Chapter 16 — Desire And The Blue-Robed Boy (1)

When Shin Hweein was a child, the days he could rise outnumbered the days he could not by about three to one.

After three days flat on his back, the fourth would ease enough for him to get up and walk a little.
But “walking” meant only a short turn through the courtyard of the auxiliary residence, or watching the house sorcerers run their drills from the edge of the main hall’s training ground.

Even bedridden, of course, he was hardly idle.
Propped against his pillows by sheer force of will, he learned from his mother: the history of Aeshin, the catalogue of yokai, the shikigami of the Shin House, sorcery itself…

After Moa came to him she lent a hand in his schooling too.
She had wanted, it seemed, to coax him into a child’s small indulgences, but his mother’s discipline was strict, and the chances for indulgence were few.

She drove her invalid son so hard that one could scarcely have pictured a mother in the act.
And yet how could she, of all people, have felt no pity for him?

When his fever climbed into his head and study became impossible, she would lay his head on her knee, stroke his brow with her cool hand, and tell him old tales.
All of them, naturally, were tales of the sorcerer’s arts, the immortal arts, or, from across the sea, of Western mages and the creatures of mystery.

It was then, too, that he first heard the story of the pando.

A story of the palace on Mount Kunlun, where the Queen Mother of the West, the Daoist goddess who reigns over the immortals, made her dwelling.
A beautiful and terrible goddess, who took for her retinue an enormous blue bird and a fox of nine tails, and who tended an orchard called the Pando Grove.
The pando peaches of that orchard, it was said, could cure any illness and grant ageless life.
Near the palace lay a lovely pond, the Jade Pond; when the peaches ripened the Queen Mother would call the immortals to its banks, hold a feast, and share out the pando among them.

‘Mother, if I eat a pando, will my body be healed too?’

He remembers clearly asking that, back then.
His mother heard the question and stroked his hair a while in silence, and then, softly, told him this.

‘My son has no need of a pando.’

Even before that, on the rare occasions when Shin Hweein gave any sign of wanting something, she had always cut him off the same way: you have no need of that.
At some point he came to read “no need” as “you cannot have.”

And so it was with the pando.
For how should Shin Hweein presume to covet a pando that grew only in the immortal realm, where the immortals themselves dwelt?

He took her words to mean do not nurse false hopes only to be disappointed, and resigned himself to them.
And his mother, what had she said to him then…?

‘Yes — she said, “Have you not already eaten enough of them?”’

The young Shin Hweein, hearing that, had asked her why, if he had already eaten the pando, his body was still so afflicted.
But his mother had only laughed quietly and soothed him.
A single pando, she said, took three thousand years just to ripen; how should a handful of mortal years suffice to digest it?

An ordinary child might have wept and stamped and cried that she was lying.
Surprisingly, though, the words sank deep into the Shin Hweein of that time.
Perhaps it was because, in the self he could see just then, there was no virtue to be found.
A lame boy with a frail body that might die at any hour, who only burdened those around him and had left nothing in the world.

To deny such a self.
And yet, because the single self he had was even so precious.

He took his mother’s words into his heart and resolved to look far ahead, to weigh every matter with care.
To resolve, at the least, that it was still too early to give himself up.

‘After that, I think, I gave myself more earnestly to my lessons… Yes — even if it were thin as a single thread, I had come to believe there might still be hope my body would mend.’

After that, his life had been like a pando lodged in his belly, waiting only to be digested.
It had been a flower bud: still closed, but waiting for the day it would open in dazzling splendor.

The image was stamped deep into his heart.
Small wonder, then, that the Great-Mouth Ghost had perceived it and tried to play upon his longing.

“But how unfortunate for you. My life is in full bloom now.”

The instant Shin Hweein lifted his face, shaking off the frail child he had been, shaking off even his mother’s hand, his vision burst its narrow confines.
It opened all at once and took in the whole place.
The peach that breathed out its beguiling fragrance and light as if to tempt him, and the worried faces of his retainers who had been watching him while he was lost to it: at last all of it came into his sight.

“Young master…”
“Be at ease.”

To Geum Moa, who stood gazing at him with that worried look, Shin Hweein answered in a firm voice, drawing back the hand he had stretched toward the peach.

“I had already guarded my mind with dream sorcery. I only faltered a moment. It seemed, for an instant, that I was hearing my mother’s voice again after so long.”

Dream sorcery was a sorcery for governing dreams, but its underlying principle was to use a peculiar force to scatter and steer another’s mind, and from there to take command of it.
Turned upon oneself, it could just as easily defend the mind, and by stimulating the mind it could even temper the mind itself.

“That dream-demon’s power is certainly serviceable, but for guarding the mind there are better arts.”
“It is enough that I master dream sorcery the more deeply.”

