The Library Committee Chair (5)
Voice. Spirit. The resonance of a presence.
All of it told him that the foreigner before his eyes was the same being who had stood in that lit room the night before.
Dangerous. He felt it on instinct. The man in front of him was no weakling who would ever fall short of a professor. Then is this the one who means the Chair harm? Possibility after possibility rose in his mind and sank again, until only a single conclusion remained. She said she'd been kidnapped, didn't she? There's a good chance that was a play the clan staged itself.
A demon statue. A clan crest he had no way of placing. And last of all, this suspicious foreigner, holding a conversation in the inner quarters of the house. Taken together, it was all too likely that they had staged the kidnapping and were now moving to carry out whatever plan came next.
The problem was that he could not involve himself in that matter. Not yet. This world is a dream built from the Chair's memories. It was not reality, and he had not returned to the past. These were only things that lived inside a memory; stepping into them would not change the world outside. So Bihyung quietly gave his body over to the actions of the child called Eunyu. Before anything else, he had to see what had been done to them. Somewhere in this memory there's a way to undo the curse, or something close to it. I only have to find that.
While he turned it over, the Chair was already listening, eyes bright, to the foreign teacher spinning tales of another country.
"So you're from Romania, mister?"
"Nope. Romanian, yes. A mister, no. I'm still a very young man in my twenties..."
"Mister."
"Oppa."
"Mister."
"...Call me whatever you like."
Having won the little war of wills, the Chair turned and smiled with fearless pride. She split her index and middle fingers into a V, and the gesture was startlingly lively. So she'd had a side like that, once. It was nothing like the easy composure she carried now.
Bihyung watched her for a moment, then took one step forward. Not by his will. By Eunyu's.
"Teacher. So what are we going to learn?"
The foreign teacher answered the tilted-head question with a soft smile.
"Mm. If I could, I'd like to teach you magic. But the two of you already seem to have awakened your attributes as children of an exorcist clan. I'll help you feel them more clearly, and understand them better."
"How?"
"For example, like this."
Snap!
He flicked his fingers, and a song of energy began to spread of its own accord through the air around them. At their feet a magic circle took shape, a pentagram inscribed within it, kin to an Eastern formula and yet not quite the same. Where the East has its ritual arts, the West has magic: spells bound to the four great attributes of fire, water, wind, and earth, a little apart from the Five Elements, and the commanding of spirits drawn out of the myriad beings of creation. To govern such magic, the circle matters most of all. Count the rings coiled inside it, and you know at once what rank of magic has been used.
One, two, three... five?
Fifth Rank. Bihyung's gaze went heavy in an instant. He's hiding what he is. He held that fact in mind without letting it go, and at the same time he turned his attention to the sensation rising through him now.
Wind blew from somewhere inside the body. A ticklish flame stirred through his insides. After it came the firmness of earth, and its dry, crumbling looseness, and then the moist, flowing sense of water, mingling along the blood. The four great attributes of magic. They looked a great deal like the Five Greats, the foundation of sorcery.
...Hm? The thought offered him an experience that was slight, and yet not the same as before. This... if I handle it right, I could raise my proficiency in the Five Greats. He fixed the sensation carefully in memory. He had come looking for a thread in the Chair's trouble, and somehow it felt as if he were finding a way to grow himself instead.
Anyway.
He bent a little more of his focus on the structure of the magic. A pentagram, and a clutter of formulas written inside it. He could not read their meaning, but from the way the energy poured outward from that point, he could read the working. Amplification of energy. A little accumulation inside the body. And a sharpening of the senses? Taken on its own, it wasn't bad. Thought of as an education for prodigies, it was more than enough.
Except— That bastard definitely said he'd help us feel energy more clearly. Didn't he? The trouble was the slip in the wording. Sharpening the senses does look like he's trying to keep his word. But accumulation inside the body—how was he going to explain that? He said he'd only help us feel it. So why does storing it carry more of the weight?
He glanced sidelong at the Chair. It was not only him. Little by little, energy was seeping into her as well, taking root in the blood. Why do a thing like this? The question flashed and was gone. The answer did not take long.
A sacrifice.
Yes. Just like the children who had died under Yu Gyeongsu's hand. The Chair's fate had been fixed that way before she was ever born into the world. And they call themselves parents...! Could they really not know that this foreigner was working a trick like this? Bihyung's answer was no. A clan that sits on the Association's map of power couldn't pull something like this while the clan head was wide awake and watching. Which meant the whole house was in on it.
......
By the time his eyes had gone cold, the day's lesson was over.
"Now then, young lady. Young master. This way, if you please."
