Black Hair
I opened my eyes to find morning already waiting.
The alarm was still ringing.
"Ugh..."
I shut it off and picked up my phone. Ten in the morning already. Even on weekends I used to be up at seven to run deliveries, and here I'd slept a full three hours past that.
"Urgh..."
The exhaustion wouldn't lift so easily. On the bus home yesterday I'd dropped so deep I nearly rode past my stop. Burning through half the mana in my body in a single go seemed to carry a serious recoil, so another trip out to Gyeonggi Province today was, for the moment, canceled.
"Haa..."
I dragged myself across the floor, caught my bag, and crammed the ginseng from yesterday's farm straight into my mouth. One root went down, and I was already chewing through two or three more.
Crunch. Crunch-crunch.
"That's better."
It felt like finishing an hour-long IV in five seconds. The weight in my head lifted, and my stamina climbed back a ways. The ginseng couldn't do a thing for the catch in my throat, though. I went to the fridge for water and stopped short. There were two kinds.
One bottle of mineral water, and one bottle of barley tea Joo Chaeyeon had given me not long ago. The mineral water's label claimed it was one hundred percent natural water, brought over exactly as found at some famous site overseas. The barley tea bottle said Del Monte. They still had bottles like that lying around? It was a gift, in its way — and handing it over in a used glass bottle was pure Joo Chaeyeon.
"Oh."
The blue line on the handmade barley tea ran far darker. I didn't hesitate for a second. I poured the Del Monte barley tea into a cup and drank. My life, these days, followed a strict four-part structure: introduction, development, twist, and blue line.
Glug, glug.
Water and scraps of ginseng mixed, and my stomach called a truce. I could feel the blue lines blending in easy harmony.
"Good."
Water and ginseng, and my spent body came roaring back. Everything about it felt simpler, easier, the way strength wells up when a game character downs an HP potion. I felt like a mage inside an RPG.
I picked the phone up again. The messenger was crammed with messages from Joo Chaeyeon and from Bodhisattva Chuyeon.
There were dozens of missed calls, too. The obsession was no joke, and very much Joo Chaeyeon. Still, her mother was the reason I'd gotten a hint about the blue line, so I figured I owed her something in return.
The replies came pouring back at once.
Fortunately, the original Joo Chaeyeon had returned. I read them, left them on read, and moved on. There was a message from my younger sibling, off studying at a boarding school in the provinces.
They'd sent a gift voucher for the bulgogi burger combo I liked. Taking an allowance from me and spending it on this — and a large combo, no less. It ached, and it was endearing.
They read it and left me on read. Fair enough. A high school senior had to be drowning in study stress.
"Hm?"
The next message was from Bodhisattva Chuyeon, and it was nothing I'd expected.
If Chuyeon, who usually tied herself in knots around me, was making a request of this size, the person had to matter. And if they knew the Joseon Record of Strange Beings well, there might be a thread leading up to the tier above it, the Eastern Record of Terrestrial Beings. To take down something bigger than the Preta King, I first had to learn where creatures like that lived.
Chuyeon answered at a speed that suggested she'd been clutching the phone the whole time.
Bzzzzzt!
Chuyeon sent an address along with a time. We'd meet in front of the shrine in a few hours. Right — I'd stop by the company first, then go.
I stopped in at the company and headed for the Information Documentation Room. I set the steel box I'd brought down on the floor and looked around.
"There's room enough."
With books packed in from every direction, the ceiling itself ran high. Even so, just in case, I shoved the desks aside and opened the steel box. The moment my hand touched it, the box opened on its own.
Rrrattle.
The steel box opened, and the Preta King's corpse showed itself. Astonishingly, there wasn't a trace of stench. If anything, it looked in better condition than yesterday — not in the sense that it might get back up, only that the body had kept remarkably well.
I took the Preta King's right hand and drew it out.
Shhhhh.
The corpse turned to heat haze, then appeared on the floor in front of the steel box. If a security camera had caught that, it would have been a scene to make anyone's blood run cold. But ordinary people hadn't even been able to see the steel box I'd carried in. The bus driver yesterday, and the company guard today, hadn't caught the slightest hint that I was carrying anything.
"Hoo."
I drew a light breath and took out the small wire saw I'd brought from home. Well. Wrap it in blue line and cut, and it'd work out one way or another. I slowly pushed the blue line from inside my body into the saw. Unlike the branch, the saw was steel, and it held up far better.
"Hup!"
I started sawing into the Preta King.
Shick, shick, shick, shick, shick.
The blue line wound around the saw made the cutting easy. I was taking a corpse apart, and yet, oddly, no nausea came. With every stroke it wasn't blood that rose — yellow lines shot upward and scattered. It felt less like butchering a body than like sawing ordinary wood.
Shick, shick, shick. Shick, shick. Shick.
I cut in earnest and flung the pieces onto the pot where the ginseng seed was planted.
Flick.
They sank into the pot at a fierce speed. Just as they were nearly gone I added more, then more again. Keep that up, and a full hour had already slipped past. I'd managed about half the Preta King's corpse.
"Oh."
I lifted my head. Looking up wasn't enough, so I tipped my waist back a little.
Stretch.
I looked up at the ginseng seed — no, at what had once been a ginseng seed and was now a long stem. The plant had swollen to the scale of palm fronds. The ceiling here ran close to sixteen feet, and the ginseng was all but brushing it. Senior Oh Seorin would be in tomorrow; she didn't need to walk in and jump, so I pulled up the plant that had grown like something possessed.
"!"
A gloss poured down the ginseng's skin. This wasn't the level of blue lines anymore. It was nearly sheathed in a blue membrane — so many lines tangled over it that they read, instead, as a film.
I brushed the soil from the ginseng and put it in my mouth.
Crunch-crunch-crunch.
The way juice bursts when you bite into a filled candy, a bundle of blue lines ruptured in my mouth. Blue line flooded it. It felt ready to spill past my lips at any moment, but I clamped them shut. I couldn't afford to lose even a little. Every single line had to be absorbed.
Fwoooosh!
The bundle plunged down my throat without resistance and beat wildly at my heart, hard enough to leave it numb. I had never felt anything like it.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
The two thin lines seated in my heart began to thicken.
Shhhhh.
At last the bundle of blue lines finished digesting.
"?"
I caught sight of myself in the mirror on the desk and startled. The white gray hairs that had been a complex since high school were cleanly gone. As if I'd just had it dyed black at a salon, my hair was a deep, saturated black. The gray wasn't the only thing that had vanished. The acne scars from childhood on my cheeks had gone smooth as a peeled boiled egg.
Magic, as expected, was the best.