WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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Chapter 4: Is the Site Bad?

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After hunting the evil spirit last night, I slept soundly.

The smell of holy oil was overwhelming, but nothing took priority over sleep.

It wasn't the evil spirit's stench or the overpowering smell of holy oil that woke me.

Clack, clack!

"Urgh!"

A heavy impact struck my stomach.

When I opened my eyes, trembling, Gari's huge body was sitting squarely on top of me.

It's not like you're a puppy waking me up in the morning. What the hell...

Clack, clack!

"Okay, okay."

I'm getting up. I'm getting up.

For an angel, Gari sure loves forcing a healthy lifestyle on people.

It was ten in the morning.

Still pretty late, though.

Normally, I'd be heading to my convenience store shift around now, but I'd quit while handling the funeral.

I hadn't wanted to do anything, so it seemed I'd gotten used to being lazy.

Maybe I should find a job.

The house and savings my parents left me would keep me going for a while, but watching my savings shrink still put pressure on me.

"Ugh, that smell. I should air the place out."

The consequences of smelling ghosts and spraying holy oil all over my room had finally caught up with me.

First, I threw open the windows and decided to evacuate until the smell faded.

As I stepped outside, the woman next door was just about to knock on my door.

"Oh, young man? You were home?"

"Uh... Hello."

"It's nothing, but the smell... Ah, so it was coming from next door after all. I was wondering why it smelled so strongly of cinnamon...!"

The woman next door recoiled after catching the scent of holy oil pouring out of my home.

"I-I'm sorry. I spilled some cinnamon powder yesterday..."

"Can cinnamon alone smell this strong? Anyway, please be more careful. The smell kept me up all night. Then early this morning, there was some glass-breaking sound too. It's been awfully scary around here lately."

Oh, right. The window had broken too.

I apologized repeatedly, promised to get rid of the smell, then headed outside.

At least I'd taken care of that ghost, so I wouldn't need to spray holy oil for a while...

"Argh!"

There was a ghost behind the utility pole.

It wasn't some grotesque evil spirit, but the ghost of a child, hiding behind the pole and watching us.

【Eek!】

The child ghost met my eyes and hid their face.

What? This one's different from the ghosts I'd seen so far.

Then I spotted the flowers and photograph placed beneath the utility pole.

Right.

There'd been a traffic accident around two months ago.

A drunk driver had sped down this alley and hit an elementary school student, killing them.

The child's tragic story had spread, and people had left memorials. Don't tell me...

"Are you Han Gyeoul?"

【......】

The ghost reacted when I said the name of the child who'd died in the accident.

"Are you Han Gyeoul?"

The child ghost gave a tiny nod.

So this really was Han Gyeoul, the child from that accident.

Since they could understand me, I thought I'd try talking to them and stepped closer. The child ghost jerked back in terror.

"Ah. Gari, could you move back a little?"

Clack?

"The kid's scared of you."

Claaack...

Don't act all deflated just by clicking your teeth...

Once Gari moved about twenty meters away, Han Gyeoul's ghost cautiously poked their head out.

"I'm not a bad person. I'm nice~"

When I approached in a friendly way, Han Gyeoul's ghost relaxed and came closer.

Their bright, round eyes were cute, so I tried to pat their head. My hand passed straight through.

Is it because they're a ghost and I can't touch them?

Just as I wondered that, Han Gyeoul's ghost staggered backward in fright.

"Gari, I told you to stay over there."

Clack...

It looked like Gari had come closer, making the child try to run away again. But...

"What are you doing?"

Han Gyeoul's ghost couldn't go beyond a certain range.

Like they were tied to something, they could only struggle desperately at some invisible boundary.

"Ah."

An Earthbound Spirit?

I thought I'd heard of those.

Earthbound Spirits tied to a particular place couldn't leave that area.

I'd probably seen it in a movie or one of those occult videos on HooTube. That had to be it.

【Sob! Hic...!】

Ah, they started crying.

"We're going over there, Han Gyeoul!"

I hurried past the utility pole with Gari.

Han Gyeoul's ghost clung tightly to the pole, finally seeming relieved. It kept bothering me.

They said ghosts were born from lingering resentment, so how had such a young child built up so much resentment?

Still, there was nothing I could do.

"Hm?"

Something was strange, though.

I'd seen a ghost, but there was none of that distinctive rotten smell.

Come to think of it, Gari didn't really smell either...

"Do only evil spirits smell?"

I'd heard there were different kinds of ghosts.

There were ordinary ghosts, and ghosts that became evil spirits.

Maybe a quiet ghost like Han Gyeoul, an Earthbound Spirit, didn't smell because they weren't an evil spirit.

Anyway, just as I was thinking ghosts came in different types...

"Ah."

The stench.

My nose was nearly blocked from the holy oil I'd smelled all night, yet I caught that smell the moment I came outside?

I'd seen four ghosts over the last few days.

Three of them were evil spirits reeking of rot.

Is this normal?

"Is this neighborhood built on a bad site or something...?"

Shouldn't I bring in a shaman and hold a gut ritual or something?

There were so many evil spirits that even a Christian like me was saying that.

Of course, I'd only started seeing ghosts recently, so it wasn't like I knew enough neighborhoods to compare it to...

"This is dangerous..."

The problem was that evil spirits moved around.

I had no idea how they knew where I was and came flocking to me, but seeing that evil spirit outside my window in the middle of the night had scared the hell out of me.

"First..."

Let's find out how many evil spirits there were.

After returning home, I decided to ride my bicycle around the neighborhood.

I went to the area where I'd first smelled one.

Then I headed in the opposite direction to see if there were other smells, and of course there were.

