Lee Yang-hoon couldn’t quite comprehend what he had just heard from Jinseong.
“Coming-of-age ceremony?”
“Yes.”
He stared at Jinseong’s exceptionally pale face for a moment, deep in thought.
Could it be that Park Jinseong really did not know much about the coming-of-age ceremony? Or was he aware but still said such a thing?
Normally, one would think it was the latter, but given what Lee Yang-hoon had seen of Park Jinseong, the former was entirely possible. He had witnessed Jinseong living with a twisted sense of logic, completely indifferent to anything outside of magic.
Slowly, he opened his mouth.
“The coming-of-age ceremony takes place next year.”
“Yes.”
However, Lee Yang-hoon’s assumption that Jinseong lacked common sense was mistaken. Jinseong responded as if it were a matter of course, looking at him with an expression that questioned what the problem was.
“It’s not bad to do it then. But I think it would be better to do it in advance.”
“In advance… Right. It’s about magic.”
Understanding Jinseong’s words, Lee Yang-hoon nodded.
He could grasp why Jinseong, who only cared about magic, would bring up a word that sounded somewhat normal like the coming-of-age ceremony.
“Right. What do you need? Costs? Connections?”
“Something similar.”
Jinseong made a request to Lee Yang-hoon.
It was a request that might require costs or possibly connections.
“I’m planning to go north.”
“What?”
Lee Yang-hoon set down the dish he was holding upon hearing that. Blinking in disbelief, he looked at Jinseong again.
“What did you say?”
“I said I’m going north.”
North.
The two words struck Lee Yang-hoon with great force.
“You’re not talking about Gangwon Province… Are you considering crossing the DMZ?”
“That’s correct.”
At Jinseong’s answer, Lee Yang-hoon slightly frowned. Then he asked.
“Are you insane?”
North Korea.
It was a place that had once been occupied by a puppet group who unilaterally named the region the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and by the late 90s, due to excessive use of magic, the land had become utterly uninhabitable.
Initially, North Korea had been doing better than South Korea.
While people in South Korea were starving for lack of rice, they lived off bowls of rice, and when South Korea was barely rebuilding with support from America, they were living abundantly from support received from communist nations and the Soviet Union.
However, North Korea’s prosperity did not last long.
Before long, South Korea managed to surpass North Korea.
And just as one side goes down, the other rises, North Korea began to move in the opposite direction of South Korea.
As Eastern Europe deepened its closeness with the South and their backer, the Soviet Union, began to crumble, they no longer received proper support. They squandered funds on extravagant displays of pride under the notion of protecting their dignity and failed in every self-sufficiency research.
There had been numerous opportunities to establish their country, but the authorities of North Korea ignored the requests, summarily executed those who raised concerns, or sent them to labor camps to maintain their wealth and power.
Thus, North Korea’s leadership burned through its few opportunities.
They felt no sense of crisis, but instead were convinced they were simply pausing and that they’d soon take off.
Finally, destiny approached.
The great famine had arrived.
What was recorded in South Korea as the “Arduous March,” this ghastly calamity swiftly engulfed North Korea.
Inept distribution, complex political situations, an inability to receive help from other countries, farmland rendered useless due to depletion of resources, devastated forests, and failed transportation…
It was a disaster created by a multitude of overlapping issues.
People outside Pyongyang began to die.
Starving to death.
Dying while foraging anything to eat to avoid starvation.
Killing others to eat them.
Being caught and executed while desperately resisting before dying.
People continued to perish.
Naturally, the North Korean authorities were not as foolish as to simply stand by without attempting to create solutions.
Yet they were too corrupt and too incompetent for effective solutions.
They had long executed shamans who claimed to spread the Juche ideology and were worried about their influence. They killed or exiled shamans for misleading the public and involving them in superstitions, claiming religion was detrimental. Instead, they focused on enhancing military power through magic and martial arts.
And their arrogant past actions became the elements that would lead to their disaster.
