The Pillar (1)
No—what the hell?
How much time had even passed, and this was already his third Unique Story?
‘What is it this time?’
Not that it was a bad thing. If anything, it was good.
‘Unique Stories have always paid off for me.’
Which was exactly why his heart was pounding—fluttering, even—and yet that didn’t mean he wasn’t anxious. He couldn’t tell whether the hammering in his chest came from excitement or from dread.
‘…This is too fast.’
He knew perfectly well that what he’d done had stepped just a little—the tiniest bit—outside the bounds of normal. Even granting that, Unique Stories were not something you were supposed to rack up like this. How absurd was it? Right up to the ending, the most he had ever opened was exactly three. And now, forget the ending—he hadn’t been at the academy more than a few weeks, and a third Unique Story was already opening at the very start.
Classification: Unique Story
You are one who can define the forms of every ghost, and of the dokkaebi.
Take them into your heart. Give them shape. Complete a ghost that is yours alone.
Bihyung’s reaction to the long-awaited third Unique Story was the same as always.
‘What kind of bullshit is this?’
They’d dressed it up in words that sounded impressive enough, but they still weren’t telling him what the ability actually did.
‘The only one whose power was ever revealed was the first Unique Story…’
…Huh?
‘Wait. The second Unique Story was definitely The One Who Begins…’
The moment the thought landed, he excused himself to Mina and borrowed the training room. Once he was inside and checked the entry, the same text as before rose up. With every single step, oral tradition accumulates.
‘Don’t tell me… this is an ability tied to Transmission?’
Until now he had simply assumed it was something connected to the main story, or to the stories that branched off it. And for good reason. As far as Bihyung knew, “story” inside Dokja Jeon-gi had only ever arrived in the form of quests. Not anymore.
‘Transmission. The oral traditions handed down through the world.’
The names for it were many. Tale. Legend. Or—
‘…myth.’
At the root of all of them lay, in the end, a story. Seen that way, the foundation of the second Unique Story had been Transmission all along.
“For crying out loud… how was I supposed to figure that out!?”
So if he hadn’t sat down at the negotiation table—no. Even if he had, if he hadn’t chosen Transmission, this was an ability that wouldn’t have shown its worth until after the ending? He’d nearly gone the whole way to the ending unable to use a Unique Story he’d suffered to earn. The kind of realization that made the back of Bihyung’s neck seize on its own.
‘…Right. Now that I know, I can put it to better use.’
If a story piled up with every step he took, he would have to walk a little carefully. One wrong move, and he might leave behind a Transmission of evil, or of demons.
‘…From here on, the performance rewards of the main story get replaced as fertilizer for my Transmission, don’t they?’
Stack the effect of The One Who Begins on top of that, and he could pull several times ahead of everyone else. After the ending—no. The true “main story,” as imagined by the ones who had called him into this world. He had to be ready for that.
‘…No. It hasn’t happened yet. For now I should focus on the story I actually know.’
Fretting over a future that might still be years away could get him burned by the trouble sitting right in front of him. Bihyung settled his heart and stepped out of the training room.
“Thanks, Mina. Looking after me must’ve been rough.”
“Mm. Nothing happened.”
Huh? Why did a thank-you for nursing him come back like that?
‘…What?’
Why were Mina’s eyes, fixed on him, gleaming with that same bewitching light as when she had unleashed a beauty that could topple kingdoms? A crisis he couldn’t name crawled over Bihyung, and he shuddered. At this rate, he had better go sleep in the dorm.
Leaving Mina behind as she smacked her lips in some inexplicable regret, Bihyung returned to his dorm. On the way a dorm supervisor caught him and asked whether he was all right, which told him just how frantically Mina must have run around spreading the rumor.
‘She was that worried, I suppose.’
Swallowing a hollow laugh, Bihyung gave the supervisor a suitable nod and went into the room he’d been assigned. His own room, for the first time in three days. Feeling a comfort he couldn’t quite name, he released every member of the Hundred Ghosts from his shadow.
“Phew! Eldest! You’re all better now, aren’t you, sir!?”
“Boss. You collapsed so suddenly—we were startled.”
Eodugi and Dueogi came forward first with the questions, and behind Dueogi the three dokkaebi watched him with worry plain on their faces.
“I’m a little better. Seems it was the backlash from my technique.”
Bihyung laughed brightly at Dueogi.
“It’s not your fault, so there’s no need to mope.”
“…Understood.”
Dueogi seemed to think Bihyung had collapsed because he had worn him. There was backlash from that, certainly—
‘Next to the collision of yin and yang, it’s a scratch.’
If the recoil from yin and yang crashing together was like being hit by a dump truck, Dueogi was closer to getting clipped by an oncoming bicycle. Both would hurt, admittedly.
“Anyway, I’m planning to recuperate for a while and tend the internal injury.”
At that, Dueogi nodded along.
“A wise decision. A superior must be healthy if those beneath him are to sleep with their legs stretched out. As master of the Hundred Ghosts, please keep that in mind.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m learning so much.”
He gave Dueogi’s hair a casual ruffle—the dokkaebi wore a child’s form—and stepped into the training room. Dueogi gaped in horror.
“Did you not just say you were going to rest!?”
“The whole point of recuperating is to treat the internal injury, so doesn’t this count as resting?”
“Turning more energy through the channels doesn’t make everything better. When you rest, you have to actually rest—that’s how the channels get their spring back, and the internal injury heals faster on its own… Are you even listening?”
