The Discipline Stick
I arrived in front of the shrine.
Bodhisattva Chuyeon was standing there with a man in his mid-to-late forties, unease written all over him. One look at his face was enough. It was dark, closed in on itself, and he kept whipping his head this way and that without a moment's rest, like a man being hunted.
"Teacher...!"
Chuyeon caught sight of me and bowed her head.
"Hello. Is this the person you were telling me about?"
The man swallowed dryly and bent at the waist.
"Ah—how do you do... I heard the teacher was remarkably gifted, so... begging your pardon for the intrusion... I asked the bodhisattva for help..."
Above his head lay countless red lines. What was strange was that half of them had been stained black. A crawling, unclean feeling washed over me.
Chuyeon indicated the interior.
"Teacher, shall we talk inside?"
"Let's."
We went into the shrine and took our places. The man claimed the lowest seat and knelt. Chuyeon sat in the second seat of honor and looked up at me.
Ah. So I'm in the seat of honor?
"Ah. Well, then."
Refusing would only have embarrassed us both. I settled onto the five-colored cushion as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and the moment I was seated the man opened his mouth with care.
"May I... speak?"
"Go ahead."
He swallowed again and went on.
"I... work as a translator. More precisely, I translate books written in Tibetan. Next to a language like English it's a minor field, so... there isn't all that much work..."
That tracked. Books were everywhere. I couldn't imagine many people going out of their way to commission a Tibetan translation just so they could read one.
"But then... one day, at someone's request... I was asked to translate a book called Records of Eastern Anomalies. And... that was where the nightmare began..."
Records of Eastern Anomalies? Was that something other than Records of Oriental Anomalies? The man couldn't sit still, fidgeting as if someone were peering at him from just out of sight.
"It was the day after I finished the translation and sent off the draft... In the dream, the ghost treated on the first page appeared. At first I thought I'd simply been working too hard..."
His eyes darted.
"But on the second day it was the second page, and on the third day the third... The ghosts kept coming, in order. The problem is... it isn't just a nightmare..."
He rolled up his right sleeve. Something like a long rod had been etched into the arm, as if tattooed there, about the length of a ruler from a stationery shop.
"With every day that passes... this rod grows shorter. And... the ghost I saw yesterday... was the one from page fifty..."
His whole body shook.
"This rod that appeared out of nowhere was originally about twenty centimeters... It shrinks by a tenth of a centimeter every day... I went to a dermatologist and had them fire a tattoo-removal laser at it, and it wouldn't come off..."
He drew a phone from his pocket.
"I know it must sound like a lie... Ha, but... it's real... I'll show you the photos I've been taking every day with a tape measure..."
On the screen was a picture of him holding a tape measure against the rod drawn on his arm. The date stamp was thirty days ago. The rod was unmistakably longer than it was now—by exactly three centimeters.
"As it turned out, Records of Eastern Anomalies had already been translated ages ago... by several publishers, no less. And I went and translated the exact same text all over again..."
He seized his hair as if he meant to tear it out.
"I think... someone laid a curse on me on purpose... The book is two hundred pages in all..."
He trembled like an aspen.
"Which means... in exactly one hundred and fifty-one days... I'm going to die. You might think that's still plenty of time... but I'm in a state where my blood dries up a little more with every single day..."
Tears spilled from both his eyes.
"So I've been to every shaman with any reputation, anywhere I could find them... I even went looking for the Taoist masters who live on Gyeryong Mountain. And that was when Bodhisattva Chuyeon introduced me to Teacher Han Jiwoo..."
Chuyeon nodded, her face grave.
"Bodhisattva Chuyeon couldn't resolve it?"
When I asked, she lowered her head.
"If I could have, I would have. That's why I presumed on your kindness and brought you here, Teacher Han Jiwoo. You were the one who restored my divine power... I thought you might be able to do something for him as well."
At those words the man's eyes went round.
"Y-you were that extraordinary...? P-please, can't you save me...? I'll give you anything... Ah! I-I'm absolutely not asking you to help me empty-handed...!"
He began hauling things out of his briefcase and setting them down.
"Th-these are things I received while dealing with Tibetan monks... I-I don't know whether they're genuine, but..."
