Chapter 46 - With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Fortunately, the root of the Seoul mage’s tongue was still there.

Of course, I had to grab what remained and pull it out, but that was a trivial task compared to the reward of advancing my magic. I didn’t forget to wink at the Seoul mage, who had lost most of her head for nothing.

"Wink~. Bleh-bleh-bleh~."

As I enthusiastically mocked her, even pretending to stick my tongue out inside my gas mask, Pastor Park Yo-han gave me a look of utter contempt.

"What are you doing?"

"Teabagging."

"Teabagging? What’s that?"

"Basically, it means taunting someone, Pastor."

At Shin Na-in’s helpful explanation, the pastor heaved a deep sigh.

"Hey. She’s already fucking dead. You think she can see you taunting her? It’s disgusting. Just get on with it."

"Yes, sir."

I didn’t want to keep holding the tongue root, slick with cold bodily fluids, either, so I decided to get it over with.

I sliced it off with my bayonet, set it on the floor, and raised my foot high.

All I had to do now was stomp down. Then I could learn the magic...

"Je-min, what are you doing?"

Lee Se-jun blinked as he asked, while Hamza also gave me a puzzled look.

At this point, I made a very serious confession about just how pampered a childhood the manly Baek Je-min had enjoyed.

"Do I really have to step on something this disgusting myself for it to work?"

"Je-min, cut the bullshit. You just grabbed the tongue root and cut it off. What’s all this whining about it being disgusting?"

Seeing everyone silently agree with Se-jun’s objection broke my heart.

Left with no choice, I squeezed my eyes shut and stomped down.

CRUNCH!

At that moment, fog hissed out. But that wasn’t all.

The tongue-branch magic script I had learned surfaced in my mind and began to glow.

Knowledge I’d never possessed was forcibly shoved into me. Perhaps all my studies of mysticism had paid off: sorting through the countless inspirations and thoughts now arising in my mind was much easier.

It was close to what people commonly called enlightenment.

Only more intuitive, and physically beaten into me.

Fragments of knowledge that had seemed meaningless flashed brightly the instant I stomped on the piece of the Seoul mage’s tongue.

Shattered wisdom of unknown origin flowed through my veins, awakening me all the way to my fingertips.

But just as I couldn’t catch an entire rushing river in my palms, what I understood amounted to only a tiny portion.

Even so, here was what I could say.

Alteration-type magic split broadly into two paths.

They resembled the sefirot and qliphoth of occult mysticism—particularly the Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah. These two pursued inverted paths toward a single ultimate destination.

I couldn’t tell exactly what that destination was... but it was clear that the paths were different.

Eyes, ears, tongue, hands, heart.

They symbolized humanity’s cognition, destiny, adaptability, intellect, and life respectively, and the division depended on whether one affirmed or denied those qualities.

Sefirot—the non-inverted form of alteration-type magic was a system of secret arts that assigned humanity’s characteristics to individual body parts in order to define humanity: the qualities unique to human beings.

Qliphoth—inverted alteration-type magic was a system of secret arts that denied the characteristics of humanity assigned to those individual body parts in order to prove what uniquely human qualities remained despite that denial.

Tongue-branch magic concerned acceptance and change.

The tongue branch of upright alteration-type magic emphasized memetic change through language, one of humanity’s most distinctive characteristics.

The tongue branch of inverted alteration-type magic focused on predation, humanity’s animal instinct, and emphasized ecological adaptability.

As Father Jeong Yong-hwan had surmised long ago, the upright form of Tongue Branch, Stage One was magic that reduced a language humans ordinarily could not speak to human language. Its inverted form was predation magic, devouring other organisms to plunder their memories and experiences.

And that wasn’t all.

The moment I crushed the piece of the Seoul mage’s tongue, I felt myself reach Tongue Branch, Stage Two. I already had two branches that had reached not only Stage One, recollection, but Stage Two, grief, so I recognized it immediately.

Tongue Branch, Stage Two was an explosion of desire.

