Chapter 15 — The Sorcerer And The Great-Mouth Ruins (1)

He had thought it was only Sister Barbara who’d been swept up in the excitement, but somehow the whole party had thrown itself into the water-play.
Maybe it was that, with no chance of running into anyone they knew from the mortal-world side of their lives, the adult, social-creature self-restraint that otherwise kept them all quietly, unnoticeably bound had finally come loose.

In the middle of using his newly settling water-authority to wage a water-fight with Father Lucas, Shin Hweein remembered with a jolt that he himself was, at this very moment, splashing about like a small child.

“Pwah! Brother, no matter how I look at it, that’s cheating!”
“Is it? And here I thought you, Father Lucas, were merely indulging me in honing my powers.”
“Tch — Erasmus of Formia shall protect me…!”

To an outsider with no context he might have passed for an adolescent at the height of puberty, but Shin Hweein had begun, bit by bit, to take Father Lucas’s measure, and he was not deceived.
Some patron saint of the sea, most likely, or something of the sort.

After firing one more pointless jet of water into the priest’s face for good measure, Shin Hweein felt a stealthy presence creeping up on his back and flung himself nimbly aside.

“Die!”
“Out of the question.”

Now that he had broken every curse of the Four Seas Dragon Kings and taken the water-authority for his own, he had grown sensitive to the flow of water and to anything moving against it, even without invoking any specific sorcery.
And in the same way, the slightest motion on his part was answered by the water itself, carrying him along as swiftly as if he were swimming.

“Tch…!”

Sister Barbara had lunged in to dunk him and missed.
She clicked her tongue at him without the slightest shame.

This was the same nun who had insisted that water-play was beneath her station, yet here she was, even now in the Specter Realm, still playing in the water in her habit with not an inch of skin uncovered.
Watching her, Shin Hweein felt his estimation of her rise, in keeping with the traditional and conservative values handed down through the Shin House.
And yet.

“Pwah! You—!”

He did not, however, forget to shoot a jet of water into her face first.

“Ah, the young master’s in danger!”
“Big Bro!”

The nun had, after all, been playing with the other women of the group, so those who saw her come at Shin Hweein naturally piled in.

“My spirit-power’s taken a fair hit. I’m out.”
“Ah!”

But to engage in water-play with women whose clothes, drenched and clinging, adhered tightly to their skin was a thing Shin Hweein could in no wise permit.
So, evading Geum Moa’s predatory hands as they sidled in toward him under the pretext of protecting him, he climbed back onto dry land.
In fairness, it was also true that he had burnt through enough spirit-power that moving his two legs unaided by the staff was becoming a labor.

“Tsk. I thought his guard had crumbled quite a bit… you lot were supposed to keep the young master pinned down properly!”
“That’s because you were closing in so blatantly!”
“Oi, don’t drag the Sister into your love-life schemes.”

Meanwhile, his shikigami were not, by their natures, especially fond of water, and at some point they had gathered cozily beneath a large parasol Leon had produced, sitting in a tidy little knot and watching the proceedings in silence.

— Hah. That fox-of-flame isn’t even bothering to hide her appetites anymore.

— Kuh-rrng…

— Kyut?

Having fled the water and the unscrupulous women, Shin Hweein took up the staff that had come unbidden to his hand and made his way over to them.
Flame-tail was sulking again, having failed to join the play, so Hweein gathered him up in his arms and soothed him.

— It’s because you keep hugging us one by one—!

“My lord, would you take a look at this a moment? I’ve found something.”
“Hm?”

Leon had come up beside him and was holding the object out.
Taking it, Shin Hweein found it to be a gemstone of clear blue water-light, as though seawater itself had been crystallized, and his expression turned puzzled.

“This is… an emerald — no, an aquamarine?”

Aquamarine. Namok in the East, the gem the West calls aquamarine.
A stone whose light resembled both sky and sea, and which, though still in its raw, uncut state, bore not a single inclusion, clear and vivid clean through; sizable enough, too, that put to auction it would surely have fetched an absurd price.

Though its name carries ‘sea,’ it is not a gem that comes from the sea. How, then, did it come to be here…? Ah.

Tilting his head as he inspected the stone, Shin Hweein at length sensed the energy radiating softly from within it, and his expression hardened.

“This is Miu’s, isn’t it.”
“It must be. I found it beneath the toppled altar.”

The lightning bolt the North Sea Dragon King had struck down earlier, when he came to take Miu away.
That power had utterly dissolved the body of the water-ghost binding Miu, summoning forth only her pure soul and spirit.
This, most likely, was a crystallization of whatever power had been left over as that body dissolved.

