The Tiger's Song [2]
My viewer count had blown past three hundred thousand.
Even accounting for how the [Suicide Train] exorcism had rocketed my name into the stratosphere and all the promotion I'd scattered far and wide, viewers multiplying like this overnight simply made no sense.
Is this a Demon Slayer stream?
The Che Guevara of psychics!
Glancing at a few of the messages, it looked like a fresh wave of foreign psychics had flooded in. Hadn't the Baekmuleeo incident turned me into some resistance icon among the psychic community — a veritable Che Guevara?
On top of that, my rising fame meant word had spread that I was the Demon Slayer, and the two together seemed to have produced this result. But even with overseas psychics pouring in, psychics themselves were a rarity to begin with — how many could there possibly be? They alone couldn't explain this colossal surge in viewers.
I briefly wondered if Cosmos had lent a hand, but there were no traces of that. Then something occurred to me.
Don't tell me it's the Narrative Coercion?
The Narrative Coercion I had tested out on a whim yesterday.
"You look a lot different in person than you do on stream, don't you?"
Just as the name implied, it was a Narrative Coercion that kept people from recognizing me whenever I wasn't broadcasting. And Narrative Coercions always came bundled with a proportionate risk.
Take the Corner Man, for instance. He carried the absurd narrative that if you turned around at the wrong moment in the alley you could never escape, he would take part of your face. In exchange, he bore a fatal risk of his own: the moment he fell from the wall, his very existence would unravel.
The Suicide Train was the same. Its narrative — that you could not leave unless you overcame your suicidal impulses — was paid for with the risk that the station where it stopped had to correspond to a real station in the world. That was exactly why, once we sealed the actual station and set a temporary pier as bait, it got dragged out into reality just like that.
Every Narrative Coercion, without exception, demands a matching risk. So what was the risk attached to "You look a lot different in person than you do on stream, don't you?"
Simple. In exchange for people failing to recognize me off-stream, my attention levels during a broadcast climbed by exactly that much.
...Wait, that's a total jackpot, isn't it?
The funny part was that this supposed risk did nothing but profit me. And the same principle applied to sorcery in general — only a fool honestly shoulders every risk that comes attached. Granted, this particular instance wasn't something I'd engineered on purpose.
I'd better be careful, though...
This time luck had turned the risk into pure return, but there was no guarantee that would keep happening.
From now on, whenever I draft a Narrative Coercion, I need to mind the risk properly too.
Well, either way, thanks to it I'd gathered even more Cognition and Gong Grade than planned, so it worked out in my favor. Having sorted through my thoughts at speed, I resumed the broadcast.
"Now then, let me first explain the urban legend I've come here today to exorcise: the Maneating Tiger of Bukhansan."
Do we really need the explanation?
fr, anyone who matters already knows this one?
You veteran gatekeepers, quit rushing people and just let them listen, plenty of new folks here.
fr stop forcing your insider trivia on everyone.
"Come on, come on, no fighting — just sit back and listen."
Oof, Kim Dosa's voice is melting my ears.
This is the first time a man's voice has ever made me flutter...
Awoo awoo Kim Dosa, will you accept my pure devotion?
"Haram, ban every single one of these people fishing for gay bait."
"Yes sir!"
After putting down a few of my more depraved viewers, I began the tale.
This story was submitted by viewer <EarGasm>.
Hello, Mr. Kim Dosa. I'm a high school student and devoted regular of your streams. When I heard you were taking submissions, I wanted to report a terrible incident I experienced on Bukhansan.
I have two very close friends I'll call A and B. I met them in college — A is a year younger than me, and B a year older. Age differences aside, all three of us loved hiking as a hobby, so we grew close fast. After graduating and getting swept up in jobs and everything else, we hadn't seen each other properly in years, so we decided to go hiking together — our shared hobby — to catch up.
And so, after finishing a happy climb with friends I hadn't seen in ages, on the way back down—
"Hey, I think that kid following behind us is lost. Shouldn't we find their parents or take them to a lost-child center?"
I tilted my head at A's words, because there was no one behind us at all. We'd lingered at the summit drinking makgeolli and only started down just before the sun set, so the mountain had gone dim and shadowed. In that situation, hearing my friend say that, I was suddenly, acutely terrified.
"Hey, is this some badly timed prank? Cut it out."
