STATS:

Full Name: Park JinYoung (also called James Park for a time)
Age: 847 (biologically mid twenties)
Species: Warlock (half Greater Demon, half human)
Date of Birth: September 22, 1170 (Goryeo Period)
Zodiac Sign: Virgo
Place of Birth: Formerly Uichang-hyeon, now Jinhae-gu district in the southern city of Changwon, South Korea
Gender: Male
S/O: Currently identifies as straight, but he’s experimented with almost everything over the years
Misc: Warlock Mark is cat eyes; can speak 6 languages fluently; has lived on 5 of 7 continents

BIO:

Park JinYoung was born on September 22nd in Uichang-hyeon (now known as Jinhae-gu district in the southern city of Changwon) in 1170 during the Goryeo Period. His mother was married to a well-to-do fisherman, but with most conceptions of Warlocks, she was tricked into conceiving her child with a demon in disguise. He was no ordinary demon, though, he was the Greater Demon Asmodeus, one of Lucifer’s followers who fell with him from Heaven into his own demonic realm.

He had a rather short childhood that came to a very abrupt end. When he was born, JinYoung looked normal, so his mother and step-father suspected nothing out of the ordinary--he was their son as far as they knew. He didn’t have an obvious Warlock mark from birth like some others with green skin or horns. It wasn’t until he began to grow up that he started to show signs of being different from the other children working the docks. With puberty starting, his body began to shift more than the usual human standards, waking up one day with green-gold cat eyes and the ability to make blue sparks dance around his fingertips. Naturally, he was afraid at first--terrified even. But using that terror he was able to somehow hide these parts of himself for months, suppressing the natural progression his body was taking with sheer will power and fear.

Of course, hiding these parts of himself didn’t last very long. The more he suppressed his true self, the more it wore on him and even caused him to fall ill months later. In the delirium of fever, his guard was let down and his cat eyes were revealed to his doting mother who was caring for him at the time, afraid that the illness was going to kill her only son. However, instead of feeling pity upon realizing that her son was not completely human, his mother felt a violent disgust--with herself and with him. When she looked at him, she no longer saw her son, she saw a monster and the thought that she had birthed such a creature consumed her with fear and self-loathing almost immediately. She locked JinYoung, still sick and fevered, in one of the loading sheds as a result so that her husband wouldn’t see her disgrace. But when he demanded to see his son, suspecting his wife of keeping him from him and questioning his power as the head of the household, she was finally forced to tell him where their son was locked up. By this point, JinYoung was heaped in the corner of the shed, sparks dancing around his whole body from the sickness ravaging him. His father was shocked and doubly horrified when his son finally looked up at him and revealed his other obvious deformation. He locked the door right back up and proceeded to turn on his wife, calling her an adultress and a shame to their small but proud household.

After three days of no news and no food, and upon hearing the sounds of something happening outside, JinYoung finally plucked up the courage to try and free himself. He put his sparking hands on the door and blew it clear off its hinges, into the water of the bay. Shocked and afraid of himself, the boy of merely 12-years-old cowered away from the threshold, staring down at his hands with wide, terrified eyes. He finally noticed then a few moments later that chaos was ensuing outside his makeshift prison, so he weakly made his way out the door and immediately saw what all the yelling and scurrying about was for. His mother had hung herself on the front gate of the family property.

He barely had time to process what he was seeing before his father was dragging him down the path towards the docks by his arm and away from the harrowing scene. He swore at the boy, called him names, and told him to take a good look at his mother because it was his fault she’d taken her own life out of shame. His father also made sure that JinYoung knew he was determined to get rid of the bad luck that had befallen his household once and for all. He dragged his son into the water and shoved him under, holding him there despite how the boy squirmed and jerked to try and get out of the older man’s grip. JinYoung was already so weak from fever that his hold on his father’s wrists was barely even there to begin with. Despite that, however, the blue sparks began to dance around his fingers again and within seconds he was no longer being held under the water and he burst through the surface with an loud gasp for air. Wiping his eyes, he looked around himself, shaking and shell-shocked, only to realize that the water around him was covered in a thick layer of singed black ash.

Then, he was running. He ran as fast as his weak body would take him to the stables, climbed on a horse and left, never once looking back on his childhood home ever again.

***

JinYoung rode for a little over three days, stopping here and there to beg for a crust until he finally he had to sell his horse to someone for money to buy proper food. Of course, he was sorely underpaid for his well-bred horse, but, on the road, taking advantage of a child’s ignorance was common and always in the best interest of the buyer. With no horse, no shoes, and nowhere to go, an ahjumma, who’d been kind enough to give him a bowl of rice on the side of the road, pointed him towards the Buddhist temple that their village was famous for: Songgwangsa. 

Elated at the prospect of shelter, he hurried up the hill to the sanctuary and met the monks who lived in the monestary there. They collectively heard out his story and took pity on the poor child, giving him a modest room to sleep in and a meal that very night. He was afraid of how they would react if he revealed his true eyes, so he worked hard to keep them hidden for as long as possible, only relaxing them into visibility when he was alone.

JinYoung went on to live among these monks for seven years, helping out with manual labor to earn his keep and becoming close to one monk in particular. His name was Chinul and he was young compared to the other monks at the temple being around 24 when JinYoung had first arrived. He looked out for JinYoung and became the first person to know his secret and not cringe in fear and disgust. He'd found out by accident one day. JinYoung had let his guard down after hammering his finger while rehanging a scroll in the main temple. He'd cried out in pain and dropped the hammer to the ground just as Chinul was coming to bring him tea as refreshment for all the hard work he'd done that day. The injured hand was surrounded by blue sparks and JinYoung looked up in a panic at the sound of footsteps, cat eyes on full display. The incident caused them to form a strong brotherly affection towards each other since JinYoung didn't have to hide a part of who he was from him. But not long after his 19th birthday, JinYoung decided that temple life was growing monotonous for him and he had too many unanswered questions to stay put any longer. He needed to know what he was and why. He didn't know how he would find out, but he'd search to the end of his days if he had to. What else did he have to live for?

