Chapter 60: It's All Mine

[Translator – Aren]

As a kid, I’d always go to sleep on Christmas Eve with my heart pounding in anticipation.

It wasn’t really about whether Santa Claus actually existed. I just couldn’t wait to see what present would be waiting for me. The only thing that’s changed now that I was an adult was that I have to earn my own presents.

Some people might find that a little depressing.

But I, Baek Jemin, am not the kind of man who got hung up on trivial details like that. I drew my combat knife, gave it a few playful swings, and happily unwrapped my present.

"Look at these things, all wrapped up nice and tight. Off with the goggles, off with the mask~.”

Being the refined and sensitive gentleman that I was, I didn’t want to accidentally touch Ski Goggles’ lips. So I carefully hooked the tip of my knife into the mask and peeled it away. My right hand guided the knife, while my left hand lifted the goggles. I just wanted to see what his face looked like.

It was far more grotesque than I’d imagined.

"Uwagh!”

"Jemin-ssi, why are you making such a fuss now…Agh!”

-Clang!

I instinctively dropped my knife and stumbled backward. Lee Sejun, who’d been about to make fun of me for overreacting, took one look at Ski Goggles’ face and recoiled just as fast.

Hamza shuddered as though he’d witnessed something no human was ever meant to see. Only Shin Nain and the pastor widened their eyes, staring intently at Ski Goggles’ exposed face.

"So this is the price Ritual-type wizards pay. What the hell did he make a contract with?”

"A fitting appearance for one of the Devil’s servants.”

Ski Goggles’ bare face was covered in V-shaped cuneiform symbols. They’d been carved into his skin in irregular, asymmetrical patterns, facing every which way. From a distance, you’d mistake them for tattoos or body paint, but having seen them up close, I could say with absolute certainty.

Those weren’t tattoos or body paint.

His flesh had been gouged out in the shape of cuneiform characters. His cheeks, forehead, lips, nose bridge, and philtrum, across his entire face…V-shaped marks of every imaginable size and orientation pitted his skin, each one sealed over with dark, dried scabs.

The worst part was that several of those cuneiform symbols even spread into his eyes.

Or rather the whites of his eyes, if you could call them that.

They were stained with crimson cuneiform symbols that drifted lazily across his eyeballs like something floating on water. A shiver ran through me.

Every instinct I had screamed in revulsion. Looking at Ski Goggles’ face covered in those filthy V-shaped markings awakened a violent impulse.

I wanted to scrape every inch of his face away with a blade until there was nothing left.

The problem was that I needed to remove or destroy the eyeglass bearing those magical symbols in order to claim the relic’s power.

Lee Sejun quietly took several more steps backward, then shrugged as if he were making some grand sacrifice.

"Wow~ Lucky you, Jemin-ssi~. I’m not an Eyes-branch wizard, after all.”

"Good Luck, Jemin-ssi. If you close your eyes, you might mess it up, so you should probably keep them open.”

Before I knew it, Lee Sejun and Hamza had huddled together, both trembling from head to toe.

Honestly, if someone asked me whether cockroaches or Ski Goggles’ cuneiform-covered face were more disgusting, I’d rather keep a cockroach as a pet.

If destroying the body parts of Alteration-type wizards wasn’t how you inherited their power, I’d have simply burned the whole thing.

Apparently everyone else felt the same. Even Shin Nain absentmindedly fidgeted with his rifle as he looked at me.

"Should I just smash this thing?”

"No, no… I’ll handle it. Besides, if you destroy it, how are we supposed to use your Ears-branch, Stage 3 to extract information out of this guy?”

No matter how revolting it was, it still had to be done.

We still needed to squeeze every scrap of information out of him using Shin Nain’s Ears-branch, Stage 3 magic, even if it meant using leading questions. If I smashed everything just because it looked disgusting, what exactly would we have to recover? I wasn’t some primitive caveman who sentenced things to death just for being ugly.

-Sssup, Haaah—.

Inhaling and exhaling through my gas mask, I reversed my grip on the combat knife.