One west of my house, one east of it.

Come on. There couldn't be any north and south too, right?

【Cackle! Cacklecackle!】

Oh, there were.

One was in front of the subway station north of my home.

And to the south... Whoa, a water ghost? Maybe someone had drowned in Tancheon Stream.

There were several others too. The stench of rot also hung over a fairly large general hospital in my neighborhood.

"Wow. Seriously. Seriously..."

Should I move?

If this place had bad feng shui, it was way worse than normal.

What if all the evil spirits came at me at once?

The convenience store evil spirit?

Fine, I'd just been unlucky enough to make eye contact with that one.

I'd also run into the bus evil spirit by bad luck, but the problem was that it had charged at me the moment it saw me.

Then there was the third evil spirit.

That one had come looking for me.

I'd only caught its scent nearby, so how had it noticed where I was and come after me?

Which meant the same thing could happen again.

Was I supposed to spend the rest of my life spraying cinnamon-scented holy oil because I was scared of evil spirits visiting every night?

If I kept spraying it for a few more days, the neighbors would report me.

"Whew..."

A complaint and fight with the neighbors would be the worst-case scenario, but fine.

There were two serious problems.

First, I'd have to live in constant fear of evil spirits showing up, spraying holy oil all the time.

Second, if several evil spirits attacked together, could Gari still beat them all?

Both involved my life, so I couldn't take either one lightly.

The best solution was to move.

Leave this cursed place, find somewhere safe and presumably ghost-free, and relocate.

Since I could smell evil spirits, finding a good place wouldn't be hard.

But there was a problem.

The scariest problem of all. Money.

I owned this house, but half of it was still bank debt.

If I tried to sell immediately, I'd have to put it up as a rushed sale. And as if anyone would give me a good price for a rushed-sale villa in a villa neighborhood.

It wasn't a loss that a fresh graduate who'd only just finished the military and university could handle.

If my life was on the line, I could do anything, but... I had a guardian angel, didn't I?

"Gari. Against the ghosts we've seen so far... can you definitely beat them one-on-one?"

Clack? Clack, clack!

Gari understood me and nodded.

Yeah, an angel didn't seem like the sort to lose to some trashy little ghost.

With Gari's fighting ability, Gari could probably beat most evil spirits.

Especially if Gari struck first.

At least I had one advantage. I could smell evil spirits well.

Maybe I'd awakened some kind of spiritual ability, because the closer an evil spirit was, the more strongly I could smell that rank dirty-rag stink.

Good. I'd made up my mind.

I'd strike first.

* * *

There were many names for land, but in the mystical world, there was a specific term for places where ghosts gathered unusually well.

Called Graveyard Feng Shui and regarded as the dwelling place of the dead, such sites were places where yin energy gathered, usually formed over time.

A representative example was a public cemetery.

Where people died and were buried, ghostly energy was naturally more likely to gather. When enough such places accumulated, yin energy had no choice but to collect, whether anyone wanted it to or not.

The more a place's yin energy lingered without dispersing, the greater the chance that powerful ghosts would be born there.

Depending on the circumstances, a simple Yin Site could become an Ill-Omened Site, then even a Malevolent Site.

That was why such Yin Sites were always targets for occult practitioners.

Those who handled yin energy could ask for no better land.

"Goddammit. What the hell happened?"

Every evil spirit that had been planted there had disappeared.

It had been a pretty good plot of land.

A large hospital stood there, along with a funeral hall, making it a place overflowing with yin energy.

Yin energy kept accumulating, yet there was no outlet for it to escape through, nor any spiritually potent building to suppress it.

If the flow of water was cut off there, or if souls who died in accidents were brought in, the yin energy would become even more clogged, strengthening the spirits.

The past few months had produced decent results.

Several traffic accidents and deaths at construction sites.

Vengeful spirits had been created, then fed weaker souls until they devoured one another within the site.

Once those souls became evil spirits, they could be embedded in hidden Possession Stakes, where even most practitioners wouldn't find them.

This plot had been progressing into an Ill-Omened Site, and a Ghost Vein that absorbed the surrounding yin energy had been set to form there...

"Some lunatic is going around killing every evil spirit!"

These were evil spirits raised in a gu vessel. It was safe to say that their passage to the afterlife was nearly impossible.

That meant they had been erased through exorcism, but some practitioner skilled enough to do that had just happened to pass by and discover the Ill-Omened Site he'd created?

The evil spirits he had raised had been hidden carefully in the Possession Stakes planted beforehand.

Most practitioners would have passed by without detecting the slightest trace.

But someone had found every one of them?

"Master, we haven't heard that any practitioners came into the area. This land hasn't even been mentioned among the Mystic Association's exorcists."

"Then who the hell was it? Did some lycanthrope with a bloodhound's nose show up?"

It was impossible.

Practitioners skilled in tracking sometimes used a dog's sense of smell through a medium, but these Possession Stakes were not something they could locate that way.

It was a ritual for the Sevenfold Correction Curse that he had prepared for over half a year.

He had planned it thoroughly and kept it hidden, yet someone had found it?

"Do something! Find them! What are you going to do if this place turns into an auspicious site?"

With the evil spirits that had absorbed yin energy dying one after another, the land could instead be cleansed.

That meant all the time and resources invested over half a year would go to waste.

"Hurry. The date of the offering promised to Decarabia is right around the corner! If we can't offer evil spirits, then offer that practitioner instead!"

At the roar of their master, the mage Kim Mun-ryong, his disciples hurried into action.

If they angered Kim Mun-ryong, contractor to Decarabia, one of the seventy-two demons of the Lemegeton, they would become sacrifices offered to the demon.

Footnotes:

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