This Is Taein's Fault
One thing was absolutely certain: Woo Yeon-woo had never met that demon, Labrum. If he had, the creature would have recognized his face the instant it saw him. Hadn't it looked at him with complete, unfeigned ignorance?
"Labrum..."
And yet when Rembrary searched the name, nothing about the demon came up at all.
So he didn't learn of it through an internet search... Well, that figures. If he already knew Labrum well, there would have been no reason to search in the first place.
The fact that he'd searched meant he wanted to know something about Labrum — and if that was the case, didn't it mean Yeon-woo had also first heard the name 'Labrum' from someone else?
I suppose I must ask Woo Sung-woo after all.
But he balked at actually calling. Sung-woo was Yeon-woo's brother, and he had the distinction of being the very first person to suspect his true identity — Rembrary instinctively recoiled from the idea.
In the end, Rembrary sent him a text instead.
Rembrary had intended to bring up the man who kept a demon on a leash right away, but he changed his mind. It seemed wiser to first confirm whether Sung-woo would even answer his questions properly.
So the changed-his-mind Rembrary opened with a perfectly ordinary question.
Were these brothers on bad terms with each other?
Was he supposed to count that as a decent answer? Rembrary scowled down at his phone, disgruntled.
He, too, had an older brother and an older sister, but never once would they have replied like this. They had been proud of their brother the High Priest, and had almost invariably offered him nothing but kind words...
The real Woo Yeon-woo truly had no luck with people, did he. As Rembrary sat there sighing, Sung-woo texted again.
Was the question embarrassing him? The messages stopped for a while. A full six minutes passed before the reply came.
There was a great deal he wanted to ask.
First, he meant to sound the man out — did he know the creature he kept was a demon? If he knew and kept it anyway, the odds were good that he was a contractor, and the demon contractors Rembrary had known were, as a rule, dangerous. Not that every one of them was a threat to humanity itself simply for having signed a contract with a demon. But demon contractors usually harbored some desperate, burning want, and demons, in pursuit of whatever their contractor desired, would stop at absolutely nothing — no matter how monstrous the means.
Then Rembrary abruptly deflated.
Suppose the man truly was a demon contractor. Rembrary here was not the High Priest, and he possessed none of the High Priest's authority — what, exactly, could he even hope to do about it?
Meanwhile, on the other end of the phone line, Woo Sung-woo had gone taut with anxiety as his brother let five whole minutes slip by without answering, lips flicking nervously.
Is he getting pulled into Cheonripung? Is that why he's asking? An uneasy thought took root.
Cheonripung and Nakru weren't fighting at the moment. If anything, they traded favors now and then. But in principle, the two stood on irreconcilable ideologies — and when their relations soured, they soured terribly, so there was no telling when things might break again.
His brother had certainly grown strange in a number of ways lately, but he was still his brother. He had no intention of handing him over to some sinister organization.
In the end, Woo Sung-woo hurriedly texted first with an offer.
The replies came quickly this time, but Sung-woo only tensed further. Him too — he wants in with Cheonripung, doesn't he...
Is that what he means? That Nakru wouldn't know the first thing about Cheonripung's business?
Out of options, Woo Sung-woo simply fired off a blank promise into the void.
Reading it, Rembrary frowned in genuine perplexity.
Ask Sung-woo about a demon? The moment he did, wouldn't the man turn around and grill him — how on earth do you know about such things? But if he stonewalled with 'that's above your clearance' after coming this far, Sung-woo might well deduce the truth from it. So he wants to ask about a demon, and that's why he's dodging!
After agonizing over it, Rembrary settled on a question that had nothing to do with demons — one Hwanshin could answer and Sung-woo could not — and offered it up as an example.
Reading the message, Woo Sung-woo's eyes went wide. That, he truly could not know.
Hwanshin's taste in those leashes was so perverse that plenty of his own subordinates were embarrassed by it. But why on earth did his little brother want one?
The creature he'd picked up was a tiger-headed youkai, so this was in no way a lie.
Woo Sung-woo, thoroughly flustered, sent back: "Then come out and meet him."
By a stroke of tremendous fortune for Rembrary, the Team Leader happened to be passing by Sung-woo at that very moment and chided him, "Oh, just give it to him already."
Wondering when on earth she'd read his messages, Sung-woo hastily hid his phone, but the Team Leader was already walking away down the hall. When he glared after her, she threw him a look of utter exasperation.
"Your brother's glued to his manager twenty-four seven, and the dorm's packed wall to wall with people. Besides, Hwanshin has zero interest in human beings."
"Even so—"
"I'm telling you it's fine. He doesn't care about Saints either. Something has to be at least one percent demon before he so much as blinks. Of course, if a one-percent demon actually existed, the man would lose his mind over it."
That much was true. And Hwanshin had expressly confirmed that his brother was human.
Sung-woo hesitated, then finally texted his brother Hwanshin's contact. The Team Leader had a point, too — his brother was a full-grown adult, already surrounded by plenty of people. He lived apart from him, and there had been stretches of overseas deployment where they'd had no contact whatsoever; making a fuss about it now, of all times, did feel a little absurd.
