The Shortest Prayer
Bop-sa Lee Su jabbed a finger at me, his whole arm trembling.
"You... You—what did you just say? A wet-behind-the-ears pup like you, running his mouth like that! You don't even fear Heaven, do you!"
His voice was thick with incredulity. If he wanted to channel a spirit, he could simply get on with it—instead he had demands and lectures to spare.
Then again, I did catch myself wondering whether he had any god left to call.
Twin flames kindled in Lee Su's eyes as he rounded on Lee Seokmin.
"What in the world did you bring into this place! If you don't take it and get out right now, I'll see to it that the retribution you bought comes straight back to you this very instant. You know full well what you've done, don't you?"
Lee Seokmin shrank beneath Lee Su's words.
Then, flailing a hand at the seated members, the old man began to bellow.
"Everyone out! Training is over for today! Anyone who wants a refund, take it up with that lawyer over there who can't understand a simple word! Out!"
The meditation center's members murmured among themselves as they gathered up their cushions and scrambled awkwardly to their feet. I had been planning to wait until every civilian was out anyway.
Thud.
The entrance shut behind us. Lee Su rose slowly from his seat and turned to face me head-on.
"You'd best not think of playing innocent. I came here knowing everything."
"I had no intention of playing innocent anyway, whelp. What exactly would I be afraid of? That pitiful lawyer? Or the man he tried to curse?"
Lee Su rummaged inside his sleeve and lifted out a bundle of bells.
"Or is it, perhaps, you—who came to this place without a single countermeasure?"
I raised an eyebrow. Didn't he know that whoever spoke first, lost?
"So? When exactly are you calling that precious spirit of yours?"
"There will be no need to call that one at all. Received your god recently, have you? Already drunk on confidence, I see... Not a chance, boy."
Tinkle-
The bell in the bop-sa's hand rang out. And from the jars lined up behind him, jet-black masses began to writhe and crawl into the open.
Evil spirits, gorged to bursting on the grudges of the lonely. And in all likelihood, these were the very ghosts that had drained the lives of his previous clients.
Which was why they now wore horrific shapes, as if human and insect had been fused together.
A spider's body crowned with a human head. A human torso bristling with hundreds of legs.
I frowned at the things, while Song Seongjae and Lee Seokmin stared at them, faces drained of every drop of color.
"Young master. What on earth are these...?"
"Get out of here. Now. Both of you."
At my low-voiced order, the two men raced each other for the exit.
They flung themselves against the door and shoved—then spun around, faces twisted with panic.
"Y-young master!! The door won't open...!"
"I can't exactly send you off gently. I do have a commission of my own to carry out."
Lee Su eyed the pair sharply, then turned his head back to me.
"I shouldn't have to explain. You know what these things are. And you know what happens if they take a body."
When I still made no move, Lee Su seemed to swell with confidence.
He shook his bell—tinkle, tinkle—and the spirits fused into a single mass that coiled around the bop-sa's feet.
A revolting, undulating thing, moving as though it obeyed his every command.
"Quite the collection you've gathered. Aren't you ashamed to make your living cursing people? How many have you killed that way? Four? Five?"
"Silence, green little brat. You know nothing yet."
Lee Su snorted. Across the back of his wrinkled hand, tendons and veins bulged precariously.
"You cannot possibly understand what it means for one's divine power to run dry. It is a pain twice as bitter as losing your eyes. Twice as bitter as losing your ears."
His fist clenched, and the bell gave a faint tremor.
"When that day comes, you too will lose all restraint. You will find yourself desperate to claw your divine power back—through Ingong, through Yeonmae, anything at all...!! Compared to that, killing a few insects is hardly worth calling a sin."
Breathing in wheezy rasps, Lee Su raised his hand high and shook the bell.
Tinkle-
The evil spirits took on distinct shapes and revealed themselves.
Every last one of them was steeped in resentment and bloodlust. These were things that knew exactly how far their standing rose with each human they killed.
"You've killed people too. So why is it that the ones these spirits devoured don't count as your kills?"
