Murder to Seal the Mouth
In the Cultivation Realm, possession was a common affair. Now and then a cultivator would take a mortal's body for sport, but in most cases possession was simply a way of clinging to life.
Lose your flesh, fail to restore it, or thrash in the last spasm before death, and you seized whoever was nearest. Most of the time, the ending was an ugly one.
Cultivation was a discipline that demanded inborn talent. Possess a body that had not been born with a cultivator's gift, and you were left a half-wit—a cultivator's soul, and nothing more.
Possessing another cultivator ended no better. Even a mangy dog ate its fill on its own ground. And if that dog happened to be a cultivator? The one who came to possess was the one who got eaten.
Planning changed nothing. Whether you took a mortal who merely carried a cultivator's talent, or a cultivator whose soul you had already crushed flat, the story stayed the same. Among those talents, some touched the soul in ways so absurd the mind refused them. Without a comparable gift, escaping the fate of being devoured was nearly impossible—and even a successful devouring was liable to leave something rotten behind.
Dokseon, who had cultivated for ten thousand years, knew that better than anyone. That was why she had spent what power remained to seek out a body that bore a cultivator's talent and had not been dead for long, and possessed it.
And of all bodies, it had to be—
A whore.
Bad luck, latched on from the very first day of her return. Even so, the talent itself was beyond doubt. She could not measure it exactly, but a cultivator's gift stirred in this flesh. Give her the means to train, and the old realm would be hers again.
A whore, though. Why, out of every corpse under heaven, a whore? Scarce as that talent might be, this was too much.
Dokseon raked her fingers through her hair and climbed down off the operating table. Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she held a hand out to the big thug who had been humoring her.
"Hand over some clothes. Shoes too, if you've got them."
"Clothes, you mean?"
"Yeah, clothes. I can't go walking around like this. Public indecency, or whatever they call it—stroll out naked and the cops haul you in, don't they?"
"...Why would the cops haul you in? Whores all walk the streets like that. Never heard of one getting arrested for it."
Whores wandered the streets half-naked? Had Korea turned this liberal? No. It hadn't. It really hadn't.
While the memories of her old life left Dokseon in a state of culture shock, the thug shrugged off the coat he was wearing and offered it to her with a courteous air. She took it as a matter of course, pulled it on, and muttered.
"Haven't got the faintest idea what's changed, or how."
In the meantime the thug fetched a pair of slippers that had been lying in a corner of the operating room and set them down in front of her, squared to a crisp angle. Satisfying. For the first time in ages, someone fit to keep as a servant had turned up.
Pleased, Dokseon slipped the slippers on and gave him a light pat on the shoulder.
"Hey. I kinda like you. Guys who wait on people this well aren't common. If you're interested, maybe—"
The operating-room door banged open. In came a middle-aged man in surgical scrubs, face flushed as if he had been drinking. He was glancing around the room when his eyes found Dokseon, and his jaw dropped.
"The hell? That cash-cow bitch was dead. Why's she alive?"
"Cash cow? And what's that supposed to be?"
"She kept paying us, steady... like a cow, you see."
"I really have lived too damn long. Livestock treatment, from a pack of mortal curs."
The sigh came out of her on its own. Dokseon shook her head.
"Enough, enough. I'm leaving, so tell your boss we'll call it quits with this."
"Call it quits, my ass. This bitch is a real comedian. Who the fuck said you get to decide? A whore, of all things."
This was why drink was bad for the health. It sent you charging in without so much as checking the grave you were about to fill.
Even so, Dokseon—who prided herself on a character so lofty it put the likes of other cultivators to shame—chose to understand him with generosity.
"I'm quitting the whore business, so stop calling me one. I'm leaving. Move."
The tone was calm, but an air hung in the room that chilled even the thugs listening quietly at her side. Liquor, though, could strip the fear from a man staring a beast in the face. As if he could not forgive a whore who had dared talk back, the middle-aged man seized her by the shoulder.
"The fuck are you saying? A whore, running her mouth."
"Doc Kim, that's... you really shouldn't..."
"Shouldn't what? Shitcheol, you little shit. What the hell do you think you're doing? You know damn well the boss has this bitch under special watch, and you're just gonna let her walk out? You out of your mind?"
"Leaving her be would be better, though..."