Granted, his memory had been perfectly intact before Sung-woo left, and it wasn't now, but still...
Will this really be all right?
Rembrary promptly tried calling Hwanshin's number. The line was busy.
He waited about five minutes and tried again — still busy. While waiting for the man to finish his call, Rembrary decided to make use of the time and check his own SNS on his phone.
As it happened, a recommended account sat right beside his feed: Oh Jung-shin's. This came about purely because Oh Jung-shin's fans and Woo Yeon-woo's fans were forever wandering back and forth between the two accounts, but Rembrary knew nothing of such circumstances — he simply thought it an odd recommendation, and tapped into Oh Jung-shin's page.
"Well, I never."
The shameless whelp behaved in a remarkably out-of-character fashion within his own account. Rembrary clicked his tongue as he scrolled down through photo after photo, and when he came upon a shot of Oh Jung-shin with a flower the size of a fist tucked into his hair, his tongue clicked all the harder.
"Truly, the boy's sense of beauty leaves everything to be desired."
And yet, astonishingly, Oh Jung-shin's fans showered that flower-adorned photo with praise — my baby's so cute, oh he's precious, admiration of every variety. Some even declared him the most handsome man in the world.
Rembrary was scandalized. I am far more handsome than he!
So this is what pleases the people of this world?
Apparently it was. If it weren't, no one would ever look at Oh Jung-shin and call him the most handsome man alive.
After a moment's hesitation, Rembrary resolved to take a photo holding a flower as well.
He needed to multiply his believers in this world, after all.
Had he been free to wield his divine power at will, such efforts would have been unnecessary — but since he could not, he had no choice but to dazzle his followers' eyes.
Now, where were those flowers...
"Ah. Taein. Taein!"
"Busy."
"Lend me some flowers."
"Why are you asking me for that?"
"I saw a fan give them to you on the way back from the broadcasting station."
"Jesus, when did you even see that?"
"Lend them to me for a moment. I intend to take a photograph. I shall cite the source, fear not."
Taein knew that having his group members' names appear alongside his on SNS was good for the group's image, so with a long-suffering sigh he went into his room, dug a paper-wrapped bouquet out of his bag, and held it out.
"There."
"Hold — why do you keep flowers inside your bag?"
"They're soap flowers. And if I leave them out, that idiot Hyegyeol tears them apart and washes his face with them."
"What in the world is a soap flower?"
Bewildered, Rembrary took the soap flower into his hands — and gasped in admiration. The flower smelled of soap, and it was a truly lovely scent.
"So this is why it's called a soap flower!"
"What?"
"Then the name 'Soap' — was it taken from the soap flower? Because it smells of soap?"
"What are you even... Uh. Uh, yeah. Right. That's it. People loved the scent of soap, so they made a cleanser that smelled just like soap flowers, and it came to be called Soap."
Listening to Taein's explanation, Rembrary hugged the flowers contentedly to his chest and held his phone out to him.
"Take the picture."
When Rembrary struck a pose, nose buried in the blossoms, Taein muttered something about this idiot and that idiot, snapped three careless shots, and walked off.
Rembrary set the flowers down on the bed and examined the photos. Even taken carelessly, they had come out absolutely divine. Rembrary beamed.
It wasn't his original body, but this much would more than do. He hurried into SNS and attached the photo to a post — then, on the verge of uploading it, found one small thing lacking, and resolved to show off his freshly acquired knowledge as well.
This way it wouldn't look like mere bragging, and he'd come across as clever, wouldn't he? Quite pleased with himself, Rembrary hastily posted the photo and caption.
Within seconds, a comment appeared. A secret one.
Not exactly the praise he'd been hoping for.
While Rembrary stood there dumbfounded, comments came pouring in by the second. The overwhelming majority demanded he delete the caption and keep the photo — and in their midst, one of Oh Jung-shin's fans, a creature who materialized regularly to leave abuse and vanish, dropped a single comment and fled:
Rembrary's enraged believers immediately charged off to Oh Jung-shin's SNS account to wage holy war, and Rembrary grew only more bewildered.
While all this was unfolding, Sunwoo Sil left a secret comment of his own.
Rembrary deleted the post first, then asked Sunwoo Sil, [Why?]
Instead of explaining, Sunwoo Sil offered advice.
Even as he traded messages with Sunwoo Sil, Rembrary moped over the fact that people refused to react the way he wanted.
What had he possibly done to deserve being called dense, a blockhead, an idiot, by everyone?
Worse, here was what his own believers were saying in his defense:
"I am not dim-witted... I am shrewd..."
Rembrary was muttering to himself when his eye fell upon yet another recommended account: Homtleman.
That, at least, posed no problem whatsoever.
What seized his attention was the introduction beneath the man's name, which read: Woo Yeon-woo Homma.
"...Homma?"
— End of Chapter 135. This Is Taein's Fault —