Wiping away blood was something he felt he could manage on his own. Since putting the restraints back on Sojunim would ease the yin energy considerably and make it somewhat easier to settle the Dongti, it was essentially the only form of treatment available given the current refusal of Purification.
Even if it was close to wrapping a wound loosely in bandages without properly stemming the bleeding first……
“I just wanted to do something, since you ended up like this because of saving me.”
“Hk. Are, are you not scared or grossed out by it?”
“……Not particularly?”
Sim Seowoo tilted his head. The mouth on his palm, the evil spirits that came out of his hand — those things called ‘Jaegui’ — were unfamiliar, certainly, but not frightening. It felt like it would be rude, even, to find them repulsive when they were the very things that had saved him.
Jin Gwangmin was genuinely surprised by his matter-of-fact attitude.
Come to think of it, even when he had been grabbed by the evil spirit, Sim Seowoo had been strangely composed. It had been a grotesque form with dozens of pairs of eyes and hundreds of flailing limbs, and yet he had no reaction to it whatsoever — the only thing that seemed to have truly bothered him was the evil spirit rummaging through his head.
Sim Seowoo’s emotions seemed to be confined solely to the world of the living, not the world of the dead. In other words, the type of person who found the land of the living far more horrifying than the afterlife.
“…….”
Suddenly, Jin Gwangmin recalled the words the evil spirit had said upon seeing Sim Seowoo, and wore an unreadable expression. A prickle of unease settled in his chest, but Do Seonhwa called out from the other side — “Hey, what are you doing!” — rushing him along, and in the end he held out the handkerchief with both hands.
“Then, please take care of it.”
He bowed so deeply that his waist curved, presenting the handkerchief as though offering a tribute to royalty, and Sim Seowoo picked it up with a slightly embarrassed feeling. It was a bit awkward — it was just wiping away blood, and yet he was being thanked as though he were taking on an enormous burden.
When Sim Seowoo approached with the handkerchief in hand, Do Seonhwa’s eyes went wide.
“Huh? Noble guest, why……”
“I wanted to help out a little, too.”
Having more or less grasped the situation, she shot Jin Gwangmin a sharp glare. The look that scolded him for pawning off an unpleasant task onto the noble guest made Jin Gwangmin clear his throat and flee to go check on Sim Seowoo’s friends.
Cheon Yijae had, at some point, slumped down against the wall in a seated position. He had his eyes closed, but then lifted his head sharply as though belatedly registering the situation.
“What. Why——”
“Thank you for helping me.”
But before Cheon Yijae could raise his guard, Sim Seowoo greeted him first. When he tried to pull away as though rejecting his approach, Sim Seowoo quickly grabbed him to stop him, and their fingertips got tangled together for a brief moment — and in that instant, every single one of Cheon Yijae’s movements came to a halt.
The Jaegui that had been writhing beneath his hand until just moments before all fell silent at once. Whether he was pouring every ounce of his focus into suppressing the Jaegui, or whether he had been jolted by the contact of their hands — he pressed his lips tightly shut, not a word escaping.
The reason was unclear, but thanks to the sudden quiet, Sim Seowoo was able to finish his greeting.
“If it hadn’t been for you, my friends would have been in danger. And thanks to you, I was able to get away from the evil spirit, too……”
He gently drew Cheon Yijae’s hand closer and carefully wiped it with the handkerchief. The condition was far worse than he had expected. The skin had rotted so pitch-black that it had obscured just how much blood had actually been shed, and on top of that, as the Dongti continued to spread, the skin was blistering and the wounds were splitting open.
Seeing the red Hanja surfacing intermittently on top of such a hand made him deeply uncomfortable. It looked as though a branding iron were being pressed into him. He was studying the wounds with a serious expression when Cheon Yijae moved his lips a couple of times before asking,
“……Why are you using formal speech?”
It was an out-of-nowhere question. The look in his eyes seemed to ask whether Sim Seowoo hadn’t been speaking casually to him back at the library, and Sim Seowoo nearly let out a laugh.
The casual speech back then had only been because Cheon Yijae kept dropping his own formality, and Sim Seowoo had followed suit without thinking. And it had only been once, and right now was a situation where he was expressing gratitude, so he had judged that it was appropriate to be respectful.
So he had sincerely thanked him — yet the other party reacting only to the formal language felt absurd, and on the other hand, it gave the impression that he had paid quite a bit of attention to their conversation back then, and Sim Seowoo let out a quiet, dry laugh.
“I wanted to set a good example of how things go between people who don’t know each other well.”
Coincidentally, Cheon Yijae had said back then that he had no one to teach him, hadn’t he? Now that he thought about it, it might simply be an attitude that had naturally taken root from being revered as the successor of an organization……
Cheon Yijae pressed his lips firmly shut.
With ash-grey eyes that were dry as a pile of ash left after everything had burned away, he gazed quietly at Sim Seowoo before dropping a single word.
“……I’m not going to use formal speech.”
There seemed to be a flicker of irritation in his tone. Whether it was displeasure at receiving a correction from an outsider as the successor of Heun, or whether something else was grating on him —
Cheon Yijae suddenly yanked his hand back sharply and turned cold.
