The True Nature of the Curse (4)
1.
The first day after being cursed and forming a contract with the doll.
After finishing training and washing up, I went to bed.
"Huh…?"
I murmured blankly and lifted my gaze — a bed sat a short distance away.
On that bed lay the doll I had purchased.
Lee Eun-ha.
I remembered the name written in the catalog. Right. That was it.
I had bought her because her appearance suited my tastes, and because I was starting to need a doll to handle the housework.
……Looking at Eun-ha lying so quietly on the bed, a mischievous urge came creeping up out of nowhere.
I wanted to tease her. I wanted to fluster her and watch her reaction — the desire was sharp and unmistakable.
"Have you been waiting for me, Eun-ha?"
"……?"
Eun-ha looked at me with open confusion.
Then, with the face of someone who had just witnessed something she absolutely should not have seen, she asked me a question.
"Who are you?"
"I'm Han Sung-jun."
For a doll, the words were startlingly emotional. And the fact that those emotions were irritation and displeasure was, if anything, a problem in itself.
What kind of doll acts like that? I thought — and yet I also found it rather enjoyable. It felt like meeting a friend, and that was surprisingly fun.
Enjoying it so much that I was smiling without realizing it, I approached the doll.
"What are you thinking about?"
I lightly caught her chin and turned her face so our eyes met.
"……That you're a fake."
"A fake?"
Even a prickly doll wasn't so bad — but that was a cold thing to say.
"I'm Han Sung-jun, plain and simple."
"That guy isn't like this right now."
She snapped it out in a tone that somehow reminded me of him.
It felt so genuinely like him that something about it was welcome. I found myself smiling again without meaning to.
"It's the real me."
As I said it and looked at her, my eyes fell on her moist lips.
They were captivating. Tempting enough that I wanted to kiss them right then and there — tempting enough that my fingers brushed against them before I even realized what I was doing.
"The real Han Sung-jun wouldn't do something like this."
The way she spoke as if she knew me so well was exactly like him, too, and it drew another smile out of me.
Did this doll genuinely believe she was Lee Eun-sung?
"So what? Eun-ha's a doll."
But I was getting tired of this emotional tug-of-war.
To simply crush her sharp attitude, I threw the word doll at her.
……It might have been a little harsh.
Peck.
I pressed a light kiss to Eun-ha's cheek — by way of apology for what I'd just said. Embarrassment sealed my mouth; no words would come.
"Come on. Don't be like that."
With an attitude that sharp, she'd have a hard time becoming a well-loved doll.
"We'll be seeing a lot of each other from now on."
She was the doll I had bought, after all.
"No. Today's the last day."
But Eun-ha remained just as prickly. More than prickly — almost hostile.
Being treated like this by a doll I'd purchased was a little unpleasant, but considering how shocking my earlier words must have been, it wasn't entirely strange either.
"See you next time, Eun-ha."
She'd need time to sort out her feelings.
Saying that, I kissed her cheek one more time.
2.
"It was just a stupid dream."
……I wanted to believe that.
Now that I was awake, I couldn't even understand why I'd acted that way. Everything I'd done in the dream was behavior my ordinary self would never have engaged in. In the moment, desire had simply boiled up so fiercely that I'd done things I never would have otherwise.
Like some shallow guy trying to pick up a girl. Like a flirt. I'd never even considered acting that way before.
That's Lee Eun-sung, not Lee Eun-ha!!
What was this disgusting feeling? I'd never once thought of Lee Eun-sung as a woman — and yet in the dream, I'd gone so far as to want to mess with him, laying on skinship I would never normally attempt and teasing him with words?
It was a dream I desperately wanted to deny.
"Damn it."
I quickly straightened up the bedding and got to my feet. If I let myself sink into this self-loathing, it would only breed a negative mindset.
Times like these called for dawn training. I needed to scrub these distractions out of my head.
To clear my mind, I trained with stubborn intensity. The dawn session stretched all the way into morning, lasting until a distinctly unimpressed-looking Lee Eun-sung appeared.
"Did you get taller?"
"Yeah. Guess my level went up overnight."
I answered casually.
I hadn't really felt it, but during training earlier I'd noticed that my viewpoint was subtly different from yesterday's.
Back when I was a kid going through a major growth spurt, the growing pains had been so bad I'd thought I was dying — but maybe because this was just my body recovering from the curse that had shrunk me, there hadn't been any pain overnight. Or maybe the stupid dream had kept me from noticing it.
Ugh.
Why was I thinking about the dream again!
When he said he needed to go outside and take a look around, I sent him off and went back to training.
When he'd checked my body earlier, he'd said my level had gone up. At this rate, breaking the curse might not take as long as I'd feared.
"Must be because the body's smaller……."
I was built like a middle schooler — so maybe things had gotten as vigorous as they had back then.
I'd always thought of myself as someone who didn't really have those kinds of thoughts about women. I never expected I'd end up dreaming about meeting Lee Eun-ha — no, Lee Eun-sung — in a dream.
And on top of that, everything I'd done in the dream had been the kind of behavior you'd use to try to seduce a woman.
That was what was feeding my self-loathing even more.
I'd throw myself back into training to forget the shame, then in the scraps of free time the shameful memories would surface again……. Today's training was a vicious cycle through and through.