"Better how? You think the boss takes pictures of that whore because he's got time to kill?! She runs, and we're the ones who get fucked, you idiot. And what's the big deal about stopping one lousy—urk."
Something had changed. To be precise, the man's neck.
Crack.
He hit the floor with his head spun a hundred and eighty degrees. A natural death. When a mortal talked back to a cultivator, dying was simply the natural order.
"Haa. Speak nicely and they still don't get a word of it. This is why mortal curs are useless."
Dokseon calmly wiped the greasy filth from her hand on the dead man's clothes. At an attitude so matter-of-fact it was hard to believe she had just killed someone, the thugs swallowed dry.
"Killed a mortal cur before I've even eaten. Hmm. Is this really all right?"
She stared at the fallen man a moment, then scratched the back of her head.
"These days, if you kill a mortal cur—no, a person—how long do you sit in prison? You know?"
"...Five years, as I understand it. But Doc Kim doesn't live in Gangnam, so the police won't even investigate."
The Republic of Gangnam, the Republic of Gangnam—people had said it often enough. Seemed it really had become one.
"Well. I'll be damned."
Dokseon shook her head, then looked at the thugs.
"Thing is, though. I've got a bad feeling. A strangely bad one."
A cultivator's hunch was never just a hunch. It sat close to foresight, and the chill raking her spine now was an omen of great calamity. She could not leave it alone.
"So, sorry, but you two are going to have to die as well. If I'm going to hide the fact that I lived and killed a man, the witnesses go first, right? You understand?"
She was not particularly hoping they would. And if they didn't, so what? What could mere mortal curs do?
"P-please spare me."
"No, no. From what the dead man said, your boss has me under special watch, doesn't he? Even if I'd just walked off quietly, he would've come after me. And I didn't just leave—I killed one of your crew. You think your boss sits still for that?"
"I-it'll be fine."
"Sure. Maybe your boss lets it go, just like you say. But he isn't taking my picture because he's bored."
That was the real problem. Someone other than the boss was tied to the whore.
"You think the one who ordered your boss to photograph me is going to stay quiet? What happens when he finds out I'm alive? Things get dangerous, don't they?"
She could not look through past and future by divine power, but a life lived in the Cultivation Realm was enough to sketch the shape of it. Whether from a grudge or some other cause, a hidden hand had cast this woman down into whoredom. That, most likely, was the root of the calamity. If the world believed the whore dead, the tie would end there. If anyone learned she had come back to life, the hunt would be relentless.
Of all the flesh to possess, this.
Dokseon swallowed her irritation and walked toward the thug, one steady step after another. He backed away each time, until the wall stopped him.
"I won't say a word. I really won't say a single word."
"I've heard a lot of people say that in my life. Not many of them kept it."
"Didn't you say you liked me? Please, spare me."
"I did. What can you do? This is how it turned out. Just call it a bad experience and accept it."
A shame, a little—he would have made a fine servant. But what was she supposed to do? He wasn't a servant yet. With power, it would have been different. Right now she had none. Become the weak, and you had to act like the weak.
Dokseon snapped his neck where he stood. At the crack he dropped, and only then did the smaller thug bolt for the door.
"A-aaaaagh!"
"If you're going to run, you shouldn't scream that loud."
Dokseon snatched up a scalpel and hurled it after him. An iron rod seemed to sprout from the back of his neck. He slammed face-first into the operating-room door and slid to the floor.
She walked over, pulled the scalpel from his nape, wiped it roughly on his clothes, and tapped his neck.
"First day back, and this is the grief I get?"
The grief was not finished. To erase the evidence completely, everyone in the building who was involved had to be dealt with. She meant to finish quickly. Otherwise she would not even get a late-night bite.
Clearing what lay outside the operating room did not take Dokseon long. Since the possession, what power remained was too pathetic to call even a fragment, but that much was still enough to handle mortals with ease. Had anyone been present with so much as the strength of the lowest cultivator, it would have been dangerous. She had spent a portion of what she had left to confirm no such person was here, and so she carried out the silencing without hesitation.
She had looked at the bed before she lay in it. In the Cultivation Realm, those who lay down without looking never became True Immortals. They became ingredients for pills.