“It’s meaningless conversation anyway, since we won’t be seeing each other again after this.”
“No, even so, let me at least finish wiping the blood……”
It was nearly done already, and Sim Seowoo quickly grabbed his hand again. Since he had already volunteered to do it, he wanted to see it through properly to the end.
In truth, this was close to an obsessive habit of Sim Seowoo’s.
When he received kindness from others, he felt compelled to repay it somehow. It didn’t stem from a simple sense of reciprocity — rather, it came from a desire to draw a clear ‘line’ between himself and others, born from past experience. Receiving something made him feel burdened, uncomfortable, and even suspicious for no good reason. Sim Seowoo felt at ease only when he maintained an appropriate distance.
Because of that, what Cheon Yijae had gone through for him honestly weighed on him quite heavily. Even if he tried to understand it as simply the successor of Heun, an unusual organization, protecting a civilian — it still sat heavy on his heart.
If he truly had the power of Purification, he would want to heal his hand. He wished he could make his hand clean, the way he had brushed off the curse of the doll he had picked up at the library. Sim Seowoo harbored that wish without even knowing how to use Purification, when suddenly he heard Do Seonhwa let out a scream.
“Th-th, that, that that, that that that Purification……!”
At her voice, trembling almost like a motorcycle engine, Sim Seowoo looked down in bewilderment.
Cheon Yijae’s hand was turning white.
Starting from the part where their fingers were intertwined, the pitch-black Dongti was being wiped away cleanly, and even the wounds themselves were disappearing entirely.
……How?
He was genuinely baffled, but there was no time to examine it further. It was as though all of his energy had been drained at once — his mind went hazy and distant, and a stinging sensation spread through his nose.
Sim Seowoo touched beneath his nose and discovered blood on his hand.
“Ah, shit.”
And then he heard Cheon Yijae let out a completely unexpected curse, and he lost consciousness on the spot. It was only a brief moment, but he felt that there was an exasperated bewilderment woven into his voice.
Honestly, the most bewildered person right now should have been himself, shouldn’t it have been?
The last thing he registered was a firm pair of arms catching his collapsing body, and then his vision went completely black.
***
Blink, blink……
Sim Seowoo slowly moved his eyelids, clearing his vision. A large blue turtle was painted across a light ochre-colored ceiling, and draped over his body was a thick red quilt embroidered with gold thread.
He sat up, slightly on edge, catching a faint scent of herbal medicine. If he had regained consciousness, it certainly wouldn’t be the corridor of a movie theater — but he hadn’t expected to wake up in such an antiquated, traditional space, the kind a royal physician might visit.
He was even marveling at the fact that the bed he was lying on was a traditional ondol floor bed when —
“Noble guest! You’ve woken up!”
Having sensed his presence, Do Seonhwa leapt up from where she had been sitting on the other side and came rushing over. She greeted him with obvious relief, as though she had been anxiously waiting for Sim Seowoo to regain consciousness. Jin Gwangmin, who had been sorting through herbs in the corner of the room, also startled and hurried over.
The two of them peppered him with questions — was his head hurting, was his stomach alright, and so on — as though going through a ritual, before finally crying out in an emotional tone,
“Noble guest, you truly do possess the power of Purification!”
“And not just any — it’s an incredibly powerful Purification, powerful enough to wash away Sojunim’s Dongti in a single go!”
Both of them had tears glistening in their eyes, as though they had witnessed a miraculous wonder. While Do Seonhwa was marveling at the fact that the owner of the brilliant light she had encountered in her dream was indeed him, Sim Seowoo looked down at his own hands quietly.
He had wondered whether Jin Gwangmin’s handkerchief might have possessed some special power — but no, that wasn’t it after all……
The last hypothesis he had clung to, the one that was at least somewhat reasonable, had been proven wrong, but he accepted it with surprising calm. In truth, he had sensed it intuitively, even if only faintly.
That he himself had Purified Cheon Yijae’s hand.
The situation of having washed away the Dongti without even knowing how to use Purification left him baffled. Even now, he couldn’t fathom what principle had caused the Purification to occur.
“We thought the Spiritual sight had opened temporarily because of being grabbed by the evil spirit, but if you have Purification power like this, then it must have opened fully and completely! No — in fact, it’s stranger that you haven’t been able to see until now!”
Purification power was grounded in a pure soul, and one who possessed such a soul would also have clear eyes, and thus would have been able to see the other world from an early age. No matter how late, the Spiritual sight would open by around the age of adulthood. No matter how much one tried to ignore it, spirits would be drawn to a pure soul, making it impossible to escape one’s destiny……
Jin Gwangmin, who had been fussing, quietly nudged Do Seonhwa’s side. It seemed as though the two of them had had a prior conversation about this, and she nodded, stepping forward with a resolute air.
“Noble guest. This is a very delicate question……”
She clasped both hands together and asked, meeting his eyes respectfully.
“By any chance — are you a survivor of the Seak Akjin Lireugyo mass arson incident from six years ago?”
