The Butterfly on the Flower Vase (6)

"Ninety over sixty."

"See? I told you it perks up after a good night's sleep."

It hardly qualified as perking up, though. Having been so alarmed by last night's reading of eighty over forty-five that he'd spent his first-ever storm of frantic research on blood pressure, Ji-won eyed the two numbers hovering right at the border of hypotension with deep displeasure. So this is why people check their blood pressure morning and night. I always thought they were being dramatic about it, but there's a reason for everything.

"Did you sleep comfortably?"

"Mm, I slept well."

There was noticeably more color in her face than yesterday, at least. The shadows under her eyes, which had been dark as a panda's, had more or less cleared up too.

"You look terribly exhausted—shall I let you sleep a while longer?"

"No. Like Director Cha said, I need to get there and sleep off the jet lag."

Gaon had eaten a single bowl of ramyeon and then stayed upright for the entire flight to London, deteriorating so rapidly that the person beside her had been quietly fretting, until by the time they walked into the hotel lobby she was half a corpse. Even while her blood pressure was being taken she kept nodding off in a way that looked anything but healthy, so seeing the results of a proper night's sleep with his own eyes set Ji-won's mind considerably at ease.

"Is there anything else you need?"

"No."

"I'll have your meal sent up in thirty minutes. Take your time washing up."

"All right."

The moment Gaon nodded obediently and disappeared into the bathroom, Ji-won arranged the clothes he'd collected in advance in the closet and immediately called down to the front desk to add several dishes to the order. Garlic, peas, and carrots are supposed to be good for low blood pressure. Though things like young radish or seaweed soup would be hard to come by around here. Dark chocolate raises blood pressure too—where was that handmade chocolate shop nearby?

As he was checking the addresses of a couple of chocolatiers he remembered, Ji-won suddenly burst out laughing at nothing. What am I even doing right now? Since when does a temp secretary on a three-day contract go this far overboard? She's the head of a major corporation—her people, who move for her like hands and feet, surely know how to manage her fine on their own. One garlic dish isn't going to cure hypotension. Should I have ordered just one of the gambas or the aglio e olio after all? Ha. Turns out I'm the type to make a huge fuss.

Because he'd piled extra dishes onto an already prepared menu, the spread laid out that morning was absurdly grand for breakfast—but fortunately, Gaon ate nearly everything set before her without a word of complaint.

She certainly eats well... where on earth does it all go? Then again, isn't Mrs. Kwon surprisingly unobservant? She said there was nothing she particularly avoided and nothing she particularly craved... Well, watching her eat one meal tells you everything. Prefers salty over sweet, likes a crispy texture, and has a real weakness for noodle dishes. Carrot cake... should I order another one? No—her face shows it that obviously, how could the people who see her every day not know?

"What would you like to drink, madam?"

"Coffee. Do you have anything cold?"

Ordering iced coffee first thing in the morning. Her tastes really are unambiguous.

"I'll bring it with ice."

By the time the meal was finished, some twenty minutes remained until the hour the staff member was due to arrive for her. It was an awkward stretch of time for anything in particular, so the two of them carried their teacups out to the terrace. The view opened wide onto the London cityscape across the Thames, which was very much worth looking at.

"What kind of site is this, that you're going to it yourself?"

"There's an old family in Chester called Rosenbalov. But at some point, it became the case that whenever a daughter was born into that family, she almost never lived past her seventeenth year. It was always a house where the women died young, but the frequency climbed sharply once the twentieth century arrived. The main bloodline in particular, they say, produced not a single exception."

It was a brutal pattern of loss, but had the ones dying young been sons rather than daughters, something would have been done about it far, far sooner. Had that been the case, it might have been stopped with relative ease, before things had swelled to this scale. The truth, however, was that before the modern era women were treated with a triviality unthinkable today, and so nearly three hundred years passed before this affair ever reached the Master of Jungcheon's ears.

"At first, I don't think anyone saw it as a grave problem. It was an era when children died often, after all. But as time went on, the family must have grown more and more uneasy—the number of sudden, inexplicable deaths was simply too unnatural. And then, this time, they learned that the long-awaited child carried by the family head's daughter-in-law was a girl. It would be the first baby born into the family in twenty years, and a household that had been banking all its hopes on the child was thrown into utter chaos. That was two months ago."

"If you've come to deal with this personally, that means the ones who murdered the family's daughters all this time were the dead themselves, doesn't it?"

"Most likely. The family head tried everything to uncover the cause, and in the end it went so far as to bring in guides—and one of those guides, they say, witnessed a malignant spirit that had gone entirely black."

The first guide summoned, it was said, had sensed the presence of a dead soul but never managed to confirm its true form. The crushing aura of slaughter blanketing the entire estate had been enough to keep her from setting foot on the grounds at all. All five high-level guides in Britain had thrown themselves at it, only to be attacked and injured rather than drive the spirit out, and the most battle-hardened veteran dispatched from Czechoslovakia had, after an agonizing struggle, managed nothing more than a glimpse of its face.

"And that face, they say, was an exact match—one might as well have traced it—for one of the portraits hanging in the mansion."

"A portrait in the house means it was a member of the family. Do ancestors ever harm their own descendants?"

