WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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Chapter 96: Representative of Gangnam Holy Temple Church

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The Mystic Association's Special Task Division office.

The Association had been around for over eighty years, yet its strongest exorcist was still Park Bokrye, who was nearing eighty herself.

Of course, her inhuman strength came from years of experience and the mystic traits she'd accumulated while dealing with all kinds of supernatural beings.

The elderly who had survived long enough, including Pastor Park of Gangnam Holy Temple Church, occasionally awakened powers beyond human limits.

Even exorcists usually possessed physical abilities no greater than those of exceptional athletes.

But every now and then, freaks like Pastor Park or Mrs. Park appeared.

"Director, here's the report."

"Mm-hm."

Mrs. Park put on reading glasses to read the report Team Leader Kang Gihan had submitted.

More precisely, they weren't convex lenses. They were concave ones.

Mrs. Park's eyesight was 32.5.

It far surpassed the Guinness World Record.

She saw the world too clearly, to the point that she had to squint or wear concave lenses.

On top of that, the report was written in 0.1-point font.

"Right. Gari Bodhisattva... Baek Yohan captured Kim Gicheol."

"Yes. The Review Division examined the evidence, and we've collected testimony from freelance exorcists, including Eom Honggeun."

"What about the believers?"

"...It seems they all scattered after the incident. They were organized in separate cells, so tracking them down is difficult."

"Tch."

Those cult bastards.

"Even by the old standards, Kim Gicheol was a Black Knot-class sorcerer, and Yohan utterly crushed him without a scratch..."

Before that, hadn't he stopped Kyoto's new Night Parade of One Hundred Demons?

Considering he'd received over a ton of gold bars from the Tsuchimikado Clan, it must have been quite a feat.

Where had a guy like that come from?

That weird maw of his, and the way Pastor Park kept shielding him...

"What are you hiding?"

Pastor Park knew something.

Enough to hand Baek Yohan every last item from the collection left behind by his beloved disciple, Pastor Kim.

A natural-born psychic?

No, that alone didn't explain why he was protecting the boy so fiercely. There was something else, something that could stir up a storm like Pastor Kim had.

That slippery Pastor Park was hiding information from the Association because he didn't trust it.

Well, she would've done the same.

Holy Temple Church had been uncooperative with the Association ever since it recognized the Great Unification Church as one of the Five Great Lineages and publicly declared it an official faction.

Ring-ring!

At that moment, the phone in the Special Task Division director's office rang.

When she picked up the receiver, her secretary's familiar voice came through.

[Director, President Baek is calling.]

"Put him through."

[Yes.]

Soon, Association President Baek Ganghyeon's voice came through.

[Mrs. Park, are you busy?]

"What is it?"

[You know Cheonghak and the Diamond Sect went to Taebaeksan recently. The Mountain Lord was running wild.]

"Lord Choi and Seon Master Unjeong went in with their people to seal it. Why? Did things go bad?"

[...]

For a while, there was no answer, only the sound of sighing.

The punk was sighing already.

Just as Mrs. Park was about to say something, President Baek Ganghyeon spoke.

[I don't know if things went bad, but it's clear they lost control. It looks like something made its way north.]

"North? You mean that north?"

[The Blue House contacted us. Apparently, they're planning to dispatch sorcerers from their side.]

"..."

[They raised absolute hell through the direct line. They say they're treating it as a potential act of war.]

"Why are those commie bastards throwing another fit?"

She said that, but if North Korea was reacting so violently, something really must have happened.

"I'll look into it. You just keep those commie bastards happy."

[Seriously, the nerve of you talking to the Association President like that.]

Mrs. Park hung up and frowned.

"Um... Director? What's going on?"

"You have Lord Choi's number, right? Give him a call."

"That man hardly answers the phone he carries. He always keeps it on vibrate."

There was never a quiet day on this tiny patch of land.

* * *

Sunday morning.

As usual, ghosts packed the area in front of my house.

Some of them had come without knowing that I took Sundays off.

"You lot! Today is the Lord's Day! A day solemnly declared by my lord, the Kirishitan daimyo!"

【Ah, you're not working today?】

【I came out at the crack of dawn for nothing.】

The ghosts who'd come with requests retreated obediently at the mention of a day off.

Not all of them left, though.

"Are you all here to convert?"

【Ah, yes. You told us to come on Sunday morning if we wanted to convert...】

There were around fifty of them. Could I take all of them at once?

"All right, everyone. Get as close together as you can."

When I used spatial jumps with others, only those physically touching me could come along.

The limit was about five people at once, so I jumped straight to Pastor Go's office.

"Jesus, you scared me!"

"Good morning, Pastor Park."

Pastor Go jumped in surprise when I suddenly appeared.

Still, it wasn't like I hadn't warned him.

We'd agreed that whenever I used a spatial jump to get to the church, I'd use Pastor Go's office.

"Right, come on in..."

Whooom!

I repeated the spatial jumps several times.

To bring fifty converted ghosts, Gari, Kohaku, and Eight-Foot Sister, I'd have to do it at least ten more times.

"Why do you keep..."

Whooom!

"...using spatial jumps?"

Whooom!

"What is this?"

Whooom!

"What the hell is this?!"

Whooom!

"Whew, that's everyone."

"Why are you teleporting so damn much?"

"Ah, you can't see them, can you? Don't you have bronze glasses?"

At that, the pastor took out a pair of bronze reading glasses and looked at the ghosts crowding the office.