***

It wasn't until five years later while traveling through China that he finally had a run in with someone from the Downworld. He'd had a bit too much to drink that night and found himself in the arms of a woman, except she was no ordinary woman. She'd been following him for days at the command of a very powerful Warlock in the province. JinYoung had been good at keeping a low profile for the most part over those five years, aside from an incident a few weeks prior that had ended with an explosion of blue sparks and quite a few singed cranes. He'd gotten away with it, but the incident did not pass the sensibilities of the High Warlock of the province he was traveling through. The hired woman just needed to get actual proof that he was a downworlder and the more intoxicated with alcohol and lust that he became, the more he was open to show her anything she'd like, including "the trick with the sparks in his hand," as she'd put it. He gladly showed her how he did it and during his drunken demonstration, he glanced over at her with his cat eyes and a dumb, drunk smile and all was confirmed.

He woke up on the floor of a bare room the next morning with a horrid hangover and after having a chance to wash up, he was ushered, in a very confused manner, to a grand study where a man with pale blue skin sat in a chair by the window. JinYoung was taken aback by this meeting at first until the man introduced himself as Yang and said, "it's refreshing to find another of our kind who is still so young. My associate tells me that you're merely in your 20's?" JinYoung could only nod dumbly, his cat eyes on full display as he was completely out of his element and feeling extremely ill from drink. “You don’t know what you are, do you?”

They sat up talking all night that night and well into the next morning. JinYoung had been intimidated by this man at first. What with the opulence of his home and being surrounded by scents of spices, incense, and expensive alcohol. However, once Yang started to explain things, and have one of his servants bring JinYoung copious amounts of food and tea as a restorative, the more everything started to click into place for the young Warlock. There was so much to know and learn and when JinYoung was able to finally retire to his private room to rest the next morning, he found himself entirely overwhelmed. He'd been searching so hard for answers for so long and now that they'd fallen into his lap he found himself missing his former ignorance.

As it turned out, he was exactly what his parents thought he was after all: a monster. A hybrid; half demon, half human, and to what end? Where did the divide meet between these two halves? He couldn't know, and he wouldn't know until many years later. In that moment though, in that lavish room where he knew he didn't belong, he felt cursed; and for the first time since he'd left his home by the sea, he mourned for the deaths of the parents he once knew.

Then, when he had no tears left, he gathered his things and he departed from that palatial home without a word to his host. He did not return again to Asia for another 200 years.

***

Over 800 years of life, JinYoung lived on a total of 5 continents and in dozens of different countries, picking up and finding somewhere new whenever he got bored of wherever he was. He taught himself languages, read thousands of books, and met throngs of interesting people along the way, including a few European kings and a group of wild French gypsies who let him live among their tribe for a few years. In the years when he was exploring the western parts of the world he was known as James Park, and he took on this new persona with enthusiam. There were no limits to what he could do because he kept no ties and lived each day without taking anything too seriously. But even ultimate freedom like that could wear on a person after a few hundred years of it.

Like any young person approaching adulthood, though 785 was quite past a normal maturing age, he began to long for stability--to settle somewhere--to be JinYoung again. That's when he decided to go back to his home country for the first time since he'd left as a young man. He'd gone back to Asia since leaving China in his twenties, but only far to the south, never back to Korea. There was still too much pain associated with that place for him back then. But up to this point in his life, he'd seen and done so much; he'd loved and learned and killed and mourned. He was ready, but his home country was not in the same state he'd left it in. The year was now 1956 and it was split in two, having been ravaged by war only a mere six years earlier.

Even the Downworld there was in shambles and if he couldn't salvage his country's dignity on the surface, than he would do it underground. He was a well-educated and well-spoken man by then and his efforts put South Korea on the road to being an economic force on the world stage once more. No one would ever know that he and a few of his associates were the ones putting ideas in politician's heads and formulating plans for industry and technological advancement that would set the country on a rapid incline towards prosperity in the wake of so much historical devastation. He could not mend the divide for there were too many factors involved even for him to gain control of and to change, but he was determined with his efforts in South Korea to hopefully make some sort of difference.

For his efforts he was named High Warlock of Seoul, the highest honor a Warlock can have in their lowly station below the angelic beings of the world. Demon blood would always set him a step below the others but he was satisfied with where he was and he'd found a place where he'd belonged for the time being. That was until the corruption, that always seemed to plague humans over the centuries no matter where he was, began to eat away at him, bringing out primal instincts of his that he usually kept locked away deep inside for the sake of propriety and putting up a good front for the ever-so-fragile and painfully weak-minded humans.

Greed and lust for power would always win out over sense. He'd seen it a million times in his hundreds of years of life. They never changed and they probably never would. This painful realization made him sick to his very core, so he abandoned his efforts, going into seclusion in his home tucked into the mountains of Seoul. It wouldn't take them long either to realize that they were getting older and he was not, so it was just as well. He could either have to hide or leave, and this time he hid...for 60 years.

Nowadays, he still hosted friends in his house and threw outragous parties, gave refuge to downworlders like himself, and performed spells and summonings here and there for the needy nephilim, but he didn't dare leave his domain. His seclusion caused him to grow rather bitter and cynical over time towards the world and his fateful, and now incredibly grueling, immortality within it. Was this all there would ever be for him?