Honbul: Flame of the Soul

Hwirim had left.

Myojeong sat on the wooden porch, staring vacantly at the scenery. The view before him was as peaceful as ever. The same days repeated, one after another. Nothing had changed. The only difference was that Hwirim was no longer beside him. He had never known before that life could become this tedious and dull.

This was not the first time Hwirim had gone away. After she went up to the capital, there had been a time when they spent several years apart, unable even to see one another’s faces. But back then, he had possessed the certainty that they would meet again someday, and with that hope as his foothold, he had been able to live each day with all his heart. The Myojeong of now felt only a dryness and emptiness nothing could fill.

Because I am a woman, I cannot remain at your side as a friend.

Myojeong was not so dull that he failed to understand what those words implied.

He could have seized on the possibility inside her statement—that because she was a woman, she could not remain at his side as a friend—and turned it around. But Myojeong could not bring himself to ask.

Then can you remain at my side as a woman?

Instead, it was Myojeong who had turned away first. He desired Hwirim desperately, but because he truly desired her, he knew he must keep her beside him not as a woman, but as a friend.

When he had once divined his own future, no farewell like this had appeared. Just as when he had cast his divination in the past, Hwirim had once again stood outside the path. And Myojeong had a fated road he had to walk. Facing their parting, Myojeong had asked whether they might at least exchange letters if she left this place and found a home of her own. Hwirim had said they could.

And so, the two of them remained friends forever.

About two months after Hwirim left, she truly sent him a short letter, just as she had promised, telling him where she had settled. Myojeong traced Hwirim’s handwriting with his fingertips, then stared blankly down at his own palm. Perhaps Hwirim had hoped he would hold her back. Perhaps she had hoped he would say he would follow her. But in the end, Myojeong could not bring himself to confess his own fate.

Myojeong suddenly found himself counting the years he had left.

No. This was right. Yes. This was enough.

Slowly clenching his empty fist, Myojeong closed his eyes.

After Hwirim left, Myojeong spoke less, and the time he spent sunk in thought grew longer.

These days, Myojeong often thought about life and death, humans and ghosts, and fate. Even while reading a book or going through the same routines as always, he would sometimes lift his head and find himself gazing somewhere far away.

“What are you looking at so intently?”

At Suhyang’s question, Myojeong shook his head.

“Nothing.”

The others did not notice, but Suhyang could tell. Myojeong had lost the vitality he once had and seemed terribly listless. Realizing that Myojeong was deeply wounded by Hwirim’s departure, Suhyang stopped by several times a day to talk to him or simply stay at his side.

“Hwirim is surely doing well. Since your paths are different, it was inevitable that one day you would grow apart. So please, take heart. They say that when a monarch is lost in grief, the whole nation falls into peril.”

“But I am no monarch.”

“Are you not the lord of the Naja, encompassing both ghosts and humans?”

“......”

Myojeong said nothing. As he thought about his fate, he found himself pondering the reason the Bangsangsi had descended upon this land, its very essence.

A god who drives off evil ghosts.

A god who sets the order of the human world right.

Power that destroys and repels the impure.

The authority of one who calls a name and guides a life.

Oh, did you hear? They say a calamity god has recently descended and is laying waste to the countryside. If it reaches the capital, it will surely become a great disaster for the country, so you must be especially careful.

Myojeong, who had been lost in thought for a moment, abruptly spoke.

“I heard a calamity god is running rampant outside. Have you heard anything about it?”

As if he had not expected the question, bewilderment appeared on Suhyang’s face. Judging from his reaction, Suhyang clearly knew about the being called the calamity god.

“That is...”

When Myojeong pressed him again, Suhyang opened his mouth, his expression strained.

“The elders said not to tell you yet... They said the time to act has not come, and that a little more time must pass. They said it was a matter long planned, and that you should only be informed once the rumors reached the palace.”

Myojeong’s face asked what he meant.

“‘It’ was created deliberately.”

Myojeong’s eyes slowly widened.

“What do you mean?”

The evil spirit called the calamity god had been created through a spell by gathering wicked evil ghosts, and the scheme had two purposes.

The first was the calculation that if they succeeded in binding the calamity god and commanding it, they would obtain a power impossible for humans to reach. That power would be of great benefit to the Naja in the future.

A sacrifice was needed in order to seal the calamity god. After creating the thing called the calamity god, they had succeeded, just as originally planned, in sealing it inside a human body by using a living child as the sacrifice. The problem was that its power was so strong they had no means of suppressing it.