Interestingly, the upright form produced an explosion of desire, while the inverted form produced an explosion of emotion. Either way, the magic focused on incapacitating ordinary people by unleashing desires or emotions they could hardly withstand.

Furthermore, a mage could acquire the remains of a more advanced mage of the same branch and absorb their essence by eating or destroying them.

They were effectively a kind of fetish object.

The tongue branch was an exception. Since it symbolized acceptance and change—humanity’s adaptability—and its inverted form emphasized predation, it could devour fetish objects from other branches and acquire their power, albeit far less efficiently.

And this entire torrent of knowledge came from the memories possessed by the Seoul mage we’d killed.

... I couldn’t take any more.

"Bleeuuurgh!"

Unable to withstand the surging dizziness, I toppled forward and retched.

I hastily pulled my gas mask up and off, but couldn’t avoid getting vomit on it. Still, I was in no state to clean it. My stomach, large intestine, and small intestine churned as though they’d all gone on strike together, threatening to send even old, backed-up shit out through my mouth.

Thankfully, things didn’t get quite that bad, but I couldn’t prevent all the strength from draining out of me.

When I came to my senses, all my hair was soaked in cold sweat.

Hamza had rushed over and was thumping my back, but the dizziness was so overwhelming that I couldn’t even feel the pain. Forget the world spinning—I’d practically lost all sense of reality.

When I finally managed to hear human voices, I asked a question before answering any.

"Hey... Lee Se-jun, why are you fine? And Shin Na-in, you must’ve overheard my thoughts, too?"

How had they endured that monstrous torrent of knowledge?

I was like this after scooping up a single handful. How the hell were Se-jun and Na-in perfectly fine? Surely they’d studied occult mysticism, too.

They’d attended Anderson Mackenford’s occult lecture with me. If they knew anything about the occult, shouldn’t they be having the same reaction?

That was when Na-in stepped forward.

That shitting bastard Shin Na-in cleared up my question perfectly.

"The very act of listening to such heretical knowledge demonstrates a lack of faith. Je-min, repent."

"You guys listened to Mr. Anderson’s lecture, too."

"Je-min. All I heard was do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do."

Only after hearing that answer from Lee Se-jun, inventor of the eight-note scale, did I fully understand.

These bastards hadn’t studied a single thing about mysticism.

So while I scooped up a handful of knowledge, they couldn’t pick up even a fragment because they had no idea what any of it meant. This was only a tiny fraction of the Seoul mage’s magical knowledge, yet these bastards had let everything go in one ear and out the other. They couldn’t salvage a single thing from the pile of treasure right under their noses.

Come to think of it, these bastards hadn’t shown their faces when monk Cheong-hwi was around and I was listening to all that numerology crap with the pastor, either...!

"Ugh... my blood pressure...!"

"You’re one to talk, Je-min."

"Je-min. First, let’s move away from the vomit smell."

Even after Se-jun’s nonchalant retort and Hamza’s calm response, my indignation refused to fade.

These...

These fucking useless bastards...

* * *

We Supreme Mages decided to rest on the department store’s seventh floor.

Despite the intimidating mannequins stationed right at the entrance, there were fewer signs of people inside than I’d expected. According to the directory illuminated by our tactical lights, the seventh floor housed restaurants, but roughly four months had passed since the crisis began, and there was nothing left.

With the power out, the refrigerators contained nothing but rotten garbage. We did at least pick up a few cans of yellow peaches that had been stocked for chilled peach dishes.

There were signs that someone had cleaned out the supplies inside the refrigerators and behind the restaurant counters, though. Apparently, the place had either been looted long ago or occupied by a survivor group. There were surprisingly few supplies useful for survival, so it was hard not to consider it a bust.

Still, after such a fierce fight, we needed a break.

We moved some tables and chairs out of the pile barricading the emergency entrance and settled down to rest.

Slumping into a chair definitely made me feel a little better.

