Chapter 18 — The Sorcerer And The Ill-Omened Prophecy (1)

— There is no doubt at all that their final aim is Aeshin.

Lyl whispered it from so close her breath all but brushed him, tracing her one singular pattern in the empty air.
The figure looked like a door shut tight and locked, then shattered to pieces, and what it meant was too blatant to miss.

“And why is it that now I can look upon this and come to no harm?”

— Because right now I have stepped in and am shielding your mind. …I cannot repeat the same mistake twice.

What she meant by the same mistake, he thought he could guess. For now, he let that part lie.

“Those who envied the Gatekeeper’s Brand… no, surely that isn’t it.”

— That would be the Onmyo Bureau of Hwa. As far as this one’s memory can attest, the roots of these men were never in Hwa to begin with.

The head Lyl meant by this one was, of course, the Rank-Two onmyoji’s.
The fellow had been one of the Onmyo Bureau’s radicals, and even among the radicals his thinking ran too extreme, so they had demoted him. Just when he was at his lowest, the story ran, they had approached him.

— They are a group made up of ability-users from every sort of country, East and West alike. This one carries the memory of attending one of their gatherings, and the members’ ethnicities varied as widely as the tongues they spoke.

Shin Hweein knit his brow and answered her.

“Then this fellow, and the other two as well, crossed over from the Onmyo Bureau into the secret organization that flies that pattern as its sign. Is that what you are telling me.”

— Just so. Of course, these fools never meant to transfer their allegiance entirely. The plan was to win results with the organization’s backing on the operation, then promptly return to the Onmyo Bureau and have their standing restored.

“The operation. The operation of laying hands on a direct-line scion of the Seo House and stirring chaos in the Capital. Or else.”

Or else, as he had suspected before, the Seo House itself was already in collusion with that faction.

— That much I could not learn. At the least, these men believe they succeeded by their own power alone. But there are suspicious points. Granted, meeting the Seo House’s youngest son out in the world and seducing him is one thing. But the ease with which they secured the Seo House’s backing, and the fact that they were even permitted into the Seo House itself…

“Tch…”

Whether it was that he had no great love for the Seo House to begin with, in his heart he could not help thinking there had to be at least one person inside that House tied to this organization.
Yet for all the talk and all the trouble that surrounded them, they were members of the Eight Pure-Blood Houses, who had warded the Capital, had warded Aeshin, for hundreds of years.
For now there was no recourse but to trust that whatever the trouble, it would in time correct itself from within.
…Though Shin Hweein would keep a sharp eye on them all the same.

— Coming to the point, then: these men move very stealthily indeed. The curse laid upon this pattern is the proof of it.

“First I want to confirm one thing. The time I caught their curse, was it the moment I drew the information out of the onmyoji’s brain? When, without your leave, I went and looked at the pattern…”

— Correct. Because you began to show signs of harm, I cut in at once, but you went on suffering, and so, with no other choice, I erased the portion of your memory connected to it.

“…How shameful this is.”

There he had been, declaring grandly to Lyl that he would learn dream sorcery and pull the information out himself, only to cause such a fiasco that she had to clean up after him.
Lyl thought it her own failure, but plainly speaking it had been Shin Hweein’s failure. No, his defeat.

‘Now that I think on it, when I woke after mastering the sorcery I’d drawn out of the onmyoji’s memory, my nose bled. I took it for the strain of having pushed myself too hard in the dream, but it was, in fact, the mark of the curse I had taken.’

When he hung his head low, ashamed of himself, Lyl, at a loss for what to do, gathered him into her arms and patted his back.
Even once he was calmer and tried to push her away, she would not be detached, and he understood then that this too was part of the recompense she had been hoping for.

“Are you so fond of a man who is like a child, one who insists he can do everything alone and ends by being a nuisance to others?”

— So long as it is you, I love all of it.

“That, you see, is precisely why I cannot accept your feelings.”

With a sigh, Shin Hweein gave up trying to escape her embrace and urged her to go on with her account.

“Carry on with the matter of the pattern.”

— I had thought, at the time, that if I only erased the part of the memory you’d taken from the onmyoji, all would be solved. But only today did I learn that the curse still lies dormant within you. As you have seen and felt for yourself, what we faced is a curse born of a perception-blocking sorcery pushed to its very limit.

“So it has turned into a curse that, the moment one becomes aware of them, lashes out at the perceiver in return…”

Lyl nodded and went on.