Moreover, the force of the calamity god rampaging inside the child’s body was so ferocious that even the human child serving as its vessel often lost all reason. For that reason, controlling the child itself was entirely impossible.

And the second purpose was precisely for a situation like this, in which they failed to command the calamity god. Even if the Naja could not handle it with their own strength, it would be possible to subdue the calamity god with the authority of the present incarnation. Even if they failed to control the calamity god and had no choice but to destroy it, that, too, would be a gain for the Naja.

“As the position of the Office of Narye grows more precarious by the day, if the present incarnation personally drives off the calamity god, the palace will realize that the Office of Narye must continue to exist. In that sense, this will also serve as a fine example.”

“So you are saying you deliberately released ‘it’ outside to wreak havoc?”

“It may be so for the time being, but when viewed from farther away, this is ultimately for the sake of the country and its people.”

“So... you used a living child... as a sacrifice to seal the calamity god...”

Myojeong muttered to himself, his face filled with disbelief.

“Then who is the child?”

The child’s parents were people comparatively close to Myojeong. One of them was an aide who attended him in his daily life, a person whose face he had seen and with whom he had exchanged words only half a day earlier. Having served as his aide for several years, he was a familiar face to Myojeong. He had married a fellow Naja here, and the child who became the vessel for the calamity god was said to be the young son born between them. It was common for Naja to marry one another.

“Does that mean... the parents offered up their child as a sacrifice of their own will?”

“Yes, that is correct.”

At those words, Myojeong stopped breathing.

“......”

A strange heat felt as if it were boiling up from the tips of his toes. Myojeong ordered Suhyang to bring the Naja couple who had offered up their child at once, and to immediately apprehend the elders who had planned and carried out this affair.

Myojeong staggered out the door.

Before everyone who had gathered, Myojeong approached a guard standing nearby. He reached toward the scabbard at the guard’s waist and drew the sword at once. It all happened in an instant. Striding toward his aide, Myojeong aimed the cold blue blade at his neck without the slightest hesitation.

Just then, Suhyang rushed forward and blocked Myojeong’s path.

“Please, compose yourself!”

“Move.”

Myojeong felt a rage close to murderous intent.

“You must not...!”

“I said, move.”

Suhyang pleaded desperately.

“He is a man who fulfilled his duty as a Naja and strove to set an example.”

It was so repulsive and contemptible that Myojeong felt as if he might retch.

“You cannot do this while wearing human skin.”

“Though they offered up their beloved child as a sacrifice solely to serve the Office of Narye, how could their hearts as parents have been any less pained? You must regard them with generosity and grant them mercy.”

At Suhyang’s plea, Myojeong’s hand paused. He had spent time face-to-face with the aide, so even Myojeong knew the man was not evil by nature. In fact, the aide had been more good-natured and upright than nearly anyone he had seen. He was an ordinary person, no different from anyone else.

Myojeong stood frozen for a long time, not even twitching.

“What is the child’s name?”

Myojeong asked, facing the aide. But the aide, his face deathly pale, merely moved his lips a few times, hesitating as if he could not find the words to answer.

In that moment, Myojeong understood.

“You did not give the child a name?”

At last, a dry laugh closer to a scoff escaped Myojeong. It was true that, for a moment, Suhyang’s words asking him to show mercy, asking how pained the parents’ hearts must have been, had struck him with sorrow. But the human being before him was no ordinary parent.

No parent would withhold a name from a beloved child.

Myojeong slowly lowered his hand and looked up at the night sky. The pitch-black sky stretched out like a curtain of tragedy. Staring blankly into the darkness, Myojeong clutched his forehead.

His head ached.

As Naja, they were not guilty.

They were guilty only as human beings.

Myojeong swung the sword in his hand and severed the aide’s head. Blood surged upward like a fountain. Screams burst out all around him. Myojeong then beheaded the other person prostrate on the ground. Suhyang stared at Myojeong with wide, stunned eyes.

Myojeong turned and aimed the tip of his sword at Suhyang and the elders.

“Is using your own child’s life as a sacrifice the greater good you speak of?”

Looking up at the night sky, Myojeong slowly dropped the sword.

If the land stained by darkness was the domain of ghosts, then Narye was the torch that drove out that darkness. If the wick of the flame had burned down, then it was time for it to be extinguished. Just as the full moon waned, perhaps prosperity and decline, too, belonged to the will of heaven.

In the future Myojeong had foreseen for himself, there had been no such thing as destroying the Office of Narye.

Therefore, this was not the righteous path he had been given.

“As of this moment, I hereby dissolve the Office of Narye.”