After all that physical exertion, I should have been exhausted enough to pass out at any moment. Fortunately, the dopamine from acquiring magic and knowledge was keeping sleep at bay.

Thanks to that, we Supreme Mages could sit around a small round table, open a bag of hardtack, and talk. The seventh floor itself seemed safe, Na-in’s past sight and detection had picked up no particular dangers, and, most importantly, Hamza had judged it safe.

Though I did have to pour water from my canteen to rinse out my gas mask.

Even while doing that, I diligently upheld the spirit of benefiting all humanity by sharing what I’d learned. After hearing everything, the pastor rested his chin on his hand and summed it up.

"According to Baek Je-min, when a mage dies, the magic script for the branches they learned appears engraved on the corresponding body parts. Destroy those parts, and you can absorb their knowledge and magic. That’s it, right?"

"Exactly."

"And you can only remember knowledge within your own understanding—in other words, you need a certain foundation?"

"That’s right!"

I couldn’t help applauding the pastor’s neat, concise summary.

He would have achieved great things if he’d learned alteration-type magic. I couldn’t understand why he insisted on doctrinal magic, which was so difficult to combine with it. Surely seeking magic was better than seeking the Lord.

Just then, Na-in returned after spending twenty-five minutes alone in the bathroom singing hymns.

"Je-min! How can a holy warrior of the Lord, wielding alteration-type holy-war arts, harbor such deplorable thoughts!"

"Stop reading other people’s thoughts first."

Hearing the voices of nearby people was clearly the backlash of ear magic, but that bastard Na-in seemed to have reached the point of enjoying it.

He might be a shitting lunatic zealot who sang hymns to relax his sphincter whenever he shut himself in a toilet stall, but however uncomfortable it made me, I had to acknowledge his enthusiasm for magic.

Now look at Lee Se-jun, on the other hand.

Seemingly unhappy that he’d gained no knowledge despite reaching Heart, Stage Three, he idly rubbed his bristly stubble.

"It’s so unfair. Just looking at magic script used to shove knowledge straight into my head. Why do I suddenly have to study now?"

"You say that like you ever studied."

"I became a staff sergeant because I didn’t want to study."

I started to reply, then merely rolled my tongue around in my mouth.

Why was this guy suddenly bringing out facts that were hard to argue with? I wanted to talk back and win, but infuriatingly, there seemed to be nothing I could pick apart.

In the end, I settled for passing on the knowledge I’d gained.

"Looks like the Seoul mage we killed had Tongue, Stage Two and Heart, Stage Three."

The knowledge I’d acquired concerned the difference between upright and inverted alteration-type magic, the magic of each tongue-branch stage, and facts about acquiring magic.

The important point was that mages could ordinarily advance by eating or destroying the remains—the fetish objects—of a more advanced mage of the same branch.

If Se-jun had advanced by destroying her heart, then the Seoul mage must have had Heart, Stage Three. That also explained why our Supreme Mages’ magic had been less effective against her.

The reason my Eye, Stage Two, Na-in’s Eye, Stage One past sight, and his Ear, Stage One mind-reading had all failed to work properly was very simple.

Hamza nodded and put it clearly.

"Higher-level mage blocks lower-level magic. Easy to understand."

When there was a gap in advancement, the lower side had to bust their ass, while the higher side could laugh and beat the shit out of them. Rather than some vague explanation, it was a level difference—easy for adults who gauged combat power with numbers to understand.

But the Seoul mage, who was clearly an alteration-type mage, had failed to overcome the pastor’s absurdly overpowered doctrinal magic, [Soteriological Conviction].

Anyone could see she’d been screwed over by bullshit luck, missing a perfect opportunity and giving us an opening to strike back.

Here, the pastor offered a theory.

He spoke while wiping a smudge off his sly-looking glasses with a lens cloth he’d brought.

"Back in Suwon, Baek Je-min said something about magic. That magic is belief. I can’t be certain what the fundamental difference between doctrinal and alteration-type magic is, but some distinctions seem to be becoming clear."

