The Divine Message (2)
As before, Maeng Woo-shin led him through the secret passage behind the café.
Trailing after him, Rembrary found himself reconsidering the layout of the place from an angle he hadn't taken before.
'For something to be hidden this systematically, this well — could they be hiding from Nakru? And if Daeju really is a Saint...'
Tap, tap. The sound of their footsteps echoed off the walls from every direction. Perhaps so that the intrusion of an uninvited guest could be caught at once, this secret passage was unusually loud underfoot.
Walking along in quiet thought, Rembrary finally glanced over at Maeng Woo-shin.
"Sunbae."
"What."
"How did you come to set foot in a place like this?"
"And what's your excuse for trying to get into one?"
"I have always taken an interest in such things."
"Such as what, exactly?"
"Religion."
"What, was that interview about wanting to become a monk actually serious?"
"I have no designs on monkhood at present."
"Then what is it?"
"And why did you seek entry here, sunbae?"
"Why on earth would I owe you that answer?"
But Maeng Woo-shin gave nothing away. Jungseo called him an attention seeker, yet apparently even an attention seeker could keep his mouth shut when it counted.
Before long, they arrived at that waiting-room-like chamber Rembrary had visited once before. The woman who had sat at the front desk that day was in the very same seat, reading a book in a foreign language. When Rembrary and Maeng Woo-shin approached, she looked up with naked curiosity.
Last time she had treated Rembrary as if he weren't there at all; today she was quite obviously paying more attention to him than to Maeng Woo-shin. Then again, the previous visit had been an emergency raid — she'd hardly had the presence of mind to spare anyone a glance.
"We would see Daeju," Maeng Woo-shin said calmly, regardless of her staring.
"One moment," the woman replied, checked her monitor, then keyed something into her terminal. "He's in. Would you care to wait a moment?"
Hands leaving the keyboard, she turned and studied Rembrary again as though he were some rare specimen.
Maeng Woo-shin tilted his chin toward an empty sofa. "Let's wait over there. Usually you're kept waiting a good fifteen minutes before he calls you in."
Barely thirty seconds had passed when —
The door on the far side, opposite the passage Rembrary had come through, opened, and a white-haired man appeared without delay. At once, the woman at the front desk went round-eyed and murmured, "Daeju-nim?"
It wasn't just her. Everyone in the room wore the same stunned expression — even Maeng Woo-shin, who had escorted Rembrary here in the first place.
Rembrary, for his part, realized that this white-haired man was far lighter on his feet than he'd been led to expect.
Regardless, the white-haired man paid the commotion no mind and came straight to Rembrary, speaking with a coldness that somehow remained perfectly courteous.
"Come in."
At that respectful tone, every pair of eyes in the room grew wider still.
"You — remain here as well."
When Daeju held back Maeng Woo-shin, who had been about to follow along as a matter of course, the onlookers looked positively floored.
Daeju, his composure unruffled, extended a hand toward the door he had emerged from.
"This way."
Rembrary walked ahead in the direction indicated, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
Daeju's room stirred in Rembrary a nostalgia he knew all too well.
"A temple..."
It resembled the priests' chambers in the temple of his world. And yet the materials of the objects, the fine details of their shapes, were all subtly wrong — familiar and foreign at once, as though the whole place had been built from nothing but secondhand accounts of somewhere the maker had never actually seen.
"Thank you for coming at so late an hour."
Only at Daeju's words did Rembrary collect himself and come straight to the point.
"What is this message you speak of?"
A faint, barely-there smile touched Daeju's cold face.
"You are more impatient than I was led to believe. Word had it you were the unhurried sort."
So word has reached him... Rembrary listened closely even as he answered as though it were nothing.
"Do I look a man with leisure to spare, in the midst of all this?"
But the answer was a probe. He wanted to see whether Daeju truly knew something about the goddess Redrin — about him — or whether he was simply talking.
As if reading him down to the bone, Daeju replied with a smile that gave nothing back.
"Well. It is hardly good news."
"!"
"But it is news that carries hope."
Unable either to hurry the man along or to feign indifference, Rembrary stood there dumbly, staring hard at him. Daeju continued, composed as ever.
"Lady Redrin exhausted herself sending you here against the limits of her strength. What is more, now that you are gone there is no High Priest in that world, and her faction has weakened in its own right — she can no longer wield her power freely, I am told. The message she granted me was sent barely, on the very verge of collapse. Since then, I too have not heard her voice."
The news was more concrete than Rembrary had expected, and it startled him a little. It could all be a lie, but it rang plausibly enough — after all, Redrin really was receiving his attempts at contact. She simply never answered.
And judging by Daeju's account, the one who had flung Rembrary into this world was not the Demon King at all, but Redrin herself.
Rembrary stole a glance at the evil spirit clinging to his shadow, and the bone-chilling laughter and words he'd heard just before crossing over rose again in his memory.
"I cannot simply stand by and allow that."
He had been channeling a great surge of divine power when he heard those words and got knocked clean out of his world — so naturally he had assumed the Demon King had said them to him, and that the crossing between dimensions had been the Demon King's doing as well.
Then had the one the Demon King spoken those words to been not Rembrary, but Redrin?
And that evil spirit...
'Could it have followed me here?'
Setting the thought aside, he caught Daeju's voice picking up again.
"While Lady Redrin recovers her strength, she has commanded that you and I make many believers here. Only then, once her power is restored, can she return you to your original world — and stand against the Demon King."
"So you truly are one sent by Redrin."
"You have been doubting me all this while?"
"Did you not doubt me?"
