The Role (3)
Splash.
—Squelch.
The moment he set foot in the Cursed Sea, what greeted Bihyung was an ocean he could not quite decide was water or slime. It was the stretch where the beach of the island ahead met the surf, and he scowled down at the mucus sucking at his shoes.
"What is this stuff?"
It was exactly like looking at one of those polluted seas he had seen before. It stank a little, and worse, the filth creeping stickily up his shoes made his skin crawl. If he had followed his heart, he would have flared his presence to the fullest and shaken the whole mess off—but do that, and he would wreck the kids' exam.
He grit his teeth, circulated his energy, and sheathed his shoes and body in it. The slime that had been clinging to him sloughed away. Mina seemed to handle it the same way he had—no. She was walking on the water?
What is that, now.
That was stranger than the sea itself. When Bihyung went over and asked, she told him that if you hauled the weight of your whole body upward with spiritual power and raised something like suction beneath your feet, that was all it took.
"Oh."
He copied her on the spot, and before he knew it he was walking on the water too.
Peerless Master plus Mimicry... this combo is straight-up cheating, isn't it?
Mimicry let you understand another person's technique and reproduce it. On the surface the explanation sounded like nothing much, but the word understand was what mattered.
How complete the Mimicry comes out depends on how well you've understood it.
Take Professor Shinhoo's Blossom Grafting from before. Among the cluster of arts folded inside it, hadn't he understood only the Scripture of Solitary Dominion, and been able to use only that? No matter how tremendous a technique was, if your understanding fell short, you could not mimic its true power. The blood art itself was still low-grade, besides.
Which is why getting to share the effects of Peerless Master—the one tied to talent—is broken.
This, too, was only possible because he and Mina had become one body. Bihyung nodded, thoroughly satisfied, and Mina, who had somehow caught every bit of it, flushed red all the way to her earlobes.
Anyway!
Seen from atop the water, the Cursed Sea was quite a sight.
"An island?"
For some reason an uninhabited island reared up dead-center in the waters—mountains, palm trees, cadets romping along the beach, and chasing after them a crab the size of a house. Er... hmm. They weren't playing, were they?
It's survival.
And here he had thought they had stumbled on a place like this and gotten briefly excited, exam or no exam.
Anyway, why is that crab so huge?
House-sized described only the body. The claws looked hard enough to crush a decent boulder in a single snap. Still—
They look thrown for a second, but they'll find a way soon enough.
And they did. Several cadets brought out Earth Art, seized the beach sand, and stopped the crab cold. In the same breath they poured Fire Art into it without pause, until the house-sized crab was a grilled crab that would make your mouth water.
Bihyung looked mildly startled. Because their level was impressive? No.
They're eating it.
He was simply amazed, watching the kids tear their hunting spoils apart and start divvying them up, one piece and then another. Adaptability like that really was the GOAT.
Did they say that for two weeks, aside from drinking water, they wouldn't be issued a single necessity?
Self-sufficiency. To learn how exorcists trapped inside a domain actually felt, from this moment on they had to survive.
Nothing for me to do right away, then.
He lifted his head. Blue sky. Which meant it was not yet night.
They said we play the anomaly's role at night.
So this was standby—time for the cadets to adapt to the island and make the bare minimum of preparations. Bihyung watched them a moment longer, then turned away.
"Hm? You're not gonna watch anymore?"
At Mina's question, he shrugged.
"Watch any longer and I think I'd start feeling guilty."
"...Ah."
Mina seemed to understand. She smiled bitterly and followed after him, and well she might.
"We're heading back."
He triggered the formation built into the inside of the robe. His vision inverted, and a space like a hotel suite revealed itself, and inside it a spread worthy of a buffet.
"...Yeah. Figures. Looking at this, I do feel a little guilty."
But in that very instant, a professor came toward them, offering comfort as he came.
"This, too, is proof of how outstanding you are. If some other kid had reached what you two have, they'd be the one standing here. Am I wrong?"
As always, it was their homeroom professor. For a breath, neither of them said a word. Bihyung, taking in the sight of him, froze. So this was what it felt like to lose the power of speech.
"...What is that look?"
"Hm? What's wrong with it?"
"A Hawaiian shirt and shorts... and why the sunglasses? Are you here on vacation?"
A chicken drumstick in one hand, and in the other—that couldn't be alcohol, could it? Bihyung fixed the thing in the opposite hand with open suspicion, and Shinhoo grinned and held it out.
"Well? Want a glass? Booze, as they say, is something you're supposed to learn from an adult."
"...It is alcohol. Are you sure this is all right?"
"And why the hell wouldn't it be? Even if I'm plastered, the whole cadet corps could dogpile me and still pin me down. That's what I'm telling you!"
He said it with considerable pride, but Bihyung still shook his head.
"We're in the middle of an exam. What if something happens?"
Shinhoo could hear the worry for the cadets in that voice. Aside from Salutatorian Hwang Mina and Committee Chair Eunha, the boy still did not seem to have opened his heart—and yet his nature was warm in a way he could not hide. The corner of Shinhoo's mouth drew a lazy arc.