— Just so. The deeper one tries to learn of them, the more fatal the curse one suffers. At first it is only simple forgetting, but the more one resists, the stronger the curse grows. You have already drawn information about them from an onmyoji once, and today you encountered another trace they left. That is why you have come into greater danger.

“Then those who saw that pattern today, every one of them—”

— Most likely they will forget it before long. If by some chance they do not forget and persist in pursuing it, then little by little they will fall under heavier curses. Even should one resist somehow, the more people drawn into the matter, the wider the damage spreads… so collective tracking of them is, all the more, made impossible.

“Indeed. It is the worst of it.”

But surely the one who crafted this curse never imagined that the queen of dreams, the Dream-Demon Queen herself, would meet it and lock it firmly into memory.

Whether it was that their long embrace had satisfied her, Lyl now poured out everything she had drawn from the onmyoji’s brain, holding nothing back.
To be sure, the Rank-Two onmyoji had been only a late conscript into the organization, no more than a disposable underling, so there was not much usable intelligence.
There was, of course, no information on the sorceries the organization wielded as its own.

The only things to be learned were these.
That the organization had shown very deep interest in a sorcery the Onmyo Bureau’s radicals had devised, a sorcery for manipulating the breath of the Specter Realm Gates and drawing yokai through them indiscriminately.
That the organization bore a very deep hatred toward Aeshin, more precisely toward Aeshin’s upper echelon.
That it already held several sorceries to do with the Specter Realm Gates in its keeping.
And that the organization’s name was Honwondorae¹.

“Honwondorae. Childish in the extreme. Surely they do not actually mean to do away with every last Specter Realm Gate, to fashion a world in which the present world and the Specter Realm can no longer even be told apart.”

— A preposterous wish, yes. Ah, even so, you had better not say that name aloud out in the waking world. A curse weighs upon it just as it does upon the pattern… no, one even more grave.

“Well. I am not so sure of that.”

With a snort of laughter, Shin Hweein at last pried Lyl off him, reached into his robes, and drew out the Indulgence.
When he had loosed the curse of the Dragon Kings last time, the Indulgence’s reservoir of karma had been all but empty. Yet thanks to the various matters he had attended to at Myeongdong Cathedral on the Cardinal’s commission since then, it now scattered a respectable, bright light.
And more than that, over the past week of working out with Yun Juna, no small amount of karma had accumulated besides, though why on earth that should be he could not for the life of him say.

Was it that exercise had so great a bearing on his fate?
Did it mean that, from this point on, he must never skip his workouts?

Averting his eyes from a reality he could not bear, Shin Hweein lifted up the Indulgence, and Lyl, with a shriek of kyaa, rose to her feet and stepped back.

— Please, do not use that. It is the one and only tie between you and me. I beg you, do not use it!

“It is not your curse I mean to sever. It is the curse of Honwondorae, the one that lies upon me at this very moment, that I would cut away.”

At his words Lyl’s face contorted further still.

But that makes no sense.

— I too know what can be done with that Indulgence. To absolve a curse, one must come face to face with it. But at this moment you are under my protection, you cannot even perceive the shape of the curse properly. And so…

“And so I must lift your protection and face it.”

— Do you mean… do you mean to die?

“Do I look to you like a man set on dying? I want to live. More than anyone, desperately.”

Shin Hweein rose to his feet.
Gripping firmly the staff that had appeared in his hand by now, without so much as a flicker of doubt about what he was about to do, he fixed his gaze on the Indulgence.

“Lyl. Loose your protection. Already I have braced my brain and my heart with my own spiritual power. If I can hold out against it for even a brief moment, then directly after I shall be able to lift the curse.”

— No.

“Lyl.”

— No!

Lyl shouted at him and flung herself onto him.
Shin Hweein did not dodge. He received her.

If Lyl had pretended not to see, he had truly meant to challenge the curse head-on, but as it turned out, Lyl was, in temperament, much like Geum Moa.
To torment him to a degree just shy of his death was acceptable. His actually dying, that she could not bear.
It was the moment he won a small wager.

— You win. Bad man. You were truly bad.

She pounded his shoulder again and again with her fists, as if undone by vexation.
Because she knew he had meant it sincerely, she seemed only the more furious for it.

— Cunning, cruel, to refuse my feelings flatly and then turn around and use them so well… I shall not forgive you. I shall never let you go, not so long as I live.

“You speak as if you had once meant to let me go. Will this not be a long bond between us, in any case? Walking it together, we shall cross hills and valleys both. Let us go at our ease.”

— Y-you…!

