You Severed Your Own Spirit Line
"No!"
Director Kwon's shriek came tearing through the air behind him, but Kang Hyeong-seok swept the red cloth away in a single motion.
And as the thing's true form was laid bare, the president squeezed his eyes shut, the department head wrenched his face away, and Director Kwon crumpled where he stood, his features contorting so wretchedly it was almost pitiable.
"…You mad bastards."
It was a goat.
Someone had taken a goat's bones and, with glue and tree branches, assembled them into the shape of a Buddha seated in the lotus position. What looked at first glance like black paint was blood.
WARARARARANG!
Kang Hyeong-seok swept the malignant aura radiating off the thing away with the sacred shaman bells, then leveled his glare at Director Kwon.
"Where did you learn filth like this and use it to take human lives! You son of a bitch!"
Director Kwon couldn't even answer; he only kept his head bowed low. The blood had been painted on afresh with every life offered up — crusted now, layer upon layer, one stratum for each of his victims.
Kang Hyeong-seok's molars ground together, and he raised the Sinjangkal.
Such a thing has no right to exist in this land.
When he drew the blade free of its scabbard, the pale steel caught the sunlight and gleamed, the dulled edge sharpening swiftly — and with it, he gained the strength to stand against the unclean.
WARARARANG!
Shaking the shaman bells to call on his Momjusin for protection, Kang Hyeong-seok brought the Sinjangkal down on the goat's skull.
CRACK!
The struck skull broke apart with a rattle and fell away; the second swing brought the ribcage crashing down.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
"Ugh… uuuugh!" The president moaned, backing away step by step, his face drained white.
Director Kwon's sorcery had carried him far. He had doubted the altar at first, then believed in it blindly, and at the last he had feared it. Now that object of worship and terror alike was collapsing in the hands of an unknown shaman — and to the president it looked like a rehearsal of his own future. His trembling gaze slid to Director Kwon. But the man only hung his head, his parched mouth quivering and nothing more.
THUD! CRACK! BANG!
Kang Hyeong-seok kicked the altar apart.
The clamor sent the employees stumbling back in fright, and Chae Young-sik's fists clenched and unclenched, his face a tangle of feelings. This was the altar built to receive him. Watching it being destroyed wrung out of him an emotion too knotted for words.
Crash! Clatter-clatter! WHAM! THUD!
He brought the bone effigies on either side crashing to the floor as well, then stood glaring down at the altar, hauling in ragged breaths.
"Don't think your spirit line is safe."
And without turning, he spoke to Director Kwon behind him.
"You severed it yourself."
The moment a man did such a thing — perhaps long before it — his spirit line was already cut. Whatever remained, he had only been forcibly holding in place. A shaman bereft of his power draws the unclean close and clings to it to keep that power alive. For Director Kwon, this altar had been exactly that.
"Live out your whole life being punished. A very, very long life."
Kang Hyeong-seok turned to face him. The man was still breathing — and Director Kwon, of all people, understood exactly what that meant. Death, here and now, would have been the mercy. The great punishment the gods send down is only the herald; if it has yet to arrive, a far greater one is still waiting.
It would be horrific.
Profoundly so.
"Ugh… uuuh… ugh."
Kang Hyeong-seok shifted his gaze from the trembling, speechless man to the president and slipped the shaman bells inside his jacket. Only the Sinjangkal remained in his hand, and the president flinched — but Kang Hyeong-seok merely sheathed the blade and spoke.
"You're not exempt either."
"I—I only… I only did as this man told me…!"
Excuses meant nothing. Meeting the president's eyes with a shaman's gaze that saw through to the marrow, Kang Hyeong-seok slid the Sinjangkal into his bag.
"You know better than anyone that that isn't true."
"But…!"
"Everything you've built is going to disappear. The factory. Your health. Your family."
The president's face hardened white, and his legs gave out beneath him.
Last of all, Kang Hyeong-seok's gaze came to rest on the department head. The man kept his head down as if looking away might be enough to escape notice. It meant nothing. He had aided the shaman. It would not end with a light punishment — perhaps not as heavy as Director Kwon's, but not light.
