An Exorcist Magical Girl! Chapter 93

“Is it weird? That there are so many Jangseung here?” Seon-yeo asks, scratching his head.

 

“No, the road never ends.”

 

“How long have we been walking? Come to think of it, it seems like we’ve been walking for quite a while…”

 

“Let’s do this.”

 

I took a plastic bottle of water from my bag and set it down next to the Jangseung. The bottle was half full.

 

Seon-yeo realized what I was thinking and let out a small sigh.

 

“Oh, no…”

 

“Just in case. Let’s go.”

 

We started moving again in the direction we were going.

 

There was a tension in the air that wasn’t there before.

 

“Did all the monks we’ve seen so far look the same? It was so dark that I just thought, “Oh, there’s another pair of Jangseung’s.”“ Seon-yeo asked softly.

 

“Honestly, I can’t say for sure because I didn’t look too closely. I think they were all the same height. That’s why I left my water bottle behind, just in case.”

 

She nodded slightly at my answer.

 

We walked for another minute or so, and then Seon-yeo stretched out her arm and pointed ahead.

 

“Hey, Iri, come here. Over there…”

 

A dozen meters ahead, I saw two familiar silhouettes.

 

It was Jangseung.

 

Our pace quickened when we spotted it. Seon-yeo almost ran.

 

She reached it first and looked at me with a white face.

 

“I have…”

 

There was still a plastic bottle with half a glass of water next to the Jangseung.

 

We had been circling around the same place the whole time.

 

As soon as I realized this, a voice came out of nowhere.

 

“You have entered the area of Question 13. Would you like to try Question 13? The difficulty level is “Prize”.”

 

***

 

“Whoa, what is it, Seo Jun?”

 

“Uh… Hwang Hanju?”

 

The entrance to the trailer park near the pool.

 

Hanju spotted Seo Jun and recognized her first.

 

“Seo Jun, you’re also here because there’s a problem with 16, right? Why don’t you and I team up?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“Good, then let’s have some fun against the A-List!”

 

Seo Jun accepted Hwang Hanju’s team offer, and the two of them started with the next caravan, unlocking the doors and checking inside.

 

“Oh, there’s a bug in caravan number two, can we leave it alone for now?”

 

“Yep.”

 

Things were normal until the fourth trailer.

 

It was only when they opened the door to the fifth caravan that they realized something was wrong.

 

“Incense…?”

 

The smell of incense, which shouldn’t have come from such a place, wafted from the inside of the fifth caravan.

 

At the same time as they recognized the strangeness, they heard a familiar announcement.

 

“You have entered the area of Question 16. Would you like to try Question 16? The difficulty level is medium.”

 

Seo Jun tapped the ring to confirm their intention, and the simulation began.

 

An image of a new room began to be superimposed on the dusty, white-colored artifacts.

 

“A shrine.”

 

Seo Jun scanned their altered surroundings and quickly came to a conclusion.

 

The inside of the caravan had been transformed into the cramped interior of a shrine.

 

The thick smell of incense mingled with the putrid stench of something rotting to become a musty stench.

 

Hwang Hanju lit a half-melted candle.

 

“Wow, look at the atmosphere… Ah, what is this?”

 

Looking around slowly, he spotted something and jumped.

 

A corpse had spawned in the center of the caravan, or rather, in the center of the room that now resembled a full-fledged shrine.

 

“Aaah, when did this thing appear again? Give me a break, please…”

 

Hwang Hanju was embarrassed and fumed into thin air. Seo Jun studied the body carefully, ignoring her teammate.

 

The corpse was prostrate, bowing to one side toward the altar.

 

Blood soaked the ground where its face lay.

 

A colorful array of shrines filled the wall behind the altar.

 

Dozens of deities, their faces highlighted, were densely painted, but strangely, only the center of the painting was empty, as if someone had deliberately erased it.

 

“He died trying to summon a demon.” Seo Jun said, rummaging through the various ritual items and books scattered near the body.

 

He had summoned a demon he couldn’t handle.

 

“Hey, you don’t know a good student when you see one.”

 

“My… feeling is that you’re better.” Seo Jun mumbles to herself as she watches Hwang Hanju pick out some of the gourds on the altar and break them.

 

A black, steaming liquid oozes out of the broken gourds, along with pieces of fingernails that look like they’ve been torn out of the ground.

 

It was meant to hold demons, but it could not withstand the power of the summoned demon, and it was contaminated.

 

Hwang Hanju would pick out such vessels and destroy them.

 

Such contaminated vessels could not bind spirits.

 

Rather, they would serve as food for the demon and contribute to its evil power, so it was better to get rid of them before seriously confronting the demon.

 

Seo Jun carved a simple glyph with her dagger in the place of the broken flask, and the liquid from the flask evaporated in a puff of smoke and burned away.

 

Having done so with the last of the vials, they waited patiently for the demon of Question 16 to appear.

 

But they didn’t have to wait long.

 

The faces painted in the graffiti behind the altar, their eyes shot up to the ceiling in unison.

 

***

 

“That’s where the problem comes in?”

 

Seon-yeo laughed in disbelief. Then she looked back at me and asked.

