Dokkaebi Fire
It was at a bus stop that Yoon-sang first laid eyes on Kang Hyeong-seok. Two people had gotten off the bus — an old man, and a young man laden with luggage. The young man was Yoon-sang, and the instant he recognized Kang Hyeong-seok, his heart nearly leapt clean out of his mouth. The only reason he didn't immediately feign a reunion was that Kang Hyeong-seok had struck up a conversation with the old man right away.
"You have no idea how long I've waited for this moment. Me, seriously. Wow! Hyung-nim, what are the odds of running into you here again!"
Thud.
Yoon-sang advanced as though bewitched by a fox, and Kang Hyeong-seok backed away just as fast.
"Who are you?"
"Hyung-nim, you seriously don't remember me?"
"No."
Even Yoon-sang could read the heavy wariness, so with a somewhat steadier face, he began introducing himself.
"You remember the abandoned warehouse in Osan, right?"
"...What?"
"That's when you sent the ghost at the warehouse on to the afterlife. I was standing right outside the building."
Kang Hyeong-seok raked through his memory until, at last, he placed him. But contrary to Yoon-sang's hopes, his brow knotted into a scowl.
"Get lost."
"N-no, wait, Hyung-nim!"
Barely had Kang Hyeong-seok turned away before Yoon-sang darted around to block his path.
"H-Hyung-nim, how can you tell me to leave the second you see me? What did I even do wrong?"
"Don't talk to me. Go."
Kang Hyeong-seok brushed Yoon-sang's shoulder aside with the back of his hand and started toward his car.
Coldly speaking, he disliked people like Yoon-sang. He had no intention of getting close to him, and no desire to build any friendly rapport either.
"Come on, Hyung-nim! Just—just give me a second!"
Yoon-sang, his complexion gone deathly pale, clung on with relentless persistence.
"Please, just hear me out. I—I've wanted to see you so badly, Hyung-nim. I wanted to apologize for what happened before, too."
Woof, woof, woof!
When the distant barking of a dog drifted faintly across the air, Kang Hyeong-seok stopped in his tracks. Then he stared dead into Yoon-sang's face.
"I hate bastards like you."
Bastards who lined their own pockets off vengeful spirits and ghosts — off the very people stricken by misfortune. It was his honest impression of occult streamers.
"Wh-why? What did I ever do wrong?"
"Because you're the type who turns other people's suffering into entertainment to shake donations loose."
"No, I'm not! I would never do that! Hyung-nim!"
His sense of injustice must have been too great — Yoon-sang's voice came out louder than he'd intended, and he startled and glanced around. Then he raked his fingers roughly through his hair and put on a face as pitiful as a dog caught in the rain.
"Hyung-nim, you don't know, do you? In all my years of streaming, I've never stirred up a single controversy. Not once."
"And a guy like that goes sniffing around an abandoned warehouse?"
"I'm telling you, I slip in, film quietly, and slip right out. Nothing shady happens in there, nothing at all. And when I leave, I tidy up and even pay my respects. Honestly!"
Yoon-sang pleaded his innocence with his entire body. So Kang Hyeong-seok simply kept glaring at him, and Yoon-sang, after double-checking that he wasn't bothering anyone nearby, spoke up.
"Hyung-nim, you have received a god, haven't you?"
"That's none of your business."
"It is, though! I saw everything that day — even the Chilseong-go bells you were carrying."
Now he understood. Why Yoon-sang was clinging so hard. To a streamer dealing in shamanic content, a mudang made for prime material.
"Look at me with your Yeongan, Hyung-nim. If I were some creep running around doing shady things, something would've latched onto me by now, wouldn't it?"
Yoon-sang spread his arms wide, his face tight with nerves. Go ahead — inspect every last corner. The sheer audacity came through so clearly that Kang Hyeong-seok glared at him for a long moment before exhaling.
"If you're lying, you won't find it funny."
Then he began examining him through the Yeongan.
Men who were rude inside haunted houses. Men who carried something out with them. The spirits of the dead never let such people be. Naturally, he'd expected Yoon-sang to be plastered with clinging spirits from head to toe — yet nothing in particular caught his eye.
"Th-there's nothing, right? Right? There isn't... something, is there?"
Kang Hyeong-seok rounded his lips and began to whistle.
Wheeeeee—
Yoon-sang screwed his eyes shut, fingertips trembling, while Kang Hyeong-seok made one wide circle around him.
