Heat rose in shimmering waves from the asphalt stretching endlessly ahead.
Under the blazing sun, an old, ordinary-looking small truck sped along, kicking up dust.
Inside, of course, it was a different story.
The truck had been specially fitted with all sorts of shamanic implements, a shrine for the spirit, and talismans placed throughout to strengthen my spiritual attunement to him.
Its records had also been thoroughly scrubbed to shake off anyone tracking me.
‘I spent a fortune on this.’
Around five hundred million won had gone into it in one shot.
Some might call it a waste of money, but I was overjoyed.
In South Korea, I’d always had to pinch pennies over the budget just to buy a single ritual implement…. Now I could spend as much as I wanted without any financial constraints.
I hummed as I looked out the window.
My destination was Window Rock, Arizona, the capital of the Navajo Nation.
‘The Navajo….’
The memory of that day came vividly to mind.
The elderly Native American medium who had passed that astonishing spirit on to me. The strange, mysterious syllables she’d spat out had unmistakably been in the Navajo language.
If I spent the month there asking around, I might find information about the spirit.
And if I learned enough to use his power properly?
‘Blue Tile or any other damn thing, whoever comes… I won’t care.’
I was certain I could gain overwhelming power.
‘Spirit, Spirit, are you asleep?’
I called to him just in case, but he must have gone back to sleep. There was no response at all.
When I kept calling, though….
《Quiet. Let me sleep…. Let me get some sleep.》
He made his displeasure plain, then went back to sleep.
…The White Tiger Spirit used to talk so much that my ears practically ached.
Now that I had such a quiet partner, I felt oddly bored by comparison.
Besides….
‘Making me drive 3,500 kilometers alone is a little cruel, isn’t it?’
It was an enormous distance, unimaginable in South Korea, where I could get from Seoul to Busan in three hours.
But I’d chosen not to take a plane or train. There was no reason to give those bastards at Blue Tile an opening to track me.
Thirty hours of driving. I might as well enjoy the time as a sightseeing trip…. My Furabono-flavored electronic cigarette kept me company, too.
“I’ll just think of it as an American road trip.”
I muttered to myself and had just begun to smile when the clear sky turned yellow in an instant. A massive wall of sand rolled in from beyond the horizon.
It took only a moment for visibility to disappear.
“Fucking hell….”
A sandstorm.
Sand pattered against the windshield, and I felt the truck shake. I was also running low on fuel.
I hurriedly checked the navigation system, but there was no sign of a rest stop anywhere nearby, no matter how hard I looked.
‘This is a problem. Should I use the spare fuel?’
Just as the sound of the engine was being swallowed by the wind, a neon sign flashed through the blowing sand as if by magic.
It was a rest stop packed with trucks. The murmur of voices carried all the way outside, so the place seemed to be doing brisk business.
I parked and stepped in. A peculiar smell pricked my nose.
Sweet, yet strangely dizzying, as though it could send a person’s mind adrift.
“Welcome, sir!”
I took an empty seat and looked for a menu.
But every customer in the place was eating the same kind of food. The menu on the wall listed nothing but spaghetti.
Cheerful spaghetti characters were painted everywhere, to an almost excessive degree.
‘What is this place?’
My tastes were Korean through and through, so it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. But what could I do? I had to eat something if I didn’t want to starve.
“Tomato spaghetti with extra bacon, please.”
“Yes, sir! I’ll have it ready right away!”
A short while later, a plate heaped with red sauce arrived. Expecting little, I twirled some pasta around my fork and put it in my mouth.
“…Hm?”
It was surprisingly good. The texture of the noodles and the flavor of the sauce were far better than I’d imagined.
The bits of ground meat mixed in here and there had an especially good texture.
‘What on earth did they make this with?’
I’d never had spaghetti that tasted so heavenly.
As I savored it and nearly emptied my plate, the chair opposite me slid back with a soft scrape.
“Are you enjoying the food, sir?”
I looked up. A pretty, ginger-haired waitress sat there with a bright smile.
She rested her chin on her hand and gazed at me with a strangely languid look in her eyes.
The moment I met her gaze, a chill ran down my spine.
All at once, I could sense the source of the sweet smell filling the restaurant and the energy of its unnaturally crowded customers.
“Oh, yes. It’s delicious.”
I wiped the sauce from the corner of my mouth and smiled easily.
‘Fuck me. This place is a den of ghosts.’