According to Pastor Park Yo-han’s ongoing observations, doctrinal and alteration-type magic were almost diametrically opposed.

Father Jeong Yong-hwan had learned both, so combining them seemed possible. Looking back now, however, both his doctrinal and alteration-type magic had suffered from weak output or flaws in performance.

"That young priest fellow apparently thought learning both would make him stronger, but I disagree. For starters, the doctrinal magic I use, and the Muslim uses, doesn’t come with horrible pain like yours. You’ve probably noticed."

Alteration-type magic demanded its practitioner’s pain as payment. In return, it guaranteed a diverse range of powerful abilities appropriate to each branch and stage.

Doctrinal magic, on the other hand, demanded strong faith. Regardless of morality or how faithfully someone observed rules, it varied according to their worldview, manifesting through religion, which profoundly shaped a person’s view of the world.

But unlike alteration-type magic, it didn’t provide immediate understanding in the practitioner’s mind. They had to vaguely infer its workings from what happened around them.

That didn’t mean doctrinal magic had no advantages over alteration-type magic.

Unlike alteration-type practitioners, its users didn’t need to endure pain or nausea to learn magic script. Apparently, when exposed to the fog, they instinctively used and awakened to doctrinal magic without any script.

And today, we suspected it had one more strength.

Around then, Na-in addressed the pastor in a voice full of respect.

"It seems doctrinal magic can bypass the resistance that alteration-type mages possess according to their stage of advancement."

"It feels like it applies uniformly, rather than having individual stages. When that flashy Seoul mage charged me, I would’ve been dead if stages applied to my faith in the Lord. Of course, faith has neither stages nor limits."

"I am ashamed. As a fellow Christian, your devotion puts me to shame, Pastor. Ah, Lord God. Why hast Thou granted me alteration-type holy-war arts?"

"Na-in. It’s all God’s work. Rather than doubt, simply believe He has given you a mission and carry it out. Faith is salvation!"

"... Yes. I nearly wavered. Thank you, Pastor. I nearly forgot that the Lord bestowed alteration-type holy-war arts upon me rather than doctrinal magic so that I might drive out the devil’s power...!"

Things had been going so well, and now this fucking nonsense again.

I snapped my fingers repeatedly to bring these overzealous Jesus freaks back to their senses.

"You ugly Christians, quit your fucking nonsense. Let’s hear from Se-jun. So, what’s this Heart, Stage Three you learned?"

Having learned that I should never let Na-in and the pastor get together, I turned the conversation to Se-jun.

He popped a piece of hardtack into his mouth, chewed, tilted his head, then shrugged and tapped his chest.

"Seems pretty useful. I think it lets me choose one thing my body needs and satisfy it."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Well. People have physiological needs, right?"

Se-jun started gesturing as he chewed his hardtack.

True to form, he explained it in crude language, but translated into the cultured vocabulary of yours truly, Baek Je-min, it went like this.

"Hunger, sleep, sex, excretion... It seems to be magic that lets me choose and satisfy one of those essential needs. For example, if I choose hunger, it maintains my body without my having to eat."

At that moment, all the Supreme Mages except Se-jun exchanged looks.

Hamza asked first.

"You feel full without eating?"

"I can, yes."

Next, the pastor lowered his glasses slightly and asked.

"If you eliminate the need to shit, does that, what’s the word, max out your digestion? Like everything that would’ve come out as shit gets absorbed?"

"I think just choosing hunger would get rid of it, too. Wouldn’t it be something like that?"

This time, Na-in asked a question to confirm his suspicion.

"Eliminate the need for sleep, and you don’t have to sleep. Is that correct?"

"Ah. That’s right."

CLAP, CLAP, CLAP...

Someone applauded Se-jun’s clear answer.

It was me, Baek Je-min.

I marveled at the tremendous power of Heart, Stage Three: transcending physiological needs.

