Surviving as a Sorcerer in Seoul - Chapter 3

Chapter 3: I Became a Sorcerer? (3)

TL: DDTL

“You got here faster than I thought?”

Inside the noisy beer hall.

Min-su, seated at a corner table, shot his hand up high.

I pulled out the chair across from him and dropped into it.

The moment I sat down, the kid tilted his head and scrutinized my face.

“Why the face? Did you bite into shit or something?”

“Nah. Just not feeling great.”

I brushed it off.

Because my head was completely filled with other thoughts.

That site I’d just seen at home. Principles of Sorcery.

What the hell was it?

What was it that had so many people logged in?

And why were they chatting among themselves, like it was some everyday thing, about stuff straight out of a weird comic book?

Too serious to be just role-play, too organized to be a gathering of psychos.

Whatever.

Min-su was busy peering at me through narrowed eyes.

“….Bastard. Already getting sentimental just ’cause you’re unemployed? Big bro’s buying you a pity round. Two drafts over here!”

“What about food?”

“This place is famous for rice-flour fried chicken. Aunt! Two drafts and one rice-flour fried chicken here. Extra radish!”

At Min-su’s booming order, the part-timer nodded.

A moment later, two glasses of draft beer with thin slush floating on top landed on the table with a thud.

“Alright, let’s wet the throat first.”

“Sure.”

Clink!

The sound of glasses striking together.

I took a gulp, foam smearing around my lips. The sharp, fizzing carbonation going down my throat cooled my jumbled head, if only for a moment.

Once the mood had warmed up a bit,

Min-su lowered his voice and leaned forward.

“So, you’re curious, right? How Park Gyu-shik died.”

“……Yeah.”

I swallowed hard. I didn’t actually want to hear it, but I had to know.

“How do I put it. The guy went out raving like a total lunatic.”

Min-su knit his brow, digging through the memory.

“It was during the morning weekly meeting. The CEO was getting the performance report, and out of nowhere, Park Gyu-shik shoots up and grabs his own throat. At first I thought something went down the wrong pipe. But…….”

“But?”

“The sound, it wasn’t a human sound. Hrrrk, kuk, kuk! His eyes rolled back. Dude, I swear I thought I was watching The Exorcist. Then he was thrashing on the floor, clawing at his own throat. Like somebody was strangling him.”

Cold sweat beaded on my palms.

Grip the doll hard, with all your resentment.

The sensation of twisting and squeezing that doll came flooding back.

“Cops showed up, it was a whole mess. Words like ‘poisoning’ got thrown around too.”

“Poisoning?”

“Well, yeah. The number of guys who quit because of that bastard isn’t small. And how many people are still actively wishing him dead? Guy drops foaming at the mouth, of course poisoning’s the first suspicion. But I think the final verdict landed on a simple heart attack.”

“…….”

“Anyway, we’ll know the details once the autopsy comes back.”

I tightened my grip on the beer glass. My fingertips went white.

“Ugh. Maybe I’m getting too worked up over a dead guy? Anyway, you don’t have to see that bastard ever again, so sleep easy. For now, let’s drink.”

Min-su raised his glass again. I clinked mine half-heartedly.

A corner of my mind felt thoroughly unsettled.

Still, a guy I’d known for years, dropping dead just like that.

He didn’t actually die because of me, did he?

Has to be a coincidence. The timing just lined up way too perfectly, that’s all.

Trying to soothe my uneasy mind, I absently pulled my phone out of my pocket.

Out of habit, I opened the browser.

The Principles of Sorcery site I’d visited earlier was still up on the screen.

When I refreshed, new posts were going up in real time.

Posted by: Antiquer | Views: 703

[Title]

Quick Sale) Selling a cursed jar. (ghost inside)

[Body]

Crying sounds every night, can’t sleep. Quick deal gets you 2 free talismans.

└ [Tongue-Flicker]: What grade Spectral Object is it?

