The Bell That Chooses Its Master
Vrrroooom.
Sipping coffee from his tumbler, Kang Hyeong-seok drove on. He was in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province. He skirted a factory complex, slipped into quieter backroads, and after threading past a site humming with construction, steered the car up into the mountains.
Bump, bump — then came a road of poured concrete. Climbing the narrow track as it jolted the car viciously beneath him, Kang Hyeong-seok checked the clock. It was closing in on eight.
Did I oversleep?
He had meant to rest his eyes for only a moment at the rest stop, and had gone out like a light. Then again, maybe that was just as well.
Grrrowl.
Around the mountain's midpoint, a patch of flat ground appeared — nothing wide, but level — and Kang Hyeong-seok parked at its edge and stepped out of the car. This was the home of the shaman Lee Geum-kyeong.
It was a hanok that carried the air of a temple, but rather than head straight inside, Kang Hyeong-seok stopped to gaze at the courtyard.
Every time I come here, I think of it.
The memory of kneeling in the very center of that yard, receiving the Sin-nureum — the suppression ritual.
That was when it happened.
"What brings you out here, sir?"
A woman's voice — standard Korean, but thick with a Jeolla accent. When Kang Hyeong-seok turned, he saw a young woman in name-brand athletic wear. She rubbed her nose as she glared at him, wary as a cat.
"That stench of misfortune is practically vibrating off you. What business brings you here?"
Kang Hyeong-seok gave a small nod. She was a total stranger, yet he had a fair idea who she was.
"You're her disciple, I take it? I've come to see the Teacher."
The woman was a practitioner of the shamanic arts. In crude terms, a saekki mudang — an apprentice shaman. Think of her as an intern: someone learning, step by step, everything from how to live as a mudang to how to perform a gut.
"It's late. You should be heading back now."
"There's something I must ask her in person."
"I said, turn back."
The woman's expression hardened by degrees.
"One look and I can tell — you went poking around some haunted house or other and caught yourself something nasty. Why is it your kind insists on crawling into places like that of your own free will, only to come shamelessly crawling here begging for help?"
She had plainly endured more than her share of such visitors, because the words poured out of her like machine-gun fire. To her, Kang Hyeong-seok must have looked exactly like one of those people who haul themselves up mountains that are clearly off-limits and then dial 119 for rescue.
But he was not the man she took him for.
"My name is Kang Hyeong-seok."
"So what?"
He had spoken in the tone of a man expecting to be recognized; the flat retort threw him. Kang Hyeong-seok pressed his lips together, then opened his mouth as if exhaling a sigh.
"Tell her that the wretch who failed to become her son has come, and she'll understand."
Hypothetically speaking, that is.
Had he received the Sinnaerim — the divine calling — instead of the Sin-nureum, he and Lee Geum-kyeong would now be bound as spirit-mother and spirit-son. A bond as tight as blood, one that could never be severed.
That was when it happened.
The woman's eyes went round as saucers, and her crossed arms fell slack.
"Huh? You're... the Young Master?"
"...Young Master?"
"I've heard so much about you! You should have called ahead, at the very least. The road up here is treacherous — you must have had a rough journey."
Her entire manner transformed. The voice was far more deferential than the one she used even on Lee Geum-kyeong's guests, and her face had gone soft.
There were reasons for that. His relationship with Lee Geum-kyeong. And his Momjusin — the deity that governed his body.
If Kang Hyeong-seok walked the proper rites and accepted a god, he would become a mansin, a great shaman commanding the reverence of every mudang in the land. No one in the shamanic world who knew his name could afford to treat him carelessly.
"Then what in the world has you reeking of misfortune, sir?"
"That's actually why I've come."
"Aigoo. Sounds like a vicious one got its hooks into you. Whatever could do this much harm to the Young Master is no ordinary creature."
Kang Hyeong-seok nodded, rueful, and the woman stopped before the paper-paneled wooden door.
"Teacher, you have a visitor."
"Let him come in."
