Chapter 13 — The Price That Must Not Be Forgotten (5)

“I— I thought I was about to be stabbed…”
“Hmph. If I’d had my way I’d already have torn you to ribbons and dried you out.”

They had just entered the Specter Realm.
For some reason Ham Seoyeon and Geum Moa were squaring off, strange looks on both their faces and a peculiar charge in the air between them, while Shin Hweein turned away first and drew his hand down from above.

At his guidance the door of the Specter Realm, which had stood open on both sides, sealed shut completely, and a moment later not a trace of it remained.

“Amazing… You’re sure you only just had your coming-of-age, right? Then how can you handle the Brand so well?”
“It came about by chance. Not long ago I learned a sorcery tied to the Brand.”

He answered her plainly.
Her staring-match with Geum Moa apparently finished, Ham Seoyeon watched him with shining eyes.
He was layering on still more Brand-power to keep anyone outside from sensing that a door had ever stood there, and while he worked she spoke up again.

“At first, honestly… I, well, I thought maybe you’d given up on the task. That maybe you didn’t have the Gatekeeper’s Brand at all…”
“You judged wrongly. I might die carrying out the task, but giving up on it never once crossed my mind.”
“Sorry.”
“What for? Anyone who knew the state I was in would have thought the same.”

The man he had been in his past life was simply weak.
Ham Seoyeon understood well enough that he was not that man now, so there was no need to correct the misunderstanding.

“Maybe…”

Ham Seoyeon had paused, watching him, hunting for something to say.
Then she looked down at the Gatekeeper’s Brand stamped onto the back of her right hand and murmured.

“Maybe it’s because you didn’t go through the gatekeeper rite as a child’s-play formality, the way the rest of us did.”
“Mm?”
“Maybe, just as the old tradition says, you wagered your life carrying out the task, and were granted the two Brands because of it.”
“Do you happen to know something about this?”
“Mm. I’ve heard something like it from my grandfather.”

Shin Hweein’s head whipped around.
Honestly, he had asked without much hope, and yet here was an answer.

“What did he say about it?”
“That if the world were ever thrown into chaos again, a single Brand would no longer be enough to close the doors. That the door which appeared then would not be one you closed with a single hand, but one you closed by bringing both hands together. That to close doors which must not be opened, and to open doors which must not be closed, two Brands are needed.”
“Doors which must not be closed…”
“Don’t— don’t take it too seriously. He’s an old paksu, and like all of them he spouts plenty of nonsense too.”

But to Shin Hweein, those words sounded almost like a prophecy.
The yokai Eul, who foretold war, whom he had met when he first entered the Specter Realm.
The radicals of Hwa-guk’s Onmyo Bureau and their disturbances.
The stirrings of yokai tied to his past life, like what had just happened at Hotenshi-no-Kami Shrine…
It struck him that all of it seemed to be flowing together into a single, enormous current.

“It would be good if I could meet him just once… though for the time being that will be impossible.”
“My grandfather?!”
“Yes. But in my position, running about like this, I can’t go calling on him. At the very least, after I’ve become a First-Rank sorcerer and recovered my standing, I’d like to go together with— Ham Seoyeon?”
“Recovered your standing, and together…!”

As though a fever had seized her all at once, Ham Seoyeon’s face flushed bright red, and she ducked her head down deep.
It did her no good.
The blotchy red had already spread to her ears and the nape of her neck, and there was no hiding it.

“Are you alright?”
“I’m fine, fine— no, am I not fine? Maybe I’m not?”
“What a creature of delusions you are.”

Watching Ham Seoyeon behave in some way she couldn’t fathom, Geum Moa abruptly spat a curse, and Leon and Flame-tail snorted in unison alongside her.

“Same-kind disgust.”

— All exactly the same lot.

Shin Hweein left him to it, feeling a little lonely at the thought that Ham Seoyeon seemed to have grown close with his shikigami.

“A-anyway!”

Her face back to its usual color, Ham Seoyeon jerked her head up and raised her voice.

“What are we going to do now? You’re not planning to just hide inside the Specter Realm, are you?”
“Of course not. I’m thinking it over. For the moment, calling on Father Lucas seems the best option.”