└ [Antiquer]: Grade 6.

└ [Tongue-Flicker]: Bit of a borderline one…..

Posted by: SoltKIM | Views: 552

[Title]

Any Manifestation System Sorcerer wanna take questions lol

[Body]

Nobody here? lol

└ [SoltKIM]: I said, nobody here? lol

.

.

.

.

.

.

The more I read, the more absurd it got.

What was all this, some kind of novel-setting roleplay? And yet…

“What’re you doing?”

Min-su cut in out of nowhere.

“Huh?”

“What are you staring at so seriously, man? Watching porn or something?”

Min-su stretched his upper body halfway across the table and peered down at my phone.

I almost hurriedly killed the screen, but ended up just mumbling.

“Nah, just browsing the internet.”

“What internet?”

Min-su cocked his head. His gaze fixed on my phone screen.

But his reaction was strange.

“What’s there to look at on a blank screen?”

“……What?”

I doubted my own ears.

“There’s nothing there, what are you staring so hard at, dumbass? You drunk? Already out of it?”

Min-su snickered and nudged my shoulder.

Was he messing with me?

I tapped the screen with my finger.

Clear as day, my eyes could see that flashy title about selling a cursed jar.

“You can’t see this? These words right here.”

“Words?”

Min-su narrowed his eyes and stared hard at the screen.

“Screen busted? All I see is a black screen.”

“…….”

What kind of bullshit was this?

I clicked on one of the posts. A screen packed with text came up.

Keeping it like that, I lifted the phone and shoved it right in front of Min-su’s face.

“There, look again. You really can’t see it?”

“Ugh, what am I supposed to be looking at!”

Min-su irritably pushed my hand away.

“You want me to look at my face reflected in a dark screen? I know I’m handsome, but let’s not do this between men. Gives me the creeps.”

“…….”

“What’s with you? You really drunk? Look at your eyes, all glazed over.”

Min-su genuinely couldn’t see a thing.

The bizarre posts flashing before my eyes.

To his eyes, they were just a dark, switched-off screen.

What in the world was going on?

* * *

From this, I realized something.

The community called [Principles of Sorcery] was invisible to ordinary people’s eyes.

It was driving me crazy with curiosity. Why? Why was this happening to me?

And so, for several days, I did nothing but lurk on the [Principles of Sorcery] free board.

It was pretty damn absorbing.

There’s a term, “Lurk Three Years”.

The saying goes: to post in any community, shut up and lurk for three years first.

These days people don’t take it that far, and some even say three days, or thirty minutes.

Either way, after actually putting Lurk Three Years into practice, I learned a lot.

For starters, this Sorcerer community itself couldn’t be accessed by ordinary people.

The most basic requirement was Spirit Sight.

This included not just the ability to see those incomprehensible phenomenal beings called Vengeful Spirits, but also the ability to recognize the sorcery practiced by Sorcerers themselves.

In other words, the fact that I could see the QR code and read the text on the board meant that, without my even knowing, my Spirit Sight had opened.

Whether it was because of the book that homeless guy gave me,

or whether I’d awakened from squeezing that 50,000-won Curse Doll, I couldn’t say.

Anyway, the ranks of Sorcerers here were roughly divided like this.

A-rank (甲), B-rank (乙), C-rank (丙), D-rank (丁), Unranked (戊).

Yes, those very 甲乙丙丁戊 taken from the sexagenary cycle. [TL Note: The first five of the ten Heavenly Stems in traditional East Asian ordering systems.]

From the vibe of the board, A-rank Sorcerers were, in the literal sense, beings rarely encountered in everyday life.

Treated almost like figures out of legend.

Apparently, even just being a C-rank Sorcerer was enough to be treated as a fairly impressive Sorcerer in its own right.

What exactly any of it was useful for, I’d find out in time.

But going by the various posts, the demand was clearly there.

So it seemed D-rank Sorcerers were generally the most common.