"No, I'm not pranking you. Can't you see? There's a kid back there growling — like it's imitating a tiger."
"Ah, for god's sake, enough! You scaredy-cat — what wind blew up your ass that you need to spook me?"
"What? Scaredy-cat? Hey, how can you talk to me like—"
A's words were so utterly certain that fear made me lash out, and from there things turned ugly — I ended up in a bitter fight with A.
After coming home from that fight, real life swallowed me up and I didn't contact A or B for several days. Honestly, real life was an excuse. A's story about seeing the child frightened me too much, and the fight weighed on my mind, so I avoided them on purpose.
Then a few days later, B called.
"Hey, A says the prank back then went way too far and wants to apologize. Says to meet up on Bukhansan today and patch things over? Makgeolli and snacks are on them."
By then my anger had cooled and I did want to make up with A — but I had no desire to set foot on Bukhansan again, so I refused. B tried to persuade me for a long while, but I kept saying no to the very end.
"ComeComeCome! Come to Bukhansan! Don't-wanna-makeup-makeup-makeup? Why-not-why-not-why-not???? I'm telling you to come, come-come-come-come!"
At that point B started acting bizarrely clingy and cloying, and finally flew into a rage. It was so strange that I dug in my heels all the harder and flatly refused.
I hung up the phone half by force, and a few weeks later came the news of B's death.
The place where B was found was Bukhansan. And the day B died was the very day B had begged me to meet there.
I asked A, whom I ran into at B's funeral. What on earth had happened? Why did B die?
But A's answer was completely unexpected.
"Why are you asking me that?"
I was dumbfounded and pressed the point.
"A, you're the one who suggested we meet again on Bukhansan! That's why B died!"
But A looked even more bewildered than I was.
"I never suggested anything like that?"
Chills ran straight down my spine. I pressed A again — was that really true? Had A really never contacted B?
A hesitated for a moment, then said this:
"I never made any such suggestion... but a few days before B died, I did get a call."
I demanded to know what kind of call. Then A, with a face drained by fear, asked me a question out of nowhere.
"...But did you really not see the kid following behind us that day?"
"I didn't see it! I didn't! Neither did B! You just saw it wrong!"
"No..."
"What?"
"You were the only one who didn't see it."
A confessed that during that call a few days before B's death, B had admitted to seeing something too.
"...You mean, like the kid you saw?"
"No... people."
"People?"
"Yeah. People dressed in old Joseon-era clothes, hiding behind thickets and boulders, watching us."
..........
I was terrified.
A, who saw the child. B, who saw the crowd of people from long ago. And me, who saw nothing at all. Why this difference?
After the funeral procession was done, I overheard B's relatives talking, and that was how I learned how B had died.
"His whole body was mangled like he'd been torn apart and eaten by a beast, they say?"
"Aigoo, that poor child... But how on earth did something like that happen?"
"Well, the police think he fell to his death and was then eaten by a wild boar..."
"There are boars on Bukhansan?"
"How would I know."
So B's funeral ended, and a few weeks passed. I tried to erase this mysterious, horrific incident from my memory as fast as I could. But I couldn't. Because to this day, the calls still come sometimes.
B's calls, begging me to meet on Bukhansan.
From B, who should be dead — over and over. Come meet me, I'm on Bukhansan, hurry up and come to me.
......One more thing I learned while looking into all this: the time B made that last call was 2:30 in the afternoon. But B was already dead by eleven that same morning, they say.
Then who made that call to me that day? Who's making these calls to me even now? And why is it that every time I answer one, I'm overcome by an unbearable urge to go to Bukhansan?
— Submitted by viewer <EarGasm>
That was the gist of the Maneating Tiger of Bukhansan legend. Afterward, someone gets lured to Bukhansan and comes to harm. The body is found in a horrifically mutilated state, as if torn apart by wild beasts. Then the person — already dead — places a phone call to a friend or family member. And whoever answers that call is seized by the compulsion to go to Bukhansan.
Piecing all of it together, the true identity of the Maneating Tiger of Bukhansan was...
It had been a while since I'd run into a yokai-type anomaly. Lately I'd been dealing almost exclusively with urban-legend types. No — strictly speaking, considering that Seirae was a demon and the fake Dragon King was some unidentifiable monster from the Outside, this might actually be my first true yokai anomaly.
