Chapter 18 — The Sorcerer And The Ill-Omened Prophecy (3)

— Khuaaaagh!

Oxhead let loose a hideous shriek, his throat torn open and devoured by Barabacha.

Already his whole body was studded with countless iron spikes that must have come from his own arsenal, and the holy bird’s flame, the flame that embraced and sublimated even the fires of hell, had cooked him head to foot and stained him red and black.

— In hell… I’ll be waiting…

— Krunch.

Even Oxhead’s head, as it tried to leave behind some final curse, was sucked whole into Arong’s mouth.

Barabacha, the Infant-Eating Hungry Ghost, could by its own nature feed only on crawling infants.
But the Shin House’s shikigami arts, as has been said again and again, are truly underhanded and shabby things, twisting weaknesses into strengths while keeping the strengths intact.
So the creature paid no mind whatsoever to such restrictions, busy swallowing whole a top-grade delicacy of a Rank-Four yokai.

“Master, might I have the iron spear this fellow left behind?”

Arong was not the only one coveting the spoils.
Leon was eyeing the iron spear Oxhead had dropped with a greedy gaze, and Shin Hweein nodded readily.

“Of course. You earned a commensurate merit. Without you it would have been far more troublesome to deal with him.”
“Haha, that’s rather embarrassing. Thank you.”

Outwardly it didn’t look like much of an iron spear, but it was, after all, an article that had belonged to a Rank-Four yokai.
It was steeped in the breath of hell, and its master’s aura would still cling to it. Try to sell it and an absurd sum could be had.
But for Shin Hweein, shikigami came before money.

“By the way, Master, you’ve seemed in something of a hurry just now — are you all right?”
“Ah.”

Leon fed the iron spear he had received from Shin Hweein to the headless man as he spoke, and Hweein nodded and turned his gaze to the sky.

There was no mistaking it.
Cleverly hidden within the yokai aura that flared roughly, as though sensing its own end, there was a faint aura just beginning to pulse.
So ill-omened was it that his instinct was all but screaming at him to take measures at once.

‘Could this be an ability I inherited from Father? If not, then…’

His spirit-eye had grown alongside him every time he grew, and no matter how he thought about it, there was something to it that surpassed the spiritual senses of sorcerers of his own grade.
But could it really surpass even a Special-Grade sorcerer’s?

If he had misread it…
What if, by butting in needlessly partway through, he ended up obstructing Yun Jinseong?

On top of that, Ham Seoyeon and Yun Juna were still in the middle of dealing with Horsehead.
If he were to leave his post over an uncertain matter and these two suffered harm in the meantime…

“Go!”

From the rear, where she had been concentrating on support and so had the leisure to read his expression, Ham Seoyeon raised her voice.

“There’s something over there, isn’t there? Go, right now! Just — leave us a few of your shikigami…!”

— Kuwo?

Barabacha, who had only just finished gobbling Oxhead down to the soles of his feet, jerked his head up with a look that said, Is there more prey?

Shin Hweein shot the creature a light glare and turned to confirm with Ham Seoyeon.

“Is it all right if I take Horsehead’s corpse?”
“We wouldn’t take it even if you gave it to us!”
“Arong, did you hear that?”

— Kuwoooooong!

In an instant the wall of water collapsed.

— Y-you bastards…! What have you done to Oxhead!

Horsehead had been blocking Yun Juna’s heavy descending greatsword with his iron spear, dodging Athena’s spear as it sought every opening.
Now, across the way, he saw that Oxhead, the one he had been fighting, had vanished without leaving a trace.
Shaken, he cried out.

“Die!”

Yun Juna would never have missed such an opening. She loosed a fierce slash that sent his weapon spinning into the air, and Athena’s spear pierced his shoulder.

— Kuooooo!

Arong had devoured one huge yokai whole and still looked hungry. When Shin Hweein saw him hurling himself at Horsehead from behind, he finally set aside his concern for those two.

“Flame-tail, can you fly?”

— A beast ought to keep its feet on the ground.

“Very well. Then I shall go alone. It is my first time flying by the dragon’s authority, but there is nothing for it but to try.”

— Ah.

It would not be too difficult.
He had already seen a dragon with his own eyes, and he remembered watching Miu ascend.

Recalling that, Shin Hweein wielded the dragon’s authority, summoned the wind, and lifted his body into the air.
It was naturally far clumsier and more lacking than the dragon’s own, but thanks to his inborn talent and the support of the gem-dragon set into his staff, he managed to fly in a fairly convincing manner.

— Young master, even a Rank-Three yokai thrashing in its final death-throes is something the Rank-Two great yokai cannot afford to take lightly. And on top of that, that creature is right now…
— Even so, I must go. The unease will not leave me.
— Very well. …The young master as he is now will be fine.

