Honbul: Flame of the Soul

It was the dead of winter, in the hour after midnight when morning had only just begun.

Seok Juryeon walked down the empty street with the collar of her coat turned up against the biting wind. From time to time, the wind blew through, rattling the branches overhead. At some point, she realized someone was following her. Whoever it was, they were fairly stealthy, keeping a steady distance.

Is it a ghost or a person...?

Seok Juryeon, who had no shortage of enemies, walked calmly on. In the distance, she saw a brightly lit store: a twenty-four-hour convenience store. Seok Juryeon went inside first. When she opened the glass door and stepped in, the bell jingled. The clerk, who had been dozing at the counter, reflexively greeted her.

Seok Juryeon glanced sideways at the clerk. As he half bowed his head, another face rested on his shoulder.

It was a ghost.

The ghost looked like a child of six or seven, and it had its chin propped on the clerk’s shoulder. The young ghost opened its eyes wide and looked at Seok Juryeon with an innocent expression.

Seok Juryeon turned her gaze away from them and walked over to the clear refrigerator where the drinks were displayed. Just as she was calmly choosing a drink, the convenience store door opened with a click, and a gust of cold air rushed in.

Someone came inside.

Seok Juryeon stared at the refrigerator door. Through the reflection in the glass, she checked the face of the person who had entered behind her. Their hair reached their shoulders, so at first she thought it was a woman, but when she looked more closely, she saw it was a boy.

He looked about fifteen. Even at a glance, his appearance was shabby. Wearing a worn-out baseball jacket, the boy stood in front of the dairy section and picked out a product.

Was that kid the one following me?

After thinking for a moment, she took out a bottle of beer and a bottle of mineral water.

Seok Juryeon brought the beer and bottled water to the register. The clerk was so busy dozing that he did not even notice a customer had come to pay. He could barely keep his head up, nearly falling asleep with his chin hanging down. He looked exhausted, as if he could not get his bearings. Of course, some of it might have been the hardship of working the night shift, but more than that, it was because of the ghost on his shoulder. When a ghost attached itself to a body, the person became heavy and drowsy.

Instead of waking the clerk, Seok Juryeon opened her wallet expressionlessly. Mixed in among the bills were Reduction Talismans made in shapes similar to banknotes. Seok Juryeon took out a ten-thousand-won bill, slipped a talisman underneath it, and set both on the counter. At a glance, it was clearly only a stray ghost with no malicious intent and little strength. It would be easy to drive it off just by brushing the talisman against the clerk’s hand.

“I’d like to pay.”

Seok Juryeon spoke. The clerk looked up in surprise and sluggishly rose to his feet. His sleep-filled eyes were cloudy. He first picked up the beer Seok Juryeon had brought and scanned the barcode.

At that moment, a carton of milk suddenly appeared beside the bottled water on the counter.

Very Berry Drinkable Yogurt.

Seok Juryeon turned her head and looked to the side. At some point, the boy in the baseball jacket had come to stand there. The boy met Seok Juryeon’s gaze without retreating an inch. Sharp eyes. Deep, dark eyes.

Seok Juryeon recognized it at once.

Deep hostility and anger were coiled like snakes in the boy’s eyes.

The clerk scanned the barcode on the remaining bottle of water and asked,

“Together?”

He was pointing to the drinkable yogurt the boy had brought. To the half-asleep clerk, Seok Juryeon and the boy seemed to be together. She shook her head and opened her mouth to say something, but the boy spoke first.

“Yes.”

She stopped and glanced at the boy. The clerk picked up the yogurt carton, scanned the barcode, and said, “That’ll be four thousand seven hundred won.”

Just as the clerk reached for the bill, the boy touched the ten-thousand-won bill before he could take it. The boy quickly snatched up the money and shoved it into the pocket of his jacket. Naturally, the talisman underneath went with it. The clerk looked puzzled.

“...”

Seok Juryeon narrowed her eyes as she stared at the boy. The boy took money from his other pocket—a crumpled five-thousand-won bill—and handed it to the clerk. The clerk looked back and forth between Seok Juryeon and the boy, then silently accepted the money the boy offered.

