Introduction to Alchemy
"Baby! Thank goodness you're safe! Thank goodness!"
The one who greeted us when we returned to the mart was Choi Eun-ha's mother, her face a complete mess of tears.
"M-Mom! You're embarrassing me in front of people...!"
Choi Eun-ha tried to wriggle free, embarrassed by the spectacle we were all watching, but her mother wasn't having it.
"Oh come on, you were only gone for a little while. Why are you crying like this? I'm an adult too now, you know."
Soon enough, Eun-ha was hugging her mother and patting her on the back.
After that, we decided to call it a day.
I did wonder about the Count of St. Germain, and whether it was really okay to just send Choi Eun-ha home like this. But given how he'd bothered to use Lostco of all things—a method that troublesome—it was highly likely he couldn't move about freely in the real world.
If anything, the odds were higher that I was the one in danger, simply because those Jeong-myung-gyo bastards had made it out alive.
"Ugh, what a garbage day."
Even so, the reason I could sprawl out at ease on my one-room studio's bed the moment I got home was because I trusted Aegis.
'Aegis [Αἰγίς]'
The impregnable divine shield said to have been wielded by Athena in Greek mythology.
"That damn Gong No-sa, that mutt of an old man..."
Once I'd heard the full story from the Chairman, it finally clicked for me.
The curse Gong No-sa had laid on me.
Just as the Chairman said, it wasn't a powerful curse.
But weak or not, a curse is a curse.
It scattered a person's focus, starved them of attention, and gradually clouded their judgment—until in the end, it made them a self-control-less violent lunatic. A genuinely nasty, low-grade piece of work.
Granted, my Daoist spiritual power had resisted it unconsciously, so the effect had been negligible. But negligible doesn't mean nonexistent.
"When did this thing even get on me?"
Because if it had been on me before the week of training in the True Immortal Fire-Regulation Method, then I'd been grinding away at that leveling grind with a stat debuff on the whole time, hadn't I?
Thinking about it now, I was seriously pissed off.
I could take a guess as to why Gong No-sa had chosen this particular curse.
"Was he trying to drag me down into someone so pathetic that even the Fire-Tipped Spear would abandon me?"
That conniving, snake-bellied old schemer...
Every fiber of my being wanted to march straight to Gong No-sa right now and turn that cane of his sideways, but I decided to hold back.
Because if I went now, I'd be the one getting skinned.
Cosmos, Jeong-myung-gyo, Gong No-sa, the Count of St. Germain—every last one of them was, for the moment, beyond my ability to touch.
But...
"Give me time, and I'll beat every single one of them."
That wasn't a hope. It was a settled future.
And Aegis was going to buy me that time.
"So how exactly is a shield supposed to buy me time, anyway?"
The Chairman had clearly said it twisted cause and effect... but what did that actually mean in practice?
Maybe the bastards trying to devour me would suddenly come down with amnesia—'Kim Yi-yeon? Now who was that kid again...?'
Gong No-sa, who'd already planted his curse. Cosmos, who'd traded the Fire-Tipped Spear as a condition to buy time. The Count of St. Germain, who seemed constrained in how he could act in the real world.
Fine. Those three at least had their justifications, so I could imagine ways they'd get stalled.
But Jeong-myung-gyo? Those bastards were practically frothing at the mouth to eat me alive right now. How was a shield supposed to buy me time from them?
"Now I'm curious..."
A tower palace in Hannam-dong, Yongsan-gu, Seoul.
On the surface, nothing but sheer luxury—but this tower palace was in fact the Seoul branch of Jeong-myung-gyo.
Branch or not, aside from the main temple where the cult leader resided, it was the largest facility in the country, serving as the head of four hundred thousand Jeong-myung-gyo believers.
Recent anomalies breaking out left and right had the public terrified, and the cult's numbers were swelling by the day. Which meant the Seoul branch—effectively the brain of Jeong-myung-gyo—was running at full tilt even in the dead of night.
Making people work at this hour? You expect a pseudo-cult to care about labor law?
"Damn it...!"
And the quarters where Jeong-myo, barely alive after crawling out of Lostco, was recuperating—was this very Seoul branch.
Jeong-myo stared down at his own hand, half its fingers gone.
The scar left behind by his fight with the Manager. The flesh hadn't been cut or crushed; it had been digested, and even the cult leader's grace had failed to regenerate it properly.
"Kim Do-sa...!"
