There Is No Boon Without a Price
The site of the explosion was the Niche Perfume Pop-up Store.
You've got to be kidding me!
It was the very place I'd walked into just yesterday, and now it had been reduced to nothing in a heartbeat.
But that was simply how the world worked. A shaman who acted like the invincible master of everything one day could be boiled down into pill ingredients the next — that was the truth of making a living.
Everything changes in the end, and since no one can stop that, the only thing left is to change your own mindset.
Experiencing it firsthand, however, was a different matter entirely.
And that, precisely, was the great contradiction of living in this world.
"I-it's already—!"
The second suited man spun around.
The blast site lay outside the range of the perception-obscuring art.
Plaster dust swirled through the air as startled onlookers murmured and surged closer. One person immediately called it in, demanding to know what had happened; another whipped out a phone and began filming the smoke pouring from the wreckage.
So no one died, at least.
The youkai's aura wasn't yet overwhelming, either.
"A m-monster!"
A woman who looked like a store employee came crawling out, shrieking at the top of her lungs.
"Ah—hkk! A m-monster… a monster, a monster. I'm telling you, it's a monster…!"
A monster. A word so alien, so utterly at odds with the peaceful modern world of barely an hour ago.
Yuki swallowed hard, set her feet, and started barking orders to those around her.
"Secure the scene first. Lee Hyeon-woo, file the report right away and keep every civilian back until headquarters support arrives. Got it?"
"Y-yes. Understood."
As she and the suited men advanced, the crowd parted one body at a time.
"We're from the Special Disaster Response Agency. Please step aside."
"Sp-special agency?"
"Wh-what's going on? Is this some kind of accident?"
The department store staff, grasping the severity of it at last, sprinted over one by one, radios crackling. In the middle of the commotion, Yuki walked into the site without a moment's hesitation.
"It's d-dangerous!"
A camera shutter clicked somewhere; one person stared blankly, another tried to flee the area, and yet another kept craning his neck between the suited men for sneaky peeks at the scene.
In the space of a breath, everything had gone to hell.
And I was standing at the very center of that chaos. I stroked my chin beside the crowd and gazed off at the site from a distance — my signature "too cool to care" pose, a personal habit of feigning indifference to the situation while my mind worked.
Back in the day, I'd only stroked my chin and played it nonchalant when things went really bad. These days, it was rather different.
So what exactly am I supposed to do here?
Think it through.
The shamans had hired me as a porter for a secret realm where lives hung by a thread. Then out of nowhere, a beast attacked. What's a porter supposed to do at a time like this? Cheer them on? Stand there quietly? Go back home? Hmm, they did say the new release was coming out next week…. Wait, shit. Didn't this whole thing start while they were interrogating me?
——CRASH!!
Yuki went tumbling back through a wall.
"Wha—! A p-person! It's a person!"
A colossal boom.
She'd been flung all the way across to the opposite wall and slammed into it with a sickening impact. Then, hkk… hkk-hkk… — she coughed up blood where she lay on the floor.
"T-Team Leader!"
Over her arm, pale lines glimmered into view — slender strands of blue and red, tangled together like a composite formation. They rippled from her forearm up past her wrist.
A Conversion Formation.
A protective array that channeled the shock of a blow through the meridians of the body.
But the design's a sloppy mess.
Just look at it. The formation script itself was anything but clean, snarled and knotting over itself.
From between the collapsed ruins of the pop-up store, the youkai revealed itself. Twice the size of a human, vaguely shaped like a person — but no person at all.
Black carapace covered most of its body.
Where a face should have been there was nothing — no eyes, no nose. Only a jagged maw, twisting of its own accord, its pointed teeth clicking together, sharp and hollow.
That was exactly what the Primal Concept of Destruction would look like, I thought, if its essence were molded into human form.
For reference, the greater youkai — the true heavyweights — weren't merely shaped like their nature. They were born with it.
Just as shamans have their five elements and attributes, Primal Concepts, spirits, youkai, and beasts all possess a fundamental nature of their own…. Hold on. Why am I even thinking about this?
I crossed my arms.
"R-raise a barrier! The containment one!"
Yuki shouted, and the suited men hurriedly pulled out some rectangular objects.
Spell tablets?
They slapped them down onto the floor all at once.
Thin lines spilled from the tablets and raced across every stretch of ground in sight. They squirmed like snakes for a moment, then gathered into a circle around Yuki and the youkai.
A barrier had formed.
"What the— what is that? A movie? Is this some kind of movie?"