Water-ghost though she had been, the body had held the lingering power of Miu, the North Sea Dragon Princess, and had taken on a further charge of power from the North Sea Dragon King in the bargain.
That the resulting force was no trifling thing only stood to reason.

And the faint, swaying pull he could feel as he held the stone still in his palm meant that his connection with Miu had not yet wholly faded.

“Miu, you little thing. Afraid you might not be able to find me again, you left a token behind.”

— Oi. You’re not going to soften toward some water-ghost who just tried to kill us, are you?

Caressing the aquamarine stone, so large he could scarcely hold it in one hand, and smiling faintly, Shin Hweein heard Flame-tail grumble up at him from where he nestled obediently in his arms.

“Ha. Of course not. Mine and her bond has been settled, once and for all. If she would build a bond with me again, she ought to come not bearing such a gem, but in a body of unsullied white, and begin everything from the start.”

— Then can’t you just throw it away? I don’t like it.

“That will not do. A gift is an object that the heart follows. To throw away another’s offered heart without care — would not great misfortune surely follow? This stone is also a token, proof that she has cast off her resentment and returned to her true station. Not a hair’s worth of impurity remains in it.”

It seemed Flame-tail did not care for Shin Hweein being pleased to receive a gift left behind by the North Sea Dragon Princess, the very creature they had fought with their lives on the line only hours before.
But knowing the sulk came from a worry that Shin Hweein’s affection for him might wane, Hweein found it only endearing.

“If you are so uneasy, I shall hold you in my arms the whole day.”

— The very idea that I’d actually LIKE such a thing is itself a delusion!

The other thralls, however, evidently did like the sound of it, for at his words Arong and Neuldam came piling onto him with a thump.

Watching the spectacle, Leon let out a quiet laugh and made a proposal.

“It would be a shame to leave it as a raw stone. What if we had it worked? It will surely become a powerful artifact. If you would entrust it to me, I shall craft it splendidly.”
“Mm. Making it into a sorcerous implement would be well enough. But more than that…”

A bright idea flashed in his head, and Hweein waved his hand.
Geum Moa, who even while fending off the concentrated assaults of all the other women had been sinking them one after another with a contemptuous snort, came briskly up onto dry land.

“So you do get lonely without me after all, then?”
“That is not it. The metal I entrusted you with before, the phantom-gold — what has become of the work on the fox-ornament for the staff?”
“About that…”

Geum Moa’s face stiffened guiltily, and with an expression that desperately did not want to admit it, she shook her head from side to side.

“It’s not that I lack the confidence, of course. But to fashion it with only the limited abilities I have right now, balancing the energies is proving a little tricky. It’ll take a touch more time.”
“I understand. Many things have happened since, but if one counts by the days, it has been only a handful. …But what if I had this?”
“Ugh, that.”

Truly a great yokai, of a different class from Shin Hweein.
The instant Geum Moa laid eyes on the aquamarine Shin Hweein held out, she recognized it at once as the gift Miu had left behind, and her expression went thoroughly sour.

“Good material — yes, fine material, but… do you suppose that woman would accept her own gift being carved into a fox? It feels like it would attract a curse.”
“Then we shall make a dragon as well, that is all.”

Shin Hweein answered at once, eyes gleaming.
This had been his intention from the very start.

“A bird-finial standard¹ has a pair of birds, left and right, perched atop the sotdae pole, does it not? Just so. We make the foundation from phantom-gold, divide the aquamarine in two, and carve one fox and one dragon onto it as ornaments. Quite the splendid piece, no?”
“I don’t want to.”

Geum Moa flatly refused the proposal, for Shin Hweein, it seemed, still could not give up on his dragon-finial standard (dragon-feeding pole-head) ambition.
When Shin Hweein pursed his lips, Geum Moa let out a sigh and laid out her reasoning.

“The thoughts and feelings sealed inside it are too dense. If we were carving the whole thing into one piece it might be fine, but split in two it won’t end well. And besides, with the yin energy so thick on it, wouldn’t we want to balance it with a material thick in yang energy on the other side? A large, top-quality ruby would do nicely.”
“And why are you looking at me as you say this? Of course, for my lord’s sake I could rustle up one or two rubies easily enough. But I expect what you have in mind, fox, isn’t an ordinary ruby.”
“Tch — calling yourself a noble of the night and you can’t even fetch one gem? Useless.”

