The Library Committee Chair (4)
The library anomaly.
An anomaly the Academy had tamed—and, used the right way, a tree that gave without end. A veteran's way of seeing it, of course. If the library anomaly had a mind of its own, the remark would have drawn tears of blood.
It was a dangerous thing, originally.
Of every anomaly seeded through the Academy, this one was, without question, the most dangerous. A fixed order. A prescribed arrangement. Above all, the mere act of drawing a book—and through nothing more than that, its domain had grown exponentially stronger. A whole colony of forbidden-book anomalies was not something an ordinary exorcist of the Middle Ranks could easily put down, nor even one who had only just set a foot on the lowest rung of the High Ranks.
So what.
Turn the same fact around, though, and it meant that so long as you kept those rules, the thing was a meal. Look at it even now. By grafting on the attribute of dream, it was letting him live another person's past in sharp, immediate detail.
Well, now. Who needed VR?
Anyway. Whose body is this?
Bihyung looked down at his hands. He had expected to wake in the chair's body, or else to watch her past from a third person's remove. The body he came to in was male, and young. His senses were so perfectly intact that, for a moment, he even doubted this was a dream at all.
Just then, the brush beside him gave a small rustle.
What burst out of it was—
...the chair?
A young version of the committee chair. Unlike now, she wore no glasses, and the curve of her eyes was subtly different. Even so, for some reason, that face was strangely familiar. Not awkward in the least.
Familiar? I know this face?
While Bihyung was caught on that question—
"Eunyu. I told you not to leave your big sister's side."
The chair said it as she caught his hand. The grip was weak, as a child's ought to be, and yet a will ran through it, as if she meant never to let go again.
Bihyung looked at her without a word, then looked again at the little girl before his eyes. His mouth opened of its own accord.
"Okay. Noona."
"Then let's go. Today we're going all the way to the entrance of that hill we couldn't see last time."
"But... isn't that too dangerous? Even the family elders said not to go there."
"...Did they? Hmm. Then what do we do... Eek! Hide."
The chair ducked urgently into the brush, and Bihyung slipped in after her.
Thud.
—Thud.
The footsteps of whoever had been patrolling nearby grew distant.
Thump. Thump.
Even so, the chair's small heart showed no sign of growing brave.
"It's all right. They're gone now."
Only after she heard her little brother say so did the chair let out a sigh of relief.
"Whew. If they catch us still awake at this hour, Mom and Dad will scold us, won't they?"
"You'll get scolded, and you'll catch a beating, too."
"But going back in is boring... So let's wander around for exactly one more hour, and then we'll sleep."
...?
In that instant, Bihyung's will and the little brother's fused into one.
No—how did that conclusion follow?
"Noona?"
"Let's go, Eunyu. This time you can't let go of Noona's hand, all right?"
And so the young chair ran and played through one brief hour of the past.
"Mmh... over there, it's fun..."
The hour was deep into the night, edging toward dawn. Bihyung turned to look at the chair, sunk fast asleep and mumbling.
Free at last.
The words named two things. One was being dragged about at the chair's heels. The other—
From this body's control.
Senses, will, mind: all of them were plainly his. And yet, strangely, whenever he was close to the chair, his thoughts never made it into his actions. Most likely, the movements stored in the memory of the child called Eunyu took precedence. Only once both of them had fallen asleep did Bihyung gain the chance to move entirely by his own will.
Creeeak...
He eased the door open and began to wander the house that seemed to be the chair's family estate.
A fine house.
The style resembled a traditional hanok, but the scale stood out—the sort of size only the great ministers of old would have lived in. More than that, there were carefully tended gardens everywhere, an artificial lake, even the gloss on the scales of the carp swimming in it. This was no poor household.
At this level, they'd sit among the upper families.
Not a true great house. Those possessed history and tradition, and power to match them; it was simplest to say that a single residence of such a family was a palace in its own right.
But has a family like this ever appeared?
Bihyung called up the layouts, the structures, and the crests of the countless families he had met while playing Reader's Chronicle.
When I saw it earlier, this family's crest was definitely a solar eclipse.
More precisely, the middle of an eclipse—the sun half-hidden, the mark drowned in dark.
...There isn't one. No family bears a crest like this.
And in Reader's Chronicle, no family used such a mark. He did not remember every house, of course, but he remembered every one that could be called upper-tier. Judging by this family's foundation alone, it seemed it ought to belong among them.
And if it doesn't...
Then they were hiding their strength on purpose.
