Putting a Cult to Rights
Choi Dugwak felt as if his mind were about to come apart.
That—that thing is really the same kind of human as me?
He had been startled the first time he saw Muwon, but he had never, in any true sense, accepted that figure as a god.
Fierce disbelief, they say, can turn into fierce faith. For a man more certain of God's absence than anyone alive, Muwon's performance as a deity simply did not take.
No. No. That's impossible.
And because it did not take, the shock that landed on Choi Dugwak was all the more crushing.
If there truly was no god, then what on earth was that? Was that the majesty a human being could actually possess?
He had appeared wreathed in five-colored clouds, strolled through empty air, and lifted a woman who believed in him onto a stairway of heaven. With a single word he had halted hundreds of people in full riot; with a single syllable of rebuke he had jolted their minds awake.
He has to be human. He can't actually be a god. But if he isn't a god, then what—!
In Choi Dugwak's head, thoughts about Muwon's existence kept slamming into one another. By any ordinary measure the man could not exist; he was a being so impossible that even understanding him was out of reach. And people, by nature, feel fear toward what they cannot understand.
"Ah... ahh...!"
A sound closer to a groan leaked from a body that could not so much as twitch a fingertip. Whether Muwon was man or god no longer mattered to him.
His whole frame began to shake.
The questions vanished from Choi Dugwak's heart, and terror rushed in to fill the space they left. Because he understood nothing, he felt every kind of fear he was capable of imagining.
Muwon gave a glance to everyone present — the shivering Choi Dugwak included — and spoke.
The words were not for Choi Dugwak alone. They were for everyone who faced him. Only five syllables, and the trembling in every body stopped.
As if heart had touched heart, they knew without being told that there was no hostility in him. It felt as though something had looked all the way down to the deepest place in the human spirit and soothed it there, and everyone went still with ease.
Realizing that only plunged Choi Dugwak into a greater terror.
He can even read a person's heart...?
And Muwon was not the sort of man to miss a thing like that.
A low hum rolled through the air.
An arm stretched toward Choi Dugwak as if of its own accord. Suddenly his body lifted, drifting, and came to rest in front of Muwon.
There was barely time to be stunned at a casual gesture that plucked a distant man out of the crowd and floated him through empty air before the next question made Choi Dugwak swallow hard.
"Do you know why I have come here?"
He didn't. But if he thought about the intent behind the question, he did. Muwon had appeared exactly as the god of the scriptures — so his purpose was surely the collapse of the order.
So he stayed silent. Gaejeon Cheonjingyo was Choi Dugwak's entire life, piled up over a lifetime.
It was a honey pot that rolled vast sums of money to his feet even if he sat still. If he answered Muwon's question here, that carefully tended honey pot would shatter.
Faced with a future so obvious, Choi Dugwak pretended not to know, pretended not to hear. If he just kept his mouth shut, he told himself, he could ride out today's crisis too.
"You, the cult leader — even if no one else knows, you who have lived off my name and my will ought to know."
Muwon's reaction was not what he expected.
A grinding pressure closed in from every side.
"Kh...?!"
A sudden force as if his whole body were being crushed made Choi Dugwak's eyes fly wide. He thought it was a trick of the mind, but something enormous was clearly bearing down on him.
It felt like countless hands seizing every inch of him and wringing. The pressure, which had been merely pressing, turned in a heartbeat into a force that meant to crush him until he burst, and Choi Dugwak ground his teeth.
This—this bastard. He really means to kill me...!
A mind that had fought legal battles more than once kicked into desperate motion. If he were murdered here, what crime could they pin on the man in front of him?
The answer was simple. Under the current laws of the Republic of Korea, it was legally impossible to punish the man before him for murder.
There's no CCTV, no recordings. If I die, the followers will be so dazzled by this guy they won't cooperate. And above all, no decisive evidence that he killed me will remain.
A murder investigation first distinguishes suicide from homicide, and in the case of homicide analyzes what weapon was used and how.
But the victim floats into the air and then, in empty space, suddenly bursts as if crushed to death?
Even if the prosecutors somehow dragged it to trial, the judge would tell them to stop talking nonsense and curse them out.
A perfect crime...!
They could put him on a suspect list by circumstantial suspicion, but they couldn't prove direct physical contact or the circumstances of the killing — so it was a perfect crime.
The modern justice system was not designed with crimes committed by supernatural means in mind.
If this continued, he would lose even his life.
I—I have no choice. I have to live first if there's going to be a next time!
In the terror that he might actually die, Choi Dugwak let everything go. He knew Muwon had just laid a trap, but knowing didn't stop him from stepping into it.
"L-Lord... s-spare me, I beg you...!"
Muwon's trap was simple.
He had called Choi Dugwak the cult leader and said he had lent him his name and his will. In other words, he had secured a kind of religious legitimacy.
A Cheonsin descended from heaven to punish a corrupt order led by a fallen cult leader. In the blink of an eye, Choi Dugwak, who had been master of the order, was driven out, and Muwon had taken his place.
"I... I was wrong about everything. I will confess every sin before you...!"
From that moment Choi Dugwak no longer resisted Muwon. Wrapped in the terror that Muwon might kill him on the spot, he faithfully confessed every one of his atrocities as demanded.
If he just survived, there would be any number of chances. Even the followers who had begun to show hostility might, perhaps, be sweet-talked back.