For harvesting, it was much easier to stab downward with a reverse grip than to hold it normally.

As if it’d simply needed a little more time, the magical symbols finally surfaced in Ski Goggles’ eyes, like a crab shell turning a vivid orange-red once it’s cooked.

A distorted square forcibly crammed inside a triangle.

The symbol representing the Eye drove away the surrounding cuneiform and settled squarely over the pupil.

Now, all I had to do was extract it.

Maybe this was how bounty hunters in the old days felt when they cut off a wanted man’s head.

Crouching low, I began harvesting the relic with the tip of my combat knife held in a reverse grip.

-Slice, slice.

The handle transmitted the sensation of scraping against bone. Then came the unmistakable feeling of piercing something soft vibrating up through my fingers.

By the time I finished, I was holding Ski Goggles’ pair of eyeballs in my hand. Without hesitation, I placed them on the ground and raised my foot.

That was when Pastor Park Yohan blinked and held up a hand.

"Wait a second, Jemin. Since there’s a pair of them, couldn’t you split them with Nain, taking one each…”

"No! They’re all mine!”

A Ears-branch, Stage 3 wizard trying to get his hands on Eyes-branch, Stage 2 magic as well?

Absolutely not.

-Crunch!

Ski Goggles’ eyeballs burst beneath my heel. Just like before.

Just like the Dubai Sticky Witch’s tongue root and heart, the eyeballs released a sharp hissing sound, pouring out fog. The moment it enveloped my entire body…

I was once again flooded with knowledge.

Words and languages I’d never heard before, poured endlessly into my mind. It felt as though I’d been dropped into the center of a debate hall where dozens of different people were all shouting over each other, each determined to say only what they wanted to say.

Even throwing diehard supporters of opposing political parties into the same room would’ve sounded infinitely more civilized than the voices echoing through my head now.

The ominous, revolting voices tearing through my mind were a chaotic cacophony, worse than a construction site. Their tones lurched unpredictably. Their pronunciations slurred together. They screeched like a recorder played horribly off-key.

Even the strained groans of someone with a ruined voice or vocal cords drowned in phlegm would have sounded clearer than this.

Trying to salvage useful knowledge from voices filthier than industrial wastewater demanded incredibly grueling levels of concentration. In some ways, it was even worse than the pain I felt whenever I used Eyes-branch magic. The sensation of eyeballs being rubbed against coarse plastic.

The harder I focused, the more my forehead throbbed and the more my skull ached.

The more I listened, the dizzier I became. The harder I tried to uncover any pattern, the more nauseous I felt.

But, just as a man dying of thirst would scoop muddy ditch water into his hands and drink it, I, too, desperately scooped up meaningful knowledge from that disgusting cacophony.

Organizing the pieces of knowledge Ski Goggles possessed that I could actually understand, it amounted to this:

The Seoul wizards’ classification of magic was far more systematic and far more detailed than anything the military knew.

First. The Incantation-type magic. This was an academic discipline of magic encompassing everything from the curses cast by Korean shamans and tarot card divination to the esoteric secrets of alchemy attributed toHermes Trismegistus.

Naturally, most Seoul wizards initially lacked the knowledge to use Incantation-type magic properly.

But after January 6th, as chaps spread following the threshold breach, information about Incantation-type magic gradually circulated. Some Alteration-type wizards supplemented their firepower with Incantation-type magic and survived because of it.

Second. Ritual-type magic. A contract-based form of magic that came to be recognized once Incantation and Alteration-type magic became widely understood.

At its core, Incantation-type magic was humanity’s attempt to recreate and manipulate natural phenomena according to human will.

Science and Incantation-type magic were far more alike than most people realized. The key difference was that science sought the principles behind natural phenomena through empirical experimentation, while Incantation-type magic sought those same principles in divine beings, attempting to control supernatural phenomena through rituals.

Ritual-type magic, meanwhile, focused specifically on the ceremonies ancient spellcasters had originally used to command or commune with divine beings. Through revelations received in dreams or through painstaking personal research, a wizard would form a contract with one of these higher beings and borrow its power in the form of spells.

