Chapter 14 — The Sorcerer And The Two Faces Of The Shadow (4)

The world shook violently, and in that same instant, three pillars of light shot skyward from Miu’s burning body.

Blue, red, white. Beautiful, even. But Shin Hweein knew them for what they were: nothing more than the colors of the spiritual power belonging to those who had laid the curse.

The flame that had tormented her so persistently subsided fast.
The breath of the curse withered away, driving out the foul aura that had gnawed at her soul.
She who had taken the shape of a water-ghost, now that both grudge and curse were cast off, had reclaimed the form of the beautiful maiden he had seen when first he stepped into her dream.

“Ah, aah.”
“Just as I thought. You are without sin.”

Perhaps it was because he had poured out not only every scrap of karma he had accumulated, but very nearly the whole of the force that made up this space.
In a realm dyed pure white, where even distance could no longer be measured, nothing remained save Shin Hweein and Miu, who knelt before him.

The Indulgence, too… is just as empty.

Lightly, strangely lightly, Shin Hweein gave the Indulgence a flutter or two between his fingers, reckoned with a wry smile that he had best not dare use it again for a good while, and tucked it back into his breast.
Then Miu, who had at last gathered enough strength to lift herself up, seized hold of his lapel and shook him.

“Why did you do it? Why…!”
“Why, you ask?”

It was a question that needed no thought.
And yet he was ashamed to have hesitated over it at all, however briefly.

“While I prance about playing judge, having gotten hold of an artifact and carrying on as though I were some sovereign arbiter, I could not leave a sinless girl such as you to her fate simply because I feared the sin might rebound upon me. That I could not bear to do.”
“You should have done exactly that. Everyone looks only to themselves! You, who all your life have given to others alone, you of all people should have done so even now!”
“No. I shall never do so. Not for your sake alone, but for the sake of being myself. That is why I did this.”

Wait.
What if, when he returned to the waking world, Geum Moa once again said this was exactly like his past life?
He had to show her something different, something better. He must not, of all things, show her the same self he had been before.

“But do not mistake me.”

So Shin Hweein hastened to add:

“It was because you were Miu that I sought to save you. Had you truly been my enemy, had you not saved my heart, even I would not have staked the danger of using the Indulgence. Which is to say that this time I moved with utter selfishness, purely for my own sake. Do you understand?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”

A small smile rose at last to Miu’s face, which until now had been brimming with tears.

“You said you would not take me as your bride. Then how is it that you treat me so well? Could it be that, on seeing how I looked in life, your heart has changed?”
“That is a separate matter. You only ever followed me, followed the me of a past life, as your husband. If you wish to become my bride, then be reborn and come find me. Cast aside the narrow gaze with which you regarded my former self, meet me as I am now, take time enough to build a fresh bond, and weigh with care whether, even after throwing away every favor you earned in your past life, you can still imagine a happy marriage with me. Then come and propose again.”

To the dumbstruck Miu, Shin Hweein went on:

“It can be done now. Your father, the North Sea Dragon King, does not seem to have cursed you. You might do well to go to him and entrust yourself to his care.”
“That was not what I was puzzling over… My husband, you are still chaste, are you not?”
“What did you say?”
“For the way you speak is just the same as a pure-hearted boy who has yet to so much as touch a woman.”

Sinless, he had called her. But he was wrong.
For at this very moment a sin had been born, the sin of insulting him.

“My past-life self may have shirked marriage on whatever paltry excuse, but do not lump the me of now in with him. It is only that I have yet to meet a bond I am certain of, and, more than anything, that the curse leaves no desire to stir in me. That is why I have not married.”
“That is the most welcome news I have heard in some while. Pray, until the day I come to call upon you again, remain just as you are.”

Miu’s smile fell suddenly from her lips, and she turned her gaze up to the pure-white sky.
The three pillars of light that had drawn the curse from her body and risen up were gathering once more in the empty air, and he saw it too, with his own eyes.

“They are coming now. Their grudges press upon me, vivid and near!”
“Yes. They come.”
“You must not die. If you die, I shall become a vengeful spirit once more and curse them…!”
“There is no danger of my dying. Do not set yourself to chaining misfortune upon misfortune.”