And even if not, hadn't he piled up wealth over decades? If he retired here and washed his hands of the business, he could live out his old age on a fortune and leave a huge sum to his son.
"I have confessed all my wrongs. Please, just my life...!"
After that coerced confession ended, a Choi Dugwak who looked suddenly much older begged for his life in earnest. The gazes pouring onto him from around him were sharp, but those gazes meant nothing to him now.
"You have laid your sins bare, so there is room for you to be remade."
At Muwon's words, Choi Dugwak's face brightened for an instant.
"As you wished, I will spare your life. If you are judged by the laws of the earth and pay the full price of your crimes... I will not pass a separate judgment upon you."
But at the addendum that followed at once, his face went stupid.
"What... what do you mean...?"
The Stun Acupoint — a single point struck, and consciousness goes out like a lamp.
Before he could even register the strangeness of a mind suddenly going dim—
"Did you not say with your own mouth that you wanted only your life spared?"
His eyes rolled back, and his mind sank into darkness.
"Very well. As you wished, I shall spare only your life."
First, the hardest part was done.
I swallowed that thought and looked around. Not that I really needed to look.
Yeah. This method's effectiveness is off the charts.
Several people were already stabbing the collapsed cult leader — the one I'd dropped with a strike to the Hunhyeol — with their Intent and their eyes.
Time to drop the god act.
I decided I no longer needed to play deity. Until now I'd acted like one to handle people brainwashed by a cult, but now that the cult leader had exposed his own atrocities and the order's various truths, everyone should have come back to their senses.
They would have realized on their own, without me pointing it out, that Cheonjingyo was a fraudulent cult, so it was right for me to bow out around here.
More than anything, if I keep playing god here, the picture that comes out is me seizing Cheonjingyo and running it myself.
That would be putting the cart before the horse.
I shuddered at the dizzying thought for a moment, then, just as I was about to slip away before the chaos settled—
"E-excuse me!"
A woman who, until a moment ago, had been a missionary of Gaejeon Cheonjingyo suddenly called out to me in a loud voice.
"...Yes? What is it?"
I opened my mouth in a low voice, back to my usual way of speaking. The woman whose shoulders flinched, and the hundreds of people around her, all looked at me.
Pupils rolling as if an earthquake had hit, lips twitching. Even so, taut cheeks and slightly tilted brows. A look that said they had something they wanted to know sat on the face of the woman who had stopped me, and on the faces of all the hundreds of people.
"Are you... really, truly a god?"
A person whose life has fallen into ruin because of faith cannot easily believe anyone. But this world is too harsh and too hard to live in without believing in something.
So they cling. If they have to believe in something, they would rather believe in the one who saved them.
Unfortunately, I had no intention of living up to their expectations.
"If you believe I am a god, I will become a god. If you believe I am a man, I will become a man."
Instead, I decided to leave a little teaching for those who would stand up again.
"Because faith has that kind of power."
So they would not believe in the wrong thing again. So they would know what they ought to believe.
"Before you go putting your faith in someone else, believe in yourselves."
In the end, the one who knows you best is you. Life is a road you have to take responsibility for and carve out yourself.
"Faith in others can sometimes be a support that keeps you from collapsing. But it can never be the central pillar."
With that, I, who had brought Cheonjingyo down, left the place.
I left the defenseless, unconscious cult leader in their hands. Even if they put their heads together and half-crippled him, as long as he lived to be thrown in prison, it wasn't something I needed to worry about.
Well, even if he's unlucky and dies, I did spare his life once. So I didn't lie.
Only after I had come down to a place with no one around did I look at the phone in my hand. Glancing at the screen that had been stuck to my chest, I couldn't help a hollow laugh at the chat blazing like fire.
"Well, I showed you about as much as I needed to, didn't I?"
I was glad to see their faces after so long, but the phone battery was starting to be a problem. And as I'd said, I'd shown them plenty.
The chat alone was flying at a speed even a decent streamer's dynamic vision couldn't keep up with.
"I'll cover the rest next time I go live. Or wait — maybe a lot of this will be on the morning news tomorrow?"
Huh. It really was. When did we pass ten thousand?
Going out to blow up a cult really did pull aggro like nothing else.
Still, looking at that reassuring five-digit viewer count, I was starting to feel like a proper big-league streamer.
I was wearing a faint smile at the noisy flood of chat when my finger drifted toward the end-stream button. The remaining battery had gone red and folded down into a single digit.
"That's all for today's stream."
Sorry, but not today. If the phone dies here, how am I supposed to catch the bus? I'd have to qinggong the whole way home.
"Trying to squeeze even this bean-sized battery dry... the code of the martial world really has hit rock bottom."
Do I trust chat? Yeah. You said it.
"Can't be helped. Then I'll leave you with one last teaching as well."
Not particularly. But looking at the situation, I couldn't think of an insight they needed more.
Anyway. This was a piece of understanding you really ought to have while you were alive.
"Ahem. Listen carefully, then."
I even cleared my throat to gather their attention. For a moment, even the blazing speed of the chat slowed a little.
I passed that insight to the viewers, and flicked the finger I'd been resting on the screen.
"See you next time. Snrk."
A laugh I couldn't quite hold in slipped out as the screen went black.
The broadcast has ended.
And that was how the long, eventful fifth stream came down.