The Difference Between the Grotesque and the Uninvited
The stone realized its identity had been exposed. It stopped pretending to be an ordinary rock and began releasing its divine power. The sheer volume of energy took physical form, evoking a brilliant light that gradually illuminated the main shrine. The glow intensified, gathering into a single point before coalesting into shape. At last, it formed the massive silhouette of a dog made entirely of light.
Its name was Mukurikokuri-no-Inugami. It was the Shintai that the Saigo family had venerated for generations, a wretched, cowardly being that had sensed Jinseong’s presence and immediately hidden itself to save its own skin.
Mukurikokuri-no-Inugami
“Mukurikokuri-no-Inugami. Mukurikokuri-no-Inugami. Mukurikokuri-no-Inugami.”
Jinseong gazed at the entity and murmured its name three times.
“Truly a long name. Yet now I understand why you could neither fight properly nor bare your fangs at me. I see why you fear me so much that you dare not sink your teeth into my throat.”
“I thought I might gain a great deal, but I never imagined my luck would be this good from the very start!”
Jinseong burst into laughter.
“The guardian hound of Mukurikokuri. The watchdog brought by the Mongol-Koryo alliance. A pitiful beast that has feasted on faith for so long it forgot its duty as a hunting dog. And yet, bound by instinct, you cannot bring yourself to harm your master’s bloodline.”
The past. Not decades, but centuries ago. There had been the Mongol Empire and Goryeo.
The Mongols had grown tired of the Wokou pirates who periodically raided their coasts. In the end, they assembled an expeditionary force. Having turned entire continents into wastelands and spread their name across the world, the Mongols feared nothing. They believed Japan would fall just as easily. But their power had grown thin from being spread so wide. They pressured the Goryeo kingdom now under their rule to join the campaign. Thus was born the Yuan-Goryeo allied army.
Through fierce battles they had honed their combat techniques and absorbed advanced weaponry from many nations. They pushed back the Japanese forces with ease. Moreover, the Mongols had collected and organized every kind of sorcery from the lands they conquered, acquiring all manner of byproducts in the process. They did not hesitate to share these with their vassal state of Goryeo.
They turned Japan into a literal wasteland. Anyone taller than a cart wheel was slaughtered. If people barricaded themselves inside a castle, the invaders would bypass it, scour the surroundings, then spread plague within. They burned granaries and salted the earth. Whenever they found water, they dumped filth into it and hurled corpses infused with curses of decay.
The combination of Mongol and Goryeo forces was horrific. Their warriors coordinated seamlessly, but the true terror lay in the shamans they brought. The Mongol sorcerers wore garments stitched from deer heads and raptor wings. With these they cast spells upon their warriors, granting them the agility of deer, the strength of eagles, and the night-piercing sight of owls.
Nor was that all. Horses blessed by their magic became savage, tearing into other animals and drinking blood without hesitation. They moved in packs, hunting men like wild beasts.
The Goryeo sorcerers excelled in defensive arts and mukgo—curses and venomous witchcraft. They wore colorful robes and carried bundles of ritual ingredients, casting spells as they moved. They wove protective charms so that warriors and their own shamans would suffer no harm from magic. If an enemy commander appeared, they would assassinate him with targeted curses. To prevent soldiers from regrouping in scorched lands, they created cursed objects shaped like wooden dolls with nails driven into their heads. Wherever those dolls were placed, people inevitably died in ways that defied rational explanation. The Japanese feared this dreadful curse so much they dared not linger in those territories.
Yet even their unstoppable advance could not last. It was the will of nature. A massive typhoon—then called Shinpu, later known as Kamikaze—inflicted catastrophic damage on the Yuan-Goryeo fleet. The storm forced them to abandon their advance and retreat. When they tried again, the typhoon returned, compelling them to give up their invasion entirely.
But the terror they left behind remained, enduring to the present day.
Mongol. Goryeo.
Mokuri. Kokuri.
Mukuri. Kokuri.
The fear sown by the allied army transformed into a yokai and vengeful spirit known as Mukurikokuri. It became a primal terror so widespread that Japanese parents would scare disobedient children by saying, “If you don’t behave, Mukurikokuri will come and take you away!”
Even as spirits and apparitions began to haunt every corner of Japan—eventually leading to the Hundred Demons’ Night Parade—Mukurikokuri itself never appeared. Still, people continued to fear it.
From the time Japan changed its name from Wa to Nihon, through its annexation of Joseon, its defeat in the world war, and its rebuilding into the modern nation it was today, that fear had never faded.
“Because it had no physical form, it became an inescapable terror. How ironic.”
