The Grail of My Making
"What gender would you like the baby to be? A boy? A girl? ...Oh, a girl catches your interest, does it? Then I'll have a girl. Choosing the sex and bearing a human child is a simple matter for me."
I was stunned as I listened to the demon, who kept watching my reactions with every word and adjusting her answer accordingly.
She could manipulate a child's sex at will?
For a human, such a thing would be absurd beyond belief—but the being standing before me was a demon.
An unreal existence, one capable of dismissing the words impossible as thought through a human lens and simply making them real.
"And what would you want to do with the child you father? How about making her a sex slave? Don't worry—I'd exclude every one of the genetic problems that come with sleeping with your own daughter before she's even born. If I brainwashed her thoroughly from the moment she was young, I could mold her into a wonderful slave devoted to you alone. Or, alternatively, should I raise her with all the affection of a mother? I could bring her up upright and honest, like a child growing up in the kind of peaceful, virtuous, happy home that humans so often speak of. Of course, I'd naturally educate her to obey your every word, wouldn't I? Whatever you want, just say it. I'll shape the child into exactly the form you desire."
Swish.
When the demon leaned in toward me, the darkness beyond the streetlamp's reach fell across her face.
The words spilling out of that shadowed mouth carried something lewd and yet chilling enough to make my chest go cold.
"It's a life you created, after all. A life born from your seed. I'm merely offering the body that will carry it and nurture it. In the end, it's still a life you created. Since it's yours, it's only right that you do with it as you please. That's only natural."
Coming from the demon, it sounded persuasive enough to almost sway me—the logic was eerily airtight.
The thing below my waist had already grown hard under her sweet whispers.
My eyes were nailed to the spread opening of the woman before me, and my heart was pounding wildly with excitement.
If I just squeezed my eyes shut and chose it, I could almost see the unimaginable pleasures unfolding right in front of me.
But the moment I remembered that everything the demon had said was warped and twisted, with no sane thread to be found anywhere in it, my reason came rushing back.
Perhaps it had been wrong from the very start to measure a demon's way of thinking against a human yardstick.
After all, morality and law were nothing more than things humans had built from their own perspective.
To the demon, all of it surely sat unremarked in her mind, as if it had never existed from the beginning.
And yet she so diligently preserved and mimicked a human life—maybe, just maybe, that was because of me.
Which meant that if I denied the human life I was living, the demon would embrace that wish completely, without a flicker of doubt or criticism, and follow it.
And so I had to choose.
Would I abandon my humanity in exchange for a life of pleasure within this world the demon offered, as if it were all mine to take—or would I remain who I was, the human called Yoon Dohyun?
Something told me with intense certainty that if I chose the former, I would never return to my old life again.
I would become a contradictory, crooked thing—human, and yet no longer human.
Just as I steeled myself and opened my mouth to deliver my verdict, the demon who had been watching me spoke first.
"I'm joking."
...What?
Hsss...
"As if I'd actually go through with something that absurd. Something that would trouble you, oppa."
The demon, back in Jia's form, walked ahead of me with a bright, innocent smile, as if nothing had happened at all.
I stared blankly at her retreating figure, stunned by her sudden shift in attitude—until a nagging sense of unease surfaced.
When I forced myself to reason through that something, that almost-graspable something, I arrived at one conclusion: the moment I opened my mouth, the demon had already known my answer.
And to wipe away the awkwardness that conclusion left me with, she had made her move first.
It was only speculation. But if it was right, then the demon was, without a doubt, thinking about me down to my deepest parts.
"Oppa, how was university today?"
Jia, who had been strolling ahead with her hands clasped behind her back and light steps, turned around and asked.
"Nothing strange happened?"
The follow-up question made me flinch inwardly.
For a moment, I wondered if I ought to tell her about the woman named Ryeonhwa, who had asked me about the demon—but I shook my head inside.
"It was just an ordinary day."
"That's a relief."
Watching Jia smile brightly at my answer, I felt a strange, unidentifiable pang of guilt.
"Let's go, oppa."
Jia held out her hand.
I understood what she meant, but I hesitated—I had no memory of ever walking hand in hand with my little sister.
I stared at her hand hanging awkwardly in the air, and then, out of a variety of apologetic feelings toward the demon, slowly took it.
As Jia clasped my hand firmly in her grip and beamed at me, I realized my grown arousal still hadn't subsided.
* * *
I heard his answer without him saying a word, and because I didn't want to put him in an awkward position, I spoke first.
His choices should always be respected as a matter of course—but no negative feelings should ever accompany them.
I knew about everything that had happened at the university involving him, but I pretended not to.
If he didn't want to talk about it, that was enough.
If he told me later that it was a bother, that it got on his nerves, then I would simply erase it then.
I want him to be happy.
That was the only reason I made a single, simple proposal—and if it was refused, I would simply think in another direction.
Whatever it was, whatever it might be, I would only act in accordance with his choices and make them come true.
Because I am the Demon of Existence, existing for him alone.
Perhaps not right away, but someday, he might accept a proposal of the kind I made today.
I don't care when that time comes.
Until then, I need only make various suggestions for the sake of his happiness and build the environment suited to them.
I can take it slowly.
Slowly...
Like a single drop of water seeping lazily into a sponge.
If I proceed gently and softly, so that no unease ever stirs in him, the day will surely come when he takes it all for granted.