Was this magic? It was only Stage Three, yet he could choose one of humanity’s inevitable expenditures and satisfy it completely?

As a mage walking the path toward becoming an archmage, of course I applauded.

But that wasn’t my only reason.

The other three Supreme Mages realized why I was clapping and joined in.

It didn’t matter if monsters came, or some other mage bastard showed up.

At that moment, Hamza, Na-in, the pastor, and I were all sincerely congratulating and welcoming Se-jun’s ascension to Heart, Stage Three.

Only Se-jun failed to understand why we were applauding, narrowing his eyes as he looked around at us suspiciously.

"What’s with everyone?"

The pastor glanced at Na-in and spoke.

"To the end of playing rock-paper-scissors with a mind-reading bastard. Amen!"

Smiling, I explained for Se-jun, who still hadn’t grasped the situation.

"Se-jun, you’re familiar with democracy in the Republic of Korea, right?"

"Uh. Wait..."

Apparently, he’d finally caught on.

With an oh-shit expression, Se-jun hurried to correct himself, but the tide had turned long ago. Na-in and Hamza spoke in unison.

"To Heart, Stage Three mage Lee Se-jun’s permanent night watch!"

"Cheers!"

And just for a moment,

I, willingly yielding the title of archmage to a companion who had advanced beyond me, brought things to a close.

"Long live Archmage Lee Se-jun!"

In the end, Se-jun’s assignment to permanent night watch fell through.

Despite reaching Heart, Stage Three, he vehemently rejected noblesse oblige.

To this selfish bastard, his own mental rest mattered more than four people getting a good night’s sleep.

He swept us all with an icy stare and spoke firmly.

"The moment you make me the permanent night watchman, I’ll show you exactly what I can do."

"What can you do?"

My mocking retort earned a terrifying warning.

"I’ll chew and swallow food twenty-four hours a day, store it in my gut, then spray shit over your faces while you sleep."

"!"

Lee Se-jun... I’d had an inkling ever since this bastard started talking about becoming a gender-swapped pretty girl.

But fuck, did this guy possess no human shame at all?

Breaking into a cold sweat, I exchanged looks with Hamza, Na-in, and Pastor Park Yo-han. The other three were clearly wavering in the face of Se-jun’s fierce resistance.

"Se-jun’s pushing back pretty hard, huh?"

All three nodded at my words, wearing grave expressions.

"Lee Se-jun. I didn’t think he had it in him, but he’s got some serious guts. This won’t be easy."

"Scary. I don’t want a shit storm while I’m sleeping."

"Se-jun means it. Terrifying. To think he’d discard his human dignity merely to avoid permanent night watch."

Na-in’s testimony confirmed that Se-jun wasn’t bluffing.

He was insane. It was only a matter of staying awake twenty-four hours a day, yet in my twenty-eight years of life, Se-jun was the first person I’d met who threatened people with his bowel movements to avoid it. Opinion among the Supreme Mages had no choice but to shift immediately.

The problem was how to assign the night watch.

Our old method had been rock-paper-scissors with the mind-reading Na-in. Even if I deliberately threw a hand on instinct to keep him from reading my thoughts, I couldn’t beat him.

Because Na-in went beyond reading minds—he was just fucking perceptive.

Ten consecutive losses at night-watch rock-paper-scissors taught me that when this bastard acted oblivious, it wasn’t because he lacked awareness. He simply didn’t give a fuck.

He’d only stolen the first watch for one night so far, but how many more first watches would I have to surrender?

We had to fix this now.

So the three of us quickly united behind democracy.

"Let’s make it fair and just rotate the first and last watches."

"That sounds good. Baek Je-min’s right."

"Fairness is a Sunni virtue."

It was a moment when a reasonable man, a Christian pastor, and a Muslim migrant worker came together as one.

But someone fiercely opposed this historic unity: a convert named Shin Na-in, the shitter.

Shaking his head, he began spouting nonsense in a calm voice.

