Honbul: Flame of the Soul

As golden light flashed from the chain, smoke began to rise from the paper net binding the child’s limbs. A moment later, it burned away and vanished. When the ritual was finally over, the talismans pasted around the room hung in tatters, and the vast formation drawn across the floor had been wiped clean. Everything around them was in ruins. Even the strange tremors that had been shaking the room had stopped.

Myojeong, drained to the limit, suddenly coughed up blood. He had poured out an enormous amount of power all at once, and now crushing exhaustion swept over him. A double seal was an act that dangerous. Dangerous enough that even Myojeong, the caster, could not escape the backlash. Without the Golden Chain Formation, he would never have endured it on his own strength alone.

Even amid all that chaos, the child was sleeping peacefully.

Myojeong went closer to the sleeping child. He knelt and examined him. Thankfully, the child seemed perfectly fine, without a single injury. Myojeong wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth with his finger, then pressed it firmly to the center of the child’s forehead as though stamping a seal. He wrote the character for “open” on the child’s palm. Once he opened the child’s spiritual force, he could finally feel only the child’s own complete presence. The force of the calamity god, which had always lingered faintly inside him like a few drops of ink, had been erased cleanly.

It was proof that he had successfully suppressed and bound the calamity god as planned.

Confirming that the ritual had succeeded, Myojeong murmured, his face haggard.

“It worked. It worked....”

His chest swelled with emotion as his consciousness gradually faded.

Myojeong collapsed with a thud beside the child.

When the child woke from sleep, he opened his eyes drowsily. It was a morning no different from any other. He was lying wrapped in his blanket, and when he turned his head to the side, Myojeong was still asleep in his bedding.

“Myojeong, I had a weird dream.”

After blinking a few times, the child sat up.

“...Myojeong?”

He was just about to shake his teacher awake without the slightest courtesy when he stopped.

“Are you sick?”

The child’s eyes suddenly widened as he placed a hand on Myojeong’s forehead. Myojeong’s forehead was burning hot. After exhausting his power down to the very dregs the night before, Myojeong ended up bedridden for several days.

“Are you okay? Do you have a fever?”

Myojeong feigned ignorance and made up an excuse that he must have caught a cold in the chilly wind. Seeing Myojeong, who had always been healthy, suddenly confined to bed, the child seemed sick with worry. Myojeong let out a quiet laugh as he watched the child fuss, saying he would make porridge or go dig up medicinal herbs.

His body ached, but strangely, his heart was at ease. If falling ill for a few days was the price of being able to live with the child, it was no problem at all. Myojeong was simply happy.

The seal had been successfully cast, and the child seemed healthy and unharmed. Now it was time to tell him the whole truth. After spending a full week sick in bed, Myojeong finally recovered enough to call for the child.

“Gyeom. Where are you?”

Myojeong stepped out into the yard and looked around for him.

“Did you call me?”

Just then, the child came running out from the stove.

“There is something I have been meaning to tell you....”

Myojeong, who had begun speaking cautiously, broke off and let out a soft laugh. The child was covered from head to toe in black soot. It seemed he had been cleaning out the furnace. Myojeong knelt in front of him.

“What is this mess?”

Myojeong reached out toward the child, who stood there with soot smudged all over him. He was brushing off the ash when his hand touched the child’s knee. The child let out a small “Ow” and frowned slightly. Seeing him react as if it hurt, Myojeong tilted his head.

“What’s wrong?”

“I scraped my knee.”

Myojeong immediately rolled up the child’s pant leg. When he looked at the knee, he saw a wound that truly had not been there before. Blood was still seeping from it as if it had only just happened, and a dark bruise had formed around it.

“Oh dear. You must be careful. How did you hurt yourself?”

“Was it about six days ago? I was going to pick herbs and tripped over a stone.”

Six days ago was when Myojeong had been bedridden. The child had said he was going up the mountain to gather herbs good for a cold, so it seemed he had hurt himself then. Myojeong had been looking at the wound casually, but he suddenly froze.

“Six days ago....”

The scraped knee looked so fresh that he had assumed it had happened yesterday or today. But if it had been six days ago, a fair amount of time had already passed since the injury. If that was the case, even if it had not healed completely, the bleeding should have stopped and a scab should have formed by now. Yet the knee remained exactly as it had been when scraped, not healed at all.

“Have you put a bandage on it?”

The child grumbled with a sullen face.

“Yeah. I put one on yesterday too.”

Only then did Myojeong’s face slowly harden.

“What’s wrong?”

Seeing Myojeong’s grave expression, the child asked in confusion.

“Didn’t you say you had something to tell me?”

A wound that should normally have healed quickly remained unchanged. What did that mean? Staring at the child’s injury, Myojeong slowly closed his eyes. A nameless, chilling premonition rose suddenly from deep inside his chest. Something was clearly wrong. No. It could not be.

After a moment of silence, Myojeong finally managed to shake his head.

“No. It is nothing.”

Having noticed that something was wrong, Myojeong decided to observe the child’s condition carefully for a while. And when a full month had passed, he understood what had happened to the child.

Wounds that should have healed quickly did not heal no matter how much time passed, and the child’s height, which had been shooting up day by day, remained the same. The child did not seem to have noticed the changes in himself, but Myojeong, who had watched him grow, could see the difference easily.

The child’s growth had stopped.

And worse, he now had a body that could not heal itself when injured. In short, the child’s physical body had stopped growing. This was clearly a change that had occurred after the seal was cast.

It was a side effect of the seal that made the soul immutable. The soul and the body were fundamentally connected, organically influencing each other within a living being. Since the calamity god’s soul and the child’s living soul were fused, the double seal placed on the calamity god had inevitably affected the child’s body as well.

Completely separating the two was only possible when life ended. By sealing the child’s living soul, Myojeong had placed it in an immutable state, and the body had stopped along with it.

Could this truly be called living?

Myojeong felt an immense sense of failure.

A state that could neither disappear nor grow, only remain frozen in place.

Though he had been a vessel for the calamity god, the child was ultimately an ordinary human. He had been, until now. But after the double seal, he had become a strange, eternally unchanging being whose wounds would not heal and whose body would not grow.

Living things were meant to move and change constantly. But the child’s life had been pinned in place, bound to the calamity god, unable to move even an inch. And the one who had made him that way was none other than Myojeong himself.

Myojeong, you truly want to become family with that child, do you not? But if you do not confess the truth, you can never become family. Do you have no intention of telling Gyeom everything?

Family. He said family.

Myojeong despaired. He lowered his head and let out a hollow laugh.

He had believed it was for the child’s sake. But in the end, he had turned the child into an anomaly that strayed from the natural order. At last, Myojeong was seized by an indescribable agony. If he undid the immutable seal, the calamity god’s soul would steal the child’s living soul. But if he left things as they were, the child would be unable to heal from injuries and would live outside the flow of time in a body that would never grow.

Myojeong covered his face, his expression twisted in anguish.

I think it is all right for Myojeong to be a little greedy.

You are not a god. You are a cowardly, petty, weak human.

For a long time, Myojeong had wondered what exactly the Bangsangsi’s curse meant by “the one thing he could never have.” He had thought that, whatever it was, as long as he coveted nothing, he would not suffer. He had resolved to live as a god and die as a god.

And this was the price of abandoning that resolve.

Lost in a daze, Myojeong looked down at his own palm.

Should he let the child live in eternity, or should he kill the child?

He would die at thirty-three. Put another way, that meant that until he turned thirty-three, he would not die no matter what he did. If so, if he could share that life with the child...

There was no room for hesitation.

And it was not as though there was no way at all.