Perhaps that was precisely why. The Japanese people, forced to live alongside dreadful entities, evil spirits, and malevolent ghosts due to the side effects of the energy dome, had no choice but to coexist with fear. On the street one might encounter a weasel-shaped demon slicing invisible blades across human flesh. A horned giant might beat people into pulp with a club. Evil spirits possessing courtesans mutated their bodies. Objects became haunted, bewitching and cursing anyone nearby.
The demons were ferocious. The spirits were grotesque. Impossible to categorize, they inflicted harm without pattern. To escape them, the Japanese gave them names and depicted them in absurd, comical ways. They mocked and ridiculed them, struggling to break free. Using their own developed sorcery, they exorcised the entities and reduced them to mere stories.
The method proved quite effective. Beings that had once inspired terror were now consumed only as fictional characters in modern media.
But Mukurikokuri had no physical form at all. They could not casually name it or trivialize it. It remained an entity wrapped only in indescribable dread, one that could not even be exorcised. Even if they wanted to forget, it was engraved into their genes and subconscious, impossible to erase.
Thus the Japanese created another solution: worship.
They elevated the incomprehensible terror, the being of the supernatural, to the same status as a transcendent entity in hopes of freeing themselves from its shackles. Their determination to escape fear through reverence if they could not understand it was remarkable.
And so shrines dedicated to Mukurikokuri sprang up across Japan. In some places they composed songs praising it. Known as the “Mukko Lullaby,” the tune helped people overcome their terror and fall asleep. In other regions they created dolls that would be taken away in their place, praying for bountiful catches in return. These became the Mukurikokuri dolls used in modern festivals. Elsewhere they turned to divination sorcery, relying on the omnipotence proportional to that fear. It was called Kokkuri-san. In the past it had been written with characters meaning “High Goryeo,” but during the Japanese colonial period it was changed to “Fox-Dog-Raccoon” as part of the policy of Japan-Korea unity.
That same sorcery spread to Korea under the name Bunshin Saba, where the loss and alteration of rules eventually transformed it from divination into a summoning ritual.
And in yet another place, they had enshrined the mukgo brought by the Yuan-Goryeo army as a god.
That was precisely the Shintai now baring its fangs and growling before Jinseong.
“For a mere animal spirit dwelling within a curse, you have accumulated far more power than you deserve. Yet even after hundreds of years you failed to reach the realm of a yoseon. I suppose you have no right to resent being used by me.”
Jinseong smiled as he watched the dog that could not bring itself to attack him despite its exposed teeth.
“A beast grown lazy, a half-baked creature that never attained transcendence. Receive my gift.”
BOOM!
He stomped hard. Though it was nothing more than a footfall, the immense vibration and sound spread like the tolling of a giant bell, shaking the entire shrine. The doors twisted and the pillars bent as if struck by an earthquake.
The dog hurled itself into the air the moment the shrine trembled. Formed of lighthouse-like radiance, it soared through the air and slammed into the warped doors, bursting outside. The doors shattered like paper. The dog should have escaped with ease… but.
There was nowhere for the dog to run. What it saw was a pitch-black sky. The heavens had turned so dark it was impossible to believe it was still daytime. The blackened firmament had descended all the way to the ground, forming a dome that completely enclosed the shrine and isolated the space. It blocked every ray of sunlight, plunging the entire shrine into shadow.
Even the light composing the dog’s body could not dispel that darkness.
“If you had gained spirituality, you would have paid attention to the outside world. Had you done so, you would surely have noticed this. All of this is the result of your own laziness.”
As he spoke, Jinseong flicked a small bell with his fingernail.
EEEEEEEEEEEEE—NG!
The sound of a bell. Yet unlike the clear tone from before, this was thin and grating. It scraped like wire across a chalkboard, resonated like a smooth, hard stone, stood every hair on the body on end, and induced gooseflesh. It was a sound that raised the pitch of a siren higher and higher until it nearly surpassed the limits of human hearing—an auditory assault that made listeners shudder just to perceive it.
The noise that stimulated the ears and awakened the brain spread in all directions just as before. And the black sky that heard it began to move slowly.
Like a curtain rotting away, small holes appeared here and there, allowing shafts of sunlight to pierce through. The sky transformed into something resembling Swiss cheese riddled with perforations and began to undulate. Then it gradually closed the distance, descending toward the dog.
To the glowing dog’s eyes, it looked as if the sky itself was collapsing. It seemed the heavens were falling to crush it, that the curtain of darkness had become a tidal wave about to swallow it whole. Memories surfaced of being carried across surging waves in the hands of shamans. Nightmares resurfaced of a world sunk in shadow, where hands made of seawater repeatedly reached out to seize it only to shatter apart.
The dog howled at the recollection of that old memory and scattered its divine power in every direction.
KWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANG!
The black sky—no. The countless mosquitoes that had gathered in such numbers they dyed the entire shrine black—swooped down upon the dog.