A Great Deed
Clink.
A cup of coffee was set down before Kang Hyeong-seok. It rested on a table whose shattered glass had been mended with layer after layer of clear tape, and the cup itself was far from spotless.
"Thank you."
Still, the sincerity behind it was plain, so Kang Hyeong-seok bowed his head in thanks and lifted the cup.
"You're Mr. Na Seong-hwa, I believe?"
"Yes. Yes."
Na Seong-hwa, seated beside him, nodded again and again, his head bobbing like a weight on a string.
A gaunt face and stick-thin limbs. His clothes were none too clean, either. Perhaps his life, like the fractured tabletop, had been riddled with cracks from the start.
"There's something I'd like to ask you. I understand you once worked with Kim Ki-ok."
"Yes."
Na Seong-hwa answered as if trying to read Kang Hyeong-seok's face, and Kang Hyeong-seok rubbed a thumb across his knit brow.
"Please, speak freely. And as for payment — the person who contacted you will see to that separately."
Meaning: just answer at your ease. That was all he intended, but Na Seong-hwa's head swung from side to side.
"I don't want money."
"I'm sorry?"
"I said I don't want money."
Na Seong-hwa moved his eyes and met Kang Hyeong-seok's gaze, and there was nothing ordinary in them. They were not the eyes of an ordinary man. They belonged to someone who had steeled himself around a single resolve.
"Kim Ki-ok. That man is not human."
Kang Hyeong-seok met his gaze and left the cup where it stood. The man was still timid to a fault in his manner, yet his eyes alone brimmed with an uncanny, overflowing vitality — enough that he might have spent his whole life waiting for this very moment.
"What happened?"
"Plenty."
Na Seong-hwa answered with a voice that turned suddenly forceful, then pressed on with hardened eyes.
"He's a vicious man. It isn't just that he wrings his workers dry — cruelty is in his nature, and when he needs something done, there is nothing he won't do. Enough that rumors went around he had killed my own mother."
"...I'd like to hear it all, as concretely as you can tell it."
"He's been keeping sorcerers at his side since he was young."
I know what you want. Isn't that what you came here to ask of me?
Na Seong-hwa's eyes said exactly that, unmistakably.
"It was the same even when I was there. People called the man a mudang — a shaman — but he was no Korean mudang, not to my eye. An onmyoji, I think they call it. He spoke Korean well enough, but not one thing he did was something a Korean would do."
Kang Hyeong-seok ran his tongue across his teeth, carefully weighing his next question, but Na Seong-hwa's words flowed on unchecked.
"Then one day, purely by chance, I overheard that man telling Kim Ki-ok: a great building had to be raised. But its purpose was never, on any account, to be found out."
Then something flashed through Kang Hyeong-seok's mind.
The factory...?
That place ringed about by mountains like a folding screen, its ground damp, a fishy reek like the blood of beasts rising from the soil. Beyond any doubt, a site some shaman had divined with intent.
And then it came.
Pad, pad, pad, pad, pad.
He saw the figure of a man shaking something like a luxuriant tree branch woven of snow-white paper.
This place...
All around was empty ground, but the lay of the land was familiar. It was the very ground where the factory now stood.
Pad, pad, pad, pad!
The man brandishing the bundle of white paper — much like the spirit money called jijeon in Korean rites — could only be Kim Ki-ok.
"That's what the man said. That if Kim Ki-ok was to prosper, the gods had to be summoned down."
While Kang Hyeong-seok watched the vision, Na Seong-hwa's voice went on.
"That they had to crush the energy of this land and raise a shrine to bind Japan and Korea together. That was the covenant between that man and Kim Ki-ok."
Kang Hyeong-seok turned his gaze aside.
There stood a figure in snow-white kariginu — the ritual dress of a Japanese onmyoji — watching over Kim Ki-ok. And beside them, a baby was cradled in a young woman's arms, its face veiled with white cloth. Perhaps the onmyoji's assistant, or his wife.
"He said it would be no easy task. That the gods of this land would not leave them be. That they would suffer karmic retribution and heaven's punishment."
At Na Seong-hwa's voice carrying on even within the vision, Kang Hyeong-seok swallowed drily. He had a fair idea of what the man would say next.
"So he said they must make a shikigami — a bound servant spirit — to guard his body."
Rokurokubi.
The word left Na Seong-hwa's lips: the yokai the onmyoji had fitted onto Kim Ki-ok.
"And that shikigami, he said, was the stakes."
Kang Hyeong-seok felt as though lightning had struck him.
The stakes. The rokurokubi's long neck. The chopsticks in the jar. Every one of them shared the same defining trait.
So that's it. That's how it was all made to fit.
Kim Ki-ok meant to sever the veins of this land. Like stakes hammered into the earth — raising the factory disguised as a shrine had been his true purpose all along.
"No one ever believed me."
The vision was fading. The scene about him had returned to Na Seong-hwa's home, and Kim Ki-ok's figure had vanished without a trace. In its place sat Na Seong-hwa — shoulders hunched, eyes stretched wide, head bowed.
"And yet how was I to stand by and do nothing? Kim Ki-ok meant to do something so dreadful. What kind of human being could hold his tongue and let it happen?"
Kang Hyeong-seok dragged his tongue over a mouth gone dry as desert and nodded, heavily. At once, Na Seong-hwa's gaze fastened onto him.
"Do you believe me?"
"Yes."
"...Truly?"
The question came threaded with doubt. Still, Kang Hyeong-seok nodded with weight.
