A Genuine Windfall-1
The Ilbaekgukeondo was a stone from the underworld.
Send a hundred souls across to the other side, and a stone pops out right at the mouth of hell. How often could something like that happen?
No. Never.
Cho Eun-sun had raised hell trying to get her hands on one of those stones. And yet here in our village, they were turning up like common pebbles.
I held the Ilbaekgukeondo in my palm and asked No. 1. There had to be a reason he'd been keeping watch over this place. It couldn't just be that he liked the view. No. 1 was a powerful evil spirit, but unlike Abe, he couldn't cast curses or raise barriers — though he could tear one open, slip inside, and gobble up the spirits hiding in there like pickled fish in a jar.
And because he had roamed Manchuria in life, he remembered every path he'd ever walked with perfect clarity, which meant he could turn those memories into a map. The fact that our village, facing Mount Odae, was shaped like a haechi — he'd stumbled onto that one himself, just muttering to himself as he wandered around.
So the reason he wanted to station his own kitten, Shin No. 1, here as a guard was probably down to that same geographic analysis. And now the Ilbaekgukeondo had dropped right onto a spot like this. Was that really just coincidence?
That was what I wanted to know.
[Evil spirits love this place.]
No. 1 lifted his head, swept his gaze across the surroundings, and spoke. [They crouch flat and hold their breath so you won't catch them, but nobody hides from my eyes. This place is a gourmet restaurant.]
Flicking his red tongue over his lips, drooling, he pointed at the shade beneath the trees. [Dozens of spirits and ghosts are hiding in there. Spirits of those who died in the wars fought on this ground — beasts, insects, souls that killed themselves carrying grudges too heavy to bear.]
And the reason so many of them gather here in particular has to be that this place is...
[A place thick with dark energy,] Abe finished for me, raising his arms as though to shield me. [Curious, isn't it? Like a crack running through a well-built house, water seeps into this spot from everywhere else. It's a channel for ghost energy.]
No. 1 leapt straight up in vigorous agreement. [That's it! A ghost-energy channel! That's exactly what I've been sensing. This is prime real estate — you could open your mouth and eat until your belly bursts.]
He trotted over to a patch of ground that rose ever so slightly above the rest and pawed at it, thump thump. [Something fairly strong is hiding in here, too. Not an evil spirit, but no ordinary ghost either.]
It was the spot I'd been watching myself for a while now. A grave, most likely, once upon a time. The mound had long since washed away with the years and the weather, leaving nothing but land a little higher than everything around it.
Grandpa Hosik said there was a low rise just like this on the front hill where he found his Ilbaekgukeondo.
I pressed my palm flat against the earth No. 1 had pawed.
A low hum. Ghost energy rang through my skull.
And then — a voice vibrated against my eardrums. I couldn't make out what it said. A ghost with its tongue cut out? It wasn't merely slurred; it wasn't speech at all, just a groaning murmur shaped like words.
"Hah!"
I jolted upright, sucking in shallow breaths. No. 1 was right. Something was inside there.
And it knew me.
I couldn't explain how, but I knew it in my bones. A spirit connected to me somehow was sealed inside that grave.
Probably someone tied to my past life, I'd guess?
The problem was, I had no idea whether the thing entombed in there was my enemy or my ally.
Yes — sealed. Whatever was inside was trapped. Kept from ever coming out, by someone's hand.
I turned to Abe. "Can you check whether there's a barrier here too?"
[Yes, my lord.]
Abe chanted an incantation, drew a talisman in the empty air, and sent it flying. A slip of transparent paper inscribed with golden characters sailed up and settled gently onto the low rise.
Zzzzip!
Abe's talisman burst into phantom flame and burned away. [There is a barrier, yes. But it is not a barrier I can unweave.]
"A barrier you can't handle? Such things exist?"
[Even if Tachibana was a brilliant onmyoji, his craft flowed from the same current as mine. That is why I was able to unravel his barrier.]
He meant the barrier Tachibana had laid at the Hwacheon Chilseongru.
"And this one?"
[This barrier was laid not by an onmyoji, but by someone wielding divine power.]
"Divine power?"
[Every land has its earth gods, its guardian spirits. The gods who guard the soil of Joseon are not the gods of Japan — and above all, the earth gods of Joseon are strong.]
According to Abe, it wasn't only the gods who kept watch over this land; the people rooted in it carried an iron will of their own. The mediums who had once wielded shamanic arts to defend this very ground, he said, had possessed power on par with the gods themselves.
[A being of tremendous divine power set this seal. I cannot break it.]
Sweat was trickling down my forehead before I realized it. I wiped it away with the back of my hand.
"So something enormous is sealed in there?"
[That is correct.]
I swallowed dryly. "Though — if it's not concealed the way Tachibana's barrier was, I'd think the seal could be broken by brute force."
Dig the ground up with an excavator, and a barrier-sealed vault comes apart. In the Silla royal tombs, the moment archaeologists bored through limestone-lined sarcophagi, strange sounds rang out and the artifacts sealed inside suffered catastrophic damage. Tear a seal open with raw force, and the barrier itself can shatter.
Still — surely there aren't twelve of these scattered around our village?
I scooped No. 1 into my arms. You said it yourself — our village is shaped like a haechi and it drinks in ghost energy, so you need to stop ghosts from wandering in and out.
[Yep, that's right. That's why I had my twelve kittens — to protect you and the village, remember?]
It was a puzzle whose pieces fit together a little too neatly. Goosebumps rippled up my arms. None of this felt like coincidence.
I picked up Shin No. 1 as well — the firstborn of First Wife's litter, a tomcat. No peanuts to speak of, of course.
