Chapter 18 — The Sorcerer And The Ill-Omened Prophecy (5)

Shin Hweein sat face to face with a mirror.

No sorcery had been laid on it. It was only a fine, high-grade mirror, one that gave his image back with exceptional clarity.
He had refused to send Geum Moa on the errand and gone to a department store himself to buy it, a half-length glass with no showy ornament, set in a frame of good hardwood.

“That old geezer. I really am going to kill him.”

Geum Moa did not approve of this business in the least, and yet she made no move to stop him.
She knew that anything Shin Hweein had set his mind to was past her reach, whatever she said; the season for papering things over with lies of her own had largely come and gone; and on top of all that, the offering he had brought home from the department store, Western pastries, had put her in a good mood.

“Faces… For my part, I’ve always made it my habit to judge people only by their souls, so when it comes to telling them apart by face alone, I might actually have some trouble being accurate.”

Across from him, Father Lucas, who carried a spirit-eye of a slightly different sort than Shin Hweein’s, seemed to find the new discipline fascinating.

“Brother, once your discipline is finished, might I borrow that mirror for a while?”
“That, you cannot.”

Shin Hweein had been glaring into the glass, straining to perceive himself truly, when his own face collapsed in an instant beneath inflammation and scars.
He shut his eyes tight, opened them again, and turned to the priest.

“I chose one as clean of stray spirit-influence as I could find, but a mirror still carries deep sorcerous weight. If a glass that has reflected my own face over a long span then goes on to reflect you, who carry Zer inside you, there is no telling what might happen.”
“Ah, I see. Then I shall have to buy a personal mirror of my own.”
“Who knows. Keep working at a mirror and you may yet draw Zer’s consciousness into the glass. The two of you could even sit face to face and converse, could you not?”
“Oh… Brother, you truly are a genius after all! I’ll go buy one this instant!”
“I had a feeling it would come to that, so I picked one up for you already.”

Father Lucas had given his whole life to theology and was a complete layman where sorcery was concerned.
Every time Shin Hweein set about some sorcerous undertaking, the priest grew fascinated and wanted to join in. Shin Hweein had foreseen this, and so had bought a mirror on the priest’s behalf as well.

“Brother!”
“Don’t make a fuss over nothing. Just take it.”

The mirror slid out of the subspace storage, drifted through the air, and arrived in the priest’s arms.
He cradled it tenderly. He could perfectly well have carried it back to his own room and concentrated there; instead he settled in to face the glass right where he stood.

Geum Moa set down her teacup and spoke with a look of pure exasperation.

“You’re not going to your room?”
“It’s only that I’m so sorry to hear Brother is leaving the church soon. Hahaha.”
“This one’s hopeless. If we don’t do something about him soon….”

And so the two men in the one room sat wholly absorbed in their mirrors, while Geum Moa watched in silence over the pastries Shin Hweein had brought her and her tea. A strange little chamber composed itself around them.
For the record, Shin Hweein habitually kept Neuldam perched on his head, even through that fierce battle not long ago, yet this once he had laid the little thing down to sleep apart from him, in a baby’s cot.

— This one sleeps an awful lot.

“It’s still growing.”

— Is that so? It doesn’t seem to be getting any bigger.

Flame-tail had been turned out of Shin Hweein’s arms along with Neuldam, since the two of them could not be reflected in the mirror together, and now he watched the little one intently, waiting for it to wake.

“Every time I bring down an enemy, it absorbs their yokai aura from the nearest point it can reach and grows on it. Mark its size now, and you’ll be astonished when you see it again later.”

— Hmm… So its yokai force certainly has increased. It seems it might have passed Rank Six clean through. But this fellow…

Arong, too, had returned for the moment to his small-bear form and lay sleeping near Neuldam.
For all that the Hungry-Ghost Dominion had strengthened him, devouring two Rank-Four yokai one after another had plainly cost him something; ever since, he had stayed asleep, digesting what he had eaten.
Even at this very moment that nourishment was being turned into more yokai force inside him, and the rate of it was frightening.

— It’s outright monstrous. Its growth-rate is on another plane altogether. Even I have no wish to fight it.

“…Flame-tail, I’ve wondered about this for a while now, and I think the time has come for you to tell me.”

Shin Hweein forced the figure of the sneering, ugly man in the mirror to break apart, drew a long breath, hoo, and turned to Flame-tail.

