A Most Honest Sorcery
The ritual created for recovery, inspired by the sight of a white elephant gleaming beneath starlight, was known as the Holy Light Elephant Sovereign. It was a shamanic ceremony that drew upon the elephant’s status as a sacred animal, granting it potent effects related to health and restoration. The addition of fortune magic also bestowed a modest measure of luck.
Yet nothing in this world is wholly good. The ritual’s true mechanism was not to “bestow the symbolism of the elephant,” but to “transform the user into something resembling an elephant, thereby allowing them to wield its symbolic power.” As a result, the price it exacted was to make the shaman more like the beast itself.
Elephants possess tusks. Elephants have thick, rough hides. Elephants are herbivores.
Humans have no tusks. Humans have soft skin. Humans are omnivores.
Elephants and humans are similar, yet different. One of the core principles of sorcery, however, is similarity. Like begets like. Similarity calls to similarity. This is known as homoeopathic magic.
And so, by that principle, the human becomes like the elephant. Though a person has no tusks, they have teeth; thus, teeth grow that resemble tusks. Though a person has soft skin, it roughens and hardens like an elephant’s. Since humans can eat plants, they become capable of consuming nothing else.
The Holy Light Elephant Sovereign was an exceedingly honest sorcery. For three blessings it demanded three exact prices: two new teeth where none had been, skin that grew coarse and armored, and a body forced to draw all nourishment from vegetation alone.
Still, roughened skin could be managed with diligent care, and a vegetarian diet presented little difficulty in an era overflowing with plant-based options. Specialized vegetarian combat rations had been perfected for mercenaries who needed to perform extreme activity on minimal calories, so in the modern age these prices were hardly crippling.
The true malice lay in the teeth that sprouted where none had existed before. Those teeth were wisdom teeth.
Jinseong, perhaps cursed with misfortune, had never known love yet had already endured the extraction of three wisdom teeth in middle school. The ritual now forced him to lose more. When he learned the price of the Holy Light Elephant Sovereign, a curse escaped his lips.
Yet the nature of shamanic ritual is that one can never know what price will be demanded. Jinseong simply decided he had been unlucky, visited the dentist, and had the tooth removed.
When he performed the second ritual, he forced himself to rationalize the outcome.
Seven wisdom teeth extracted in total. Since wisdom teeth could serve as ritual ingredients, the outcome was not entirely without merit… yet for Jinseong, who still remembered the agony of an extraction performed with insufficient anesthesia, it was hardly a welcome price.
Even then, having drawn the same cost twice, he merely blamed his own ill fortune and thought no more of it.
But when the third ritual delivered the identical price, he finally sensed something unnatural.
Two wisdom teeth. Roughened skin. Forced vegetarianism. All three times the same. Even more bizarre, the precise locations of these manifestations never varied. The wisdom teeth always emerged on the upper jaw. The skin thickening concentrated on hands and feet.
Three rituals. Three identical prices. Can this truly be dismissed as coincidence?
Jinseong began experimenting at once. The fourth use of the Holy Light Elephant Sovereign produced wisdom teeth in the same locations and roughened the skin of his hands and feet. The fifth yielded the same result. This repetition—too consistent to be random—continued unchanged through the tenth attempt. Only then was Jinseong convinced that the ritual always demanded the exact same price from him.
Yet a new question surfaced. Something so easily discovered by him—why had no other shaman noticed it? Was this phenomenon unique to him, or unique to this particular ritual?
To test the theory, he taught the ceremony to another shaman. The man accepted it without hesitation; the effect was modest and the price seemed light. He paid a different cost than Jinseong.
The shaman grew no wisdom teeth. He suffered no forced vegetarianism. Only the skin on his hands and feet roughened.
“To heal internal injuries at a price this trivial is excellent indeed. I shall inform my fellow shamans.”
The shaman, who could mend grave internal wounds for what amounted to nearly no cost at all, thanked Jinseong profusely and spread knowledge of the ritual. Other shamans began using it enthusiastically, each paying their own unique price.
One grew four wisdom teeth. Another discovered that salads suddenly tasted exquisite. One developed an extra stomach and elongated intestines. Yet another found his feet had hardened into something like stone.
As the ritual spread, the prices demanded of later users grew ever more severe. Eventually they became so enormous that the rite could no longer be considered cost-effective. At that point the shamans discarded it with familiar refrains: “Old sorcery is always like this,” “The efficiency is terrible after all,” and “The effect is mediocre but the price is far too harsh.”
Having witnessed the entire sequence, Jinseong finally understood why the true nature of ritual costs had never been properly studied.
Shamanic rituals demand their prices in peculiar ways.
Suppose a typical ritual offers an effect of 100 and a price of 100. Using it naturally grants 100 in benefit while requiring 100 in payment. This honest equivalent exchange would seem marvelous to any shaman. In a world crawling with swindlers who overcharge at every turn, the chance to buy at exact value? One could only welcome it with both hands.
Summoning, contracts, magic, martial arts… all of them are unfair to humans.
Magic cannot operate at 100 percent efficiency; loss is inevitable. Summoning demands a price in exchange for borrowed power. Contracts see transcendent beings attempt to reshape the contractor to suit their whims. One must accept that life and fate will be altered. Martial arts always incur loss during accumulation and sometimes burden the body.
Countless sorceries are rejected because their prices seem excessive relative to their effects. Even among rituals, many are avoided after earning the label “Chaos’s choice.”
Yet to receive a clean 100 benefit for a clean 100 price? It would appear positively angelic.
What happens next, however?
Would anyone keep such sweet information to themselves? Of course not. Most humans feel compelled to share good fortune with those around them. It is the instinct of a social animal, or perhaps the desire to be admired.
Thus the shaman tells close acquaintances—colleagues, friends, lovers, family. But once two people know a secret, it is no longer a secret. Those who learn it pass the wonderful knowledge to others they trust, who then spread it further. The beneficial ritual gradually disseminates.
And then the problem appears. The price, which was light at first, becomes monstrously heavy.
The benefit remains fixed. Everyone receives the same 100. Yet one person might pay 1 while another pays 199.
Benefits identical. Prices random.
When two people perform the ritual, they divide a total benefit of 200 equally. They do not, however, divide the total price of 200 equally. The sum to be paid is fixed, but its distribution is random. What was fair for a single user becomes unfair the moment multiple people know the rite.
The horror compounds as the number of users grows. Twenty people perform the ritual. Total benefit: 2,000. Each receives 100. But the price…? The lucky ones might pay only 1 or 10. The unlucky ones…
Thus a ritual once praised as excellent is recast as “something very bad.” Labeled as garbage efficiency, it is gradually forgotten. In the end it meets one of two fates.
The first occurs when the original user performs the ritual again. That shaman will pay the honest price once more and thereby perceive the underlying mechanism. The natural conclusion is that the ritual must be kept to a single inheritor. Thus is born the one-man transmission.
And the other fate…
The other fate is simple oblivion. It happens when the first user dies, or when the suddenly inflated price horrifies them into never using it again. In such cases the ritual is forgotten entirely or survives only as dusty text in ancient records.
Its essence never changes, yet its rise and fall are dictated by human evaluation. How truly lamentable.
In this manner the truth about ritual costs sinks deeper into darkness. Those who do not know, do not know. Those who once knew, keep silent. Those who try to teach it cannot prove their claims. And those who understand all of it wish for everyone else to remain ignorant.
Just as I do.