Chapter 154: Early Coming of Age Ceremony (6)

Lee Yang-hoon didn't understand what he had just heard from Jinseong.

"Coming-of-age ceremony?"

"Yes."

He pondered for a moment, looking directly at Jinseong's incredibly pale face.

Was Park Jinseong truly unaware of what a coming-of-age ceremony was?

Or did he know well and still say such a thing?

Normally, one would think it was the latter, but given what Lee Yang-hoon had seen of Park Jinseong so far, the former was entirely possible. He had often seen him living with a twisted common sense, showing no interest in anything other than sorcery.

He slowly opened his mouth.

"The coming-of-age ceremony is held next year."

"Yes."

However, Lee Yang-hoon's assumption that Park Jinseong might lack common sense was wrong.

Jinseong responded to Lee Yang-hoon's words as if it were obvious, looking at him with an expression that seemed to ask what the problem was.

"It wouldn't be bad to do it then either. I'm just saying it might be better to do it in advance rather than waiting until then."

"In advance... I see. It's for sorcery."

Lee Yang-hoon nodded as if he understood after hearing Jinseong's words.

He could now understand why Park Jinseong, who was only interested in sorcery, had brought up a seemingly normal word like coming-of-age ceremony.

"Right. What do you need? Funds? Connections?"

"Something similar."

Jinseong made a request to Lee Yang-hoon.

Something that might or might not require funds.

A request that might require the use of connections.

"I want to go north."

"What?"

Lee Yang-hoon put down the utensils he was holding upon hearing those words.

Then, blinking his eyes, he asked Jinseong again.

"What did you say?"

"I said I'm going north."

North.

Those two words strongly resonated in Lee Yang-hoon's ears.

"You're not talking about Gangwon-do... Are you planning to cross the DMZ?"

"That's right."

Lee Yang-hoon slightly frowned at Jinseong's answer.

Then he asked:

"Are you crazy?"

*                     *                     *

The northern region.

It was a place once occupied by a puppet group that had arbitrarily called itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and by the late 90s, it had become uninhabitable due to the depletion of the land's energy from excessive use of sorcery.

At first, North Korea was even doing better than South Korea.

When people in South Korea couldn't even eat grass porridge, North Koreans were eating rice, and when South Korea was barely rebuilding with U.S. support, North Korea was living abundantly with support from communist countries and the Soviet Union.

However, North Korea's prosperity didn't last long.

Before long, South Korea succeeded in surpassing North Korea.

And just as one side of a scale goes down when the other rises, North Korea began to move in the exact opposite direction of South Korea.

As Eastern Europe, with which they had close exchanges, and the Soviet Union, their backing, began to collapse, they could no longer receive proper support. They wastefully spent money on showing off to maintain their pride, and their attempts at self-sufficiency repeatedly failed.

There were several opportunities to set the country right, but North Korea's leadership, to maintain their wealth and power, not only ignored these requests but also repeatedly found fault with and executed or sent to camps those who made them.

Thus, North Korea's leadership squandered their few opportunities.

Even then, they felt no sense of crisis, and instead continued their baseless optimism, saying they were just momentarily stagnating and would soon take off.

And finally, fate arrived.

A great famine struck.

This terrible disaster, recorded as the 'Arduous March' in South Korea, hit North Korea in an instant.

Inadequate rationing, complex political situations, inability to receive support from other countries, land that could no longer be properly farmed due to energy depletion, devastated forests, inadequate transportation...

It was a man-made disaster created by the overlapping of numerous problems.

People outside Pyongyang began to die.

Dying of starvation.

Dying from eating anything they could find to avoid starving to death.

Killing to eat people.

Being caught and executed while trying to make a last struggle before dying.

People kept dying.

Of course, North Korea's leadership wasn't entirely stupid and tried to find solutions somehow.

But North Korea was too corrupt and incompetent to create solutions.

From the past, they had killed talented individuals who had foreign experience to spread the Juche ideology, killed or expelled sorcerers on the grounds that they deceived the people and made them fall into superstition, and prevented religion from taking root, claiming it was completely useless. Instead, they focused on demonic arts science and martial arts that could increase military power.

