Memories Best Left Buried
Huh? I'm getting angry here? A jellyfish that jams its tentacles into people's skulls and slurps them dry is now spewing out fog? Anyone with eyes can see that's dangerous.
With no way to be sure that mist wasn't poison, I had no intention of inhaling it straight down on faith, so I pulled back to a safe distance...
"Ah... ah..."
The people who had been giggling like idiots, robes hanging slack, began to moan, despair creeping over their faces. Come to think of it — was that thing never a jellyfish at all, but a mushroom?
As it sprayed its mist around like mad, as if venting poison spores, I descended slowly to the ground, watching it the whole way, and spoke.
"Stay here and wait for me. I'll go take a sip and come back."
I'd only said it because, if that stuff was poison, it wouldn't do much to me — and yet...
"What kind of lunacy is that, sir?! At the very least, order me to go in and come back!"
My uselessly loyal familiar was objecting furiously and insisting on going himself. Well then, what could I do...
"Oh yeah? Then you go in first."
"I— no, wait... you're serious?"
"You volunteered out of your own mouth. That devotion alone deserves a reward, so I'll see you off personally."
Sweat streaming down him in rivulets, Dang Giyeong wore the expression of a man thinking, This isn't how this was supposed to go...
"Do I... really go in? For real?!"
Just when I thought I was finally seeing a familiar act like one, it turned out to be all lip service after all...
"Tsk..."
I twisted my mouth into a crooked smirk and kicked him square in the rear.
WHAM-
"Man, you sure do talk a lot. If you say something, you follow through. Wouldn't you agree?"
We happened to be standing right on the borderline where the fog only just grazed us, so that single kick sent Dang Giyeong tumbling straight into the mist...
"Mujin... I'm sorry..."
Yeah. That tracks...
The moment Du-sik touched the fog, whatever grip he had on his mind slipped clean away. With his eyes glazed over and a face brimming with remorse, he kept apologizing to someone, over and over — I couldn't help but press a hand to my forehead. What on earth was he seeing in that fog? Judging by the state of him, it probably worked through hallucinations, or some manner of mental effect...
But standing around theorizing would get me nowhere, so I stepped into the fog myself.
"Ooh, it's moist? It even moisturizes your skin... not bad at all."
The mist carried a cool, dew-heavy touch, like the fog that settles over a mountainside in the small hours before dawn. I seized Dang Giyeong by the scruff of his neck and chucked him back out of the fog first...
CRASH-
"Gwaahk! ...Huh? Young Master?"
"Just wait out there. Don't come wading in after me and staging a tearjerker."
Whether because the fog's grip broke the instant one left it, Dang Giyeong had already come back to his senses and stood there blinking in confusion, so I left him with that.
And so, as I walked on alone through the fog, a sound drifted in from somewhere — a wail or a scream, I couldn't tell which.
"A m... monster! Everybody run!"
Were they referring to me?
I tilted my head just enough to glance toward the voice...
"Huh...? Now this is interesting."
Not the dress of the Central Plains... nor, for that matter, anything from Earth, either... An ordinary villager, wearing the clothes of my old homeland — clothes I felt no ache of longing for — was staring past my shoulder and shouting himself hoarse.
And when I looked back over my shoulder, there stood a monster I'd seen so often in the far-off past that I was sick to death of the sight of it.
"I've got a rough idea of what's going on here, but..."
I dismissed them lightly and kept walking, and before I knew it they were gone — other things had sprung up around me instead.
"Why....."
"Why did you do this to us....."
"Please, spare me....."
"I curse you....."
Corpses far too mangled to be called whole came crawling toward me, dripping blood, straining to grab hold of my trouser legs.
"Hm... that all you've got?"
Once again I ignored the wretched things blaming and cursing me in their truly pitiful states, and asked the empty air — and everything around me melted away like smoke...
"My lord... I want to live. There are still things I haven't done....."
This time it was a pretty woman, collapsed before me, her face drained white, speaking as though pleading for her life.
"There are words I never got to say....."
The moment her frail figure sent me a pitiful gaze and she struggled to force out the words she'd never managed to say —
KWAANG-
My foot carved a beautiful arc and sent that repulsive thing's head flying.
As it dissolved like smoke, I murmured in a low voice...
"Wow... this one really got on my nerves. I'll admit it."
Just what did that piece of trash think it was doing, daring to peek into someone's memories and try to make them real? A thing without even a mind of its own, sucking down the memories of sentient beings to swell its power — and daring to...
The irritation hit all at once. What pissed me off was that memories I'd worked so hard to bury had been dredged back to the surface thanks to that insignificant little thing.
What was I even doing here? I needed to get back to Earth...
Should I just kill everything? The first time is the hard part — from the second time on, it's hardly difficult at all. It would only be repeating what I did back then. I could simply swallow the whole thing down — righteous sect or martial art, none of it mattered... throw every distinction away, devour the lot, and it wouldn't take long at all.
"Ugh... annoying."