"I believe you. You found the courage to speak."
Na Seong-hwa must have lived his whole life with a secret he could tell to no one. He may well have believed there was no way out, no hope at all. And still he had gathered his courage and done the one thing that lay in his power.
"......"
Na Seong-hwa sealed his lips hard, then clenched his jaw to the last tooth. His jutting chin trembled. Then his eyes shut deep, and the hands resting on his knees shuddered before spreading wide to seize his own thighs.
"Hngh! Hk! Hoo-ook... thank... thank you."
How long had he ached to say those words?
"Th... thank you. Thank you. For believing me... thank you."
Kang Hyeong-seok said nothing, only watched him. He hadn't even tasted the coffee, and yet a bitterness was turning in his mouth.
Na Seong-hwa was a man of virtue. For long, long years he had gnawed his heart out waiting for this moment, so that he might do what was right — unable even to live as other men lived, while Kim Ki-ok, a man who meant harm to the nation, swanned about in the fat comfort of any chaebol magnate.
"There is such a thing as karma."
It was only after Na Seong-hwa lifted his trembling head and looked at him through sodden eyes that Kang Hyeong-seok said it.
"Karma is a cruel thing. Even words merely breathed past the lips — though no deed ever follows them — become Eopbo, karmic debt, all the same."
Kim Ki-ok's karma was vaster than he could imagine.
"You have accomplished something great. You may think the world will never know, but in the end, a heart has reached you — this one, here and now."
"Hhk... hukk."
"Your courage may not be repaid right away. But remember this."
Kang Hyeong-seok looked past Na Seong-hwa's shoulder and went on in a calm voice.
"You have laid down a great deed, and that deed will stand as merit for you."
Just as Kim Ki-ok had taken a yokai for his shikigami, a guardian spirit kept watch over Na Seong-hwa as well. And its power was far from small — great enough, on the day Na Seong-hwa walked back out into the world, to gladly sweep the road ahead of him.
"I will carry what you've told me deep within my heart."
Na Seong-hwa's whole body shuddered. He said nothing. He only bowed his head and let heavy tears fall, one, then another.
Clink.
Kang Hyeong-seok drank the coffee Na Seong-hwa had brewed for him. Instant coffee, naturally — and an old batch at that, harsh on the tongue and smelling faintly off. None of it mattered.
"That was good. Thank you."
Rising while Na Seong-hwa still could not lift his head, Kang Hyeong-seok glanced once at the guardian spirit standing watch behind him, bowed low in respect, and let himself out of the house.
Thud.
The door closed behind him, and his face was crowded with thought. Still — now, at last, he knew even the purpose beyond all doubt.
I will stop Kim Ki-ok.
And Kim Ki-ok's mother, the woman made into a rokurokubi — her, too, he would release from her grudge.
With his purpose fixed, Kang Hyeong-seok walked down the alley and took out his phone.
Brrring.
"It's me. Just finished the conversation."
Passing on to Shin Yo-sep everything that had just happened, Kang Hyeong-seok walked toward the car.
Tap. Tap.
Cane in hand, Kim Ki-ok entered the factory, his aide at his side. The laborers huddled at the entrance, heads bowed as though each had committed some capital crime, but Kim Ki-ok spared them not so much as a glance.
Only the second floor, where the altar stood.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Upheld by his aide's arm as he climbed the stairs, Kim Ki-ok's eyes looked hurried — and warped with fury.
"Hoooh—!"
And he loosed a long breath, as though venting his rage upon the broken shards of the jar.
"...I have no excuse."
"Have you found out who did this?"
"We're still looking."
"Hah. Damned wretches."
Clatter.
Kim Ki-ok pushed the shattered pieces aside with his cane, and deep ridges carved themselves into his face. As if the broken jar were a piece of his own flesh, his eyes looked to be in pain.
"Isn't this what I've always told you? Korean bastards can never be trusted."
"...My apologies."
"And pawing around the village will win us nothing."
The aide ventured his next question with his eyes alone, cautiously, and Kim Ki-ok propped himself on his cane as though pushing against the floor.
"This wasn't the villagers' doing."
"Then..."
The aide knew what manner of man Kim Ki-ok was — a man whose instincts had always run uncannily sharp, as though the gods themselves favored him, and who had climbed to his present place on those instincts alone.
"Outsiders. Young ones. Two of them."
Kim Ki-ok looked down at the footprints strewn carelessly across the floor. The broad-soled prints were safety boots, left by the laborers — though prints that looked like sneakers were stamped there as well.
Wham!
Kim Ki-ok brought his cane down on the footprint as though crushing an insect, his pale eyebrows twitching.
"Vile little bastards."
"Shall we keep men posted through the night as well?"
"We will. Seal it so tight not even an ant can show its face. And..."
Before his attentively listening aide, Kim Ki-ok leveled his cane at the altar — and at the cat's carcass still hanging from the wires.
"Set it all up again. The cat — spend not a coin. Catch one nearby, or fetch one from a shelter."
"Yes, sir."
"Nothing matters but completion. Nothing but completion."
Kim Ki-ok turned himself toward the stairs. The aide stepped to his side to steady him — but Kim Ki-ok turned his gaze back toward the altar.
Silence pooled in the room, thick with the musty stink of dust. And there, eyes lifted toward the ceiling, Kim Ki-ok murmured with his lips alone:
"Daijōbu desu yo ne, okā-san."
(It will be all right, won't it? Mother.)