...Tsk. What a genuine pain.
Bihyung clicked his tongue low and moved all the faster. First, the outer grounds. It was not the inner grounds, where the family's own people stayed; if anything, it was a space used by the servants, who outnumbered the blood kin, and so it sprawled. He vaulted the garden wall and swept the surroundings at speed, and something began to catch his eye.
That?
A strange statue. Bat wings sprouted from it, and the body was that of a naked person. And yet, strangely, it was sexless.
No genitals at all.
And above all, the head looked a little wrong.
A goat?
Bihyung knew this shape, if only a little.
This is just... a demon, isn't it?
He had never seen such a being in Reader's Chronicle, but it was a subject he had often run across in the modern world. Things that wagged sly tongues at people, corrupted them, and in the end took their souls. That was a demon.
A demon statue on a family estate?
Stranger still.
I can smell it.
The coppery stench of whatever had befallen the chair's family—and her.
Let's look a little closer.
The moment he drew near the statue, having resolved as much—
"Haaahm. Tsk. What kind of patrol is this, in the middle of the night?"
"They pay a lot, though, don't they? Money's the master. When they tell you to do something, you do it without complaining."
Dry twigs snapped underfoot, and voices came with them. Bihyung climbed a tree at once. The guards' level, as his senses read it, was 1st Rank even if he was generous. Their spiritual sense would be pathetic. Hold his breath, and they would never find him. Hidden in the thick leaves, he looked down.
A pair of guards, working as one team, was coming this way. Then—
"Oh."
They stopped short and came to a halt before the demon statue he had found so uncanny. And would you believe what they said?
"Whoa. No matter when I look at it, that statue really does make you feel reverent."
"An angel statue, wasn't it? I heard they had it brought over from Europe because of the madam's taste."
"Right? Something about looking at it, and even I start feeling reverent."
"But why stick a statue like this off in a corner? It'd be better in the middle of the garden, where people could actually see it."
"How would we know what's in the family head's heart, or the madam's? And they say treasure's meant to be hidden, don't they? Maybe it's that."
"You think so?"
They snickered among themselves and went off on patrol again.
"......"
The place they left behind.
High in the tree, a pair of ghost-flames kindled, burning with a searing cold.
"......"
Bihyung crossed the wall of the outer grounds at once and stepped back into the inner grounds, making straight for the houses where the blood kin would be living.
The guards saw that as an angel statue.
He did not. He rubbed his eyes and looked again, and it was still a demon. Which meant there was a separate condition under which that shape became visible.
And for the most part, conditions like that are shared through the blood.
Or else only those chosen by the one who had hidden the shape could recognize it. It was one of the tricks that appeared, very occasionally, in Reader's Chronicle.
Keeping that in mind, Bihyung entered the house. A dim corridor. A scene much like the one when he had first opened his eyes. Within it, he began to walk in the exact opposite direction from the room where the chair would be sleeping.
The space feels hazy.
It warped. It bled together. It felt like looking upon the library anomaly's end, back when he had obtained the Colorless Painting. But this was not the library anomaly's doing. Simply, because dream was at work, this world was a place built upon the chair's memory.
And so Bihyung advanced with care through the warped scenery. At the end of it—
"......"
A single room with its lights burning in the dead of night, and from within, voices, as if people were talking. Also—
...Strong.
A presence so powerful that the fine hairs rose along his skin.
This far is enough.
He had searched the house thoroughly. Without lingering, Bihyung turned and went back to the room.
A demon statue visible only to the blood kin. The one space that shows clear inside a warped landscape.
And a conversation.
The chair has been to that place.
And in the course of it, her mind would not have been whole. Otherwise there was no reason the path leading there would be warped, while that room alone showed clear.
But nothing definite has happened yet. What on earth happened to her?
With that question turning over in him, Bihyung spent the night with his eyes open.
Morning came the next day. And before him—
"Eunyu. Eunha. Come say hello. This is the teacher who will be instructing you from now on."
A man who was plainly a foreigner removed his fedora and bowed at the waist. The carriage was gentlemanly, the sort one saw in films.
"Haha. A pleasure to meet you. Please understand, if only a little, should my Korean prove clumsy."
"Wow! Teacher! Then what are we going to learn?!"
The chair—no. The girl who bore the name Eunha practically bounced at the sight of him.
Bihyung, by contrast—
...This man.
—was busy hiding the tremor in his eyes.
The one who was speaking in the lit room last night.
He had come face to face with the owner of that overwhelming presence.