On a day that miserable, his "magic lecture" was a pretty decent option. Picking up new knowledge might help a little, at least.
He'd somehow gotten hold of a whiteboard, and with that set up he launched into the lecture.
"Magic is the art of using mana to produce extraordinary phenomena."
As he spoke, he moved his finger with deliberate precision, drawing a line from top to bottom. It was a clean, straight stroke clean enough that you could have called it a sword path.
Mana scattered along the line his finger traced, glowing as it drifted — and the moment he finished speaking, those motes of mana found their partners and knit together into a magic circle in the blink of an eye.
"You've got two paths open to you."
"Either you study it as a proper mage and raise your mastery through pure scholarship."
"Or you learn only the practical know-how useful in real combat and use it as a rough, field-ready bag of tricks."
I understood what he meant.
The same paths existed in martial arts.
The first: studying the discipline of martial scholarship, researching it, pursuing ever-higher mastery.
The second: the path walked by people who simply lived off instinct and whatever they'd picked up on the surface.
Naturally the first looked superior and more appealing — but raising the level of a scholarly discipline was no easy thing. If your talent fell short, you'd have to pour in enormous amounts of time, and even then the results you got might be meager.
The second path offered little room for growth, and you could even end up going the wrong way entirely. But it was practical. You only learned the techniques you needed for real combat and put them to use.
Both are appealing in their own way.
Logically speaking, the rational move would be to pursue the first path and switch to the second if you hit the limits of your talent. But how were you supposed to know when you'd hit that limit?
A wall that one person experienced as a steady, gradual climb could feel to another like a jagged barrier of wildly uneven heights — that was the nature of a scholarly path. Walking the first road meant pushing through that kind of hardship.
It's the same with the sword.
The path of the sword had been no different.
I'd been lucky enough to be born with talent, so walls rarely stopped me — but plenty of people walking the same road alongside me hadn't been so fortunate.
Even so, giving up from the very start wasn't the answer.
I remembered the near-certainty I'd felt the moment I learned the doll's true identity was Lee Eun-sung — the instinct that I needed to learn magic. Starting off by surrendering and treating magic as nothing more than a set of cheap tricks would be a waste.
"The first one, for now."
Even if I hit a wall the moment I started because I had no talent for magic —
I decided to walk the first path.
If my talent can't keep up, he'll offer me the second path himself.
That thought was there too.
"Then shall we start by sensing mana?"
As he said it, he extended a finger.
"Touch fingertips with me."
"Okay."
Even with my body still small, his finger was smaller than mine. That slender fingertip met mine. It was so delicate it looked like it might snap if I misjudged my strength even slightly.
Carefully, as requested, I pressed my fingertip to his.
"Ah."
The flow of mana made no sound. But I felt it with absolute clarity.
I couldn't see them, but red, powder-like motes of mana coiled around my hand.
"It's warm."
"Good catch."
The instant he finished speaking, a sharp, static-like jolt ran through the hand that had been warm a moment before.
Had he swapped it out for mana of a different nature?
"This one's electricity. Did you change the attribute?"
"Electricity, yes. But I didn't change the attribute just now. I simply replaced it according to the flow of mana."
The moment his words ended, a cold chill settled in.
I'd heard before that mana circulated — was this what that felt like?
"Cold."
"Haha! You've got good sensitivity."
He laughed and carefully withdrew his finger. The moment it left mine, the mana vanished with it.
"Your sensitivity for sensing the flow is excellent. I'll teach you how to create a flow of your own."
With that, he flicked his fingers. A sharp snap rang out, and multicolored mana wrapping his body blazed into visibility, announcing its presence.
"Fire. Water. Electricity. Plants. Ice. Steel. Light. Darkness. Earth. Stone. These are the attributes commonly classified in magic."
His body glowed in as many colors as the attributes he'd named.
"That's a beginner's logic, though."
Fwoom. Every last mote of mana went dark.
But perhaps because I'd just been in contact with his mana, I could still feel the immense power that remained with him.
He kindled a flame at his fingertip, turned that flame into water, turned the water into a crackling burst of sparks, shaped those fleeting sparks into a whirlwind that took form at his fingertip, transformed the whirlwind into a blunt lump of ice, changed the ice into a light-orb of the kind used to illuminate dark places, turned the light-orb into a heap of sand, turned the sand into a viscous darkness, and turned that viscous darkness into a shard of stone.
Then he shook out his fingers, and the stone shard became a soft breeze and drifted away.
"Like that. Mana can take on any nature. At its root, mana is ether."
"If what you showed earlier was beginner's logic, doesn't that mean this is way out of my league?"
"Don't be weak."
"I'm not being weak. If I launched into some long-winded lecture on the sword, could you learn it?"
"Why would I learn the sword?"
"Oh, for crying out loud."
Why had he suddenly gone into elementary-school mode?
He snickered, then grinned with pure confidence.
"Don't worry. With the Magic Primer Even a Monkey Can Understand that I wrote years ago, even you'll find it easy."
As he said it, he pulled out the book he'd written.
Why did I have to pay money for a book you wrote yourself? That thing's out of print now — a single volume goes for over five million won.
—If I said that out loud he'd only get smug, so I just quietly nodded.
If he can't teach me, that's on him. Whatever.