The Library Committee Chair (6)
Four months passed.
The day the committee chair, Eunha, was meant to have been kidnapped was drawing near.
A full moon tonight.
The moon hung vast and bright, and the night was so hushed it was impossible to imagine that anything at all might happen. Even so, Bihyeong's face had gone hard.
Today.
The foreign magic teacher had said he would begin a new lesson tonight, at midnight. The later the hour, he claimed, the narrower one's sight became, and in such quiet there was no need to rely on hearing—so they could move on to the next stage of the lessons in touch and the sense of qi.
Bullshit. He had never heard bullshit quite like it.
If they've stored up that much energy and taught them to feel it, even a child who knew nothing could sense yin energy by now.
This very moment, though the body was Eunyu's, Bihyeong felt the chill of that sinister yin against his skin. And yet—no, precisely because of it—he stood before the door in silence, steadying his breath.
Beside him the young committee chair, Eunha, fidgeted with her fingers, then caught his hand with a smack.
"I-if you're scared, you can tell your big sister anytime!"
The two of them had often wandered the night garden, but this was the first time they were stepping out because the adults had called. Perhaps that was why her face was full of fear of the unfamiliar. Even then, she was worrying over her little brother's safety—over what he felt—and saying a thing like that.
She really didn't seem like a bad person.
A faint smile touched Bihyeong's lips. Seeing it, the committee chair's eyes went sharp and sulky.
"What. You don't trust your big sister?"
"...No. I trust you."
He understood her nature a little now, if only a little, and it made him want all the more to help her.
Someone like this is more than enough to trust with my back, someday.
So he would find a way. With nothing but that single resolve in him, another person's outline began to take shape before his eyes.
"Eunyu. Eunha. Come here."
A middle-aged man stood with his hands clasped behind his back, looking their way. What he wore was a modernized hanbok, cut with a curious hint of Western tailoring.
...The family head.
He knew it by instinct. This was the patriarch who had never once shown his face until now.
What kind of parent neglects their children like this?
No. It wasn't neglect. Locked away was the better word. The attitude of a man keeping beasts in a pen. There was no father's love in it—not even a scrap of affection. Could something like that truly be called a parent?
The orphanage director, who didn't share a drop of blood with me, was warmer than this.
The man who had taken him in after his parents abandoned him, back when he lived in the modern world. That one hadn't been a particularly good man either. Still, hadn't he at least taken in a boy who was about to freeze to death in the winter? On the strength of that alone, he was already halfway there.
In that moment the family head's eyes, turned their way, twitched. His mood had soured, if only a little.
Uh-oh.
Bihyeong hurriedly caught the committee chair's hand and drew her along until they stood before the family head.
"We greet the Family Head."
"W-we greet the Family Head."
Bihyeong set both hands at his middle and bowed neatly from the waist, and the committee chair followed. Only then did the family head's eyes ease, just a little.
"It seems you've learned the bare minimum of manners. Fortunate. You must not forget that propriety in what is about to come, either."
And he had the nerve to lecture anyone about propriety? The words surged all the way to Bihyeong's throat, but he swallowed them and shaped an awkward smile.
"Yes."
"Good. You look ready."
The moment he said it—
...It's coming.
Bihyeong knew that what he had been waiting for had arrived. The corridor warped, though they were still within the same house, and within that distortion only one room shone and held a clear form: the place where the committee chair had woken after she fainted. That was where they would be taken.
Fwing!
As if to prove it, a lash of finger-wind came flying in. The sense carved into his mind felt it and nearly made his body flinch, but he forced the reaction down.
Still—a little defense.
Even as he quietly drew his energy up, Bihyeong took the finger-wind in. His eyes sank, little by little, under the pull of sleep.
And then—
"...hnnh."
"Hnnh..."
Only the two of them breathing, even and intermittent, sounded in the corridor.
"It is done."
The family head looked down at them for a moment, then flicked a finger through the empty air.
They rose. The committee chair and Bihyeong floated gently off the floor. He regarded them with indifferent eyes and began to walk.
Step, and then the echo of a step. Down the corridor Bihyeong had seen before, along the path of which only a splinter remained in the committee chair's memory, he went deeper, into the hidden heart of that place.
Thud.
Entering a room, the family head immediately set the two children down on the floor. Before his eyes, the foreign teacher who had instructed Bihyeong and the committee chair until now was smiling a thin, soft smile.
"You've come. On an important day."
"Yes. Today, the 'wish' will be fulfilled."
Unlike when he had faced his children, the family head showed a clear, vivid emotion. The foreign teacher watched him a moment, then wiped the smile away.
"Our wish, you mean."
"Yes. A slip of the tongue. It will be the day our wish is fulfilled."
