The White Tiger of Mount Baekdu
Baek Seol-hwa had driven away every single evil spirit that swarmed us, just as I’d asked her to. As if answering the powerful yoki radiating from Mount Jangsan, every one that showed up was a fairly strong malevolent entity.
“I told you not to come near!”
But she hadn’t wasted a thousand years of life. Together with the fox bead she’d taken out, Baek Seol-hwa made sure none of the evil spirits could even get close. Just by gathering and launching her yoki, she sent them flying the moment they were hit. Thanks to her, I was able to finish every single one of the dance movements safely.
It wasn’t like I’d danced for no reason. If something was only exhausting and had no meaning, there’d be no point in doing it. This ritual was a way to gather the spiritual energy of the mountain right here.
Every mountain holds its own sacred power, so spiritual energy naturally spreads throughout its grounds. The dance I’d just performed was meant to guide all that scattered energy to come this way. Luckily, it seemed I’d done it properly—the holy aura was gathering above the candle flames.
This was my first time actually trying it. I’d only ever watched before… but now I finally understood why my father always looked so drained afterward. It really was brutal.
“…Baek Seol-hwa, just hold on a little longer.”
“I can last twenty-four hours, you know!”
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t a joke. She really might be able to. Thanks to her, I was able to approach the ritual with some composure.
Even while I’d been dancing so fiercely, Jang San had been sitting quietly. I looked straight at her and brought my hands together. Then, just like her, I knelt down in front of her.
The ritual to extinguish calamity worked by pouring all the gathered spiritual energy onto the target at once, completely erasing the misfortune they carried. So I was going to collect all the energy we’d drawn here and pour it over Jang San’s head. That holy power would wash away the calamity known as “Jangsanbeom” that clung to her.
“Unity.”
As I chanted with my palms pressed together, the sacred energy swirling above the candle flames gathered onto the single candle placed between me and Jang San. I slowly separated my hands and turned my palms upward. The condensed energy naturally rose onto them.
I gently grasped it, then reached out and lightly tapped Jang San’s forehead with my index finger.
“…!”
The holy energy flowed down my finger and seeped into her body. It began driving out the calamity that had been defiling her, taking its place.
…Was this going right? Since this was my first time, I couldn’t be sure. But seeing how peaceful Jang San’s expression remained, it seemed the ritual itself was proceeding without issue.
“…Ah.”
At that moment, Baek Seol-hwa let out a strange sigh. Wondering what was wrong, I rolled my eyes toward her. She was looking at me.
“I’m hungry…”
“……”
That gluttonous gumiho…
That was what I thought at first, but I quickly realized her “hungry” wasn’t about regular food. Come to think of it, she hadn’t eaten anything since she took a bit of Seong Si-hyeok’s spiritual energy. If she’d just stayed still it might have been fine, but after using so much yoki in battle, she’d grown weak from hunger fast.
With her spiritual energy depleted, Baek Seol-hwa could barely move. Her face looked utterly drained. I’d thought she was just showing off earlier, but now things had come to this. I should’ve told her to conserve her strength…!
The moment Baek Seol-hwa’s attacks stopped, the evil spirits that had been hesitating began creeping forward again. Seeing those grotesque hands reaching out from every direction, I shouted urgently.
“It’s almost done! Just hold on a little longer!”
Just a little more and I’d make sure she could eat that damn spiritual energy somehow, so please just endure…!
But Baek Seol-hwa wasn’t without willpower. She wanted to protect me, yet despite my plea, she couldn’t move easily.
“Ugh… I want to, but…”
I wanted to summon a shikigami, but I couldn’t take my finger off her forehead right now. The spiritual energy was still settling in… If I moved carelessly, I could ruin the entire ritual.
“Baek Seol-hwa, please, just a little longer!!”
“Ugh… Okay…”
Baek Seol-hwa moved her hand slightly, guiding the fox bead. The bead, obeying her command, released one final powerful burst of yoki toward the grasping hands of the evil spirits closing in.
And then…
“I… I can’t anymore… My spiritual energy is too low… Ueeek……”
The gumiho who had lived for a thousand years couldn’t even last ten minutes before collapsing from exhaustion. The fox bead returned to her body, and Baek Seol-hwa slumped to the ground.
Now she was a gumiho with terrible stamina on top of everything else!
“Damn it…”
I still needed to wait just a little longer. The spiritual energy had almost fully transferred. If I could endure just a tiny bit more, it would be over. The question was whether the evil spirits’ hands would reach us first, or if I could finish delivering the energy to Jang San first.
