A Monster Lives in the Central Plains?
Where had it all gone wrong? When he had refused to join the Beast Palace? Or when he had tried to win them over with words instead?
The old man laid his dead to rest with a heart steeped in misery. If only, when those Beast Palace bastards had come swarming in, he had met them head-on at once instead of wasting his breath on persuasion — none of these hollow, meaningless deaths would ever have happened. Perhaps the one small mercy was that the moment he had finally drawn his blade and carved through them, the wretches had fled far into the distance. But if they returned with reinforcements, could the village be spared even then?
After it happened, he had gathered the surviving villagers for a council, yet no brilliant answer had come of it. And so the village simply went on living as it always had...
"Haah... nothing of any use in this one, either."
"Tell me about it. If we'd known this was coming, we should have either dragged that fellow from earlier back with us, or at least left a few of the others alive."
"And how, exactly, would you have had me catch him? The moment I turned and swung, he'd have been sliced clean in half."
"Which is precisely why the young master should have been the one doing the catching! And scattering the other small fry to the four winds — wasn't that the young master's doing, too?"
Having heard the old man's tale to its end, I sat sunk in thought with a hand pressed to my temple — pointedly ignoring Dang Giyeong, who was rolling back and forth on the floor beside me...
So a tremendous roar had rung out, and in its wake, all manner of beasts came pouring out toward the edge of the jungle...
Even with only that much to go on, one thing was all but certain: something had taken up residence deep inside that jungle. Those vicious, venom-laden vermin had abandoned the very grounds they were born on and fled for their very lives. Then what in the world had moved in there?
The whole pattern did seem roughly reminiscent of the summoning of Vifrons...
I began hauling that memory up from the far corner of my mind.
Around the time the war had ripened into its bloodiest stretch, traitors had begun to surface among humankind. One anecdote from among them: in a country village far removed from the front lines, strange things had started to happen.
"Lia! Where are you?! Lia!!!"
In the dead of night, the village's adults turned out with torches in hand, combing the mountainside for the missing child.
But the child was never found — and worse, as the days wore on, the children kept vanishing one after another. Parents took to keeping their little ones at their side every waking hour, only for the parents themselves to start disappearing along with them, in an unbroken chain.
In the end, something unknown swallowed an entire village whole, and the place became a ghost town where no living soul remained...
As incidents of this sort crept outward through the surrounding lands, knights dispatched from the Holy City at last turned the whole region inside out. And what they found was...
"Commander! A demon, over here!!!"
A demon, summoned by the hand of one of those very traitors. The knightly order, having come expecting nothing worse than common monsters, was wiped out to the last man. That demon went on to lay waste to a tenth of the kingdom before it was finally put down...
"So this thing, called here by somebody or other, has been gorging itself on live sacrifices to build its strength, has it?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Though those sorts usually have a taste for children... how strange."
"Young master? Perhaps stop telling stories that only you know..."
"So it's deliberately passing over the soft, tender children and making off with nothing but tough, grown adults?"
Clatter— clunk—
It happened to be around mealtime, and one of the village youngsters, trundling in with an armful of dishes, went white as a sheet and dumped the whole lot across the floor...
"WAAAAAAAH!!!"
The next moment he was bawling his eyes out and dashing straight out the door. I could only stare after him, utterly baffled.
"Good grief... Young master, why must you go making children cry again?"
And the mouth of that damned thrall of mine was once more rattling away in high glee...
Shff—
At some point the old man had been busily scooting away on his backside, and was now a fair distance from me.
"Ah... seriously, what is with today? Why is it always me and my rotten luck?"
Cursing the heavens yet again, I bemoaned the wretched jinx that seemed to have latched itself onto me.
"Honestly, young master... you only said all that nonsense because you saw a man-eating monster once before... isn't that right?"
..........
"Y-young master? It's not that... right?"
"..........It's not."
By then Giyeong, too, had put a good stretch of distance between us and was pressed flat against the wall.
"I'll bring your meals in to you myself, so please, just don't come out."
"Tch....."
"I'm begging you. The villagers are that terrified of your kind, so do not come out — not ever!"
"Fine, fine..."
Thanks to our promise to pass the night quietly and be gone by morning, we were lent the most out-of-the-way house in the village for a single night.
"Haah... a mere whippersnapper, talking like some ancient graybeard."
"Young... whippersnapper, you say?"
"A whippersnapper is exactly what you are. You haven't even lived a hundred years. Back in my day, when we saw our elders..."
At the sight of me clicking my tongue and rambling on about 'back in my day, this' and 'back in my day, that,' that rascal Du-sik asked with a look of open curiosity:
"But just how old are you, young master?"
"Me? No idea...?"
"Aww, come on... don't be like that — just tell me, and me alone. Would I go about blabbing it to the whole world?"
Giyeong, wearing the smuggest of faces, had been sneakily prodding at my shoulder, so I seized the offending finger...
"AAAARGH! It's... it's going to break!!!"
"Where do you get off getting fresh with me..."
For a lowly thrall to lay hands upon the sacred body of the True Ancestor... Having bent the finger of this rabid cur — a creature who did things unthinkable in my day — back until it pressed against the back of his own hand, I picked the conversation back up.
