Chương 72: 나비별곡_[Verse of the Butterflies (胡蝶別曲)]_Lore Bible_02

I have trimmed as much as I could, but for those who have not yet read the story, I want to give fair warning before they walk into a wall of spoilers. This installment is a brief introduction to the four central protagonists. Some pieces of the worldview will unfold along with them, so — spoilers, take care. The title of my screenplay is 나비별곡(Na-bi-byeol-gok). In Japanese, 胡蝶別曲. In English, Verse of the Butterflies. In Korean shamanism, the butterfly is regarded as a "drifting being."

Because its undulating motion resembles the way a spirit moves, the butterfly came to stand in for the shaman herself — the one who guides and leads spirits. That is the origin. This is why Korea has passages such as 도령돌기(Do-ryeong-dol-gi) within the 진오귀굿(Jin-o-gwi-gut), and even a separate 나비춤(Na-bi-chum_Butterfly Dance) of its own. Whether the textual record reaches back to the Goryeo period, or only as far as the Joseon period of the 동국세시기(Dong-guk-se-si-gi), I cannot say with certainty.

But within Korea, the equation "shaman = butterfly" carries a connection deep enough that academic papers have been written on the subject. (There may be parallels in other countries, but I drew on Korean academic records of Korean shamanism and Professor Seo Jung-beom's 무녀별곡(Mu-nyeo-byeol-gok), so please bear that in mind.) Originally, the four protagonists of Verse of the Butterflies came from four entirely separate screenplays, each with its own story.

But as life went on, I kept looking at four scripts that shared a single worldview and thinking, "Why on earth did I split this up?" That is when the blunt, foolish stubbornness of "let us merge them" kicked in. I gathered the four screenplays — already notarized and copyright-registered in 2019 — bound them together, and the volume of the story grew. Under a different working title, I had it notarized again in 2022, and now I am moving toward visualization. My story has four central protagonists.

With a runtime of fifty-five minutes per episode and a volume of roughly 141 episodes, the cast is far from small. At the heart of all of it sit these four. Depending on which of them takes the foreground, the subtitle of each season changes. Some of what follows may carry mild spoilers, so please keep that in mind as you read. The story is so large and the cast so wide that without laying the characters out, I would honestly start passing blood.

I have lived buried in this work for thirty years, so I am fine — but for anyone meeting it for the first time, that very scale becomes the threshold at the door. 도연희(Doe Yeon-hui) 都連曦 - ト・ヨンヒ (As the sunlight enters in succession.) 종즉유시(Jong-jeuk-yu-si_Where there is an end, there is a beginning.) Every ending is the shadow that drapes the next beginning, 조소희(Jo So-hui) 趙所姬 - チョ・ソヒ (Through the place where the prayer is laid.) The path of all ages descends, through you, upon all, 이시연(Lee Si-yeon) 李始緣 - イ・シヨン (As the bonds between us begin.) As we believe that every wounded life, and every life that wounded another, will end and begin anew, 강지영(Kang Ji-young) 姜知暎 - カン・ジヨン (They reflect one another.) Your life will carry on through you, and will continue, just as it is, watching over us all. Just settling on the hanja for those four name-readings nearly split my skull open.

Those four are the most central protagonists of my work, and they sit at the heart of every strand of the narrative. Among the four, the season subtitles shift according to whose weight rises. Seasons centered on Lee Si-yeon and Jo So-hui — Conflict. Seasons centered on Doe Yeon-hui — Eclosion. Seasons centered on Kang Ji-young — Memory of the Clock. Any subtitled season that does not fall under those rules means the four carry roughly equal weight in that arc. Or — it may mean a parting that no one was ready for.

To begin with, Kang Ji-young and Lee Si-yeon are doppelgangers. Within the work, this is called "the front face of the mirror" — a presence that exists almost as a smokescreen, set up to shield a figure of true importance. To put it plainly: if Kang Ji-young is the truly important one, then Lee Si-yeon is born later, bearing the same face and the same voice, so that no one can take aim at Ji-young — that is the relationship to picture.