His brief exchange with Geum Moa finished, Shin Hweein shot upward through the air at a greater speed.

The two Rank-Four yokai had made the ground below into something resembling hell, and now the sky was dominated by its own distortion, born of a Special-Grade sorcerer and a monster of vast yokai aura clashing. That distortion inflicted spiritual injury on anyone who so much as entered the space.
For an ordinary person, even before the pressure crushed their body, their mind would already have shattered from the waves born of the heavy intent freighted into each side’s yokai aura and spiritual power as they collided.

“You?!”

But none of it could interfere in the slightest with Shin Hweein, who had erected a perfect mental wall with the help of the Dream-Demon Queen.

Reaching Yun Jinseong’s side swiftly, Shin Hweein delivered only the essentials to the Lieutenant General, who was startled into shouting at the sight of him.

“Lieutenant General, sir, this creature may be carrying a young one. I feel an ill-omened aura coming from it.”
“A young one? That’s absurd.”

— Kuoooooo!

The monster hurled its body at him, perhaps trying to replenish its vitality by devouring Shin Hweein, who was far weaker than Yun Jinseong.
Whereupon Yun Jinseong, as though he had been waiting for just this, kicked off the empty air, drove a fist into the creature’s body to strike it, and spoke.

“This thing is a Gyuki. And it’s male!”

Was that so?

Gyuki are yokai of Hwa.
They are famous for having the face of an ox upon the body of a spider, but the creature wailing in agony before him was hardly even that. Its body had been twisted all over, sprouting thorns and tentacles, and its proper shape was difficult to make out at all; only the ox’s face remained, just barely.
What was certain was that it was a fearsome yokai befitting its Rank-Three grade, and that, according to the lore of Hwa’s western provinces, as the husband of the serpent-yokai Nure-onna, it was unambiguously male¹.

“Beyond that, since you’ve come up here, hear this.”

Even as Shin Hweein, unable to shake the lingering disquiet, glared at the Gyuki, Yun Jinseong drew several new sorcerous arrays in empty air, struck the enemy with all of them at once, and quickly went on.

“While fighting that fellow, my body suddenly grew lighter. Meaning, perhaps the same curse that brought you down had also been laid on me. Seoyeon and Juna may be in danger as well.”

At those words Shin Hweein’s expression turned to one of surprise.

The curse Yun Jinseong spoke of would unmistakably be the curse of perception, planted the moment one discovered Honwondorae’s sigil.
It was true that Shin Hweein, in absolving the curse of perception laid on himself, had returned the recoil to its caster.
But could that recoil really have been strong enough to undo the curse laid on Yun Jinseong and the others?

If not, then…

“I checked first, but the two of them were fine. The one who confirmed it before us and told the rest was you, Lieutenant General — so you were the one most at risk, and yet…”
“So that sigil really was the problem.”
“Yes.”

‘Now that I think of it… why is my spiritual power still rising?’

He knew, of course, that activating the Indulgence to undo a curse plundered the caster’s power and spiritual power.
But there were limits even to that.

Not a shred of the curse of perception remained on Shin Hweein.
Then why was his spiritual power still climbing?
Paradoxical as it sounded, it had to be because a curse remained somewhere.

‘The Indulgence is still shining.’

The Indulgence, which had activated in the dream, was still going about its work even now, after he had returned to reality, pouring out light without pause.
Add to that the fact that the curses on Yun Jinseong, Yun Juna, and Ham Seoyeon had been absolved on their own.

It was something he had never imagined, yet only one possibility remained.
The Indulgence was erasing the very root of the curse laid upon Shin Hweein. That is to say, ‘the curse that prevents one from perceiving Honwondorae’ itself!

‘Could it be absolving every human who has been afflicted by the curse through encountering the word and the sigil ‘Honwondorae’…!’

It was as though lightning had struck inside his skull.

Of course, even Shin Hweein’s spiritual power, together with the karma stored in the Indulgence, was insufficient to wipe away a curse of so vast a scale all at once.
But was it not being replenished in real time, even now?

In the course of absolving the curse of perception, not only he himself but Yun Jinseong had been liberated, and then Yun Juna, and then Ham Seoyeon.
If the karma piled up by absolving them was, in turn, becoming the offering that absolved the others stricken by the same curse in some other place…
If, in that fashion, the offerings were continually replenished, lending strength to the Indulgence so the chain of absolutions repeated itself, then in the end the curse of perception might be extinguished from the face of this earth entirely.

‘Outrageous!’

Shin Hweein shuddered at the Indulgence’s true possibility.

Even in this moment, his spiritual power was increasing.
Naturally, his opponent must be losing spiritual power.

The instant this absolution was completed, Shin Hweein would no longer be able to share the same sky with the curse’s caster. But the man had been beyond reconciliation with him from the very start, so it was no concern of his.
And thanks to the power he had gained from a certain someone, his worries about being tracked had eased as well.

