The Great Shaman Duel [2]
A shaman.
One of Korea's most representative spiritual professions — the first thing that comes to most Koreans' minds when they hear the word "psychic."
But the image of the shaman that modern Koreans carry was actually formed fairly recently. Through the process of modernization, the shape of Korean shamanism underwent a dramatic transformation.
Traditionally, shamans were broadly divided into two categories: possessed shamans and hereditary shamans.
The possessed shaman is the kind most people know — a vessel who receives a god into their body and wields its divine power. The hereditary shaman, by contrast, served gods that dwelled not in their own flesh but in ritual objects: sacred shrines, ceremonial blades, guardian trees, village altars.
Because hereditary shamans served gods housed in physical, enduring objects, Korea once had what you'd only expect to find in Japanese media — entire families and villages that had served a single deity for generations upon generations.
The traditional division was possessed shamans in the north, hereditary shamans in the south, with the hereditary tradition holding the greater share of influence.
But the Japanese colonial period, the Korean War, and countless other historical upheavals shattered much of Korea's long-unbroken traditions and history — and the hereditary shamans were no exception.
The families and villages entrusted with housing a god's sacred vessel vanished or scattered in the chaos, and their numbers dwindled with terrifying speed. By the modern era, so few remained that "shaman" had come to mean the possessed variety by default.
One shaman grieved this loss deeply — and that shaman was Baek Gong-ju.
The young Baek Gong-ju lamented the slow forgetting of the gods who had watched over this land for countless ages. To keep them from fading away — or worse, mutating into anomalies — she traveled the length and breadth of the nation, gathering the sacred vessels that held forgotten gods.
She enshrined these vessels at potent geomantic sites across Seoul and provided for their offerings, until their number reached several dozen. The gods she had saved from oblivion, in gratitude, linked their own divinity into the land veins flowing beneath Seoul and promised to supply her, at all times, with the power drawn from them.
That is why Baek Gong-ju can draw on a nearly unlimited supply of spiritual energy while she stands within Seoul's bounds.
But the gifts of the gods she saved did not end there.
The materialization of each god's unique ability in the form of a ritual implement — that was the second power the gods granted her: Borrowed Spirit Shamanism.
Clack!
Baek Gong-ju spun a ceremonial blade between her fingers — the power of the Blade God, a deity usually served by possessed shamans but rarely by hereditary ones. Then she flicked her wrist, and a fan appeared in her hand. This, too, was one of the powers of the gods she had enshrined in Seoul.
Whoosh!
She swept the fan through the air, and a gale worthy of a typhoon swallowed Gong No-sa whole.
"Tch!"
Rather than resist the wind, Gong No-sa wove a hand seal. In that instant, the shadows spread wide behind his back knitted themselves into a net, catching him mid-flight.
Tap!
Halting in the net of shadow, Gong No-sa snapped his fingers.
Fwoosh!
Dozens of jiangshi rose from the shadows at once. Processed with metal and mercury-lead, they were far too heavy to be swept away even by the typhoon-force wind. And yet—
Krrrrrsh! WHOOOOM!
They were powerful enough to charge straight through the gale instead of against it. As the poison-laden jiangshi — carrying venom potent enough to kill with a single graze — hurtled toward her, Baek Gong-ju simply—
"You reek, you bastards!"
THUD!
She stomped her foot, the floor dissolved into sand once more, and Gong No-sa, the jiangshi, and Baek Gong-ju all dropped down yet another level.
"Damn you, you old hag! I'll cut off those noisy ankles of yours!"
Gong No-sa dove into the shadows — and moments later burst out of Baek Gong-ju's own shadow, a perfect strike at her blind spot. Or so he believed.
"Oop! Scaring an old lady — you think that's clever?"
BOOM!
Her foot hit the ground faster than he could emerge. The floor dissolved into sand again, and the shadow, robbed of any surface to cling to, floated loose and lost its form. As it scattered, Baek Gong-ju's blade struck once more.
KWAAAAAAAANG!
A hair before the shadow was torn apart, Gong No-sa wrenched himself free and escaped. From then on, his shadows and jiangshi clashed against Baek Gong-ju's endless arsenal of ritual implements, and the battle only grew fiercer.
And in that fierce struggle, it was Baek Gong-ju who held the advantage. The fifty Shidokshi had long since rotted into lumps of poisoned meat, and Gong No-sa himself bore wounds large and small.
Yet even as he was pushed back, Gong No-sa was certain of his victory.
