Part 1. Follow the God's Guidance (1)
CLAAANG. CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG! BOOOM! BOOM!
The sound of a brass gong being struck.
The sound of a drum booming.
The sound of bells shivering.
In the wide yard, the men playing the instruments let out cries of "Hoo!" and "Haaaaah!"
Their expressions were heavy, their eyes desperate.
It was a shamanic rite.
Young Kang Hyeong-seok, the subject of the rite, stared blankly at the dancing shaman.
She wore robes of fierce red and blue, and she shook the white cloths tied to both her hands.
Why on earth am I here, at this rite?
From the boundary between reality and illusion, Kang Hyeong-seok shifted his gaze to the altar behind the shaman.
There stood a figure clad in black armor like a general.
It was a striking sight, yet the others seemed not even to perceive his presence.
It was wreathed in a black heat haze, and its face could not be seen.
But it was unmistakably staring at Kang Hyeong-seok.
With eyes that longed desperately for something.
'Who are you?'
What is it you expect of me so badly?
He asked earnestly, with a mouth that would not open, but it did not answer.
Suddenly his head swam.
Overcome by unbearable dizziness, Kang Hyeong-seok toppled over like a block of wood.
Amid the clamor of the traditional instruments, his parents and the musicians came running.
Fallen, Kang Hyeong-seok kept staring at the black general.
Until the very moment he lost consciousness.
Twenty years later.
VROOOOM.
A deep backcountry road in Gangwon Province.
Kang Hyeong-seok held the wheel of a silver sedan that gave good value for the money, and in the passenger seat, Noh Su-cheol, his superior at the same company, looked out the window with knitted brows.
"Hah, it looks like a goblin could jump out at any second."
That was Noh Su-cheol, a deputy manager in the same department at Daejeong Trading.
They were not close enough for jokes.
So he did not feel like playing along, but this once he could not help agreeing.
"It does look that way."
Air where the night fog had settled heavily.
A road that wound like a coiled snake.
They were on their way back from a business trip.
The hour was running toward dawn, and the moon had hidden behind the clouds.
There were no streetlights, let alone other cars, and the mood was such that it would not have been strange for a ghost to leap out, never mind a goblin.
『Accident risk zone.』
"Turn that thing down!"
Noh Su-cheol said it sharply, the space between his brows narrowing, and Kang Hyeong-seok drew a deep breath, let it out, and lowered the volume on the phone mounted to the dashboard.
"Tsk! Every bit of this is irritating. Really."
Noh Su-cheol tipped his seatback down and took out a cigarette.
It was Kang Hyeong-seok's car.
Even so, he lit it without asking.
"Whew! Kim Jae-sik, was it? Your professor."
The name of the professor he had been close to in university.
Kang Hyeong-seok guessed what was coming and frowned, and right after that it came.
"Is it because you majored in folklore studies? A professor's recommendation, in this day and age. A professor's recommendation. Real old-fashioned."
"...That is going too far."
"Is that so? Sorry, then."
Having sneered, Noh Su-cheol drew deeply on his cigarette and opened his mouth again.
"And you. If you got in on a referral, shouldn't you be working harder? You don't want people calling you a parachute hire behind your back, do you?"
Kang Hyeong-seok let out a breath through his nose and clenched his back teeth.
It was hardly the first or second time that bastard had pulled this.
Every time, the urge to throw down a resignation letter surges up.
If it had not been for Kim Jae-sik's request, he would have done it long ago.
'Keep at it steadily. You have to be the model, or how am I to find work placements for the ones coming up behind you?'
Because of those words, he had endured one year.
The remaining two he had held out on sheer stubbornness.
"I have not seen anyone besides you say that, Deputy Manager."
"This bastard's grown a lot, hasn't he? Talking back, even."
"I suppose I have you to thank for that."
Noh Su-cheol muttered with only his lips moving, and there was no need to look to know.
He was cursing.
A worthless man whose pride ran high but whose self-esteem was damn frail.
The sort of man who believed his own value rose only when he scraped at the nerves of the people around him.
That was Noh Su-cheol.
'If only he were not my direct supervisor.'
Kang Hyeong-seok cracked his neck to the side to show his discomfort and drove on in silence.
It was then.
"Hey, Folklore."
There was only one reason Noh Su-cheol ever called him that.
"Yes, sir."
"The weather's shit anyway, so pull out a scary story or something."
Kang Hyeong-seok let out a laugh of disbelief and turned the wheel along the sweeping curve.