When the family head corrected himself, the foreigner found his smile again and looked down at Bihyeong and the committee chair, lying where they had fallen.
"The energy Eunyu carries was outside the expected range. At this level, she alone could cover what remains of the offering."
"A safeguard is necessary. Use Eunha as an offering as well."
"Haha. How utterly heartless. Then again, that's why you named the child Eunha, isn't it."
Suffering, bound to the meaning of being kept far away. Hardly a name one ought to give a child.
"You meant to make her an offering from the very beginning, didn't you."
Suffering: a life lived as an offering, or perhaps the pain of that single moment. And to keep her far away—in the end, wasn't that simply to offer her up and send her out of the house for good? The foreign teacher found this heartless family head rather amusing.
But then—
"They are nothing more than abandoned children we picked up. If the two of them prove of use to our house, the Yeollakgu—the House of Delight—is that not simply those children repaying a kindness?"
At the words of the family head's wife as she appeared, the foreign teacher finally burst out laughing.
"Hahaha! What thoroughly entertaining people you are!"
"Enough. Let us begin the work."
"Understood."
So saying, the foreign teacher stirred the pentagram he had laid upon the floor. At once the surroundings changed, just as that room had once been dyed in light in the dim of dawn.
Within it—
We're moving. Spatial teleportation? I heard that was famously difficult.
In that moment, Bihyeong was awake.
After the blaze of light vanished, silence came. At the same time, as if the colors themselves had been swapped, the world around them was steeped in darkness. Pitch black, all at once.
Within that black, Bihyeong kept his eyes shut and threw his senses wide. Insects skittered across the floor, and the touch against his cheek had the particular hardness of stone.
Cold. A cave that never sees the light?
The thought had barely formed when—
"Awaken."
With that word, he felt the family head's energy—all of it that had invaded the body—vanish at once.
"Mmm..."
The committee chair groaned, dragging a half-dreaming mind toward waking. Bihyeong matched her, rising unsteadily, as if dizzy. Three pairs of eyes looking straight down at them were unusually clear, even in the pitch-black cave.
"Eunyu."
At the family head's voice, Bihyeong swallowed dry without meaning to.
"...Yes."
"Have you heard what is to happen today?"
Here it was.
I've endured until now to learn what happened on this day.
Bihyeong steadied himself and put on the face of an innocent child.
"I heard we were having a lesson... Where are we?"
He let Eunyu's manner take him and glanced around. The foreign teacher began, with a kindly smile.
"I'm a foreigner, so I don't know the place-name well, but the Family Head calls it the Palace of Delight."
"The first step toward a paradise of pleasure, and the place where we shall enshrine Them. Of course it must be called a palace."
The family head's words followed, and they sharpened Bihyeong's mind.
The Palace of Delight... But who are these beings he honors as Them?
Not an anomaly, it seemed. If it were nothing more than an anomaly, the head of a house that had built its name as exorcists could never have used such honorifics. As if in answer to that doubt, the family head went on, his voice thick with fervor.
The foreign teacher, listening, laughed and stroked the heads of the trembling committee chair and Bihyeong.
"Difficult, isn't it? Why does this man insist on speaking so hard? I'll explain it simply."
As he smiled, his eyes seemed, just for an instant, to burn a bewitching red.
The Bokmajeon? What was that supposed to be? Something that never even appeared in the game. Which meant—a yokai.
Bihyeong's eyes flashed.
Whatever this Bokmajeon was, they had offered the committee chair and her little sister as sacrifices to drag it down into the world. And the result... failure? She was still alive, so it seemed that way. Even so, something must have gone wrong in the committee chair's body along the way. Forcing a yokai into living flesh. Of course the body would rebel.
A half-yokai, child of human and yokai, was something innate. This was the opposite—an attempt, after the fact, to pour yin into a human already brimming with yang. And into a child, at that. Madness. They had thrown away the last scrap of decency a person was meant to keep.
Then the curse was most likely the yokai's doing. And the change brought on by presence—had the yokai been pinned beneath mine? Either way, it was a boon. His very existence was the chance of making the committee chair well.
He knew enough. Any further, and all he would see was her suffering as an offering.
Bihyeong meant to smash this world before it went any further.
Lucid Dream
His original self, called forth.
A deep roar surged through him. All at once Bihyeong's body creaked, twisted, and began to change, and with the change came a presence that crushed everything around them.
"What!?"
"Have They already come!?"
The foreigner was shaken. The family head looked drunk on rapture. Neither of them knew that what was about to crash over them was a calamity.
Let's end this.
Bihyeong poured that will into giving his presence form, and he was a breath away from striking the true body of the library anomaly—
With that voice, everything stopped.