Her energy efficiency is poor.
Baek Gong-ju's Borrowed Spirit Shamanism was a formidable art, letting her borrow the powers of every god she'd enshrined in Seoul at will. But because she was wielding abilities that belonged to gods other than her own patrons, the conversion efficiency was dreadful. Within Seoul's bounds, the unlimited supply made it a non-issue — anywhere else, it was a fatal weakness.
Gong No-sa, by contrast, was conserving his energy and stamina by relying solely on his efficient Ghost Shadow Dark Curse Arts and his jiangshi. Right now Baek Gong-ju looked dominant — but the longer the fight dragged on, the more the odds favored him.
"Crush!"
Then a stone Baek Gong-ju hurled swelled to the size of a house in an instant and came crashing down on Gong No-sa's head.
"Are you insane—!"
He slipped into his shadow and dodged the boulder by a hair.
CRASH!
The house-sized brown rock obliterated the spot where he'd been standing. It was so heavy that the floor of Cosmos Tower — built with the latest engineering — caved in within a second. Had he dawdled even slightly, he'd have been flattened alongside it. The boulder kept punching straight down through the floors below.
Gong No-sa felt a chill at the sight — and then, perversely, he laughed.
"Running low, are we? Well, I suppose spamming techniques that big would wear anyone out. Heh heh heh."
Baek Gong-ju's storm-like offensive had indeed slackened.
"Does it look that way?"
"It certainly does."
Gong No-sa laughed, certain he'd seized the upper hand — and Baek Gong-ju laughed too. At the sight of it, a flicker of puzzlement crossed Gong No-sa's mind. And then, belatedly, he noticed something.
That throughout the entire fight, she had been smashing through the floor with almost unnatural enthusiasm.
Wait. Is she trying to descend two hundred meters below ground while fighting me? No, that's impossible — she's dropped a few floors, sure, but getting within two hundred meters would mean going down at least twenty more! Then why—?
A single question flashed through Gong No-sa's mind.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
The boulder was still falling — still punching through floor after floor, long after it had left its wielder far behind.
Don't tell me—!
"That's not a boulder, it's—!"
"Heh heh heh. Quick on the uptake."
FWAAAAAAAH!
From the boulder — no, from the seed — a tree erupted with staggering force. Having descended to around the sixtieth floor, within two hundred meters of the surface, the seed devoured the unlimited spiritual energy the gods supplied and grew at a monstrous pace. The divine tree stretched its branches all the way up to where Gong No-sa and Baek Gong-ju stood.
"You're kidding me!"
The tree was, in essence, a pipeline. A conduit connecting the spiritual energy drawn from Seoul's land veins directly to Baek Gong-ju. The proof was plain: her badly depleted energy was refilling at breathtaking speed.
Gong No-sa sprinted toward the divine tree.
"You dare turn your back before me?!"
Baek Gong-ju aimed for his completely exposed back. But that, too, was exactly what Gong No-sa wanted. The moment Baek Gong-ju regained her unlimited supply, a prolonged battle became unwinnable — so he was throwing his die.
From within his shadow emerged a black, sinister golden cord — and a crimson spear wrapped in talismans.
The Fire-Tipped Spear. A dharmic treasure of the mythic age, the very weapon that had repelled the Great Demon Saire.
Because the old man Gong had never been acknowledged as its master, he had never been able to keep the spear within his shadow. But after nearly losing it to Kim Yi-yeon, he had soaked it in malice and forced dominion over it through every binding art he knew. With a method like that, formal recognition as its true master was forever out of reach, but—
Still better than doing nothing and getting it stolen like a cripple!
Every fiber of him wanted to kill that bastard Kim Yi-yeon — but if he approached to try, the Fire-Tipped Spear might break its bindings and fly back to the man. So he held himself back.
FWOORORORORO!
As if this had been his goal all along, Gong No-sa gripped the spear and pivoted smoothly into position. The moment his hand closed around it, his arm began to char bit by bit in dark-crimson flame — but that much was an acceptable price.
"How impatient of you."
He leveled the spearhead at the space between Baek Gong-ju's brows and smiled.
No—!
Baek Gong-ju had known of the Fire-Tipped Spear since wrapping up the Seonhwa High incident. But she had known Kim Yi-yeon was its acknowledged master, so it had never once occurred to her that Gong No-sa might wield it. Sacred implements like that, once they chose a master, would never choose another for as long as that master lived — nay, for centuries even after death.