With one hand, though… I gripped the talisman inside my jacket.
“Our organization is running a special promotion. If you join now, today’s meal is completely free, and you’ll get fifty percent off for the rest of your life.”
“…Oh, really?”
The waitress smiled. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, and an unreal smile hung on her lips.
Still resting her chin on her hand, she subtly pressed herself closer.
It felt like an overt attempt at sex appeal.
“The membership fee is normally five hundred dollars, but just for today, it’s free. What do you say? All the other customers have signed up.”
I followed her nod and looked around. Strange scenes were unfolding throughout the rest stop.
Burly truck drivers, their faces entranced, scribbled their signatures on the papers the staff held out.
“Ho-ho! Really? I’d better take advantage of a special opportunity like this!”
“Then could I get your number?”
The atmosphere was as merry as a festival, but the sweet smell pricking my nose grew more sickening by the moment.
Do-jun smiled and answered.
“I’m sorry. I prefer to pay the full price for my meals. I don’t think I need to join.”
But the waitress showed no sign of backing down.
Instead, she bent farther forward and thrust her face toward his. A gust of perfume mingled with the smell of tomato sauce hit him.
“Would you consider joining anyway? I… would like to see you here often.”
An undisguised invitation.
But what Do-jun saw was not her red lips. It was the repulsive energy writhing beneath her skin.
He sighed before he could stop himself.
‘I just wanted to eat in peace, but that’s never easy.’
As he often thought, there was a reason the Commanding Star appeared in his birth chart.
Just as he took hold of the fork on the table, a huge trucker who had been eating nearby came over with a hearty laugh and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Hm?”
“Hey, friend! The lady’s going to all this trouble. Why don’t you sign up? Be a man! A man! Ha-ha-ha!”
“What’s being a man got to do with—”
“Can’t you see you’re putting the young lady in a difficult spot? If I could, I’d sign up over and over for her!”
While the man stuck his nose in, the waitress shoved the contract right up to Do-jun’s face again.
She even grabbed his wrist and tried to put a pen in his hand, as if to force him to sign.
Do-jun’s eyes flashed coldly.
THUNK—!
A scream rang out with the dull impact.
“I warned you to stop, didn’t I?”
The fork in Do-jun’s hand was buried deep in the center of the waitress’s forehead.
“Aaaaaah!”
A scream filled the room, but no red blood came spurting out.
Instead, thick, dark tomato ketchup streamed from around the fork and soaked the floor.
The nearby truckers sprang to their feet in shock.
“What the hell are you doing, you lunatic?”
“Miss, are you okay?”
“Call 911! No, let’s take her in my truck!”
People crowded around, their mood turning hostile. One of them even pulled a handgun.
Then the waitress, the fork still lodged in her forehead, twisted her head at an unnatural angle and shrieked.
“You bastard…. Why the fuck won’t you listen to meee?!”
Her shape warped in an instant.
Her once-smooth skin melted like flour dough, turning into thousands of writhing strands of spaghetti.
“Aaaaaah!”
“Wh-what the fuck is that?”
In an instant, she wrapped her tentacle-like noodles around the truckers who had tried to help her.
Strands of spaghetti shot in from every direction like arrows.
Without hesitation, Do-jun snapped his fingers and chanted a spell.
“Flame!”
Blue fire sprang from his fingertips and swept over the onrushing noodles.
“Aaaaaah!”
The noodles charred black amid horrible screams.
He turned to survey the dining room.
“M-monster!”
“Aaaaaah! L-let go of me!”
The place had already descended into chaos.
Other employees’ arms and legs had stretched out like tentacles to bind the customers, and they were forcing the terrified truckers to sign the papers in blood.
‘This… is the Flying Spaghetti Monster Church (FSM).’
I remembered a classified report I’d seen when I was with ‘Blue Tile.’
The FSM had once been a simple parody religion, but a powerful evil spirit had entered its leader’s body, and the group was spreading from here.
Some of them must have set a trap at this rest stop and lain in wait.
‘I really have the worst luck.’
I put my mask back on and drew an exorcist’s silver-bullet pistol and a sacred hammer I’d bought from Underworld Shop.
The Western weapons didn’t fit my hands quite right, but it didn’t matter.
I ran a finger along the barrel, secretly infusing it with ‘malefic energy.’
BANG—! BANG—!
Each time a silver bullet struck, the spaghetti creatures burst like balloons.