"I can see your halo with my own eyes. Doubt is impossible."
"If doubt is impossible, why did you run off alone before?"
"...Because I could not be certain until I beheld you with my own eyes."
So Daeju really was Redrin's man. Everything he said was coherent, and not a single piece of it was out of joint.
Rembrary nodded, a shade glum.
Ever since his meeting with Yeomra, Rembrary had gone lukewarm about climbing the ranks as a celebrity — what use was rank, he'd figured, if it only bought him entry into some crackpot organization? His sense of purpose toward success had dulled accordingly.
But if Lady Redrin herself had commanded him to gather believers, then purpose or no purpose, the choice had been taken out of his hands. He simply had to work hard and swell their numbers.
If not for this organization called Nakru, he could have exercised his divine power openly and inspired people's faith outright. But with Nakru's eyes to mind here, he had to win people's belief with his divine power left entirely out of the picture. And in Rembrary's judgment, no profession on earth courted the public's affection quite like that of a celebrity.
"Lady Redrin has commanded that you be well looked after. You have suffered greatly, have you not? You may set your worries aside from this day on."
"Look after me?"
"I hear you have been living without so much as a slice of pizza."
"I eat plenty these days. That aside, Daeju."
"Yes, High Priest."
"I understand that you truly did receive a message from Redrin. But... who are you?"
"..."
"Who are you, that you know all of these things?"
"I, too, am a priest of Lady Redrin."
"Did you also cross over, as I did?"
"No."
No? As Rembrary's brow furrowed, an amused smile curled at the corner of Daeju's mouth.
"I have been a child of this world from the very beginning. I have never once set foot in the world of Lady Redrin and you, High Priest."
"Then how is it you know of Lady Redrin at all?"
"Who can say? Only this much is certain: I am the sole priest of Lady Redrin in this world. You are here too, of course, High Priest — but strictly speaking, you do not count as a person of this world."
So he even knows I came from another world. As Rembrary clicked his tongue, Daeju drew a phone from his pocket and held it out.
"I shall give you my number. Contact me whenever you have need."
Once Rembrary had typed his number in and handed the phone back, Daeju immediately dialed it so his number would appear on Rembrary's screen, then beckoned Maeng Woo-shin over with an instruction:
"This is a most precious guest. See that he is well looked after from this day forward."
Maeng Woo-shin's face froze over in an instant, as if he'd taken a straight blow from a club of ice.
On the way back, Maeng Woo-shin walked the whole route with his face scrunched up, not opening his mouth once. The thought that he had to obey Daeju's words, and the thought that he had to serve well this Rembrary of all people, seemed to be at open war inside him.
Rembrary, for his part, didn't bother teasing the man, and returned quietly to the dorm. His own insides were tangled up far worse than any pointless bickering with Maeng Woo-shin could have fixed.
Which was exactly why, when Sa Gam-jae called and asked about his meeting with Daeju, Rembrary couldn't bring himself to answer honestly.
"Did you meet with that white-haired man?"
'If I tell them I mean to spread Redrin's name here, Sa Gam-jae won't like it. Nor Yeomra.'
Rembrary remembered how grave Sa Gam-jae's face had gone at the mere half-joke about founding a religion in this world. If even that had earned such a reaction, actually announcing his intent to preach the goddess Redrin might displease him far worse.
"Mr. Woo Yeon-woo?"
"It was just an ordinary cult."
"And what, precisely, does an ordinary cult look like??"
"Nothing worth mentioning, I told you."
In the end, having papered over the matter of Daeju, Rembrary turned around and scolded Sa Gam-jae instead.
"You go catch that Ox-Head and the fools chasing after it, and be quick about it."
Perhaps something had stung, for Sa Gam-jae asked nothing further and hung up on the spot.
But with the call ended, Rembrary sank into even deeper thought. Talking about the people tailing the Ox-Head had dredged up the memory of those masked assailants who had once stormed in to attack Daeju.
'Were those people Nakru?'
If Daeju was a priest, then in this world he would be treated much like a Saint. It was entirely plausible that Nakru had marked him as a target.
Rembrary took out his phone and asked Daeju point-blank by text.
Just as he'd suspected, the ones who had been hunting Daeju were Nakru.
But the goat masks brought something else to mind — the necklace. Those mask-wearers had worn a necklace identical to the one on Woo Yeon-woo's brother, Woo Sung-woo.
'Surely it isn't possible that Woo Sung-woo, of all people, is with Nakru?'
Even sunk in thought, time slipped briskly by, and before he knew it the next day had arrived — the hour to head out for the filming of Process of Love.
Rembrary left the dorm looking even more listless than usual.
"Huh? Mr. Woo Yeon-woo, are you okay? Are you coming down with something?"
He must have looked truly drained — even the VJ riding in the van with him was startled into asking.
"My body is in fine health. It is merely my mind that is in disarray."
"Ah... could it be you're not happy about the three-under-one-roof concept?"
"Two boxes of pizza pose no problem whatsoever."
The VJ, feeling a touch guilty toward all that sighing, cautiously handed over a script — clearly nursing the worry that despite Rembrary's words, the cohabitation concept really might draw a firestorm of backlash.
"Well, the three-way cohabitation is confirmed, but we're not filming the staying-in-one-house scenes first. The order is: Mr. Shin Jo-woon and Ms. Jang Tae-ri are already settling into the house, and then you show up and declare you'll be moving in with them. We're shooting from that scene."
Rembrary unfolded the script with a sullen face.
— End of Chapter 105: The Divine Message (2) —