The White Fox Craze
I let out a hollow laugh the moment I took in the absurd spectacle inside the Jirisan Yokai Extermination Office. White fox posters here. White fox posters there. The damn things were plastered across every wall in sight.
I glanced back at Lee Ha-neul, who was trailing after me like an eager puppy. “...What exactly is all this?”
“White foxes, obviously.”
“I have perfectly functional eyes, thank you. I can see they’re white foxes.”
I caught her soft mutter of “You’re not even human,” but decided to ignore it and pressed on.
“Don’t tell me…” I pointed at my own face. “Are these all supposed to be me?”
“Of course they are.”
“...”
I’m not the type to suffer from terminal celebrity syndrome, but between the way people kept looking at me and the sheer number of “white fox” posters, it was impossible to deny who everyone was worshipping.
Lee Ha-neul’s explanation followed shortly after. Apparently, on the day I saved their lives, every single agent had caught a glimpse of my face right before they thought they were going to die. Whether it was gratitude or something else entirely, fox-related merchandise had exploded in popularity at the office ever since.
…No matter how I looked at it, this didn’t feel like simple gratitude for saving their lives.
“Lady Miho, good morning!”
“Lady Miho, did you sleep well?”
“Lady Miho, I’m your biggest fan!”
See? How was any of this simple goodwill? Calling it “favor” felt like a stretch. This was less about kindness and more like… some other kind of emotion. I couldn’t quite pin down exactly what it was.
Still, the way people kept sneaking glances at my face and body while grinning like idiots left me feeling both flattered and vaguely uncomfortable. What struck me as even weirder was that the vast majority of those giving me these strange looks were male staff members.
The female employees were friendly too, of course. Some smiled warmly when they saw my ears and tails. Others approached me directly to thank me for saving them. But unlike that pack of perverts, the women didn’t act like they’d come down with some terminal case of hero-worship.
It was strange. I hadn’t even used my fox magic—Charm or anything of the sort.
That was when someone crept up beside me.
“Ahhh, it was truly the descent of an angel!”
“...?”
Who the hell was this guy? I shot Lee Ha-neul a look that begged for explanation. She simply pressed a hand to her forehead, looking exhausted, and offered nothing more.
The man continued enthusiastically. “I was certain I was going to die. That sinister blue fox yokai had devoured half my liver, and my intestines were spilling out in the most horrific way… Then our savior appeared like a comet. Ah, Lady Miho’s grace is as vast as the heavens themselves…”
“Excuse me.”
“Yes!”
“Who are you…?”
“Oh! How terribly rude of me. My name is Kim Myung-ho. I’m a Grade 7 civil servant. It is an absolute honor to meet you, Lady Miho!”
“Ah… yes, hello…”
Still somewhat bewildered, I offered the man a handshake. He grasped it with such overwhelming emotion that he began shouting at the top of his lungs, loud enough to rattle the entire Yokai Extermination Office.
Yeah. The stress of hunting yokai must have finally broken his brain. Your average run-of-the-mill lunatic. And a lunatic, in my book, meant someone I could make use of.
I asked him casually, “Would it be all right if I used the computer for a bit?”
“Of course!”
Permission granted in under a second. Is this really okay without reporting to the director…?
I glanced at him nervously before settling into the chair and reaching for the mouse. The tail made sitting a little awkward, but after two full years without touching a keyboard, I actually felt a thrill run through me.
I typed “Taeja Singi” into the search bar.
Surprisingly, results popped up immediately—including a dedicated wiki page.
Taeja Singi (態者新氣)
1. Overview
2. Characteristics
3. Patch History
4. Usage Locations
1. Overview
Taeja Singi is an item that appears in the online game [Loaderna - Lord of the Night].
Goddamn it. It was a game item. And looking closer, the Chinese characters were completely different from the ones Mangtae Grandfather had taught me. What an unpleasant coincidence.
Besides the game item, there were plenty of other search results for “Taeja Singi.” An antique shop with the name. A Chinese restaurant. Even a small business. Everything except books, it seemed.
It looked like gathering information from the internet was a dead end. I gave the seat back to Kim Myung-ho.
“Oh, you can keep using it!”
“...Aren’t you supposed to be working?”
He pointed at the headphones over his ears and smiled brightly. “I am working, so there’s no need to worry! Hahaha!”
Was he detecting yokai energy through those headphones? I wasn’t sure, but since I no longer had a reason to stay on the computer, I started to get up—
…Only to end up diving into an online community for the first time in ages. Sure enough, three hours vanished in the blink of an eye.