"Silence. People die regardless; I merely finished them with my own two hands. How is that any different from crushing insects?"
I gave a hollow laugh at Lee Su's refreshingly original bullshit. His mind really was going, this old geezer.
"Forget the meditation center. What you need is a nursing home."
Tinkle-!
Lee Su shook the bell a few more times, sharp and irritable. At once, the spirits spread wide in every direction.
Fsshhk.
Shadow swallowed the lamps whole, and darkness came down over the meditation center.
"AAAAAH!! Young master!!"
The lawyers flailed helplessly by the door, unable even to come down from it.
...Yeah, just stay right there. Anything's better than you coming down to 'help' with your amateur heroics.
"Let us see just how long you can keep that mouth flapping."
Tinkle-!!
KIIIIIEEEEK!!!
The evil spirits hurled themselves at me with horrific shrieks.
I stretched out my left hand. A dull, aching throb pulsed through my mark, as if to warn me against overusing this power.
...Did I take in too much?
I was honestly rattled. I'd gobbled down that many evil spirits and felt nothing—so why was my body picking now, of all times, to act up!
The most I could manage was drawing shadow up out of my mark and winding it around my hand—and I swung that hand, gone black as pitch, at the oncoming spirits.
FWOOOSH-!!
Even watered down through my ability, Mother's power held true. The spirits that touched my left hand were shredded to ribbons without offering anything resembling real resistance.
—You bastard!!
Tinkle, tinkle!
More spirits came boiling out of the jars before my eyes.
Basements are dank, sunless places—evil spirits love them.
And with jars full of distilled loneliness sitting here, the yin energy of this place must have doubled overnight.
In a word, this basement was an incubation chamber where evil spirits ran themselves off like photocopies.
Even now, countless spirits sensing that yin energy were swarming, shrieking, into the meditation center's basement. And there they became feed for the ghosts under Lee Su's command.
I swung my left hand and stretched my shadows thin, cutting the spirits down—but Lee Su called them in faster than I could put them to rest.
And the things that had crawled from the jars preyed on the weaker spirits, swelling in power and bulk with every meal.
...The spirits he summoned were one thing. But the moment even a few of the jar spirits took root in Song Seongjae's or Lee Seokmin's flesh, it was over.
I twisted my face and clicked my tongue.
"What's the matter? You seem flustered. Where did all that swagger from before go?"
Thump. Thump.
Lee Su advanced on me with a laugh like iron scraping iron.
...No help for it, then.
Channeling a god without proper preparation came dragging countless risks behind it—but I couldn't see any other move left on the board.
And so I closed my eyes.
The lawyers' screams faded into the distance.
Lee Su's laughter, too, receded, slow and far away.
I turned my ear inward, to the voice inside my mind.
That voice was telling me to recite a scripture.
My mouth fell open, and out leaked an ominous language—impossible to tell whether it was exclamation, refrain, roar, scream, or song.
That language, carrying an ominous rhythm and beating like the pulse of life, quivered at the tip of my tongue and, drumlike, began calling out to something.
This was the shortest spell there was for begging Her aid.
A spell for yearning to hear Her voice—a voice so overwhelming that even attaching the word "god" to it felt blasphemous and glib.
And I began to recite the Okchugyeong—the Jade Pivot Scripture.
Generals of Heaven, Great Divine Generals—Generals of the Earth, Great Divine Generals
Iä.
"PUHAHAHA!! Cornered like this, and the grandest thing you can chant is the Okchugyeong!! There's never been an amateur like you. They say ignorance is bold—here's a whelp with no experience, come strutting in!"
Lee Su's voice reached me from somewhere far away.
"All the better. If I succeed in offering you up as a sacrifice, my divine power will climb higher still...!!"
In the end, a scripture was nothing more than a ritual for borrowing the power and authority of specific beings.
The Okchugyeong, for its part, was a Taoist scripture chanted chiefly to drive out ghosts or to break a curse.