"The Israelites wandered the wilderness, persecuted by countless others because they were few in number. Of course, the fundamental cause was their failure to properly serve the Lord God, but the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah alone shows that greater numbers do not make one righteous."

"And?"

"Let’s be fair and play rock-paper-scissors, or palms-up, palms-down."

"You fucking bastard. What if we don’t?"

"I shall ask leading questions and expose every last one of your most hideous and horrifying memories. What the unrighteous and unrepentant need is truth revealed in the Lord’s name. Amen!"

Na-in’s threat was terrifying, too.

Though in my case, as a decent, reasonable man named Baek Je-min, the damage was minimal. My ugliest secret had already been revealed long ago.

The sin of defecating in a urinal in elementary school, left with no choice because shitters like Na-in had occupied every stall, had long since become public knowledge.

Of course, there was a heartwarming epilogue.

Feeling sorry for the student on cleaning duty who’d had to clean the urinal in my place, I secretly bought them a chocolate conch-shaped bun. A touching tale. I absolutely wasn’t fabricating it now—I’d only just remembered that epilogue.

But not everyone in the world lived with only minor blemishes like me.

Both Pastor Park Yo-han and Hamza could only wilt under Na-in’s relentless pressure.

"Ear-branch magic really is horrifying."

"Oh, Allah."

Se-jun, however, merely watched the discussion with his arms crossed and snorted.

"Go ahead, Na-in. As long as I have a dream, Lee Se-jun, a man of Korea, will never crumble under shame."

"To think I would encounter such a revolting aspiration in my lifetime. Lord God, please grant me the will to endure this trial..."

Even Na-in could only groan in the face of Se-jun’s brazen confidence.

Here, despite myself, I understood Na-in. Of course, both he and Se-jun were enemies obstructing my precious sleep.

But having heard far too much unnecessary detail about Se-jun’s dream, I felt a strange sympathy for Na-in, who had to hear Se-jun’s inner thoughts through ear magic without even the filter of language.

At this rate, I might end up taking Na-in’s side.

The fact that I felt a kinship in suffering with that shitting lunatic zealot was profoundly humiliating. However rich my sensitivity might be, I’d never imagined empathizing with such a worthless bastard.

So I decided to change the subject and pressure Se-jun.

"Se-jun, if you’re not going to erase your need for sleep, what are you going to do? We need to find out what the penalty for erasing a need is anyway."

These were the side effects of each branch that we Supreme Mages currently possessed and had confirmed.

Eye branch. Your eyes just hurt in a fucking unpleasant way. It felt like someone was scrubbing your eyeballs squeaky-clean with plastic or shampoo, complete with the pain.

Hand branch. You had to bleed.

Ear branch. Unless you concentrated, you had to hear every sound around you.

Tongue branch. The papillae bearing your taste buds split, opening wounds.

Yet the heart branch alone seemed to have no penalty. Now that I was convinced magic without a price couldn’t exist, it made sense to assume Se-jun’s Heart, Stage Three had some penalty, too.

Though we could reasonably guess that the price would be easier to bear than those of the other branches.

Just then, Pastor Park Yo-han snapped his fingers, his eyes lighting up.

"Se-jun, how about erasing your sex drive? Then, you know, you’d stop saying you want to become a woman."

I blinked at that, then clapped my hands in agreement.

Right.

Come to think of it, that wasn’t bad.

Na-in and Hamza reacted just as cheerfully and enthusiastically as I did.

"Not bad, huh?"

"Really wonderful idea. Korean Christian imam is excellent."

"Just what I’d expect from you, Pastor. A fine idea."

I was just thinking that even if the night-watch issue went unresolved, this might be a decent ending for everyone.

Then came a disapproving click of the tongue. The culprit was heart-branch mage Lee Se-jun.

With his arms crossed, he raised only his left index finger and wagged it, looking down on us as though we were idiots with eighth-tier school grades.

The sheer condescension of his gaze was something I hadn’t seen since showing my English teacher a mock-exam report with an eighth-tier English score I’d earned without guessing a single answer.

