Unknown
It was hard to tell whether my eyelids were open or not.
My whole body felt as heavy as if it were pinned beneath a slab of iron. Even breathing was an effort, and my throat burned as though sand had dried and caked inside it.
My head throbbed as if being pierced through, my hands and feet were numb with pins and needles, and a persistent ringing filled my ears.
This feeling…… it's exactly like my original body. Like the days I went without painkillers.
Gathering every ounce of strength I had, I managed to lift my eyelids. A ceiling I knew all too well swam into my blurry vision.
My bedroom in Sangra Palace…….
As I blinked slowly, my sight sharpened a little more. And then, from beside me, a familiar voice reached my ears.
"Huiyo!"
Mother.
My lips moved, but no words came out.
A soft hand slid beneath my back and propped me up at an angle, and then a spoonful of medicinal decoction touched my lips.
Painkillers. The same kind I always take.
I swallowed what flowed into my mouth, and another spoonful was immediately at my lips. The taste filling my mouth was bitter beyond bearing, but I forced myself to endure it — once the medicine took effect, my senses would dull soon enough anyway.
And so I drained the entire bowl of decoction that way.
I was sucking on a piece of candy to cleanse my palate when the crushing pain that had dominated my whole body finally began to ease.
A familiar sensation.
So I really have returned to my original body.
I wiggled my fingers a little, then turned my head. Beside the bed sat Mother, her long jade-green hair spilling down over her shoulders.
"Mother?"
"Ah…… Heavenly spirits above."
Mother murmured through her tear-streaked face, then reached out her arms and drew me into an embrace — so carefully, as if she were afraid of hurting me by holding on too tightly.
I embraced her back and closed my eyes for a long moment.
Mother's scent. Her warmth.
The anxiety and fear that had gripped me settled softly, like sediment sinking through still water.
Resting my forehead against her chest, I asked in a small voice, "What happened to me?"
"……Your father and I made a mistake. I was…… I was wrong."
Mother's voice trembled with suppressed tears.
Unlike Father, who turned into a crybaby the moment he looked at me, Mother almost never wept. Worried, I could do nothing but hold her tighter and move only my hand, patting her back in small, gentle strokes.
"It's all right, Mother. It's all right, so please don't cry."
"……Huiyo, what am I to do when it's you comforting me? It should be your mother — it should be me — who comforts and shields you."
Mother trembled finely, as if struggling to swallow down the emotions crashing over her. Then she held me tight one more time and pressed her forehead against mine.
"Huiyo."
"Yes?"
"Do you remember? Before you went down to the mortal realm, we promised we would keep trying every treatment we could think of."
"Yes, I remember."
It was the promise I'd made with my parents when they formally granted me leave to leave home and descend to the underworld.
Don't use divine power. Keep receiving treatment. Live like a human.
Mother asked, her eyes lowered, "And the attempt to seal your divine power again — do you remember that as well?"
"I remember. Wait — don't tell me……?"
"That 'don't tell me' is exactly right."
Mother let out a long, deep sigh before continuing.
"This time, we devised a new method — dividing your divine power into pieces and sealing each one. We tried it…… and the aftermath pushed you back to the edge of death again."
I could roughly piece together what had happened.
My body was in this state because I had been born carrying far too much divine power — and the only reason I had somehow survived in such a ruined body was because of that very same excess of divine power.
To save a dying me, the power had to be sealed — but the moment it was sealed, my already broken body would simply give out. An endless stalemate.
That was why my parents had abandoned divine power sealing as a treatment — until they decided to try it again, using my peculiar circumstance of inhabiting Seruhwa's body.
So Mother and Father attempted the sealing again in the celestial realm, and when it failed, the me down in the mortal realm nearly died once more.
Once I understood the reason, the thing that worried me most at once was me — as Seruhwa.
"Th-then what about my human body? Please tell me that body didn't die. Kellugh, kellugh!"
Raising my voice felt like tearing my throat apart. The moment I coughed, Mother hurriedly pressed a handkerchief to my mouth. It was soaked red in an instant.
"Don't speak so loudly. Your body is far too weakened right now……"
While holding the handkerchief to my lips and rubbing my back, Mother glanced over her shoulder. A tall, golden-haired woman who had been waiting quietly in attendance came forward carrying a tray with tea.
Geum-ryeong. It's been a while.
Geum-ryeong — the golden-feathered phoenix who served Mother as her mistress, and Ansi's mother.
She handed the teacup to Mother and withdrew, then settled herself to one side and began to sing in a low, gentle voice.
The Phoenix Song — the singing of the phoenix that cleansed corruption, stilled troubled hearts, and aided the healing of the body.
