Part 6. Half-Baked Shamans Will Fear the Young Master (3)
『Left turn in five hundred meters. Then right turn two hundred meters ahead.』
All the way to the shrine house Kang Hyeong-seok said nothing.
Instead he watched only the road ahead with a face full of thought.
'F*cking bastard. What was he thinking, pulling that?'
The more he thought about it, the more his forehead burned with heat.
A shaman is meant to protect people.
A shaman is meant to soothe wronged souls.
And a shaman like that uses a ghost to push a person into danger?
It was no different at all from the ones who take a fat sum to hurl a malefic at someone, or who do foul things to top up their fallen spirit power.
'Say you didn't know.'
Say you wrote that talisman because you knew nothing at all.
Otherwise he was going to end up raising a hand to that shaman.
"Hey....... Ease up on that face."
Reading the mood, Shin Jeong-a spoke carefully, unlike her, and Kang Hyeong-seok only nodded with his lips pressed shut.
『Right turn shortly. You are near your destination.』
It was as the troubled air hung heavy.
The navigation announced that the destination was close.
Kang Hyeong-seok leaned his head forward and scanned ahead with a look that asked whether this was really the place.
"Isn't this an officetel?"
"It is. Why?"
Kang Hyeong-seok answered with a subtle expression.
"No, nothing."
It could be called a prejudice.
The feeling that tarot cards suited an officetel rather better.
'Not an old shrine house, then.'
Which told him everything without looking.
It meant this was not a shaman who held his ground the way Lee Geum-gyeong did.
Shamans with strong spirit power are not left alone by the powerful and the wealthy. So when they do set up a shrine house, it is often in a neighborhood with eye-watering prices.
If Lee Geum-gyeong had wanted money, she could have set up several palatial shrine houses somewhere like Cheongdam-dong.
RUMBLE, FLING.
Having parked in the officetel's underground lot, Kang Hyeong-seok waited for the elevator with Shin Jeong-a.
All the while she kept calling.
"He's not picking up. He must have a client."
"Let's go up anyway."
Kang Hyeong-seok got into the elevator with thought-heavy eyes.
The bag with the shaman's bells was tucked under his arm, and in his everyday clothes he gave the impression of a cram-school instructor.
So much so that a boy who looked like a high schooler, boarding on the first floor, kept glancing at him, wondering whether he was a new teacher.
DING.
But Kang Hyeong-seok got off not on the third floor, where the cram school was, but on the fourth, where the shrine house was.
With a long talisman and a flag posted on the door, it was a place anyone would take for a shrine house.
"You call him out, Manager."
"Me?"
Shin Jeong-a asked it back with uncomprehending eyes, and Kang Hyeong-seok calmly gave his reason.
"However I think about it, he was trying to make you desperate. So it is better if you are the one who calls him out."
"Ah. All right."
Shin Jeong-a nodded with a face that did not entirely understand.
When Kang Hyeong-seok positioned himself out of the peephole's line, she raised a curled fist.
KNOCK, KNOCK.
There was no answer, so she pressed the bell, and eventually went so far as to pound the door with her fist.
Well done, Manager Shin.
"Open the door! Dharma Master! Open this door! It's Shin Jeong-a!"
She could throw a fit properly, and without being asked.
BEEP! BEEP-BOOP.
At last the door opened, and a young man appeared in cotton clothes with only shaman's robes thrown over them.
"Do you know where you are, making a racket like this?"
He had assumed the practitioner was a woman, but it was a man.
Kang Hyeong-seok stepped straight into view of the bellowing male shaman.
The fact that he had been hiding.
The fact that his eyes were not kind.
And as the male shaman faltered at the hand reaching toward him,
GRAB!
Kang Hyeong-seok seized his shoulder and shoved him inside.
Shin Jeong-a followed them in and shut the door at once.
"Wh-what is this? Do you know where you are, how dare you!"
"You wrote the talisman, didn't you."
He cut away the front and the back and threw only the heart of it.