Jeong-myo's mind conjured the hateful image of Kim Do-sa.
It had been Kim Do-sa the Manager was hunting all along. But Kim Do-sa had used sorcery to overwrite Jeong-myo's appearance with his own—and his own with Jeong-myo's—throwing Jeong-myo out as bait and fleeing.
'If it weren't for that man... I could have presented the Philosopher's Stone to the cult leader...!'
Jeong-myo had no idea why the cult leader wanted the Philosopher's Stone.
But in Jeong-myung-gyo, the cult leader's will was absolute.
If the leader said laugh, they laughed; if he said weep, they wept; if he said die, they died—and if he ordered them to kill their own family and kin, they would do it with a smile on their faces.
That was Jeong-myung-gyo. That was the duty of a Daoist Master.
And then—
"...!? The Inner Space!? Why is this place—!?"
The Jeong-myung-gyo Seoul branch building was swallowed whole into an anomaly domain.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
Boom! CRASH!
An instant later, the thunder of gunfire and explosives began erupting from every corner of the branch.
"Wh-what in the—!?"
KRA-KOOOOM!
Before he could even finish the sentence, the outer wall of the room where Jeong-myo lay burst apart in an explosion.
Simultaneously, rappelling down through the breach and storming inside—a Cosmos private military unit.
"Y-you bastards, do you have any idea where you are—!"
He still had no idea what was happening. But he was a Daoist Master of Jeong-myung-gyo, and it was his duty to defend this Seoul branch from external invasion.
Jeong-myo bludgeoned the charging Cosmos operators to death with the power of his anomaly, the Jade Rabbit's pestle.
But the ones who'd crashed into his room were only a sliver of the strike force now assaulting the Seoul branch.
Several hundred of Cosmos's elite operators, armed with equipment purpose-built for fighting psychics, struck the Jeong-myung-gyo Seoul branch simultaneously from every direction.
The raid inflicted damage on Jeong-myung-gyo unlike anything since the cult's founding.
The lower-ranked Daoist Masters—including Jeong-sul and Jeong-hae, who'd barely made it back from Lostco—were all but annihilated, and even the high-ranked masters were critically wounded.
Had the Dharma Protectors not arrived too late, every last soul in the Seoul branch would have been wiped out.
What was even grimmer: the Seoul branch was not the only target of the assault.
Busan. Daegu. Incheon. Gwangju. Daejeon. All the way to Ulsan.
The reason Cosmos had suddenly launched its offensive was simple.
To seize the Philosopher's Stone by force.
And it hinged on a hidden rule of Lostco that only Cosmos had uncovered.
Whenever one of the flyer's slashed-price items was sold, Lostco would end its business—regardless of closing time—and expel every customer from the store.
This hidden rule was insurance the Count of St. Germain had put in place to prevent theft. He was, after all, bound by his employee status within Lostco, unable to engage in direct combat should the Stone be secured by someone else.
And Cosmos had assumed the sudden, pre-closing expulsion was caused by exactly that rule.
Through a spy planted in the Paranormal Administration Bureau, they had already confirmed that the Bureau had not acquired the Philosopher's Stone.
And through the same spy, they'd confirmed that the civilian group—[Kim Yi-yeon and company]—had entered Lostco for the purpose of rescuing Choi Eun-ha.
Of course, all of it was a misunderstanding.
And from that misunderstanding, an all-out war between Cosmos and Jeong-myung-gyo had begun.
With both organizations locked in open conflict, neither had a shred of spare attention to spare for Kim Yi-yeon—and so, naturally, their interest in him could only wither.
Whether all of this was a preordained harmony—or whether it was Aegis twisting cause and effect—no one on earth could say.
The next day, I visited Choi Eun-ha's house for the first time.
"I'm sorry about how pathetic I looked yesterday."
"Pathetic? There was nothing pathetic about it. Honestly, I was kind of jealous you've got a mother who cares that much."
"Ugh, Yi-yeon, aren't you laying it on a little thick?"
"It's not flattery, you brat. You should be thanking your lucky stars."
"Lucky stars, my foot."
"Look at her sulking for no reason. She's been fussing over her hair since this morning because Yi-yeon was coming over..."
"AAAAAAAAHH! MOM!"
"Sorry, sorry, you told me not to say it."
Eun-ha's mother flashed a mischievous grin, then tilted her head thoughtfully.
"Still, what happened yesterday is strange even thinking about it now. The internet cutting out at exactly the right moment like that..."