"What is that thing? Is this actually happening? Hey, you said you were a response agency, a response agency!"
"Everyone stay where you are! No… Sanghyun, tear open the rest of the talismans! All of the perception-obscuring ones, now!"
So we'd graduated from a shitshow to a truly monumental shitshow.
I finished scratching my chin and kept watching inside the barrier. Yuki spread her hand, wiggled her fingers in some bizarre little dance, then seized at empty air.
A hilt landed in that hand.
Krrrrrk— the air split open as if torn, and something emerged.
A scythe.
Oh.
Now that's actually kind of cool.
Shamans ride swords, pull stunts, throw tantrums, sure — but I'd never thought of summoning a weapon that way. Should I have done that too?
The instant the scythe materialized, she swung the blade. But the motion tangled.
The youkai threw a punch. At the moment of impact, she wrenched the scythe and her whole body onto a completely different trajectory, dropping flat to the ground.
The fist sailed past. Yuki didn't let it go. She hooked the scythe's shaft over its arm.
Then yanked, hard.
KRA-KOOM—!
The carapace along the arm crumbled away in chunks. It had looked hard as stone, but apparently not — it scattered like plaster dust. And right where it had fallen, a new arm was already forming.
Again. An arm.
"……!"
Yuki's eyes went wide as saucers.
A Primal Concept form, then. Things like that don't have a true body — you have to shatter the soul itself.
I tilted my head slightly.
Every gaze in the building converged on us. People watching from the third floor, from the fourth, from the first floor where newcomers had just walked in and were looking up at this. Even those suited men were in for a headache.
"…It's an emergency! The Team Leader is holding it off alone inside the containment barrier, buying us time—!"
"No, sir, it's not a calamity-grade formation, it's a hard-grade destruction formation! Its shape is distinct — every civilian present can see it!"
"We can't confirm if there's only one. Are you ordering a retreat? Yes? Sorry, I can't hear you! The radio's broken—!"
A couple of the suited men were shouting reports into their phones, too busy clutching their foreheads and sighing to do much else. On the other side, at the entrance — so that's why the sirens had been wailing earlier. Firefighters and paramedics had arrived.
'Didn't they say they'd retreat immediately if they couldn't handle it?'
A question formed.
They'd said a hard-grade was beyond them, that they'd assess and come back with headquarters. So either things had gotten that royally screwed, or they had some other trick up their sleeve.
Except judging by how their precious Team Leader was getting smacked around out there, it was probably the former. Wouldn't it have been smarter to just gang up on it with the whole team?
CLANG—!
The barrier shattered. The black lines did. And then — Yuki took the blow square in the gut. What came after? Flight, obviously.
She bounced off the barrier with a thud, smashed straight through its walls, and landed right beside me.
"Gahk…!"
The formation scripts on her arm crackled and screeched through a medley of noises before tearing apart entirely. And by pure coincidence, our eyes met. I was still standing exactly where I'd been.
"Y-you…."
Yuki turned her head.
Through the shattered barrier, the youkai pounded its fist into the ground. The punch came at Yuki.
She rolled out of the way, barely dodging — and in the moment she retched up another mouthful of blood, its elbow came swinging.
Toward me.
Oh, dear.
Why did I...
I pulled my head back. The youkai glanced over at me in an instant. Faithful to its nature of destruction to a fault, apparently.
Another fist came flying at me. I slipped it with the slightest twist of my body.
Dodge, dodge, dodge.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
What the hell. This is bad.
Humanity is always standing at a crossroads of choices, and that absolute law had apparently decided to spare me no mercy today either.
The secret realm had collapsed in the end, and here I was, its porter, at the point where I had to do something. The world regards all things as straw dogs to be discarded — so only we who stand upon the earth can ever be the ones to decide.
Did that apply here too? Was this also something I had to decide?
Even as I ducked my head to slip another punch, I looked down at Yuki.
She was coughing up blood.
The Primal Concept flailed its arm around with brute, mindless force again, and this time I leaned back a little further to dodge. Once more. A few times more.
"Hkk… hkk…."
Her groans caught at my ear. These bastards had hauled an innocent person in here and treated her like a criminal, and that part was fine, apparently. So much for not underestimating people. Who knows what a person might be carrying — a knife, anything — under all that?
But in the end, I decided.
My mercy, for the record, extended exactly as far as tolerating a complete stranger squatting in my home for the better part of a few weeks. I opened my mouth.
"Its fighting style and form are close to a Battle-Body type."
