Chapter 93
Ian sat on a nearby rock and caught his breath while watching the others deal with the residents.
‘This headache is awful…….’
No matter how good Ian was, he couldn’t use a large-scale spell and come out unscathed. Since it was magic cast with nothing but a simple incantation and no magic circle, the risk was fairly serious, too. It was only a headache, but it was a pretty big one.
A pain as if his head were being split in two. He was pretending to be fine, but in truth he wanted to collapse onto the floor and crawl around right away. If he lay down and closed his eyes like this, he’d probably pass out.
Even just partially summoning the environment of the Outer Sea was enough to do this much. On the cruise, there had at least been the ocean nearby, so pulling out the black seawater hadn’t been too unreasonable. But this was a mountain valley with not a trace of seawater anywhere. The recoil was naturally bound to be severe.
‘It’d probably be cheaper to bring out an Outer Sea creature instead.’
Ian let out a long breath and lowered his head. Through the spreading black seawater, he could faintly see the residents’ red blood and translucent brain matter. Moving only his eyes, he watched his companions deal with the residents.
Crack!
Lee Min-su split a resident’s head with an axe. Kim I-seo blasted their bodies apart with a shotgun, and Kim Yul caved in their faces with a hammer formed using water pressure. Kim Mi-ryeo sliced a resident’s body into pieces with a Japanese sword.
A brutal sight. But even after their heads were smashed and their bodies split apart, the residents still didn’t die and kept writhing. Apparently neither the head nor the heart had much to do with their immortality.
Then where exactly was the foundation of their immortality?
“…….”
Ian brushed back his wet bangs and slowly looked around.
Then a small hanok came into his view.
A hanok that was far too small for people to live in. It lacked many things to even qualify as a residential area. There was no yard, and most of the roof tiles had fallen off and lay shattered on the ground.
But the inside of the hanok, as far as he could see, looked perfectly fine.
No, it was more than fine. It seemed to be maintained far better than the other houses; not a speck of dust could be seen, and the wooden floor shone with a polish. Aside from the collapsed roof tiles, it was in good enough condition to belong in a hanok village.
That was what made it so out of place. It was a structure that simply didn’t fit this village.
“Ugh…….”
Ian pressed a hand to his throbbing head and slowly stood up. Then he began walking slowly toward the hanok.
“Are you going to investigate it?”
Kim I-seo immediately followed after him. Ian pushed her back and held out his hand to Lee Min-su. When he made a gesture like pinching a cigarette between his fingers, Lee Min-su took one from his inner pocket and handed it over.
“The hanok seems a bit suspicious. I’m planning to take a look by myself.”
“You’re not going with us?”
“We handled the residents, but their immortality hasn’t been cut off. There may still be something else in there, and I can’t bring along people with weak mental defenses.”
He tucked the cigarette between his lips and lit it.
As he inhaled the acrid smoke, the headache seemed to ease somewhat. Ian blew the smoke out into the air and brushed off the ash.
“So I’m going alone.”
“……I don’t even know what to say. Still, just in case, if anything happens, give us a signal. I’ll come running at once.”
Kim I-seo said as she spat out the blood pooling in her mouth.
Her tongue was half torn to shreds. The fact that she’d been able to bite it off like that meant her mental fortitude was considerable, but that alone wasn’t enough. She had gone berserk just from hearing the residents’ muttering; there was no way she’d stay fine if she saw what was inside the hanok directly.
It wasn’t confirmed yet that there was anything in the hanok, but there was no harm in making sure. If there was nothing there, that would be good in its own way.
Ian put the cigarette back in his mouth and staggered toward the hanok. The headache that felt as though his skull were splitting open, the fatigue, and his wet clothes pressing down on his body all made him want to collapse disgracefully, but he didn’t want to. He forced his heavy legs to move and stood before the entrance to the hanok.
The front door was slightly ajar. He opened it without hesitation and went inside.
At the same time, a pungent incense smell stabbed at his nose. A faint scent of blood seeped through the incense, and an even stronger, nauseating odor wafted about. If he had to compare it, it was similar to the smell of a feral dog that hadn’t been washed in days.
The source of the smell was a small Buddha statue placed in the corner of the hanok.
A Buddha statue drenched in red blood like paint. Its eyeballs looked as if they’d been forcibly inserted from a human body, the ends crushed as clear vitreous fluid streamed out. Judging by the different colors of the irises, they hadn’t even been taken from the same person.
‘So, it’s a Buddha.’
The moment Ian saw it, he recognized what the statue was.
The PPT he had seen before entering the mountain. The general sketch of the Buddha statue shown there was not all that different from the one before his eyes.
The only difference was that one of its arms was covered in shaggy fur like a monkey’s.
“…….”
It was so blatantly attached that it was awkward even to pretend not to notice. Ian let out a long sigh, crouched down in front of the statue, and blew out a stream of cigarette smoke.
“Does it have self-awareness?”
He was asking both the monkey’s hand and the Buddha statue.
No answer came back. Still, he could clearly see sweat beading on the monkey’s hand. That meant it had enough intelligence to feel tension or fear.
And the Buddha statue?
[…… …… ……!]
It was muttering something or other, but there wasn’t a single intelligible word.
Probably it was spouting Shakyamuni’s famous sayings, just like the residents.
According to the Bureau agent who had gone insane the moment he saw the Buddha statue, its mental assault was probably far stronger than the residents’.
The agent must have encountered the residents too, so the fact that he still killed himself here after getting through all that was proof of just how powerful the Buddha was, and of how excellent the agent’s mental fortitude had been.
Ian prayed for his soul in silence and tapped the statue’s smooth head with his pistol.
