The Straw Effigy's Fortune
Jinseong used successive short-distance leaps to reach Seoul. He found a suitable three-way intersection near an elementary school, hurled the jeung he had prepared, and recited the incantation. "The Cheoyong who captured the plague spirit advances a thousand li; the plague vanishes and blessings arrive." The moment the words left his lips, he slipped into a back alley and waited for the effigy to break.
"Huh?"
"Hey! This is weird!"
"Don't touch it! Isn't that a cursed doll?"
"Nope~ Not at all~ The only thing cursed is your empty head~"
"Yeah, not really~ Touch it and you'll be cursed~"
It was dismissal time. Children poured out of the school in a noisy stream. The strange shape of the jeung quickly drew the attention of curious elementary students, forming a lively wall of humanity around it. They argued loudly among themselves—some insisting it was a cursed doll, others claiming it was simply a ritual object someone had dropped.
"Kids, what are you doing…? Oh my?"
"Goodness, it's been a while since I've seen one of these."
Two adults emerged from the school grounds in response to the commotion: a teacher in her mid-thirties and the security guard. The teacher recoiled at the sight of the effigy and tried to shoo the children away, but the guard strode forward with evident interest, examining the jeung closely.
"Let's see… dressed in clothes… coins too. My word, people still do this these days."
"Sir! What are you doing? That's dangerous!"
"Ah, Teacher Kim, it's nothing like that. This is a jeung. A jeung."
The guard launched into a long reminiscence that began with "When I was a boy…" He spoke of seeing jeung often in his childhood, of smashing them to retrieve the coins and buying ice cream to share, and of once trading a poker from home to a taffy seller for sweets, only to get beaten for it. The teacher, looking as though she were listening to an endless baseball commentary, finally cut him off.
"So you're saying it's safe?"
"Of course. They're doing this to receive blessings. If you leave it at a crossroads and the children smash it, blessings come. And the coins are for the kids who break it to split among themselves."
"Haah…"
The teacher sighed, glancing at the restless children eyeing the jeung. "You heard him, kids? It's not dangerous, so go ahead and play with it, break it if you want. Take the coins stuck in it for yourselves."
"Okay!"
The children dragged the jeung to the playground and kicked it, threw it, and otherwise abused it with youthful enthusiasm. Before long the bindings loosened, the straw burst in several places, and the effigy could no longer hold its shape.
"I'm taking this 500-won coin!"
"I was going to grab it first! Then I'll take the 100-won one!"
"Ah… this one looks like a toy coin…"
Once the three coins had been claimed and the children scattered, Jinseong finally stepped out of the alley.
"Fortune lingers on the child who took the silver coin at the end. A most auspicious outcome."
The silver coin alone was worth roughly seventy thousand won. Moreover, it had been purified in the vertical cave and carried a trace of anti-evil power. To a discerning eye it might fetch two or even three figures. Jinseong approached the remains of the jeung, retrieved the tape recorder he had hidden earlier, and placed it atop the straw.
"That which was once one can resonate across space and time. Here lies what once beat in place of a heart and spoke in place of a tongue; therefore, the soul of the jeung must return."
By the principle of contagion magic, the remnants left in the broken jeung—the "leftover" or "dregs"—drifted naturally toward the tape recorder like wind following a path. The power was faint and ultimately insignificant, yet…
"One must squeeze every last drop for maximum efficiency."
Jinseong placed the recorder on the remains and pressed play to wring out every possible benefit.
"—Inchanboksung, the seven treasures accompany the noble one; good fortune and celebration follow the one who stays long—"
Listening to the Cheoyong-ga flowing from the speaker, he used another short-distance leap. The destination: the mansion.
* * *
"Om svabhava suddhah sarva dharmah svabhava suddho 'ham."
Upon arriving at the mansion, Jinseong immediately changed clothes and bathed. The ablution served both to remove any lingering impurities and to wash away the scent clinging to his body.
"That which emits an odor is impure. Therefore, the impure carries odor."