Thud. Thud. His footsteps carried him across the floor, and no one moved to stop him. The employees — men who knew precisely how fearsome a shaman could be — drew back as if avoiding his very shadow, while Chae Young-sik and Lee Ha-yoon watched him go with faces that could hardly breathe.
"Let's go. It's over."
Kang Hyeong-seok took them out to the car. The security guards hovered, at a complete loss, but they couldn't hold him any more than anyone else could; all they could do was watch the car pull away.
Vrrroooom.
In the moving car, Chae Young-sik looked back. Right up until yesterday — no, right up until this very morning — it had been a factory where he worked like anyone else. Now it looked like a den of demons.
He stared blankly as it receded, and his fingertips began to shake. How ridiculous must I have seemed to them — that they would do that to me. To me. His mouth twisted, and he clutched at his chest as self-loathing and hatred swelled together inside him.
That was when it came.
"It wasn't your fault, Mr. Chae."
"…I'm sorry?"
"It wasn't your fault, I said. You didn't go through any of this because you did something wrong, Mr. Young-sik."
Chae Young-sik stared at him with eyes gone wide, and Lee Ha-yoon in the passenger seat blinked in open surprise. Even so, Kang Hyeong-seok continued in the same level voice.
"You couldn't see the warehouse because they had clouded your eyes."
It happens often enough. A house you've toured a dozen times, fallen in love with, signed the contract for — and only afterward do you notice the graveyard through the bedroom window. Things of that kind. They can happen to anyone. At any time.
"They didn't mark you for human sacrifice because you were pathetic. You simply stood out — the way a man who commits violence without reason seizes as his victim whoever happens to catch his eye."
"But maybe that's just it — maybe I'm weak-minded. That could be the reason, couldn't it?"
"If you must dig for a reason, it was your name."
"…My name?"
"Young-sik, wasn't it."
The characters in his real name were different, but Director Kwon, being a shaman, would have seen other, similar hanja shining through it all the same. Yeong — the character for spirit. Sik — the character for a meal. Set the two side by side and they read: to devour souls. The instant Director Kwon saw Chae Young-sik's name on his résumé, he must have decided to feed that soul to his altar.
"A name isn't something you get to choose for yourself."
Inside the car with its heavy engine droning, Kang Hyeong-seok's low, steady voice carried on.
"None of this was ever your fault. So don't go blaming yourself."
Chae Young-sik's trembling lips buckled. Then he buried his face in his palms, shoulders shaking, and forced out a heavy nod.
Lee Ha-yoon glanced back briefly, then returned her eyes to the road. Her friend was crying. She couldn't bear to watch, so she only reached her hand behind her and held Chae Young-sik's.
Vrrrrrooom.
All the while, Kang Hyeong-seok drove in silence, eyes fixed ahead — as if to put Chae Young-sik as far from that factory as possible, as fast as the road allowed.
Bzzzt.
Kang Hyeong-seok answered the call. He'd already dropped Chae Young-sik and Lee Ha-yoon off, and with a half day already filed at the office there was no reason to go back — so he took the call sitting in his parked car by a café near his home.
"What?"
"You'd already left, huh?"
"Where?"
"The factory. Figured if you were still around, I'd stop by and see your face while I was at it."
Kang Hyeong-seok could picture Shin Yo-sep's face perfectly — the voice in his ear was pure grumbling.
"You know that factory? Turns out they supply parts to one of our subcontractors. I decided to tear the place apart properly, so I cooked up a problem worth raising and went to them with it."
Inside a car with every window shut tight, the air somehow turned cold. He hadn't said he'd found something worth raising. He'd said he'd made one. And gone in person, no less — Shin Yo-sep himself, heir to Shinjin Construction, the prime contractor above them all.
"Since you'd already torn through the place, there wasn't much left for me. Collected a few penalty fees, killed the contract. Dropped a few rumors around the neighborhood, too."
At Shin Yo-sep flatly reeling off how he'd finished an entire factory, Kang Hyeong-seok smiled — something wry and strange in it.
"So you were the punishment."
"What punishment?"
"The one that president had coming. That place was rotten through and through. The president, the director, the workers — all of them."
"They even had some strange things in there, didn't they."
Kang Hyeong-seok nodded, his smile turning bitter.
"Then he'd best receive that punishment in full, too."