Shin Hweein checked Miu, who was about to fall into another flurry, and stretched one hand into the empty air.
Whatever came, if it was the price for having acted true to his own heart, he was ready to receive it.

There was nothing to fear.
He was not the self of his past life, after all, and he had committed no sin against them.
If the Dragon Kings forced some heavy curse upon him, all he need do was pile up the karma the Indulgence required once more and absolve the curse a second time over.

“Aaaaah…!”

And at last the three pillars of light came crashing down into his outstretched palm.
The blinding light raced through his sight, through his mind, through the very inside of his body, and at length burst forth in a brilliant detonation.
Shin Hweein, eyes closed and shoulders steady, bore the shock it dealt him and spoke in a low voice:

“Look. Your word, that I was without sin, was the right one after all.”

— You are right. My husband, you were right.

At the North Sea Dragon Princess’s voice ringing through his mind, Shin Hweein’s eyes flew open.
Somehow he had slipped out of the dream and stood once more in the very heart of the Specter Realm.
His hand was still outstretched, reaching toward the sky.

For a while he stood motionless, unable to tell where the dream ended and reality began. Then, feeling the great force surging through him, he closed his eyes once and opened them again.

The price… of the curse the three Dragon Kings left behind. I have absolved the curse they laid upon one without sin, and from them I have collected the price for it.

Though it had happened within a dream, all of it had happened in truth as well.
The force that rose up as he absolved Miu’s curse had not, in fact, been any curse rebounding upon him. It had been the price he had levied from the Dragon Kings in compensation for that long, long curse.
Spiritual power even greater than what he had gained from the Nine-Headed Dragon; the elementary authority of a Dragon King; and, above all else, the side-effects that came with it.

My body is light, and my mind is clear. I have never felt so refreshed before.

Shin Hweein, who had ordinarily suffered every variety of vascular ailment, now found that more than half of those ills had vanished.
In the Five-Phases doctrine, water corresponds, among the five viscera, to the kidneys, and the kidneys are the organ that filters waste from the blood.
Having levied the powers of no fewer than three Dragon Kings, Shin Hweein was in effect now blessed by water, so it stood to reason that his health should improve.

It was not my aim, when I did this, to mend my body… but as a result, a considerable portion of my bound-up spiritual power has been released.

Counting the diseases dispelled by the force he had gathered from the three Dragon Kings, and the surge in usable spiritual power that came with it, he now wielded fully more than twice the spiritual power he had commanded before.
Of course, that still left him a Rank Two. That much remained the same.

The vascular curses are all weakened thanks to the Dragon Kings’ power, so absolving them will be easier from now on. Or even left alone, they shouldn’t pose any great trouble… Though, were I to thank Miu for it, I doubt she would easily be persuaded.

Shin Hweein, mastering the spiritual power that had abruptly more than doubled inside him, drew a long breath to settle his body, then slowly opened his eyes.
Everyone there was staring at Shin Hweein, and at the North Sea Dragon Princess, Miu, who had collapsed before him in the form of a slender girl.
On behalf of them all, Geum Moa asked:

“Young master, surely you and that woman didn’t…?”
“Yes. The North Sea Dragon Princess, Miu, has released her grievance. She will attack us no longer. As for the North Sea Dragon King’s soldiers…”

Glancing toward the shore, Shin Hweein could not finish the sentence.
While he had lain insensate, the Yokai-Luring Art had also lapsed, and the yokai drawn in until that point and the spectral soldiers had ended up fighting each other into mutual annihilation.
In any case it would have been too much to release every one of their grievances individually, so perhaps this was the best ending for it.

“That is not what’s important right now!”

Even though she had only just escaped a deadly crisis, Geum Moa lit up both eyes with fire and bore down on him.

“You absolved the grievance of a maiden-ghost?! That is to say… that is to say, what exactly did you do with that wretched thing? Tell me the truth, this instant!”
“Is some such trifling fancy more important than the fact that we are alive?”
“It is a fancy, is it not? It is merely my unforgivable fancy, is it not?!”

It was only after Shin Hweein had made the shameful confession that, even within a dream, no desire of his stirred, that he managed to escape Geum Moa’s suspicious glare.
Meanwhile Leon, for his part, wore the expression of a man genuinely re-evaluating what he had seen, struck with admiration.