"How could you commit such sacrilege against a sacred implement—!"
"Tools exist for people's sake, not people for tools'!"
The instant Gong No-sa flaunted his brutal pragmatism and thrust the spear forward—
VRMMMMM!
"What—!?"
The Fire-Tipped Spear abruptly wrenched off course and flew toward the window. Naturally, Gong No-sa — still gripping it — went flying right along with it.
"Wh-what the— don't tell me!?"
In that instant, he understood exactly what had happened.
"That goddamn thieving bastard!!!"
At the same moment, Baek Gong-ju moved. She dissolved the Borrowed Spirit Shamanism she'd summoned for defense and prepared her trump card — the borrowed spirit art meant to end this. Gong No-sa, for his part, was burning through his hoarded energy in fistfuls, desperately trying to bind the spear that sought to return to its master. Defense was impossible. Baek Gong-ju's killing blow was about to land—
"That will be quite enough."
A massive wall of steel rose between the two of them.
"Alchemy…"
Baek Gong-ju clicked her tongue inwardly and turned toward the second Special-Grade.
"Duke Alchemis… So the Rosicrucians have become Cosmos's lapdogs too?"
The composed German man gave a slight bow of his head.
"'Lapdogs' seems rather excessive."
"If it weren't true, you'd have no reason to show up now, would you?"
While Baek Gong-ju feigned calm, she was silently clicking her tongue. No matter how much the terrain favored her here, a two-on-one against Special-Grades was lunacy. As she racked her brain for a way out of this—
Ding.
An elevator arrived at the ninety-third floor where the three stood.
Tap. Tap.
Men in black suits stepped out first and arranged themselves in formation. Down the aisle they formed walked a man in his late thirties — a young man impossible to square with the image of a mega-corporation's chairman. Without a word, he passed between the black suits and stopped before the three of them.
"Jung Tae-min…!"
Baek Gong-ju spoke his name. It was a voice laced with spiritual energy — the kind that would make an ordinary person's whole body shudder and their bladder give out just from hearing it.
But Jung Tae-min—
"Your business."
—asked, simply and flatly.
"…I've come to hold you accountable for Baekmuleo. Do I need to say more?"
"I merely replaced outdated equipment at a recently acquired subsidiary."
"…And you call that an answer? Baekmuleo is a mid-to-upper Regional-grade anomaly at best — and it spread that widely because of Cosmos's involve—!"
"The Masquerade Alliance's verification is already complete."
"…!?"
"See for yourself, if you wish."
Baek Gong-ju silently called the Paranormal Administration Bureau. Ignoring her subordinates — who were begging her to tell them what was happening and to please get out of there — she asked a single question: whether Jung Tae-min's claim was true. And the answer that came back—
"…Understood."
"That should be sufficient, shouldn't it?"
Alchemis asked.
"The Masquerade Alliance has officially certified that there is no connection whatsoever between this Baekmuleo incident and the equipment Cosmos provided."
"…And you expect me to believe that?"
"The results speak for themselves. What more do you need?"
And indeed, the results did. The verification had confirmed that the broadcast equipment Cosmos replaced was nothing more than state-of-the-art technology, the finest of its kind — with nothing supernatural about it at all.
"……"
For Baek Gong-ju, it was an intolerable position. The grounds and justification for this entire raid had evaporated in an instant.
"We'll leave the debt on the books."
And so she had no rebuttal to offer. It was a complete, humiliating defeat.
At her back, Gong No-sa — still wrestling with the Fire-Tipped Spear — sneered.
"You crazy old hag! Only now figuring out you took your frustrations out on the wrong target, huh!? Stop wasting your tantrums on an honest company and go babysit some other Special-Grade properly! That cult in Gangwon-do that's been all over the news lately — human trafficking, organ harvesting, the whole circus? Turns out they're a Jeong-myung-gyo splinter group! You knew about that, didn't you?"
Even under his taunts, Baek Gong-ju could only maintain the silence of the defeated. Without a word, she brushed past Jung Tae-min and boarded the elevator.
Just before the doors closed—
"If hell descends upon this world — will you close your eyes, or open them?"
Jung Tae-min turned to her and asked.
"I will open my eyes."
The doors shut, and the elevator began its descent.
Alone in the car, Baek Gong-ju exhaled a long sigh and cursed her own blunder. After today, Cosmos — an organization the government already struggled to control — would become more untouchable than ever. And it was her own mistake that had done it.