“It’s over —!”

— Kuwooooooo!

That was the mistake.

Trembling at the realization of how vast in scale the thing he had set in motion was, his attention had strayed from the battlefield, and his reaction came a little late.

“Ah.”

Yun Jinseong sliced his hand into a blade and severed the Gyuki’s neck. In that instant the creature’s body swelled and burst, and a thick darkness filled the area and blotted out the field of vision.

To Shin Hweein’s spirit-eye, a small cluster of yokai aura could be seen falling away beneath it.

— The first to crumble shall be the cornerstones of the Royal House.

He hurled his body recklessly toward that cluster of yokai aura, his sight still unable to penetrate properly, and in that moment an ill-omened voice came clearly to his ears.

— As the false has prophesied in the likeness of the true, a monster of war and chaos shall set Aeshin’s Capital to the flame.

“Kudan!”

With a single short cry he poured on speed, and at last, sweeping the darkness aside, Shin Hweein reached the thing itself.

It was a monster, the body of an ox with the face of a man.
Smiling balefully, it began to continue.

— And that shall be but the beginning —

“Ha!”

A great flame burst from Shin Hweein’s staff and consumed the monster, the kudan, without leaving it the breath to go on.

Hurriedly sweeping a hand to summon a wind, he gathered what ash remained after the creature had burned.
Cradling it in his arms, he halted in mid-air and lowered his head in utter desolation.

‘Ah, how foolish of me.’

A bottomless despair took hold of him.

What the Indulgence had done was certainly astonishing. Even so, how could he have forgotten the very purpose for which he had risen into the sky?
However great a Special-Grade sorcerer Yun Jinseong might be, how could he have failed to trust his own judgment, and let his guard down at the man’s word?

“You… were right.”

A moment later, Yun Jinseong, having swept clean the darkness draped across the sky, came flying slowly toward him and bowed his head.

“Forgive me. I was narrow and obstinate; I failed to trust you, and held to my own way, and so committed an immense blunder.”
“It was I who brought it up — I should have kept my own wits about me. I should have trusted in myself and acted on it; the fault is mine, for failing to do so.”
“No.”

Yun Jinseong shook his head slowly.

“My words became a ju and suppressed your thinking.”

He understood his own position, and so understood, just as keenly, the weight of his own words.
That was precisely why he was a Special-Grade sorcerer.

“Even so… a kudan, of all things…”
“…An ox, as it happens, was born from an ox.”

The kudan, like the Gyuki, is a famous yokai of Hwa.
It has no direct connection to the Gyuki, however; the one thing they share, if anything, is only that both are yokai related to oxen.

It is a monster with the body of an ox and the face of a man, famous for uttering, at the very moment of its birth, an ill-omened prophecy that is certain to come true.
Its own power is nothing remarkable, but precisely because it is so ill-omened a being, when a cow gives birth a man stands by, and if the calf is confirmed to be a kudan, they kill it before it can spit out the prophecy. Or so it is said.

In other words, a kudan is not some auspicious creature that foretells calamities already in motion. It is a yokai of an outrageous authority by which the calamities that spill from its own lips come about exactly as spoken.
Of course, in compensation for that, its natural lifespan is short, about a week, they say. But for those who hear its prophecy, that is no concern of theirs.

“Did you hear its prophecy?”
“…I heard it. It said the cornerstones of the Royal House would crumble, and a monster of war and chaos would set Aeshin’s Capital to the flame.”
“By ‘monster of war and chaos’ it surely means Bulgasari. They are the same organization as those who tried to create it. There is no way to take it but that the birth of a kudan was their intent from the very start.”

How the Gyuki came to be carrying a kudan in its own body was not the matter to pick over now.
To begin with, lore is the sort of thing that is continually added to and revised.
The Ushi-gozen, said to be a variant of the Gyuki, was unambiguously a boy, and yet, for the sole reason that he was called by the feminine honorific gozen, there have even been instances of later media treating the figure as a woman.

What mattered now, then.

“The prophecy must be prevented.”
“Yes. The two ways to prevent a kudan’s prophecy are…”
“One is to kill the kudan.”
“He was about to go on and call down a still greater calamity, so I killed him without hearing the rest. But that cannot prevent the two prophecies he has already spoken.”
“Then there is no choice but to carry out the other one.”
“Somewhere there must be a kudan of the opposite sex — we must find it, and hear from it a prophecy that counters his.”

Shin Hweein looked at the kudan’s ashes gathered in the palm of his hand and nodded.
He had realized it while looking at the creature’s face, but yes, it was indeed male.

In other words, from this moment on, they were now in the position of having to find, as quickly as humanly possible, a kudan born of the female sex, and hear its prophecy.