If Silk Flowers Bloom by the Water’s Edge Chapter 69

Whenever something happened, Sarira was the type to start by complaining that it was annoying and bothersome. Perhaps it was a characteristic of those with strong innate abilities. She had a tendency to leave the task of looking after her own surroundings to other people. This ranged from basic room cleaning to the important cleanup after rituals.

Yirok walked with muffled footsteps, then picked up a mask that the men sprinkling horse blood had left behind. After covering half of his face, he walked as leisurely as if he were out for a stroll.

The servant carrying the trash bag chatted with people passing by, and at one point, suddenly stopped to offer a prayer to one of Sarira’s statues. Each time, Yirok hid in the shadow of a tree or concealed himself behind a wall.

Before he knew it, he had passed through the middle gate of the inner quarters and was heading toward the outskirts where the incinerator was located. Only a sliver of the reason that usually kept him coolly separate from others remained.

The ballpoint pen taken from Yirok, and the lock of hair taken by an insider. Chaehwa must have collapsed because they had steadily gathered the ingredients and performed a curse ritual.

The possibility that Sarira had kept it like a souvenir after the ritual, and the possibility that she had forgotten about it while rolling around with a man like she was now—it was a gamble with a precise fifty-fifty chance.

The servant quickened his pace, as if the object in his hands was heavy. He passed swiftly between people who were draping red cloth over every door.

Even the impure energy of the year-end created by the Maengmusa could not tie Yirok’s feet down. At the edge of the estate, steeped in the smell of rotten blood, the servant who had entered the incinerator came out empty-handed not long after.

The servant, with a proud face that said he had done his duty, noticed Yirok leaning against the wall and gave a slight nod.

“Hello.”

Yirok bowed his head to avoid eye contact and returned the same greeting. Perhaps because his face was covered by the black mask, the servant passed him by without suspicion. Only after watching the servant disappear into a tiny dot did Yirok begin to move.

It was called an incinerator, but it had been a long time since any fire had been lit there. He knew that someone came once a month to collect the trash in bulk. This was because the items left over from curse rituals had a value of their own. Moreover, if they were items from the Bansi clan, who stood at the pinnacle of the Maengmusa, people would supposedly line up to buy them.

Opening the door to the incinerator, Yirok saw a path lined with ten rows of black trash bags. In the center, they were piled up like a small hill. After tightening the straps of his mask, Yirok sat down and opened the first bag.

The bag closest to the incinerator entrance was the first target. The moment he opened the bag, the first thing he saw was a centipede-like insect, twitching even in death. Yirok, as if steeling his resolve, put his hand in and rummaged through the bag.

It felt like the sticky slime of a snail, and there were also actually sharp awls and needle-like things inside. Yirok, whose back of the hand was badly scratched, found a clue as he swept the bottom of the bag. The hair tie he had just seen in Sarira’s room came out in his blood-beaded hand.

It was not Chaehwa’s. The young lady of Nanjubeol had an old-fashioned side to her; she used a ribbon, not a rubber hair tie. Having learned the knack for rummaging through trash bags, Yirok put the items back inside and tied the bag up as it was before.

Yirok glanced at the trash bags arranged in a single row and repeated the same task. Judging by the servant’s pattern, he would have placed the trash bags from the left according to the date.

Mindful of the potent medicinal herbs that might be inside, he wrapped his hand with the bottom of his shirt, but he could not avoid being pricked by broken glass or thorns of unknown origin. He had expected this up to the third bag. But when the item he was looking for did not appear even in the fourth bag, Yirok’s hands gradually began to lose their composure.

Unlike at the beginning when he had neatly tied the bags up so it would not be obvious they had been opened, his focus increasingly shifted to opening the next bag. He threw off his shirt, which was hindering his movement, and put his bare hands into the bags.

Ah, with a groan, he hastily pulled out his hand, which felt numb as if paralyzed. One of his arms was a complete wreck. The zigzag shape of the wound on his palm was grotesque. But Yirok, for whom pain was familiar, quickly returned to a blank expression and put his hand back into the bag. It seemed he had brushed against a poisonous herb, as the bone and flesh of his wrist felt as if they were separating with every second.

But there is always a reward at the end of pain. Inside the filth-like bag, he touched an object that felt familiar. He pulled it out as if rescuing it from the bottom of the bag.

“I didn’t give one to you last time. It kept bothering me. This time, I’ve made up my mind to give it to you instead of using it myself. My favorite pen.”