"It isn't common... but it happens."

Ordinary ancestors, even those who hadn't been particularly virtuous in life, generally want to watch over and protect their descendants as best they can. Which meant that a spirit who had spent centuries committing murder against her own blood alone was most likely harboring a colossal grudge against someone—or had slipped beyond anyone's control entirely.

"In any case, an evil spirit that has survived hundreds of years while preying on the living is beyond what guides can resolve. Power doesn't necessarily scale with age, but when the gap in experience is this wide, a human who hasn't lived even a hundred years simply doesn't stand a chance."

"So do you deal with all such spirits yourself?"

At Ji-won's question, Gaon let out a soft laugh and slowly shook her head. I certainly wish I could.

"That's realistically impossible. For one thing, there are far too many of them, and there are cases where a spirit's hand is never revealed at all. Whenever I do learn of one, I do my best to see it dealt with somehow—but alas, I have only one body."

"You must travel like this often, then."

"No. I haven't been traveling for very long at all. These days movement between continents is free, so if I set my mind to it I can go anywhere—but the first time I came to England, it took me more than two months. Before that, I could only go where the roads allowed. And even then, not very often."

It was the first time Ji-won had seen Gaon speak at such length since meeting her. Her voice really is lovely. For a moment his attention drifted from the content of the conversation entirely, caught instead by the beautiful resonance of her voice—and so, even when a certain word reached his ears, he failed to react with his usual quickness. It took a little while for the question to land.

"Two... months? What did you come here on?"

"Hmm. First I took a ship from Yokohama to San Francisco, then a train from there to the East Coast, and then another ship from New York. That was the fastest means available at the time. Practically the only one, in fact. The Trans-Siberian Railway was still under construction, so getting to Europe overland meant walking the whole way—and I couldn't afford to waste that kind of time."

As he listened to this staggering itinerary, Ji-won's eyes grew wider and wider. The Trans-Siberian Railway was... still under construction? Wasn't that already running in the early 1900s? What year does The Barber of Siberia take place again?

"When, exactly, was this?"

"1896. The year had turned by the time I made the journey back."

Good grief, the nineteenth century...! For a moment, Ji-won had to clench his jaw to keep from letting out a hollow laugh. It wasn't as though he hadn't suspected Gaon was considerably older than she appeared. Her aura alone was nothing like what one commonly found in a woman in her early twenties. She didn't seem rude by nature, yet the way she spoke down to her staff was far too natural to be anything but long practice.

Even yesterday, when he'd watched her exchange greetings with the local staff who'd come to meet them at the airport, something about her English had struck him as curiously old-fashioned. It hadn't been a long conversation—just a brief situation report and a few questions—but there had been words in it that Ji-won, who'd lived over ten years in the English-speaking world, was hearing for the first time. He simply hadn't imagined it spanned entire centuries.

Then how old is she, exactly? Is she... even human?

"London back then was truly dreadful, you know. The air was so foul it was hard to breathe. My throat hurt for a long while after I left this place. When the Great Smog came, I thought—so the day finally arrived."

"...I see."

Gaon, who had been gazing at the scenery with a faraway look in her eyes, slowly turned her head. The moment she sensed, for some reason, that his voice had changed entirely, and leaned in to study his expression, the bell announcing a visitor's arrival rang through the room.

"Let's be on our way, madam. It seems Jayden has arrived."

"...Right."

It bothered her a little, how abruptly the mood had turned serious, but there was no room to tend to Ji-won's feelings as well. Rising obediently from her seat, Gaon tightened the loosely knotted tie at her collar, opened the closet, and drew out a crisply pressed jacket to put on. It was time for her duties as the Master of Jungcheon to begin.

The moment the ancient walls of the medieval fortress came into view, Gaon—who had been resting in a relaxed posture—straightened her spine, and her eyes sharpened to a glinting edge. As the party passed through the gates of Chester, the clear sky gradually dimmed, and by the time they reached Rosenbalov Castle, rain had begun to fall in scattered drops. Ji-won was used to England's habit of raining without warning or reason, but this rain somehow felt deeply wrong.

Doesn't this feel like winter rain? The weather is this warm, and yet it's freezing.... It's the wrong word for a meteorological phenomenon, but it's honestly intimidating. Almost as if it has a will of its own. I know I've felt this exact sensation somewhere before.... Watching the thickening raindrops tap against the window in silence, Ji-won's face suddenly lit with realization.

"This rain... is it falling because of you, madam?"

"What makes you think that?"

"The energy feels the same as when you summoned your sword in Jungcheon."

In an instant, Gaon—who was ordinarily unflappable about everything—raised her eyebrows in open astonishment. Even among the high-level guides who worked closely with her, only a small handful could distinguish her energy from others.

"No one has ever recognized it in one go before."

"I made it half by guesswork, honestly. The timing of the rain starting was far too convenient to be coincidence."

"Clever thing, aren't you."

At Gaon's undisguised admiration, Ji-won pressed his lips shut and offered an ambiguous smile. He'd been treated like a child yet again after barely a day, but this time he couldn't quite bring himself to protest. In her eyes, he and the head of security and Hae-soo were all one and the same thing: children.