Even so, the man's shoulders flinched, so he had grasped the context.
And when the bastard twisted his mouth into a smile, what he was thinking became visible too.
"So you had a hard time of it with the ghost. I told you, didn't I? That if the talisman had no effect, we would have to do a rite."
It was then.
Kang Hyeong-seok's eyes caught two figures.
One was an elderly man in the inner room where the altar stood, at a loss for what to do, and the other was a child fleeing in a hurry.
The old man was a person.
The child was not.
"There is a client here before you. I will hear you out, so sit and wait."
The male shaman tried to remove the hand on his shoulder, but Kang Hyeong-seok only pressed harder. Having pinned him, he turned his head toward the flustered old man.
He could see him too.
The story of a man who had come seeking help even from a half-baked shaman like this.
And how he had been about to wring money he did not have out of himself, on the man's nonsense.
Watching the old man for a while, Kang Hyeong-seok felt his mouth open.
"Your daughter's surgery will go well."
The old man's eyes went wide, and the male shaman looked back and forth between Shin Jeong-a and Kang Hyeong-seok in confusion.
Before them, Kang Hyeong-seok went on evenly.
"Your heart must have suffered a great deal. You thought yourself a father who could not clothe her well or feed her well. But you never once said you were sorry; you only reproached her instead. You even said a daughter was of no use, since she marries out of the family."
Like a shaman reading spirits, Kang Hyeong-seok was looking into the old man's past and present.
So he gave off an air that overwhelmed people.
But it was not only the air that had the old man standing like a stone marker with his whole mind fixed on Kang Hyeong-seok.
"Which is why you believe your daughter's grave illness is your own fault too. No. You need not think that. The guilt you have held in your chest your whole life, the tears you shed alone, the self-reproach, all of it has reached heaven."
The male shaman now seemed unable even to think of pulling his arm free.
He was overwhelmed by the air of it, and the old man stood with his mouth slightly open, watching the man who was consoling him.
"Those tears stood in place of an offering. Your daughter's surgery will go well, and when she has her strength back, go to the National Cemetery. You must go with her."
The old man stared at Kang Hyeong-seok like a man who had received the counsel of his life.
His mouth worked and his breath came fast, and then his lips twisted and a sound broke out of him.
It did not take long for tears to well in his deeply lined eyes and fall.
"D-Dharma Master, are you?"
"No. I am not that."
"Th-then how......."
"I am only a man walking the road his guardian god guides him down."
The male shaman in his grip looked at him in great surprise, and Shin Jeong-a's expression turned subtle.
To her eyes, Kang Hyeong-seok right now looked like something well beyond any ordinary shaman.
"There are words that must be spoken to a person, not to a god. The words in your chest now, be sure to give them to your daughter. She will understand all of it and take it in."
The old man nodded with a face swallowing back tears.
Then he bowed deeply to Kang Hyeong-seok.
"Thank you. Thank you."
"Go on home."
"The, the fee......."
"Use it for the taxi."
The old man kept a face of deep shock to the last, and nodded hard.
His head had already been full of the thought that he should go at once to his daughter in the hospital.
When the old man left, still repeating his thanks, only Kang Hyeong-seok, Shin Jeong-a, and the male shaman remained in the shrine house.
It was right after that.
THUD!
Kang Hyeong-seok shoved the man against the wall.
But unlike before, the male shaman could neither bellow nor put on an arrogant look.
Kang Hyeong-seok had said himself that he was not a shamanic practitioner, and yet the man had recognized someone of a different order from himself.
"Wh-where have you come from?"
"Why? Your Child God did not tell you?"
The male shaman worked his mouth wide open and then hung his head.
"Your god fled long ago. No, it was never a proper god at all."
The child he had seen fleeing the moment he entered the shrine house.
The thing that had run from Kang Hyeong-seok's guardian god was a false spirit.
Take the divine descent wrongly and a false spirit can move in instead.
Could such a man be a proper male shaman?
No.
A half-baked shaman at best.
