“What is… all this?”
Mua asked with a dumbfounded face, looking at the table setting laid out before him. Jieon, sitting across from him with his arms crossed, answered with a deliberately stern expression.
“It’s porridge.”
“Porridge?”
“Yeah. You don’t eat so much that eating proper food right away is impossible, so they said to start slowly with porridge. I had it specially made with everything that’s good for your body, so eat it with a grateful heart, okay?”
It was quite impressive boasting considering he didn’t even make it himself. Anyway, since he’d specially instructed it to be made, he thought it wasn’t something he couldn’t take credit for.
“I won’t eat it.”
But the unyielding Shin Mua immediately turned his head away and refused. He wasn’t even a three-year-old child—it was absurd.
“Are you joking?”
Jieon asked with his eyebrows deeply furrowed.
“I have no interest in painstaking human food, so leave me alone. I’ll handle it myself.”
Even while speaking, the savory smell rising from the warm porridge lingered around Mua’s nose. Though it should have been disgusting and nauseating, his body, faithful to the instinct to survive, was being drawn to the food smell regardless of Mua’s will.
Feeling disgusted by the reflexive response of drooling, Mua closed his eyes altogether. Seeing Mua’s attitude was unusual, Jieon spoke again in a much softer voice.
“Why on earth do you hate eating? I just said it was specially made, but what is porridge? It’s just cooked rice. It’s not much different from plain rice.”
“……”
“You have to survive first and see. Right? What if you die like that? Is that okay? Well, I wouldn’t mind that, but you said you have to solve a case. But if you keep collapsing, how are you going to go around solving any case?”
When he logically persuaded him while thinking from Shin Mua’s perspective, Mua slyly opened the eyes he’d closed. Jieon internally cheered but didn’t show it and took the next step.
“Oh, and that thing you asked for.”
“……?”
“I narrowed down some shamans who are said to be capable, you know? Now we just have to go see them.”
“That worked out very well. Let’s go right now!”
Just as Jieon expected, Mua wiggled his bottom as if he’d dash out right away. But Jieon firmly shook his head.
“No? We’re not going.”
“What do you mean?”
“What if you collapse outside while wandering around without eating? Right now there’s about to be articles saying you got malnutrition from spousal abuse. Does malnutrition in a chaebol family make sense? I’m doing this to help you, so should I become that kind of trash too?”
Mua obediently stuck his wiggling bottom to the chair and clamped his mouth shut. No matter how much he tried to refute, Jieon’s words were all correct, so he had nothing to say.
Jieon pointed with his chin at the bowl placed in front of Mua and maintained a firm voice.
“Eat. And when you get a bit healthier, we’ll go. Whether you like humans or hate them, you’re currently inside a human body. So follow the rules of the human body.”
Even at the absurd word combination like ‘rules of the human body,’ Mua only made a gloomy expression without saying much else. He suddenly thought that this man before him who insisted he was a Grim Reaper might actually be easier to coax than expected.
“What are you going to do?”
Without answering Jieon’s final question, Mua slowly picked up the spoon with a face that said he hated it to death.
When he put a spoonful of porridge that had cooled to just the right temperature during their argument into his mouth, an indescribable feast of all kinds of flavors burst like fireworks on his parched tongue.
Though he didn’t want to admit it, honestly it was delicious, so Mua felt a bit sad. The human body was truly insufferably vexing.
***
“My back is warm and my stomach is full. I’ve completely become human.”
Mua, who had been lying in bed about to sleep and staring blankly at the ceiling, muttered self-deprecatingly. Certainly, once proper food went in, he could feel his physical condition improving at once.
After entering a human body, Mua had to endure constant faint headaches, heartburn, and feelings of tremendous heaviness. At the time, he’d simply thought they were symptoms arising from the mismatch between soul and body, but now it seemed they were symptoms from not eating properly.
The porridge he’d been semi-forcibly fed by Cheon Jieon’s nagging was more delicious than expected. Unlike the beginning when he’d resolved to just pretend to take a few bites, when he came to his senses, he’d even scraped it all clean until the bottom showed.
Even when he was human, there were times he occasionally ate porridge. It was so long ago the taste didn’t come to mind well, but one thing was certain: he’d never once felt that it was delicious.
Was that why? To be a bit more honest despite the shame, it was delicious. The feast of flavors filling his mouth wasn’t unpleasant enough to make meaningless those moments when he’d forced down plain rice saying he hated feeling human sensations.