Had there been shamans, the famine could have been patched up somehow; instead, it turned into a catastrophe. What could have ended with slight hunger became lethal due to their incompetence.
The closed environment, the decay, were sufficient to corrupt the spirits and souls of men, leading to numerous deaths by starvation.
Ultimately, malevolent spirits and evil ghosts spread throughout North Korea.
Countless ghosts began appearing in North Korea.
They were so obvious that they could be seen even without any spiritual vision, driven by the lingering resentment they bore just before death.
Evil ghosts tore apart those who wandered in the vacant places abandoned by the living, while malevolent spirits led those who could not eat to consume fatal things instead.
Evil ghosts, rending bodies with physical force, and a hungry ghost forcing the living to eat things that would burst their bellies.
Terrifying figures that seemed better suited for hell roamed every corner of North Korea, forcing the residents to endure the horror of starving to death along with the fear of being captured and killed by ghosts. In response to the appearance of these spirits, the power holders in Pyongyang were shocked and sealed off the city, aiming to survive solely themselves.
Yet was there still a fragment of reason remaining within them despite their fear for their lives and statuses?
They attempted to find a solution to the causes of the malevolent spirits and evil ghosts.
Their solution was none other than the Great Ritual of Magic.
The Great Ritual, while costly and difficult to perform, possessed astounding effects.
It could turn famine into plenty, summon rain in a desert to make vegetation grow, and purify polluted rivers and lakes.
It was akin to a miracle.
The power holders sought to vanquish the calamities besetting them—the threats of malevolent spirits, evil ghosts, and famine—through the Great Ritual of Magic.
Yet a problem arose here.
After years of oppression, executions, and expulsions, there were no shamans left in North Korea.
They executed shamans who could cast spells and lay curses that could harm the power holders, while they sent those who were closely associated with the community and well-respected to labor camps or exiled them out of fear that they could become focal points for rebellion. Shamanic practitioners who appeared useful were captured and tortured to extract their knowledge, leading to their eradication.
Thus, there were no shamans to conduct the Great Ritual of Magic.
Fortunately, the access to magic as an ability was generally good.
The horrific cost was simply a problem; as long as one had the correct knowledge, executing the magic itself was not particularly hard.
Sure.
As long as one had the correct knowledge.
The North Korean leadership attempted to perform the Great Ritual of Magic based on the spells they had seized from shamans.
They slightly loosened their tightly sealed storehouse for the necessary materials for the ritual, selected loyal talents to learn about the ritual, and disregarded any thoughts of reducing the sacrifice while instead frequently tossing in more people to perform the Great Ritual.
As a result, those who participated in the ritual began dying.
Rather than executing the Great Ritual properly, people were dying while suffering from the minor costs inherent in the process, blood gushing from every orifice as they perished, drowning in their own bodily fluids, tasting the most excruciating forms of suffering before screaming their last moments.
Yet the leadership continued to follow through, forcibly completing the Great Ritual of Magic by pouring in ‘loyal’ citizens.
They fed thousands, even tens of thousands, into this ritual.
It was nothing short of human sacrifice.
Yet even after so many lives were sacrificed, the authorities masked it with phrases like “sacrifices for a greater cause,” “the great heroes who devoted their bodies for the nation,” and “noble sacrifices for the people,” feeling not an ounce of guilt.
In fact, they felt relieved that such sacrifices would free them from the calamity.
They believed that they would overcome this ghastly disaster and rise again as one.
And so they believed.
But wrong methods will inevitably yield incorrect outcomes.
The Great Ritual of Magic was performed, yet its activation turned in a different direction from what they desired.
Rather than transforming famine into abundance, the ritual manifested as a transformation of North Korea’s climate.
The sky turned completely devoid of clouds.
The rain that had been keeping the residents from dying of thirst ceased to fall.
The parched earth cracked wide open, while rivers and lakes began to dry up entirely.
The trees shed their bark while the weeds withered away, and new sprouts could barely poke through before wilting.
Drought.
A disaster that deserved to be called a great drought had been added to their woes.