An attack that worked on a Bureau agent wouldn’t work on Ian. Unless the thing used physical force, mysteries that only dug into the mind were his worst possible matchup.
Well, that suited Ian just fine. It seemed like he wouldn’t have to worry about mental attacks or hypnosis in the future. If need be, maybe he could even pretend to be affected by them and use that to strike back.
He hadn’t met many espers yet, but there were definitely some among them who manipulated the mind. If they were allies, it didn’t matter; if they were enemies, there was no need to show them mercy. The best course would be to kill them when the time came.
He hadn’t killed anyone yet, but if he needed to, he wouldn’t hesitate. He had already made up his mind long ago.
“Phew…….”
Ian snuffed out the nearly finished cigarette by pressing it against the Buddha statue’s brows, then casually tossed it onto the floor. Whether it caught fire or not didn’t concern him much.
Ziiip.
He unfastened the bag he was carrying and took out a long kitchen knife.
A knife for killing primates.
Monkey hands were primate hands, after all, so he figured this might kill it with a single blow. Even if it didn’t, it would at least inflict some pain, so there wasn’t much of a problem.
‘Looking at how the monkey’s hand is clinging to the Buddha statue, it seems the Buddha appeared along with the wish being granted.’
It was a reasonable suspicion. Ian lightly scraped the Buddha’s surface with the edge of the kitchen knife and let out a low hum.
In fiction featuring monkey hands, reality alteration often appears just as frequently. For example, a college student wishes for romance, and everyone at the school suddenly changes gender. Or they ask to become popular, only to end up popular with the same sex.
This case was probably similar.
A little girl’s wish that happiness would continue every day. The monkey’s hand granted that wish through an aberration with the ridiculous name of the Buddha of Laughter.
And so a grotesque village was completed—one where they lived forever as immortals, dismantled visitors to make masks out of them, put those masks on, and obtained laughter and happiness.
Ian didn’t know what this place had originally looked like.
Perhaps it really had been a cult, or maybe a small, closed-off hillside slum. Or perhaps they had originally lived somewhere else and been moved here by the wish.
Whatever it was, the appearance of the aberration had reduced it to nothing more than a MacGuffin. There was nothing he could do but speculate, so he didn’t pay it much mind. Honestly, it didn’t really matter.
What mattered was dealing with the mystery. Ian first placed a hand on the Buddha’s head and switched grimoires. The black grimoire was instantly transformed into the Hand of Re-creation.
It was a grimoire he shouldn’t use when he was with Bureau agents, but there was no one watching now, so it didn’t matter. Ian opened the grimoire without hesitation and cast the spell.
“Be born anew.”
KRRRRZZZT!
The Buddha statue compressed into a small, flattened disc. He rolled it back into a stick-like shape and put it into his bag.
With that, the Buddha statue was dealt with. All that remained now was the monkey hand. Ian closed the grimoire, gripped the kitchen knife in a reverse hold, and aimed the tip at the furry hand.
“……Huh?”
Then an odd pattern entered his field of vision.
A small mark was engraved on the palm of the monkey hand. A black geometric pattern that wouldn’t have looked out of place as a tattoo was faintly glowing. Ian instinctively recognized what it was.
“A magic circle?”
The moment he said it, a long needle shot out from the pattern, aiming for Ian’s brow. Ian immediately twisted his head to evade the attack and drove the kitchen knife into the pattern.
Schtk!
With the sensation of flesh being pierced, the monkey hand went into convulsions and then went limp. The needle embedded in the ceiling trembled violently before soon dying down.
“…….”
Ian stared at the blood-soaked pattern with a cold expression.
*
“Found you.”
Eddie, who had been quietly keeping his eyes closed, slowly opened his eyelids and muttered.
It was a pity that the ambush hadn’t worked, but he’d memorized the face, so it wasn’t a big problem.
“So it was that young man who asked for directions back then.”
Not quite an acquaintance, but not a complete stranger either. Back then he had simply backed off, but now there was no need for that. If anything, he ought to go find him and thank him.
“…….”
It was hard to see him as the owner of the foreign god’s grimoire. He wasn’t certain yet.
But he possessed a grimoire. And he had calmly killed a fairly powerful mystery, even slaughtering the monkey hand he himself had created in a single stroke. There were plenty of reasonable circumstances pointing that way.
‘Even if it isn’t the foreign god’s grimoire, that doesn’t matter. He’s definitely quite skilled, so killing him and taking it will still be useful.’
Now that he had the information, there was no need to linger in this country. This was the best time—right now, when he was likely worn out from repeated use of magic.
Eddie immediately stood up and drew Ian’s face on a sheet of paper.
He held the perfectly drawn face up to a mirror and recited an incantation.
“Find him. Your grudge is here.”
Kiiiiiing.
The magic circle engraved inside the mirror began to glow as the spell activated. Eddie held the mirror up to a map of the Korean Peninsula and pinpointed Ian’s location.
‘Gyeongsang-do. Though it won’t be a residential area. We ran into him near the hotel, so he must have a home in Gyeonggi-do.’
Having gained certainty, he fixed the mirror in place on the map and began selecting the mysteries he would use for battle in advance.
If his location didn’t change for three hours, he would go there and kill him. If it did change, he’d wait until it was fixed and then ambush him. If he’d had even a drop of blood or a strand of hair, he might have tried attacking from afar, but unfortunately, he had nothing like that.
It didn’t matter. The usual time for a mage to recover from magical overload was about a week. He only had to handle it within that window.
“At last, I’ll get my hands on a grimoire too.”
Eddie smiled faintly and brought the cigarette in his hand to his lips.
The acrid smoke traveled down his airways and back out through his mouth.
The beautiful gray mist felt as if it were blessing him.