At the elderly woman's voice from within, the young one stepped aside. Through the gap she left open, Kang Hyeong-seok first pressed his palms together in a respectful bow.
"Teacher, it's Kang Hyeong-seok."
"I know. Come in at once, child."
He flashed a brief smile, gave the young woman a silent bow, and moved toward the door.
Knock, knock. He knocked with due courtesy, and when the door swung open, the scent of incense pooled in the room was the first to greet him. Buddhist statues and an altar met his eyes next, and there, seated on the floor in a white hanbok, an elderly woman wore a faint smile.
"It's been a while since you stopped by, Hyeong-seok."
Late sixties. White hair, never dyed. Eyes that carried quiet force, lips that betrayed an iron will. From a distance she looked every year her age, but up close she seemed younger than her years. Lee Geum-kyeong was, to the letter, the very image of the famously formidable practitioner, one brimming with qi.
"Have you been well, Teacher?"
Lee Geum-kyeong smiled, the corners of her red lips drawing in, and beckoned.
"Come in, child. And Cheong-geum — bring us some tea, would you?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Only after the woman outside the door had bowed at the waist and withdrawn did Kang Hyeong-seok speak.
"I take it she's a disciple you've newly taken in."
"She didn't give you any trouble, did she?"
"Not the warmest first impression, I'll admit."
"Be understanding. She serves a martial General Spirit, and it's left her temperament unlike other people's."
Whatever it was, there was clearly a story here worth savoring — judging by the way Lee Geum-kyeong pressed a hand to her temple and heaved a sigh.
"Still, I can see why you took her on."
"What did she say to you? That you smell like a beast?"
Kang Hyeong-seok's eyes went wide; then he gave a wry smile.
"So you already knew."
"You were radiating the stench. It would have been stranger not to notice."
Her eyes said she had a fair grasp of the circumstances. Lee Geum-kyeong was a shaman whose divination ran deep. Her Momjusin would have told her everything the moment Kang Hyeong-seok set foot on this mountain. Perhaps it was whispering to her still.
Kang Hyeong-seok glanced behind her — nothing there.
"But more to the point. Don't you have something you need to tell me?"
He shut his lips firmly, then parted them.
Just then—
"Teacher, I've brought the tea."
The voice from beyond the door cost him his moment. Cheong-geum entered balancing a small tray with two cups of green tea, setting one before Lee Geum-kyeong and one before Kang Hyeong-seok, and Lee Geum-kyeong gestured for her to sit at the far side of the room. Quiet settled back over them.
Hooo. His mouth felt strangely dry, so Kang Hyeong-seok took a sip of the green tea before he spoke.
"You'll already know that I was hunted by a Chang-gwi."
Holding her grave expression, Lee Geum-kyeong answered with her eyes alone: yes. A short sigh of dismay swept across Cheong-geum's face like a gust of wind — the true source of that stench of misfortune was fouler than she had imagined.
"I had the aid of my Momjusin, and I came to hold the Mudang Bang-ul — the sacred shaman bells."
"You're telling me you received a god?"
"I am."
Cheong-geum was more flustered now than she had been at the gate. If Kang Hyeong-seok ever received the Sinnaerim, she had always taken it as given that it would be through Lee Geum-kyeong.
Did the Young Master take another spirit-mother? The thought that he had been initiated by some other shaman — anyone but Lee Geum-kyeong — raised so deep a sense of betrayal that her brow knitted.
Yet again, Lee Geum-kyeong showed not a flicker of disturbance.
"I haven't taken a spirit-mother, Teacher."
"I know."
Cheong-geum flinched despite herself, shot Kang Hyeong-seok a baffled look — and felt Lee Geum-kyeong's gaze upon her. The old woman's eyes said only one thing: be still. There are worlds and heights of mastery you know nothing of. So sit quietly. Having read it, Cheong-geum settled back down obediently and watched Kang Hyeong-seok with a heart full of tangled feelings.
"The Chang-gwi was on my heels when I heard the sound of a bell. I followed it and found the Mudang Bang-ul, and the instant I took it up, I felt the Momjusin enter me."