“My lord, truly, this time was magnificent. The opponent was a yokai bordering on Rank Four.”
“Rank Four, indeed. We held the elemental match overwhelmingly in our favor from the start, and I happened to have a personal connection with her. That is all that made it easy.”

If the opponent were merely a yokai of superior combat or special ability, with no particular elemental advantage on either side, the very best the present Shin Hweein could manage, leading all his thralls, would be to defeat a Rank Five yokai.
Two Rank Five yokai he might still overcome; against three he could only hold the line at best; against four he must run without hesitation.

But, put another way, this meant he had already passed the level of an ordinary Rank Two sorcerer.
The bare fact remained that, having levied the spiritual power of the Nine-Headed Dragon and the Dragon Kings, his spiritual power had grown all too rapidly for his sorcery-craft to keep pace, and there he would certainly need polishing.

— So what are you going to do with her, then?

Flame-tail was fixing his gaze on the North Sea Dragon Princess where she had fallen on the ground.
Every trace of a ghost’s foul aura had vanished from her, and she lay there pale-white, very nearly in human shape, yet he alone remained on guard against her.

“Well, had her station been only a little lower, I could have taken her as a shikigami. But that, I’m afraid, cannot be. She herself would not wish it, either.”

— Isn’t she just dead? She doesn’t look conscious.

“No, she has merely fainted. As I was waking from the dream, I heard Miu’s voice clearly.”

— …Calling her by her name, are you.

In truth Shin Hweein had a method already in mind for what to do with Miu.
But it seemed there would be no carrying it out at once.

“The tide is rising again.”
“What? What do you mean…? Ah.”

Upon the shore, left empty in the wake of the yokai-horde’s mutual annihilation, fierce waves began once more to come crashing in.
Seeing the Dragon King’s soldiers reveal themselves one and two at a time from within those waves, the thralls’ faces hardened.
For this time they were not soldiers commanded by the North Sea Dragon King.
And they were not ghosts at all, but living yokai.

“It seems my having absolved the curse has displeased them not a little. These are soldiers sent by the other three Dragon Kings.”
“This is no time to be discussing it so calmly. We must flee before the encirclement closes!”
“Indeed. And to where?”

Before them, the shoreline.
To their backs, to either side, all shoreline.
The party, it turned out, were stranded upon an island wholly cut off, ringed in on every side by the sea.
The fishman-soldiers stepping onto the sand one and two at a time with each wave that rolled in were a further bonus.

“What of spatial transposition?”
“Still beyond me. The upheaval of the Specter Realm has not yet subsided, and the Dragon Kings’ spiritual power fills every quarter, interfering with sorcery.”

The moment Shin Hweein had used the Indulgence to absolve the curse, the Dragon Kings had clearly fixed his location and, bent on making an end of him here and now, had pushed beyond their means to dispatch troops.

“Small-minded creatures. One can well see how they came to be betrayed.”

But if they thought a show of force on this scale would frighten him, they were sorely mistaken.
He had power enough now to hold his ground and fight.
If he held on, and held on still, the Specter Realm’s currents would also subside; when they did, he could take the party and flee by spatial transposition, or even throw open the Specter Realm Gate and run.

“They would, if they heard you, accuse you of having the gall to play the wronged party.”
“Hah. Whatever my past-life self may have done, that is no concern of mine now.”

At those words, Geum Moa quietly turned to look at him.
We are hardly in a comfortable position, he thought, what is it now?, and met her gaze. She was grinding her teeth in a most aggrieved expression.

“Young master, the feeling you give off right now, it’s so good…!”
“I thank you for the praise, but the praising party hardly wears the face of one giving praise.”
“That such a positive change should have been drawn out of you by some woman who is not me, it is too vexing for words!”

What a maddeningly complicated woman.
He sighed and gripped his staff.

“This is not the dire pinch we faced earlier. We need only set our line of defense and hold it. Leon, with your ability, you’ll do well enough at my side to build the line and hold it.”
“But of course. You have judged my ability precisely. It would have been better still had I been able to call out my own thralls, mind you.”

The reason he could not call out his own thralls was the same as the reason Shin Hweein could not, at present, wield any spatial-class sorcery.
But beneath the smile he wore as he said it, there was the glint of something concealed; to Hweein’s surprise, it seemed he yet had one more hand to play.
For the moment, even his shiftiness felt unreservedly reassuring.