The safest route for Shin Hweein would, of course, be to rely on Yun Jinseong.
Beyond being a powerful sorcerer in his own right, the man held the rank of Lieutenant General, so he could not only hide Shin Hweein but, whenever his ability allowed, surely help him sit the sorcerer qualification exam directly.

And he’d very naturally set a wedding date with Yun Juna at the same time. Absolutely not.

Sooner than that, his temper would be better served by revealing himself and confronting Shin Uin head-on.
If his original plan had been to seize his father by the collar, he would now have to adjust the angle downward a little; instead of his father’s collar he’d seize the front of his trousers and beg, first and foremost, to be spared his life.

I can’t know how Shin Uin will react… but seeing him roam about for the better part of a month searching for Moa, he has no intention of leaving me alone at her side. Was he always so sick with love?

With a sigh he turned to look at Geum Moa, who, oblivious to his troubles, was beaming at him brightly.
She was, after all, beautiful enough to settle an impatient heart of its own accord.
And what was more, just now she had pared a fair amount off her natural beauty.
What, then, must her true face be like?
If the only image branded into one’s mind were that, then Shin Uin’s deranged state could, admittedly, be understood.

“Why do you look at me so? Ah — could it be you’re about to give me a kiss?”
“Persistent woman.”

Ham Seoyeon, who had been laboring so hard to ignore her until now, turned her head toward Geum Moa.

“Kiss? Kiss why?”
“Oh come on — when a man and a woman kiss, is there ever any other reason?”
“I said you were persistent.”

Shin Hweein sighed and floated a compass up over his palm.
This was his refinement of the country-crossing sorcery Makoto used; with the needle shrunk down so small, “compass” was the apter name.
The Onmyo Bureau had never told him its proper sorcerous name, and even had he known it, he could hardly have admitted to stealing it from them, so from here on this would be a unique sorcery of Shin Hweein’s own devising.

“What’s that?”
“A compass. A multipurpose sorcery for use in the Specter Realm. I can’t teach it to you directly, so watch and steal it.”
“Do you even know how hard it is to steal-learn a sorcery when you say— ah, right, you did exactly that.”
“Exactly!”

Shin Hweein flinched at the strangeness in her words, but Geum Moa cut in to back her up so swiftly that he forgot it almost at once.

“Don’t go thinking just anyone can learn that sort of thing so easily!”
“Still, Ham Seoyeon has the Gatekeeper’s Brand, so… never mind. If she has the will herself, she’ll watch and learn.”
“Ugh, insufferable.”

Clicking his tongue only inwardly, he summoned to mind the Zone 3 door he had used when returning from Hwa-guk.
At that, the compass spun violently before locking onto a single direction, and Shin Hweein nodded and led the party on.

“Let’s go. I think it’ll be alright, but in the Specter Realm we might still cross paths with them.”
“Mm. Myeongin had better cover for us properly.”
“I never had any expectation of her to begin with.”
“Ahahaha…”

Fortunately, the worst did not come to pass.
Perhaps because they moved with their presence suppressed, the Specter Realm lay utterly silent, and Shin Hweein, catching hold of the surging flow of spiritual force without incident, safely opened a passage and led the party straight to their destination.

“Wha— what is this?”
“This sort of sorcery. Useful, so learn it.”

Seeing the surroundings transform in an instant, Ham Seoyeon startled, and Shin Hweein gave a small, proud ahem.
He thought himself that he had remade Makoto’s spell into something far simpler and faster, a far more useful sorcery.

“I told you it’s hard to learn just by watching!”
“It can’t be helped. I’ll show it once more, so at the very least memorize its shape.”
“Ugh — I really want to hit this guy…!”

Friends did speak a little roughly to one another, didn’t they?
In that case, surely it was fair to say he and Ham Seoyeon had become good friends.
Shin Hweein gave Ham Seoyeon enough time to study the compass sorcery as she muttered her complaints, then withdrew it and spoke.

“I’m sorry, but could you go out first and contact the Father? I’d like to be safe.”
“You’re not planning to send only me out and then act on your own, are you?”
“Why would I do that?”
“If not, never mind. …I just got a little uneasy, that’s all.”