This'll end easy.
Yokai-type anomalies carried no Narrative Coercion like the legend-types did, so I could simply overpower them and finish the exorcism by force. And right now I was a super psychic standing right on the threshold of Special-Grade — below Special, above First. The moment I laid eyes on that tiger yokai, it was a wrap.
"Alright, let's start with canvassing the area."
But I couldn't very well brute-force my way through all of Bukhansan hunting for a tiger yokai. For an efficient exorcism, information gathering came first.
I made my rounds through Uijeong-dong, hitting up the oldest shops I could find and asking about local tiger lore. The responses, though, were unexpectedly lukewarm.
"A tiger on Bukhansan? Hmm... I can't say I've ever heard such a story."
"I've lived in Uijeong-dong over twenty years, and honestly..."
Just as I was racking up nothing but dead ends, someone finally gave me a lead worth having.
"A tiger, hm? There's a shaman's house down that alley there — try going once. I don't know much myself, but I hear it's a place that serves some kind of tiger deity?"
"Thank you very much."
Kim Dosa VS a shaman — my chest is swelling.
Kim Dosa's about to feast~!
On my way to the shaman's house the villager had pointed me to, one thing had been nagging at me, and I finally put words to it.
"...Why are there so many people streaming in Uijeong-dong?"
"...Good question?"
Minseo, who had been trailing behind me with a slightly blank expression, tilted her head too. I'd already counted more than ten people broadcasting just while canvassing the neighborhood. Sure, streamers were a dime a dozen in Seoul these days, but this was too many. And what was weirder, every single one of them had seemed to vaguely recognize me. Some of them even drifted in close on purpose, as if trying to catch me on camera.
"That's because of you, Mr. Kim Dosa."
"Me?"
I pointed at myself, incredulous.
"Yep."
"What about me?"
"Are you genuinely asking because you don't know?"
"...Don't tell me it's because I'm streaming?"
"Correct answer."
Momo said with a bright smile.
"Your stream dates and locations have been leaking for days now, so all these small-timers are swarming hoping to latch onto the Kim Dosa name and spike their view counts."
"Latch onto—? Even if they ride my name, how much could they possibly make?"
"Oh my, do you really think that?"
What she showed me was stuffed with videos bearing my name that I had never made.
The Man at the Center of the Occult Boom, Kim Dosa — Who Is He?
Everything About Kim Dosa From A to Z!
A Working Shaman Reviews Kim Dosa.
And every one of those videos had already racked up over a million views within a day or two of going up.
"What the hell is this...!"
My views! Those are MY views leaking out by the bucketful!?
"Your profile exploded after the [Suicide Train] incident, remember? The terrestrial networks haven't reacted yet since it was only a few days ago, but YouTube and the streaming scene have been going absolutely nuts."
"Hoo... I've got complicated feelings about this."
Given that I needed to gather Cognition, this kind of attention wasn't a bad thing. But when anything rises too suddenly, side effects inevitably follow. And those side effects had already begun.
"That guy..."
Momo scowled and glared off at something. Following her gaze, I saw a man filming a solo stream on his phone. There was something oddly familiar about the guy's hairstyle, his outfit...
"Kind of looks like me, doesn't he?"
"...That's right. He's a Kim Dosa knockoff."
"What!?"
A knockoff of ME!?
"He goes by KimExorcist. There are plenty of people out there doing YouTube while imitating you, but this guy's the worst of the lot. He started copying you relatively early, and now he actually goes around claiming he's the original."
Minseo spoke coldly, eyes fixed on KimExorcist.
"Teacher, shall I handle him?"
"No — handle him how?"
What did handling even look like here?
"Or I could do it, if you'd like."
Momo produced a small wooden box. A box containing a shikigami.
"It's the new shikigami I got from Ryuko. I've been wanting to test its performance, you see."
"No no no, leave him alone!"
Look, people in the same line of work can end up with similar concepts. It's not like KimExorcist had caused me any direct harm, right?
Just then, KimExorcist — mid-broadcast — spotted us too.
"Oh hey, chat, there's my knockoff right over there! This is it, folks — KimExorcist versus Kim Dosa, time to settle once and for all which one of us is the real deal, my dudes!"
With that one line, I cleanly gave up on covering for KimExorcist. If the man was begging to die, then die he should.