And when that day arrives, if it still represents his happiness, then I will reshape the very existence of this world to fit his will.
* * *
Ryeonhwa was still an Apprentice Knight, not yet a full Knight.
Raised from childhood to become a Knight, she had earned top marks in every test the Order had ever administered, and she had a respectable record of putting down demons besides—but she had failed to meet the single most important requirement, and so remained an apprentice.
That requirement was the choice of the Holy Grail.
Only a human chosen by the Grail could drink the Holy Water it held, and only then could one become a Knight in the true sense.
The criteria by which the Grail chose remained unknown even now.
The Order called it the will of God, but for Ryeonhwa, who longed to become a Knight a moment sooner, it was an unbearably frustrating answer.
And then, one day, a faint light of hope shone before her.
Ryeonhwa, who had taken a leave of absence for the Order's business and returned to university, felt something off about one of the men sharing her lecture hall.
Yoon Dohyun—a man carrying the lingering scent of a demon.
Her talent for detecting demons was on par with the Knights, perhaps even beyond them, which was how she'd caught the faint residue clinging to Dohyun's person.
To be honest, it was so faint that suspecting him of being a demon would have been almost embarrassing.
Even ordinary humans of poor quality sometimes gave off traces of it—under normal circumstances, her suspicion of Dohyun would have ended as a mild curiosity.
But Ryeonhwa, made desperate by her burning wish to be chosen by the Grail as soon as possible, found herself hoping Dohyun really was a demon.
She hoped to fell more demons, and be chosen for it.
Of course, killing many demons and building a record didn't mean the Grail would choose her—but Ryeonhwa was grasping at whatever sliver of hope she could find.
So she questioned him indirectly, and though it turned out he was no demon, she could tell—whether he knew it or not—that he was connected to one somehow.
If she kept surveillance on the suspicious signs, she would eventually reach whatever demon was tangled up with Yoon Dohyun.
The truth was, finding a demon hiding among crowds of humans was far harder than fighting one.
Demons fundamentally took the same shape as humans, so by appearance alone they were indistinguishable from us.
But a Knight—or even an Apprentice Knight—whose ability to seek out demons was sufficiently developed could find them in a crowd.
Lingering traces, a sense of wrongness—each described it differently, but a demon carried an alien atmosphere, a feeling unlike anything human.
For better or worse, of everyone at the university she'd returned to, no one but Dohyun gave off a demon's residue.
That was the conclusion she reached after the morning lectures ended, having spent the afternoon combing every corner of the campus.
She had even investigated Yoon Jia, a human celebrated as a staggering beauty in the first-year class, on suspicion—but no residue lingered on her either.
There were no demons at the university.
If a demon could evade even her superb detection, then she'd stake her word that no Knight in existence would ever recognize it as one.
It was impossible—unless its very existence was cloaked in the shell of a human being.
And that was exactly why she had to keep her eyes fixed on the human called Yoon Dohyun.
For the sake of being chosen by the Holy Grail she had yearned for all her life.
* * *
"I made the Grail."
We had come home together with Jia, and were sitting side by side on the living room sofa, asking the questions I hadn't been able to ask during the day—that was when the demon answered.
"...What?"
Her answer came so far out of left field that I made a fool of myself.
Hadn't the Grail been said to be the thing that gave humans the power to stand against demons?
As if to get a better look at my face, the demon tilted her head to the side and smiled.
Her hair swayed with the motion and spilled downward, carrying the pleasant scent of her post-shower fragrance past the tip of my nose.
Remembering what had happened earlier, and recalling once more that Mom would be away until the day after tomorrow for work, I found myself conscious of my lower half all over again.
Frankly, the lingering thrill still hadn't faded, and part of me wanted to slip into my room and quietly take care of myself—but my curiosity, my hunger to ask the demon, ran even hotter.
"You said you made the other demons, didn't you? So I figured a force capable of standing against them was necessary as well, and I created the thing called the Grail and handed it to the humans."
"I don't follow... If that's what you wanted, why make the other demons at all? In the first place... why did you make them?"
When the question tumbled out of me like it was only natural, the demon—delighted about something, smiling to herself as she stroked my thigh—replied.
"I thought that if I introduced change into a monotonous world, the odds would rise of an existence appearing in it that I could love. That's all it was."
It was an answer I couldn't understand.
But even if I pressed for details, I doubted I'd get an answer I could make sense of, so I asked something else instead.
"Then on what basis does the Grail choose its humans and dole out the Holy Water?"
"Whatever I feel like."
"What... really?"
"Yep."
Before I could press her for details on that shocking answer, the demon spoke first.
"The will of the Grail is my will. What humans call the will of God is, in other words, my will. Only the humans I choose may drink from the Grail. Because the Grail is a thing I made."
If the humans who opposed the demon had heard her so casually confess the truth to me, they would have been plunged into an abyss of shock.
These were words that would shake them to their very foundations.
Words that negated, root and branch, everything they had done—and the very meaning of their existence.
But to the demon, such a fact seemed to be nothing worth noticing at all.
The demon's entire consciousness was focused on me, as though the most important thing in the world right now were me alone.
Watching her—cheeks flushed, murmuring you're so handsome, you're adorable as she fawned over me—I began to think that the being before me might be something far more distant and vast than anything I had imagined.