In a calm voice, as though he had no choice, Se-jun explained to the pastor.

"Pastor. Do you think I want to become a gender-swapped pretty girl because of some petty sexual fetish?"

"You don’t?"

"Haaah~. Pastor. If I wanted to become a gender-swapped pretty girl so I could get into that sort of relationship with a man, I’d be gay. Fucking gay!"

MURMUR, MURMUR...

Me, Hamza, Na-in, and Pastor Park Yo-han.

The four of us could only look at one another and whisper.

Wasn’t wanting to become a gender-swapped pretty girl already fucking gay?

For the four of us, who’d provisionally been treating him as gay, Se-jun’s declaration was nothing short of shocking.

Amid that atmosphere, Se-jun uncrossed his arms and thumped his chest with his fist.

"I don’t want to become a gender-swapped pretty girl because of some petty sexual fetish. It’s because I crave validation!"

"Isn’t a gay guy’s desire to be popular with men a craving for validation, too?"

"No!!!"

Pastor Park Yo-han’s timely and reasonable question lost its force before Se-jun’s furious shout.

Se-jun began snapping at us in frustration.

"I just want head pats! Endless affirmation, total affirmation, praise no matter what I do! A rough-looking boy can’t get that, so I want to become a pretty girl! A gender-swapped pretty girl is someone who gets praised and loved just for existing, without doing anything!"

Only then did understanding flicker across the pastor’s and Na-in’s faces.

Even the last trace of contempt vanished, leaving nothing but gentle, benevolent smiles.

"Se-jun, then you should come to church. Jesus loves you unconditionally."

"The moment you come to the Lord, you will know that you were born to be loved."

"Everyone, stop."

I couldn’t even imagine how much bullshit would have ensued if I, Baek Je-min, hadn’t intervened.

Under my firm and thorough mediation, we managed to return to discussing magic. Put a hairy former staff sergeant bastard who dreamed of becoming a gender-swapped pretty girl together with two Jesus freaks, and there was no hope.

The Muslim migrant worker Hamza, a former Pakistani medical student, was the most reasonable person here after me. Aphorism’s future looked grim.

Hamza’s expression darkened, apparently troubled by similar concerns.

"Je-min is most reasonable after me. I worry about Aphorism."

"You said it."

I magnanimously decided to overlook Hamza’s slight misunderstanding.

But times like these were precisely when we needed to keep our wits about us.

On the secured seventh floor of the department store, we properly resumed our discussion of magic. We Supreme Mages could manage a conversation even while the smell of burning corpses drifted up from below.

Through Se-jun, we gained a rough understanding of the heart branch’s penalty.

"A bit more appetite? Eating more? It did feel something like that."

"Come to think of it, Se-jun, you were eating hardtack every time I looked at you."

The stages of heart-branch magic worked roughly like this.

Heart, Stage One. Metabolic efficiency rose to its utmost limit, making it difficult to tire.

Heart, Stage Two. Overall physical capabilities improved, with suppression of aging as a bonus.

Heart, Stage Three. One essential human need or demand could be replaced by magic.

There was almost no penalty at Stage One, but from Stage Two onward, you started eating a lot more. Apparently, enhancing your physical abilities required more food. Still, compared to the degree of improvement, the amount you ate was a mere pittance.

If a single bag of hardtack gave you the strength to throw a grenade through a person’s leg, that certainly qualified as magic.

The penalty of the much-anticipated Stage Three was an increase in another need.

Se-jun suddenly blinked and let out a long yawn.

"Stage Three... uh. Seems like replacing one need increases another instead. Turning off hunger makes me a little sleepy..."

After the four of us grilled Se-jun at the department store table, this was what we established about Heart, Stage Three.

Heart, Stage Three magic was [Complete Need Replacement].

The demands inevitably created by the body’s expenditure, or the desires of the conscious mind—hunger, excretion, sleep, sex, validation, and so on... It could completely satisfy one of humanity’s many needs through magic.