A red jewel. Ruby.
A precious stone for which the phrase king of gems was no exaggeration: useful enough as a material for sorcery, but more than that, the most coveted top-grade magical medium for those who handled Western elemental magic.
Owing to its property of amplifying the most destructive of the elements, flame, any ruby worth the name scarcely reached the open market at all, and the few that occasionally surfaced at auction were monopolized by the mages.

If Hweein scraped together every coin Father Lucas had ever given him, he would still be unlikely to obtain a ruby large enough to be carved.
And not just any ruby, but one bearing spirit-power equal to the aquamarine the North Sea Dragon Princess had left behind?
Not even Leon, nor for that matter Leon’s former master, Attila, the progenitor of vampires himself, would have any guarantee of finding one easily.

“So, give it up, please.”
“In any case, what you mean is that with only the phantom-gold, production will be difficult for the time being. Am I right?”
“It’s not that I’m lacking — it’s because of the Three-Year Pact, yes!”

At Geum Moa’s words, for she would sooner die than admit any insufficiency on her own part, Shin Hweein gave a small laugh, ran his thumb over the aquamarine in his palm, and abruptly raised his head.

“Perhaps a good encounter is yet to come. Let us wait just a little longer on the ornament-work.”
“Oh my, did you read your fortune?”
“I am not my Father. Only… if there is one, and there are two, then perhaps there may be three as well — so the thought comes to me.”

It must have been the moment of absolving the North Sea Dragon Princess Miu’s sin that had changed his spirit-eye.
Perhaps it was a broadening of the field of vision through which he beheld karmic bonds; perhaps a shift in perspective.

Caressing the aquamarine, which gave off, alongside that instant’s intuition, a strangely uncanny sensation in many ways, Shin Hweein lingered over it a while longer before he stored it carefully in his subspace storage.

The rest was over now.

“Lucas! Let’s barbecue, barbecue!”
“What barbecue, in the Specter Realm. …I’ll at least ask Brother, though.”
“Give it up—”
“He says give it up. Give it up.”

That they had been able to enjoy water-play this far without yokai threats was thanks to Miu’s protection.
For her, now, to talk of deliberately summoning yokai to gather… there was a limit to how shameless one could be.

Shooting Sister Barbara a sidelong glare, Shin Hweein declared to the group at large:

“Let us all wrap this up and head back.”
“Then can we at least stay until our clothes—”

Shin Hweein swept his hand, and the droplets of water soaked into the party’s clothing were all at once drawn out and dropped to the ground.

“There may still be salt residue. Even if it has been purified, the clothing has sat in the waters of the Specter Realm — anything not particularly precious, throw away; anything precious, wash it with sorcery accompanying it. Let us set off, then.”

While the party patted at their suddenly dry and fluffy clothing with bewildered faces, Shin Hweein shook his head once in mild exasperation, called up a compass to hover above his palm, and without another word began to walk.

“Shin Hae.”

Ham Seoyeon swiftly drew up alongside him.

“That woman earlier… the North Sea Dragon Princess. You’re not going to tell me what was between the two of you, are you.”
“No, that is a private matter. And in any case, it is no longer something of much importance.”
“But you’ll at least tell me what happened yesterday, won’t you? With that Shinto-shrine custodian fellow.”
“Ah. That is true.”

When Shin Hweein glanced back over his shoulder, Do Yumi had been edging up close, only to be barred by Geum Moa and get a kick to the rear for her trouble.
Father Lucas and the muttering Sister Barbara followed behind, close enough that anyone listening could have followed along; but nothing being said here was unfit for the present company’s ears, so Hweein did not bother to set a barrier.

“I went briefly over to Hwa-guk.”
“To Hwa-guk?! Ah—!”

Ham Seoyeon, who had certainly not expected him to say he had crossed a border, raised her voice.
Then, an instant later, she made a sound of sudden understanding.

“The compass!”
“Just so. If you know the coordinates precisely, it would not be difficult even for you.”
“How could you do something so reckless… Wait. That means that tea leaf, too.”

Shin Hweein nodded and gave her a rough sketch of what had happened in Hwa-guk.
He could not very well tell her about his past life and his body, of course, so he framed it only as having lent a hand in re-sealing a yokai sealed in a shrine.
Even so, it was every bit as astonishing.

“Hold on. You mean to say you fought the Onmyo Bureau awakened and the Seo House pursuers, crossed over into Hwa-guk to seal a great yokai, came back, and went straight into this mess?”
“There were small intervals between each event, but — yes, that is how it went.”
“You… is your body all right?”

