Chapter 314 : The Passage of Time (3)
Chapter 314: The Passage of Time (3)
While Il-mok just stood there totally dumbfounded, the two kept talking. "But selling indulgences, you say? This Catholic institution in the Western world sounds absurd. They're essentially running a business out of religion."
"You don't know the half of it, Sixth Young Master. I can't speak for the old days, but the Papacy these days is completely blinded by greed."
James and Jong-ri Chu carried on a surprisingly in-depth conversation, mixing English and the Central Plains language as they went.
Il-mok, who only belatedly noticed this, asked with an even more bewildered expression.
"...Sixth Brother? When did you learn a Western language?"
"Hahaha. It's all thanks to you, youngest. Thanks to you, I've made quite a few foreign friends lately."
"Ah, you learned from the newly initiated foreigners?"
Il-mok hadn't expected Jong-ri Chu's language acquisition ability to be this impressive.
But for some reason, both James and Jong-ri Chu wore peculiar smiles at his question.
"Hahaha. There are those friends, but I have other friends as well. I picked up foreign languages while befriending them."
Having said that, Jong-ri Chu suddenly began conversing with thin air. He even spoke while switching between different languages each time.
While Il-mok watched this eerie spectacle with a vacant expression, Jong-ri Chu concluded his chat with the void with a bright smile on his face and said, "Oh dear, where are my manners? I should take this chance to introduce my friends to our youngest."
He then gestured for Il-mok to greet them.
"Say hello. This is my youngest brother. Say hello, youngest. This is my dear friend Édouard."
"...N-nice to meet you."
This thought crossed his mind as he bowed to the empty air.
'...It looks like Sixth Brother has finally hit the Extremity.'
His hallucinations and the voices in his head had clearly gotten way worse.
‘Hah? Wait a fucking minute, does it even make sense to learn a foreign language through hallucinations?'
The moment that thought crossed his mind, a chill crawled up Il-mok's spine.
* * *
After offering a few more perfunctory greetings to empty space, Il-mok fled the Initiation Hall like his life depended on it.
The whole situation was so mind-bending that he felt like his own Demonic Art’s side effect was about to make a comeback.
After escaping that haunted madhouse, Il-mok made his way straight to the Grand Teacher's office, i.e., the Demon-Teaching Pavilion.
The place is fucking a warzone.
"Where are the textbooks we talked about last time, and what exactly is your plan when we haven't even finished half of them for the kids entering the Middle Learning Hall next year!!"
"Tell the workers to pull all-nighters if they have to, or else you can stay up all night and do it yourself!!"
People with dark circles under their eyes and bloodshot pupils were screaming at each other while furiously wielding brushes or sprinting back and forth.
'Wow... I think this is actually worse than those Korean companies from my past life.'
While Il-mok was taking in this horrifying spectacle, a booming voice called out to him.
"Ha ha ha! Welcome, youngest!"
Wi Jin-hak, who was literally buried under a mountain of paperwork at the head desk, finally spotted Il-mok and greeted him with a hearty laugh.
The instant he did, every pair of eyes in the Grand Teacher's office turned toward Il-mok in unison.
Every last one of them was glaring at him with pure, unadulterated murderous intent and deep-seated grudges. It honestly felt like he was staring down the vengeful ghosts trapped inside the Ascension Sword.
'I-I'm just imagining things, right?'
Il-mok forcefully convinced himself that he was just misreading their expressions because their eyes were so red.
Either oblivious to their stares or just painfully dense, Wi Jin-hak let out another booming laugh and kept talking.
"Hahaha. Your Elder Brother here has been too busy with work to come visit, so I appreciate you coming to me."
To Il-mok's ears, that sounded a whole lot like, "Thanks for voluntarily walking into your own execution."
Because out of all the reasons these poor people were suffering in this administrative hellscape, the former slaves he had dumped on them before running away definitely made up a huge chunk of the blame.
But Il-mok had completely misread the situation.
"I actually had something I wanted to discuss with our brilliant youngest, so let's have a chat right now."
In Wi Jin-hak's beaming face, Il-mok saw a familiar shadow.
