The forged blade flashes and draws its line with conviction.
A dance of blades performed by both hands and the sky.
The blade pierces the body of the centipede, which takes the form of a depraved monk.
It is not the same criminal-subduing blade that once pierced Assistant Manager Jin Nasol in the Ocean Palace, or myself in the dream cultivation chamber.
This blade is at least twice as large, adorned with brilliant pine and intricate bells.
It’s a ceremonial blade.
A cleaver designed to confront evil ‘entities’.
Thrashing now was the twisted thing that mimicked a human mouth and planted madness, which had been preaching the so-called truth of the world. Or rather, only muttering its own horrific enlightenment.
Each time, human arms writhing on its body fall to the floor, turning to ash and finding rest.
The procedure of a ritual to appease souls of the dead.
The centipede convulses, and the shrine’s pillars and rafters collapse.
It looks as if the debris could fall onto people at any moment, but.
Agent Bronze’s firm voice rang out.
The transparent bullets from his glass handgun embed themselves in the air around the shrine, trapping the centipede inside.
Like a kind of talisman, the bullets engraved with the proper character each activate their precise effect.
“It will be alright now.”
“The most difficult and tricky part of ending these shamanic-ritual-type supernatural disasters is that you must reveal the hidden identity.”
You can only exorcise something if you know what it is.
And this is also the reason why the Disaster Management Bureau was unable to easily identify that strange evangelist of the Church of the Luminous Unknown, who had been buried together with the liquor jar beneath the shrine, granting it an unusual power.
Agent Choi’s own hard-won notes come to mind.
– Hmm… Actually, the branch wanted to investigate more thoroughly, but other government agencies kept getting in the way. They were even blocked from dissolving the village itself.
Some said, ‘Why not just keep rescuing people every year? The causal relationship with the disappearances and deaths isn’t proven.’
However, in reality, it seems there was a government official who was being bribed by Jisan Village.
That’s why things were at a standstill.
– If you think of the annual festival as a disaster, it’s actually long and repetitive, right? But the investigation periods are always much too short.
Especially with such an old ghost story, where the ritual has been distorted and it’s hard to find the original form, it gets even more difficult.
We’re always just barely managing to keep the situation stable.
– So it’s always a shame. There must be a real culprit… If we could just find it, we could try exorcism or banishment or whatever. The fact we can’t is just frustrating.
– Wait, Grapes-ie, don’t decide to dig up the village’s secret by yourself just because you read this, okay?! We all do it together! You know, right? ^^
“You’re the one who found its identity.”
“You drew that thing out of the shrine. And now that its identity has been revealed…”
Agent Bronze was smiling.
“Ending this disaster has become what we do best.”
The specialty of the Black-Tortoise Team.
“Eliminating evil things in the traditional sense.”
A voice calls from the roof.
Agent Choi throws his cleaver into the air, the dokkaebi flame in his hand burning as bright as the sun.
Flames sweep all the way down to the broken base of the shrine.
The dark, damp shade created for the centipede burns away as if it’s being erased, and a bright, warm, yang energy arrives.
The centipede, having lost many of its human arms, tries to open its mouth again, but now its so-called enlightenment can no longer be properly formed into human speech.
The Black-Tortoise Team’s methodical supernatural disaster response steadily pushes it into a corner.
First. Purification of the ritual space.
Driving out the environment suitable for evil to dwell in.
Agent Bronze’s bullets constrict the shrine.
The centipede, robbed of many arms and exposed to dazzling brightness, thrashes and struggles.
But the targeted response, stabbing at its inborn, elemental weaknesses like an awl, severed its connection to unspeakable evil truths and left it vulnerable.
Thus, the end draws near.
Agent Bronze’s glass handgun fires its final bullet.
Charged with a powerful exorcistic rite, crafted skillfully at the Baridegi Workshop, it fits perfectly into the evil thing’s body.
Exactly into its forehead.
From the hole in the centipede’s body where the bullet embedded itself, its innards began to be sucked away.
The centipede collapsed inward with a strange rending sound, as if it were shrinking down to a single point. No, not just the centipede. Also the shrine, the ground beneath it, the spirits, and all the territory tainted by the Centipede Sage were sucked in.
Into the glass bullet.
The centipede’s voice rang out in a dying scream, and then…
The now-blackened glass orb dropped into the hollow left where the shrine once stood.
On the surface of the orb, now about the size of a fist, was the engraved image of a centipede.
The rough, bold carving gleamed gold for a moment like a fragment of a sacred scripture from the Church of the Luminous Unknown, but then, as if blocked by the sealing power, the light faded.
Soon, the surface of the glass orb cooled and turned to solid silver.
Agent Bronze walked over to the pit, picked up the silver orb, inspected its surface thoroughly, then put it into his pouch.
And then he declared,
[1] 搏 – a character that means ‘to be entangled’, ‘to bind’, ‘to tie’, etc. ↩
[2] 䥗 – a character that means ‘branding iron’ or ‘to solder’ ↩
sidenote: I’m not really the best at hanja or chinese though, so please take these translations with a grain of salt~