230.
〈When the Dead Breath Returns〉
When the fire in the shrine went out completely, what remained was ash and silence.
Whenever the wind stirred, ash scattered, and it felt like the last breath of souls that still could not depart.
Park Seongjin stood before the altar for a long while.
He planted the tip of his blade into the ground, laid a hand atop it, and closed his eyes.
His body, which had been in the strata of the soul only moments ago, had not fully returned.
His heartbeat lagged in a strange way.
When he inhaled, the air was cold.
When he exhaled, it was hot.
Even the fact of being alive felt unfamiliar.
A warrior who had collapsed earlier staggered upright.
"Nangjang."
His voice split like a dry cough.
"I thought I was dead."
Park Seongjin turned his head.
His gaze wavered for a moment, then settled.
"You weren't dead.
You only stepped onto the wrong road for a moment."
Song Isul sat down on the ash to catch his breath and continued.
"The soul left the body, then came back without the thread being cut.
It was only possible because the line remained.
The shaman's jar was holding that line."
He nudged the shards of a jar shattered beneath the altar with the tip of his foot.
Inside was already empty.
The black-and-red liquid had turned to ash and clotted across the floor.
Song Isul added quietly.
"If we'd been any later, you wouldn't have come back."
A low sigh moved through the warriors.
Someone pressed their forehead to the ground with hands clasped.
Someone else stared blankly at their own hands, as if confirming they still belonged to them.
Park Seongjin slowly swept his gaze across the interior of the shrine.
Traces of what had once been a practitioner's dwelling remained:
a neat foundation, a carved seat for meditation, fragments of old scripture.
All of it had been turned into tools of black sorcery.
Anger brushed past him.
But what settled first was deep fatigue.
"This place is finished," he said lowly.
"The origin point has collapsed.
It won't be easy to write it again."
Song Isul nodded.
"But the road remains."
He looked at Park Seongjin.
"Those who dragged this sorcery all the way here—
the shaman was only a hand."
Park Seongjin's eyes went beyond the shrine, beyond the ridgeline.
"Shadow Guard," he said quietly.
"And those above them."
Silence followed.
The wind swept once over the ash, and the shrine's last afterimage scattered.
No trace of the soul's presence remained here.
The warriors began to pack up one by one.
They bound wounds, checked on one another, moved quietly.
They were preparing to leave.
Song Isul looked back at the shrine one last time and said,
"They say emptiness itself is existence—heohwan, 虛幻.
Today, that saying reaches the body."
Park Seongjin fastened his sword back at his waist and turned his steps.
He said,
"Even if it's empty, people must live.
And someone has to put an end to that emptiness."
They descended from the ruined shrine.
They did not look back.
All of them knew this fight hadn't ended—
it had only moved to the next layer.
The wind of Liaodong came over the ridge.
Cold, and far.
And somewhere, an unseen gaze was moving again.
---*
"What do we do now?"
At Park Seongjin's question, Song Isul repeated the same words.
"Strike the origin point."
They had believed this was the origin, but following the thread revealed another origin beyond it.
This was not a disturbance born of personal hatred.
Someone stood above, and everyone moved while clinging to that hand.
"Eunpo Merchant Guild, Itak, Jang Heon-yu, Yerek."
"And Gi Cheol."
"Ah, Gi Cheol is troublesome."
"Didn't you say Goryeo will suffer if we touch him?"
"Yes. That's right."
Song Isul fell silent for a moment, thinking.
"They'll be gathered."
"We only traced a trail to get here.
The real ones are somewhere in Liaodong."
Then Yi Jiseon stepped forward—
a man who studied the all-capable, a field most dismissed as petty arts.
Unlike other warriors who kept their distance from the unseen, he pressed right up to the boundary.
Sometimes he spoke nonsense with a straight face, enough to make one doubt his sanity.
Talking to ghosts, claiming the nonexistent existed—he did it often.
Since his studies ran that way, people had simply let him be.
If he were set loose in a crowded town, his nature could bring disaster.
"Ahaha. I'll look for them."
Song Isul slid him a sidelong glance.
"What?"
"If this fellow stayed here long, he would've met them directly.
You said the third attack came two days after the failure report went up."
Park Seongjin blinked.
His memory was hazy.
"Did I say that?"
"You did," Yi Jiseon said firmly.
"Then contact with this sorcerer is recent.
I'll put it bluntly.
They're within a day's travel.
Not all of them—but at least one."
Song Isul asked with a scoffing tone,
"A ghost told you?"
Yi Jiseon widened his eyes.
"As if.
It's rational inference."
"So you want to search every direction for a hundred ri?
Itak! Jang Heon-yu! Yerek!"
"Wait."
Yi Jiseon splashed liquor onto the sorcerer's cold, blackened corpse.
The smell spread instantly.
Tap, tap—he lit a flame and burned incense.
He rummaged in his pouch, pulled something out, and flung it.
A paper talisman flew like a steel plate and slapped onto the sorcerer's forehead.
And then—
the dead sorcerer sat bolt upright.
"Hiiik!"
Park Seongjin jolted backward in shock.
All three of them stepped back at once.
It felt like the space itself shoved forward.
The best way to handle a panicked bumpkin was to ignore him.
"Tsk tsk tsk."
Song Isul clicked his tongue.
Park Seongjin crept closer.
Arms hanging loose, neck stretched forward, his walk oddly like a monkey.
The sorcerer mumbled words no one could understand.
Yi Jiseon cursed.
"Ah, damn."
"This bastard's using a Mongol dialect."
"Anyone here understand it?"
It was true.
The dead were speaking.
Song Isul asked,
"What's he saying?"
"He's telling us their location."
Song Isul immediately called for someone fluent in Mongolian.
Johaeng came running from nearby—
he had been barefoot, trimming his toenails.
He spoke little, but was a master of brushwork like a changgeuk writer.
The moment he listened, he translated.
"Baeksan."
Song Isul snapped,
"I know that much too."
"Where in Baeksan?"
Johaeng shook his head.
"It's not a place-name."
"He's describing the surroundings."
"Then what's he saying."
"I'll interpret in real time."
The shaman's voice drifted like wind.
"They call it Baeksan, but that is the name of snow.
Not white because the sky falls,
but a place where the mountain exhales its own white breath."
Her eyes stared toward something unseen.
"The ridgeline is like white scales fallen from the heavens,
and in every valley frozen water runs like thread.
In that water there are no beast prints, no human shadows.
The wind passes first, and light follows after—
a land like that."
With every phrase, the landscape of Baeksan rose vividly.
"Birds do not sing, and rocks weep.
When night comes, sky and earth touch,
and when moonlight wraps the mountain's waist, white qi rises.
The whole mountain breathes like a single living thing."
"Hey!"
Song Isul shouted.
"Speak like a person!"
In the end, one conclusion remained.
Southeast of Baeksan—Goryeo-gu.
Countless words poured out as if soothing a wandering soul with nowhere to go,
but the meaning stayed there.
That single thread was enough.
The direction was set.
Those seated rose to their feet.
They spurred their horses toward Baeksan.