Before opening the Specter Realm’s door and stepping through, she turned back to look at Shin Hweein, hesitated a moment, then with an expression of firm resolve held out her little finger to him.

“Promise. No wandering off anywhere strange — wait for me.”
“You’ve turned into a child all of a sudden.”
“Quick — promise.”
“Alright.”

He had never linked little fingers with anyone other than his mother and Geum Moa.
But if he thought of it as proof of friendship, then holding out his little finger to her felt less embarrassing than it might have.

“Seal.”
“Seal.”
“You know this is a contract, right?”
“A splendid sorcery. I shan’t move from this spot, so hurry.”
“Mm.”

Linking little fingers and then pressing thumbs together, Ham Seoyeon finally pulled away with a satisfied face, threw a hmph of a snort toward Geum Moa, and flung herself through the door.
Without a doubt, some glance had passed between the two of them while Shin Hweein wasn’t looking.

“You two are getting along splendidly.”
“Putting me to such a test, the both of them — fox-of-flames… Shall I just sweep them away — every last one? I could carve them up so they couldn’t so much as breathe a word… but, but then the Three-Year Pact would…”

Shin Hweein had only just barely come around to thinking of Ham Seoyeon as a friend, and yet Geum Moa was already at the point of cracking jokes like that.
He had been watching her with a contented look for only a little while when his own face hardened.

“The coordinates of the door.”
“Mm?”

The flow of spiritual force in the area roughened all at once.
Even in the Specter Realm, a great change usually announced itself with omens, yet there had been none at all.

— Hey, look over there!

“Wha— t.”

Shin Hweein turned his head at Flame-tail’s voice, the fur bristled stiff, wary of their surroundings, and could not believe his eyes; he shut them tight, then opened them again.

“The sea…?”

The horizon was drawing closer and closer to them.
No, that was his misperception.
Dark blue seawater was welling up and rolling toward them, that was all.
Each time the water rippled forward and spun out another layer of waves, the surrounding fields and trees vanished, weathered with terrifying speed into sand that crushed underfoot.

By the time he felt the seawater lapping at the tops of his feet and lifted his head, already the place where they stood had become a bleak, dark stretch of coastline by the sea.

“A sea inside the Specter Realm — how dangerous.”
“…We need to get out. At once.”

He said it in full knowledge that it was already impossible.
When the Specter Realm convulsed and its inner coordinates scrambled wildly, there were cases of those who rashly opened a door to step outside and were lost without leaving so much as a corpse.

With a disturbance this abrupt and this vast in scale, it would not be strange if even nation-level coordinates had shifted, so for all that Shin Hweein had learned the compass sorcery, he could hardly promise to smoothly find a location connected to the Capital’s Zone 3 door.

If only the paths leading back to the present world had been scrambled, perhaps things would still be all right.
But when the Specter Realm convulsed like this, it usually came accompanied by other phenomena…

— Found you…

This time was no exception either.
From the far side of the sandy beach abutting the coastline, something had abruptly shown itself.

— Found you. I knew it — that scent was yours, after all…

If voices had texture, this one was like soaked silk.
And not merely soaked silk, but soaked silk that clung to the skin unpleasantly.

“What kind of yokai are you.”

— You know, don’t you — don’t pretend not to…!

Shin Hweein opened his spirit-eye wide and watched the sand around the yokai slowly stain itself black.
No, that was no blackening at all.
It was hair.
The yokai had been steadily lengthening her hair to blanket the whole area, and however he looked at her, she gave off a far stronger force than her appearance suggested.

“Moa, do you have any idea what we’re dealing with.”

— Don’t put another woman’s name in your mouth!

A voice freighted with a horrifying density of curse-power lashed through Shin Hweein’s whole body.
Arong, who at all times wrapped him in mist-form, formed a barrier of blood and blocked it, but the sound tore clean through the spiritual-power protection in an instant and shook Shin Hweein from within with curse.

“K-hak!”