“You saw the Gyuki yesterday too, so by now you must have the yokai grade-scale completely in hand.”
— Yes. That was Rank Three, was it.
“What rank is your true form?”
— …Well, that, you see…

Flame-tail could not answer at once, and dithered.

— First, you understand, I’m sure I can take that fellow.
“You mean the Gyuki.”
— Right. That much is certain. I could trample him pretty thoroughly, I’m sure.
“In that case, your true form is Rank Two.”
— That isn’t certain yet! There may be Rank-Two yokai weaker than my true form too!
“Let me know when I set eyes on one. Though whether I can come back out alive with a great yokai right in front of me, I cannot say.”

Yesterday everyone had carried on about great yokai over a Rank-Three creature, but in truth, what Aeshin formally recognizes as a great yokai begins at Rank Two.
The reason is that a Special-Grade sorcerer is generally said to be able to face down, alone, only as high as a Rank-Three yokai.
From the great yokai of Rank Two upward, the very notion of a one-on-one duel disappears, however gifted the sorcerer, and if such a thing is not properly handled, it can bring an entire nation to ruin.

“I shall certainly take you at your word that you are a great yokai, so don’t be too embarrassed about it.”

Which was to say, on his very first entry into the Specter Realm, Shin Hweein had met a great yokai and lived to come back.
However special the bond between the two of them might have been, at the time a single puff from Flame-tail’s nostrils would have been enough to send Shin Hweein flying.
It was a tale that showed how gentle a yokai the flame-hound was, and how, for all his rough talk back then, he had been holding himself back for Shin Hweein’s sake.
That Shin Hweein had then tricked such a flame-hound into a perpetual shikigami contract was, perhaps, even more impressive of him.

‘And….’

The burning bird that kept a Rank-Two great yokai as its retainer. Just what manner of being was it?
Since that day, the volcanoes around the world had stayed vigorously active.
The news kept reporting, day after day, that the earth’s temperature was climbing at an unnaturally rapid rate.
The world’s awakened were joining forces against it, but at this rate it would be no surprise if the planet’s environment were overturned root and branch.

‘Four years at the least, was it. Perhaps I’ll have to seek him out myself before then… hm?’

Lost in such thoughts, he suddenly met his own eyes in the mirror.
For once the illusion was not tormenting him, and he was reflected purely as he was.
With the mirror alone before him, all sorts of thoughts of the past and of himself rose up, and that was why he had deliberately filled the time with talk, emptying his head.
It had done its work. At last, with no stray thought mixed in, he could face the glass purely.
His own face showed itself to him properly, without any distortion.

“…Ah.”

In that moment, all at once, a single tear ran from the eye of the self within the mirror.
This time it was no illusion. A tear was running from his own eye as well.

“Young master! Are you all right?! What’s wrong!”
“It’s nothing… nothing.”

Shin Hweein stopped Geum Moa, who had startled and was rushing toward him, raised a hand to wipe the tear away, and smiled.

“I caught sight of Mother inside me… that was all, and it startled me a little. Haha….”
“Her Ladyship, I see.”

Geum Moa took her seat with a bittersweet smile.
There was something almost indignant in her voice when she spoke.

“At last, young master, you can see your own face objectively.”
“And where would anything objective be found? There is only the subjective. Even so… yes, I really do take after Mother.”

It had not been a polite formula, after all.
Nor had it been words his mother offered only to soothe him.
Still less had it been something he muttered to console himself.
He simply took after his mother.
Once he understood that, no inflammation rose on his face in the mirror anymore; no scars surfaced; no blood ran; no corpse-like pallor came over it.
There was no inflicting petty fancies as wounds upon a face that took after his mother.

“I’d wondered what sort of monster I would turn out to look like, but I do look human after all.”

— This guy, there’s a limit even to talking nonsense. From the day I was born to this one, there’s never been anyone as handsome as y— mmpf!

Geum Moa silenced Flame-tail, who had finally run out of patience and been on the verge of crying something out.
Watching even that, Shin Hweein only gave a wry smile.

“I gather my face is not ill-favoured. Looking the very image of Mother, it could hardly be. That much I know. …But how does it serve as the face of a man?”
“Hmm.”

— Historically, the sorcerers who made names for themselves were often of an androgynous beauty, weren’t they. Looked at that way, isn’t it a good thing?