Geum Moa, who hated it whenever Shin Hweein learned anything from another, and from a woman most of all, bristled at the words “dream sorcery.”
But he dismissed her with that single line and walked up to the peach tree.

“The tree itself is real.”
“Quite right, it is.”
“By nature the peach tree brims with so much yang energy that ghosts cannot even come near it. And to think that a thing with ghost in its very name had to go to such pains to drag a peach tree in here. I find it amusing.”

It was not just any peach tree, and still less the peach tree of the Queen Mother of the West.
He could see only that a clever sorcery had been laid upon it.

When Shin Hweein stretched out his hand, the branch bearing the fruit rose higher, and in its place a parched, withered root surfaced through the ground.
The spell forced upon a person the realization that, to obtain the fruit, the root must first be fed.
Just as the Gem-Mage earlier had offered up a person upon her altar, this compelled one to sacrifice another in exchange for what one desired.

“That peach is hardly an ordinary peach either… My lord, I have a fair store of blood. Shall I try feeding it a little?”
“No. That will not be enough to fill the creature’s belly. And I have no intention of dancing to its tune. Above all…”

Shin Hweein drew the Pagoda-Tree God’s talisman from his breast, fixed it to his staff, and swept the staff through the air.
Dozens of branches in beautiful bloom burst forth and swept across the place.
The peach tree, the peaches at its tips, and of course the lovely pond as well were all destroyed, dissolving into particles of light.

“I have eaten enough pando already.”
“What?!”

Leon, hearing him murmur beside him as though to himself, stared in disbelief.
Only Geum Moa, who shared the memory, understood his meaning and snickered.

…Wait, though. Wait a moment.

“Moa. At that time, were you not absent from my side?”
“I was right beside the young master the whole while, you know?”

How frightful.

A chill ran through him.
He drew his staff in close against his chest, and just then realized that it had changed.
The last time it had broken and been restored, the vampire’s power and the Pagoda-Tree God’s power had been embedded together within it, and across the whole a splendid pattern of red flowers had bloomed.
Now another change had come.

‘The flowers have multiplied. The peach blossoms, too, are lovely.’

In truth the pagoda-tree’s blossoms are not red at all but a near-white cream.
This much is plain if one recalls that the yellow-toad paper, the talisman-paper dyed with pagoda-tree flowers or fruit, comes out closer to yellow.
It was only because the vampire’s power had been mingled in that it had taken on red, and now the originally pale-pink peach blossoms had joined them too, until the whole thing had grown rather motley.

Studying it, he could not quite say it was anything but beautiful.
And yet for a man like Shin Hweein to be swinging about a staff carved all over with bright, mottled flowers seemed wholly unbecoming, did it not?

“Ah — thank goodness.”

Whether the staff had grasped his thought or not, the softly glowing flower-patterns all subsided at once, leaving only their faint outlines behind.
The staff did look, on the whole, to have been steeped in a red tint; but that too had its own splendor, and given that he handled the vampire’s force himself, it struck him as well-suited.

‘But… surely this does not count, too, as having seized upon a desire.’

It could hardly be that the Pagoda-Tree God had succumbed to a craving for the peach tree, and this was the result.

Glaring quietly at the talisman he had fixed to the staff, Shin Hweein peeled it off, slipped it into his breast, let out a low sigh, and once more mounted Flame-tail’s back.

“You wasted your time on my account. Forgive me; we shall have to hurry.”

— No, no. It rankled to be the only one made a fool of, so this works out well. I’m curious now how many more you’ll show me.

So saying, Flame-tail cast a sidelong glance at Leon and Geum Moa.
Yet only Arong and Neuldam, clinging to him, tensed up; the other two looked perfectly at ease.

“It’s the vampire’s nature to obey a superior. So long as my lord is here, there’ll be no question of being swayed by illusions. Then again, I’m not even sure this Great-Mouth Ghost fellow has properly registered me at all.”
“You little mongrel. Surely you don’t think I would fall for a sorcery of this petty caliber?”

— I really want to give that fox-of-flame a kick in the teeth, somehow…!

To Flame-tail’s regret, Geum Moa did not fall under the Great-Mouth Ghost’s sorcery.
That was because, before she could, she found Sister Barbara.

“Big Bro?”
“Aha.”

Fortunately it seemed she had not run into anyone else inside the Other Realm so far, and looked tolerably unharmed.
The trouble was that she had already been caught fully by the Great-Mouth Ghost’s sorcery, and now gazed at him with dazed, unfocused eyes.

“What’ve you been doing, getting up so late? It’s my entrance ceremony today. You promised you’d come with me.”

Her face all screwed up, the nun came striding up to Shin Hweein, spitting out words he could make no sense of.
Flame-tail growled beneath him as if to warn her off, but Shin Hweein stayed him.