Following Lee Ha-neul’s guidance, I got to tour every corner of the Jirisan Yokai Extermination Office. The first thought that struck me was just how impossibly vast the information humans had gathered. They had yokai encyclopedias thick enough to rival full dictionaries, scientific research papers and theses on yoki, and—most surprisingly—detailed records on goblins, a species believed to have gone extinct five hundred years ago.
Goblin. A mysterious race believed to have gone extinct five hundred years ago. Unlike the yokai hostile to humans, the goblins of that era are said to have been friendly toward them.
The following is an excerpt from the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty.
Seongjong 3rd Year, 8th Month
[Veritable Records of Seongjong, Volume 21, 24th Day of the 8th Month, Year 3 of Seongjong]
— Attending the morning audience
— Proceeding to the royal lecture
— Proceeding to the royal study
— The Ministry of Taxation reports financial difficulties due to losses caused by goblins
— Summoning the winged Taoist master Jeon Woo-chi to the palace to request the extermination of goblins
The divine official of the Great Qing Temple and Chachaung, Baek Geum-hwan, reported to the king: “The recent tyranny of the goblins has gone too far. Summon the winged Taoist master Jeon Woo-chi, who can fly across the sky, and have him destroy the goblins that harm the nation.” The king issued a royal decree: “Goblins are mysterious beings that can be both beneficial and harmful to the people. Are they not like us? In my view, goblins are no different from humans. Focus your efforts on exterminating true yokai rather than goblins.”
Reading the annals was incredibly fascinating. No matter which page I opened, it was packed with stories about goblins, yokai, the winged Taoist master who appeared and disappeared like lightning, the King of Yuldo, and Hong Gil-dong. Seeing official royal documents openly and elaborately recording tales of yokai and goblins made the whole thing feel strangely unreal.
…It was a little funny that a fox yokai who had possessed a human body was the one thinking this.
Still, my idea to gather information at the Yokai Extermination Office hadn’t been wrong. Unfortunately, no matter how deeply I dug through the annals, there wasn’t a single mention of Taeja Singi. That was to be expected. According to Mangtae Grandfather, it was a mystical book distributed only to yokai—and one that had vanished five hundred years ago. If humans had any records of it, that would have been even stranger.
I ended up staying at the office for several more days. The director granted me far more authority than I’d anticipated; I was allowed to access all information except for Level 2 classified material. But since there wasn’t a shred of data on Taeja Singi even in the Level 3 files, I decided to strike a deal with the director.
The result was failure. In exchange for Level 2 clearance, he demanded information about the Jirisan Hidden World. No matter how human my roots might be, I wasn’t cold enough to sell out friends like Depo, whom I’d lived with for two years.
…Though if I was being completely honest, I did briefly consider selling out Sangun. We weren’t close, and he didn’t think much of me anyway, so I wouldn’t have felt any guilt. But while I felt no guilt, I did feel a very real threat to my life. The moment I imagined what that insane tiger monster might do to me in retaliation, I broke into a cold sweat. Best to avoid getting entangled with Sangun.
…
…
…
Life at the Jirisan Yokai Extermination Office was surprisingly pleasant. The quality of the three square meals they served me was excellent, and the dog food I ate as snacks was genuinely delicious.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
Oh, I’m still eating it right now. I was embarrassed at first, but now I just eat it openly. It’s surprisingly good at stimulating the appetite. When I eventually return to the Hidden World, I’m definitely taking ten packs of this stuff with me, no matter what else I leave behind.
“...”
Little by little, impatience was starting to creep in. I’d gathered plenty of information about goblins and yokai, but I hadn’t found a single clue about Taeja Singi. I was just starting to seriously consider heading back to the Hidden World when Kim Myung-ho, who was on yokai detection duty, suddenly shouted at the top of his lungs.
“Director! Emergency!”
The director came running, his few remaining strands of hair flying wildly. “What is it?”
“Abnormal signs detected from a 7th-grade yokai—Jomagu.”
“Jomagu…? Isn’t that the trivial little yokai that’s smaller than a rabbit? It’s not even on the high-priority surveillance list.”
The director muttered to himself, then asked again. “Has its yoki increased?”
For some reason, the director’s tone carried clear trust in Kim Myung-ho. So the fox fanatic was actually a capable civil servant who had earned the director’s confidence.
“No, the yoki level is unchanged. However…”
Kim Myung-ho stared at his monitor in disbelief and continued.
“Its size has increased. It’s bigger than an elephant… No, bigger than two elephants combined…!”