Honbul: Flame of the Soul

Yoon Taehee had briefly blacked out, unable to endure the pain. When he opened his eyes again, he was high above the vast night sky.

A clear half moon kept pace with him at what felt like arm’s reach. Yoon Taehee ground his teeth against the sharp, unmistakable pain that seemed to be strangling his throat and carving up his heart.

Soft mane streamed in the wind and brushed past his cheek.

Amid that unreal sensation, Yoon Taehee realized he was seated on a horse’s back.

A ghost horse that flies through the sky.

It did not take him long to figure out what Bima was. A height like this should have been dizzying enough to shock anyone, yet Yoon Taehee remained calm.

“You’re awake?”

Bima, galloping across the night sky, spoke as if in greeting.

After glancing down at the dizzying darkness below, Yoon Taehee asked what was going on. Bima answered,

“I am taking you somewhere safe.”

And, not forgetting to make a lofty show of it, Bima added that he did not ordinarily offer his back to just anyone, and that only because the boy had asked was he allowing this just once.

But Bima’s grand display came to nothing, because Yoon Taehee asked to be taken back where he had come from.

He still remembered that the Naja had been there with him.

If he disappeared like this, he would obviously be questioned. It would be far more natural if he stayed beside them instead.

Once he returned to the scene, the first thing Yoon Taehee did was clear away the scraps of paper littering the ground. The arrows embedded here and there, as well as the ones stuck in the Naja’s bodies, had vanished at some point. It seemed they had naturally dissipated with time.

After eliminating the remains of the Black Oblivion Birds and every other clue that might help reconstruct what had happened, Yoon Taehee sat down with his back against a tree.

There was only one thing the Naja needed to know.

That the ginseng child had disappeared.

That, and only that.

Naturally, the same had to apply to Yoon Taehee himself.

While he waited for daybreak, leaning against the tree, Yoon Taehee lost consciousness over and over through the night, fainting and waking, then fainting again.

He had used ghostly force against not one Naja, but five.

And a chief Naja had been among them.

The price for breaking a taboo like that was bound to be severe.

The horrific pain came in waves, intermittent but savage, as if something were carving up his heart. Only when morning came did it begin, little by little, to ease.

As time passed, the Naja woke one by one.

The moment they opened their eyes, they realized they had been blighted. Their whole bodies hurt as if they had been smashed apart. The Naja from the Ritual Implements Department, barely regaining their senses, groaned in confusion.

Lee Youngshin and the others remembered nothing after roughly the moment Lead Naja Shin had lifted the axe to cut off the little master’s ankles.

The Naja concluded that they must have been struck down by the little master, and gathered around the opinion that the enraged ginseng child had dealt divine punishment to all of them before fleeing.

But Lee Youngshin did not accept it so easily.

“Ginseng children are supposed to be spiritual creatures that don’t harm humans....”

That was when the Naja began to stir uneasily at his words.

“Who knows,” Yoon Taehee said.

Until then, he had remained silent.

“There are always exceptions.”

It was neither agreement nor denial. Just an ambiguous answer.

But it was the sort of thing that sounded plausible no matter where you attached it. With that single elusive remark, countless possibilities opened up at once.

In the end, Lee Youngshin had no choice but to shut his mouth. There was no point wasting his strength clinging to what did not make sense. There was nothing they could truly know anyway.

Eventually, Lee Youngshin and the others decided to return to headquarters.

They were not merely injured. They had been blighted, so there was no choice but to receive cleansing from the Purification Unit. Their plan to take the ginseng child away had failed, and in this condition there was no way they could pursue its trail.

I guess we took the little master too lightly.

Barely managing to move his aching body, Lee Youngshin contacted the situation room at headquarters and requested support.

“Uh... this is Naja Lee Youngshin, Team 1 of the Ritual Implements Department at the Office of Narye....”

He had no choice but to lie, saying they had ended up like this after accidentally laying a hand on a sacred tree.

From the other end of the phone, the Naja in the situation room let out a startled, “What?”

The tone was so incredulous it practically asked how anyone could make such a stupid mistake.

Lee Youngshin’s face flushed bright red.

It was humiliating, but if they wanted to bury the incident, they had no choice.

After all, that embarrassment would only last a moment.

If they told headquarters the truth—that they had discovered a ginseng child, concealed the fact, acted on their own, lost it in spectacular fashion, and ended up with backlash on top of it—then it was obvious as daylight that headquarters would dissolve Team 1 of the Ritual Implements Department on the spot.

That, no matter what, had to be avoided.

Everyone was complaining of pain and desperately waiting for rescue from headquarters when Yoon Taehee groaned softly and pushed himself up.

“Huh? Where are you going? You need to go to headquarters and get treated too.”

“I can’t. If I do, they’ll find out I was here with you.”

“Why does that matter?”

“It’s not strange when you make mistakes, Youngshin. It’s strange when I do. If they learn even I got taken down, headquarters will get suspicious.”

It was a statement that felt oddly insulting and yet, at the same time, made perfect sense.

Team 1 of the Ritual Implements Department already had a reputation around headquarters as a bunch of screwups, so an excuse like this might pass well enough.

But if Yoon Taehee were dragged into it, the situation changed. There was no way the chief of the Spirit Suppression Unit would be brought down by something on the level of a sacred tree.

Yoon Taehee swayed and pressed a hand to his head.

“I don’t want to share the blame, so keep your mouth shut ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) for once.”

Lee Youngshin bowed his head, thoroughly abashed.

“O-of course. I’ll make sure nothing comes back on you. Absolutely....”

“Good. I’ll contact you later.”

“Y-you’re really leaving? Huh? In that condition?”

With a body marked by blight, he should not have been able to move at all.

But Yoon Taehee left anyway, insisting he had to go before he ran into the Naja from headquarters.

The others stared at the chief of the Spirit Suppression Unit stumbling down the mountain on his own two legs as if they were watching some kind of monster.

“Is that even... human...?”

The rescue team did not arrive until long after that.

*****

Afterward, Team 1 of the Ritual Implements Department was rushed to the treatment room at headquarters, where they were met with harsh looks from the Naja of the Purification Unit.

The diagnosis they received was hopeless: they would need cleansing for at least two full weeks before they could even move properly again.

The head of the Ritual Implements Department came charging in after hearing what had happened, then roared at them at the top of his lungs.

“So you idiots finally did it, didn’t you? You lawless little bastards!”

Team 1 lay side by side in their hospital beds and spent nearly an hour getting showered with furious abuse from their superior.

Were they out of their minds, making a mistake that ridiculous? He had always known something like this would happen eventually. When were they ever going to learn to ask for approval from above? Where had they stuffed their talismans—down a soup pot?

As a result, Lee Youngshin and every member of Team 1 of the Ritual Implements Department were ordered to submit written incident reports and were placed under one month of disciplinary confinement.

They were going to be stuck lying there unable to move for a while anyway, so the hell-raisers comforted one another by saying it was a relief things had ended at only this.

It stung to have lost the ginseng child, but there was nothing to be done about it now.

They decided to be satisfied with the fact that, at the very least, they had upheld their slogan and to look ahead to another chance in the future.

Our love forever♡

And so the ginseng child kidnapping case came, for the time being, to an end.