Very few such divine beings were known to exist. And because revealing the terms of a contract, or the spells granted by it, made them vulnerable to being countered, those secrets were guarded at all costs.

Contracts with these divine beings were extraordinarily dangerous. Once one’s Contract Progress reached 100%, certain destruction was guaranteed.

Even Ski Goggles himself didn’t fully understand the being he’d contracted with.

He’d only pieced together guesses based on the cuneiform slowly covering his body and the grimoire he’d created with his own hands.

Even so, the doom he believed awaited him was becoming nothing but cuneiform himself.

He believed that once his destruction was complete, he would become a single page of a grimoire like theNecronomicon from the Cthulhu Mythos. To postpone that fate, he offered sacrifices. 

The divine being Ski Goggles had contracted with demanded only fresh, raw meat.

A remarkably difficult commodity to obtain in a Seoul buried beneath endless fog.

He’d probably started by searching for freezers in occupied districts or looting grocery stores that hadn’t already been stripped bare. Eventually he changed tactics and began hunting ordinary civilians instead.

He deliberately avoided targeting wizards.

The cost in familiars was simply too high.

Ski Goggles estimated that roughly tens of thousands of wizards had survived throughout Seoul. Of those, he believed only around 10 thousand had actually reached Stage 2 or beyond and were genuine threats. He assumed every one of them was hiding their true strength, so he’d cautiously preyed only on ordinary people.

And that was where I heard about another hidden effect of Ears-branch magic.

How had Ski Goggles awakened Ritual-type magic in the first place?

The moment that question crossed my mind, the filthy cacophony that had been tormenting me without pause gradually faded away, and a familiar voice emerged.

[The 66 Society?]

Ski Goggles.

His voice was still rough from cigarettes and alcohol, but unlike when we’d fought him, it was calm and strangely polite.

[Who the hell are they? Why do they care how I learned it?]

He was talking to someone.

Before I knew it, my vision had become a hazy image of Ski Goggles’ hideout while he was still alive. The ears. Every sound they picked up sharpened my other senses.

[Seriously?]

As the vision grew clearer, I finally saw the hideout.

The first thing that caught my eye was a window completely sealed shut with blackout curtains and wooden barricades. A pentagram painted in blood stained the blackout curtain, its crimson lines dripping like bloody tears. Even inside his own hideout, Ski Goggles remained wrapped from head to toe. Holding aChinese cleaver, he was chopping something apart.

-Chop, chop, chop, chop...

The rhythmic sound of the cleaver striking the cutting board echoed pleasantly through the room.

The walls were cracked, their wallpaper peeling away after countless bombardments. Aside from the human hands nailed to those walls, hanging limply from iron spikes, it almost looked warm and homey.

A dented aluminum pot bubbled gently on the stove. Ski Goggles chopped a human hand into pieces, bones and all, then used a sharpened pen nib to carefully carve something into each piece.

Someone else might have seen nothing but brutality and madness there, but I saw dedication. The almost reverent concentration of someone utterly absorbed in his craft.

Ski Goggles switched his spell phone to speaker mode and set it on the table before twirling the bloodstained Chinese cleaver in one hand.

His voice was so clear now. It sounded as though he were standing right beside me.

"Man. Those guys are completely insane.”

He let out a dry laugh, but he didn’t seem upset.

He simply kept smiling to himself, carefully carving cuneiform into a severed human wrist with the pen nib, one stroke at a time. Eventually he even started humming.

Then he set both the pen and the wrist aside and walked over to the blackout curtain. Hooking a finger beneath its edge, he lifted it just a fraction, barely enough to peek outside, before immediately letting it fall again.

When he returned to the cutting board, there was an unmistakable spring in his step.

"But this actually sounds doable. So if I share what I know about Ritual-type magic, what exactly are you offering me in return?”

I couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the spell phone.

Instead, I watched Ski Goggles hurriedly gather up writing supplies. When he couldn’t find a notebook, he dug through a heavy pile of black garbage bags stacked in the corner.