All manner of objects were going up onto the low table. Thick stacks of fifty-thousand-won notes—the largest bill there was—were only the beginning.
"Still, the monks gave them to me themselves whenever we did business, telling me they were grateful... so I thought they might be real... and I gathered them up..."
There was a jewel like a wish-fulfilling pearl a dragon might clench in its jaws as it ascended to heaven, scriptures written in Tibetan, elixir pills that looked immensely old, and—
"What's this?"
What caught my eye was the object set farthest to the right: a long wooden branch wrapped round and round in cloth, its protruding tip neatly worked. A faint black sheen clung to it. It did not look ordinary. At a glance, it resembled a switch.
Rustle.
"Ah... y-you mean this...? The Tibetan monks called it a discipline stick... They said that when the novice monks nod off during lessons, they bring this down on their shoulders..."
He carefully lifted the cloth-wrapped branch.
"It looked quite antique, so I asked whether I might have one, and they gave it to me readily... It was even something a high monk had used... and they just handed it over..."
"Hm."
Right. A switch only lands if the power in it runs this strong. Yellow lines shimmered along the branch they called a discipline stick—and that was with the cloth still covering it. What would happen if I took the wrapping off?
"The monks told me never to touch it with the cloth removed... They said something terrible happens if you unwrap it and handle it bare... That the discipline stick devours you, or something of the sort...?"
A slightly glazed look came into his eyes, and he shuddered.
"I've kept that warning without fail... I may not look it, but I put a good deal of faith in superstition... Ah... though looking at the rod on my arm, 'superstition' is a rather odd word for it..."
"May I take the cloth off?"
"Uh... if you're a teacher Bodhisattva Chuyeon acknowledges... it might be all right... Go ahead..."
I lifted the branch with care and peeled the cloth away.
Shrrrip.
—!
I had never felt energy surge this fiercely. Yellow lines that would have put even the Hungry Ghost King to shame. They kept plunging from top to bottom, almost like lightning striking again and again.
Crack-crack-crack!
The yellow lines stabbed wildly at my palm. But just in case, I had already wrapped the palm in blue lines. Furious that their attack wasn't landing, they came flying at my face instead.
Whoosh!
I ducked with a start. A little slower, and a yellow line might have punched clean through my face. When my head dropped without warning, Chuyeon and the man shot to their feet.
"Hup— a-are you all right...?"
"Teacher...!"
Fortunately, my blue lines were catching the yellow ones one by one. More precisely, they were forcing them down and packing them in. Even so, the yellow lines were so strong that one slip and they would have shoved me aside in an instant.
"......"
Cold sweat poured from my brow. Chuyeon and the man stood around me, utterly at a loss. The air said they mustn't touch me, so both pairs of hands flailed in empty space, searching for somewhere to go.
"T-Teacher...!"
"Ah— ah...! Wh-what do we do...!"
Streaming sweat, I jerked my chin toward my bag.
"Ginseng... give me some ginseng... it's in there..."
Bewilderment rose on Chuyeon's face.
"Pardon? G-ginseng?"
"Quickly...!"
"Ah—yes...!"
She rummaged urgently through the bag, pulled out the ginseng, and pushed it straight into my mouth. I had forgotten to brush the dirt off, and soil filled my mouth. I had no room to care about anything so trivial.
Crunch. Crunch-crunch.
Only then did the color of the blue lines being crushed grow deeper. In a flash I seized the advantage again. The yellow lines began to be ground down beneath the thickened blue, and soon they hid away among the twigs of the branch. It sounded like a car stalling out because it had run out of fuel.
Pssshhhhhk...
I wound the cloth tightly around the branch once more. Only then did the yellow lines vanish completely. I wiped the sweat from my brow, and an unaccountable freshness came over me—the feeling of gentling a wild horse little by little and raising it as my own.
"Hoo..."
I drew a deep breath and gathered myself. Then I pointed at the objects laid out on the table.
"You're giving me all of this?"
The man, who had been staring at me blankly, soon nodded furiously.
"I-if only this rod disappears...! These things, of course—and I can even pull the deposit on my apartment and give you that...!"
I nodded.
"Let's go to your place."