It was the third day.
The fever wouldn’t break. It had no intention of breaking. My forehead was a furnace, but my bones were ice. Under the blanket, I sweated. Kick it off, and my teeth started chattering.
I couldn’t count the meridians. The backflow that had started in nine places spread to ten, and after that, counting stopped meaning anything. My whole body was one big backflow.
There was no ceiling.
More accurately, there was a ceiling, but there was something beyond it, too. Something that wasn’t cement lay over the cement. The floor above. A figure crouched beneath it. Another layer beyond that. I could see it even with my eyes shut. My eyelids couldn’t hide anything anymore.
I raised my hand. The back of it looked half-transparent. Something like black thread ran through it instead of veins.
I lowered it. I decided I hadn’t seen anything.
I knew what it meant to cross over to the other side while still alive, even if I didn’t know what it was called. And I knew I had one foot over that threshold right now.
Grandma paced outside my door.
The scrape of her slippers. She stopped, then started again. The doorknob turned down once, then sprang back up. The door didn’t open.
“Jin-oh.”
“...Yeah.”
“Let’s go to the hospital.”
“Tomorrow.”
I’d said tomorrow yesterday, too. Grandma probably knew that. Her slippers moved away, then came back. Something was set down in front of the door. A tray. The smell of porridge slipped in through the crack.
I couldn’t get up.
Night came. I didn’t know what time it was.
Jangmuk clamped down.
Not on my spine. Just below my heart. Right where the fragment of Jangmuk was lodged. Something grabbed tight inside me. Like a fist.
The malignant spirit’s yin energy was swallowing Jangmuk. The newcomer was trying to eat the one that had come first. Jangmuk held out. To hold on, it clutched the center of me.
The two of them fought inside me. I was the battlefield.
I couldn’t breathe.
The room tilted. The bed tilted. No—I was falling. Through the mattress, through the floor, down beneath everything.
The sound cut out.
It was dark.
But I could see in the dark. I wasn’t seeing with my eyes. The sense I’d used to read yin energy with my fingertips had spread through my whole body.
And I saw myself.
The inside of my body unfolded like a map. I could see my meridians.
I’d never seen diagrams from the Bureau’s textbook. Still, I could guess. A normal exorcist’s meridians were probably pipes. Hollow inside, with refined energy flowing through them.
Mine were different.
There was hardly any hollow space. The walls had eaten up almost all the passageways. They were black, thick, and grained. Layer upon layer, like the rings of a tree. Each layer was one night. An underground parking garage. An abandoned hospital. A goshiwon. An alley with its streetlights out. A factory.
The walls were the power.
Not the passageways.
The moment I understood that, I saw the shape of the backflow. Why it had burst. I was still trying to send half of it through the passageways. I’d forced a river into a narrow channel, and it had overflowed. Until now, whenever I hurt, the walls grew thicker, and when they grew thicker, they held. I hadn’t known why.
Now I did.
It wasn’t about letting it flow through. It was about dissolving it.
I pushed it into the walls.
All of it this time. Every bit pouring out of countless places, not a drop left behind, not into the center but into the walls.
My bones broke.
It didn’t feel like they broke. They broke. The walls of my meridians cracked from the inside, split, and collapsed. The malignant spirit’s yin energy surged through the gaps. Those black tendrils that had spread along the factory’s steel frame.
My jaw trembled. I didn’t even have the strength to grit my teeth.
Jangmuk let go.
A new wall rose where the old one had collapsed.
It was thicker. Denser. Its grain was different. If the old wall had been built up, this one looked as though it had always been this way. As though the part that collapsed had been a shell covering it.
Then I drew a breath.
The breath didn’t stop in my lungs. It followed the new walls all the way to my fingertips and toes, down to the furthest reaches inside my body—places that hadn’t felt warm once since the day I’d been in the morgue at four years old. And for the first time, they weren’t cold.
I opened my eyes.
There was a ceiling.
Only a ceiling. Yellowed wallpaper. A mold stain in the corner. A fluorescent light. That was all. No floor above, no crouching figure, no layers beyond it.
I stared for a long time.
It was the first time since I was four that I’d seen a ceiling with nothing layered over it.
I sat up. My body felt light. The fever was gone. I opened the door. The porridge on the tray had gone cold and congealed.
Grandma was dozing on the living room sofa. Her head had tipped to one side.
I looked at her face.
Nothing was layered over it. No shadow past her shoulder, no layer behind the wall. She was just Grandma. She had more wrinkles than I’d thought. There was a streak of drool at the corner of her mouth.
My throat went hot. I swallowed. It wouldn’t go down. I swallowed again.
I’d shut the Other Side. No—I’d become able to shut it.
I opened it again. Just by thinking, like turning a doorknob. The world beyond the walls returned. The layers on top of one another. Clean darkness beneath the crack in Grandma’s bedroom door.
I shut it. Grandma.
Open. Shut. Open. Shut.
After thirteen years, all I’d gotten was a switch. But it was bigger than anything I’d swallowed so far.
I went back to my room and sat on the edge of the bed.
I opened my palm.
I drew a little yin energy from the new wall. I gathered it instead of letting it flow away. The air above my palm crumpled inward. Something black took shape. About the size of a marble. A blackness that swallowed light. Beneath the fluorescent light, it was night only above my palm.
I wondered what the Spirit Gauge would read if I put this on it.
Probably zero.
I closed my hand. The black seeped between my palm lines and vanished.
I was hungry. For the first time in three days. I went to the kitchen to heat up the cold porridge. I turned the burner on as low as it would go so Grandma wouldn’t wake.
At the same time, at the Spirit Management Bureau’s Seoul Branch.
A report was placed in the approval tray. The title was brief.
“Witnessed the Nonstandard Exorcism of Grade Zero Constitutionally Gifted Person Jin-oh Seo.”
Prepared by Se-ra Yoon.