"You think I'm drinking because I want to? This is something I've got no choice but to drink, on account of the dungeon."
"Because of the dungeon?"
"Yeah. The dungeon I have to enter today has a sensory-transfer formation hung on it. Get me dead drunk, and it passes that straight on to the cadets."
Anomaly domains came in every shape. Among them, the ones that threw the senses into disorder were too many to count.
"We cooked it up to train them for that, you brat."
With that, Shinhoo tipped the liquor back in one long pull, then slid the drumstick in his hand straight into Bihyung's.
"Ghk. Agh, bitter. Bitter as hell."
He shook the glass empty and turned to Bihyung.
"You've got the look of someone with a question. What is it?"
Bihyung asked the thing he had been wondering at once.
"Didn't you say this place was the Cursed Sea?"
"Hm? And?"
"Then why is there an uninhabited island out here?"
The Cursed Sea. It had appeared once in the game as well.
When I saw it then, there definitely wasn't anything like an island.
Just the sea. No—the Heart-Sea. Its origin was the Bermuda Triangle. Everyone who entered those waters was issued an oxygen tank, the most basic of supplies, at the start, and the moment it ran dry they were reduced to fodder for the anomalies.
There were sunken airships and boats all over the place. You could scavenge fortune and oxygen from them.
That was exactly why the island had made him suspicious, so he had asked what was going on. As he remembered it, the Cursed Sea was an anomaly that had shown itself in this world some time ago, and he judged it safe enough to talk as if he knew a thing or two. And the professor's answer was this.
"The island? The Association President made that one for us."
"...Pardon?"
A single person had made an artificial island.
"Hauled the seafloor up with Earth Art, packed the bedrock with Metal Art, then shaped the scenery with Wood Art and Water Art. And just like that, one island."
The casual reply was absurd, and yet some part of him thought, well, of course. Because it was the Association President.
The old hands rate him the strongest of humankind.
In the setting, when Korea had nearly been destroyed by the anomaly known as the Great Calamity, he had appeared and saved the country. He was also a figure wrapped in veils, one who had never once appeared in the game.
The only way you could tell he existed in the game was the items tagged with the epithet Made by the Association President.
Ordinarily, if your proficiency fell short when you made something, the result came out a grade below your own rank. And yet everything the Association President made was 9th Rank, every last one. Which meant his proficiency at making things was just as high.
How is that even possible?
Spellcraft, the forging of magical arms, even pill refinement—all of them judged 9th Rank. Even yokai with obscenely long lives probably could not manage that.
Even Dueok's technical proficiency and his progress in growth are all over the place, depending on the art.
But no matter how he turned it over, no answer came to him now. And it was not a problem he needed to worry about at the moment, either.
It's not like I'm meeting the Association President anytime soon.
For a while he would be living a life with no ties to the Association. Getting properly entangled with them would be... around third year, probably.
...By then, at least grow enough to protect my own hide.
The goal was High Rank. Anyone who heard it would snort, but Bihyung was confident.
Melt down all of the Lore of the Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils, master the Eight Trigrams, then achieve Divine Weapon-Body Unity.
That alone would be more than enough to surpass Middle Rank.
Divine Weapon-Body Unity needs the body. The Lore of the Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils needs mental power... and the Eight Trigrams, in the end, are something that happens inside the body, so do I need qi and blood tough enough to withstand the shock?
He knew one countermeasure where mental power was concerned. The Academy's valedictorian privilege: the right to request spirit elixirs he could use throughout the first semester. Precisely because, through them, he could train his mind.
Using that as a foundation, I can obtain another hidden piece... the Immovable Heart.
Then the conclusion was that he needed to pick up a few things related to the body.
Hmm.
The body, the body...
Hm?
In that moment, something came to mind. Something that existed in this very Cursed Sea.
Right... wasn't it the treasure sleeping in the pirate ship beneath that sea?
And the floor of that deep sea had, by the Association President's spellcraft, become the uninhabited island.
...Huh?
Then—
I can sit the exam and pick up a fortune while I'm at it. This is what they call killing two birds with one stone, isn't it?
A dark room. There were those who lit that place with nothing but a single candle. Every one of them was wrapped in a dark-crimson robe, faces shoved at the ground so they would not look upon one another.
At their center, the man who had been kneeling foremost drew a flask from his breast and set it beside the candle.
"We beseech Thee... we beseech Thee... Pray, descend, and set aright the false order of this world..."
No sooner had the man at the front spat out those words than every voice in the room latched onto the trailing syllables.
"We beseech Thee..."
"We beseech Thee..."
Those syllables soon became a single power and turned to spellcraft. The faces inside the robes went deathly pale. Their blood was vanishing. Yet as if such things were none of their concern, they offered up nothing but blind reverence.
...Clink.
At last, the moment the flask stirred slightly of its own accord, a mad laugh closer to rapture than mirth bloomed at the mouth of the man at the center.
"The revelation has come down. We go."
"O Bishop, whither shall we head?"
"The Cursed Sea. What we seek lies there, so it is given."
He declared it, pupils burning blood-red.
"As you command!"
And so an anomaly began to move toward the cursed domain.