"I-is there something, Hyung-nim...?"
"You're the one who asked me to look. What are you so scared of?"
"Huh?"
Kang Hyeong-seok rubbed his stiff lips and spoke, the anger easing out of his voice.
"No stray spirits on you."
Whewwwwww.
For a man who'd demanded the check himself, Yoon-sang sagged where he stood, every ounce of tension draining from his face.
"Why did you come to this village?"
Kang Hyeong-seok's voice had dropped noticeably.
The only spirit Yoon-sang carried was a guardian spirit. He wasn't opening his heart completely — but it was solid proof that Yoon-sang was a different animal from other streamers.
"It's true I've been looking for you, Hyung-nim, but I didn't follow you here. Really."
"Out of all the shamans in this wide world, why me...?"
"I'll be straight with you, Hyung-nim."
Yoon-sang wore an expression that made plain he didn't want to fall out of Kang Hyeong-seok's favor one bit, and he went on.
"I want to do a collab stream with you."
"Get lost."
"No, no — not now! Later, once we've gotten closer. Later — really, really later. And besides, I can feed you information, be useful to you, can't I?"
Ugh. Clingy as a wad of gum stuck to my shoe.
It came after Kang Hyeong-seok shot him a sour look.
"I came once to scout out stream material, that's all. And then here you are, Hyung-nim, standing right in front of me, just like that. I guess this is fate, huh, Hyung-nim?"
"'Fate,' he says. If you came because of the mudang too, then behave yourself. Don't go rummaging around with that camera."
"Sorry? The mudang?"
Kang Hyeong-seok cocked one eyebrow. Yoon-sang looked as though he couldn't make sense of a single word he was hearing.
"I did come off a tip, but it's not about a mudang."
"...Then what?"
"Dokkaebi fire."
Dokkaebi fire?
The unexpected word snagged in his mouth all at once, like a fishbone caught in his throat.
"I'm telling you it's real. Here, see for yourself."
To prove he wasn't lying, Yoon-sang hurriedly dug his phone out of his pocket. Then he played a clip and held it up for Kang Hyeong-seok to see.
"See it? Three o'clock on the screen — there's a red flame."
Kang Hyeong-seok shot him a keep-quiet look and focused on the phone. Sure enough, Yoon-sang was right. The footage had been shot from a distance, a village visible on the right — and there, flickering at an abnormally high altitude, burned a red flame.
"...And that's supposed to be dokkaebi fire?"
Kang Hyeong-seok had never seen dokkaebi fire either. He knew only that such a thing was said to exist — and that one interpretation held it to be a natural phenomenon born from the phosphorus released by corpses. But there was something so grotesque about the fire in the video that no such natural phenomenon could explain it.
"Look here. At first this was reported as the Gangneung UFO, but when somebody zoomed in, it turned out to be a ball of fire."
Yoon-sang declared this with total confidence. And in the very next moment, the dokkaebi fire in the video surged skyward, then flew toward the left of the frame at a blistering speed, bobbing and weaving as if dancing a wild jig. A little below the mountain's summit. As the flame vanished — sucked in as though the slope itself had swallowed it — Yoon-sang reclaimed his phone.
"What do you think, now that you've seen it? Does it look like real dokkaebi fire to you?"
He didn't know. But a vague unease prickled at him, and without a word of reply, Kang Hyeong-seok shifted his gaze to the mountain. The mountain from the video. The mountain that had swallowed the dokkaebi fire. Drowned in darkness, it loomed down at Kang Hyeong-seok like a ghost.
"Whoa — hold on, Hyung-nim."
Thud. Thud.
"Come on, let's go together! Why are you walking so fast?"
Kang Hyeong-seok turned his head to look down at Yoon-sang, fifty meters below.
"Just go home. This is no place for you to be following me."
Yoon-sang shook his head, heaving for breath. What a relentless bastard. The man was hauling two enormous bags of streaming equipment just to chase after him, after all.
"Hyung-nim, are you by any chance going to check out the dokkaebi fire?"
Without answering, Kang Hyeong-seok began climbing the mountain again. Behind him, Yoon-sang let out a strangled "Graaah!" and started the pursuit anew, but he kept his eyes silently ahead.
There's something out there.
A mudang driven mad. A Momju-sin that toys with its own shaman. Dokkaebi fire. A hunch that these three were not entirely unconnected jabbed at his chest, again and again.
