Chapter 13 — The Price That Must Not Be Forgotten (2)

That the Indulgence had filled with karma was, naturally, the work of the night he and his companions had joined forces and put down the sorcerers.

The three ruffians who had bewitched the youngest son of the Seo House and meant to throw the Capital of Aeshin into chaos, of course.
And on top of them, the Seo House sorcerers who had circumvented the contract to do away with Shin Hweein, and the Seo House hunting-hound that had been climbing past Rank Two toward Rank One.

Whether that was good karma or evil karma, he had decided no longer to mind.
The very business of judging one’s own deeds good or evil lay, he thought, beyond the proper sphere of a human being.
Strip away the circumstances and judge purely by the deed in the moment, and Shin Hweein, who had circumvented a contract to lay dream sorcery on the Seo House’s youngest son, was not so different from the Seo matriarch herself.

I made judgment the banner of it, yet I did not punish one who had wronged me directly. I merely stepped forward of my own accord and played at being judge. Even if that proves evil karma, I can hardly complain. I will not deny it; I will accept it all.

What mattered was that here, facing the shintai of Hotenshi-no-Kami, the Indulgence now shone with a dazzling light, as though to announce that its turn had come.
Perhaps even a little while ago it had been glowing inside his robe, and he had simply mistaken its summons and drawn out the slip instead.

“Lord Hotenshi-no-Kami… is sealing a great yokai?”
“Yes. However splendid the thing may be, did it not strike you as strange that it could reach even into these precincts, steeped as they are in Lord Hotenshi-no-Kami’s divine power? And without the slightest delay, the moment we so much as spoke of it.”
“Indeed. As though it had been listening from very close by.”
“It is simple, in fact. It was. Very close. Perhaps right beneath us. The thing is here.”

The Mochizuki siblings wore the look of people who wanted to deny it that very instant, but their eyes too must have seen it.
A foul aura had crept into the pure, clean shintai of Hotenshi-no-Kami, a shintai in which one could feel even sanctity, and was muddying it.
Something had gone wrong with the vessel that had, for more than several hundred years, held a great yokai down alone, and the thing was tainting the seal, honing itself to break free.

“Even in my father’s day there was no such trouble. …Around the time I made up my mind to become shinju, I’d hear murmurs that his divine power was waning, little by little. My father scolded me for it. Said it was because my faith was weak.”
“I got the same earful from elementary school. That’s because you don’t dance the kagura (the dance and music offered to the gods) hard enough. By day I had to practice until the sun burned my skin black, by night until the moonlight wore my toes raw. And it turns out that wasn’t even our fault…?”

The two of them confessed it at last, in voices gone hollow.
So far as Shin Hweein could surmise, in their parents’ generation the shrine had not been so wretched a place as this.
Which meant the seal had not weakened gradually across several hundred years. It had begun to fail only a scant decade or so ago…

“Ah.”

All at once Shin Hweein let slip a small sound, as if something had come clear to him.
When the siblings turned to him together he shook his head, nothing, but in his own mind he had already guessed the reason the seal was failing, and it was this.
It was his own birth.

If that thing was truly a piece of his past-life body, then from the moment he was given new flesh and born, the weakening of the past-life body had been inevitable.
It had lost its uniqueness as the only body. Natural enough.

— Then, young master, if there are yet other dangers somewhere being held down in this same way by your past-life body…
— And how high do you reckon that possibility?

When Geum Moa drew out exactly the worst-case picture he had been turning over, he twisted his face into a ghastly grimace and asked her. The answer that came back was a piece of work.

— Even now, and long before too, you were a person quite like a perfect, flawless saint. Since that day, for many reasons no doubt, the world has gone quieter than even I’d have expected; I’d wondered why. I’d say there must be at least twenty places, no fewer, sealed up in this fashion.
— Why twenty?
— Well, to start, I counted off all ten fingers and toes.

A number to draw a sigh out of him on its own.
Geum Moa would not joke about such a matter, which meant that from now on, willy-nilly, he would be wandering the world and taking measures.

It was a rather embarrassing turn, having only a moment ago declared again that what his past-life self had done was no business of his.
Yet however much it had been the deed of his past-life self, if his birth had become the signal-flare for calamities to fall upon every corner of the world, was it not perfectly natural that he should feel the weight of responsibility?

This slip… in one fashion or another it certainly has a connection to my mother. Perhaps it is a record of the calamities I am meant to keep at bay.

His mother was really too much.
If she meant to leave a final slip behind, she might at least have prepared her son some sort of gift; instead she left him only matters that drop him into demonic madness and grind him through hell to ward off, and went on her way.
And if she would do that, she might at the very least have explained how she came to know of his past-life self!

“S-shall we offer up a prayer to Lord Hotenshi-no-Kami, then?”
“I’ll dance kagura! If we don’t pour our spirit into Lord Hotenshi-no-Kami’s strength…!”
“That can wait. No — though I should like to see a miko’s kagura at some point. After all of this is settled.”
“But…”
“Leave it to me.”

Shin Hweein smiled faintly at the siblings, who in their fluster were nonetheless trying to throw their own bodies into resolving the matter, and stepped firmly into the honden.

