Chapter 87
What should be done?
How could one survive?
The fortune-teller pondered while watching the tooth fairies dancing in circles.
He pondered and pondered again, his eyeballs rolling and a headache overwhelming him as he thought.
But no answer came.
No possibility of survival was in sight, and only Crom Cruach's pattern, illuminated by the torch, smiled wickedly as if to say there was no way but to be offered to it. The cloth fluttered as if dancing, and as it moved here and there, it became fins, becoming Crom Cruach's gestures.
Crom Cruach's pattern moved as if alive, dancing to the intense rhythm, and twisted its body here and there as if embodying the madness of primitive religion, joyfully changing its body in the torch.
Shadows fell, shadows disappeared.
That appearance looked as if it was turning its body sideways and spinning around.
It made one think of a dancer performing ballet on stage.
The tooth fairies danced as if they were assistants highlighting the main performer.
They bent their waists back fully into an 'L' shape, and moved with worshipping gestures such as raising their pincers up and down. They bounced around, raising their suckers upwards, and at times showed bizarre movements by crawling with their multiple sprouted feet and bouncing their bodies.
If humans danced intoxicated with madness, wouldn't it look like that?
While the fortune-teller was pondering, the mysterious atmosphere created by the second movement of Part 2 of The Rite of Spring, The Sacrifice (Le Sacrifice), Mystic Circles of the Young Girls (Cercles Mystérieux des Adolescentes), was coming to an end. The melody of flutes and clarinets was gradually ending, and the percussion and wind instruments changed to sounds that seemed to howl with madness.
The third movement, Glorification of the Chosen One (Glorification de l'Élue), had begun.
The madness unique to primitive religions, the unified collective consciousness of pagans, and deep, dark emotions that seemed to howl with the soul rather than the throat flowed out unfiltered. And as if in sympathy with those emotions, the dance of the tooth fairies became even more bizarre, and they continued actions that now looked more like convulsions rather than dance.
"Ugh!"
Amidst the terrible dissonance, the fortune-teller felt his heart beating rapidly.
His heart, beating abnormally fast, literally throbbed madly as if it would burst at any moment, and it was so severe that the vibration could be felt even in his ears.
Would you believe it if it was said that the vibration caused nausea and made it impossible to stand properly?
Unlike other religious vibrations that calmly stimulated people's souls and minds, this vibration that affected people's bodies and used that as a basis to drive the mind mad was reminiscent of the berserkr sorcery that turned people into blood-crazed killers.
But the fortune-teller couldn't even collapse.
When he tried to fall forward due to nausea, his body suddenly fell backward as if an invisible hand was pulling him, and when his knees gave out and he tried to fall, he was suddenly stood up as if a puppet was being set up with strings. When he staggered, someone seemed to catch him as if helping, and when he tried to vomit, his mouth closed and his head tilted back.
That appearance looked like he was dancing a madness-filled dance like the tooth fairies.
The fortune-teller finally accepted his fate.
That he had already become the center of this terrible ritual.
The fact that no matter what he did, he couldn't avoid death.
He could only accept the fact that there was no future but to die without becoming a hero.
Why?
Why did it turn out like this?
The fortune-teller didn't want much.
He just wanted to become a hero.
When he realized he was different from others as a child.
Sexual identity, another personality that occasionally popped out. And the visions he saw before his eyes.
He considered all of that as trials.
He just thought of them as events to complete himself as a hero.
So he. She.
Had just been running non-stop, thinking of everything he experienced as trials to become a hero.
The stories of Gael warriors he saw in fairy tale books as a child.
The stories of those who were heroes and gods.
I.
Wanted to become a hero.
So he tried to accumulate good karma.
If offering one person to benefit many wasn't good karma, what was?
Offering people to make the earth fertile.
Offering people to receive the sun's grace.
Offering people to give wings to talent.
In that process, he just gained good karma and took one step closer to the path of a hero.
Yes.
All he did was approach it.