"Why are there so many..."

"I brought the people who converted this time to church. I think they'll soon make their passage to the afterlife, so I told them to attend until then."

"...You're doing something important."

Judge Kim included, ghosts needed to attend church and all that if they wanted to make their passage to the afterlife and go to Heaven, right?

"I'm not the one in charge of sermons or ministry. Pastor Park is leading the second service today, right?"

"Yes."

"All right, everyone, line up and head into the worship hall."

Just as I was about to lead the converted ghosts there...

"Yohan, come to Pastor Park's office after service. We're doing a job together."

"???"

What was it this time?

* * *

After service, I repeatedly used spatial jumps to take the ghosts back home.

I'd made about twenty group jumps today alone, but there was no sign of my spiritual power being drained.

The dragon node supported me within the sanctuary, but if even group jumps consumed practically no energy, I could use this all I wanted.

Anyway, following Pastor Go's instructions, I arrived at Pastor Park's office.

"Yohan, you need to go to Taebaeksan."

"Taebaeksan?"

A business trip had suddenly landed in my lap.

"What's there?"

"There's a Mountain Lord in Taebaeksan, and it seems the resealing went wrong. I heard things got so bad that North Korea got involved."

"Why would North Korea be involved?"

It was so random. What did North Korea have to do with this?

"Mm, I should explain what a Mountain Lord is first."

"A Mountain Lord literally means the ruler of a mountain, but traditionally, it referred to tigers on the Korean Peninsula."

A tiger was the king of the mountains on the Korean Peninsula. If someone disappeared or died, it usually meant they'd been taken by a tiger.

"That's why Korea mostly had tiger-type monsters. Unlike Japan, we didn't have many different kinds of monsters or evil spirits."

"Those monsters and evil spirits got eaten by tigers."

"...What are they, guardians of the Korean Peninsula?"

Pastor Park shook his head.

"Do you know how many people were eaten by tigers? They probably caused far more damage than most monsters."

"Mountain Lords are tigers that grew into great tigers. Until the nineteenth century, there were so many that each mountain had at least one."

"What happened to all those Mountain Lords?"

"They were exterminated through large-scale tiger hunts during the Japanese occupation. One of the few good things that came out of it, I suppose."

I thought I'd seen something in a textbook about Korean tigers being driven extinct during the Japanese occupation.

From a nationalist point of view, people criticized it as severing the vitality of the Korean Peninsula. Still, was it really that sad that man-eating tigers had gone extinct?

Then again, there'd been a government project that released Asiatic black bears across the mountains. Maybe tigers wouldn't be any different.

"But there was one tiger greater than all the other great tigers, something comparable to the Kyoto White-Faced Golden-Furred Nine-Tailed Fox in Japan. A monstrous tiger that had lived for nearly six hundred years."

When a monster lived too long and became an object of fear and terror, it sometimes gained the power of immortality.

Beings like 《the Count》, progenitor of vampires, 《Kraken》, the legend of the sea, and 《Kyoto White-Faced Golden-Furred Nine-Tailed Fox》.

Taebaeksan's Mountain Lord was one of those cases.

"Onmyoji from Japan came and sealed it back then, but seals are bound to come undone eventually. When it started to waver in the modern era, the Diamond Sect and Cheonghak went to reseal it..."

"Things didn't go well."

"People killed by tigers become Chang-gwi. They're evil spirits that are little more than puppets for tigers. When the seal came undone, a huge number of Chang-gwi the Mountain Lord had killed over the years were released."

"Cheonghak and the Diamond Sect have set up a defensive line and are holding them back, but some of them went up the Taebaek Mountain Range and crossed into North Korea."

Apparently, three entire villages had been devoured by Chang-gwi.

"North Korea is making a huge fuss, claiming this may have been an intentional release."

"Wait, does that even make sense?"

"..."

"..."

What? Why were both of them silent?

"After the war, the North and South had plenty of silent battles."

"One common tactic was dropping monsters and evil spirits into each other's territory. What would you call it? Being assholes? Passing off a ticking bomb?"

"North Korea has a communist regime, so they purged almost all their exorcists. They were almost always on the receiving end."

Apparently, South Korean exorcists had lured evil spirits and monsters across the border because it left no evidence.

South Korean exorcists had even paid monsters that could talk to go to North Korea.

"Anyway, North Korea seems to be remembering those days, because they're completely losing it. They're sending their sorcerers to monitor things and demanding that we solve this together."

"So each lineage is sending representative sorcerers to deal with the Mountain Lord's sealing."

"Ah, the Dragon Maiden Bodhisattva herself is going for the Black Lotus Society."

Oh, Bang Seoryeong?

It'd be nice to see Holy Tyranno again after so long.

Still, when was that brat going to give me a dinosaur?

"I see. But why am I the representative?"

I had no intention of denying that I belonged to Gangnam Holy Temple Church.

The pastors helped me all the time, and it was the church I'd attended from the beginning.

But didn't I lack too much seniority to represent them?

"I'm leaving for Eastern Europe for a week starting now. It's a boring, pedantic gathering where Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox exorcists come together. Will you go in my place?"

"Me? Not a chance."

"Pastor Go has to handle Sunday service while I'm gone."

The other exorcists weren't strong enough to serve as representatives either.

"And more than anything, our opponent is a Mountain Lord. I think Yohan will have a lot to gain."

Why though? Ah!

Mountain Lord equals tiger equals beast.

Could Marchosias's magic work on it?!

Footnotes:

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