Shamans Kim

Chapter 20 : The awakening rune

A feeling of sadness mixed with rage suddenly took hold of Jungkook who suddenly opened his eyes and quickly looked up from the book he was sleeping on. He was back in the school library.

"It-it was just a dream," he stammered, panting, as if he had just run up the mountain and back.

He suddenly noticed that the pages of the book were warped, and that the handwriting of his Nordic shamanic treatise was threatening to fade because of drops of water that had fallen on them. Instinctively, he brought his hands to his face and realized that he was crying.

"What is happening to me?" he whispered.

He had first imagined that the memory of Seokjin which kept imposing itself on him was normal, that it was linked to the fact that he missed the Twilight Shrine and to the fact that it was Seokjin who, after the having saved, had allowed him to enter.

But now he had the feeling that there was a magic at work behind it, as if Seokjin's soul, instead of completely leaving his body, had partly remained clinging to him and causing him to think about him and to worry about him. Yes, that must be why: he didn't think about him because he loved him but because he had to.

Then, Taehyung's words from his dream came back to him. Could it be that he was truly connected to Seokjin and instinctively felt that Seokjin was dead? What if the reason for Jimin's absence was that he was attending his brother's funeral rites and mourned his death? What if, despite his discovery that he belonged to the magical world, Jungkook had remained a useless human?

What was the point of becoming a shaman and returning to the shrine if Seokjin was no longer there? He forcibly interrupted the flow of his thoughts and forced himself to say:

"Nothing is certain, I have to be clear about it and I would only believe it when I had proof?"

He decided that he had to go to the Twilight Sanctuary that same evening without delay. Now he had to urgently find a way to activate his magic.

"Search, Jungkook, search," he ordered himself urgently.

He couldn't find anything in books. As the Ho had told him, it must have something to do with Inwagsan Mountain and what he found there. But even if his magic had been activated when he was on the path of souls, how could he find his way back?

"Maybe it's the path of souls that connected me to my magic?"

He took out his ice stone and tried to draw on his arm the hanja characters which were engraved on the stele marking the beginning of the path of souls, first the entire sentence, then only the characters designating the Path of Souls.

He was hopeful that something would happen but as soon as they were drawn, the characters disappeared, like all the previous drawings that Jungkook had tried to do on him since the day before.

"No, it must be something else, something that connected me with my magic through my emotions..." Jungkook said pensive. "If it's not the path of souls, maybe it's Jimin or Seokjin or both."

But something was wrong, he felt it. Jimin himself had no magic in him and couldn't activate his own magic, how could he activate someone else's without knowing it? As for Seokjin, he was a shaman with magic, certainly, but not belonging to the same shamanic branch as him.

"I am a northern shaman, but the Kims are western shamans, my magic is linked to the heart and theirs is linked to the soul, what could have connected me to them?" Jungkook asked himself in despair and thinking quickly.

He knew that the western shamans drew magic from their souls, but he did not yet know very well how the soul was used and in any case, he did not possess this magic. All he knew from Jimin was that Seokjin had shared a part of his soul with him for a short time.