It had no true lyrics at all, only a sound like a bird calling softly from deep within the trees, flowing onward like a song. As I drank the tea Mother fed me and listened to that melody, my throat genuinely began to feel better.
Mother set aside the blood-soaked handkerchief and drew out a fresh one, then spoke in a voice that was clear, though deliberately quiet.
"The human body you were using is in a coma, but it lives on safely. So do not worry."
What a relief. My body didn't die.
A coma was hardly good news, of course — but in this situation, that much truly was a mercy.
Everyone in the mortal realm must be worried sick, too.
Come to think of it, the fact that Mother was speaking more softly than usual meant my hearing must be in bad shape as well.
……Was there any part of this body that wasn't broken anymore?
"Your father had Gangrim Doryeong hold fast to the Lifespan Cord connecting you to Seruhwa's body, so there will be no trouble returning to the mortal realm."
Having reassured me once more, Mother fell silent for a moment.
I spoke slowly, in a tiny voice. "The sealing of my divine power…… it failed this time too, didn't it?"
It must have failed — that was why I had nearly died again. An obvious thing to ask, and yet I threw it out just to be sure.
But astonishingly, Mother shook her head.
"No. It succeeded. For the very first time."
"What? How? If it succeeded, then why did I die of— kellugh! Kellugh!"
"Good heavens, Huiyo!"
My shock had made me raise my voice again. Perhaps because it was the second time, the coughing didn't stop until I had soaked two handkerchiefs through with blood.
Mother let out a long, weary sigh.
"You are so weak right now that I meant to let you rest and explain the details later…… but you insist on hearing it now, don't you?"
"Yes."
Even at my small answer, Mother hesitated for a moment. Unable to say anything more, I simply tugged, ever so slightly, at her sleeve.
Mother looked down at my hand gripping her sleeve, her expression turning sorrowful, and at last she opened her mouth.
"The divine physicians who have been studying your condition proposed a method of separating your divine power into seven parts and sealing each one."
"But my divine power — it can't be separated in the first place, can it?"
"It could not. Until now. But with this new method — the Straw God Plan — we finally glimpsed a way it might be done."
The Straw God Plan.
Listening as Mother's explanation continued, I came to more or less understand what kind of method it was.
Divine power, by its nature, is an authority that belongs to its god. Every divine power has its own character, a nature suited to the domain that god governs.
That is why it is extraordinarily difficult for one god to wield another god's divine power as if it were their own.
At most, you might manage it — barely — if you were a god of lower rank, one governing some narrower concept or smaller domain.
For instance…… the bonds between men and women, governed by Cheongsil and Hongsil, are a subcategory of the destiny governed by Gameunjang. That's the sort of hierarchy it follows.
And it was this very principle that had made dividing my divine power into pieces impossible.
My divine power is the power of Princess Cheonmyeong, Sangra Huiyo.
A divine power of staggering rank, born of the union of the Jade Emperor and King Yama.
Even my mother and father cannot claim perfect superiority over my power — for within it lie attributes of each of them that stand in direct opposition to the other.
Worse still, as a god I govern no domain of my own, so my divine power's character was never properly defined. That meant there was no concept whose scope I governed — no purchase by which anyone could claim precedence over it.
Because no one can stand above my divine power, no one can take it from me.
My parents were the only ones who could manage even a little — and even then, only when my power was overflowing wildly beyond my control, they said.
If it cannot be taken, it cannot be divided. And what about dividing it myself, you ask?
I can't even use my own divine power properly — how am I supposed to split it apart?
Merely possessing it is more than my body can bear; that excess is killing me. There was no way I could divide it at will. If that were possible, I would never have been this sick to begin with.
And yet, in this impossible situation, the celestial physicians had arrived at a wholly new idea.
The root of every one of these problems is that the divine power belonging to a single god — Princess Cheonmyeong, Sangra Huiyo — is far too vast.
Then what if we were to classify the divine power of Princess Cheonmyeong, Sangra Huiyo, and force it into subcategories — and bring new lesser gods into being to govern those concepts, so that the power could be divided among them?
Just as the supreme deity the Jade Emperor, god of Heaven, of yang, and of principle, has beneath her countless gods of destiny, fate, weather, nature, the seasons, agriculture, and more.
Just as the supreme deity King Yama, god of the Underworld, of yin, and of qi, has beneath her countless gods of punishment, sin, reincarnation, life, emotion, boundaries, and more.
The plan was to make Princess Cheonmyeong a supreme deity in her own right — to forge beneath her a host of subordinate gods, and in doing so, to divide my divine power at last.