“Humans are truly filthy and selfish, beings who can trample others for their own benefit at any time.”
“……”
“How can one endure without hating such humans?”
Mua’s voice was like the sound of wind echoing in a deep cave. He was clearly moving his mouth to speak, but it didn’t feel like the sound was being heard through his ears.
Jieon could only stare at Mua, unable to move even a fingertip, as if he were sitting under sleep paralysis. He wanted to avoid his gaze, but he couldn’t even move his eyes as he wished.
Was this a dream? Jieon rather hoped this was a dream. If it wasn’t a dream, there seemed to be no way to explain this situation.
“So from now on, never again let the words telling me to pretend to be human leave your mouth. Just imagining it makes me nauseous.”
“……”
“Do you understand?”
Mua demanded an answer, but Jieon couldn’t bring out his voice according to his own will. It felt as if an invisible force was gripping his throat. All he could do was barely nod his head slightly.
“If you have nothing more to say, I’ll be going now.”
With those final words, Mua turned around and went back into his room.
“Huk, heok…!”
Only then did Jieon curl up his body as if freed from restraints and gasp for rough breaths. His head tingled at the sudden feeling of blood flowing through his entire body.
“What, what was that…?”
Even having experienced it directly, he couldn’t understand what on earth had just happened. What he’d just felt was a bizarre sensation that couldn’t be explained with words like grotesque or creepy. Could a human overwhelm someone so much with just their presence? Am I really going crazy?
“Urk, uurk…!”
Suddenly his vision became dizzy and nausea surged. Jieon covered his mouth with his hand and dry-heaved several times.
It seemed the accident aftereffects were severe. Otherwise, there was no way such symptoms would appear. Or maybe there was a problem with his brain that the hospital hadn’t discovered. In any case, this definitely wasn’t normal.
His face turning deathly pale, Jieon hurriedly searched for his phone and contacted Suchan. It seemed he needed to get examined again. This was accident aftereffects. It absolutely had to be.
Because it made no sense that Shin Mua was really some other being that wasn’t human. Because something like a Grim Reaper possessing a human body was something that could absolutely never happen in reality, something that shouldn’t happen.
Jieon tried hard to ignore the alien sense of fear he’d just felt. Of course, it didn’t work well.
***
“Ah… I meant to ask if he knew any shamans, damn it.”
At that moment, Shin Mua, who had returned to his room, stopped in front of the door and muttered with a stupid expression. He’d had something to ask Cheon Jieon, but he’d only said other things and forgot, just coming back in.
Sangmyeong hadn’t appeared for several days and it was frustratingly unbearable. This wouldn’t do. He couldn’t just sit and wait endlessly for news from the Afterlife with no promise of when it would come.
After agonizing all night, the method Mua came up with was to find a shaman who could connect him with a Grim Reaper.
Of course, this also wasn’t an easy task. Grim Reapers weren’t petty minor spirits. Among the gods who sat atop shamans’ heads and showed off in the Living World, there weren’t many beings who could look down on Grim Reapers.
Moreover, the majority of minor spirits who weren’t even capable would be busy bowing their heads at just seeing a Grim Reaper’s shadow, so even if you searched all of South Korea, there would only be a few shamans who could connect humans and Grim Reapers.
That said, he couldn’t just sit around doing nothing. He had to come up with some solution somehow. However, Mua didn’t currently have anyone in the Living World to ask for help.
So he’d been planning to subtly ask Cheon Jieon in a roundabout way, but the guy with a liver the size of a bean suddenly got startled and collapsed, then acted arrogantly telling him to use human speech, so he couldn’t say what he needed to.
“Tsk…”
Mua clicked his tongue and sat on the bed. But after giving a warning out of Grim Reaper pride, it was awkward to go back out and ask now.
I’ll try again in a bit. Thinking that, he picked up ‘Shin Mua’s’ phone that had been tossed on the bed. Mua was currently trying to gradually learn how to use the phone these days.
It was because this place called the Living World was a world where you simply couldn’t live without becoming familiar with phones. In a situation where he already had nowhere to rely on, if he couldn’t even use a phone, there would be no answer whether it was solving the case or anything else.
The locked phone unlocked immediately when he held his face to it. It was natural since it was his own face, but Mua still couldn’t get used to it.
Not just the phone. Every time he looked in a mirror, Mua found his own face unfamiliar and would stare at it for a long while. He couldn’t even remember anymore what he’d looked like when he was human.
Just very faintly, only a vague feeling remained of how lovably and innocently his younger sibling had smiled.