A few seconds later…

He slapped a severed woman’s pale forearm onto the cutting board. Its wrist had been cleanly cut off, and no cuneiform had been carved into it yet.

"Hang on…July 7th, 2:30 AM. Prepare the ritual circle and the ceremony…and the incantation was…?”

-Scratch, scratch.

Watching him use a sharpened pen nib to write notes directly onto someone’s forearm as though it were nothing more than a memo pad was so disturbingly ordinary that I was the one experiencing cognitive dissonance.

Even while gouging deep enough to scrape against bone, I could hear Ski Goggles swallow.

"66 for the sake of 7. 55 in pursuit of 66. A pair of eyes seeking to understand 55. Perfect. Gotta help out our fellow Seoul folks.”

-Pop.

The pen nib slipped free from the dead woman’s arm.

Setting the blood-smeared pen aside, Ski Goggles casually wiped the blood from his fingers onto his long padded coat.

"Go to sleep. Symbols representing each god are hidden throughout this damned fog. If you’re lucky, you’ll find one. Sleep beside the symbol, dream through the symbol, and you’ll receive a revelation. Maybe even an offer.”

But wiping away the blood did nothing to erase the cuneiform covering his body.

Without thinking, Ski Goggles raised his left hand. Then he saw the irregular V-shaped cuneiform covering the back of it, pitted into his flesh like scars of pockmarks.

-Crunch!

He drove the pen nib straight into the back of his own hand. Then he began gouging widely, digging the cuneiform out one mark at a time. 

But no matter how deeply he carved, no matter how much flesh he tore away, the V-shaped cuneiform wouldn’t disappear. Blood pooled inside the wounds, forming new V-shaped marks.

Eventually he stopped struggling.

After taking a slow breath after more than a single blink…

His left hand had already returned to normal. Without a single wound. Still covered in cuneiform.

"One more favor."

He rubbed his hands together over and over, desperately trying not to look at the cuneiform etched into them.

"Just tell me where the useless non-wizards are hiding. Food’s getting hard to come by for everyone, right? By now some of them should’ve changed their minds. Time to face reality. If you’re not a wizard, you’re not even human. Even if you save them, they’ll just turn into monsters anyway.”

The moment Ski Goggles abandoned the cutting board and headed toward a corner, he picked up one of those tent stakes, rapped it against the wall a few times, then began stuffing his backpack.

"Wouldn’t it be a hundred, no, a thousand times better for us to use them efficiently and raise our own levels than to make one more monster?”

-Tap.

"I can make 10 thousand times better use of them. Call me.”

The instant Ski Goggles, backpack slung over his shoulders, struck the wall one last time with the stake, the vision ended.

I’d completely absorbed the power of the relic.

At the same time, understanding of Stage 3 Alteration-type magic flooded into me like the incoming tide.

Stage 1, Retrospection. You look back on happiness to understand pain.

Stage 2, Grief. You fall from happiness and experience pain. Mind and body mourn unavoidable suffering, purifying the heart through sorrow.

Stage 3. Overcoming. You either reject your pain or embrace it.

Whether you’re preparing to escape suffering or to revel in it willingly, this is the stage of resolve.

And I was already enjoying my pain.

* * *

"Bleeeeaaaaaargh…”

Throwing up had become second nature by now.

The instant I felt it coming, I yanked up my gas mask before it could become a vomit-filled disaster inside. Sure, my puke splattered all over the asphalt instead, but roads were made for that anyway.

As I knelt there with one hand on the ground, retching my guts out, I heard someone clicking their tongue overhead.

"Hah. Baek Jemin, you’re completely insane. You stomped both of them just because you didn’t want to share.”

"Jemin-ssi, shouldn’t we at least have tested what would’ve happened if you and Nain-ssi had each taken one eye?”

"Bleegh…Peh!”

I spat after hearing Lee Sejun’s calm-sounding nonsense.

"If we each stomped one and neither of us leveled up, I’d be the only one losing out. Why the hell would I do that? Are you crazy?”