It was the gift Chaehwa had given him, even adding such grand words. As he touched Chaehwa’s faded initials, ‘CH’, with his thumb, blood smeared on them. With one arm covered in blood, Yirok smiled.

All this time, whenever Chaehwa sat next to him without a second thought, he had been secretly on edge. He was afraid she would ask if he was even using the pen she gave him. The words “I lost it” would get stuck in his throat and refuse to come out. He was also worried that Chaehwa would look at him with disappointed eyes.

Yirok put the bloodstained pen in his pocket and calmly stood up. The surroundings were a mess, a pile of trash, but his expression looked as light as if he were on a spring outing.

🌹₊ ⊹

As soon as he returned to his room, Yirok took out a first-aid kit from his drawer. When it came to emergency treatment, he was skilled enough to earn a certification. He cleaned the wound with disinfectant and applied a layer of medicinal herbs he had received from the Bansi clan. Just as he was wrapping the wounded area with a white bandage, he heard a knock. Yirok glared at the door, then hurriedly pulled down his sleeve to cover his wrist.

“Yes.”

He made the sound of a book, as if he had been doing something inside, and opened the door. He could not hide the smell of the herbs, but fortunately, the year-end event was going on. Compared to the outside, which felt like it would suffocate him with the stench of blood, the smell of herbs was a gentlemanly affair, was it not? Yirok opened the door only halfway and met the housekeeper Halmeom’s eyes.

“The feeding will start this evening. The preparations are all done. Do not come outside after 8 PM.”

When Yirok nodded obediently, the housekeeper Halmeom placed an incense stick by the door. He quietly watched the housekeeper Halmeom go, then took the incense stick and went inside his room.

Only when no footsteps could be heard did he roll up his sleeve again and finish wrapping the bandage. The time on the phone he took out of his pocket was 7:45 PM. There was no time to dawdle like a grub.

After treating his arm to some extent, Yirok took out a lighter he had put in his bag. He lit the incense stick the housekeeper Halmeom had given him and placed it near the door.

Outside the door, rotten meat would be prepared. This was to make the impure Yogwi, drawn by the smell of dead horse blood, come and pick up the meat to eat. They would prepare it the same way every evening until January 1st arrived.

Rumors would spread among the ill-natured Yogwi, and for a while, they would wander the Bansi estate every evening even if the meat was no longer put out. Then, on January 1st, the Maengmusa who had served them with rotten meat would step forward and hunt those shabby Yogwi.

This was one of the Maengmusa’s training methods, a type of hunt, so to speak. Usually, the ones drawn to blood and rotten meat were not very formidable Yogwi.

He had encountered Yogwi at the Nanjubeol clan as well, but in any case, the Yogwi there did not harm people. Unlike the Jeongmusa, who only accepted harmless Yogwi, the Yogwi who sought out the Maengmusa coveted humans.

If one did not burn an incense stick that the Yogwi disliked, they would burst through the door and come inside. Yirok finished his basic preparations and sat leaning against the drawer.

There were dozens of reasons why he hated the year-end, but the worst among them were the shadows that passed by his door. Shadows that loitered about as if they could not give up even after smelling the incense. Spending the night with those shameless beings made sleep a distant story.

7:59 PM.

The only light in Yirok’s room, who had checked the time, was coming from his phone. Yogwi flocking to eat the rotten meat scattered throughout the estate. Another sleepless night was coming.

In his first year after being captured by the Bansi clan, he had spent a night with his ears covered, terrified that a Yogwi might open his door, or that the scent of the incense might weaken. That lonely and frightening night seemed to summarize the life Yirok would face from then on.

Thump, thump. 

One had already landed in the quarters’ courtyard. There was the sound of wind whipping, suggesting it was a Yogwi with wings. The Yogwi scraped the ground with its claws and picked up the meat. The sound of it tearing at the meat, filled with rotten juices and maggots, made Yirok grind his teeth.

Vzz, vzz. 

But today, there was the sound of his phone crying out, keeping Yirok’s eyes from closing.

Best Chaehwa

He stared blankly at the name on his phone screen, then smiled. Now, just seeing her name made him smile. In his unrealistic and cruel world, the strangest thing of all was this woman. Looking at Chaehwa made him fall under the illusion that the world was not so bad after all, that it could become clean.

When he did not answer the call, it stopped ringing. But not even a minute later, Chaehwa’s name filled the screen again.

Yirok put his injured hand in his pocket and stroked the pink ballpoint pen with his thumb. Then, on impulse, he pressed the answer button.

—Kim Yirok