It wasn’t simply because of their holy power.
The shaman’s malefic energy carried inside the bullets shook their spirit bodies to the roots.
《…What is all this noise? You are being loud.》
The spirit in my belly spoke, sounding annoyed.
“You certainly woke up quickly.”
《These things… are nothing but shells. Empty phantoms without substance.》
The spirit was right.
‘There are no souls inside their bodies.’
I’d crushed and smashed them with my pistol and hammer, but each time, it felt as though I’d scattered only empty shells, not souls.
Meanwhile, the spaghetti kept multiplying without end.
“Eeeek! Th-the door’s blocked!”
“S-save meeee!”
They had even sealed the restaurant door with a wall of spaghetti to stop the truckers from escaping.
As everyone struggled in the chaos….
“Help us! Mister Exorcist! Please!”
The very man who had told Do-jun to ‘be a man’ a moment earlier came over and clung to his leg, whining.
He seemed to have realized in the meantime that Do-jun was a shaman… no, an exorcist.
“Me! Me too!”
“We’ll help, so let’s do this together!”
Other truckers, each carrying a club or a knife, gathered around Do-jun.
‘These people have no shame.’
Only moments ago, they’d been calling him unmanly. Now they had changed their tune in seconds.
Tssss….
“I don’t mind helping.”
“R-really?”
“Then deal with them at once!”
Do-jun held out his palm.
“Ten thousand dollars.”
“…What?”
“I’ll make sure you survive. Pay me ten thousand dollars a head.”
“T-ten thousand dollars? You’re asking for money now…?”
“That’s America for you, isn’t it? No, isn’t ten thousand dollars cheap for your life?”
While they hesitated….
“Aaaaaagh!”
A strand of spaghetti coiled around one man’s neck and tightened.
At the sound of his choking death rattle, the faces of the others went white.
“A-all right! I’ll pay! Just save me, please!”
“I-I’ll pay too!”
The deal was done.
Do-jun drew an exorcism sword imbued with holy power and faced forward.
A voice came from the spirit jar.
《You have an eye for business.》
‘Does that displease you, Spirit?’
《No. It is wise. When prey is before you… needless mercy is a luxury.》
Well, our spirit might have lost his memory, but our values lined up nicely.
‘Let’s go.’
SLASH—! SWISH—!
A dazzling arc of sword energy cut through the air and severed the masses of noodles trapping the people.
“Get over to the corner.”
“A-all right!”
After herding the survivors into one place, Do-jun pressed a talisman to the floor and raised a sturdy protective barrier.
“Don’t take a single step out of there if you don’t want to die.”
“…W-we won’t!”
Then he swung his sword briskly, cutting down the spaghetti people.
Each time, he focused spiritual power into his eyes to search.
‘Over there.’
Whenever the spaghetti broke apart and lost its shape, its energy dispersed and vanished in one direction.
He headed straight toward it….
“Kreeeek! Kreeek! You, you bastard!”
Deep in the kitchen, an enormous lump of meat shaped like a meatball was pulsing.
It was more than a mass of ground meat.
The skulls and bodies of people who had not yet been digested were tangled within it, giving off the stench of vengeful spirits.
That must be the main body containing the spirits of the spaghetti creatures raging all around.
‘Elder, it’s mealtime. Please wake up.’
I called on the spirit, but his response was cold.
《It smells foul. Not to my taste. Deal with it yourself.》
There was a hint of mockery in the spirit’s voice.
‘Is this some kind of test?’
It was a new kind of evil spirit I’d never seen before. He probably wanted to see how I’d deal with it.
Spirits did sometimes put their mediums to the test.
‘That stings my pride a little.’
Still, I was Kang Do-jun.
I smiled and gripped my sword in one hand and my pistol in the other.
SLASH—! BANG—! BANG—!
I cut through the incoming tentacles with my sword and fired at every point where the strands bunched together.
But fresh noodles immediately sprang up in their place.
It felt as though they were desperately trying to keep me from reaching the meatball.
Besides, the spiritual power the spirit was lending me was severely limited.
‘I won’t break through with firepower alone.’
Stubborn pride flared up in me. I wanted to show the spirit what I could really do.
“Kreeeek!”
“Hissss….”
As the spaghetti people and their tentacles kept swarming in, I pulled back and ran straight for the truck.
Then I curled my lips into a grin.
‘Let’s exorcise that bastard with a shamanic rite.’