truly right for him to be receiving this now, half-believing, half-disbelieving.
He wondered what it was, exactly, that the slip of paper had truly wanted of him.
He barely managed to open his mouth.

“In truth, then, the little finger of that hito-gami.”
“Yes. Officially, we are said to enshrine a mirror in which his divine spirit resides as the shintai, but that is not the truth.”

Guji Mochizuki’s face wore a look that had reached, by now, some manner of conviction.

“Within the main hall of our shrine, his actual little finger remains.”
“Big Bro!”

As though to say that even that should not have been spoken, Mari let out a cry, but Guji Mochizuki’s expression did not waver.
If anything, gazing steadily at Shin Hweein, he added.

“And it occurs to me, also, that perhaps, Master, you are likewise a part of the ‘body’ he left behind.”

At that very moment, something within Shin Hweein’s robes shone with a dazzling light.
What Shin Hweein drew forth, his hand reaching trembling inside his robes, was the slip of paper he had received that day.
When he unfolded it, beside where Sojy had been written, a single new character had appeared, set down in a neat hand.²

Sik.