“Um, I have something I’m curious about.”
“Oh my, you scared me!”
The housekeeper who’d been cleaning Jieon’s room and coming out was startled by the voice suddenly speaking to her in front of the door and dropped the dishcloth she was holding.
“Ah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
The flustered Jieon picked up the dishcloth for her and spoke. The housekeeper shook her head vigorously and waved her hands.
“No, no. I was lost in thought for a moment…. Do you need something?”
At the housekeeper’s question, Jieon’s gaze turned to Shin Mua, who was sitting on the living room sofa in the distance. He was sitting with a deliberately serious expression, looking at a tablet. It was an item Shin Mua had newly taken interest in since yesterday.
That tablet had originally been Shin Mua’s, but he didn’t know how to operate the device at all. Not just the tablet. He couldn’t even properly use a phone, so a few days ago, Jieon had to slowly explain step by step how to send a message.
When reproached about how he couldn’t even do this, he shamelessly spouted nonsense about how they didn’t need to use such things in the Afterlife, or did he think such machines existed a hundred years ago.
Then yesterday, after hearing from Jieon that ‘Shin Mua’ had frequently used not only a smartphone but also a tablet, he shamelessly even demanded a lecture on how to operate a tablet.
‘You don’t have anything to do anyway, do you?’
When he snapped about why he should have to teach him such things, he got beaten down with facts. After earnestly learning how to operate it all day yesterday, today he’d been clinging to that machine from morning without a word.
Since he’d taught him how to find information on the internet, it seemed he’d started searching for things himself whenever he was curious about something.
He was having the frivolous thought of whether it was okay to introduce such a stimulating world to a Grim Reaper who’d lived without knowing what dopamine was, when the housekeeper standing beside him carefully spoke to him.
“Representative?”
“Huh? Oh, sorry.”
Having forgotten for a moment while thinking about Shin Mua that he’d even spoken to the housekeeper, Jieon hurriedly continued.
“Um, about Shin Mua.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Does he eat anything on his own? Like demanding that you prepare something for him…”
The housekeeper immediately shook her head.
“No. He’s never once requested a meal from me.”
“……”
“I haven’t even seen him eating anything on his own.”
“I see.”
“Even when I ask if I should prepare a meal, he always just says no… Should I pay more attention?”
“No, it’s fine. He’ll eat on his own. Please continue your work.”
Jieon deliberately answered as if it were nothing and turned around to look at Shin Mua again.
The first to feel puzzled was Suchan. As he was seeing Suchan off at the door on his way home, he suddenly brought up this:
‘Hey, but Shin Mua… hasn’t he lost too much weight? He wasn’t particularly fat before either, but now he’s almost… what, isn’t there something wrong with his body?’
Hearing those words, Jieon carefully observed Shin Mua. Just as Suchan said, he was excessively wasting away. Even before the accident, he’d had a slender physique, but he wasn’t the type to be worryingly thin.
Especially after marrying Jieon, in a more comfortable environment than before where he ate and slept well, his weight had actually increased compared to before, which stressed him out.
But looking at Shin Mua’s state now, it was literally ‘skin and bones.’ Exaggerating a bit, he looked like he’d fly away in the wind. Suchan’s worry wasn’t unfounded.
Come to think of it, he couldn’t remember seeing him eat anything since returning home. Except for that terrible first day when he sat in the darkness eating plain rice.
“No way…”
At that moment, an intense hypothesis flashed through Jieon’s mind.
No way, has he been eating only plain rice all this time?
Come to think of it, he seemed to remember Shin Mua telling him at some point that he hated eating rice. Back then, convinced he was acting out memory loss, he hadn’t listened properly.
But what if those words were sincere? What if that’s why he hadn’t been eating proper meals all this time?
At the absurd hypothesis, a chill ran down his spine. He thought there’s no way he’d still be doing that, but considering Shin Mua’s terrible behavior so far, it seemed entirely possible, which disturbed him.
“Nah, no way.”
Jieon deliberately ignored the chilling hypothesis that kept rising and slowly passed through the living room toward his room.
He really didn’t do it on purpose—he just suddenly coughed and cleared his throat, yet Shin Mua still only stared at the tablet with a serious expression without even lifting his head. No matter what, it was ridiculous that he didn’t even acknowledge someone passing by.