The stench came from the evil spirits that had swarmed him in the vertical cave. Powerful evil spirits naturally carried a foul smell. Long exposed to yin energy and dampness in the lightless depths, they had steeped in resentment for years, acquiring a distinctive corpse odor mixed with the stench of rotting blood. It was fortunate that only blood scent remained; had there been standing water at the bottom, water ghosts would surely have been present, bringing their characteristic fishy reek and decaying gas.
Thinking of the smell brought to mind the martial artist still crawling across the bare floor at the cave's bottom.
"The scent of ghosts lingers no matter how much time passes. His nose must be suffering greatly."
Yet what could be done? He had been useless.
"A little usefulness would have been preferable."
Jinseong had not even hoped for a valuable hostage. Any worth sufficient to create a negotiation table would have sufficed. "Scoundrels exist everywhere." The martial artist had been deemed worthless even in Japan and sent to Korea as if exiled. He had caused endless trouble in Satsuma, running with other delinquents, harassing locals, and stirring up scandals while chasing pretty women. Eventually he had tried to seduce the niece of a major patron of his school, the Wild Longsword Starving Wolf Style, and disaster followed. Mistaking her for a pretty outsider, he had persisted until she reported him; the school cast him out completely. After enduring subtle harassment, he was dispatched to a Japanese-affiliated loan company in Korea.
"If he could not recognize a person of power, he should at least have recognized her divine power. Truly an ignorant and feeble man."
He had no chance of regaining his former position. The patron he had offended was a Shinto religious figure, and the woman he had pursued was a shrine maiden serving the gods. Cast out by his school, eyed with suspicion by the Shinto community, and rumored to have attempted to molest a shrine maiden, he drew disapproval even from ordinary people. Could he not simply move elsewhere? The Japanese were insular. A young man relocating alone to another region would not be viewed kindly, and if even a fragment of his deeds in Satsuma spread, he risked becoming a target of village ostracism. Thus the martial artist had come to Korea intending to live there permanently and had fortunately found kindred spirits at the loan company. He had opened his heart to them as friends and tried to build a second home in Korea, but…
"Om."
In the end he paid the price for his sins. Had he possessed even the slightest goodwill in his original home, the tiniest scrap of value as a hostage, or the ability to reveal information about mana-based martial arts through diligent training… If only. If only…
"There were countless 'if onlys,' yet not a single one applied. Therefore he deserved to die."
That was all there was to it. Still, they had extracted sufficient useful information from him, and he had served as an assistant in the jeung ritual, so it was fortunate he had not been entirely worthless.
"Since I performed a fortune-bringing ritual with the jeung, Arin will surely be drawn to Japan."
Jinseong slowly organized in his mind the tasks awaiting him in Japan, based on the information obtained from the martial artist.
* * *
Time passed, and the day the lottery results were announced arrived.
"Huh? Russia?"
Arin spoke with her usual bright smile.
"Then I… I'll go to Russia too…"
Serin stood beside her sister with a noticeably lighter expression, as though a weight had been lifted. Behind them, Gremory's wavering form drifted back and forth. Jinseong, who had been quietly observing, felt a single question rise within him.
'Why?'
It was not a question about the jeung ritual failing to take effect, nor about why Russia had been chosen instead of Japan. A fortune-bringing ritual merely invited blessings; it did not guarantee the fulfillment of specific desires. It simply smoothed the flow of fortune and increased the likelihood of happy events, so the absence of Japan was understandable. His doubt lay deeper.
'If things are like this now, then they must have been the same before the regression!'
His question cut across both past and future. The magical trace left by the jeung. The power of fortune's rise and fall that emanated from it. The flow of luck itself. All of it was being diverted away from the east—from the East Sea, to be precise. Considering that he had failed to notice this before the regression, it could not be the work of sorcery. Had it been sorcery, no matter how vast or how far above his level, he would have sensed at least a trace of it. Even the Jinseong of that time, limited though his abilities had been, could not have remained completely unaware. Therefore someone had interfered through means other than magic.
'If I had remained ignorant, that would be one thing. But now that I know, it is done.'