'Yep... those are the textbook symptoms of severe workaholism.'
Bloodshot eyes, dry flaking skin and hair, deep shadows under the eyes, yet a mind consumed by nothing but work.
You'd almost never see this kind of thing among government workers, but if you lived in modern-day Seoul, you'd see faces like this on the subway all the time.
Oblivious to Il-mok’s concern, Wi Jin-hak kept talking.
"Il-mok, have you heard that, thanks to the newly admitted foreign believers you brought, our office has recently been learning foreign languages through them, just as we discussed?"
"...I stopped by the Initiation Hall today as well. Sixth Brother's foreign language ability is quite remarkable."
"Hahaha, I honestly had no idea our Sixth Brother had such an incredible hidden talent, but moving on, don't you think it's time we start preparing for the next step? How about creating teaching materials for foreign languages and adding them to the Middle Learning Hall curriculum alongside administration and medicine?"
"You're looking to train diplomats... no, missionaries to operate abroad?"
"Hahaha. Got it in one."
"...If we're looking at the big picture, it's definitely a brilliant idea."
The question was whether they could actually manage that on top of everything, given they were already on the verge of overload.
"You think so too, youngest? Hahaha. What a relief. Oh, and what do you think about this? You've been going back and forth to the north frequently for trade, right? I heard they've started proselytizing up there too. What if we sent people who've learned the nomadic languages to the north as well, to accelerate the missionary efforts..."
Wi Jin-hak went on and on without pause after that, laying out the plans he'd been devising over the past several months.
The longer Wi Jin-hak talked, the more Il-mok's eyes trembled with unease.
Wi Jin-hak hadn't noticed. But Il-mok could see them.
"P-please..."
"S-save us..."
The poor souls in the office were staring at him with eyes that looked like they were about to cry tears of blood and pass out at the same time.
"Y-You're giving us even more work to do...?"
At that point, they were already half-corpses.
It made him wonder why the Blood Cult even bothered going through the trouble of procuring actual corpses to make a Jiangshi when there were readily available here.
Even as the entire staff of his office turned into the walking dead right in front of his eyes, Wi Jin-hak just kept talking without taking a single breath.
Grand plans that spanned decades into the future just kept pouring endlessly out of his mouth.
"AAAHH..."
"Kill me! Just kill meee~!!!"
Several individuals who had fallen into Qi Deviation suddenly began having fits.
"Oh dear, here we go again."
Wi Jin-hak, who had been talking up a storm, finally closed his mouth and swung his sword at those having the episodes.
"Take them down carefully so no one gets hurt, and make absolutely sure none of the paperwork gets torn!"
Following his orders, the rest of the staff drew their weapons in unison and intercepted the rioters.
They focused purely on defense to avoid injuring the afflicted. Well, more accurately, they were just playing defense to keep the rioters from destroying any of the precious documents or teaching materials.
In the meantime, Wi Jin-hak stepped forward and subdued them one by one by pressing their paralysis acupoints.
Il-mok joined the scene at some point.
With both Wi Jin-hak and Il-mok stepping in, the berserkers were subdued in no time.
"Whew. Thank you, youngest. Thanks to you, we managed to subdue everyone without a single injury this time."
Something about Wi Jin-hak's gratitude struck Il-mok as odd.
'Hmm. Seeing how they go out of their way not to hurt each other, I guess they really do care about their colleagues.'
The rest of the staff were also looking down at the subdued individuals with eyes full of camaraderie.
"You think you get to take a sick day all by yourself?"
"You're not leaving us behind. Hell no. If we die, we're all dying together."
"......"
Their muttering sounded a bit strange for camaraderie.
When Il-mok looked at Wi Jin-hak, he laughed heartily and explained.
"Ha ha ha. Last time, I accidentally put two of them in the hospital. Because those two were out sick, everyone else had to pull extra all-nighters to cover their parts."
"......"
It finally clicked for Il-mok.
This place was a hell on earth where everyone had each other by the ankles and refused to let go.
* * *
After surviving the hell of ghosts and the hell of crunch culture back-to-back, Il-mok practically sprinted to his next destination.