Blood leaked from every opening in his face and his vision flooded crimson in an instant; clenching his teeth, Shin Hweein pulled his spiritual force upward.
He had thought that, having mastered Fire-blood and gained Arong besides, his foundation in defense was at least somewhat in place, but that had been nothing more than a green boy’s misjudgment about the world.
If he could neither read the opponent’s sorcery in advance and cut it off, nor block sorcery as it came at him, then he ought at least to have cultivated the ability to read a crisis quickly and dodge.

If I’ve realized there’s a part missing, I just have to fill it in. Learn, supplement — that’s all…!

It was not that the warding charm had failed to activate.
Rather, with the spiritual force of the Specter Realm in upheaval and his connection to the yokai who warded him and the Shin House grown faint, the talisman had been unable to play its proper role against the surprise attack.
Only now did the thought come to him: that unless he had means to fully bring his power to bear without depending on others, sooner or later he was going to take a heavy blow.

Indeed… I’ll need exercise, too. If my body were not so frail, this would never have been an attack of a sort to wound me to this degree.

Gritting his teeth, he raised his head.
The instant he was struck, Leon and Flame-tail had already hurled themselves at the yokai, and Arong, incensed, it seemed, at having failed to protect him properly, was incessantly shifting faces within the mist, displaying complicated emotions.

— Why are you stopping me — I am that man’s wife!

“And now even this lunatic is tormenting my lord. Hah!”

— My lord is impotent, you lying bitch!

“Flame-tail, there’s no need to go that far!”

Bellowing at Flame-tail as he wiped the blood from his face, Shin Hweein gathered his precious fresh blood to a single point and concentrated his spiritual force.
The sorcery to protect himself he would have to develop in due course; for now, the first task was to subdue the yokai who, mistaken for who knew what reason, had appeared bearing a grudge against him.

“Still — preposterous yokai-force. By her appearance she’s like Hwa-guk’s iso-onna, but she must be a yokai aged across long centuries.”
“That isn’t what she is, young master.”

— Nya!

Summoning the myodusa forth to heal the wounds Shin Hweein had taken, Geum Moa explained in a low voice.

“The iso-onna, who appears on a shore and sucks a person’s blood with the hairs of her head; the water-ghost, who appears in the water and drowns the living… they’re all just yokai reproduced by people who saw the victims of that woman and were afraid.”
“Then what is that thing.”
“A Maiden-Ghost.”

Knowing full well it was no time for such things, Shin Hweein still turned to Geum Moa and asked again.

“What did you say?”
“A Maiden-Ghost in the grip of delusion — who believes she and my young master have been wed.”

Water-ghosts and Maiden-Ghosts were both crystallizations of yin energy, so it would not be too much of a stretch to say their attributes aligned, but even so…
At a loss for how to answer, Shin Hweein settled on simply gathering his spiritual force, and the ghost, locked in combat with his two thralls, raised her voice once more.

— You — you are still deceiving my husband with your lies! Give me back my husband—!

“And…”

Parrying with one hand, easily, the curse that this time came aimed at her alone, Geum Moa added, as though it were of little consequence.

“She is the daughter of the dragon-king who once ruled the North Sea.”
“What — surely not.”

The daughter of the North Sea Dragon King.
Could it be that this North Sea Dragon King meant the Daoist Northern Black Dragon, the King of Vast Marshes?

“You’re saying that if she were still alive there’d be no chance of victory at all, yes? Ho ho — but dead or alive, she’s no match for me, so if you require my help, you have only to say the word.”

So in the end she really was the daughter of the King of Vast Marshes, Aoshun.¹

An impossible heavyweight. Why now, so suddenly… No — this is the Specter Realm.

The moment Shin Hweein shut his eyes tight and opened them again, the waves rolling onto the shore slapped down hard.
From within them, monsters beyond counting, soldiers of the Dragon Palace bearing the heads of fish, emerged and began to land.
Seeing it, Shin Hweein at last gave way to a sigh.

“Today the omens are weighted more toward ill than to good.”

At his words, Geum Moa shook her head and spoke.

“This is the price for using the Specter Realm to flee a matter as paltry as one with a mere human.”

He could not bring himself to deny her words.
The Specter Realm had never once, in all its history, been kind to humans.
The forgotten price had simply, at last, come due.