Honbul: Flame of the Soul

After Chairman Jang and his entourage left, laughter echoed through the room that had finally fallen quiet again.

“Hahaha...”

While Paehyeon stepped out to see the guests off, the Leader sprawled facedown across the table, laughing openly to himself. By the time Paehyeon returned, the man was still shaking with amusement. Seeing that, Paehyeon smiled faintly, as though he understood perfectly.

“Did you enjoy yourself that much?”

Paehyeon knew the Leader’s personality well. There was something fundamentally twisted about him. He liked to toy with people, and whenever a client rubbed him the wrong way, that streak only became worse. He would deliberately needle them, pick apart their pride, and thoroughly grind down their dignity. Watching people who had likely never bowed their heads once in their lives squirm in discomfort seemed to entertain him endlessly.

“Did you see his face earlier?”

The Leader covered his mouth with one large hand, shoulders trembling with laughter. He had laughed so hard his cheeks hurt. Chairman Jang had never been good at hiding his emotions. The memory of his face cycling between red and blue, looking moments away from storming out, kept making the Leader burst into laughter all over again.

“He’s proud as hell, but you pushed him pretty far today.”

Paehyeon spoke carefully, indirectly expressing concern that the Leader might be stirring up unnecessary trouble.

“I’m worried he might refuse payment on the scheduled date. He could cancel the request out of spite.”

But the Leader shook his head without hesitation.

“No. He won’t.”

From the very beginning, Chairman Jang had chosen a shaman over the Office of Narye. At this point, it was already too late for him to turn back. His only remaining option would be another shaman—but unless they were some fraud hosting stray ghosts to imitate possession rites, no true shaman walking the path of a disciple, like Master Yeohye, would ever accept a request like this.

“In the end, the desperate side is always the one that loses.”

Even if Chairman Jang took offense, withdrawing the request would only hurt him.

Yoon Taehee had organized the spirits into a group called Byeoksadan six years ago and begun secretly taking on cases beyond the eyes of the Office of Narye.

He had realized early on that there were people neither the Office nor shamans would save. For years now, Byeoksadan had quietly handled the requests of those abandoned people instead.

“Oh. I should feed Dduddu.”

The Leader abruptly rose from his chair and crossed to the window. He pushed open the lattice frame covered with paper.

The window rattled loudly as it slid open, letting cool night air sweep into the room.

Leaning halfway outside, he searched the darkness for something before giving a sharp whistle. A fuzzy little shape came scrambling out from somewhere and climbed straight onto his shoulder.

The Leader turned his head toward it. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

“Dduddu.”

Dduddu was a squirrel.

With the squirrel perched on his shoulder, the Leader returned to the table and picked up a black plastic bag set nearby. He overturned it, scattering hazelnuts across the tabletop. Selecting the plumpest one, he held it out toward the squirrel.

“Here. Yum-yum.”

Dduddu glanced at the hazelnut, then abruptly began rubbing its face in exaggerated protest. The Leader tried offering it again, but the squirrel snatched the nut and flung it away.

“...”

He stared at it in disbelief. As the hazelnut rolled across the floor, he slowly turned to Paehyeon.

At that exact moment, Dduddu bit down hard on his finger.

“Ow—”

The Leader jerked his hand back with a grimace.

“Why are you mad?” he asked in genuine confusion.

Paehyeon narrowed his eyes at the squirrel.

“It’s sulking because you disappeared for nearly a month and left it waiting.”

Dduddu was a squirrel the Leader had brought back himself. About a year ago, he had found it injured in the mountains, likely bitten by a snake, and carried it back to the pavilion to nurse it. After several days of care, it recovered surprisingly quickly. He had assumed it would leave once it got better, but instead the squirrel grew attached to the pavilion and continued returning even after wandering the mountains.

Dduddu adored the Leader.

Whenever it got upset with him, though, it bit his hand.

“It’s gotten awfully spoiled.”

Paehyeon badly wanted to sweep the insolent little furball out with a broom, but because the Leader doted on it so much, he held his tongue and waited for an opportunity instead. The Leader was ruthlessly cold toward humans, yet strangely gentle with things that were not human.

“Are you sulking?”

Even after getting bitten, the Leader showed no sign of irritation. He merely stroked the squirrel’s tiny head as if trying to soothe it.

“...”

Paehyeon was a ghost, yet moments like this still struck him as strange.

The Leader was human, but he never truly seemed human.

He cared more deeply for things that were not human, and at times he felt more like a ghost than Paehyeon himself did.

Humans, bound to short lives, were naturally impatient. They hesitated, wavered, and failed. To ghosts, humans were fragile creatures.

But the Leader—his young master—was different.

That was the conclusion Paehyeon had reached after watching him for the past ten years.

***

For Yoon Taehee, the last ten years had been a period of waiting.

A time of neither flying nor singing.

Like a bird lying still until the proper moment arrived, Yoon Taehee endured an age of absolute stillness.

Sometimes Paehyeon wondered whether his young master could see the future with terrifying clarity. Yoon Taehee always knew exactly what he needed to do and exactly what he was capable of doing. Once he made a decision, he carried it through with chilling precision.

It began the moment he entered the Office of Narye and declared he would rise to its center.

And he did.

Without the slightest hesitation, Yoon Taehee threw himself into the front lines and clawed his way upward. Just two years after entering the Office, he became Chief Yoon and stepped directly into the heart of the enemy stronghold.

The very next day after his promotion, Yoon Taehee summoned the spirits together.

Recognizing that the long-awaited time had finally come, the gathered spirits lowered their heads before the human standing at their center.

It was the moment the force opposing the Office of Narye was born into the world.

Long before that day, Yoon Taehee had already finished laying the groundwork to destroy the Office.

At the heart of his ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) strategy was a diversion.

Make noise in the east, strike in the west.

A direct confrontation would have been suicide. To hunt a tiger, bait was necessary, and the bait Yoon Taehee spent years carefully preparing was Byeoksadan.

Byeoksadan itself was the blueprint.

Once Byeoksadan openly attacked the Office of Narye, the war would begin with their preemptive strike. The Office’s attention would be dragged entirely toward the clash between Naja and spirits. Amid the chaos, Yoon Taehee planned to advance from inside the Office itself as the “Leader” of Byeoksadan.

The man who had returned after coming so far, stripped of every smile, would finally place a blade against the scholar’s throat.

And so began Yoon Taehee’s double life as both “Chief Yoon” and “Leader.”

The first step was making the Office aware that Byeoksadan existed.

The existence of organized spirits alone would already trouble them, but that by itself was not enough. Byeoksadan needed to become irresistible bait.

So the Leader came up with a guaranteed way to provoke the Office of Narye.

Byeoksadan would imitate the Office itself, solving people’s requests in its own name.

Of course, they could not accept just anyone. Revealing themselves carelessly to ordinary people was too dangerous. If word of the Leader’s identity or Byeoksadan leaked, capture would only be a matter of time. If headquarters discovered the truth too early, the entire plan would collapse.

They needed a trustworthy intermediary who could connect them to reliable clients.

After long consideration, the Leader chose Master Yeohye.

She was the most famous shaman openly standing apart from the Office of Narye. If someone as influential as Master Yeohye stood at the forefront of Byeoksadan, it would create enormous confusion for the Office later on.

And so Yoon Taehee began secretly investigating her daily life.

Visiting her shrine directly was too dangerous. He needed to move without headquarters noticing.

For months, he quietly observed Master Yeohye’s routines.

Eventually, he discovered that twice a month, she closed her shrine and boarded a bus several stops away to visit Hwamun Market.