Ham Seoyeon looked him over with a worried expression as she asked.
In truth, this was the very thing Shin Hweein himself had been wondering about.
Even granting that his condition had improved, he had fought one large engagement after another that an ordinary sorcerer would not have survived, and then gone splashing about in the water on top of all of it.
By rights every muscle in his body ought to have been in pieces.

And yet, astonishingly, he was at this moment moving his arms and legs without trouble.

“It seems I came into a fortunate encounter this time round.”

If he had to name a cause, it was probably the absorption of the Four Seas Dragon Kings’ power, which had cleared every vascular illness from his body.
Before, only one part of his body would improve and that was that; this time the blood vessels of his entire body had been cleansed, working a benefit not only on his frame but on his brain as well.
And so, at last, his body had gained the endurance to bear hard exertion without leaning on spirit-power.

“That’s a relief.”
“It is, indeed.”
“Right — so, I’ve been thinking on my own about how to repay you. What if we tried looking for a sorcerous implement that could heal your body even faster? It would have been hard before, but who knows about now.”

So saying, Ham Seoyeon floated a compass up above the back of her hand to show him.
Watching, Shin Hweein snorted.
She meant, no doubt, that she too had now acquired a means of long-distance travel; but really, that was no great matter.

“Let it go. Right now, focus on properly establishing your footing in the capital.”
“Ugh — you too, sounding just like the General…”
“Wise of him.”
“No, the General just hates the idea of me being involved with a man.”
“Aha.”

Only now recalling whom she served as a god, Shin Hweein nodded.

By then the passageway had been completed, and just as he was about to lead the whole party through, Father Lucas spoke up.

“Just a moment, Brother. I have something to tell you.”

Drawing Ham Seoyeon away from him as though it were something no one else could be allowed to hear, the priest recited a prayer for protection, and only then leaned in to whisper into Hweein’s ear.
Hearing the priest’s whisper, Shin Hweein shook his head, dumbfounded.

“You really are doing something audacious.”
“Heheh — Brother is an accomplice now, too.”

Letting out a sigh, Shin Hweein clapped his hands, and the long-needle split into two.
When one of them swelled to massive size and formed a passageway, Shin Hweein gestured to Ham Seoyeon and Do Yumi.

“You two, this way. We’ll be in touch later.”
“Hey, I still have things I want to talk to Big Bro abou—”

Ham Seoyeon tossed Do Yumi into the passageway and, narrowing her eyes, shot a glare at Father Lucas.

“I have a rough idea of what it is, but — please, please, do nothing in the capital that goes against the Royal House. That is beyond what I can help you with.”
“Of course. I have it firmly in mind.”
“Ham Seoyeon — pass word along to Yun Juna for me. The exercise session will have to be another time.”
“I don’t have her number.”

To Ham Seoyeon’s transparent and futile refusal, Shin Hweein sighed and passed along Yun Juna’s number.
She had given every sign of knowing about Yun Juna before he had even said anything, and even had she truly not known, she could perfectly well have asked Shin Myeongin. But.

“You know full well I can’t be the one to contact her directly. There’s no telling where or how someone might catch on.”
“…Fine. I just have to tell her you can’t do the exercise session, right?”
“Yes.”
“Right, got it. See you later. Definitely contact me.”

Once Ham Seoyeon, too, had stepped into the passageway, it presently melted from view.
In form it was a passageway; in substance it was as good as a spatial-translocation sorcery mediated through one.

“Then we should go as well.”
“Are the two of you dating, by any chance?”
“I said no.”

The remaining party entered the passageway and soon arrived before a particular door.
Shin Hweein opened the Specter Realm Gate and shot a wary glance at it.

Is this the right place?

But Father Lucas stepped forward without hesitation, poked his head through, came back grinning, and nodded.

“Let us go in together, then.”
“…Right.”

Could he really let this be?
With deep misgiving, Shin Hweein crossed the threshold of the Specter Realm Gate.
And beyond it was a brick-walled basement.

“Welcome, Sorcerer Shin Hae.”

Inside, the middle-aged man who had been waiting for Shin Hweein was the first to greet him, with a gentle smile.
One of the two highest-ranking figures in the Aeshin Catholic Church, a man frequently seen in mass media: Cardinal Mose Oh Unwon.

“Welcome to Myeongdong Cathedral. As Father Lucas’s partner, I look forward to working with you from here on as well.”

These treasonous bastards.

For all that they claimed to carry Aeshin blood, they had been hiding a Specter Realm Gate beneath a cathedral that belonged, quite firmly and quite officially, to Zone 1.