The Village Needs an Exorcist
“It must have been the wind.”
“It doesn't sound like wind to me….”
“Winter wind makes all kinds of strange noises, as you well know.”
Sowol hurried over to the long cabinet and swept the counting sticks into a corner.
Fortunately, the village chief didn't notice.
In the meantime, Jang Wi took a seat in the middle of the main hall and grinned.
“Don't you worry, Brother Yeon. We'll prove it to you for certain tonight—there's no such thing as ghosts.”
The village chief spoke with grim determination as well.
“A rumor, once it spreads, is a hard thing to rein in. Best we catch it before it runs any farther.”
It was clear the two of them had steeled themselves for this before coming.
Sowol's lips moved a few times, but in the end, unable to find an answer, he changed the subject.
“…I'll bring out a late supper, then. How about wonton noodles?”
“Wonderful! Any dish from your kitchen, Brother Yeon, is welcome any day.”
Jang Wi beamed. The chief too rose from his seat with a laugh, bracing himself on the small of his back.
“My mouth's in for a treat. Now then, I'll just step out to the privy.”
“It's dark out there. Mind yourself.”
“Worry not. Old as I am, I've never once fallen on my way to the privy—oof!”
Even as he answered, the chief's toe caught on the doorsill. His body pitched forward.
“Elder!”
Jang Wi threw himself toward the old man with a desperate shout. Sowol's hand shot out on pure reflex.
But neither of them reached the chief.
“…?”
Because the tumbling old man was floating in midair.
It was a ridiculous sight—he was neither fallen nor quite standing—but not a single soul could manage a laugh.
Sowol pressed a hand to his forehead, sneaking a glance at the baby, while Jang Wi stared with his eyes gone round as saucers, mouth hanging open.
Dangling in the empty air, the chief could only sweat, great drops rolling down his face.
In the eerie silence, his body slowly began to sink.
Thump.
The moment his feet touched the floorboards, the chief collapsed right where he stood.
With trembling hands, he felt along his own arms and legs, then muttered in disbelief.
“…A ghost. There really was a ghost.”
THUD!
Before anyone could offer a word of comfort, the chief keeled over backward, out cold.
“Village Chief!”
Jang Wi rushed over partway—then spun around sharply to look at Sowol.
His eyes were gleaming with a light that was almost unsettling.
“Brother Yeon. Are you a martial master of the murim?”
While Sowol was still choosing his answer, Jang Wi's eyes flashed and the words came pouring out of him.
“Is this it? That thing I've only heard tell of—the Space-Grabbing Technique? That legendary art of moving objects without touching them? You can lift a whole person with it?”
“No.”
“No, my foot! I just saw it! The chief went like this—up, up like this!”
Jang Wi flailed his hands about in a grand commotion, then dropped his voice to a whisper.
“Brother Yeon, what in the world are you?”
“The owner of an inn.”
“The owner of an inn, throwing people about with telekinesis?”
“It wasn't me, I tell you.”
Sowol shook his head.
The one who had lifted the chief was the infant in the cradle, not Sowol.
But Jang Wi seemed to have already concluded that Sowol was hiding his true identity.
“I always suspected you were no ordinary man. All those sword scars, that fearsome face, those eyes that could curdle a man's blood when the mood took you. And to think—you were a reclusive master of the Jianghu all along!”
Sowol stared up at the ceiling in sheer exasperation.
It was because the remark wasn't entirely wrong that his headache only grew worse.
“Little brother Jang, forget what you just saw.”
“Knew you'd say that. Worry not—this Jang Wi, upon the honor of the Jang family name, shall guard this secret unto my grave.”
With that solemn declaration, Jang Wi seized Sowol's hand in both of his own.
Sowol awkwardly detached himself, then moved the unconscious chief to a bed upstairs.
The village chief came to around the time the roosters crowed at first light.
The moment his eyes opened, he bolted upright and hollered.
“Jang Wi-ya! A ghost just dragged me off and back again!”
Jang Wi lied without so much as blinking.
“What ghost, Elder? You were about to fall, and Brother Yeon caught you.”
“Fallen, my foot! I was floating up in the air, just like this! Floating! And when I touched down, not a single thing hurt!”
“Brother Yeon caught you that gently, is all.”
Jang Wi parried with such unshakable composure that Sowol, listening nearby, nearly believed it himself.
But the chief was not so easily fobbed off.
The instant he stepped out of the inn, he waylaid every soul he met to prattle on about the night's events.