The boy asked for a plastic bag to put the items in. As if that were not enough, he very naturally accepted the change from the clerk and pocketed it too. It was an outrageously shameless act. Only after putting not just his own drinkable yogurt, but also the beer and bottled water Seok Juryeon had bought, into the plastic bag did the boy speak to her.

“Let’s go.”

The boy opened the glass door wide and gestured to Seok Juryeon, letting cold wind blow into the warm convenience store. At that, the clerk looked at the boy with his arms wrapped around himself, as though begging him to close the door quickly. Even the ghost shivered.

Seok Juryeon cast one last glance at the ghost on the clerk’s shoulder, then left the convenience store without a word.

“What are you doing?”

Seok Juryeon folded her arms at an angle and looked at the boy. The plastic bag hung from the boy’s wrist as if everything in it belonged to him. The bitter winter wind tore through his long hair. Facing her, the boy calmly took the talisman out of his pocket.

“It’s cold.”

The half-crumpled talisman glowed, then burned in the boy’s palm. Seok Juryeon narrowed her eyes at that. The boy made no attempt to hide that he was gifted. Moreover, judging by the fact that he could burn talismans, his skill seemed fairly good.

The boy dusted the remaining ash from his hand and said,

“That ghost. It isn’t even a vengeful ghost, so just leave it alone. It’s clinging to him because it’s cold outside. It’ll leave once the sun comes up.”

Seok Juryeon stepped closer to the boy.

“You’ve been following me for a while. You must know °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° who I am.”

“Is there anyone trying to become a Naja who doesn’t know you?”

Muttering that, the boy rummaged through the plastic bag.

Smack!

Seok Juryeon slapped the boy across the cheek with an expressionless face. She could tolerate fearlessness, but not rudeness. The boy lowered his head, one hand covering his cheek. His frozen cheek stung as if it might split. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

“You insolent bastard.”

Seok Juryeon spoke in a low voice. Then the boy slowly raised his eyes. When the wind blew his hair aside, the eyes half-hidden beneath it glittered strangely. They were clumsy, rough thorns that exposed raw emotion.

“You have a knife in your eyes.”

Seok Juryeon recognized those eyes. She had once been the same.

It was an expression often seen in young gifted children around that age. To live as one of the gifted meant wandering along the edge of the world, unable to belong anywhere, unable to take root. There had been a time when her temper flared for no reason and her anger boiled over uncontrollably. To Seok Juryeon, who had passed through those days long ago, it now felt almost laughable.

“Take me with you,” the boy said.

Seok Juryeon asked coldly, “Why should I?”

“Because it’s cold.”

Seok Juryeon snorted. It was a fairly good answer. The boy had deliberately hung around her to catch her attention. He was bold enough to ignore every other route and approach her directly. She liked that much, but she had no use for a beast that bared its teeth the moment someone touched it.

“I don’t need a man who can’t even hide the tip of his knife properly.”

After saying that, Seok Juryeon turned around. The boy stared at her back with unwavering eyes. As she moved farther away, the boy spoke.

“Then what should I do?”

Seok Juryeon stopped walking and looked back at him.

“Who knows. If the knife isn’t in your eyes, but here...”

Seok Juryeon pointed below the boy’s abdomen.

“Shouldn’t you hide it in your belly where no one can see it?”

The moment Seok Juryeon finished speaking, the boy suddenly took off the jacket he was wearing. The bitter winter wind swept over his thin T-shirt. The boy took the beer bottle from the plastic bag around his wrist.

Crash!

In an instant, the bottle shattered.

“...”

“...”

“Like this?” the boy asked.

Seok Juryeon, who had a bad premonition, went stiff.

“You—wait...!”

She quickly reached out toward the boy, but she was one step too late. The boy gripped the jagged neck of the broken bottle and drove it straight into his stomach. The broken glass bottle was a weapon in itself. As the sharp edge pierced him, his thin T-shirt quickly began to turn red. The hem of his blood-soaked shirt froze cold.

“I’m Yoon Taehee. I don’t know my age, and I don’t have any parents. So leash me and use me as your hound. If you don’t need me anymore someday, you can just throw me away.”

