The Sorcerer Offers Himself to the Stars
The stars were moving.
Jinseong sat at the center of the Uyuni Salt Flat, its surface transformed into a perfect mirror, and quietly gazed up at the sky. His eyes had turned as clear as glass, reflecting the stars above, while the ground beneath him—purified by ritual into a shallow pool of water—held the entire cosmos in its depths. The universe had descended to earth.
“O stars… O grand procession of the celestial host…”
Jinseong murmured to himself in quiet awe as he watched the stars shift. Yet the sound that left his throat was ghastly—a voice shredded and crushed, as if dragged up from the abyss. It was the pitiful ruin of vocal cords and lungs ruined by long illness and ceaseless battle.
The moment the words left him, a crushing pain seized his lungs and a burning sensation scorched his throat. Jinseong frowned for a brief moment.
Even at the very end, you torment me.
He had taken fentanyl near a lethal dose and injected every narcotic painkiller he possessed, yet the agony remained impossible to ignore. It was a pain no amount of battlefield wounds or enemy torture had ever prepared him for.
Flesh… O frail flesh…
It felt as though his nerves had been ripped out, scraped raw with sandpaper, and his brain seared with a white-hot brand—yet he could not even faint. Worse still, this torment was devouring what little life he had left. Pain could only be transcended by the spirit, yet it was a demon that devoured even the spirit.
Unconsciously, the agony forced his jaw shut until his once-strong teeth cracked and splintered. It twisted the joints that had always sat perfectly in place. Even when he lay down to sleep, sudden bursts of pain would expose every nerve, activate every bodily function, and rob him of control. Such seizures were torture that denied him even the mercy of restful slumber.
His brain had gone mad from the overload. The five senses that formed the foundation of humanity had become erratic and unreliable. Sometimes salt water tasted of nothing. Other times the scent of roasting meat filled his nose when nothing was there. He might feel his legs shattering while simply walking, or feel nothing at all even as a hole was torn through his stomach. Blackouts would swallow the world when he forgot to blink, only for the returning pain to jolt his brain awake again, denying him even the refuge of unconsciousness.
This physical torment had driven the soul dwelling within the flesh to madness as well. The twisted, wounded soul then fed its suffering back into the body. In this way, flesh and soul inflicted endless pain upon each other, wounding one another without cease. The result was a tattered soul and a body little better than a corpse—the worst possible synergy, one that could only end in death.
It was a tragedy born from the nature of sorcery, in which essence, energy, and spirit all influenced one another with merciless intensity.
If only I had prepared Body Reinforcement… If only I hadn’t given up… If I had at least tried…
Jinseong looked down at his body with quiet regret. It resembled a rice paddy cracked open by long drought. Fissures ran across his skin; the blood vessels and muscles within them had dried and twisted until not even blood could flow. In the worst places, white bone gleamed at the bottom of the cracks. It no longer looked like the body of a living man.
But what good was sighing now?
Jinseong was dying. No more than an hour of life remained. When he looked at the sky, the star that had accompanied his birth shone ominously, pronouncing his death sentence. When he looked at the mirror-like ground, the aura of the underworld coiled around him in pitch-black spirals. The lines on his palms—the ones that spoke of life and future—had been completely erased. His soul, which should have rested quietly within his flesh, had gone mad and was trying to flee the body; he was barely holding it in place.
Jinseong would die soon. Fate could not be avoided.
There was no ledger of the dead in the underworld, and no reapers came to claim humans. Having never believed in religion, there were no angels for him. Having mastered sorcery, demons showed him no interest. He who had traveled the world solely by his own power would meet his end solely by his own karma.
Thus his soul would return to the world, his body would be preserved in the salt flat, and his mind would vanish without a trace. That was death. That was the inevitability awaiting him.
“What a shame… How regrettable…”
Jinseong felt a strange serenity in the face of approaching death. Yet if anything still clung to him, it was the powerful lingering attachment of never having fulfilled his purpose. The dream he had carried since childhood—to master every form of sorcery in the world and transcend through it—would remain unfulfilled.
He had stumbled upon sorcery by chance as a boy and lived solely for it ever since. How ironic that it was sorcery itself that had devoured his lifespan and brought him to this end. Jinseong felt the bitter irony of his fate.
“Since it cannot be avoided… I shall choose the process myself.”
Jinseong believed that because he had lived his entire life for sorcery, its ending should also be adorned with sorcery. Therefore he had chosen to conclude himself with the most horrific and alien ritual of all—human sacrifice.
To whom does one offer a person? For what does one offer one’s own flesh?