Although later in the work, this is unfolded as something other than what it first appears. By the same logic, Doe Yeon-hui and Jo So-hui are also doppelgangers. The two of them stand as "the back face of the mirror," and the relationship itself is not so different from the one between Kang Ji-young and Lee Si-yeon. The common notion that "if they see each other, they die" simply does not exist here. They exist for one another's sake, so they look at each other, eat well, and live well.

The bond between the four — and the debt — is so central a substance of the drama that their sense of one another is anything but light. That they do not die from meeting eyes is a given. By age, the order goes Kang Ji-young, Doe Yeon-hui, Jo So-hui, Lee Si-yeon. Korea places more weight on age-based hierarchy than the West tends to, so as a familiar form of address, the older one is called 언니(Eonni). In the translation guidelines I have set this as sis. In Japanese, the Korean word itself is preserved as オンニ.

That said, this is not a relationship of stiff honorifics or rigid hierarchical speech. They tease each other, they run from each other — it is simply the shape of an ordinary "family." -Spoilers ahead, take care- Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. In the work, this world and the lives within it lie under an eternal curse. The natural order — that life ends in death — remains intact, untroubled, faithful to the cycle of rebirth.

But the lives that dwell in this world are drawn under an eternal curse: that they will be eaten away and collapse beneath the flooding of the world of the dead. Three worlds exist. 이승(I-seung_the world of the living), 저승(Jeo-seung_the world of the dead), and 요승(Yo-seung_the Between World). The world of the living is, as it sounds, where life dwells. The world of the dead is where death dwells. The Between World, between them, is neither life nor death — a middle stage.

Rather than the negative weight of words like demon or monstrous spirit, please take it more in the sense of "the strange-feeling." A gate exists that holds the world of the living shut, and a gate exists that holds the world of the dead shut. And a key exists that can prop both gates open. The origin, the root, and the very reason these three pieces exist will be unfolded later through the creation myth that surfaces within the drama.

To reveal it here would be a perfect spoiler — if I let it slip in this seat, I am finished. For reasons I cannot disclose at this point, life within the work lies cursed, and to forestall that curse, "단(Dan_The Covenant)" has, across the cycles, executed the key whenever it appears. The moment that practice finally went off the rails — that is the starting point of this screenplay. And so, to the figures who follow. First, Kang Ji-young carries within her one of the three pieces — 전령(Jeon-ryeong_Harbinger).

Among the three fragments of the deepest death — Harbinger, 사절(Sa-jeol_Envoy), and 사도(Sa-do_Conduit) — the Harbinger holds the station known as the "key." She is the figure who flatly refuses one of the great purposes of The Covenant — the destruction of the key — that the four protagonists will all come to belong to. And she goes so far as to take the seat of its head: the 56th 단장(Dan-jang_The Oldest). She assumes the post by the will left behind by the 55th The Oldest.

By trade, she is a game-loving corporate accountant, of the "trash-tier elite" sort. She carries the narrative of one who, by all rights, was meant to die. The ones who saved Ji-young from death in her childhood were the woman who would later take her in as her own — Mother Jeon I-sim, the 55th The Oldest — and the young Yeon-hui. Ji-young believes her own life was forged out of a "debt" — the help, or the sacrifice, of every other person.

She is drawn as a figure who gives everything she has to repaying that debt, and through the yoke of that debt she is drawn into one event after another. Next, Doe Yeon-hui carries within her another of the three pieces — Conduit. The death that holds the gate of the world of the living, she stands as the last bulwark of this world against the flooding 삼도천(Samdo-cheon_River of the Dead) of the world of the dead. She did not carry it from the start.

Through a certain incident, she came to bear the last of the three pieces, the Conduit. She was the child who saved the young Kang Ji-young. Two years younger than Ji-young, yet she does not call her sis. Because Kang Ji-young threw such a tantrum over it, Doe Yeon-hui treats her as a friend — or something even closer — and the two of them simply stay together. As mentioned, she stands at the back face of the mirror with Jo So-hui.

She is one who cannot bring herself to kill the living, who stands forever wavering before the moment of decision — a figure of conviction who will not stain her hands with blood, even if the one before her is an enemy. This trait is mirrored in So-hui as well; the two of them carry the narrative of having never once killed a living person. And precisely because of that, they are dragged into one event after another. Jo So-hui, in the work, comes to carry "ㅇㅇㅇ."

