1440 - Chapter 57

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 57
Yeonhyung’s Curse Art took place in a sprawling Prayer Hall connected to the side of the Separate Pavilion.
He obtained the Four Pillars of Destiny inscribed with the birth time of the Youngest Son of Wens Group, selecting the most chaotic and inauspicious day to perform the ritual. Since he’d been told he didn’t necessarily have to kill the target, he thought confining him to a psychiatric ward somewhere would do nicely.
In actual shamanic rituals, one doesn’t use a blade to cut living things. The entire ceremony is merely symbolic—a gesture of severing to release the resentment of the dead and aggrieved spirits while conducting intricate rites.
But Baekga was a family that made cursing their trade. The texture was entirely different from ordinary shamanic practice. Beneath the Spirit Pole meant to receive divine grace hung upended Golden Ropes in thick clusters. And talismans covered in inscriptions of incomprehensible characters filled every corner.
In that shadowed space—hardly a place where one would offer prayers to the divine—a cow suspended from a large wooden frame bellowed in agony.
Moo-ooooh, moo-ooooh!
“Cry out, cry! Louder!”
The louder it cried, the better, Yeonhyung said, driving his blade deep into the cow’s hindquarters. With each escalating moo, he felt power surge within him. The two Kitchen Knives in his hands danced.
Yeonhyung fell into a state of frenzy, hacking at the cow. As blood sprayed forth and drenched his face crimson, he laughed like a man intoxicated by something dark, never ceasing his blade work.
When he split open the cow’s belly, organs spilled forth in a torrent. Jomu, waiting nearby, seized a large brass basin to catch them.
“Hand it here!”
Catching Jomu as he staggered backward, Yeonhyung plunged his hand into the basin, stirring the pooled blood with frantic sweeps. Clutching the still-warm organs, he trembled in ecstasy.
His blood-soaked hands seized a Talisman and Name Inscription Paper in one motion. The paper began staining red instantly—upon it was written the Four Pillars of Destiny of his intended target.
Yeonhyung tore the paper and shoved it deep into the cow’s hollowed belly. Then he thrust in the burning Straw Bundle as well.
As the cow’s breath came to an end, it wept one final tear. Fire roared within its belly, and the remaining organs charred while the cow’s heart ceased to beat. Yeonhyung licked that tear.
His behavior was exactly like that of a Mudang possessed by a spirit—and not a righteous one, but an Evil Spirit.
Yeonhyung laughed, drunk on rapture, as though he could not bear his own joy at this moment of cursing someone. He reveled in disarranging the already-completed ritual space, draping the cow’s entrails across his body.
Those who watched—the Evil Practitioners, Jomu, all of them—shared the same thought.
He was a true malevolent spirit. They themselves had no clean hands in aiding this curse ritual, but Yeonhyung’s nature was simply born to torment others.
Yeonhyung wiped his filthy, blood-covered body roughly with a towel. Without even removing his cumbersome ritual robe, he headed toward the Annex Building.
At the thought of violating that strangely lustrous Monster and shedding this sickly yin energy, heat already gathered heavily in his lower body.
But when he wrenched open the paper door with his blood-drenched hands, what awaited him was his half-sister, her clothes half-stripped, straddling the Monster beneath her.
“……What are you doing right now?”
At Yeonhyung’s question, Yeonsu, who had her lips buried against the Monster’s neck, slowly lifted her head.
The room was pitch-black, lit only by the faint light bleeding through from behind Yeonhyung’s back. Her face was not the neat, delicate visage of her usual self, but that of a man steeped in lust.
“……Welcome, brother.”
Yeonsu answered his question curtly, her voice low and gravelly.
At the sight of her undisguised displeasure at being interrupted, Yeonhyung’s blood surged. How dare she?! Yet Yeonsu’s lips opened first.
“Brother. I’ve been taking in so much Backlash lately that I simply cannot bear it today.”
Then she traced her hand along the Monster’s bare form with deliberate sensuality.
He newly grasped how massive the creature’s frame was, how large his hands. When he splayed his palm, it nearly covered the Monster’s entire slender lower abdomen.
For a moment, Yeonhyung felt the pressure of touching a beast in rut, sharpened by instinct. Without thinking, he stepped back across the threshold. But it felt as though he’d lowered his tail before his half-sister, wounding his pride. In the end, he raised his voice.
“……How strange! You speak as though you’re so admirably ascetic, but it seems that’s not quite true!”
“You’re right, brother. I’ve been remiss.”
Yeonsu breathed shallowly, as if laboring under some burden. At that, Yeonhyung felt satisfied—his Backlash and curses were working effectively.
Most of all, the fact that he’d left deep scars on Yeonsu’s beautiful face felt like his own achievement.
And strangely, he felt no Backlash this time. Had his power grown stronger? Just moments ago it shouldn’t have been possible, yet oddly he felt connected to the divine.
Perhaps he too possessed the Power of Spirit Possession. Perhaps it was only now manifesting, belatedly.
If he, having learned all the Family Secret Arts, were to gain Divine Power on top of that, how much stronger could he become? Suddenly flooded with overwhelming joy, Yeonhyung smiled thinly and stepped back further.
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“Well then. I’ll yield to you today. Your brother is in a very fine mood.”
Was it the thrill of having bested his half-sister? The excitement that had possessed him moments before about violating the Monster vanished entirely. Only the exhilarating rush of victory burned hot in his mind.
Yeonhyung left without hesitation. Violating the Monster could be done anytime.
As Yeonhyung departed the Annex Building, three soft knocks sounded from the entrance shortly after. Only then did Yeonsu withdraw her body from atop the man.
“I apologize. That must have been terribly heavy.”
The man did not know what to say in response to Yeonsu’s apology. He could only gaze up at her silently, unable to muster any other reaction. He had never been apologized to for such a thing before.
Until now, he had thought of his encounters with the Baekga men merely as acts to ease their own anxious consciences regarding their sins. It was the only way he could endure.
At first, he had not resisted simply because they were men. But with strength nearly spent in his weakened body, trapped in a space from which he could not escape—he could not hold out long against torrential violence and the crushing weight of physical force.
Yes. For the salvation of all suffering beings, he could bear such things. That was what he had to believe. And that belief gradually became indoctrination, erasing the man’s shame and despair.
But after Yeonsu returned as a grown woman, feelings he had forgotten and suppressed began to surface once more in his heart.
Shame.
Giving his body to one who was not his beloved, accepting affection and Backlash—it filled him with overwhelming shame.
A new revulsion welled up. Only then did all the emotions he had once harbored come back to life. And the affection he had once held as well.
Back then, the man had someone he wished to share affection with.
Not merely an act to ease bodily yin, but a genuine exchange of affection. To embrace as partners who loved one another, to kiss, to hold hands, to touch skin to skin through the night.
“……It’s fine.”
He could manage only such words, and it made him feel foolish. The years of silence, closed eyes, and endurance had made him like a simpleton, and the sorrow of that realization threatened to break him.
Yeonsu, unaware of such grief, gently cradled the man’s cheek in her hand.
“To be honest……, I didn’t want to see you and Yeonhyung entangled like that.”
Yeonsu’s face as she spoke that way held all the passion of twenty-four years of youth. Her gaze fixed on him—a face twisted with jealousy, petulance, and a fierce desire to hold onto him properly.
Jealousy. The man felt his hair turning white all over again.
So you do know how to be jealous? I always thought you were perpetually at ease. But if I say I’m happy seeing all these different sides of you now, will you mock me again for being foolish and tender-hearted, hopelessly naive?

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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