"Hmm... Du-sik."
"Ow, ow... yes?"
"Do you know how many loaves of bread you've eaten in your life... no — how many bowls of somen?"
"Well... I eat it three or four times a week, so I'd say somewhere around four thousand bowls by now?"
"Is that so?"
I scratched my head and tried again.
"Then do you know how many hidden weapons you've thrown in your life?"
"I never really threw any after I was a child... so about a thousand, give or take?"
..........
"So just what is the young master's age, then?"
He asked it with those slit eyes of his — the kind where you couldn't even find the pupils — half-lidded and sly, and there I was, wanting to say something and having no clue what it ought to be...
"Uh... haah... hrm..."
My hand simply kept clenching and unclenching at empty air, for no reason at all.
"Young master, the worst man in the world just stopped talking mid-story..."
"Let me think! Just let me think!!!"
In the brief silence won by that lion's roar of mine, I cast about for a way to explain.
"Uh... you remember Chunshik? From a while back?"
"Chunshik?"
"Yeah. The fellow who came springing out at us mid grave-robbery."
"Ah... Qin Shi Huang? Of course I remember. But why bring him up all of a sudden...?"
"I'd wager he's younger than me."
..........
Another silence settled over us. I had brought up age for no good reason, and now the mood had gone thoroughly strange...
"Du-sik, the look in your eyes is quite disrespectful right now?"
With him regarding me as though I were the most pitiable creature alive, I held up two fingers and said:
"Uh... haah... it is not, sir....."
Had the wretch finally snapped his tether and gone and committed the most wicked deed in the world?
It was too absurd for words; I let out a hollow laugh and asked.
"Heh... can't bring yourself to believe me?"
"No... well, if the young master says so, then believe it I must."
BANG—
"Still can't believe it?"
"AAK! I believe you! Believe you I do, of course!!!"
"You've got sleep crusted in your eyes — where do you get off telling me lies?!"
"AAAAAAAACK!!!"
As for the villagers — at the screams drifting out of the house where the man-eating demon and his henchman were said to be sleeping for the night...
"Aigoo... so he eats even his own underlings. How on earth did a monster like that come barging into our village?"
"Waaah! Mommy... I'm scared!!!"
"Hush! Keep crying and that monster will come carry you off!!!"
— they only muttered such things and shook their heads.
Having screamed himself hoarse until dawn, Giyeong finally stepped out the door, his voice reduced to gravel and his face mottled black and blue...
"Du-sik, out of the way — let's get moving."
"Yessir....."
At the prodding from behind, he answered listlessly in a voice split at the seams and shuffled aside. Unlike yesterday, the sky above us was clear today, without a single cloud.
"Uuurgh... haah... Well then, I suppose we'd better pay a visit to that Beast Palace of the Southern Barbarians, or whatever it's called."
I said this as I stretched myself tall — and naturally, Giyeong asked in reply, a shade of worry in his expression:
"Are you certain there's no need to call for more people from the Dang Clan?"
"What, shall I summon my father while I'm at it?"
"No... that is not quite what I meant....."
"Because calling anyone short of that would be pointless, I'm telling you. The clan heads are far too busy to come in the first place, and the squad leaders would be nothing but dead weight if they did."
"Haah... understood."
"Ooh, listen to that voice...?"
"UNDERSTOOD!!!"
Watching Giyeong serve as the village's living alarm clock — bellowing at full volume from the crack of dawn in place of the roosters — I at last allowed myself a satisfied smile and said:
"That's more like it... that's the volume a young man's voice ought to have."
In any event, true to our promise to the old man, we slipped out of the village before its people stirred. And so, setting our steps toward the jungle's depths, we whiled the walk away with idle chatter.
"No, no — I'm telling you, gather it all into one tight point?"
"Like this?"
"That's a dumpling. Where in that do you see a bead?"
"Uuuuuu....."
Since the scenery never changed — just more of the same jungle, mile after mile — and since neither I nor Du-sik had any need to fear poison, I was teaching him the art of handling blood...
"It's not working?"
"Why on earth won't this work? I told you — gather it into a single point, tight and firm?"
"I don't believe this art suits me. If you'd kindly teach me that animal summoning you showed me the other day instead."
A brat who couldn't yet walk asking to be taught how to run — I answered him with a snort.
"Heh... Du-sik, if you want to conjure up so much as a single rat, you'd have to gulp down what we ate at that inn another ten times at the very least, and even then it'd be touch and go?"
"..........Then just teach me what you showed me yesterday."
"Talking about what? Summoning a human shape?"
"No. Not that — that prison-like thing..."
"Oh, for — you blockhead! You get this right first, or I teach you nothing at all!!!"
"Tch....."
"Tch...? You have gone properly out of your mind. Where do you get off throwing a tantrum!"
And so, by degrees, our conversation was degenerating into a distinctly physical one — when:
"By the way — do we actually know where we're going?"
The feeling that we had been circling the same ground over and over had been gnawing at me, so I asked Giyeong...
"Pardon? I have simply been following you, young master?"
Was this fool spouting pure lunacy?
I answered, wearing an expression of utter disbelief:
"I was following you."
"...What?"
And so the two of us became lost children, adrift in the jungle.