Chapter 26
Jinseong used space contraction repeatedly to move to Seoul. Then he found a suitable three-way intersection near an elementary school, threw the Jewung he had made, and chanted an incantation.
"As Cheoyong who caught the god of disease travels a thousand li, misfortune disappears and good fortune comes."
He hid in a back alley as soon as he chanted the spell, waiting for the Jewung to break.
"Huh?"
"Hey! This is weird!"
"Don't touch it! Isn't it some cursed doll?"
"No~ it's not~ Your head is the cursed one~"
"No, it's not~ You'll be cursed if you touch it~"
It seemed to be the time when school ended, as children were pouring out. Perhaps due to the Jewung's appearance, it quickly attracted the attention of curious elementary school students, creating a curtain of people. The children noisily shared their opinions, saying it was a cursed doll or just some sorcerous item someone had dropped.
"Children, what are you doing... Oh my?"
"Oh, it's been a while since I've seen this."
Then two people came out of the school as if they’d heard the commotion: a teacher who looked to be in her mid-30s and the school janitor. The teacher was startled upon seeing the doll and tried to shoo the children away, but the janitor instead walked briskly towards the Jewung like he was pleased to see it, examining it closely.
"Let's see, it's dressed... There's a coin too. Wow, there are still people who do this these days."
"Mister! What are you doing, it's dangerous!"
"Oh, Ms. Kim, it's not like that. This is a Jewung, you see."
The janitor's story, which started with "When I was young~", went on for quite a while.
He talked about how he often saw these things when he was young, how they would break the Jewung and take out the coin to buy and share ice cream, and still wanting more how they would take a poker from home and trade it to the taffy seller for taffy, only to get beaten for it.
The teacher, looking done with the endless storytelling like a certain baseball player (Chan Ho Park, aka Too Much Talker), forcibly cut him off.
"So you're saying it's safe?"
"Oh, of course. That's all done to receive blessings. They put it at a three-way intersection like that, and when kids break it, blessings come, blessings. And the kids who break it share the coin among themselves."
"Haa..."
The teacher sighed, looking at the children who seemed to be itching to get at the Jewung.
"Kids, you heard that? It's not dangerous, so feel free to play with it and break it, and take the coin stuck in it as you like."
"Yes!"
Then the children dragged the Jewung to the playground and played rough with it, kicking it hard or throwing it around. Because of this, the Jewung's bindings quickly came undone and burst open in places, and soon it could no longer maintain its form.
"I'll take this 500 won coin!"
"I was going to take it first! Then I'll take the 100 won!"
"Ah... This looks like a toy coin..."
Finally, when the children who had shared the three embedded coins dispersed, Jinseong came out of the back alley.
"Fortune lingers on the child who picked up the silver coin last. This is truly a good thing."
The silver coin itself was worth about 70,000 won. Moreover, it was a silver coin that had gained some power of breaking evil while purifying souls in the vertical cave. If taken to someone with an eye for such things, it could probably fetch at least a two-digit, or even a three-digit amount.
Jinseong walked to the broken Jewung and took out the tape recorder he had removed earlier, placing it on the remains of the straw.
"What was originally one can resonate across space and time. Here, where something beat instead of a heart and spoke instead of a tongue, the soul of the Jewung must surely return."
Due to the principle of infection sorcery, what remained in the broken Jewung, mere 'leftovers' or 'dregs', naturally flowed into the tape recorder like wind following a path. Although this power was extremely weak and had little significance...
"It's efficient to squeeze out until the very end."
Jinseong used his hand until the end to maximize the effect of the sorcery. He placed the tape recorder on the remains of the Jewung and played it.
"---Praised by people and full of blessings, wearing seven treasures on the shoulders, wearing good fortune on the shoulders, on the sleeves of heaven----"
He listened to the Song of Cheoyong flowing from the tape recorder and used space contraction again.
Creak.
The destination: the mansion.
* * *
"ॐ स्वभाव सुद्भाः सर्व धर्माः स्वभाव सुद्धोऽहम्."
As soon as Jinseong arrived at the mansion, he changed his clothes in his room and took a bath. This was both an action to remove impurities like a purification ritual and to erase the smell on his body.
"What smells is impure. Therefore, impure things hold smell."
This was because his body had absorbed a foul odor due to the evil spirits that had swarmed in the vertical cave. Originally, strong evil spirits tended to have a foul odor. In the deep vertical cave where light didn't properly reach, evil spirits had been harboring grudges for a long time while exposed to yin energy and moisture, and because of this, they held a unique corpse smell along with the smell of completely rotten blood.