If I failed here, Jang San would be completely consumed by the calamity and turn into a true monster. The evil spirits here would obviously be wiped out, and both Baek Seol-hwa and I would be in danger too. So I had no choice but to gamble.
It was a chicken race—would I finish the ritual first, or would the evil spirits touch us first?
Every time their hands stretched closer, cold sweat poured down my back. Baek Seol-hwa had her own yoki so they couldn’t touch her easily, but I was just an ordinary human. If they grabbed me, I’d lose control of my body with no resistance. I had to finish this ritual before that happened.
Why was this spiritual energy moving so slowly? Even in this situation, its speed hadn’t changed at all.
Creak. Creak. Creeeak.
They were getting closer. I could hear long fingernails scraping against the floor. Even though they were evil spirits, they were still ghosts. They couldn’t physically affect the living world. So all of this—the sounds, the scraping—was nothing but auditory hallucinations meant to instill fear in me.
Knowing that helped me stay focused. Still, I deliberately avoided looking at the ghosts, afraid it would break my concentration. Even so, I couldn’t stop the chills running through me or the way my body trembled.
Cold sweat poured like rain while my whole body suffered from the freezing aura. My jaw shook uncontrollably and my hands quivered. But I couldn’t lower my arm or pull my finger away.
“Hoooooo……”
I exhaled deeply and held on desperately until the very end. I prayed that all the spiritual energy would safely settle into Jang San’s body before their hands could reach me.
Scraaape. Scraaape. Scraaaape.
Now the sounds were coming from right behind me. The candle flame in front of me flickered wildly. It meant the evil spirits had gotten extremely close.
“……That body.”
And then a voice spoke.
Like a faint breeze tickling my ear, it whispered softly and quietly.
“That body… give it to me……”
Fuck, please hurry…!
“Give it to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!”
The ear-splitting hallucination suddenly rang out, making my body flinch. I saw an evil spirit’s hand stretching toward me from the side.
“!!”
Almost on pure instinct, I pulled my hand away from Jang San’s forehead. At the same moment, the evil spirit’s hand clamped tightly around my throat.
Spirits couldn’t touch physical objects in the living world, but they could harm humans and animals. More precisely, they gripped the soul, but the effect on the body was the same. Dark handprints formed on Se-hwan’s neck, making it impossible to breathe.
“Ghk……”
“That body… I will… take it……”
The evil spirit’s head twisted at an unnatural angle and spun a full circle before coming right up to Se-hwan’s face. On closer look, it wasn’t that the body had moved—the neck had simply stretched that far.
Even for an exorcist like Se-hwan, the evil spirit’s power was so immense it was hard to tell if this was hallucination or reality. Not only the one gripping his throat, but other evil spirits began gathering around him as well.
They had given up on possessing his body since they were too late, but now they lusted after the yoki possessed by both Jang San and Baek Seol-hwa.
“Kgh, hack…”
Even as his breath was being cut off, Se-hwan tried to pull a shikigami talisman from his pocket. But the evil spirit, noticing the talismans inside, stretched out another hand and grabbed his wrist.
“I’ll erase your soul… and wear your shell instead……”
His breathing grew more and more blocked. His vision began to blur. Se-hwan kicked his legs desperately, trying to break free, but the evil spirit had no intention of letting go. His eyes started rolling back. His mouth opened wide, instinctively trying to breathe, but his windpipe was sealed shut.
The evil spirit was just about to end Se-hwan’s life completely.
BOOOOOOM!!!
Something slammed into the evil spirit and sent it flying. Not just the one trying to kill Se-hwan—every single evil spirit that had gathered around him was blasted away by an overwhelming pressure.
“You could have given up.”
It was an enormous wave of spiritual pressure. Holy energy overflowed in every direction. Even though all the candle flames had been extinguished, the area around them glowed brightly.
“Usually… people don’t go this far for a yokai they’ve never even met before, do they?”
The evil spirits that witnessed it trembled violently and tried to flee, but another surge of spiritual pressure seized the area, crushing them so they couldn’t move an inch.
There was only one being who could emit such overwhelming spiritual pressure.
It was Jang San, the one who had been undergoing the ritual.
The reason Se-hwan had pulled his hand away moments ago was because he had endured until the very last second, risking his life to transfer every last bit of spiritual energy. Thanks to that, all the calamity had been washed away. The holy energy she originally possessed had been purified, revealing her true power.
“I asked because I had no one else to turn to.”
A pure white tail swayed gently. She lightly lifted Se-hwan, who had fainted but was still alive, into her arms.
“What a strange human.”