Thud- thud- thud- thud- thud- thud-
The pounding of my heart began to ring in my ears, and then a blood-red aura started to coil around my body...
"...—Master!"
If I simply surrendered to this feeling, I wouldn't have to care about a single thing...
"...ng Master!!!"
As if I'd grown attached to a place I'd spent barely a year and a bit in...
"YOUNG MASTER!!!!!"
A voice both familiar and insufferably irritating came ringing into my ears from somewhere.
"...Huh?"
The fog kept whoever it was out of sight, but when I tilted an ear toward the sound...
"Young Master! What are you doing! If you don't come out, I'm coming in!"
There was Du-sik, bellowing his lungs out for me.
"Ah, shit — I think I've lost it."
My body had wasted away so badly that my mind had apparently gone soft with it. To nearly lose my grip over a cheap trick like this. All those long years endured flawlessly, only to be hooked by some lousy fog — what a sorry state this was. The words that had been left with me like a binding spell — how could I ever have forgotten them...
"I'm coming out now, so just stay right there!!!"
Half afraid that lunatic really would follow me in, I roared at the top of my lungs, then started laying into both my own cheeks.
Smaack- crack- crack- smack- SMAAACK-
After pounding out a steady rhythm for a good long while, my head felt noticeably cleaner — and as the price of that clarity, I stepped out of the fog with both cheeks glowing scarlet, where Dang Giyeong looked me over with worry written all over his face.
"What, why — what is it?"
"A-are you all right, sir?"
"What do you mean, am I all right?"
"Your cheeks..."
Apparently I'd slapped myself harder than intended — my cheeks had swollen up more than I expected, earning me entirely needless concern...
"They'll go down on their own if you leave them be. Let's get away from here first."
With a distinct lack of enthusiasm, I hauled Dang Giyeong off and put some distance between us and that damned jellyfish. Once the fog was no longer even visible behind us, I asked him:
"By the way — did you call out because you knew? Or did you just shout on a whim?"
"Pardon? Wh-what do you mean?"
"Never mind. Forget I asked."
The way he blinked back at me in confusion told me everything — he'd simply gotten lucky with the timing.
"Well, the truth is, sir, a little while after you entered the fog, this crushing sense of dread hit me all at once."
Lucky timing, my ass... Then again, perhaps because he was bound to me as a familiar, he really had sensed something after all.
"It felt like we were all going to die if things kept on like this, so I just started screaming my head off... My gut's been scarily sharp ever since I was little — I simply couldn't let it slide."
Familiar, my ass... The man was simply born with instincts so sharp they bordered on a superpower. It's rare, but such cases do exist — I'd actually seen a few myself, once upon a time...
"Ever since I botched brewing some medicinal herb at the age of five or so, I've strangely had this keen sense for such things—"
"That's enough."
"Huh...? Where'd that come from?"
"You did well, so just shut your mouth now."
"Yes, sir..."
Whatever else might be said, it remained a fact that without Dang Giyeong, things would have gone badly for me — and so, deep in my heart, I was thinking:
"From now on, I'll let two offenses slide before I deck him... no, three."
And so the two of us caught our breath, until, a short while later, we came face to face with the real problem.
"But Young Master — how on earth are we supposed to kill that thing?"
"You're telling me. Leaving it alone doesn't look like much of an answer, either."
"Shall I go fetch the Clan Head, even now?"
"Hm... I don't think that'd accomplish much?"
And for good reason: things slathered in that many layers of immunity are usually spirit-type beings, elementals and their kin — and no matter how magnificent one's Profound Realm cultivation might be, a ghost is not something you can cut down. What's more, the power I could vaguely sense from the thing didn't seem to belong to the demonic (ma) side, so even bringing in the Sword Queen or Bulseong, who could wield the power to break demons, would yield no ready answer... As for me, I had next to no means of manhandling a spirit directly, so at this very moment, the only thing I could actually do was scratch my head.
Mikhail could certainly land a hit on the thing, of course — if I had any idea where the hell he was these days, and if one look at that guy's face wouldn't have us declaring a death match on the spot...
"AAAAARGH! Can't cut it, can't poison it, and the second you land a single hit, it blasts out that godawful fog like 'back off' — how does any of that make sense?!!!"
In the end, I was having a full-blown fit, whipping my head every which way. Dang Giyeong, who had been watching this sorry spectacle as though he pitied me, broached carefully:
"Then how about visiting the Beast Palace first? There's a matter over that way that needs settling anyway."
With nothing better to try, I nodded and gave in.
"Haah... I suppose that's the move. It'd be even nicer if I could pick up a way to deal with that thing while I'm at it."
"But Young Master — if they knew how to solve it, wouldn't they have solved it themselves by now?"
Even in the middle of all this, he had to snatch the tail end of my every word. I smacked a hand to my forehead with an audible thump. In my day, when an elder spoke, you nodded along earnestly and agreed. That was the whole job. Why were the young ones these days so damn forward...
Still, resolved to see my promise through, I began a count in my head.
"One."