That was about the youkai.
"Except it's actually a Primal Concept form. Not a Battle-Body."
In other words: that woman had done nothing but swing her scythe, and she'd misjudged the thing completely.
"You people are short on dharma instruments, short on protective formations, short on the eyes to even see what it is…."
The Primal Concept raked its hand down in a clawing arc. I tipped my head out of the way.
"Which is to say, it's an absolute mess. A botched, half-assed mess."
The eyes of Yuki and every suited man went wide. It didn't look like my jab was what did it, though.
"At your level, you can't take this thing down just by flailing a scythe around."
The reason was simple. They lacked spiritual power.
Spiritual power is the element that determines the very foundation of a shaman's strength. The greater one's spiritual power, the greater the force one can wield through the body.
It's tied to the Five Attributes. Those blessed with them can naturally claim the qi of heaven and earth as their own and command it with ease. So what are the half-pints supposed to do — the ones short on attributes who can't even handle their spiritual power properly?
"You learn to master the arts."
Doesn't matter if your weapon is just a baseball bat. If the one swinging it can bench-press three thousand, the story changes entirely. So what's a scrub stuck at three hundred supposed to do? Whittle that bat down, and down, and down, until it's a spear.
WHOOM!
A fist came flying.
As I tipped my head back again, I reached my hand out into empty air.
My palm closed around something.
"Wh-what is that?"
I dragged the handful of nothing sideways.
DRRRRRK—
Something long unfurled from within my grip.
And at last, a crescent-curved blade surfaced, gleaming blue.
"The Team Leader's…!?"
A scythe.
I couldn't say it carried a perfect replica of her dharma power. But it had come close enough. At the very least, being able to draw a weapon out of the air like that meant I could handle spiritual energy to this degree.
So I bent the direction of that spiritual energy.
Into a form optimized not for cutting flesh, but for cutting spirit.
In other words — I'd switched from physical damage to magic damage.
I swept the copied scythe in a half arc. A line of blue drew itself across the very center of the youkai's torso as it reached out its arm.
It twisted.
Krrk—
Its upper body slid off at a slant.
Shhhk.
It fell to the floor.
The lower half stood there, dumbfounded. In the moment a faint dust began gathering over it, I cut that down too.
The legs toppled over with a clatter.
"……!!"
It was over.
Just like that.
I turned my head.
Everyone was staring at me as if their breath had stopped. The civilians, and above them the police. The firefighters.
And above them, the suited men — the so-called shamans. And at the very top, Team Leader Yuki's trembling gaze.
Layered upon layered, all of it fixed on me — even here, it was like watching a sacred rite unfold.
"The design's, well… more or less the same."
I tossed the scythe back to Yuki.
The dharma power spent was nearly identical, and so was the art itself.
Tasked with protecting people, yet hopeless at wielding her own abilities — there was no irony quite like it.
Yuki coughed, hacking up another blood-flecked wad of spit. With hands shaking like leaves, she finally managed to catch the scythe.
"Who… who the hell even are…."
you?
The end of the sentence caught in her mouth.
And at the same moment, the scythe she'd worked so hard to hold vanished — rising into the air like powder, leaving nothing behind but the embarrassed emptiness of her own hand.
"……?"
Yeah, that was a lie.
Why would I hand it over? I didn't learn to protect people. I learned to survive. This kind of expensive knowledge — swallowed down through loneliness upon loneliness — isn't something you go around teaching to just anybody.
Unless, of course, they guaranteed the safety of my peaceful everyday life….
"Tsk tsk tsk. The very heart that swallows things down without a shred of suspicion is rotten from the start. There is no boon without a price. Go learn that lesson again."
No boon comes without a price.
That was the truth of how the world worked. I had lived it myself — and therefore, that too was the correct answer.
That same day, at the Korea Shaman Association Gangseo Branch.
"…A c-copying ability? Hold on — neutralized it in a single strike, and killed a hard-grade youkai in two exchanges?"
"Shit. What the hell am I even looking at? Hey, replay the footage. Is the report on this ready yet?"
"This has to be an active practitioner… Pass it up to the Branch Director for now. This is not something we handle at our level."
"Hey! Send the footage up the chain — to the higher-ups, now!"
By the time the department store incident had been reported up the ladder, one report after another, the entire building was in an uproar in the space of a breath.
And the subject of it all was Jin Hyeon.
It was because of the unprecedented event — a man with no connection whatsoever to the shamanic world, a complete civilian, had done the impossible.