Stepping past the corpses strewn across the floor, Dokseon flicked the scalpel in her hand and regarded the man in front of her at her leisure. A slab of muscle. Deal with this one, and it was over.
"I need a late-night bite before the shops close, you know? Don't dawdle. Let's wrap this up."
He was different from the others, though. He knew how to handle the energy of heaven and earth. Mortals in the Cultivation Realm sometimes used martial arts or spellcraft, so it was no surprise. They boasted of being secret-art practitioners who had learned hidden techniques—stronger than ordinary mortals, certainly, but from a cultivator's point of view not even half-wits.
The slab in front of her was no different. A being born without a cultivator's talent was inferior beyond words. However far Dokseon had fallen, she had not fallen so far that she could not handle something that was not even a half-wit. On top of that, his nerve was already crushed beneath the pressure pouring off her soul—spiritual pressure. Killing a man in that state was easy enough to yawn through.
Even so, contrary to her talk of finishing quickly, she did not strike at once. A secret-art practitioner, sprung up in her old homeland, had piqued her curiosity.
"W-why are you doing this? Huh? Y-you need money? I'm Big Brother Yong-sik's cousin—his cousin! I'll give you as much as you want, so don't do this. Okay?"
A disappointing display. And he was not even an ordinary mortal cur. No backbone at all. It was not only her spiritual pressure; hers no longer carried its old might. Dokseon as she was now had fallen without end. Hadn't even a drunken mortal cur shrugged that pressure off and put on a show of bravado? The slab in front of her had less spine than a drunk.
"Kill me and you won't walk away either! My cousin's Big Brother Yong-sik! You think Big Brother Yong-sik's gonna leave you alone?! Huh?! Yong-sik, boss of the Yong-sik Faction!"
Pathetic. Not worth watching any longer. Dokseon flung the scalpel in her hand into his thigh to cut off his escape, then sprang in like a leopard and stabbed him through the throat. He could not so much as answer before he crumpled.
The last of them was dealt with. Now it was time to claim the spoils—a rightful exercise of privilege. A cultivator, by nature, was the sort who stripped everything that could be taken from the people they killed. Dokseon, who unlike other cultivators prided herself on a lofty character, was in this respect about as decent as the average of her kind.
Unfortunately, there was little worth taking. Bills, at best. Gold and jewelry caught her eye, but the risk of being traced made her leave them. Her pockets grew fat with cash, and she was not particularly satisfied. If anything, she was disappointed—and not on account of the gold or the ornaments. Had she been whole, she would not have spared a glance for paper money, let alone gold, silver, and jewels.
To a cultivator, cultivation mattered more than treasure, and nothing served cultivation so well as elixir pills. The ingredients were right in front of her. Kill someone, and a cultivator's first thought was of grinding them into pills. Dokseon was a cultivator in the truest sense.
Had she so much as reached Essence Refinement, she could have gathered up their essence-blood and their souls.
She looked at the corpses with regret practically dripping from her eyes. Even if essence-blood and souls were beyond her, taking just the hearts would be a great help in rebuilding her realm at once. But she could not. A simple murder and hearts cut out of chests would draw very different kinds of attention, and someone who needed to fake a quiet death had to avoid that.
So she gave it up cleanly. Dokseon knew better than anyone that staring only at the profit in front of you was how you failed to live long. You did not rejoice or grieve over immediate gain.
Last of all, she cleared away anything that could identify her and carried a woman's corpse into the operating room. Whether the woman had been a crew member's lover or a prostitute herself, there was no telling. Fortunate, either way. She needed a body to pass off as the whore she now inhabited. If there had been no woman here, she would have had to go outside and catch one. This saved her the trouble.
She laid the corpse on the operating table and set the room alight. The builds were similar enough that, once the body burned, no one would suspect the whore Dokseon had possessed was still alive. She kept setting fires on her way out, and with what power remained she fed the flames, until in no time a firestorm had swallowed the building.
Was it the shudder of the flames, or the smell of cooking meat? Perhaps both. Grilled pork belly surfaced in her mind without warning, and her stomach answered with a growl.
Yeah. Pork belly. That's the one.
Dokseon walked out with the fire at her back. Murder and arson had already left her head. All that remained was the thought of properly tasting pork belly in the hometown she had returned to after so very long.