“Flame-tail, if a strong one appears, see to him quickly. There is spiritual power enough; you may pour out everything you have.”

— Right. You’ve finally become a sorcerer worth calling one! For an instant, I can pull off something like Rank Four power. …Though that one’s still a bit beyond me.

The reason Flame-tail had never been a sorcerer worth the title was the meddling of the yokai, the very ones, including the ‘one’ he so revered.
But Flame-tail was the one in the party who, even if only for an instant, could put forth the greatest firepower.
What was more, that he was as loyal as every legend told of him was something Hweein could already affirm from all he had seen.
If he had to pick someone in the party to whom he could leave his back with an easy mind, just now he would put Flame-tail ahead even of Geum Moa.

“Arong, you become Bariram and devour them whole. They are, in the end, no more than fish that live in the water; they cannot stand against you.”

— Kyu!

Bariram is one of the thirty-six classes of Hungry Ghost set down in the Saddharma-smṛty-upasthāna Sūtra, the water-drinking Hungry Ghost, permitted to eat only water.
His whole body burns, like most of the other Hungry Ghosts, but his head is so long that he cannot see properly before him, and he may drink only the water that drips from those crossing a river, or what is offered him by another.
If he tries to drink water for himself, the ghosts who guard the waters appear and beat him senseless. Yet, as it happens, what they were facing now were the very soldiers of the Dragon Palace. And so Arong, who by the secret art of the Shin House took only the advantages of Bariram, would instead hunt them down as if catching rats.
If Shin Hweein had not learned the Yokai-Luring Art a little earlier, he would have made Arong into Bariram and staked everything on a do-or-die showdown.

“Neuldam, you stand by. I know full well that the one who will protect me in the final moment is you.”

— Krrng.

Neuldam was still a baby, and sending it onto the battlefield gave Hweein pause.
But the lightning it could call up for a single instant was stronger than any sorcery of Shin Hweein’s, and that power, which wiped away every foul aura, would surely become a great variable in a crisis.

“Moa, I owe you much today as well. Once this battle is over and matters are settled, let us have that drinking-bout we promised. By around then, my body should be able to take a drink again.”
“Sounds good. As it happens, I was planning to come pounding on your door when the time came.”

Today, in the gaps where Shin Hweein could spare no attention for her, Geum Moa had quietly stepped well past several lines.
It was safe to say that, had she been strictly observing the Three-Year Pact, she had broken any number of the things she ought to have kept, and yet she had aided him.
It was, no doubt, because she knew the effort he was making and wished to cheer him on.

The relationship between the two of them, twisted out of shape these past ten years, had at last begun, little by little, to gear together once more.
And there was no way he could let that be lost so emptily, here of all places, swept up in some petty tantrum from the Dragon Kings.
He would conquer this in plain sight, in defiance of them all.
He would take even their fury as fodder, pile up his karma, absolve the curse, and lay hold of his freedom.

“Miu, wait but a little while.”

Last of all he lifted the fallen North Sea Dragon Princess at his side, propped her up against the wooden barricade, and whispered:

“I shall send you back to your father’s side soon enough.”
“My… husband…”
“I told you I was no husband of yours.”

At Miu’s sleep-muttered words a wry smile rose to his face, and he lifted his head.
The hardy soldiers of the Dragon Palace, the lowest of them Rank Seven, more than half of them Rank Six, already filled the field on every side, and yet he was not in the least afraid.

A day ago, he might have felt some fear.
A week ago, he would not have dared even imagine it.
But the self of tomorrow would snort and send the lot of them flying with a flick.
And today, then.

“I shall take on the lot of you.”

He declared it boldly and stepped forward.
Not with the staff first, but with his sound right foot.

“Brother—!”
“Shin Hae! We’ve been looking everywhere for you—!”

It was at that very moment that the voices of those he had been longing for reached him.
Shin Hweein lifted his eyes, made out the figures who had appeared on the far side, and could only smile.

For wherever there are those who break their promises, there are those, too, who will stake their lives to keep them.
And right now, at his side, there were such people.
He was not alone.
Now, there was nothing left at all to fear.