There were apparently various kinds of sorcery, too.

Ritual System, Mediumship System, Barrier System, Word-Spirit System, Phenomenon System, and so on…….

And among those, Sorcerers above a certain rank had mastered their own unique sorcery called the Self-Nature System.

There wasn’t much information on that one, so that was as far as my knowledge went.

Honestly speaking,

the more I looked, the more fun it got.

Why?

Because didn’t every single bit of it feel exactly like game settings?

Seen through the eyes of a former professional game designer,

every last one of these concepts was packed with things that stoked my curiosity.

To understand it through my own lens, this stuff was like:

Rank systems, skill trees, hidden pieces…….

That kind of vibe.

Now I could understand what people meant when they said browsing Namuwiki for no reason was fun. [TL Note: Namuwiki is a large Korean-language wiki, similar in function to Wikipedia.]

Because that was exactly what I was doing right now.

“Maybe I should start putting up posts……?”

My fingers were itching. Just lurking was getting under my skin.

Surprisingly, signing up was simple too.

Just pick an ID. No password, phone number, resident registration number, or anything like that required.

Was accessing the site with Spirit Sight itself the authentication?

“An ID…….”

Nothing really came to mind.

I just carelessly dropped the middle character of my name and wrote it in.

[Jubaek]

Simple and clean.

Once I finished logging in, I moved over to the free board.

Should I put up a quick post?

Posted by: Jubaek | Views: 0

[Title] Newbie here~ Please go easy on me!

[Body] Nice to meetcha, big bros!

Wasn’t that a fine first greeting? Polite and lively.

But the comments that popped up right after were something else.

└ [Kimchi OUT]: If you’re a newbie could you please just shut up. You stink.

“……Assholes.”

Like they’d never been newbies themselves. Hazing here was brutal.

Slightly wounded, I deleted the post.

“Hmm.”

What kind of post should I put up, then? Wasn’t there something that might grab their attention a bit more?

A post that baited them a little while also squeezing info out of them.

“Ah.”

Right, let me put up my current problem first.

While I was at it, without the newbie stink. As expert-seeming as possible, going for that chic vibe.

Tap tap tap.

I pounded away at the screen, writing out my situation. Suitably dramatized, of course.

Posted by: Jubaek | Views: 0

[Title]

Put a Curse on someone and they dropped dead the next day.

[Body]

Used a Curse Doll I bought off the street on a guy who used to torment me. But the next day he dropped dead from a heart attack. Is this normal?

This was my biggest worry at the moment.

I was full of doubts about whether I’d actually killed Park Gyu-shik with a Curse.

Park Gyu-shik being a piece of shit was a self-evident fact, but he was still a human being. The knowledge that I’d killed a person was nagging at me in a way I couldn’t shake.

Not even a few minutes after I put up the post, a comment appeared.

└ [SoltKIM]: What’d you use as the doll? lol

I paused to recall what kind of doll it had been.

Just a crude little thing made of straw that the homeless guy had been peddling.

└ [SoltKIM]: What’d you use as the doll? lol

└ [Jubaek]: Straw Effigy.

But after posting the reply, it struck me as odd.

Did it matter? No matter what the material was, dead was dead.

When I refreshed, more comments had appeared.

└ [SoltKIM]: A Straw Effigy is at best a Spectral Object below grade 8, how’s that supposed to kill a person? lol

└ [Pickled-Radish Bunch]: Some fucking moron humble-bragging about his high Spiritual Power. Cut the showing-off.

└ [Brother Damae]: How you gonna kill a person with a low-grade Spectral Object on raw Spiritual Power alone lmao. Ain’t like you’re one of the Ten Celestial Immortals.

“Huh?”

Now what was this supposed to mean?

A whole mess of things I couldn’t understand.

What did “high Spiritual Power” mean, and what were these Ten Celestial Immortals?

Humble-brag? Showing-off?

I’d just written down the facts.

Why were they reacting like this?

