Night Parade of Ten Thousand Demons (1)
Even after the Spirit Selection Ceremony ended, my days did not change much.
I was still in the corner room. I still leaned on incense to build my spiritual power. If anything had shifted at all, it was the nights.
At some point, the space outside my corner room grew restless every night.
At first I let it wash past me half-asleep. But after several days of the same, I could no longer pretend not to hear. Feigning sleep with my eyes shut, I listened to the sounds seeping through the crack of the door.
It was the low murmur of bargaining. My mother's voice. And the voice of an unfamiliar peddler.
"…How much would you give me for this jade bracelet?"
"My lady, this one isn't worth much at all…"
"I'll put the jadeite bracelet with it as well. Please get me one more casket of that incense."
I could not bring myself to open my closed eyes.
My mother had always been sharp about profit.
That was not a slight; it was simply true. The mistress of the Eoryeong Family kept the household ledgers in her grip, and she was famous for having no soft spots in that regard—quick with figures, never wasteful with a single coin, never bested by anyone in a bargain. Even through the eyes that saw spirits, the aura she wore had that same tight, competent edge.
There had been an incident once.
A relative close to my mother had come all the way to the corner room to find her, her face full of incomprehension.
"Why on earth would you go this far? Selling your jewelry for a child who can't even wield a spirit—do you not know people are pointing fingers? Do you not care what becomes of your place as the household mistress?"
It was genuine concern. To that relative, watching the sharpest person she knew carve away her own flesh to pour water into a bottomless jar must have looked like madness.
My mother regarded her for a moment, then answered calmly.
"Hwiun is my son."
"…"
"Do I need any reason beyond that?"
The relative closed her mouth. Unable to say more, she only sighed and left.
…I had heard every word of that conversation while pretending to sleep.
That night, too, my mother came in carrying a new casket of incense.
"Hwiun, today you should…"
As her words trailed off and she set the incense on the brazier, I quietly looked up at her wrist.
It was bare. The jade bracelet, the jadeite one—somewhere along the way, both had vanished.
"…Mother."
I opened my mouth. Even in this body, short words came out clearly now.
"That incense. You don't have to buy such expensive things for me anymore."
Her hand paused.
"Paying the merchants all that money… You don't have to go that far. I'm… a little better now."
It was a lie. Without the incense I would not only fail to accumulate spiritual power—I would spend whole nights writhing in agony. But the words came out on their own. Looking at her empty wrists, at the ties of her robes growing plainer by degrees, I simply could not keep taking without end.
My mother looked down at me in silence.
"…Better? What part of you is better."
Her voice was strangely roughened.
"As if this mother wouldn't know you groan through the night whenever the incense runs out."
She had known all along. That I pretended to be fine, pretended not to hurt—and still she had accepted it, and looked the other way.
She reached out and slowly stroked my hair.
"What does jewelry matter. What do clothes matter, or other people's pointing fingers."
The tips of her fingers trembled a little as they stroked.
"What kind of mother counts those things against her own son."
The sharpest reckoner in the family. The woman who never spent a single coin for nothing. In front of her own child, she had set that quick arithmetic down entire.
Somewhere in my chest, that unfamiliar ache tightened again.
…This person, truly.
Embarrassed by the hand on my head, I turned my face slightly aside—without, for all that, actually pulling away from it.
Then, a few days later.
A summons came from the Family Head.
The Family Head himself had called for the defective product shut away in a corner room. Even the servant who brought the message looked as if he could not believe the words he was delivering. Something had been turning strangely since the Spirit Selection Ceremony.
My mother carried me toward the main compound, where the Family Head waited.
The main compound was another world from the corner room.
It was the first time I had set foot in the heart of the Eoryeong Family. All the way along the broad corridors, I could not keep my eyes still.
Because of the shikigami.
Throughout the galleries, the family's shikigami were nested and at rest—curled under the eaves, wandering the gardens, coiled around the pillars. Through eyes that saw spirits, their ranks poured in one after another. Things I had never even glimpsed in the corner room.
"…Whoa."
A babyish sound of wonder slipped out of me before I could stop it.
It was fascinating. Truly. Keeping spirits at one's side and commanding them—the thing I had only ever read about in books—was unfolding right in front of me. Spirits of every rank and every grain of power, settled quietly beside people.
"Do you like them?"
Mother, holding me, asked softly, as if she found the look on my face endearing.
"Yes!"
I answered with force—more clearly than I ever had.
Those things. To keep them at my side and command them like that. That I, too, might one day have them. I, who for a lifetime had only reached out and crushed everything so that nothing could stay near me—that I might keep those spirits and make them my servants.
My heart pounded at the mere thought.
Mother smiled faintly at the way my eyes lit up. For the first time in a long while, color returned to her gaunt face.
At last we reached the front of the Family Head's Hall.
The doors of the Family Head's Hall were enormous. A man stood guard before them. He looked like the head of the escort—formal martial dress, a well-honed sword at his waist. But more than his appearance, the aura he wore was heavy.
…Oh.
The moment my spirit-seeing eyes caught him, admiration rose in me unbidden.
He was considerable. For a mere gatekeeper, his rank was no small thing—the density of spiritual power settled in his dantian, the years soaked into the hand that held the sword. Measured by the sense of my past life, he was solid. Not the sort who would shatter the instant a hand closed on him.
As Mother approached, the man bowed his head with formality.
"Greetings, Pureblood. It has been some time."