The power holders were aghast at this nonsensical outcome and sought to uncover the reason behind it.
And soon, they discovered the reason.
It was none other than their karma.
The shamans who had to vomit their knowledge in such inhumane ways did not speak of the “correct methods.”
They disclosed truths about minor spells but twisted and obscured the larger-scale knowledge, burying the core truths and the precious knowledge they had learned by devoting their lives in silence.
Threats and torture?
These were individuals who had lived with the cost of magic all their lives.
If someone were weak enough to be broken by threats or torture, they would never have become shamans in the first place.
For those to whom the stripping of skin and tearing out of intestines had been part of their daily life, what pain could possibly destroy their spirit?
For those who had led a life bordering on madness focused on a singular goal, what kind of threats were likely to have any impact?
The captured shamans exploited the arrogance of their captors, who believed they could extract knowledge from them. They shared seemingly appetizing bits of knowledge requested by their captors, each laced with poisons that would guarantee death.
As time passed, the power holders were utterly unaware and proceeded as instructed.
The drought was a revenge from the shamans and the cost of the malevolent actions performed by the power holders.
And it wasn’t until this catastrophe reached a peak that North Korea finally regained its senses.
They realized that allowing this situation to persist could lead to the destruction of their nation.
Thus, they desperately begged China for a genuine Great Ritual of Magic and strained their resources to conduct an abundant ritual for a plentiful harvest.
And that would be what ended North Korea’s lifeline.
The Great Ritual bestowed upon them by China was executed flawlessly.
The magical forces spread throughout North Korea revived the wasteland, allowing dying plants to thrive and absorb nutrients once more. Leaves that had turned yellow once again became green.
Like a last flicker of light.
As the flame emits its final, brilliant glow before extinguishing.
The Great Ritual had extracted the very essence of the land to enable growth in the plants, but at the cost of turning the entirety of North Korea into a desolate wasteland.
They transformed into a desert where not a single fleck of fertility could be found, making farming entirely impossible.
Had they solely performed the Great Ritual given by China…
Perhaps there would have been a chance.
They could have scraped by momentarily, utilizing most of their resources to overcome a brief crisis, potentially seeking support from other nations to revive themselves, and with whatever little resources remained, they could have endeavored to make the land fertile once again.
But unfortunately, they instead enacted the distorted Great Ritual imbued with the grievances of shamans, causing the land to become parched and unsuitable for farming. In turn, this prevented the ‘most’ of their depletable resources from being sufficiently drained and disrupted the very effectiveness that the Great Ritual was meant to provide.
Karma.
Everything was karma.
Thus, North Korea fell.
In a state of isolation, North Korea couldn’t stand back up and ultimately ceased to exist.
North Korean residents fled to China and South Korea, while the power holders sought asylum in China or were killed by the malevolent spirits and ghosts that invaded Pyongyang. The Kim family, perched at the peak of this hierarchy, attempted to flee to China, only to be struck down by an assassin whose location remained a mystery.
Thus, the land once known as North Korea became a place briefly occupied by a puppet group, officially becoming the territory of South Korea. South Korea changed its national name to Unified Korea and welcomed those who came from North Korea, thriving in progress.
However, while they salvaged a degree of humanity, they couldn’t reclaim the land.
The land of North Korea became barren, unable to grow even a weed, while when darkness descended, malevolent spirits and ghosts surged up from every corner, turning it into a hell that killed the living.
South Korea was inevitably left to forsake the land of North Korea, setting up defensive lines along the former 38th parallel to fend off the spirits and ghosts.
Thus, the Unified Korea embraced North Korea but became a bizarre nation where the only habitable area lay below the 38th parallel.
“What will you even do in that ghost-infested land?”
Lee Yang-hoon asked Jinseong, anger apparent in his voice. Yet beneath it lay a clear concern for Jinseong’s safety.
Jinseong smiled brightly in response to Yang-hoon’s query.
“Since the land will be tainted during the coming-of-age ceremony, wouldn’t it be better to do it in a place utterly worthless?”