“I experienced it with this very body of mine! A man toppling headfirst—and then, stopped dead in midair!”
And so the village chief, who had gone out to prove there were no ghosts, returned as a living witness to one.
The village split clean down the middle.
Half sided with the chief—surely the Elder was no man to see things that weren't there. The other half sided with Jang Wi—if Jang Wi, wide awake the whole time, had seen nothing, then there was nothing to see.
Arguments broke out at the well, at the washing stones, at the mouth of the market.
Unable to watch any longer, the chief's wife stepped in.
“This is getting us nowhere. Let's call a Taoist priest. If there's a ghost, he'll drive it out—and if there isn't, he'll confirm it for us, won't he?”
“Let's do that. That's the sensible way.”
Worn out from all the bickering, the villagers nodded in rare, unanimous agreement.
“Now hold on—it's my inn. Why are you calling a priest here without asking….”
Sowol tried to interject, flustered, but the chief's wife was immovable.
“You keep out of this, Master Yeon! Keep it up and they'll be calling Goam Village a haunted settlement!”
And so it was decided: a Taoist priest would be summoned to the inn.
Two days later.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!
Someone pounded on the inn's door.
When Sowol opened it, the chief's wife stood there with her hands planted on her hips, a crowd of curious villagers huddled behind her.
“Master Yeon, come out here. Today we settle this once and for all.”
“Settle what, exactly?”
“We drive out the ghost and put an end to this whole mess, that's what.”
“This is utter nonsense….”
“Quiet now. We've brought a reverend priest with us, so step aside.”
The chief's wife loomed at him threateningly.
Sowol swallowed a hollow laugh.
Any priest who went around taking coin for exorcisms and the like was bound to be a charlatan. So thinking, he looked up to get a look at the priest's face—and his brow furrowed.
Snow-white Taoist robes. Hair bound in immaculate order. Not a thread out of place.
“I trust you have been well.”
There stood a priest he knew all too well.
“…What are you doing here?”
“It has been a long time, Senior Brother.”
The chief's wife, glancing back and forth between the two men, blinked.
“You know each other?”
“We do. He did me a great kindness, many years ago.”
The priest answered courteously, then saluted the gathered villagers with cupped fists.
“I will inspect the inn myself, so rest easy and return to your homes. Nothing in this village will come to harm.”
Only then did the chief's wife relax.
“Then we leave it in the priest's hands.”
“Yes.”
Shooting one last curious look between Sowol and the priest, she led the villagers away.
Sowol shut the door quickly and folded his arms.
“What business brings you to Sichuan?”
The priest answered with unruffled calm.
“Official duties. Wulin Alliance Inspection Division.”
“In a backwater like this?”
“While inspecting the Sichuan branch, there was a matter I wished to verify, so I stopped by on the way.”
The Wulin Alliance. A confederation formed by the great sects of the Jianghu—a body that regarded itself as something like the authorities of the martial world.
And the Inspection Division was the arm that ferreted out those who broke its codes.
Sowol's eyes narrowed.
“Then why would the chief's wife drag you along here? Can you even see ghosts?”
“Hardly.”
The priest shook his head placidly.
“The common folk seem to have misunderstood something. But as I needed to see you regardless, I simply came along.”
This was the man who, in days past, would have flushed with indignation and argued every last point that he did no such exorcisms….
Sowol snorted with laughter.
Seeing a man who'd never had a flexible bone in his body playing it so slick—so the years had done their work after all.
This priest, who called Sowol Senior Brother.
He was Jinseong, an elder of the Wudang Sect.
“Sit down, then.”
“With pleasure. Biluochun tea, if you have it.”
“Ha? You expect to find tea leaves that pricey in a mountain inn like this? You get more shameless by the year, you know that?”
Sowol scoffed, but Jinseong's expression didn't flicker as he took his seat.
Staring at that unbothered face, Sowol found himself remembering the Jinseong of years ago, when they'd first met as young men.
A haughty creature who bore the whole world's rights and wrongs on his shoulders alone—stubborn beyond all reason.
He'd grown older and acquired the grand title of Head of the Wulin Alliance Inspection Division, but to Sowol's eyes, precious little had changed.
If anything had, it was only that he'd now piled shamelessness on top of his stubbornness.
Swallowing another hollow laugh, Sowol fetched the tea set and put the kettle on.
Jinseong's gaze, which had been drifting idly around the inn, came to rest on the cradle beside the long cabinet.
“So—here is where she was, after all.”
“What was where?”
“The child that Monk Beopgong smuggled out.”