 

“It’s a senior problem, will you do it?”

 

“Of course. Of course.”

 

We immediately teamed up and tackled question 13.

 

“What kind of problem is that?”

 

Seon-yeo grumbled.

 

The canned questions in the assessment center don’t allow just anyone to solve them.

 

Students must recognize that a problem exists before they are given the opportunity to try.

 

“Why make it so hard to recognize the problem? Oh, save that shit for high schoolers.”

 

She grumbles, but looks around intently. Something must have changed, because the problem simulation has started.

 

“Oh, it’s brighter.”

 

The first thing she notices is the brightness of the sky.

 

It was clearly the middle of the night, but the simulation was set for early evening.

 

Fortunately, it wasn’t so bright that they couldn’t see anything without a flashlight.

 

“Huh? Hey, there’s a body.”

 

Seon-yeo pointed towards the forest. I followed the direction she pointed and saw a dead body hanging from a tree.

 

“Oh no…”

 

Even though it was a hypothetical situation, I gave a polite sigh and walked closer to examine the body.

 

It was a flat forest, so it wasn’t too inconvenient to stray from the path.

 

The rope around its neck was not tied to a branch, but to a stake artificially driven into a tree trunk.

 

I think it was because the nature of the trees in the forest made it difficult to tie the rope directly to a branch.

 

The branches of the pine extend from the top of the trunk out of reach, and the branches themselves were not strong enough to support the weight of a man.

 

The sign under the body carried an anti-suicide message.

 

“You are a valuable person.”

 

I looked around and saw similar signs all over the forest.

 

“Please protect your precious life.”

“Tomorrow will be fine.”

“Need help? Call the helpline ☎ 13nn”

“We are all people who deserve to be loved.”

 

“Seon-yeo, this forest must have been a suicide spot.”

 

“Yes.”

 

We searched the wallet in the dead man’s arms and found out that his name was Lee Dae-wook, that he was born in 1983, and that he hadn’t won the lottery.

 

But other than that, there wasn’t much useful information to be gleaned from the body.

 

“Honestly, I thought there might be an amulet or something in there. If he killed himself because he was cursed by the amulet, then we could release the grudge or something like that, and then we could solve the problem. But what the hell is that… Heh, advanced problems are so hard.”

 

Seon-yeo sighed softly.

 

Understanding a given situation was definitely part of problem solving.

 

It was graded on how close you got to the essence of the situation and how you handled it.

 

“I think we’re wasting our time holding on to the body. Come on, let’s go around the block one more time.”

 

“That’s a good idea. There must have been changes in the woods and the trail itself.”

 

We walked back along the path from where the Jangseung was.

 

As we passed, we saw a row of crude stone statues lining the road.

 

Some were knee-high, others barely half a calf high, and all were of different sizes.

 

“Hey, come here. Didn’t you see them before?”

 

“Yes. I didn’t see them because it was dark, but they weren’t there.”

 

“Is it a Dongjasang? How many? One, two, three… Thirteen?”

 

“It looks like a monkey, it looks like a Dol hareubang…”

 

“Oh, it’s not a real monkey. What is it wearing on its head?”

 

“I don’t know if it’s hair or a hat.”

 

It wasn’t an intricately carved stone statue.

 

If it weren’t for the unevenness of the stone and the distinctive features and clothing carved into the stone, I wouldn’t have recognized it as a statue.

 

“There must be something on the statue. There has to be something. There has to be. There can’t be.”

 

“Then can I touch the statue?”

 

“Uh-huh. Ask me something like that.”

 

“No, adults usually tell you not to mess with these things. What if you mess with them and you wake up a demon or something that’s sealed away?”

 

She scoffed at my comment and laughed.

 

“It’s our job to wake them up and catch them, you idiot!”

 

“What if we lose points for waking demons without a plan?”

 

“In that case, not waking them up is actually a point deduction. We have to do something.”

 

“Oh, is that so?”

 

I carefully placed one of the statues on the floor.

 

“Do you need help? Isn’t it heavy?”

 

“No. I can handle it.”

 

With a thud, the head of the statue hit the ground completely.

 

Only the grass didn’t grow where the statue lay, leaving a square mark on the ground.

 

“Wonjae Kim…?”

 

At the base of the statue, which was covered in marks that looked like they were made on purpose, a name was carved in the middle.

 

“Let’s check the one on the right.”

 

This time, Seon-yeo pushed the next statue over with a grunt.

 

It too had someone’s name carved into its base.

 

“Yun Ho-sun? Who is Yun Ho-sun?”

 

“This is the first time I’ve encountered such a problem with just giving out people’s names. Does this mean that all the statues have names on them? Do I have to turn over all thirteen of them?”

 

“Oh, just a few more and we’ll see.”

 

We turned over two more statues right next to each other.

 

“This one says “minimum”. What about that one?”

 

“This one says “Kim Mi-young”… Oh, wait. No way.”

 

I pressed the last one down and read the name carved into the stone underneath.

 

“…Daewook Lee.”

 

“What?”

 

Seon-yeo jerked up from her crouch.

 

“Lee Dae-wook is the name of the man who died hanging there.”