“Eh, Master! It’s dangerous!”
“If the god’s energies are disturbed any further now…! Ah — kindred energy, so it’s all right?”
“All of you, watch from there.”

The great yokai’s force, beating against the seal, came rushing on as though to swallow Shin Hweein along with it.
He had felt this energy once before, but having felt it before made the pressure no easier to throw off, and his shoulders were ground down beneath it.
Yet even that, Shin Hweein took as proof of the thing’s impatience.

“Until now you’ve kept your claws fairly well hidden, I’d wager. But the moment you felt my presence, you must have grown excited. Someone you thought dead has shown up again — naturally. …And that is how you made your mistake, is it not?”

When he tossed those words into the empty air, the energy throttling him bristled at once with thorns.
Shin Hweein set his staff aside and drew the slip from his robe as well, and the energy mustered as though to tear it to shreds the very next instant; but the slip in his hand swallowed it all and stood firm, not so much as a scratch on it.

“Yes — that is how your mistakes pile up. After centuries of being sealed you cannot, surely, be in your right mind. The moment you’re rid of me, you can spring out into the world; you must have reckoned that if I, having swallowed your little finger and lost my mind, were eaten back up by you, you’d gain a power past even your prime. …Hoh. Struck the bull’s-eye, did I? Cough.”

In an instant the pressure crushed in so hideously his innards must have ruptured, for blood came up onto his tongue even as he spoke.
Shin Hweein gave a snort and wiped it away with the Indulgence.
Then he unfolded the slip, and a single character, Sik, was packed densely across its whole face.
The character itself was not particularly ill-meaning, yet plastered over the paper this way it gave off the revolting feeling of insects crawling on its surface.

— Eat. Eat. Eat. Eat. Eat eat eat eat eat eat — swallow it all down!

Even though he had once already overcome it, even though he held his mind fast with dream sorcery, for a moment he felt a shock, as though his consciousness were being dragged out into haze.
He had overcome it only for an instant; he had not yet wholly unbound this sorcery, this great yokai’s curse.
…But it was precisely because of that, that Shin Hweein had the upper hand.

“Release.”

He brought the Indulgence, stained with his own blood, close to the slip that held out steadfastly even as the curse invaded it, and murmured the word quietly.
In that moment the earth gave a great peal and shook.

— KYIEEEEEEEEEEEK!

A scream burdened with foul aura, ringing out fit to rupture every eardrum, came as the bonus.

“Wh-what is this…!”
“To sift out the false sinners, and to punish those who are truly sinners.”

Each time the Indulgence added more light, the slip rattled fiercely, as though it would be torn to pieces this very instant.
The characters inside it staggered every which way like insects flung into fire, and at each such jolt a shock struck Shin Hweein’s body as well.
Naturally. The yokai’s curse had been bestowed on him through this very slip as its medium.

“Give up, and acknowledge… your defeat!”

He poured every last drop of his spiritual power into the Indulgence.
Past the limit allowed him, with the intent of weakening the yokai as far as it could possibly be weakened!

— Stop, stop…! I only want to live again, that’s all!

“At the cost of someone else’s sacrifice.”

— It was you who sealed me up by your own will! You were the one who betrayed me, the one who made me a sacrifice! Every bit of it was you!

Before Shin Hweein’s eyes the phantom of an enormous serpent revealed itself.
A nine-headed dragon-king out of Indian mythology, reckoned in Buddhism among the eight great dragon-kings: Vasuki.
The serpent thought to be his descendant, a snake whose heads numbered nine: the Nine-Headed Dragon.

— Save me!
— I’ve suffered too long…!
— It wasn’t me.
— You haven’t even got anything to be aggrieved about.
— I was only voicing what everyone wanted!
— But of all of them, I alone was on your side. You know that!
— You’re the one who betrayed me!
— If you let me out, I’ll help you again. Believe me!
— You wretch beyond all dealing! I’ll kill you for certain!

Nine heads at once, each in a different voice, blaming and clamoring at Shin Hweein. Could the noise of it even be put into words?
The nine heads thrashed about one after another, so the quake too came in irregular bursts, until the whole area looked fit to be ground into a wasteland at this rate.

“It is I who have named you a sinner.”

From his ears, from his nose, from his mouth, blood was running.
Even so, Shin Hweein stood firm and straight without wavering, and declared in a stern voice as he raised the Indulgence.

“And yet you laid that sin upon me and made of me your sinner; so now I shall set every part of it right and exact the price in full.”

— Lies, all lies…! Everything you say is a lie — I only wanted you to take back that thing and learn the truth!

“It is not needed. Not, at least, until the moment you die.”

The very instant he denied the curse head-on.
The Indulgence burst into light as though it had detonated.

— KKHRAAAAAAAAAGH!

A wretched scream.
Right after it, a silence fell upon the world.

“…”
“…Is it, over?”

The ceremony, which had plainly dealt no small shock not only to the shrine but to the land around it, was done, and Shin Hweein stood vacant where he was; Mari opened her mouth to him cautiously.
But Shin Hweein did not answer.
He was in no condition to answer.