In exchange, the expenditure associated with another randomly selected need increased slightly.

For example, replacing sleep kept you energetic without sleeping, but made you eat a little more. Replacing hunger made you sleep a little more. Replacing sexual desire inflated your need for validation until you needed praise merely for breathing; replacing validation made your sexual desire boil over.

Of these, replacing the need to excrete had the smallest penalty.

It let you eat less, barely feel tired, and retain the same sex drive. The only drawback was a slight increase in the need for validation, making him go on a little more about that damned gender-swap fantasy.

Here, Hamza offered a hypothesis.

Perhaps the penalty remained this small because it felt more like maximizing the efficiency of a life function than replacing that function entirely.

"Probably easier than completely replacing it, so magic backlash is smaller, too."

"The heart branch must be affected by the fog, too. But its penalty is definitely smaller than the other branches’."

As I agreed with Hamza, Pastor Park Yo-han nodded as well.

"When I discussed it with that sham monk Cheong-hwi, he talked about five branches and five aggregates. I thought it was mostly nonsense at the time, but considering the knowledge you acquired, Baek Je-min... this certainly seems to be a magic system designed on the assumption that you’ll ultimately learn all five branches. The heart branch blatantly seems to exist to help withstand the backlash of the others."

"Monk Cheong-hwi clearly knew something."

"He probably came to Seoul because he knew. I don’t think he was your average informed fellow. Looking back, he was subtly teaching us. And those sefirot and qliphoth... You said there are upright and inverted forms, right? Then what happens if that sham-monk bastard comes here and teaches the upright form?"

I wondered what he meant.

When I blinked at him, the pastor heaved a sigh. Perhaps being fellow Jesus freaks put them on the same wavelength: only Na-in widened his eyes as though he’d realized something and clicked his tongue.

He took off his headset, hung it around his neck, and kindly explained for our benefit.

"If that sinister monk Cheong-hwi contacts the mages inside Seoul and passes on his knowledge, the people outside Seoul will lose their informational advantage."

This was the concern the pastor and Na-in had recognized.

Monk Cheong-hwi was deeply fascinated by the practices of esoteric Buddhism, and knew that mystical knowledge and rituals could advance each stage of alteration-type magic.

What would happen if he used knowledge as bait to contact groups of mages inside Seoul and gain influence?

It was difficult to obtain systematically organized occult knowledge within Seoul. If Cheong-hwi’s knowledge spread there, the outside world’s relative informational advantage would weaken.

The Seoul mage’s occult knowledge alone had been this vast. If it were combined with that of a mystic from outside, the magical achievements within Seoul would become irreversible—

I gave a simple answer to that concern.

"Wouldn’t that just increase the chances of getting nuked?"

Once the situation was confirmed to be uncontrollable, the United Nations Security Council could simply sacrifice the Korean Peninsula’s fifty million people and unleash a nuclear baptism.

They could hold some perfunctory memorial event and call it a day. All that diplomacy bullshit was only possible if people were alive, wasn’t it? Humanitarian objections might be raised, but to us Supreme Mages, who had already witnessed countless monsters and the Seoul mage herself, those arguments were utterly useless.

With the Republic of Korea’s government having revealed Seoul’s rampant monsters to the entire world, I doubted the leaders of other countries knew nothing about conditions inside the city.

What kept the nukes away for now was the potential of magic, the first cordon guarded by roughly 140,000 ROK troops, and the second cordon, where mobilized reservists and second-line units held the line with all of Gyeonggi Province designated a quasi-danger zone.

Given the circumstances, even the pastor, always going on about his little lambs, propped his chin on his hand and clicked his tongue.

"That’s the problem."

Pastor Park Yo-han tapped the arm of his sly-looking glasses with his index finger and let out a strained groan.

"If the Seoul mages become too powerful, there’ll be no choice but to fire nukes. It’s almost as though someone’s deliberately trying to make that happen."

* * *