"Taking up that bell can't have been an easy resolve."
Kang Hyeong-seok lifted the corner of his mouth without a sound.
"Strange, isn't it? It was a moment I'd been waiting for a very long time."
"When your destiny hangs in the balance, I suppose it would be."
For a while, Lee Geum-kyeong studied him in silence. Her gaze was not fierce, but it pierced clean through a person — and it was also the gaze of a shaman looking into the past.
"There was someone with you."
"Yes. My supervisor at work."
She had guessed what he had left unsaid. And still Kang Hyeong-seok went on as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
"The Chang-gwi gave him a terrible scare. Terrible enough that he's decided to quit his job."
"Tsk, tsk, tsk."
Lee Geum-kyeong clicked her tongue, her face showing she had sized up precisely how frightened Noh Soo-chul had been. But there was no pity in her eyes.
"Should something be done for him?"
"Even for a man who mistreated you, you worry?"
Kang Hyeong-seok glanced at her briefly, then smiled faintly — as if borrowing the smile she wore.
"He reminds me of myself, when I was young."
There had been a time when Kang Hyeong-seok too, terrorized by ghosts, burrowed under his blankets and wouldn't so much as go to school. Noh Soo-chul was a man he disliked — and yet he could grasp how enormous the fear swallowing him must be.
"That is not yours to carry. He was merely frightened, that's all."
"You think so...?"
"Though it will take him time to shake it off and stand again. He's been knocked flat by something harrowing; he'll be turning his own past over in his mind."
Why did this happen to me? Did I do something wrong? Is it punishment for all the tongues I've wagged? Such were the thoughts that must be filling Noh Soo-chul's head.
"...It won't be easy for him."
Given Noh Soo-chul's temperament, it might take years. He could end up living out his days dreading the next time a spirit came for him.
"Such is the nature of karma. No one can bear it in another's stead — so it is not yours to fret over."
"Understood."
Kang Hyeong-seok nodded, his face sour as a mouthful of bitter herb. Then—
"And how did it feel, when you received the god?"
Lips pressed shut, he recalled the moment he had driven out the Chang-gwi. It had felt as though someone were guiding his body from within — and yet it had not been unpleasant. If anything, it had felt like being made whole.
"It was a mystical experience."
Communion with the divine. In that instant alone, the Momjusin was Kang Hyeong-seok, and Kang Hyeong-seok was the Momjusin.
"I had certainly never heard that Mudang Bang-ul before, yet it felt like a part of my own body. Even the sacred scriptures I had only ever memorized felt as though they had become mine."
"And you have that Mudang Bang-ul with you now?"
"Yes."
"Let me see it."
Kang Hyeong-seok undid the bag at his side and drew out the Mudang Bang-ul.
"Here it is."
Lee Geum-kyeong and Cheong-geum. Neither of them could find her voice. The extraordinary aura the bell breathed out declared, loud and clear, that this was no ordinary object.
Lee Geum-kyeong held out her hand, and he placed the bell in it. The moment it settled into her palm, Cheong-geum's brow creased.
What is this? Something's off...
The aura that had poured off the bell seconds before was gone. Strangest of all, there was no sound of bells.
Clunk, clunk. Lee Geum-kyeong had noticed the same strangeness; she shook the thing, and only a dead, dull clatter of metal answered.
"No ordinary object at all."
Lee Geum-kyeong marveled as she turned the Mudang Bang-ul over in her hands, examining every detail.
"A sinmul. I'd only ever heard of them from my own spirit-mother — this is my first time seeing one in the flesh."
"Sinmul?"
"It means an object that chooses its own master."
Lee Geum-kyeong held the Mudang Bang-ul back out to him.
Tling.
Unlike in her grasp, the bell rang out clear and bright. And the aura that had vanished came flooding back, filling the room — as if to prove, beyond any argument, that the Mudang Bang-ul had one master and one master only: Kang Hyeong-seok.