No Power Without a Price
"I see. So that's why you asked for the liquor and the side dishes..."
"Well, he loved his drink back then and he loves it now. Some things don't change."
After that, the strange happenings at the museum vanished as though someone had snuffed them out at the source.
I was taking tea in a private sitting with Director Lee Yongdeok—he wished to hear, he said, exactly what had transpired there. When I told him the tale of the dokkaebi, his eyes gleamed and he nodded along eagerly. Well, I suppose it takes that kind of passion and curiosity to run a museum.
"Now that he's been properly appeased, just bring him liquor or buckwheat jelly every now and then. That'll do."
"Thank you. I have learned a great deal."
Leaving the museum and heading for home, I checked the freshly deposited amount and gave my shoulders a shrug.
About what I'd charge for a single gut ritual. Neither impressive nor insulting—but a far cry from the windfall some bet-losing bastard kept boasting he'd shower me with.
"So what gives, then? Weren't you going to make money rain down on my head?"
"I bestowed wealth-luck upon you, I said. Trust and wait, I said."
A gruff middle-aged man's voice droned through my skull. Beaten down as thoroughly as he'd been, he apparently still hadn't come to his senses, because his tone remained every bit as insolent as ever.
"...sir."
"Don't do the polite act in that voice, it's creepy. Just talk the way you always do."
"You whelp!! How dare you scoff at this elder's dignified voice!!"
God, what a headache. I pressed a hand to my forehead.
Somehow, in the wake of the last incident, the mark on my hand had gone and connected itself to the ley line beneath this district. Perhaps because of that, the dokkaebi I'd assumed annihilated had reappeared—though drained of nearly all his strength. That much was a mercy. If a guardian spirit like a dokkaebi vanished from its land, there was no telling what might come creeping in behind it.
"Damn it all! And why is it that I must now have your permission to use my own power! What manner of nonsense is this!"
"Beats me. And quit yapping while I'm driving. It's annoying."
As you could see, thanks to that ley line connection, the dokkaebi now popped up at every opportunity purely to make my life miserable.
"At this rate, this is nothing but a prison."
"Should've picked your opponent more carefully, then."
I didn't know precisely what manner of being Mother was. But this much I did know: she possessed an otherness utterly divorced from any spirit or divinity I had ever encountered. An otherness vast enough to swallow a dokkaebi centuries old. My brow creased, just faintly.
"Keh! Strapped to something strange and strutting about like a peacock. In any case, you would do well to be careful. No power of that sort comes free of charge."
"Spare me the sudden wisdom, old man. You don't know everything."
"That power will need to keep drawing its fuel from outside itself, you see. To sustain itself."
The dokkaebi let his voice sink low.
"Sooner or later, a handful of stray spirits may not be enough to sate it. Even fed daily, mind you. Can you not feel it yourself?"
A sinister chuckle curled around my ear. The mark on my left hand had begun to tingle, slowly, faintly.
"And from that point on, it will be you who is devoured by this power, little by little."
"What did you see inside it?"
"Ha! So NOW it makes you curious? Finally wondering what's been living inside that body of yours, are we?"
The dokkaebi swelled with sudden triumph, his voice rising. I never should have asked. Damn it all.
Then, abruptly, he went quiet. After a long silence, puzzled, I spoke first.
"Why did you clam up all of a sudden?"
"...I cannot seem to remember."
The dokkaebi's voice trailed off into vagueness.
"What? Is this a joke?"
"Tch. It is nothing. In any case, my advice stands—stay vigilant, always. The god that possesses a mudang is no friend to the mudang."
"...I know that much."
To a divine entity, concepts like good and evil, ally and enemy, simply do not exist. Even this dokkaebi chattering away in my head only felt closer to human; he was no more a fit subject for notions of virtue or wickedness than anything else. All a human could ever sense from such beings was faint curiosity, faint goodwill—and malice. And that will, whether goodwill or malice, rested in a place where a god could reverse it as easily as flipping a palm. In the end, all I could do was hope Mother would remain a little more indifferent toward me.
"Kekekeke! Well, a prison this may be, but dull it will not be. The goings-on beyond these bars are quite entertaining."
"Shut it. Hurry up and drop my windfall already."
"I told you, I have bestowed it! Even I cannot know what form it will take!"
I scowled hard. What kind of nonsense was that?
"All I can do is sprinkle the very slightest extra fortune over your wealth. How it manifests, I cannot say. Why not try buying a lottery ticket?"
"How does the one who bestowed it not know what it does, you damned dokkaebi!"
"Silence! It is largely your own fault for stealing the initiative over my power in the first place! And how many times must I tell you—this elder's name is Muyeong, the Shadowless!"
Ugh, my head. I let out a sigh. Well, maybe I'd buy a lottery ticket on the way home. If I scraped even a modest second or third prize, that would prove the dokkaebi right.
"See? Nothing hits."
"Hm. Then I suppose it was not the lottery."
Damn it all.
I set my phone down with a sigh. I hadn't even recouped what I'd spent. How do you get exactly two numbers right and fumble the rest?
"Stop waiting on miracles and get to work."