“It does not seem to be an aggressive sort of desire. That is a mercy. Though it may, in time, turn toward something of that kind…”

Before then, he need only subdue her and undo the sorcery.
Shin Hweein leapt down from Flame-tail’s back to meet Sister Barbara.

“Eh? What’s this, I can’t even see your face properly. You went and got plastered again and slept without washing up, didn’t you?”
“Sister Barbara, I am not Father Lucas.”
“Aigh, don’t call me by my baptismal name, it gets on my nerves. El—”

When Sister Barbara picked up where she had left off, on the verge of speaking aloud either his own real name or Father Lucas’s, Shin Hweein, aghast, shot out his hand and clamped her mouth shut.

It was a relief she had not fallen prey to a dangerous sorcery; but this, in its own way, was every bit as dangerous.
If he kept humoring her, he was about to learn, quite by accident, Father Lucas’s true name and her own, and a host of intimate matters besides.
So in haste he invoked dream sorcery and laid its force over her like a mantle.

It was a touch absurd, of course, to try to wake someone who had fallen into a dream by means of a sorcery that governed dreams.

“Sister, wake yourself now. I am trying to spare you a shameful memory; you would do well to grasp my meaning quickly and come round.”
“Tch—! He’s groping his fully grown little sister, he is!”

Astonishingly, the nun shrugged off the dream sorcery entirely, then knocked his hand aside on top of that.
Behind him, Geum Moa was whispering ‘See? What did I tell you?’, though at this moment it sounded only as if she were needling him.

“Why are you sticking to me so annoyingly all of a sudden today? Aha, you’ve got something to ask of me, haven’t you. You’ve gotten into the family money? Or broken another expensive ornament?”
“I am grateful to learn how mischievous Father was in his younger days, but—”

At this rate he really was going to hear all manner of things he had no business hearing.
Sighing, Shin Hweein made up his mind.
Until now he had been spending half the force of his dream sorcery to shield his own mind; but since he had already overcome the first desire once, he resolved to draw that force back and pour every bit of it over the nun.

“Moa. Should I seem to go strange again, knock me out cold without mercy first. Then Lyl will come find me in my dream and lend me her help.”
“I’d rather not have to keep step with that woman, but if there’s no helping it…”

For someone who claimed there was no helping it, Geum Moa was beginning to puff onto her own fist with a fair amount of cheer.
He had noticed it before: she tended to take physical contact, in general, for a token of affection.
She loathed it when anyone else touched or wounded Shin Hweein, yet when she herself struck him “only just hard enough not to hurt him,” that, it seemed, was fine.
If only she would think of it in Shin Hweein’s terms, and not by the standards of a great yokai.

“Then, here I go.”
“Go where. You’re coming with me to the medical school— uagh!”

Pouring every ounce of dream sorcery’s power into his palm, Shin Hweein brought it down on the crown of Sister Barbara’s head before she could so much as resist.

He swore he had harbored no pent-up grudge against her.
It was only that, aiming to be quick enough that she could not dodge, the blow had come out that way.

“—Hah. Well, now.”

The next moment Shin Hweein realized he was half undressed, facing a beautiful woman across from him in much the same state, a woman who looked half Geum Moa and half Ham Seoyeon.
It appeared the Great-Mouth Ghost had not given up on testing him.
After the desire for life, it now meant to try him with the desire of saek (lust of the flesh), of all things.

‘No sooner is the dream sorcery shaken off than it leaps at me again — its zeal, I suppose, is to be admired.’

But this second bout, too, was his to win.
A woman of beauty as though his two close companions had been blended together, Sister Barbara in truth, was advancing on him in a posture as embarrassing as it was provocative; and yet his heart did not stir in the slightest.
Seeing that, he was certain.
And to add a word more, his body too had undergone no change at all.

“Young master…”
“Just as I thought.”

Even unmoved by the desire of lust, he could not make the sorcery vanish at once.
While he was wondering how to deal with it, his eye caught the necklace dangling and swaying at her chest.
Now, under the sorcery, it looked like a pretty jeweled necklace; but if one remembered that the woman before him was in fact Sister Barbara, then surely it was…

“There is no help for it.”

He reached straight for her chest.
Perhaps because the sorcery took it that he had lost to desire, it grew stronger still, and the woman’s face turned yet more bewitching; but he did not so much as touch her skin, and snatched only the necklace.

“?!”

Even caught up in the sorcery as she was, did she still recognize that the thing was precious to her?
Or did the memory of having once had it smashed by Shin Hweein’s hand linger somewhere within her?
She stiffened, and reflexively her hand shot out, and toward her mouth.

Shin Hweein slipped that necklace… no.
He fitted the electronic vape between her lips.