He did not know to whom or for what this human offering was being made. The ritual had been obtained from a half-collapsed ruin during his days as a mercenary. The site had been too badly damaged; the murals too weathered. Even the latest scientific methods could not restore them. The only things that remained were the method of the human sacrifice ritual and a few fragmentary records.
The spell, carved into the rough cave wall with something sharp and written in unknown ancient hieroglyphs, was impossible to evaluate. No one could tell what side effects it might carry or what results it would produce. He had simply memorized it and never dared to attempt it.
But if this is the end, it should be fine.
After all, Jinseong was already a dead man walking. No price could be heavier than death. Moreover, because he had mastered sorcery to an exceptional degree, the blessings of transcendent beings no longer affected him. He would certainly be spared the horror of becoming something that could neither live nor die.
In that case, it was only right to spend his remaining life unraveling this unknown.
Jinseong truly believed so. That was why he had been able to act without hesitation—whether soaking the firewood in oil, stacking the altar with wood and straw, or facing the future in which he would have to burn his own living body and chant the incantation.
To him, sorcery was everything. It was something worth offering everything for without the slightest regret.
“Haa…”
Suppressing the pain that felt as if it would tear him apart, he slowly walked toward the altar he had built. It was made of straw and oil-soaked firewood. At its center, clear oil as pure as water rippled gently, carrying the faint scent of salt on the wind.
He stripped off the single layer of clothing he wore and cast it aside. Naked, he lowered himself into the pool of oil, lay back comfortably, and looked up at the sky.
“Grand Alignment…”
What filled his vision was the slow, precise movement of the stars finding their places. It was the alignment in which every planet in the solar system lay upon a single straight line—planetary syzygy.
“O stars…”
The Grand Cross, in which the planets formed the shape of a cross. The Grand Alignment, in which they lined up in a single row. In astrology, such configurations were said to herald great events whenever they occurred.
The moment the stars aligned perfectly in a straight line, Jinseong cried out.
“With the forgotten sorcery discovered in the ruins, I adorn my final moment! O stars! Accept my death…!”
Whoosh.
Right on cue, the altar burst into flame. The fire seemed to trace patterns as it climbed, painting symbols across every surface before rising upward. It looked like a wicked serpent flicking its tongue, like a nebula somewhere in the cosmos flinging its gaseous body in every direction, like the final scream of an exploding star.
At last the flames gathered countless shapes and symbols and reached Jinseong. They kindled a blue fire above the small pool of oil and began to consume his body.
The flames spread slowly across him. First they took his body hair, then his skin, then his muscles… What had begun as blue fire became a violent, blood-red blaze so intense that nothing could be seen within it. It surged toward the heavens.
The sight was like a colossal candle made from a human being. It inspired both horror and reverence at once.
Within that ferocious blaze, Jinseong felt a pain no amount of drugs could suppress—and he grinned.
“ॐ—”
t, tT, Ttt, T- Yha’sy thalap, Byyyyyyyyyyy—
“ॐ———”
The flames entered his lungs and reduced what little remained of them to ash. His esophagus burned away until it could no longer function as a passage. His organs cooked and shriveled. Yet from his throat came an endless stream of sound.
Too high to be called a bass, too low to be called a treble. It sounded like the ceaseless wind howling from the depths of a cave. Even though his body could no longer draw breath, exhalation poured out without inhalation. Though he had no tongue, the sounds still shifted and resonated as if something moved inside his mouth.
Ypag-sothepppppppppppt——
Yi-t, t, ttttttttT…
The sound spread.
A burning candle. A lump of charcoal turned pitch black. A corpse that had become closer to an object than a human being. Though he could not possibly speak, his mind alone remained alive, moving the dead body.
The maddened soul had already escaped the flesh and scattered into the world. The body crumbled as it burned in the flames. Yet the mind alone lived on, taking form.
“ॐ————”
And then the flames moved without wind, shaping themselves. Though there was no more wood to burn, they formed a long stem. When that shape bloomed like a flower and adorned the sky—
CRACK———!
With the sound of the world tearing apart, the altar exploded into ash and scattered in every direction. At the center of the altar, the being that should have been there was gone. The last remaining fragment of mind had vanished without a trace.
The moment the planets slipped out of alignment, Jinseong disappeared from the world.
That was the end of one sorcerer among the countless many on Earth. The insignificant conclusion of a wretched sorcerer who had wandered battlefields, endured being called a parasite, and yet endlessly pursued transcendence.
Nothing more.
Death is this hollow.
That was all.