As his thoughts reached that point, Mua hurriedly shook his head to scatter his musings. His head was already complicated enough without needing to recall meaningless memories of the past. It was better to spend that time digging into even one more aspect of the case.
Mua pressed around on ‘Shin Mua’s’ phone, which he’d already looked at many times. He’d already examined easily checkable things like messages and the gallery, but there was nothing suspicious.
However, seeing the tremendous number of what seemed like secretly taken photos of Cheon Jieon, he could only guess that Shin Mua had harbored one-sided feelings for him. Yet Cheon Jieon hated Shin Mua so much he wouldn’t even believe the claim of memory loss—what had Shin Mua found so good about him?
Well, the relationship between those two had nothing to do with him anyway. Shin Mua was already dead, and once he returned to the Afterlife, the connection between the two would be completely over.
Mua stared at the phone apps with an indifferent expression. Honestly, even looking at it, he didn’t really understand. He knew something changed when you pressed them, but it was daunting trying to figure out exactly what to look for and how in each app.
In truth, while they only appeared stern on the outside, among Grim Reapers there were quite a few who had great interest in the Living World. Especially the young ones who hadn’t been Grim Reapers for long were mainly like that.
Of course, the moment they put on Grim Reaper robes, they became completely different beings from humans, and thus weren’t greatly swayed by emotions or memories from when they were human. But it was extremely natural for those who hadn’t yet accumulated enough experience as Grim Reapers to peek at the culture of the Living World while coming and going on missions.
Dabbling in the Living World like that, causing some accidents, getting punished by the head Grim Reaper, and maturing into true Grim Reapers, shall we say.
“Should’ve done something…”
But unfortunately, Shin Mua—no, Mua—had early on not had even a fingernail’s worth of interest in the Living World. It had been like that from when he first received a mission as a Grim Reaper and was dispatched to the Living World.
Anyway, an old-fashioned Grim Reaper among old-fashioned Grim Reapers who hated being associated with humans even the tiniest bit. That was Mua during his time as a Grim Reaper.
And yet.
To be trapped helplessly in a human body and have to fiddle with a phone. Even though life was full of ups and downs, this was too much.
“Should I just learn from Cheon Jieon…?”
In fact, that was the only method Mua could use right now. He knew Jieon hated him, but it wasn’t like he was asking for something tremendously difficult, and above all, it would be good for him too if Mua returned to the Afterlife quickly, so the proposal to cooperate wasn’t bad.
The problem was whether he could trust Cheon Jieon.
“If only I could at least glimpse his memories…”
Sighing with a frustrated heart about this and that, Mua flopped down on the bed. Then a sharp pain shot through his waist. The waist injured in the recent accident still presented uncomfortable pain every time he moved.
Suddenly, sadness welled up. Not only was adapting to a human body difficult, he even had to endure the accident’s aftereffects, so nothing was easy.
When Mua was human, he’d been strong against pain. He’d also had strong patience and was someone who wouldn’t show he was in pain until right before collapsing.
It was the same when receiving punishment to erase his sins from when he was human in the Afterlife. Even when countless souls around him screamed at the top of their lungs that they were dying, Mua gritted his teeth and held back his screams. How else would rumors have spread in the Afterlife that a really tough guy had come in, bringing Lord Yeomra to personally come see Mua’s face?
But he’d already been rolling around in the Afterlife for a hundred years. While Mua was still among the Grim Reapers with exceptional patience, a hundred years was more than enough time to completely forget the sensations felt in a human body.
Moreover, during that time Mua had made diligent efforts to consciously distance himself as much as possible from human sensations. If he could, he’d wanted to erase everything from when he was human.
Because it hurt too much—the pain he’d felt as a human had been so terribly painful. Mua no longer wanted to keep those things close.
It wasn’t just talking about physical sensations. More than anything, Mua found human ’emotions’ most terrible. Physical pain could be endured, but mental pain carved him to pieces.
So Mua had cultivated himself to be cold-hearted. He completely separated himself from humans, and othered them by repeating countless times that he was now a different being from them.
When he occasionally had to go collect young children around the same age as his younger sibling, he tried even harder to emotionally distance himself from them. Whether child or elderly person, once he started pitying them, it seemed he wouldn’t be able to properly perform his Grim Reaper duties.
He wanted to scoff at human suffering. It seemed it would be good if he could rather feel satisfaction. He wanted to freely hate the selfish, terrible, vicious beings called ‘humans.’
As if he himself had never been human for even a single moment.
