A Resident of the Mad Moon
The blade had been creaking for a while, and at last it snapped. Yet the vampire’s condition was far worse. Bulletproof clothing or not, his whole body was shredded by gunfire, half his face caved in, a sword punched through his side so that his entrails hung free…. Even so, he charged at Se-gun, who lay weaponless on the floor. One more strike and he could take Se-gun’s head!
Crack!
In that instant a blast erupted from Se-gun’s left hand. Tough as any vampire might be, an open gut wound followed by a knuckle-blaster left his body in tatters. Se-gun kicked him away in the same motion and rose. He seized his own neck and twisted it once with a dry crack, as if nothing at all had happened….
“Guh—!”
“You the only one here?”
“…….”
“I asked if you were the only one.”
Se-gun flipped the ruined vampire over with his boot, but the creature was already dead. After facing nothing but powerful vampires for so long, he had almost forgotten that a weak one like this would drop after a few silver rounds. A face half blown away and a torso punched clean through—there was no way it could have held on. Se-gun opened the knuckle, chambered a fresh heavy-slug round, and locked it shut.
“Ah… ahhh!”
“Why so shocked? Isn’t this the sort of thing you wanted to see?”
Se-gun said it with a faint, crooked smile. In any case, the appearance of a vampire this weak suggested no real connection to a proper clan. And for some reason he felt no urge tonight to drain the blood. Whatever the circumstances, he had been forced to kill with his own hands a vampire who had been used and then locked away.
I’ve got enough money. It’ll be fine.
Thinking that, Se-gun lifted the Bloodstone Pendulum. It no longer reacted to anything nearby.
“Hmm. Cleanup’s done.”
He gathered the spent casings and looked toward the sanctuary. The service showed no sign of ending. If anything, the fervor inside was only climbing higher, a cross hanging above it all. If vampires truly trembled at the mere sight of a cross the way they did in the movies… there would not be a single one left in Seoul. But if what people truly wanted was not faith but miracles, then miracles were something far more readily found among vampires.
“W-wait! Just who the hell are you?”
Reporter Seong stepped into Se-gun’s path as he pocketed the casings and prepared to leave. Se-gun glanced at the man and gave a dry little laugh. There was no reason to tell a self-proclaimed journalist anything about himself. Even if the man tried to write an article, it would be suppressed or dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic. Still, there was no need to expose himself.
“Who knows. Let’s just say one of the Mad Moon’s residents.”
With those words Se-gun slipped away from the brightly lit sanctuary and vanished into the dark.
Vampires cannot live without human blood. That is why the very idea of hunting them may have begun to die the moment the concepts of blood donation and transfusion were born.
Paradigms are replaced by new ones; they never remain frozen in old custom. But that does not mean vampires are not evil. They are a secret society that has lived for ages, ruling and controlling the world from the shadows.
Individual hunters, however, care nothing for such grand propositions. What interests them is the immortality and wealth that vampire blood can bring. And also….
And also…?
Se-gun’s thoughts broke off there as he opened his eyes. He had only meant to sleep for a short while to kill time, and had dozed off instead.
“Ahhhhhh—”
He stretched hard, every joint popping. The Seoul sprawled out below Bukhansan was still choked with smog. Hazy streets where humans and vampires alike went about their lives. What did any of it amount to, really? Half-indifferent, Se-gun sat on the rock and unfolded the newspaper he had been using as a seat cushion.
Just as he had expected, PD Kang Seong-gyu was dead. His camera and the rest of his equipment had been found smashed; the body itself was never recovered. But the bloodstains on the wrecked camera made it clear he had not escaped unharmed—or so the paper reported.
And the Current Affairs Desk broadcast on D Church’s heresy controversy and the laying-on of hands had gone ahead exactly as planned. Even now, the report said, D Church congregants were massed in front of Station M in protest. Yet the healing power Pastor Park Jin-young had once displayed before his flock never returned. He was no doubt regretting that he had not kept a spare vampire on hand.
In response to the demonstrators the network aired a five-minute, half-hearted apology claiming it had merely fulfilled its duty as the press, and showed no further interest in dialogue. They had simply aired the program assembled from materials obtained by the newsroom’s current-affairs unit, and they were continuing an internal investigation into PD Kang’s disappearance. What did it matter to them if D Church—the party with primary responsibility, yet legally innocent—raised suspicions or not? They had merely announced the objective facts and left everything else to the viewers, a thoroughly irresponsible stance.
The church side was no better. The moment their congregation was branded heretical and the commercial-property purchase scandal hit the airwaves, they demanded an immediate apology from the network and filed suit the same day.
Across from those protesters stood the shopkeepers who had nearly lost their stores, staging daily demonstrations of their own. Church protesters and merchant protesters collided, and one chaos kept breeding another.
“Haaah.”
Se-gun stretched again and packed up. Overwork the body after taking Psychedelic Moon and full-body muscle pain was guaranteed. He had pushed himself climbing Bukhansan today as well; he had never intended to come up here at all.
“Tired in every damn way.”
He had far more pressing matters than this mess. There was the Jinma Jeong-ya and her protector Chang-hyun. According to the information Sarhyuk had posted on Finder, Chang-hyun had drunk of Jeong-ya’s blood. How much, Se-gun did not know—but enough, perhaps, to endure the sun. That naïve woman would have given generously without a thought for her own body. Se-gun sighed at the thought of Chang-hyun and Jeong-ah. And yet, hated as he was by vampires, he hummed a passage from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet as he made his way down the green slopes of Bukhansan.
You give but little when you give of your possessions.
It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
For what are your possessions but things you keep and guard for fear you may need them tomorrow?
And tomorrow, what shall tomorrow bring to the overprudent dog burying bones in the trackless sand as he follows the pilgrims to the holy city?
And what is fear of need but need itself?
Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, the thirst that is unquenchable?
There are those who give little of the much which they have—and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome.
And there are those who have little and give it all.
These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.
There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.
And there are those who give with pain, and that pain is their baptism.
And there are those who give and know not pain in giving, nor do they seek joy, nor give with mindfulness of virtue;
They give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space.
Through the hands of such as these God speaks, and from behind their eyes He smiles upon the earth.
It is well to give when asked, but it is better to give unasked, through understanding;
And to the open-handed the search for one who shall receive is joy greater than giving.
And is there aught you would withhold?
All you have shall some day be given;
Therefore give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors’.
You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.”
The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.
They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.
Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights is worthy of all else from you.
And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.
And what desert greater shall there be, than that which lies in the courage and the confidence, nay the charity, of receiving?
And who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you may see their worth naked and their pride unabashed?
See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and an instrument of giving.
For in truth it is life that gives unto life—while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness.
And you receivers—and you are all receivers—assume no weight of gratitude, lest you lay a yoke upon yourself and upon him who gives.
Rather rise together with the giver on his gifts as on wings;
For to be overmindful of your debt is to doubt his generosity who has the free-hearted earth for mother, and God for father.