'It's incredibly dangerous to leave things like this.'
Realizing that everything was spiraling completely out of control, Il-mok made a beeline straight for the Pure Mind Hall, a medical clinic specializing in mental illness, established for the Demonic Cult's mentally afflicted.
When Il-mok visited the Pure Mind Hall for the first time in a while, the Demonic Physician greeted him warmly.
"Hohoho. Welcome, Deputy Master."
"Ha ha ha. It's been a while, Elder Demonic Physician. I stepped down from the Deputy Master position years ago, so please just call me by name."
After exchanging light pleasantries with the Demonic Physician, Il-mok got to the point.
"Is Physician Seo Jae-pil in, by any chance?"
"He should be working in that hall over there. Go on in."
Il-mok headed toward the hall the physician had indicated.
"Welcome, Eighth Young Master!"
Seo Jae-pil greeted Il-mok cheerfully just as he always did.
"How's the research on the foreigners coming along?"
Seo Jae-pil had returned to the main headquarters and was continuing his research on the foreigners.
"The study on whether diseases manifest differently by ethnics hasn't yielded any significant results yet."
Seo Jae-pil answered with a somewhat disappointed expression, and Il-mok offered some encouragement.
"Still, as our contact with foreigners increases, we might gain knowledge about Western or Northern medical techniques, don't you think?"
"Ah! Now that you mention it, I heard the Grand Teacher's office has been studying foreign languages recently. Hearing what you've said, I think I should join in as well."
"Hmm. Well then, since you will be learning foreign languages at the Grand Teacher's pffoce anyway, would you mind having a chat with Sixth Brother while you're at it?"
Il-mok casually steered the conversation toward his real purpose for visiting.
"When I went to see him today, Sixth Brother's ability to pick up foreign languages seemed quite exceptional."
"Is that so? We rarely cross paths, so I had no idea."
"The truth is, there was something rather strange about it. Sixth Brother said he learned foreign languages from 'friends' he'd recently made. I am referring to those friends who appeared due to Sixth Brother’s illness.”
"You mean the symptoms where he sees and hears things?"
"Exactly. So what I'm wondering is, is it even possible to learn a foreign language through auditory and visual hallucinations? I'm starting to wonder if the side effects of the Mad Soul Sword Art might actually involve seeing real ghosts."
"Hmm. It's probably not ghosts. Sixth Young Master has quite a number of friends, and if they were all real ghosts, wouldn't it be strange for the An Family or the Eight Trigrams Hall not to know about it?"
Despite his answer, Seo Jae-pil's eyes were sparkling for some reason.
"But more importantly, learning a foreign language from a hallucination... Now that is a truly fascinating medical case. I think I'll need to go visit the Sixth Young Master every single day from now on. You know, to learn the language... and to observe him, of course."
"Please do. And if possible, it might be good to bring a sorcerer along from time to time, just in case."
"Hahaha. I'll do that, Young Master."
Now that he had successfully deployed Seo Jae-pil on his Sixth Brother, Il-mok moved on to his next patient.
"Oh, and have you spoken with my Eldest Brother recently?"
"If you mean the First Young Master, he's already achieved Transcendence, so there's no reason for him to visit the Pure Mind Hall."
Hearing Seo Jae-pil's confident answer, Il-mok quickly gave him a rundown of Wi Jin-hak's terrifying symptoms.
"I'm worried he might be overworking himself to an unhealthy degree."
But Seo Jae-pil's reaction was not what he expected.
"Why would working hard and doing a lot of work be considered a problem?"
"???"
"I'd say it's a shining example for our entire cult."
Having said that, Seo Jae-pil turned the question back on Il-mok.
"Ah, speaking of which, what about that matter you mentioned before? Do you still feel nothing when you kill someone?"
Seo Jae-pil's eyes sparkled with professional enthusiasm as he grabbed a brush to take notes. Seeing this, Il-mok realized something important.
'Ah. This crazy bastard is a workaholic too.'
This entire damn Heavenly Demon Divine Cult was just an asylum completely infested with chronic workaholics.