Generals of the Five Directions, Great Divine Generals—Generals of the Four Seas, Great Divine Generals
Iä.
Chanting a scripture did not mean those Generals of Heaven and Earth would actually come running to my aid.
It was simply the act of knocking on the door of the place where those beings dwelled. Whether anyone answered rested wholly on the god's will.
But to knock on that door was also to mean that my spirit now stood in the same place as theirs.
And in that hollow universe one could only call the abyss, when the frail thread of a human soul came face to face with a god—
Generals of the Dragon Hour, Great Divine Generals—Generals of the Horse Hour, Great Divine Generals
Iä.
The channeling begins.
Boom-!
A drumbeat sounded. The shadows rippled and swayed, dancing like the trees of a dense forest.
And then I understood: my left arm, right now, was not at full capacity at all.
Crack. Crack.
That this was nothing more than the mercy Mother extended to another of Her children.
Iä, Iä, Iä, Iä.
The child of the woods was drawing near.
Tinkle.
The young lamb was coming.
There are no gods. Only ghosts.
That was what Bop-sa Lee Su had chosen to believe, once his divine power ran dry.
The divine power of a god-possessed shaman, he had decided, was never some miracle-working deity taking up residence—it was just a somewhat stronger ghost toying with a human mind.
To replenish it, he had dragged his aged body to every place rumored to hold miracles and poured out every prayer and devotion he possessed—and still the power never returned.
Did it even make sense, that divine power should drain away with age?
If a god truly sheltered and loved its human, then surely no such fading should ever occur at all?
Yes. All of it was the mischief of ghosts.
I had spent my whole life fawning over ghosts that toyed with humans, living as their plaything.
That was when Lee Su met Them.
Lee Su could not bring himself to refuse the hand They held out.
And so the curses he had feared all his life became Lee Su's bread and butter.
The ghosts played me for a fool. So from now on, I will be the one who commands them.
Tinkle-!
Baring his yellowed teeth, Lee Su closed in on Doyoung. Doyoung still kept his head bowed low, reciting the Okchugyeong.
After all, a scripture any Tom, Dick, or Harry could chant would be useless against ghosts gorged on viscous grudges and drained lives.
Boom.
A drumbeat sounded. And then—
Tinkle.
An alien bell-chime rang out, even though Lee Su himself had not shaken his.
Something was wrong.
Lee Su would have liked to savor the sight of their terror a little longer, but he sensed he could not afford to delay any further.
Tinkle, tinkle!
He shook his bell in haste. But the spirits only milled in place, refusing to move under his control.
"Wh-what's gotten into these things?"
Flustered, Lee Su looked around.
Far from advancing, the shadows had taken fright at something that had abruptly appeared and were scrambling to flee. A few of the spirits even bolted straight back into the very jars that had once caged them.
"What in the world is happening!!"
Tinkle, tinkle!!
He shook the bell harder, faster—but the spirits only cowered all the more.
And then Lee Su noticed something strange.
If the spirits were retreating in terror, the darkness blanketing this area should have lifted with them—yet the basement and everything around it remained black as pitch.
"Damn it all!!"
Lee Su ground his teeth. He commanded spirits—but there was no god for his own body to receive.
Ringing the bell like a madman and driving the spirits onward was all Lee Su could do now.
A sound utterly out of place in all this drifted through—like a young lamb bleating, soft and gentle.
Lee Su looked down at the floor.
Something like tree roots was squirming in the shadows.
Lee Su had believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that curses and vengeful ghosts were mighty and wicked things.
That was true—right up until he came face to face with It.
"A-aaah, AAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!"
Evil spirits love dank, dark basements.
And a dank, dark basement was nothing less than the open maw of that thing.
Something wicked, something unfathomable, stretched out its twenty-odd roots.
Something great and wicked and holy and vast and dark swallowed everything into the darkness.
SQUELCH-CRUNCH!!
Every curse and every evil spirit Bop-sa Lee Su had spent long years painstakingly amassing vanished—as though it had never existed at all.