Ring, ring, ring.
The sacred shaman bells inside the bag slung across his back chimed faintly too, as if to tell him the hunch was right.
"H-Hyung-nim, would you like some water?"
Yoon-sang called out from behind in the voice of a dying man.
"You must be thirsty. I even brought water, see."
Unbelievable. This guy, seriously.
Half wondering whether such a person even existed, Kang Hyeong-seok looked back at Yoon-sang — and stopped walking. They weren't far from their destination by now anyway.
Hahh... hahh... hahh.
Panting, Yoon-sang cracked the cap off a bottle and handed it over; when Kang Hyeong-seok took it, he fished out a fresh bottle for himself.
"By the way, Hyung-nim — what was that about a mudang earlier?"
"There's a mudang in the village whose mind has given out."
"So you came because you thought the dokkaebi fire and the mudang might be connected, right?"
Yoon-sang's eyes glittered bright enough to be seen even in the dark, as if he'd already decided this would make broadcast gold.
"That's right."
"Oh, I know that one! Beoljeon!"
"No. It's not that."
Kang Hyeong-seok's reply was so flat it embarrassed the man who'd said it so confidently.
Beoljeon was divine punishment handed down to a mudang who had done wrong. But what he had witnessed was nothing more than a god's one-sided tyranny. He could not bring himself to call it a punishment the mudang — its victim — had somehow earned.
"I'm sorry."
Yoon-sang, reading the mood, glanced warily at Kang Hyeong-seok's face. Then—
"Are you seriously going to follow me?"
"Of course! Hyung-nim."
Kang Hyeong-seok met his eyes and sighed at the ground.
"Then from here on out, be careful about everything. We're nearly there. If your luck runs bad, you'll catch Dongti."
At the word Dongti, tension spread across Yoon-sang's face. He seemed to know what it meant, at least. How fearsome Dongti could be. It was retribution dealt by spiritual beings, and when it sank its teeth in deep, one was swept into horrific illness or calamity — often enough, death would have been a mercy by comparison.
"Let's go."
Kang Hyeong-seok moved off again, and Yoon-sang hastily gathered his things. The chirring of grass insects needled at their ears, and with nothing but the soft crunch of footsteps audible, the two climbed the mountain in silence.
It was half past two in the morning. Clouds shredded fine by the wind veiled the moon, and the mountain breeze flapped their collars loose.
The mood sat poorly with him. Kang Hyeong-seok felt tension stiffening his body and his face. Could it really be dokkaebi fire? Did dokkaebi actually exist? Was I walking straight into a dokkaebi cave?
Step.
Kang Hyeong-seok stopped.
Yoon-sang, who had been trailing him, halted two steps back, his breath freezing white.
Hooooo.
Kang Hyeong-seok's own breath was turning to frost as well. Right up until that moment, nothing like this had happened. Gazing at the cave that lay just ahead, he flicked his tongue over withered lips.
So this is the place.
Where the dokkaebi fire vanished. Where the god that tormented the mudang dwells.
Flap-flap-flap!
A sudden sound from behind snatched away both Yoon-sang's and Kang Hyeong-seok's gazes.
"A-a crow, Hyung-nim."
Kang Hyeong-seok furrowed his brow at the crow perched in the tree above, staring down at him. Crows symbolized dark yin energy. Not a good animal. Yoon-sang, who lacked any spiritual sense, looked at him with a face gone blue-white; Kang Hyeong-seok held the crow's stare, his breath whitening — and then covered his eyes with his palm.
Don't look. Don't let it take hold of me.
Enchantment began with the eyes. With his sight sealed off by his hand, Kang Hyeong-seok poured everything into sensation alone and waited for the crow to disappear.
Flap!
The crow vanished between the trees, and Kang Hyeong-seok lowered the hand from his eyes. It had taken only an instant. And yet, as though his vitality had been siphoned away, a distinct fatigue hung sharp around his eyes.
"Hyung-nim..."
Yoon-sang spoke up as though worried for him, but Kang Hyeong-seok answered only with a shake of his head. Then he turned his body toward the cave.
Now he had to enter that cave. To help the mudang who had gone mad. To place the Uncheol into a blacksmith's hands. Watching the bleak, desolate energy seethe and spill from the cave's mouth, Kang Hyeong-seok clenched and unclenched his damp fists.