Can a hundred-year-old Grim Reaper act so selfishly? He was grumbling internally when he suddenly stopped walking, finding it strange that he’d naturally accepted the hypothesis that he was a Grim Reaper.
Moments like this were what was truly chilling. At first, he’d definitely been jumping up and down saying Shin Mua was playing tricks, and he’d found the appearance of him sticking to that ridiculous concept detestable and disgusting. But at some point, Jieon had unknowingly gradually, little by little, become accustomed to Shin Mua who claimed to be a Grim Reaper.
Was it because, as he’d confided to Suchan, he’d come to hope he was a different being from before? Or was it because of the strange phenomena that couldn’t be explained with words?
Whatever the reason, what was certain was that like clothes getting wet in drizzle, he was slowly getting drenched by him.
Was he going crazy following him, or were there truly things that couldn’t be understood rationally? With complicated feelings, Jieon stood blankly for a while, looking at Shin Mua.
***
“Look at this wicked bastard. You’ll receive Divine Punishment, you will.”
An angry voice rang out in the room lit only by a small lamp. The one lying on the bed looking at a tablet screen and raging was none other than Mua.
The inflexible old-fashioned person famously renowned in the Afterlife, the Grim Reaper Mua, who had guided the souls of countless deceased to the Afterlife over a full hundred years.
That Grim Reaper was now glaring while watching a short-form drama playing on the tablet. Disgracefully so.
“Tsk tsk, being so soft-hearted.”
Mua, who’d been listening to the female protagonist’s wailing with a tear-stained face, wrinkled his nose and muttered. The protagonist who didn’t lose her kind heart even in a situation where her husband and friend were having an affair was not just pitiful but frustrating.
“……”
Then, suddenly thinking the outside the window was too quiet, Mua turned off the tablet screen and sat up to sit blankly on the bed. With a somehow chilling feeling down his spine, he checked the time.
“Are you insane?”
3 AM.
The time Mua had lain down on the bed was before midnight. That meant he’d been lying in bed looking at the tablet for over three hours.
“You’ve truly lost your mind.”
Mua reproached himself as if speaking to another person. It was so absurd he wondered if it was a dream.
At first, there was definitely a reason. He wanted to find clues that Shin Mua might have left behind, to find information on his own without Cheon Jieon’s help. So he’d only tried to become proficient with smartphones and tablets.
Then after watching a few videos of shamans making a fuss about being famous, the video platform suddenly started showing him strange videos with provocative text. Even though Mua hadn’t searched for them, videos just popped up on their own.
[I was the perfect wife my whole life, but the one he laid in my bed was my best friend of 10 years]
Mua thought: Even if it wasn’t a Grim Reaper of the Afterlife but Lord Yeomra himself who came, he couldn’t have not clicked on that title.
Just by lightly touching the screen with his fingertips, all sorts of stimulating stories unfolded in an instant. He’d thought he’d seen countless stories while working as a Grim Reaper, but watching stories as dramas was different.
Especially in Mua’s case, even during his time as a Grim Reaper he hadn’t been particularly interested in human lives and hadn’t bothered looking into them, so it was even more so. When the very person who’d had an affair slapped the betrayed wife’s cheek, he couldn’t help but gasp involuntarily.
Moreover, these damn videos had no end. When one finished, they’d play another video on their own. The title of the new video was even more outrageous.
[Ten years since being adopted into a chaebol family, their lost biological daughter suddenly appeared. The four older brothers who promised to cherish only me told me to become my biological sister’s servant and…]
Mua couldn’t take his eyes off that story at all.
And now, until 3 AM, Mua had been clutching a small tablet watching stories of humans grabbing each other’s hair and trudging steadfastly toward disaster. It was truly absurd.
Mua threw the tablet far onto the floor. As if it were some wicked object that had seduced him.
“The end times, it’s the end times.”
Though he himself was the one who had clicked the videos and personally watched them until this hour, Mua clicked his tongue as if it were someone else’s business and quickly lay back down on the bed, pulling the blanket up to his neck.
So, what happened to the fates of the daughters whose families had been switched when they were young?
Though he couldn’t bear the curiosity about the content of the last drama he’d been watching, since he was the owner of such strong patience that he’d be offended to be called second in the Afterlife, he decided to endure it.