"Hearing that from a deadbeat freeloader leaves a bad taste in my mouth."
"You whelp!!"
Ignoring Muyeong's racket inside my skull, I pulled up today's schedule.
Hm?
Just then, a message from an unknown number appeared on my screen.
"Must be something urgent, I'd wager."
"Looks like it."
Well, my afternoon was wide open anyway.
Nothing followed. He'd sent nothing but his birthdate, and no next message came. I waited, puzzled, until at last a message arrived that bore the fingerprints of long deliberation.
At the words CEO Kim Yeongsik, my eyes snapped wide open.
There it was. My money luck, delivered!
Grinning ear to ear, I fired back a reply on the spot.
"Didn't I tell you?! I said a customer would come, and lo—a client delivered straight to this shrine where nothing but flies buzz!"
"'Nothing but flies,' he says..."
Muyeong was buzzing excitedly inside my head. Damn it. I never should have let that delighted look show.
I gave the shrine a reasonable once-over and started getting ready to receive a guest.
Still. Something strange, was it?
If CEO Kim Yeongsik had gone so far as to recommend me, it surely wasn't going to be anything trivial.
The man who appeared at the shrine at five o'clock was a neat, well-put-together middle-aged man in a pressed suit. Horn-rimmed glasses, short-cropped hair. Even without reaching for my abilities, I could tell at a whiff that this was a man who'd consumed his share of ink.
"Gangrim Doryeong... that's right, isn't it?"
"Come in and sit."
My client, Song Seongjae, carried an air much like CEO Kim Yeongsik had on his first visit. One look said he was short on sleep, and his gaze kept darting around the room. The difference was that he didn't seem wound quite as tight with nerves as Kim Yeongsik had been.
Then the mark on my left hand twitched and spat out a curl of shadow.
"You're in law, aren't you? A lawyer?"
"...You are every bit as formidable as I'd heard. Yes. I'm an attorney."
Song Seongjae held out his business card with a sigh. Apparently a lawyer newly out on his own—a man who'd built his career at a major firm before striking out. He had far more experience, and more years, than his face let on.
"Tell me what's going on."
"It's... difficult to explain, but..."
Fidgeting with his teacup, Song Seongjae finally began.
"Lately, misfortune keeps befalling the clients I take on and win for."
A traffic accident the very day the verdict came down. A sudden collapse into serious illness. Disaster striking their families. A ruinous scam that ended in suicide.
"If it had happened once or twice, I would have written it off as wretched luck. But with it continuing like this, I could think only that something had to be behind it."
Song Seongjae spoke in a voice that trembled.
"The rumors have begun to spread among my major clients, and the matter has come up within the firm as well. By this point, I could hardly fail to notice."
It had latched on.
And a vicious one, at that.
This was like CEO Kim's case all over again. The stray spirits were not clinging to Song Seongjae himself.
Arms crossed, I frowned. Plain misfortune and something that had latched onto you were different in scale from the very first step. Above all, what mattered most was the person's own feeling—malice is the thing its target senses soonest of all.
"Anyone you've made an enemy of?"
"...I couldn't say there's no one. Those who paid steep retainers and lost their cases would surely curse me."
"You can't have lost all that often, though. Anyone who comes to mind?"
Song Seongjae bowed his head in thought, then slowly shook it.
"I don't know. If this were the work of someone's grudge, I don't believe I've ever earned hatred of that depth."
"Human hearts are unreadable. When did it start?"
"The first incident was six months ago..."
Not long at all, then. Peering down into Song Seongjae through the shadow, I narrowed my eyes.
What the shadows showed me was far from all-seeing. Only fragmentary sensations, or still images, flashed across my vision, and the gaps between those images and the present had to be filled with nothing but my own inference.
With CEO Kim Yeongsik, the cause had been plain to see. The construction site, and the curse. But in this case, the cause lay scattered like a shattered piece of porcelain.
"What about your most recent case?"
"The verdict hasn't come down yet, but I expect we'll win. ...And frankly, if I win this one too, I no longer have any idea what will happen."
Anxiously, Song Seongjae picked at his fingernails.
And suddenly, the sound of those nails came to my ears as an ominous little clicking.
Tick. Tick.
I said nothing, quietly studying the man before me. The slightly hunched neck. The shadow pooling beneath him. Everything he showed me in this moment pointed toward a single set of circumstances.
"I'll need to pay a visit to your office first. And meet those clients of yours."
"Ah—but... the clients' safety..."
I didn't bother answering—just looked at him the way one looks at something pathetic—and Song Seongjae heard his own blunder and shut his mouth.
"I'll go tomorrow. I'll know then. Whether a gut is what's needed, or something else entirely."
With that final word, I saw Song Seongjae out.
"Pathetic, the way he trembles. Not one shred of spirit to stand and fight!"
How is he supposed to fight something he can't even see? That's why he came to me.
Once Song Seongjae had gone, Muyeong barked as though the sight choked him, and I answered with a silent sigh.
Humans become terribly, terribly vulnerable when confronted with what cannot be explained. For now, all I could do was hope that weakness of his wouldn't feed the curse and make it stronger.