Dueogi’s worried counsel went unheeded. Bihyung sat down cross-legged. Lending an ear to a subordinate’s loyal advice was a boss’s virtue, but there was something he had to confirm right now.
‘The lower dantian. The yokai dantian.’
This Unique Story had sprouted thanks to the corporeal souls lodged in the yokai dantian. Then, one way or another, Imae Mangnyang had to be tied to it.
‘It’s my body. I need to understand it.’
Given the temper of that yokai nature, it might well decide an internal injury was the perfect opening. It had already tried to take his body once, hadn’t it? Better to be ready.
“So just for a moment. I’m only going in to observe.”
With that he folded his legs and gathered his awareness into the lower dantian. Within the flow of the Celestial Sight Canon, he saw that space become a dark night sky, and in it, clumps of pale light drifted like fireflies. Nothing else stood out. The yokai nature was quiet, and the energy moving around it was still.
‘Tsk. This isn’t like him. Why’s he acting like this?’
Thinking back, something had been off ever since the negotiation table. His presence had surged all on its own, and he had shown a look that was either cowed or impatient.
‘How to put it. Maybe he has something urgent of his own.’
It had been the same before, when the thing had tried to seize the initiative inside the library monster’s domain—hurried, and carrying a goal that seemed fixed. Which was why this present stillness felt to Bihyung like the calm before a storm.
‘Whatever it is, I’m not handing over the initiative.’
Whoosh—! Within the dantian’s landscape, an eerie wind seemed to rise. It felt as if the presence he knew had finally come back, and Bihyung smiled faintly.
“Well then… you’re the new friends who’ve come to live in my body, aren’t you?”
He drew his attention off the quiet yokai nature and looked at the lights of the corporeal souls that had newly taken up residence. Energy floating gently, like fireflies. The will and spirit one might have called the children’s souls had departed; only the energy remained.
“Too warm to call yin.”
And yet too cool to judge as yang. Bihyung sent spiritual power into the flames of the corporeal souls.
A low hum. They rang with warmth and shone a bright vermilion.
‘Now with yin.’
When he raised yokai power, the cool sensation amplified, and a blue light began to frost over them.
‘I see. Energy that belongs to neither side.’
And yet, whether he sent yang or yin, it took on the influence of whichever he gave. The moment he defined that energy—
“Hup.”
—he sent it up into the sky engraved within his dantian.
“Like stars.”
Beautiful stars, shining in that dark night sky. The hour was a night thick with yin, so a cool sensation reached him; but when he raised spiritual power and held the yang that turned night to day, the warmth multiplied.
‘Through these energies, the efficiency of the power I hold goes up.’
Bihyung inscribed that image into the Colorless Peach Blossom that had built his lower dantian. Drawing yang in that state and circulating it through his flesh, a denser activation than before cradled his channels. The yin was the same.
‘This… if I do it right, I could repair the internal injury within three days?’
The stars he had newly gained. Putting them fully to use, Bihyung threw himself into his training. And so three days passed.
“Nnngh…!”
Loosening legs gone stiff over three days, Bihyung rose and stretched long.
Crack!
“Oof. Look how locked up I am.”
What kind of mindset did it even take to do closed-door training? In the game there had been exorcists who sat in meditation for a year, two years, until enlightenment came.
“It is not a method suited to yokai.”
At the sound of Dueogi’s voice, Bihyung turned his head. The boy had followed his example, sitting cross-legged and settling his energy. When their eyes met, a flicker of shock passed through him.
“Yokai, by nature, place greater weight on activity. That is how one blurs the boundary between the yokai dantian and the flesh, and stirs them further awake.”
“I see.”
“To put it another way, Boss, you are different from ordinary yokai. You hold both yang and yin, and you command them as you please.”
“Is that because I’m a half-yokai?”
“What are you saying…”
Dueogi shook his head as if he couldn’t believe his ears.
“If every half-yokai in the world were like that, this world would already be ruled by half-yokai.”
In truth they were awkward figures who belonged nowhere at all. Which was why the boss before his eyes was astonishing.
“To have fully recovered an internal injury already—not even yokai with famous names could match that speed.”
“I got lucky. It’s thanks to what I picked up this time. I even wondered whether I should use the panacea, that’s how bad it was.”
He meant it. An internal injury was classified as a status ailment, too. Eat the panacea, and he could deal with it somehow.
‘On top of that, I could gain a little resistance to internal injury.’
You could call it a special property that lingered in the channels: when an internal injury was about to set in, the channels hardened and protected him. He had considered it at first, then stopped once he saw his body improving by the hour.
‘If my flesh is this exceptional, I’d rather gain something else.’
More than anything, this was the first time he had taken an internal injury, and it had come from his own attack.
‘Even if I take internal injuries from here on, they’ll probably all be from my own attacks.’
The crossing of yin and yang was a power no mere resistance could handle. If the tier of that resistance rose, it might be a different story—but who had time to wait for that?
‘And if I keep taking injuries of this degree, the resistance will probably surface on its own soon enough.’
It seemed like something he could acquire later on his own, so why spend a panacea he could only take once? And so Bihyung climbed out of the internal injury by himself.
“Then will you be attending class starting tomorrow?”
“I should. There’s something I need to do first, though.”
“Something you need to do…?”
“The warehouse.”
Bihyung summoned the Dokkaebi Bat and pulled out everything stored inside it.
“It’s the last chance, so I’m going to shake the place out completely.”
Time to let the bat eat its fill.
‘And this is the last chance.’
The pillar he had failed to find before. This time, he was going to find that thing no matter what.