Only after she had struck him a good while longer did her temper at last ebb, and, sniffling, she said,

— I shall lift only about half the curse. Even that much will make your dream sorcery strong enough, and then there will be no need for you to learn any other mental-defense art. Do you understand? An ordinary dream-demon wields power within a dream, but I make reality into a dream. I shall divide off enough power for the you of now to bear. Even should you not be able to devour the dreams of others, at the least your own dream will never be trespassed upon…

If Shin Hweein were to use the Indulgence to absolve the curse Lyl had laid on him, then in exchange a portion of her authority would be requisitioned from her.
Even out in the waking world, the Dream-Demon Queen herself would of course be horrifically strong.
That power could not be conveyed to him in full, but the mental-defense ability that belonged to her authority as Dream-Demon Queen, at least that much, she could place into Shin Hweein’s keeping.

“I am sorry to be the one asking for everything, Lyl, but the Indulgence must have karma left in it if I am to absolve Honwondorae’s curse. So…”

— It is well. I know.

She stretched out her hand and clasped his, and the Indulgence within it.
At the sight of the great quantity of pale-pink aura streaming from her fingertips and pressing itself, layer upon layer, into the Indulgence, Shin Hweein understood that for all the ground he had gained, Lyl had reached a level he could not yet so much as dream of, and could only manage a wry smile.

— Three promises. Give me three.

“Let me hear them.”

— The remaining half of the curse, you must never, never absolve it. If you do, I truly shall not forgive you.

“That, I grant.”

— The second. Fix my ornament to your staff as well.

Had she been studying his staff this whole time, then.
Whether it was only his imagination or not, the jewel-dragon and the fox set upon the staff seemed to be preening at her.

“…That I cannot promise to do in any short time. Balancing the powers there cost me no small effort.”

— It will do for you to do it once the materials are gathered. But the third. The third is very important.

Drinking in her power, the Indulgence activated.
The thing had by now refined itself into so much of a lecture-space that to call it a curse at all was embarrassing, but in any case the curse that had been twisting his dreams against his control was undone by nearly half, and the spiritual power that until now had been bound in fending it off was unexpectedly, generously released.
It had been a curse without much real harm in it to begin with, but precisely because it had operated on his mind, an appreciable amount of spiritual power had been spent defending against it.

’…Ah, of course. So this is my mind. Small wonder Moa took me for a fool. Only now have I learned how to defend my mind properly.’

Even apart from that, as his mind sharpened in real time, he could feel the thick mental-defense barrier that until now had hung beyond his perception wrapping itself about him.
It was the barrier Lyl had built to guard him.
And just beneath it now, the barrier he had instinctively woven himself was laid over hers, so that he could perceive the realm of his own mind more clearly than ever before.
Nor was that all. He had the certainty that, whenever he wished, he could leave this dream at will.

‘Even so, not now. Not yet.’

It was just then that he heard the third of Lyl’s demanded promises.

— Someday, when you become able to bear me, at that time, take me as your shikigami.

“The Dream-Demon Queen, become the shikigami of a single man?”

— And never set me loose again. Promise me.

“…I promise you. In exchange—”

He did not yet know all of her.
Of Geum Moa, of the burning bird, of Attila, likewise he did not know all.
At first he had meant only to deny it, that those whom they had been bound to was nothing but his past-life self, that the present self had nothing to do with the affair.
But if one truly meant to deny it, ought one not to do so only after knowing all that had passed between them?
Meeting her raw, unmasked feelings now, this thought, too, came suddenly to him.

“Someday, when I have come to bear all of it, when I am strong enough that I shall not be swallowed by the past. At that time, I would have you tell me everything that came to pass.”

— That is the very thing I have wanted. Yes, I promise it as well.

They nodded to each other, and he set her gently apart.
As she had assured him, even after one activation the Indulgence still shone with its dazzling light.

“Now, then. Withdraw the barrier.”

— Of course. Your mental defense is nowhere near as strong as mine. Are you certain?

“So long as I do not die, I can endure whatever comes. My life has been such.”

— But you were always in pain.

“Before, there was no hope that it would improve. But now, that is not so. The next time, there shall be no pain.”

At those words Lyl bit her lip hard and nodded.
Just after, her barrier was withdrawn.

“Honwondorae.”

Shin Hweein himself spoke the name aloud, summoning to himself the curse that still lay dormant within him.
And then, indeed, unlike the long-aged bonds, this one, only just born and seeming still faint, gave off a stench like rot fit to pierce the nose: a cord of fate, clearly visible to his eyes.
To Shin Hweein, who dared to face it head-on, the pain he had braced himself for came rushing in.

“Release.”

It was time to send that pain back.