Ah — there is no way I can speak of this one, so I ask your forbearance for the redaction. Until that point, she stands as the 안내자(Annae-ja_Guide), later 인도자(Indo-ja_The Seer), a figure capable of road-sight — a kind of prophecy. She holds, as her power, a foresight different in grain from divination, one that can lay out the road of any living person other than herself; once she has touched, or merely faced, a living person, she can predict the road they walk.

Beyond a thousand forking paths she gauges every choice, every reason behind every choice, every variable — a being who can "follow." How the road-sight is read is depicted within the work. But because her gift is bound to the roads of the living, of the four, she can lay open only Yeon-hui's road. There is also a setting that, should So-hui die, she would gain the sight of the dead. Lee Si-yeon, in the work, carries "Conduit."

As the mirror of Kang Ji-young, she is a tragic figure who has borne, in full, every worst-case version of the lives Ji-young might have led — yet through the care of the other three, and through Mother Jeon I-sim who took her into her heart, everything turns in a single moment. She carries the piece called the gate of the world of the dead, and she is the first to face the flooding.

The Envoy, that gate of the world of the dead, is the head of 사절단(Sa-jeol-dan_The Envoy's Legion), the very one who, with her own hand, forged sixty-three of the sixty-four bodies of the Legion that exist to govern the River of the Dead. Of those sixty-four, only eight are appointed to act upon the world of the living within a single key-cycle (sixty years, in the work). Which is to say: once every sixty years, the active formation of the Legion is replaced.

The one who set down that rule, again, is the Envoy herself. By origin, the Envoy reigns above the Legion. But the station that takes precedence over all else, even for the Envoy, is the rank of the three pieces. And so she comes into conflict with her own creations — but that story unfolds within the drama itself. It is not for me to lay out here. By the existence of the three pieces alone, they ought, of course, to stand at the absolute peak within the work.

But I placed the constraints upon them in two things — "the world of the living" and "flesh." For the deepest death itself to dwell within this world, it must wear the husk of the living, and so the powers it can wield are kept within limits. Even those limits, however, are at a level no ordinary shaman could withstand; and even when the Legion descends directly into the world of the living, as the three pieces do, that descent too cannot escape the boundary of the constraint.

And so my story is, in the end, a conflict between "human beings." My story is the collision between the one who tries to repay the debt, the one who believes there is no debt to repay, and the one who has prepared everything precisely because of that debt. The one who tries to settle a debt that cannot be settled. The one who pushes her to settle it. And the one who designed the entire board for the sake of every debt within it. This is their fight, and this is their narrative.

Even from this much, your head may already be spinning — but truthfully, once it is on screen, it will be far easier than the page. Watching it, the moment of "Ah." will come naturally, because the explanatory scenes have been laid in their proper places. Ah — my work has no sweet little romance, nor any heavy, intimate love story. Platonic moments come up many times, but there is no depiction of intimacy of the adult kind.

Repaying debts is hard enough as it is; there is neither the volume nor the time to put such scenes in. That is not to say there is no breathing room. The work is not heavy and gloomy from end to end. If anything, gloomy expression itself does not take up much space. By weight, it sits at about six parts daily life to four parts tragedy — it is, if anything, a story I worked to tell in the everyday register of "the people of a shaman insurance firm." Although those who have read it curse at me for that.

They ask where on earth I see anything everyday in this. Ah — that did not mean it was unenjoyable. The reactions actually leaned closer to praise, and for that I was grateful. To anyone who has followed this difficult work all the way through, I thank you, simply for that. What I had set out to do before visualization was just to leave a timestamp online — but the welcome was so much warmer than I expected that I am now wringing myself dry for a better, sharper visualization.

Next, I will take the supporting protagonists, the ones outside the central four, and lay out their settings and relations. Originally, I had meant to unpack the "villain" here — but it became clear that I cannot disentangle the villain's story from Mother Jeon I-sim's story. So this much is the brief unfolding of the four protagonists and the worldview around them. I did not expect it to run this long. In any case, thank you, always, for watching over this.

The advance-release thirty-minute visualization is also moving along steadily, so I will keep grinding myself to the bone, that more and more may receive my invitation.