"It has, Hiyato. I didn't expect to find you guarding this door yourself."
Genuine pleasure colored her voice. The man was no different. For all the weight of his aura, his eyes as he looked at Mother held a deep respect that did not match it.
I learned later that this man had a story.
Originally he had been nothing—no Eoryeong blood, only a wandering warrior. Mother had taken him in. She had brought a man with nowhere to go into the family as a guest retainer and given him a place to stand.
After that he had climbed, step by step, on nothing but his own skill, finally overtaking the pure-blooded direct line until he held the post of guarding the Family Head's Hall itself. That a man who was not of pure blood had risen to that seat was said to be one of the rarest things in the long history of the Eoryeong Family.
In short: the wanderer Mother had taken in had, by sheer ability, become one of the strongest pillars of the house.
So the respect in his eyes as he looked at her could not have been empty words.
Then the man looked at me, held in Mother's arms.
His gaze sank in a subtle way. It was not contempt. If anything, it was closer to pity.
"…Pureblood. Are you truly certain of this path."
A careful remark. Not scorn, but the sorrow of watching one's benefactor decline. He seemed to know, too, that the once-sharp mistress of the house had been reduced to selling her jewelry for a single defective product whose spiritual veins stood in opposition to each other.
Mother smiled faintly.
Then she looked quietly down at me in her arms.
"I have no regrets."
Without the least hesitation.
"Not even once."
Her eyes held something that needed no further words. For this child, that was the whole of it.
…My chest tightened again.
Because of me she was losing everything. And still she smiled and said she had no regrets. Somehow I found it hard to meet that look head-on. I was a man who had never once in my life put either thanks or apology into my mouth.
So something else entirely came out instead.
"Don't worry."
Clear and careful from a small mouth.
"Because I am the strongest."
It was meant for Mother. For the person who said she would not regret losing everything for my sake, that was all I could offer her. That I would pay it all back—so she need not take it so hard. I could not say it straight, so I said, because I am the strongest.
For a moment, silence fell.
Then Hiyato burst out laughing.
"Haha. Now there's a bold little one."
A blood-smeared infant who could not even handle his spiritual veins, calling himself the strongest. To the man it would have sounded like nothing more than charming bluster for his mother's ears. Fair enough, given the state I was in.
But since the words were already out.
I added one more.
"You don't believe me."
"Haha, of course I do. Our young master is the strongest, no question."
Exactly the tone of an adult humoring a child. Finding that tone a little ridiculous, I tossed the next line out.
"I nearly cut through the Night Parade of Ten Thousand Demons, you know…"
Hiyato's laugh stalled for a beat. Then he put on that generous smile again.
"Hoh, is that so. Drove the Night Parade into a corner, did you. Quite the feat."
Still the humoring tone. Fair enough—a baby mouthing the name of the Night Parade of Ten Thousand Demons would only sound like cute bravado. But that tone nettled me a little, so I laid it out just as I remembered it.
"I was alone, you see. No one to help me. So I just… cut them. Everything that came at me."
"…"
"It was strange. That was the first time. The first time I didn't need to hold back."
Hiyato's smile wavered, ever so slightly.
Night Parade of Ten Thousand Demons.
In this age, there was no sorcerer who did not lose the color in his face at those four characters.
Just as the spirits of this world had ranks, so did the ghostly things that preyed on people—from stray spirits drifting in the fields to malevolent ghosts that could bewitch an entire village. And at the remote, unreachable peak of them all stood the Night Parade of Ten Thousand Demons.
The apex of ghostly calamities, waking once in a thousand years if it woke at all. Every manner of spirit and evil soul tangled into a single procession that marched through the night, and wherever it passed, a capital city would be wiped clean from the map.
Even if the Five Great Families set aside a thousand years of enmity and joined hands, no one could swear they would stop it. In the deepest archive of the Eoryeong Family itself, it was said to be recorded in a single line: If you meet it, run.
The very idea of fighting and winning did not exist. Only whether you survived or not.
And that thing—
"Drove it into a corner…?"
Hiyato's voice cracked low.
It made no sense. Across a thousand years of history, the sorcerers who had faced the Night Parade of Ten Thousand Demons and lived could be counted on one hand—and every last one of them had lived by running. Not one had stood against it. And this infant claimed he had driven it into a corner? Not blocked it, not fled from it, but forced that apex calamity back to the edge of a cliff?
That he had lost rather than won only made it more chilling. The kind of rank that could press the Night Parade of Ten Thousand Demons at all was beyond reckoning.
"…Well. I did lose, though."
I shrugged and added it flatly.
It was true enough. At the end of my past life I had walked straight into the heart of that Night Parade… and died. So saying I had lost was not wrong.
Hiyato looked down at me steadily.
At first his eyes had been ready to dismiss it as a child's absurd bluff—because driving something like that into a corner simply did not make sense. But little by little, those eyes grew strange.
He studied me like that for a long while.
Then he grinned.
"…Interesting brat, aren't you."
As if it were absurd—and yet as if he were genuinely intrigued. He stepped aside and opened the doors of the Family Head's Hall.
With a deep, heavy rumble, the great doors parted.
Then, toward my back as I stepped through, he tossed one more line.
"This way… our young master who cut that endless thing alone."
It was teasing. Clearly. And yet what clung to the end of it was not teasing alone.
I huffed a short laugh.
But it did not feel bad.
Looking into the dimness beyond those doors, I drew a small, steady breath.