The additional comments rolling in were all negative too.

└ [Youngest Son of a Shaman House]: To kill someone with a Straw Effigy you’d need at minimum A-rank or above. You A-rank? No verification means what?

I smacked my lips and hit the delete button on the post.

“……Why am I even doing this?”

A sudden, hard Reality Check rolled over me.

Me, Ju Gi-baek.

A solid guy who’d graduated from a four-year university in South Korea, no less.

Instead of preparing for a job like I was supposed to, I’d turned into a keyboard warrior holed up in my room, tapping out shit-posts on some occult forum.

Ahh. Oh, my life.

“Hah.”

I chucked my phone up by the pillow and flopped onto the bed.

I stared blankly up at the ceiling.

The stark white glare of the fluorescent lamp stabbed at my eyes, and I involuntarily knit my brow.

What was I supposed to do for a living now?

Park Gyu-shik was dead.

My severance would be a pathetic pittance.

I needed to throw myself back into the job hunt soon, but the saying that this industry was small kept holding me back.

Ding!

A came text on my phone.

Shoving past the hassle, I reached out an arm and checked it.

The pile of text notifications I’d been ignoring had stacked up, filling the whole screen.

[Korea Scholarship Foundation] Student Loan Interest Payment Due (D-3)

[KD People’s Bank] Ju Gi-baek-nim, your lease deposit loan interest is due. Please check your balance.

[Seohan Card] September payment due: 1,445,000 won (lump sum)

“Hah.”

A sigh pulled itself up from my Dantian and burst out.

Money flowed out just from breathing.

Keeping one’s own body fed and housed under the skies of Seoul, like this, was no easy feat.

Especially for the kind of guy who’d lost his parents young and ended up leeching off his young, single Aunt.

I knew how much Aunt had broken her back raising me and my younger sisters.

Now it was my turn to pay her back. But instead of paying her back, I was nothing but a burden.

“Money’s the problem, money…”

With a bitter taste in my mouth, I habitually opened the [Principles of Sorcery] site again.

Pure escapism.

Ghost stories were easier on the heart than debt-collection texts, after all.

I’ll just live like a layabout for today, and tomorrow I’ll really start the job hunt.

Scrolling mindlessly down.

Truthfully, I’d never given anything but the free board a second glance,

but today, for some reason, the other menus caught my eye.

[Information Board]

[International Board]

[Q&A Board]

And below those, one board highlighted in red letters.

[Job Board]

“Jobs?”

Jobs, huh.

Like a help-wanted, job-seeking kind of thing? So they paid money too?

Work done by Sorcerers, is it.

Maybe performing exorcisms, writing up talismans, I wondered, but my curiosity was piqued.

Without really thinking, I tapped the menu.

The moment the loading finished and the list came up, I doubted my eyes.

[Yeoro Tea House] – Grade 7 Commission | Payment: 5,000,000 won | Conditional bonus: 2,000,000 won

[Museong Real Estate] – Grade 5 Commission | Payment: 10,000,000 won | Please inquire for details

[Bukcheon Office] – Grade 5 Commission | Payment: 11,000,000 won | Please discuss in person.

[Kiparan Cafe] – Grade 6 Commission | Payment: 7,000,000 won | Please inquire for details.

[Baeksong Office] – Grade 6 Commission | Payment: 7,500,000 won | Conditional bonus: 4,000,000 won

“……What?”

I bolted upright.

I counted the digits again, practically pressing my nose to the phone screen.

Ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten-thousands, hundred-thousands, millions, ten-millions…….

How many zeros were in these numbers?

5 million won? 10 million won? 11 million won?

This was a per-Commission fee, not an annual salary?

“Is this for real?”

Back when I was getting ground down at the game company without even overtime pay,

breaking my back for an entire month had gotten me just over 3 million won after taxes.

And here they were tossing 10 million won on a single Commission.

Just what the hell kind of work were these people doing to pay out that much?