And those incredibly arrogant past actions became elements of disaster.

The famine that could have been somewhat patched up if there had been sorcerers became a great famine, and what should have ended with just a bit of hunger led to starvation deaths due to their incompetence.

The closed environment and deteriorating conditions were enough to pollute people's souls and spirits, and countless people died by the terribly cruel method of starvation.

As a result, evil spirits and demons began to run rampant throughout North Korea.

Numerous ghosts began to appear in North Korea.

Ghosts so distinct they could be seen even without spirit eyes, moving based solely on the resentment they held at the moment of death.

Evil demons settled in abandoned, ruined places and tore apart wandering people, while evil spirits bewitched people and made them eat inedible things, causing death.

Demons that exerted physical force to tear people apart and devour them, hungry ghosts.

Evil spirits that bewitched people and made them eat inedible things until their stomachs burst, begging ghosts.

These terrifyingly hellish beings roamed freely throughout North Korea, and North Korean residents had to face the fear of being caught and killed by ghosts in addition to the fear of starving to death. And at the appearance of these ghosts, the power holders in Pyongyang were so shocked that they sealed off Pyongyang, trying to ensure only their own survival.

But even in the face of fear for their lives and positions, did a strand of reason remain?

They tried to address the cause of the rampant evil spirits and demons.

Their solution was none other than a grand sorcery ritual.

A grand sorcery ritual was difficult to use and came at a great cost, but its effects were tremendous.

It could turn bad harvests into good ones, make rain fall in deserts and vegetation grow, and purify polluted rivers and lakes.

It was an ability akin to a miracle.

The power holders wanted to use the grand sorcery ritual to ward off the calamity that had befallen them and escape the threats of evil spirits, demons, and famine.

But here, a problem arose.

As a result of repeated oppression, execution, and exile, there were hardly any sorcerers left in North Korea.

They had executed sorcerers who could cast curses that might harm the power holders, sent sorcerers who were friendly with and respected by the residents to camps or exiled them abroad fearing they might become the center of rebellion, and captured sorcerers who had learned useful sorcery, extracting their knowledge through torture and threats before disposing of them.

So there were no sorcerers capable of performing the grand sorcery ritual.

But fortunately, sorcery itself was an ability with good accessibility.

The terrible cost was the only problem; if one had the right knowledge, executing it wasn't difficult.

Yes.

If only they had the right knowledge.

North Korea's leadership performed the grand sorcery ritual based on the sorcery they had stolen from sorcerers.

They slightly opened the tightly closed granaries to prepare the items needed for the ritual, selected loyal talents to acquire knowledge about the ritual, and carried out the grand sorcery ritual by grinding people without even considering ways to mitigate the cost.

As a result, people who participated in the grand sorcery ritual died.

Far from properly executing the grand sorcery ritual, even with just the slight cost that came down during the execution process, people died vomiting blood from every orifice in their bodies or melting alive into a puddle of blood, dying with screams while experiencing the most terrible pain a person could endure.

But the leadership continued to forcibly input 'loyal' people to complete the grand sorcery ritual.

They completed the grand sorcery ritual by grinding thousands, or close to tens of thousands of people.

It was a terrible act no different from human sacrifice.

But even after grinding so many people, the leadership packaged them with words like 'small sacrifice for the greater good', 'great people's heroes who willingly gave their bodies for the country', 'noble sacrifice for the people', and felt no guilt whatsoever.

Rather, they even felt relief that they could escape this disaster by sacrificing that many people.

Thus, they believed they could overcome this terrible disaster and unite again to soar.

That.

Was what they believed.

But improper methods always bring improper results.

The grand sorcery ritual was executed, but it was activated in a direction different from what they wanted.

Unlike their wish to turn bad harvests into good ones and restore the devastated forests, the grand sorcery ritual manifested in a form that changed North Korea's climate.

The sky became cloudless.

The rain that had at least kept the residents from dying of thirst stopped.

The devastated topsoil completely dried up and cracked, and the water in rivers and lakes began to dry up enough to see the bottom.

The trees with peeled bark rotted, the weeds withered and twisted yellow, and the new sprouts that should have sprouted fell over yellow as soon as they emerged.