"And how exactly is this little guy supposed to protect me and the village?"
[Give me Shin No. 1. I'll show you a demonstration.]
I nodded and set both of them down on the ground.
[Abe — turn that worthless rat over there into a yokai. You can do that with a curse, can't you?]
Abe murmured an incantation toward the pitch-dark underbrush, broad daylight notwithstanding. Soon enough—
Pop! Blue light burst out, just as it had down in the valley.
[Squee! Squeak-squeak-squeak!]
The rat spirit twisted into a grotesque yokai shape and glowed with crimson eyes from the tree shade. Its fangs jutted out at savage angles — a genuinely nightmarish sight.
[Now watch, Boss! There's your sudden emergency. And now my firstborn will respond.]
No. 1 gave Shin No. 1 a nudge from behind. What happened next was nothing like I'd imagined.
"HAAA! HAA!"
Shin No. 1 puffed his fur out, arched his back, and hissed — behaving like a perfectly ordinary house cat.
And then—
A flash of red blazed across both of No. 1's eyes.
A heartbeat later, without so much as a by-your-leave from me, he slid out of his possessed body, swallowed the monster mid-transformation into a rat yokai, let out a long satisfied burp, and slipped right back into his cat.
[See that? What do you think? Rapid-response unit — whole job done in the blink of an eye.]
"So the system is: your kid rings the dinner bell, and you eat the meal."
[Still fast, though...]
"Fast, my foot! Who told you to eat spirits without asking me first? Keep this up and you'll be eating people next. Won't you?"
I made a point of never forgetting that No. 1 was an evil spirit. It would be all too easy to be seduced by that cute face and those affectionate cat mannerisms, spoil him rotten — and one day find a perfectly innocent human being swallowed whole.
[Can't I, though?]
"Ask me before you eat. Even in an emergency. Got it?"
At my scolding, No. 1's tail drooped. [Got it.]
Still, I wondered — could Shin No. 1 really make it out here on his own? I'd probably have to build him a cat house, keep him supplied with food and water, and handle his deworming and flea treatments myself.
Well, at least he won't be lonely—? Actually, no.
Shin No. 1 was already bouncing after a butterfly. When a grasshopper sprang out of the weeds, he rolled head over heels trying to catch it, flopping onto his side in a full-body tackle.
"Lonely won't be the problem, then. But No. 1 — you have to come visit him every single day. Understood?"
Chastened, No. 1 nodded meekly.
Back home, I started searching right away. Records of shamans wielding divine power, or any historical accounts of Ugok-ri during the Joseon dynasty — I dug through everything. I was looking for sources to back up my theory: someone ordered by a person of high standing flooded Ugok-ri with ghost energy, and then someone else sealed it away with a barrier.
And then, once I widened the search to Mount Odae, a fascinating historical record surfaced.
King Sejo, it turned out, once dreamed that Queen Hyndeok — the mother of Danjong, the nephew he had deposed and killed — was spitting at him, and broke out in a skin disease. As the affliction worsened, he traveled to Sangwonsa Temple on Mount Odae, where — if the story is to be believed — a cat appeared and seized the hem of his royal dragon robe.
A stray cat, daring to grab the king's own robe?
As it happened, an assassin had been hiding inside the temple hall. Sejo owed the cat his life.
In gratitude, he granted the cat two hundred seok of land — worthless ground inside an abandoned embankment deep in the mountains of Gangneung. A cat awarded its own Cat Field, a myeonjeon. The cat must have lived like an aristocrat after that.
Though cats don't exactly eat rice, do they.
Either way, that old record — of a man rewarding the cat that saved his life with a princely gift — set my thoughts churning. No. 1 might be an evil spirit, but his devotion to keeping me safe was genuine. After all, as long as I stayed alive and well, No. 1, who kept me in his home, stayed safe too.
I really should feed him more of the good stuff. Not ghosts and spirits — cake, maybe. Something like that.
The next day, I set about making No. 1's kittens independent.
Not every spot No. 1 had staked out had an old grave mound on it. But according to Abe, every single one was thick with dark energy. Places evil spirits loved. The spots with the heaviest ghost energy in all of Ugok-ri. He had picked out only those kinds of places to settle his children.
One of First Wife's kittens was adopted by Mak-sun Halmeoni; another by Bang Seongeun. Third Wife — the one I doted on most — would go on living with No. 1 and me at my house.
Third Wife is so frail and tiny, there was nowhere else for her to go anyway.
A few days later, the manager of the AI Smart Warehouse came out, surveyed the government-owned land I'd been permitted to use, and left. Since I'd be paying annual rent on the leased plot, that was where the warehouse would stand.
The warehouse was modular, but apparently if a road didn't run right up alongside it, the construction crew would have to haul every last building material in by hand. Which meant I needed to cut a temporary access road behind Grandpa Hosik's house. And since the road would cross farmland, permits were mandatory even on private property — no way around it.
So there was nothing to do but down tools and get in the car. I'd loaded up every document I could think of and was easing out toward the county office when Bang Seonghyun came walking up under a load of gear big enough to swallow him whole.
"Seonghyun, where are you off to with all that luggage?"
"I got picked to represent Gangwon Province, Uncle! I'm heading into a training camp to prepare for the National Sports Festival."
"And you weren't going to mention that?"
I pulled the car to a stop right away, walked over, and took the luggage off his hands. "Your father, honestly. When something good happens while you're working alongside me, you share it — so we can celebrate together."
"I haven't even won gold at the festival yet, Uncle."
And yet — why was it that a golden shimmer, an afterimage flickering like sunlight on water, was rising off Bang Seonghyun's face?