What the president had taken from Shin Yo-sep was not the end of it. It had only begun — and his final end would look a great deal like Director Kwon's. A shaman who works curses and human sacrifice brings great calamity down upon himself, and the client who commissions it shares in that calamity.
"Hey."
"What?"
"If any legal trouble sprouts up, say the word. I'll put our legal team on it."
Steady words — though Kang Hyeong-seok doubted it would ever come to that — and he gave a short laugh.
"Forget it. Let's just get a drink."
He had seen a wretched altar and wretched people. His mouth was bitter as if he'd licked raw gall, and he wanted to wash the taste out with liquor.
"Where are you?"
"I'll come to you. I'm in the car."
"I'll text you the address, so come on over. We'll have that drink together."
"Grilling pork belly over bean sprouts again this time?"
If it was, he'd been thinking of picking up some bean sprouts and pork belly on the way.
"No, something good came in this time. You like jamón?"
He'd heard the word somewhere before, he thought.
"Never tried it."
"Good. Take your time getting here, then."
Kang Hyeong-seok hung up, then bought an iced americano from the café and hung it in the cup holder. He turned the engine over, and before pulling out, looked at the sun through the windshield. The street was quiet, empty. It almost felt as if he'd been left alone in the world.
"Hah." He laughed as though pressing the breath out of him, then tapped the address Shin Yo-sep had texted him into the navigation.
Vrrrrroooom.
With a heavy bellow, the car began to move. Driving at his leisure, coffee in hand, Kang Hyeong-seok thought of the president and Director Kwon.
Live a little decently, for once. Wretched creatures.
Life is not as long as one thinks. People pass through its brief span like something glimpsed from a window. Even spent caring for one another and walking the straight path, the time falls short — and still so many choose to live it foul and wicked.
And the punishment they will reap will be anything but light.
Vrrrooom.
In the moving car, his lips pressed shut, as though carrying some tangled weight.
"Get out of the way! You son of a bitch!"
At the factory Shin Yo-sep had swept through, the president was screaming abuse at Director Kwon. There was no question of running the place normally anymore, so every last employee had already been sent home.
A bleak chill hung over the floor like a school emptied of its students, and Director Kwon, face burning scarlet, planted himself in front of the forklift.
"What in the hell do you think you're doing! Absolutely not!"
"Move! You crippled bastard!"
Wheeeeeeng!
Like a beast raising its forepaws, the forks at the front of the forklift surged upward. Even so, Director Kwon had no choice but to block the man in the driver's seat — because the president fully intended to grind the altar into the ground.
"We can start over! We can do it all again! You'd just end up sitting in the gutter like this, would you! Huh!?"
"You broken-brained bastard! If you — if you hadn't pulled that goddamn stunt—!"
Even with Director Kwon's eyes snapping up at him, the president didn't leash his fury. Before, it would have been different. He would have read the moods of a man who possessed uncanny power, and at Director Kwon's word he would at least have made a show of wilting.
Wheeeeeeng!
The president moved the forklift as if he'd shove Director Kwon aside along with everything else. But with his arms spread wide, the man didn't budge an inch, and the fury climbed higher still.
"Move! Before I kill you!"
"Pull yourself together! You know what this is — and now, of all times—!"
"You bastard, maybe I should gouge your eyes out. If I'd never listened to you, I would've lived an ordinary life! Fuck!"
"Who made you richer than everyone else, huh? You liked it too — didn't you say so yourself!"
"What was that, you bastard?"
Fire leapt in the president's eyes. Mind gone white, he climbed down from the forklift, seized what hung on its tool rack, and swung it in huge, convulsive arcs.
CRACK—! THUD!
It was a hammer the forklift operator had happened to leave hanging there when the workers were hastily sent home.
Director Kwon went down hard, his skull cracking against the materials stacked on a pallet, and lay sprawled — blood spreading slowly outward beneath him.
"Uh… uh-uh…?"
Only then did the president understand what he had done.
"D-Director Kwon! Director Kwon!"
He shook the man — again, again.
"Wake up! Goddamn it — Director Kwon!"
No matter how he shook him, there was no answer, and the president's face went slack. Then, bracing his blood-smeared hands against the floor, he sank down in a heap.