The man Kang Hyeong-seok had read was a half-baked shaman with a false spirit lodged in him.
"With a shallow knack you could see a little of the past. But that was as far as it went, was it not?"
Reading spirits means conveying a god's words, and it is not something a half-baked shaman can do.
The man flushed with shame.
But he could not get a word out, and was too busy avoiding Kang Hyeong-seok's eyes.
"Say it with your own mouth. Why you wrote that talisman."
Kang Hyeong-seok let him go, all but throwing him.
But the man could not open his mouth and avoided Shin Jeong-a's eyes.
"I said speak!"
When Kang Hyeong-seok finally lost patience and shouted, the man clenched his back teeth and made a groaning sound.
GRAB!
This time Kang Hyeong-seok took a full grip on his collar and dropped his voice low.
"Shall I see to it you can never work as a male shaman again?"
Only then did the man's eyes go wide, and he lowered his trembling face.
There was no evidence in what Kang Hyeong-seok said, but it seemed entirely possible coming from him.
After all, the false spirit that had let him play at being a shaman, faintly, had fled the moment it saw the man.
Squeezing his eyes shut, shaking all over, the male shaman met Shin Jeong-a's eyes.
"I-I'm sorry."
It was not the speech of a man playing at being a practitioner but of an ordinary person.
He went on as though confessing something he could hardly bring himself to say.
"I don't know what you went through, but it wasn't a talisman for driving off ghosts. That was......."
Shin Jeong-a threw Kang Hyeong-seok a question with her eyes alone.
Can I press him?
Kang Hyeong-seok answered with a silent nod.
Do as you like.
With permission given, Shin Jeong-a folded her arms and made her eyes venomous.
"Say it straight. What kind of talisman was it?"
"One that opens a passage for ghosts to come through... a talisman. It calls ghosts in."
"...Why?"
Shin Jeong-a asked it back, holding her temper once, and the man ran his tongue over his drying lips before speaking.
"T-to do a rite......."
"A rite?"
"I-I wasn't going to charge a lot! I meant to take the talisman down during the rite. And I didn't even know whether the talisman would work! I really did it without knowing."
"You crazy bastard!"
At the brazen excuse Kang Hyeong-seok curled his fist.
It felt as though he would regret it for a long time if he did not put one into this man right now.
It was the moment he moved to strike the man across the face.
"Hey, you son of a bitch!"
Shin Jeong-a lunged in without warning.
CRAAACK!
Her shin caught the side of the man's thigh.
It happened with no time to stop her.
"Gyaaargh!"
The man clutched his thigh and started to sink, and Shin Jeong-a, launching herself, kicked him in the chest.
THUD!
His head struck the floor and he looked up at her with eyes full of fear and bewilderment.
Then Shin Jeong-a, her lid entirely blown off, struck his cheek again and again.
SMACK! SMAAACK! SMACK!
That sound does not come easily from hitting a person.
Even with combat training, only someone who had trained in earnest could manage it.
SMACK! SMACK! SMAAACK!
"Kh! Kuh! Guh!"
"F*ck! Because! Of! That!"
With each landing fist the man's expression flipped: bewilderment, disbelief, horror, in that order.
At this rate the man was going to become a departed spirit, so Kang Hyeong-seok hurriedly caught hold of her.
"Hold on! What are you doing right now?"
"Hey, let go! Let go of me! I'm killing that bastard today and going to hell for it! Me! Because of you, ghosts! Ghosts, f*ck, twice in a row......!"
Shin Jeong-a lifted one foot and set it down, the way one does playing a shuttlecock game.
If she had been wearing shoes, she had evidently meant to throw one at him.
"Hold it in! Please! Please."
"Yaagh!"
If Kang Hyeong-seok had been the one to hit the man, could he have gone this far?
That was the thought her fury brought on; she was fierce.
Kang Hyeong-seok quickly threw the man a signal with his eyes.
The signal was to get down and beg if he did not want a funeral held today.
THUMP!
Understanding it, the male shaman went straight to the floor.