Bewildered, Seok Juryeon unconsciously grabbed both the boy’s shoulders. The boy, who had been expressionless the entire time, smiled for the first time.

“What are you doing?”

The boy’s body collapsed. Seok Juryeon hurriedly caught his upper body. The boy kept chuckling. Little by little, his eyes began to blur. Furious, she slapped him hard across the cheek.

You insolent bastard, open your eyes...

That was the first meeting with Yoon Taehee as Seok Juryeon remembered it.

*****

After that, the boy was arrogant enough to open his eyes only after three days. They said that if the glass had gone in just one inch deeper, his life would have been in danger. It was true that he did not know his age and had no parents. From the moment Yoon Taehee began remembering his life, he had been living on the streets. The only thing he knew about himself was his name.

Suspicious of him, Seok Juryeon separately contacted the police and asked them to check Yoon Taehee’s background, but all they confirmed was that he was a person with no official identity. He had not even been reported missing. He was like a ghost with substance, something that existed but did not exist.

“Use me as your hound.”

The moment Seok Juryeon heard those words, she felt a crack form in her heart. It was a confident, arrogant request. And yet, strangely, it sounded lonely. In Yoon Taehee, a boy she had only just met, Seok Juryeon saw her younger self.

Like Yoon Taehee, Seok Juryeon had no parents either. No, to be precise, she had people who had given birth to her, but they were not parents. Her parents had sold young Seok Juryeon to a shaman. The day she crossed the threshold of that house, led by her parents’ hands, had been a winter day so cold the sharp wind scraped her skin.

At one time, among shamans who were anxious about losing their spiritual power, it had been common to secretly bring in young children and use them as child ghosts. The method was to lock the child in a small place with no light, then slowly kill the child by draining away their vital energy. Once the child became a vengeful ghost, that ghost would exert power.

Trapped in darkness where not a single ray of sunlight entered, Seok Juryeon eventually managed to seize a moment when the shaman was away and escaped with all her strength. But she truly had nowhere to go. Young Seok Juryeon wandered the streets for days and days until, by sheer luck, someone noticed her and took her in.

She took in the boy, who was like a wild dog, and gave him an identity. Since he had nowhere else to go, she gave him a room in her house and told him he could stay there until he came of age.

Sixteen.

That was the first age Yoon Taehee ever had.

Seok Juryeon and Yoon Taehee lived together for about three years. Yoon Taehee entered the Office the following spring, rose to chief rank within two years, and Seok Juryeon became the head of the Exorcism Unit that same year.

Although they lived under the same roof, they were not family. It was difficult to call them that. Sometimes, if the timing happened to work out, they sat at the table and ate together, but that happened only once or twice a month.

At the time, Seok Juryeon was living an unbelievably busy life, so she spent more time at headquarters than at home. Even though they lived in the same house, the total amount of time they actually spent together was probably less than three months.

For those three years, Yoon Taehee lived very quietly. Whenever Seok Juryeon returned home from work, whether it was dawn or daytime, he always came out to the front door and greeted her.

“You’re home.”

Each time, his gaze was a little higher than before.

“How is it? Can you still see the knife?”

Ten years had passed since she picked him up that way.

“...”

Seok Juryeon stared blankly at the young man sitting across from her, no longer an unpolished boy. Before she knew it, his shoulders had broadened, and his frame had filled out.

“Smiling suits me better after all, right?”

His expressionless face curved into a smile. Whenever Yoon Taehee smiled like that, his eyes bending softly, Seok Juryeon sometimes felt a strange unease. Sometimes she wanted to ask him.

Had he simply become better at hiding it, or had he put the knife down?

“No. You don’t. You’re only tolerable when you smile.”

Pretending not to know, she muttered and picked up the documents. They had never exactly been close, but ten years was a long time to learn quite a bit about each other, even if she treated him as her hunting dog.

The boy had learned how to smile.

“What’s this? Our boss is giving me all kinds of praise.”

Yoon Taehee spoke playfully, resting his chin on his hand.

“What praise...”

Still, Seok Juryeon hoped it was the latter.