Eun-ha's brief disappearance yesterday had been papered over as a simple accident born of a pile of coincidences.
Eun-ha had been out shopping when a friend contacted her, and they'd happened to meet up on the spot. She'd texted her parents to let them know, but by sheer coincidence the internet had glitched at precisely the wrong moment, and the message never went through. And then, as luck would have it again, her phone battery died completely, so she couldn't receive calls either.
It was an incredibly flimsy excuse, obviously. But the two of them, relieved beyond words to have their daughter back, swallowed it without much suspicion.
Besides, there was no way to explain Lostco, the Count of St. Germain, or the Philosopher's Stone to ordinary civilians like Eun-ha's mother. It couldn't be helped.
'Although... is she really just an ordinary civilian?'
The reaction Eun-ha's mother had shown yesterday was far too extreme for an adult whose daughter had merely been out of contact for a few hours.
The way she looked... it was as if someone who knew something dreadful could happen to her daughter.
Part of the reason for today's visit was to check on exactly that.
Choi Eun-ha's house was in Seocho-gu.
It wasn't one of those airy Han River-view apartments celebrities lived in, but it was a considerably upscale complex, positioned so the river was actually visible from quite a few units.
I sat across from mother and daughter in the neatly kept living room, chatting for a while.
Not that the small talk was anything grand—just the usual stories from when we'd worked at the convenience store together.
"You little—no, you brat... you were watching me like that the whole time? You're one to talk—your work ethic was an absolute disaster, so naturally I figured you were the bad news!"
"Oh my, our Eun-ha had bad work habits?"
"Yes! The second something annoyed her she'd disappear to the break room for a smoke, and she'd bail to 'check inventory' right at peak hours! Her manager tried to fire her more times than I can count!"
"Really!? Eun-ha, how can you work like that!? And you said you quit smoking!"
"I-I did quit! I've definitely quit now!"
Having loosened the mood with some light small talk, I got down to business.
"Madam, I've come to return the rocket you lent me yesterday."
"Oh, I'd completely forgotten about that. And goodness, I made such a scene yesterday. How embarrassing."
"It's understandable—your only daughter suddenly stopped answering her phone. By the way, Madam... you called this rocket a talisman. Do you happen to know exactly what kind of talisman it is?"
Judging by how Nicolas Flamel, the Chairman of Lostco, had changed his entire demeanor the moment he laid eyes on it, this was no ordinary object.
My guess? A relic left behind by Paracelsus himself.
And if that were true, it meant the woman in front of me—Choi Eun-ha's mother, Claire von Hohenheim—was a descendant of Paracelsus.
Between that bloodline and her extreme reaction when Eun-ha vanished, the odds that she knew something were very high.
"Well... I inherited it from my grandfather, so I don't really know the details. Except..."
"Except?"
"The reason I made such a scene yesterday... honestly, it's because of a strange family will that's been passed down in our house."
A will? Whose?
"My family name is von Hohenheim, you see. I don't know how true it is, but they say one of our ancestors was an alchemist called Paracelsus. And there are words he left behind before he died."
"Would you be able to share them with me?"
"Well..."
For a moment, Eun-ha's mother glanced nervously at her daughter.
Just as I thought. That will had to be connected to the Philosopher's Stone—the one said to have been made from Eun-ha and her soul.
"What is it? What does it say? Now I'm curious too."
Eun-ha backed me up with impeccable timing, and finally her mother opened her mouth.
"Mm... first, let me say this upfront: it's just a strange old story that's been passed down through the family, so please don't take it too seriously..."
Eun-ha's mother gathered her breath for a moment, then recited the testament of Paracelsus.
"O my descendants, carry this tale down through the generations without end.
A day will come when, through one who carries my blood, my life's great work shall bear its fruit, somewhere, some day, in some age yet to come.
But I pray—may that day never, ever arrive.
For when that day comes, the child who inherits my final bloodline shall become a mirage and vanish from this world.
When that day dawns, all of you—hurry.
Before the end comes: hang yourself with rope. Cut your wrists with a dagger. Leap from the cliff.
Flee this world. Save yourself—from hell."
"......"
"......"
When the testament of Paracelsus ended, a peculiar silence settled over the living room of the upscale apartment.
"...Mm, what do I even do with this mood...? This is why I didn't want to tell you..."
Only Choi Eun-ha's mother sat there awkwardly rubbing her cheek.