I was played completely.
Cosmos, silent all this time, had timed its verification to the precise moment she launched her assault. Which meant this had been bait from the very beginning. She had no idea where their planning had started. MBB was under Cosmos's umbrella — so perhaps even the plot by the so-called [Psychic Research Society] that spawned Baekmuleo had been part of their design. No — deliberately causing an anomaly was stretching into wild speculation. What if there had been some other purpose entirely, and this was a lucky coincidence? Or then again, what if…
She couldn't grasp where their scheme began or where it ended.
"Hoo…"
Baek Gong-ju sighed. It was a burden far too heavy for one dying old woman to carry. And yet — even so, there was hope.
That presence when the Fire-Tipped Spear answered its call… was it that boy, after all?
Kim Yi-yeon. A strange one, that boy. A prodigious young talent of unknown origin — no one knew where he came from or who raised him. Kang In-hyuk suspected he was an Esoteric Buddhist master, but honestly? His techniques and spiritual energy leaned far more strongly toward the Daoist. So many mysteries wrapped around him — and yet Baek Gong-ju felt no particular wariness toward him.
Because Kim Yi-yeon had been chosen as the master of a sacred implement: the Fire-Tipped Spear.
Sacred implements were extraordinarily picky about their masters. Especially one like the Fire-Tipped Spear, brimming with yang energy — it would inevitably demand a magnanimous, upright soul to match that radiance.
Then a memory surfaced in Baek Gong-ju's mind — her son Yoon Chang-sik's words.
Not one sent down from heaven, but one who rose from the earth… Don't tell me that boy is…
Lost in thoughts of Kim Yi-yeon, something else suddenly occurred to her — the mysterious exorcism rookie, Kim Ji-woo, who had saved Yoon Soo-ah and defeated the Corner Man. The talisman Kim Ji-woo had used had carried that same Daoist flavor.
"No way…"
No — impossible. Even for a genius, it had barely been a month. A kid who could barely scratch out a single talisman a month ago, growing to Kim Yi-yeon's level now? Absurd.
But if — if — it were possible…
"One year. No… in six months, he'd reach the Special-Grade realm."
At the sheer absurdity of her own words, Baek Gong-ju snorted out a laugh. It was a daydream not even worth remembering, and she promptly scrubbed the whole line of reasoning from her mind.
Meanwhile, at a café near Cosmos Tower.
"Tch… he's not coming. And here I thought he might."
After hearing Yoon Soo-ah's call, I'd come straight to the Cosmos complex. I had exactly one goal in mind.
'A Special-Grade psychic is raising hell at Korea's number-one corporation and you expect me NOT to check it out? Genuinely curious here — asking for a friend?'
I'd been curious about what a Special-Grade was actually capable of, so the timing was perfect. Of course, I hadn't gone storming into headquarters like a lunatic — I just felt out the energy from a café far away. And even that alone was enough to grasp how absurd a Special-Grade truly was.
'So THAT'S why they kept the alphabet ranks aside and made a separate category…'
In terms of the letter-rank system, a Special-Grade wasn't an A or an S. It was EX. A completely different class of existence entirely. And three of those monsters were inside Cosmos Tower right now. It was nothing short of a demon-sealing vault — a fortress of fiends. A world several tiers above anything I could touch right now.
'Could I manage it if I showed up with the Fire-Tipped Spear?'
Not in my normal state — but with the blue flame state I used against Saire, it might be worth a shot. And with that thought, I burst out laughing.
It was the kind of laugh a hiker who'd only ever climbed Korea's famous peaks lets out the first time he truly grasps that the Himalayas exist. I'd thought I was upper-tier among psychics — but above the top, there was yet another top. And the fact that there was still further for me to climb — that fact alone had me so delighted, so giddy, I could hardly stand it.
Ah — of course, my top priority is still self-preservation. Charging at strong opponents screaming "I crave battle with the strong!" like some monkey-eared alien is not my style. Never has been.
Just then, my phone rang.
"Yi-yeon oppa, are you done with your errand?"
It was Yu Min-seo.
"Yeah, I'll head over soon. Just wait a little."
Today was a special day. For good reason — it was the day of Yu Min-seo's first summoning magic lesson. And, at the same time…
"Hmph. I wonder if this is actually going to work."
…it was also the day I, Yu Min-seo's summoning magic teacher, would cast summoning magic for the very first time in my life.
……Yes, that sentence sounds strange. Ignore it. It's all in your head.