I’d come all the way into this fog-covered Seoul for the sake of magic, and they wanted me to give that up?

Might as well tell someone to stop breathing because breathing eventually made one grow old.

After emptying my stomach and catching my breath, I gave everyone a brief summary of everything I’d seen and learned.

Pastor Park Yohan looked down at Ski Goggles’ corpse, absently rubbing the trigger with his finger.

"So if an Ears-branch wizard destroys a relic, they can directly witness memories from when its owner was alive?”

"Yeah. My Ears-branch magic’s only Stage 1, so it’s pretty lousy, but from now on, I think useless wizards’ relics should go to Nain-ssi.”

According to the knowledge I’d gained after destroying the Dubai Sticky Witch’s tongue, there was a limit to how far destroying relics could raise your level.

Your realm only increased when you destroyed the catalyst of a wizard from the same branch, who’d reached a higher stage than you.

As for inheriting knowledge from the wizard’s life, that depended entirely on how much occult knowledge the person destroying the catalyst already possessed. If someone like Shin Nain or Lee Sejun spent all their time slacking off instead of studying mysticism, those priceless fragments of knowledge simply scattered into nothing.

But, Ears-branch wizards seemed able to ignore that restriction.

When I looked toward Shin Nain, who had undoubtedly overhead everything in my head, he was staring down at Ski Goggles’ corpse with open disgust.

For a moment I wondered if he’d understood everything I’d learned from the vision as well, but that might as well be wishful thinking.

The fanatic lunatic had apparently spent the entire time I was trapped in the vision poking Ski Goggles’ corpse with the barrel of his rifle.

While Hamza flailed helplessly beside him, Shin Nain was busy prodding at the cuneiform covering Ski Goggles’ face.

"Nain-ssi. That's filthy. Don’t touch that!”

"He’s someone who worshipped false idols instead of the Lord and may have harmed our brothers and sisters in the Church. Even a heathen like you should understand why I want to make him suffer just a little longer!”

"I don’t. And I don’t need to.”

"Ah, Lord! There truly is no reasoning with someone outside Your flock!”

The only person who could stop this mess was Pastor Park Yohan, the only other fanatical Christian among us.

Catching my pleading look, Pastor Park Yohan slowly shook his head, then walked over to Shin Nain and quietly rested a hand on his shoulder.

"Shin Nain.”

"Pastor, we have to burn him. He should suffer in hellfire long before he ever reaches Hell!”

"Judgment belongs to the Lord. Not us. Our duty isn't to judge but to help unbelievers repent before they commit even greater sins.”

"But…Pastor…”

"We’ve already sent him before the Lord. That’s enough. Let’s go. We’ve spent too much time here.”

"But this man made a pact with a demon. I could tell from Baek Jemin-ssi’s thoughts. He was someone led astray by a demon through dreams!”

"What?!!!”

-Bam, bam, bam!

Pastor Park Yohan and Shin Nain immediately started smashing Ski Goggles’ head with their rifle stocks and kicking it over and over until it was nothing but pulp. Even our ancestors pounding rice cakes with a mortar duringChuseok probably weren’t this enthusiastic.

It happened so fast and with such terrifying violence that Lee Sejun and Hamza could only stand there trembling.

I was just as horrified, but all I could think about was how those lunatics were about to destroy valuable loot. I hurriedly jumped between them.

"Wait!”

"What now?!”

"Jemin-ssi, please move. This is purification!"

I raised a hand, stopping both of them, then spoke in the calmest voice I could manage.

"At least let me flip him over and take his backpack off first. Then you can keep going.”

* * *

April 19th, 2028, 3:24 PM.

Day 5 of our expedition.

After defeating the attacker known as Ski Goggles, we recovered his backpack and finally made it past Mongchontoseong Station. It would’ve been a perfect outcome if not for Lee Sejun grumbling nonstop behind his gas mask.

"So now you’re dumping this job on me too.”

"You’re a Stage 3 Heart-branch wizard who doesn’t even need to take a dump anymore, you can carry a little luggage. We burned through a ton of ammo, so it should be lighter now anyway.”