At the maid's gesture, the Chair and Bihyung were led back to the room. It felt like confinement. Like raising a bird by shutting it in a cage. And of course, the ones inside the cage were them. Hmph.
He sat on the edge of the bed, turning it over, and the Chair came to his side and slowly stroked his hair.
"Eunyu. Is something wrong?"
"...Huh? It's nothing."
"But you look gloomy."
Bihyung touched his face on reflex, then nodded. He would admit it. Gloomy was the right word. ...Because I know the Chair of the future. He knew the girl who would become both library committee chair and disciplinary committee chair of the Academy. He knew the kindness of the senior who had helped him. And he knew the end of her, after she became a villain. Looking at the scene that could only be called the beginning of all of it, he could not hide the weight in his chest. Honestly... why does it always have to be something like this around me. Or maybe he was the one gathering chains of cause like this, one after another.
He scratched his head and put on a loose, careless grin.
"Ehehe! I just wasn't doing as well as you, Noona. Guess I got sulky."
"...Yeah? Ahem! Well, of course. I'm your noona!"
The young Chair believed him without a scrap of doubt. She set her hands on her hips at once, nose in the air, and the sight was unexpectedly cute. Bihyung looked at that naive little child, who had no idea what was about to happen to her, and offered a vow she would never hear.
...I promise you, Chair. He would find out exactly what had been done to her, and he would drag her free of that damned fate.
From morning through midday, and on past a simple meal until evening, they took lessons with the foreign magic teacher.
"Excellent. Young Master Eunyu, you sense energy quickly. At this rate, it should be fine to move you to the next stage in four months."
At those words, Bihyung's eyes flashed. This world is ten years and four months before the present. Four months, in other words, before the Chair was kidnapped. And the magic teacher had put his finger on exactly that span of time. Something was going to happen. Bihyung gave no sign that he knew it. He went on playing the part of an innocent child.
The training continued. The heart of it was sensing energy inside the magic circle—no. Accumulating it. When that was done, the attendants seized them at once, saw them through their baths, and shut them into the room until it might as well have been a cell. The two of them played, and slept, and when the full moon came into its own in the night sky, Bihyung rose in secret from his place.
First, the Chair's energy. He took her wrist and stirred the power that had gathered of late. This world was the Chair's memory, given the shape of a dream. Neither the yokai power nor the spiritual power built up by his real self could be used here. It's fine. I planted a safeguard. Holding that in mind, he slowly absorbed the energy accumulating in her body. This was precisely why the magic teacher had been pleased with his progress, and not with hers. Because until now, before any of the energy in the Chair's body could take root, I siphoned all of it off.
And so Bihyung resolved to stand in as her substitute. I'll go through it in her place, and find out what happens. From that, he meant to tear out the root of whatever had taken hold in her body. ...I added a few more settings to this world, so not much time should have passed outside.
That was thanks to the anomaly's domain, and to the forbidden book he himself had added: The Connectivity of Past, Present, and Future. At a glance, the book seemed to say that past and future were joined end to end. In truth, it was a forbidden book that shut its reader inside a space where time had stopped. If past and future were connected, then shouldn't time be unable to flow between them at all? It was the sort of anomaly that offered up that question and let it collapse the mind. An absurd piece of sophistry—and yet, used the right way, it became a very useful move. Just as it had now.
The other book is Lucid Dream. Through that, if only for a moment, I can intervene in the dream by my own will. Once he had enough, he would call in his true presence, break this space, and get out.
Four months.
Bihyung's eyes sank low, and he kept watch through the night.
And so four months passed.
A dim space. No—it was as if her sight itself, and every sense with it, had been steeped in dark. In a featureless void where nothing existed, the Chair, Eunha, opened her eyes.
...What? She was certain she had entered the forbidden book's domain with her junior. And after I called up the library anomaly...
In that instant, strange scenes began to open inside her head. Not something seen with the eyes. More like perceiving a world with the mind alone. Within it, her childhood self was searching the garden with her younger sibling.
...Eunyu.
Eunha's pupils shook hard. The moment she saw that face, she remembered that such a person had existed. Why had she forgotten someone that important until now? ...Ah. No. She had not forgotten. She had been made to forget. Like a nightmare that returned every night, he had been a shadow: something that existed, and yet never rose to the surface. But the moment you recognize a shadow, you understand that it has been in the same place every single day.
Like a dam whose banks have burst, the memories forced out of her began to pour back in. Eunyu. The clan... and... magic. So many things. The strange statue that had stood in the house. The day she had gathered fallen leaves and laid a blanket over it. She remembered all of it.
Then time moved through the scene in her mind. The day she was kidnapped. And—