Should he say it was fortunate that it smelled of blood? If there had been stagnant water at the bottom of the vertical cave, there would surely have been water ghosts, and if there were water ghosts, the unique fishy smell and the smell of decaying gas would have stung the nose.
And as thoughts turned to smells, he remembered the martial artist who would be swimming on the bare ground at the bottom of the vertical cave.
"The smell of ghosts can still be smelled even as time passes. How painful it must be for his nose."
But what could be done?
He had no use.
"It would have been good if he had even a little use."
He hadn’t even hoped for a precious hostage.
It would have been enough if he had at least enough value to create a negotiation table.
Ruffians are everywhere.
The martial artist was a person who had come to Korea as if expelled, judged to be of no use even in Japan. He was someone who had constantly caused trouble in Satsuma, hanging around with ruffians, harassing local residents, or causing commotion trying to seduce pretty women.
Then he got into trouble trying to seduce the niece of a major sponsor of the school of martial arts he belonged to, the Yatachi Garo-ryu. Thinking she was just a pretty outsider, he approached her thoughtlessly and too persistently, even getting reported. Because of this incident, he completely fell out of favor with the school. After falling out of favor, he began to receive subtle harassment, and unable to endure it, he was dispatched to a Japanese loan company in Korea.
If he couldn't recognize a person of power, he should have at least recognized the divine power of that niece. Truly an ignorant and weak fellow.
There was no chance of going back and regaining his position. The big shot whose mood he had disturbed was a religious figure in Japanese Shinto, and the woman he had tried to seduce was a shrine maiden serving the gods at a shrine. Abandoned by his school, frowned upon by the Shinto religious circle, and with rumors spreading that he had even tried to mess with a shrine maiden after causing all sorts of trouble, he was frowned upon by ordinary people as well.
Why couldn't he have just gone to live in another region?
Japanese people were exclusive.
It was clear that a martial artist who moved to another region alone at a young age wouldn't be viewed favorably, and if even a little of what he had done in the Satsuma region spread, he could become a target of murahachi-bu (ostracism practiced by local communities).
So the martial artist came out on dispatch to the loan company with the intention of living in Korea, and luckily, he got along with the people there. The martial artist considered them friends and opened his heart, trying to live in Korea as his second hometown, but.
"Om."
In the end, he paid the price for the crimes he had committed.
If he had had even minimal public trust in his original place…
If he had had even a bit, even the slightest bit of value as a hostage…
If he had trained hard and could spit out information about the 'martial arts performed with Mana' that Jinseong wanted...
If.
If...
"There were numerous 'ifs', but not a single one applied, so he deserved to die."
That was all there was to the story.
Still, he was able to extract enough useful information, and he also served as a helper for the Jewung sorcery, so he should be grateful that he wasn't completely useless.
"Having performed fortune-bringing sorcery with the Jewung, Lee Arin will surely be going to Japan."
Jinseong slowly organized in his head what he needed to do when he went to Japan, based on the information he had heard from the martial artist.
* * *
Time passed, and the day for the lottery results came.
"Huh? It's Russia?"
Lee Arin said brightly.
"Then I, I'll... go to Russia too..."
And Lee Serin decided her destination after her.
Lee Serin stood next to Lee Arin with a much lighter expression, as if something that had been bothering her had been resolved, and behind them, the wavering form of Gremory was going back and forth between the two. And Jinseong, who had been quietly watching this scene, raised one question.
Why?
It wasn't a question about why the Jewung spell hadn't worked properly or why she had been drawn for Russia instead of Japan.
Fortune-bringing sorcery just brought good fortune, it wasn’t sorcery that necessarily made what you wanted come true. It just opened up fortune and made happy events occur frequently, so he could understand not being drawn for Japan.
However, his question was about something more fundamental.
If it's like this now, it must have been like this before the regression!
His question penetrated the past and future.
The Sorcery Trace originating from the Jewung. And the power of ups and downs and the flow of fortune derived from it.
All of these were flowing as if excluding the east, more precisely, the East Sea!
Considering that he hadn't noticed it before his regression, it probably wasn't sorcery. If it had been sorcery, no matter how grand it was, no matter how much of a level difference there was, he would have perceived at least a speck of it.
No matter how low Jinseong's level at that time was, it didn't make sense that he didn't know at all.
Then it must have been manipulated by means other than sorcery.
It would have been ignorant not to know, but now that I know, it's fine.