“Hoo. In the end, that’s another way of saying it isn’t a masculine face.”

There were limits to how much one ought to resemble one’s mother, and he took after his so excessively that one had to wonder where his father’s genes had gone.
Had he been born a woman, men would by now be lining up behind him. Shin Hweein was considering this in complete earnest.

But he was a man.
Being human too, he had some wish to be handsome; he had no wish to be pretty.
He opened his eyes wide and searched desperately for any trace of his father. Yes, the eyes themselves and the sharp set of the lids, at least those he might have inherited.

“No, you do resemble that man a fair amount. The both of them are basically of a beautiful type.”

— It’s all right, you’re plenty manly. Once you put on a little more muscle, you’ll be perfect, I think.

“Ah.”

At Flame-tail’s words, Shin Hweein finally understood.
So that was why, when he had been working out with Yun Juna, Flame-tail had urged him on rather than holding him back.
He had noticed Shin Hweein was short on manliness and was trying, even a little, to build the masculinity up!

“Right, understood. From now on I’ll work out a bit harder. The face I cannot fix, nor do I wish to, so at the least I’ll make the body the body of a man.”

— Excellent!

“This perverted mutt….”

Yet even Geum Moa, scolding Flame-tail, raised no objection to his working out as such.
Shin Hweein got the sense that he had come to understand, just a little, what the two of them found to their liking.

“Hey, you lot, there’s a guest outsi— ah.”

At that, Sister Barbara, who had flung the door open without so much as a knock and marched in, met the eyes of the Shin Hweein in the mirror.
She turned on her heel and walked straight back out without a word.
She looked as though she had been put under some sorcery.

“…?”
“Shin Hae, Uncle Jinseong is callin—.”

Ham Seoyeon had come in to take her place, and she too met the eyes of the Shin Hweein in the mirror, then turned her gaze and confirmed Father Lucas facing his own mirror on the opposite side, and tilted her head.

“Is some sort of sorcerous rite in progress?”
“It’s just ended.”

Shin Hweein set the mirror back into the subspace storage and rose, took up the mask that had been left on the table, settled it over his face, and gathered his shikigami in.
Flame-tail bounded into his arms first, Neuldam slipped sleek into his hair, and Arong scattered into mist and wreathed himself around him. Ham Seoyeon wore the expression of someone watching a piece of stage-magic.

“Are shikigami-sorcerers all like this?”
“At least the sorcerers of the Shin House are.”
“Myungin isn’t, though.”

Shin Hweein snorted at that.

“That child is not yet a shikigami-sorcerer. Moa, I’ll be off.”
“Yes. I’ll come along at my own pace.”

At her words, Shin Hweein and Ham Seoyeon turned to her at the same time.

“Surely you don’t mean to follow us all the way into the palace?”
“Don’t. If we’re caught it’ll be an absolute uproar. And on top of that, don’t you know the Royal House’s power? They negate every goeryeok-nansin!”

Geum Moa let out a small laugh, pfft, and set her teacup down.

“Do you really think they can negate ‘every goeryeok-nansin’?”

Faced with Geum Moa’s bewitching smile, Ham Seoyeon was, for a moment, at a loss for words.

“You must know, surely. If they could truly negate anything at all, they’d have no reason to permit the Eight Pure-Blood Houses to exist. They wouldn’t carve up power so needlessly; they’d have monopolized the lot. They could have removed the Specter Realm Gates entirely as well. The fact that they don’t means they cannot.”
“That’s… well, of course everything has its limits.”
“I exist beyond their limits.”

Geum Moa pronounced it with finality.
It sounded rather impressive, the way she put it, but parsed out in the end, what it amounted to was that with that grand ability of hers she meant to slink along after Shin Hweein in secret.

“And… young master, you’ll know it too, won’t you. That the Shin House is the same as me. The privileges granted to them are the proof.”
“…Yes.”

Shin Hweein considered, for a moment, what the words flung at him were meant to convey, then recalled what the privileges were and inclined his head.

“I remember Mother told me of it, once.”
“What story? And what privileges?”
“Nothing very grand. When the time comes for you to be received in audience by the King, you will know.”

Finding it a little embarrassing to put it into words himself, Shin Hweein brushed her off.
Ham Seoyeon protested that he was being unfair and demanded he tell her, but it was something she would soon be able to confirm with her own eyes.
For they were about to set out for the palace and meet the King.