Drought.

A calamity so severe that it deserved the prefix 'great' was added.

The power holders were shocked by this absurd result and tried to find out why it had turned out this way.

And soon they could understand the reason.

It was because of their karma.

The sorcerers who had to spit out knowledge through inhumane methods did not tell the 'right way'.

They told the truth about minor sorcery but twisted the larger-scale ones, distorted or hid information about symbols, and kept their mouths shut about the core knowledge and golden information they had devoted their lives to discovering.

Threats and torture?

These were people who had lived with the cost of sorcery all their lives.

If they were weak-willed enough to break their will under threats or torture, they wouldn't have become sorcerers in the first place.

What pain could destroy the minds of those for whom having their skin peeled off and internal organs torn out was a daily occurrence?

What threat could effectively work on those who had lived lives bordering on madness, focusing on a single goal?

The sorcerers captured by the party exploited the arrogance of those who were confident they could extract knowledge from them. They spat out knowledge that looked appetizing as requested, but coated it with poison that would surely kill or cause harm if consumed.

And as time passed, the power holders unknowingly carried it out as is.

The drought was the sorcerers' revenge and the price for the evil deeds committed by the power holders.

And only at this point did North Korea truly come to its senses.

They realized that if they left this situation alone, the country might collapse.

So they begged China and received a proper grand sorcery ritual, and used all their remaining strength to perform a ritual for a good harvest.

And that was what cut off North Korea's lifeline.

The grand sorcery ritual given by China was properly executed.

The power of sorcery affecting the entire North Korea made sprouts grow even in wastelands, and dying plants began to regenerate, absorbing nutrients to the fullest. Yellow leaves turned green again.

Like a final burst of light before death.

Like a flame emitting a brilliant light before disappearing.

The grand sorcery ritual squeezed out the land's energy to make plants grow, but in return, it turned the entire North Korea into a wasteland.

It turned it into a desert-like place where not even a speck of land energy could be found, where farming was completely impossible.

Perhaps if they had only performed the grand sorcery ritual received from China…

Then maybe there might have been a chance.

They could have overcome the momentary crisis by consuming most of the land's energy, could have revived with support from other countries, and could have made the land fertile again by putting in all sorts of efforts based on the little remaining land energy as a root.

But unfortunately, they performed the distorted grand sorcery ritual filled with the resentment of the sorcerers, and that grand sorcery ritual made the entire land of North Korea dry and unsuitable for farming. As a result, the land energy that should have been 'mostly' consumed ended up being 'completely' consumed, and even that was insufficient, hindering them from properly seeing the effects of the grand sorcery ritual.

Karma.

It was all karma.

That was how North Korea collapsed.

In a state of complete isolation, North Korea couldn't properly stand up and just breathed its last.

North Korean residents defected to China and South Korea, the power holders either applied for asylum in China or were killed by evil spirits and demons that invaded Pyongyang. And the Kim family at the top of the leadership was shot by assassins from an unknown source while trying to seek asylum in China, losing their lives.

Thus, the place called North Korea became a place temporarily occupied by a puppet group and officially became the territory of South Korea. South Korea changed its national name to the United Republic of Korea, embraced the people who came down from North Korea, and continued to develop.

But while they could somewhat salvage the people, they couldn't salvage the land.

North Korea's land became a place where not even a weed would grow no matter how much water was sprinkled or fertilizer was poured, and when darkness fell, it became a hell where evil spirits and demons would pop out from everywhere and kill people.

South Korea had no choice but to leave North Korea's land idle, and began to create a defense line based on the past 38th parallel to block evil spirits and demons.

Thus, the United Republic of Korea embraced North Korea, but became a peculiar country where the area where people could actually live was south of the 38th parallel.

*                     *                     *

"What are you trying to do in that ghost land?"

Lee Yang-hoon asked Jinseong, seemingly angry. But beneath his words, there was a clear emotion of concern for Jinseong.

Jinseong smiled brightly at Lee Yang-hoon's question.

"The land will be polluted during the coming-of-age ceremony process, so wouldn't it be right to do it on land that's useless anyway?"