"Easy for you to say when you’re not carrying it.”

"Hey. I’ve got stuff to lug around too.”

Of course, it wasn’t all good news.

Our battle against Ski Goggles had eaten through our remaining ammunition at an alarming rate. We had about 800 rounds left. If we hadn’t looted extra ammo from the Jangji Station department store, we’d already be completely dry.

As a result, the Supreme Archmages had no choice but to divide our battlefield roles.

There was Lee Sejun, who had Heart-branch, Stage 3 and Hand-branch, Stage 1 magic. The Bloody Fist who could kill monsters through sheer physical power alone.

And then there was me, Baek Jemin, the Supreme among the Supreme Archmages, armed with Eyes-branch, Stage 3, Hand-branch, Stage 2, Tongue-branch, Stage 2, and even Ears-branch, Stage 1 magic.

The two of us each carried only a single magazine, gripping our blood-soaked combat knife and Bloody Fist, respectively, as we took point in close combat. The truth was, aside from the two of us, everyone else would become little more than walking tin cans the moment they ran out of bullets.

Lee Sejun took the rear, and I, Baek Jemin, took the vanguard. That was the best formation we could take.

Honestly, my performance today had been so incredible, someone could edit it into a highlight reel and play it at my funeral under the title ‘The Great Archmage in His Prime.’

Only because of Tongue-branch, Stage 2, Hunger, had we been able to neutralize small groups of monsters and keep advancing.

I’d love to brag about every single one of those accomplishments, but I’d save that for my funeral.

The Supreme Archmages safely crossed a massive bridge, repeatedly glancing toward the silhouettes of towering skyscrapers rising beyond the dense fog. Then we found ourselves staring down at the river still flowing beneath us, and an odd feeling settled over us.

Humans were struggling desperately just to survive, yet the river flowed on completely indifferent.

Even the schools of fish below seemed perfectly fine. It was a reminder that these monsters targeted humans alone.

"Everything in Seoul’s just bigger.”

"No. The apartments are tiny.”

While Hamza and Lee Sejun traded pointless remarks, Pastor Park Yohan and Shin Nain were discussing something more serious.

The strange name I'd heard in Ski Goggles’ memories.

"The 66 Society."

"Could they be people who command demons?”

"Hard to say…but they seemed connected to that monk.”

Seeing the two of them getting increasingly grim, I clapped them both on the back.

"Don’t waste time obsessing over something we can’t find right now. Let’s keep moving.”

“We’ve still got to reach the Han River before today’s over.”

"Hmph. Makes you wonder what’s waiting for us there.”

Pastor Park Yohan frowned, while Shin Nain let out a short breath.

"Pastor, I think we should regroup once we reach the Han River.”

"Yeah. We should.”

Resolve returned to the pastor’s eyes.

He turned toward the Supreme Archmages, raised his rifle, and gestured forward.

"Alright, Best of the Best. Break time’s over. Move out.”

"Yessir.”

Lee Sejun answered playfully, then jerked his chin at me.

Grinning, I ran my left index finger along the flat of my combat knife. Across the bloodstained blade, the world [Sharpness], written in my own blood from my left hand, had dried into a dark crimson sheen.

The price, of course, was that both my hands were now wrapped in Hamza’s cat-pattern bandages and gauze.

The moment I tightened my grip on the combat knife and started walking, everyone resumed chatting among themselves.

"If Seoul property prices crash, maybe I’ll finally be able to afford a place.”

"Islam, you actually want to live somewhere like this?”

Leaving behind the screams of monsters devouring one another, we listened instead to the sound of the river flowing.

Each step across the bridge’s titles, stained dark brown with dried blood, brought with it the faint scent of river water beginning to rot beneath the heavy fog. After growing accustomed to the stench of rotten blood, the smell of the river seemed almost clean.

The city was soaked in damp mildew, rotting blood, and the smell of stagnant water.

In a place many would call Hell, we were alive.

And willingly we kept walking toward an even deeper Hell.