"This is so sudden that I do not know what story to tell."
"You've had at least one frightening thing happen to you in your life, haven't you?"
Noh Su-cheol reclined his seatback all the way and waited for Kang Hyeong-seok to speak.
Kang Hyeong-seok kept his lips firmly shut, thought for a moment, then opened them.
"You don't know why I majored in folklore studies, do you?"
Kang Hyeong-seok gave Noh Su-cheol a brief glance and went on.
"I see ghosts."
Noh Su-cheol's expression shifted faintly, and Kang Hyeong-seok slowed down because of the thickening night fog.
"The first one I saw was when I was five. There was no one home, and I saw a ghost standing on my parents' bed."
He must not have expected an account of that sort, because Noh Su-cheol's eyes thinned.
"It was a filthy sight. It was grinding both feet into the bed over and over, and its eyeballs were bright red."
Kang Hyeong-seok had majored in folklore studies because of ghosts.
In folklore studies one learned not only folk custom but oral tradition as well.
Fear comes from the unknown.
So he had decided he had to drag the object of his fear into the realm of understanding.
"I was about to leave the room when our eyes suddenly met. That thing came crawling at me on all fours. Bending its arms and legs grotesquely, like a spider that had been stepped on."
It must have been the calm voice, with the surroundings themselves backing it up.
The ghost must have taken shape in his head, because Noh Su-cheol's brow furrowed.
"You're bullshitting me, aren't you, bastard?"
"I see them at the office sometimes, too."
"What?"
"You know Assistant Manager Lee Jin-pyeong. Ask him sometime whether he used to keep a dog."
Wariness settled into Noh Su-cheol's eyes, which had been full of disbelief.
A look that said, how do you know that?
He could not help knowing, because he had seen it.
"An old white Spitz. Its tail would lean a little to the right."
Assistant Manager Lee Jin-pyeong would not know.
That the dog came in to work with him every day.
Or that it drifted around him, playing, and then went home with him wearing a satisfied face.
"Did you hear it from Assistant Manager Lee?"
"Is he the type? Assistant Manager Lee?"
Assistant Manager Lee Jin-pyeong was truly tight-lipped.
He kept silent about personal matters and work matters alike, enough to make more than a few people clutch the backs of their necks.
"Anyway, I've seen ghosts ever since I was small. They tormented me a great deal."
"......."
With Noh Su-cheol's mouth shut, the car fell quiet.
The thick silence catches hold of old memories and hauls them up.
Kang Hyeong-seok furrowed one brow, stared into the darkness, and clicked his tongue softly.
'Damn it. Why did he have to ask a question like that.'
His past of being tormented by ghosts felt like it was rushing at him in waves, the way that fog did.
"I even did my service somewhere hard, thinking it might get better if I got physically stronger, but it didn't help much."
Might it have been better if he had gone to the outfit that supposedly catches ghosts?
That was the thought he had had while on a thousand-ri march with a ghost.
"You're not spouting nonsense just because I gave you a little criticism, are you?"
"Whether you believe it or not is up to you, Deputy Manager."
"Of course I don't believe it. If what you said were true, would you be here? You'd have taken the divine descent long ago and set up your own shrine house."
At the question laced with mockery, Kang Hyeong-seok pulled up one corner of his mouth as well.
"I took the divine suppression."
"...What?"
"I should have received the god, but I came down with spirit sickness so young that I ended up taking the divine suppression instead."
There are people out there with a great interest in shamanism or the occult.
Noh Su-cheol was exactly that kind of person, so he knew the difference between divine suppression and divine descent.
And he knew well that someone who had not taken the divine descent suffered spirit sickness or was tormented by petty ghosts.
"Must have been some lesser god. Seeing as you never took the descent."
Noh Su-cheol worked his snakelike tongue, trying somehow to scrape at Kang Hyeong-seok's insides.
But it did not land in his chest.
"I underwent the divine suppression rite for close to a month."
This child is not yet ready to receive the god.
So grant him a reprieve.
That was what the divine suppression rite was, and the fact that it had taken a full month meant that the god who had marked Kang Hyeong-seok was a being of that magnitude.
"The shaman said even she could not tell who he was. She said that if I had taken the divine descent, I would become a Grand Shaman."
Noh Su-cheol clamped his lips shut, and an abrupt silence fell over the car.
A Grand Shaman meant a great shaman.
A shaman respected by every other shaman.