The fortune-teller was now going to die without becoming a hero.
"Ah."
He could see dawn breaking in the distance.
A faint light tore through the burning darkness and surged up.
Like sparks flying, burning leaves, burning trees, and eventually burning the whole mountain to illuminate the world.
Crom Cruach's sun was finally rising to collect its sacrifice.
The payment for making crops grow and fattening everyone with the heat coming from its body.
Eyes that wanted to devour the fortune-teller as a sacrifice were rising.
The round eyeball that slowly rose using the darkness of the night sky as its eyelid brilliantly illuminated everywhere its light touched, and the fortune-teller who faced that light realized that the time had come.
How terrible it was to accept one's own death.
But there was a bit of peace at the inevitable end, giving resignation instead of anger.
Boom!
The sound of a huge timpani rang out.
And with it, the sunlight came down on him, and that light soon became heat and filled the fortune-teller's body. The heat that made his blood boil and his eyeballs crack circulated fiercely through the fortune-teller's body and began to kill him, and the fortune-teller began to dance, bouncing around like a stepmother wearing red-hot iron shoes.
Despite the terrible situation where his body was being cooked alive and his nerves were going mad, he couldn't feel any pain, and only jumped madly in place with the single thought of having to get the heat out of his body. He jumped on one foot, bounced on both feet, stretched his arms upward as if begging the sun to take away the heat. He moved and moved again with such mad gestures as if trying to spit out the heat inside his body by raising his head up and lowering it down.
And as if responding to this, the tooth fairies spun madly around him again and again.
Thud.
When the fortune-teller finally collapsed on the ground, steaming profusely, the tooth fairies all stretched their arms like bamboo and lifted the corpse up. They raised it to the sky as if giving a victory toss, and held it out respectfully as if offering something precious.
And the moment they held out the corpse above, the piece ended.
The glory of spring.
The grace of the sun.
The fertilizer of abundance.
The mystery of primitive religion.
The fortune-teller became a living sacrifice embodying all of these.
With the death of the living sacrifice and the end of the piece, the madness-filled ritual ended, and Crom Cruach's pattern burned in the sunlight and turned into a handful of ashes. The fortune-teller's corpse also burned and disappeared along with Crom Cruach's pattern as if burning firewood, and the remaining ashes flew high into the sky and disappeared like dandelion seeds.
That sight even created the illusion that there might really be an evil being called Crom Cruach, and that evil being was directly reaching out its hand to collect the fortune-teller's soul. Especially when the ashes disappeared, the sight of them changing into black smoke and flying away together, that eerie sight looked even more like a grim reaper taking the fortune-teller's soul to Crom Cruach.
"Om mani padme hum (ॐ मणि पद्मे हूँ)."
Jinseong chanted the mantra as if praying for the deceased fortune-teller's soul.
Then he went to the altar and looked at Ella suffering in pain that was overwhelming her entire body.
"Like a dying flame."
The condition of the polluted Ella was serious.
Whether too much blood had been sucked out or not, her already pale skin had changed to a color reminiscent of a corpse, and cold sweat had soaked the entire altar, forming a puddle of sweat. Moreover, her body was continuously having small convulsions, looking like she could go into shock at any moment.
Jinseong placed his hand on Ella's chest and felt her heartbeat.
The heart was beating, but whether because too much blood had been sucked out or for some other reason, it was moving with difficulty. Literally squeezing out the body's energy to barely move, the heart was straining heavily and seemed like it could go into heart failure at any time.
Jinseong kept his hand in place and raised his head to look at the sky.
The sun, which had not yet completely burned away the darkness, was straining to dye the world with light, and in this situation where light and darkness were mixed, the searchlight made of top-grade rubies was exerting its presence.
As if to say that the red light emitted by the sun and the red light emitted by itself were different, with all its might.
"Oh sun! Young sun!"
Jinseong took out an obsidian dagger from his waist.
Stab!
And he plunged it straight into Ella's chest.