“Moa, a…”
“I just knew you were going to do this again — I can’t bear it, truly, I cannot…!”

The moment Geum Moa rushed urgently to his side at the voice calling her, Shin Hweein tipped over backwards.
Catching him in time, Geum Moa looked at his blood-smeared face and wore the expression of someone about to scream; but she clamped down on it and wiped his face with her own hand.

“M-Master. Are you all right? You’re not going to die, are you…?”
“Quit saying such inauspicious things, you fool!”

The girl who only a moment ago had been frozen stiff with tension was already at her brother’s throat. That was Mari.
Shin Hweein could not even see properly for the dizziness, but at hearing that he gave a small laugh and caught hold of his consciousness, which felt ready to faint away any instant.
Likely it had helped no small amount that he had grown adept at dream sorcery.
His mental fortitude had grown so much sturdier that he could now bear up, a little, even under shocks that ought rightfully to have left him out cold.

“I shan’t die, so do not fret. Rather… things will improve.”
“No matter how I look at it, that just looks like you pushed yourself far too hard!”
“Big Bro.”
“Hm?”

Makoto had come into the honden, taken in Shin Hweein’s condition at a glance, and was making an even greater fuss; but Mari, calmer than her elder brother for once, was the first to feel the change and tug at his sleeve.

“The air has gone clean. Lord Hotenshi-no-Kami’s divine power… has come back.”
“…So it has.”

Makoto’s voice, answering his younger sister, was wet with feeling, and slightly nasal with it.

“I really thought we were just going to wither away like this. The Association of Shinto Shrines’ glares were getting harsher and harsher, and before it was truly too late I’d been thinking I should at least marry Mari off abroad…”
“So that’s why you were trying so hard to ship me off…”
“But now it’ll be all right. I can get married too.”
“Is that the only thing in your head, you halfwit?”

Even as they traded such heedless words, the siblings’ voices were growing brighter and brighter.
Feeling an unbidden swell of pride at it, Shin Hweein let out a deep breath.
Geum Moa, seeming to guess what was in his chest, smiled faintly and stroked his hair.

“You’re terribly tired, aren’t you? Sleep at ease. I’ll give you my lap to lie on.”
“I am all right. I think this time I shall be able to bear it.”
“No, that isn’t what I meant — just sleep while I’m still asking nicely. I ought to have some sort of reward too, oughtn’t I.”
“Reward…?”

Lending him her lap as a pillow would only leave her own lap numb and aching, so what reward was there in it? He tilted his head; and Makoto, finished with the exchange with his sister and now gazing at him enviously, asked:

“Grand-Master. So then, the great yokai, the Nine-Headed Dragon — is it dead now, completely?”
“Why are you changing my title again. …No, the Nine-Headed Dragon is not dead. I only seized its opening, dealt it a deep wound, and drove it back so that it dares not lay a hand on the seal again.”

The thing was still down there underground.
Only its influence had been diminished to almost nothing; its presence had vanished altogether.
So long as Shin Hweein existed, the divine power of Hotenshi-no-Kami would never wholly return, and in the end the Nine-Headed Dragon would, again someday, try to unbind the seal.
…Unless, before that, Shin Hweein were to kill it.

“Guji Mochizuki.”
“Speak, Grand-Master.”
“It may be that some day hence, I shall be the one to bring this shrine down.”
“…”
“The shintai the Mochizuki family has served with all its heart for several centuries — that too may come to be no more.”
“…”
“If it comes to that, it will be entirely the doing of my own selfishness and desire. By then the contract will, of course, be voided automatically. But having guessed at the possibility, here and now, I felt I ought to say so.”
“Voided indeed.”

When his words ended Makoto gave a snort and said:

“You just get ready to take responsibility for Mari and me, as you promised. And throw us a wedding of grand style.”
“I shan’t!”
“Think it over again, properly, in light of what you’ve just seen. Truly not?”
“…Let me think it over a little.”

Hwa-guk was famous for its comic dialogues, was it not; perhaps there was such a thing as a comic-duo routine between shinju and miko too.

“Very well, then so be it.”

Shin Hweein gave a wry smile at the thought, and when at length he raised his eyes he found Geum Moa glaring fiercely at Mari, apparently having taken the talk for earnest.
He thought about saying something to her, then found it too much trouble and decided just to sleep as she had asked.
Before that, something occurred to him, and when he unfolded the slip once more, the characters that had been crusted over with yokai aura were every one gone, and in their place the words that must originally have been written there had newly come forth.

Sojy. Re-sealing of the Nine-Headed Dragon urgent — exterminate at Special-Grade or higher.

“Just so.”

It was a list of tasks after all.
What was more, it could not be exterminated until he became Special-Grade.
And Special-Grade sorcerer was a station bestowed by the gods, not one that could be attained by diligent training alone…

…No.

Recalling how, when he had undone the Nine-Headed Dragon’s curse, he had absorbed a portion of the vast spiritual power he had wrenched out of it as the thing’s stripped-away authority, Shin Hweein took the thought back.

Perhaps it is not so distant a tale after all.

In any case, one thing was certain.
It was that Shin Hweein would, very soon, rise to the rank of Second-Rank Sorcerer.