Kang Hyeong-seok's confession that he might become such a person was hard for Noh Su-cheol to dismiss.
"Was that entertaining?"
Noh Su-cheol did not answer, so Kang Hyeong-seok did not ask again.
A heavy mood settled in, heavy in a different sense than before.
VRRRRRM.
It was after some three minutes of driving like that.
Kang Hyeong-seok narrowed the space between his brows.
It was not only because Noh Su-cheol in the passenger seat had lit another cigarette with a face full of thought.
RATTLE, RATTLE.
The car shook enough to make him wonder whether this stretch had been an unpaved road all along.
"That's strange. Are you sure you came the right way?"
"It has been a single road the whole way, sir."
Kang Hyeong-seok slowed down and glanced at his phone.
The navigation app on the screen was working normally, but perhaps because of the thick fog, something felt off.
A feeling that they were headed somewhere they should not go.
That sense of wrongness, the kind that came with driving toward a defiled place or an abandoned house turned into a den of evil spirits, was striding closer.
WHOOSH!
Something suddenly showed itself in the fog,
SCREEEEECH! CRAAAASH!
and the car, its brakes slammed on, collided with it.
Smelling the burnt rubber that filled the car in an instant, Kang Hyeong-seok felt his mind go white.
'What did I just see?'
While he was still out of his senses over what he had glimpsed just before the collision, Noh Su-cheol's sharp voice bored into his ear.
"D-drive properly! What did you hit?"
Brought back to himself by it, Kang Hyeong-seok unbuckled his seat belt and spoke.
"I'll go take a look."
"Crazy, this is crazy! F*ck! Can't even drive straight!"
Beside the flustered Noh Su-cheol unbuckling his belt, Kang Hyeong-seok got out of the car.
As he did, he called back up the shape of what he had just seen.
'It wasn't a water deer or a boar piglet.'
Nor was it a person.
On a remote road like this, with no village anywhere nearby, there was no way a person could be out here.
Something that was neither beast nor human.
And Kang Hyeong-seok had even met its eyes.
At the chill crawling up his spine, Kang Hyeong-seok shook his head hard and switched on his phone's flashlight.
"Wait for me! Hey!"
With Noh Su-cheol trailing after him, Kang Hyeong-seok moved forward.
Perhaps because of the dense fog, something like the smell of earth right after rain hung heavy in the air.
CRUNCH, CRUNCH, CRUNCH.
Kang Hyeong-seok walked on, lighting the ground beneath his feet.
The strange sensation grew thicker still, until his legs felt as heavy as if sandbags had been strapped to his ankles.
Even so, he had no choice but to go, because he could not entirely dismiss the one-in-ten-thousand chance that what he had hit was a person.
"Why can't I see anything? Did we see it wrong?"
That was after Noh Su-cheol muttered from behind.
FLASH.
The thin light of the phone lit up the thing lying collapsed there.
Kang Hyeong-seok stopped dead, and Noh Su-cheol, catching up a moment later, saw it and froze like a block of wood.
"Wh-wh-what is that?"
It was still alive.
It was about the size of a large dog, its whole body thick with yellow and black fur.
Its ribs, crushed when the car struck it, heaved with every breath. The problem was the head.
The face of a middle-aged man.
That was what was attached to the body of a beast.
"SSHHK. SSHHHK."
Barely breathing through crushed lungs, it glared at Kang Hyeong-seok and Noh Su-cheol with bloodshot eyes.
Not round pupils like a human's, but pupils split into long vertical slits.
SCRAPE, SCRAPE.
Noh Su-cheol recoiled in terror, seemingly unable even to think of reporting it or leaving behind a photo.
"F-f*ck. What the hell did you hit? You crazy bastard!"
Kang Hyeong-seok gave no reply. He pushed his breath out between his teeth and looked down at it.
It was plainly something he was seeing for the first time in his life, yet somehow he felt he knew what that thing really was.
A Tiger Ghost.
It was as if someone right beside his ear were telling him its name.
Whether it was knowledge already in his head, or the guardian god he should have received, he could not tell.
'A Tiger Ghost.......'
The vengeful soul of one devoured by a tiger.
A ghost that even after death could not pass on and became the tiger's hands and feet.
Kang Hyeong-seok raised his head and looked around.
A Tiger Ghost had only one purpose.
To guide another victim to the tiger.
From within the deep, thick fog, the premonition that something was watching him came pricking at his skin.