Honbul: Flame of the Soul

...Then the namer said, By attaching the sinner’s name, shackles are placed. Those strokes become locks and iron nets. The sinner is escorted here, and their true name is bound...

“Answer me! What’s your name?”

...With that name, shackles were placed upon calamity.

“Jae” for calamity.

“Gyeom” for sword.

This was the true name of the God of Calamity...

“I’m Jaegyeom.”

Jaegyeom’s eyes slowly widened.

“...What?”

He stared at the writing on the wooden tag in disbelief.

The true name of the God of Calamity.

The moment he realized the identity of the boy standing in front of him—

“W-what the hell is going on...”

His head went numb, as though he had been struck with a hammer.

The inexplicable headache had been there for a while now, and his eyes felt ready to burst. He could not think properly. The change had come suddenly, after he cut the sacred rope and read the writing on the wooden tag.

Something inside his chest had snapped too.

“Why is my name...”

Jaegyeom groaned, gripping his forehead hard.

His mind was a mess, as if someone had stirred it into chaos. If the being before him truly was the God of Calamity, he could not understand why the God of Calamity was inside his body, or why the God of Calamity’s name was the same as his own.

All of this was new to him.

From a young age, he had known easily enough that he was different from other people.

Sometimes he could overwhelm ghosts with nothing but his spiritual force, and aside from Myojeong, he had never met anyone stronger than himself. He had thought it was simply because he had been born with more power than others.

He had never imagined there might be another being inside him.

Then since when?

As the question surfaced, memories flashed through his mind.

How often he had fallen ill as a child for no clear reason.

How, whenever he was cornered mentally or shaken emotionally, he could not control his spiritual force.

How he sometimes lost his mind and ran wild, even injuring Myojeong.

How he had no memory of what happened afterward.

Back then, he had dismissed those incidents as nothing important.

Myojeong had told him they were caused by possession. He had spoken lightly, as if stray ghosts were simply lingering around and playing tricks, and Jaegyeom had believed him.

But the thing inside him was the God of Calamity.

A divine being.

Calling that mere possession was absurd.

At last, Jaegyeom looked at the God of Calamity with disbelieving eyes.

“....”

The boy, who looked exactly like him in face, speech, and even the smallest habits, met his gaze with an expression that seemed to ask why he was staring.

Jaegyeom had thought he might be a blood brother.

Or maybe even his true self.

There was familiarity there, as if they had been together since birth, and a strange affection as well.

“Are you really the God of Calamity?”

After a brief silence, Jaegyeom wiped the blood from his eyes and asked.

“Yeah. Because at some point, humans started calling me that.”

The boy added indifferently,

“So I became the God of Calamity.”

It was a strange thing to say.

It sounded as if he had not existed that way from the beginning, but had been made into it.

Jaegyeom frowned at the puzzling answer.

“What... is that supposed to mean?”

“The moment something is defined as something, it really becomes that thing.”

The boy answered blankly, as if he could not understand why Jaegyeom failed to grasp something so obvious.

Jaegyeom studied his face.

It felt like looking into a mirror.

But why hadn’t he realized until now that this thing was inside him?

“...Was this Myojeong’s doing?”

At the sudden question, the boy raised an eyebrow.

“Huh? What was?”

Jaegyeom barely managed to force his voice out.

“I’m asking if Myojeong was the human who captured you and put you inside me.”

“No. Myojeong wasn’t the one who put me in there first.”

“...What?”

“I was inside you long before you met Myojeong.”

The boy yawned and mumbled on.

“Myojeong only sealed me so I couldn’t move around inside you.”

So Myojeong had sealed him.

But the one who had first placed him inside Jaegyeom had not been Myojeong.

As Jaegyeom stood there, stunned and turning those words over in his head, the boy made a disgusted face and cursed Myojeong.

“Every time I managed to come out once in a while, he’d lose his damn mind.”

At those words, memories flooded in like an overflowing river.

All at once, it felt as if scattered pieces were beginning to fit together.

Come to think of it, he had no memories from when he was very young.

For Jaegyeom, having no childhood memories had always been normal, so he had never thought it strange.

Humans are afraid of you.

You’re on our side.

We know why.

Fragments of a hazy past rose in his mind.

A cold winter night, before he met Myojeong.

He was cold and exhausted.

He could almost hear the voices of the ghosts that had once followed him.

You might not even be human.

Layer after layer of memory began to peel open.

Jaegyeom’s earliest memory was of wandering from place to place, welcome nowhere. Like a stray dog, he roamed about begging for food. It was during that time that he met Myojeong.

Before that, there was nothing.

As if everything had been cut away.

Jaegyeom tried desperately to recall his childhood, but no matter how hard he tried, nothing came to him.

Then, suddenly, he lifted his head.

“Myojeong... knew about you from the beginning...”

At Jaegyeom’s dazed murmur, the boy nodded.

“Of course.”

Myojeong must have known from the very beginning about the being inside him.

Jaegyeom, didn’t I tell you to hide your force?

That was right.

Looking back, there had been times when Myojeong, usually so kind, looked terrifyingly like a different person.

It was always when Jaegyeom unconsciously let his spiritual force leak out.

The first thing he learned after meeting Myojeong was how to control his spiritual force.

Before Myojeong taught him, his spiritual force often leaked out regardless of his will.

At the time, Jaegyeom had simply assumed he had been born with a troublesome constitution. But now that he looked back on it, the whole thing seemed unnatural. Strange in a new way.

Most gifted trained to release spiritual force outward.

In his case, it had been the opposite.

The first thing he had learned was how to draw back in the spiritual force spilling out on its own.

Trying to calm himself, Jaegyeom moved his lips.

“Then the red spiritual force too...”

“Of course that’s my power.”

At the boy’s immediate answer, Jaegyeom’s eyes widened.

The spiritual force he usually used was not red.

But when his life was threatened, when he was pushed to an extreme, or when intense emotions overwhelmed him, his spiritual force would explode out.

That was what they called a rampage.

During a rampage, ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) his spiritual force turned red.

He had never questioned why his spiritual force ran wild like that. Myojeong had not said much about it either, and Jaegyeom had simply thought it was because the spiritual force he had been born with was stronger than other people’s.

Myojeong knew about the God of Calamity from the beginning.

Realizing that naturally led to another question.

Then why had Myojeong hidden it from him?

Why had he told him nothing?

The answer would remain forever unknown.

Jaegyeom’s childhood had always been blank.

And the only person who could have filled that blank was Myojeong.

It felt like a hopeless tangle of threads. The key to untangling it lay with Myojeong, but Myojeong was no longer in this world.

His mind churned.

He could not understand when, where, or how all of this had begun. It was too much to simply accept and bear.

He did not know how far back he had to go.

He had to return to the most fundamental question first.

If Myojeong was not the one who put the God of Calamity inside him, then who was?

But before that, there was something else he wanted to ask.

“Then was it all because of you?”

“What was?”

“Me ending up like this...”

Jaegyeom tried hard to swallow down the emotion rising in his throat.

But his voice still trembled when he asked,

“Is it because of you that I don’t die or age?”