“Haah…”
A sigh flowed out naturally. These were precisely the kinds of moments Mua had been wary of all along.
Having trivial conversations with humans, being affected by nightmares like humans, falling into cultures humans enjoyed, coming to crave human food—all these moments evoked guilt in Mua. He hadn’t expected he would become this weak.
He’d thought he could be more indifferent since he’d forgotten human sensations while living as a being belonging to the Afterlife for a hundred years, but reality was the opposite. Rather, he seemed more vulnerable to the stimulating sensations he could feel with a human body. It was ironic.
But on the other hand, he also wanted to ask back what more he could do differently. He’d suddenly been trapped in a human body overnight and thrown into the unfamiliar Living World—what more could he have done better?
His mind was complicated. At the same time, being swayed by emotions like this also seemed to be an effect of wearing a human body, which upset him. He even thought that dying and escaping this body might be more helpful in solving the case.
Just as the shadow of depression that started as a very small dot gradually grew and tried to completely swallow Mua’s heart.
Knock knock.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Who is it?”
“…Are you not sleeping?”
Naturally, the one who intruded on Mua’s depression without permission was Cheon Jieon.
“……”
“……”
However, the quiet air being broken was brief—Jieon at the door just stood there blankly, only chewing his lips. Since Jieon didn’t open his mouth, Mua had nothing particular to say either and just stayed still. He figured once his words were organized, the other party would naturally bring them up.
But even after quite some time passed, he just kept staring at Mua. Finally, unable to bear the frustration, Mua opened his mouth first.
“Didn’t you come because you have something to say?”
Whether he’d been thinking deeply about something alone, Jieon—despite being the one who opened the door and came in—flinched his shoulders, startled. It really couldn’t help but be ridiculous and absurd.
Perhaps embarrassed himself, Jieon coughed unnecessarily and spoke curtly.
“Well, I do have something to say, but… aren’t you tired?”
“I’m fine, so speak.”
Since when did you care about what I think? He was about to add that sarcastic remark but stopped. Honestly, Mua was a little glad that Cheon Jieon had come to his room. If he hadn’t broken this night’s silence, Mua’s thoughts would have deepened and intensified further.
So he didn’t particularly want to pick a fight and chase him away.
“Well, it’s nothing much, I’m just curious about something.”
“What is it? Tell me.”
Even with Mua’s permission, Jieon couldn’t easily bring it up and hesitated. What great question is he trying to ask that he’s stalling like that? Mua was becoming more curious now.
Jieon was dying in his own way. Though he’d come all the way to Mua’s room unable to contain his curiosity, he felt at a loss for how to bring it up. On one hand, he was also cautious. Even without knowing the detailed circumstances, he had a premonition that this didn’t seem like a topic he could easily bring up.
“Um… do you by any chance have a younger sibling?”
Jieon’s prediction was right on the mark. As soon as he heard the question, Mua’s expression noticeably hardened. Internally thinking oh no, but the spilled water couldn’t be gathered back up. With the thought that there was no choice now that it had come to this, Jieon continued.
“No, what I mean is… when you were at the hospital. You kept looking for your younger sibling and crying.”
“……”
“You said your sibling was alone. You cried so miserably saying you had to go home, so I was wondering… what it was about.”
He was aware he was rambling, but he had no confidence to speak more logically. Honestly, even Jieon himself didn’t know exactly what he wanted to say, so naturally it couldn’t be organized.
However, after returning from the hospital, there was one scene in Jieon’s mind that wouldn’t be forgotten.
The appearance of Shin Mua pleading while looking for his sibling in such a pitiful, pathetic, and fragile-seeming tone came as a great shock to Jieon. It was a speech pattern he’d never heard even from Shin Mua before the accident.
It could have been passed off as a momentary happening, but strangely, that scene kept coming to mind even after returning home. To dismiss it as the nonsense of someone who momentarily couldn’t properly come to their senses due to a strange dream, the emotions he’d felt from him in that brief moment were too intense.
“I’m not trying to interrogate you, I’m just, just asking because I’m curious. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but well, you suddenly talked about a sibling out of nowhere.”
“……”
“Well, do Grim Reapers have younger siblings too? I’m curious.”
Jieon deliberately continued to maintain a light attitude. He didn’t want to show that he was seriously worried about him. Rather than for his own pride, he just had an intuition that approaching lightly would be better for drawing out Shin Mua’s true feelings.