Even though a complete stranger had come to her and suddenly made such a request, he had listened without complaint and carried it out. Of course, the situation had been half-forced on him…
“Still, the fact that you worked so hard tells me a lot about your character.”
The mountain smiled softly.
“Thank you so much.”
Seol-hwa, who had collapsed from the immense spiritual pressure, slowly regained consciousness and lifted her head. Her eyes widened in shock.
“You……”
“Thank you too, Baek Seol-hwa. It would have been better if you could have held on just a little longer, though.”
The spiritual energy of the mountain, now restored to her true form, took the shape of a tiger. And not just any tiger—a massive white tiger easily three or four times larger than an ordinary one.
Tigers were generally considered spiritual beasts, and white ones even more so… but this was no ordinary white tiger’s aura. It was far too enormous to be called a mere tiger. Its size rivaled that of an elephant.
A white tiger spiritual beast of such colossal size, radiating so much spiritual energy that it lit up the surroundings—this could only mean one thing.
Among tigers, the one called the king—the Mountain Lord. And among them, the one from the place where all the energy of the Korean peninsula originates…
“…The Baekdu Mountain Lord?”
She was the ruler of Mount Baekdu.
The Baekdu Mountain Lord has awakened.
All surrounding evil spirits are being eradicated by her sacred aura.
Spiritual Pressure: Overwhelming
The mountain slowly looked around, then glanced at the evil spirits crushed beneath her holy energy. Astonishingly, the evil spirits began to disintegrate one by one under the pressure of her power.
“S-Spare us…”
“Did you try to spare this human?”
Even the powerful evil spirit that had wounded Se-hwan’s soul was annihilated instantly. Her spiritual energy was that immense.
Seol-hwa watched the scene in utter disbelief. She had known Jang San was a spiritual beast, but she never imagined she would be such a high-ranking existence.
At the same time, she couldn’t help but marvel at how powerful human words could be—to reduce a being of such stature to a mere urban legend monster.
Once the surroundings were completely cleared, the mountain used her spiritual energy to heal the wound on Se-hwan’s soul. Watching this, Seol-hwa spoke.
“…So the power of words really isn’t something to take lightly.”
“Beings like me are affected even more strongly. Depending on how people perceive us, we can be worshipped as gods or reduced to yokai.”
“Why is the Baekdu Mountain Lord all the way down in Busan?”
“And how did you know I was the Baekdu Mountain Lord?”
Seol-hwa answered as if it were obvious.
“You’re not a divine beast, but even among spiritual beasts, a tiger with that kind of size and that much spiritual energy… it couldn’t be anything but a spirit from Mount Baekdu, right?”
“So you’re not a complete idiot after all?”
“What!?”
Seol-hwa got angry at being called an idiot again, but the mountain simply laughed as if it were amusing.
“The reason I came down to Busan… well, it just sort of happened.”
“Huh?”
“The north has already been taken over by yokai that crossed over from the continent. They gradually pushed me out until I ended up here. The great war that broke out on the peninsula at the time played a big part too.”
“Chinese yokai? There’s no way the ruler of Mount Baekdu would be pushed back by something like that…”
“During those painful times, people’s faith in tigers as spiritual beasts grew weak. Naturally, my power weakened as well.”
“…Ah.”
During the Japanese occupation, tigers in this land had been hunted to the brink of extinction. The few that survived hid deep in the mountains to escape the hunts… and the idea of treating unseen tigers as spiritual beasts naturally faded away.
Even she, the greatest among the Mountain Lords—the Baekdu Mountain Lord—couldn’t avoid growing weaker. Driven from her home, she had eventually drifted all the way to Busan.
“Are you okay now?”
“For the time being. But there’s no telling when it might happen again. The urban legend of Jangsanbeom hasn’t completely disappeared, has it?”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“There is a way. If even one person worships me as a spiritual beast, it will work. The reason I ended up bearing the legend of Jangsanbeom was largely because no one saw me as a spiritual beast anymore.”
Seol-hwa stared blankly at the mountain for a moment, then shifted her gaze to Se-hwan, whom she was holding.
“……You don’t mean him, do you?”
“Who else is there besides Se-hwan?”
There really wasn’t anyone else. He was the only one who had recognized her true identity and believed in her.
Seol-hwa, who had been nodding in understanding, suddenly tilted her head at a strange sense of unease. The way the mountain had just referred to Se-hwan felt oddly intimate.
“Wait, what? Se-hwan? Why are you suddenly acting so close to him?”
“Well, we’ll be living together from now on, so it’s better to be friendly, don’t you think?”
Seol-hwa stared at her with a dazed expression for a moment, then her eyes widened.
“L-Living together!?”