“How impudent, how impudent! The ancestral spirits are angry! You’ve been sick a lot lately, haven’t you? Look at you, skin and bones. This is all because the ancestral spirits are angry. If you don’t want a string of deaths in your family starting with you, you need to hold a gut right away!”
Eliminated.
.
“If you subscribe to my YouTube channel, you’ll get a discount.”
Eliminated.
.
Eliminated.
Eliminated.
Eliminated.
.
.
.
After leaving behind yet another eliminated candidate, a heavy silence flowed between Cheon Jieon and Shin Mua in the car. Even though he hadn’t done anything wrong, Jieon somehow felt self-conscious and kept glancing at the quiet Mua.
He couldn’t stop thinking that the plan to solve this problem by meeting shamans had been shitty from the start, but in the current atmosphere, those words wouldn’t quite leave his mouth.
“Your secretary…”
After a long while, Shin Mua opened his mouth.
“…is truly incompetent.”
At the sudden criticism, Jieon’s eyebrows shot up sharply.
“Who’s calling who incompetent? If it weren’t for hyung, do you think you could’ve found even one shaman like these?”
“Even if I had just wandered around looking for shamans on my own, it wouldn’t have been much different from this.”
“Hey, these were all supposed to be famous shamans. What am I supposed to do about there being so many scammers in the first place? I went to the trouble of finding them for you.”
“I told you. That bastard is suspicious. Unless he deliberately gave you only these nobodies to interfere with my work.”
Whether Jieon grumbled in embarrassment or not, Mua didn’t listen at all and just said what he wanted to say. How could he have chosen only these kinds of people? He couldn’t help but be suspicious of this Suchan or Manchan or whatever.
A sense of complexity washed over him. His expectations hadn’t been high, but now that they’d gone around to various places without any results, he felt lost again.
There definitely existed proper shamans. If he searched diligently, he would surely find one. It was just a matter of time. After entering a human body, Mua had realized with each passing day the emotions of his ‘humanization.’
A few days ago, he had even felt melancholy because of memories from the past, over a hundred years ago. Mua believed this was all because he had taken on a human body. Otherwise, there was no way he would still be unable to escape from memories of when he was human.
“So… so what do we do? Should we look for more today?”
Jieon, who had been fidgeting like a dog that had made a mistake, asked carefully. Shin Mua was in a position where he couldn’t even take a bus or subway alone, let alone drive. So the initiative in this situation clearly lay with him, yet strangely he kept reading the room.
“How many are left?”
“Three left, but now we have to go pretty far for all of them.”
“Hmm…”
Mua let out a sigh. Or was it just a breath? To Jieon’s ears, it just sounded like a sigh.
He didn’t like how he kept trying to read his mood. Jieon straightened his shoulders that had been hunched without realizing it and lifted his chin. The one who should be reading the room is that crazy bastard dragging me around based on absurd nonsense, not me.
“Since it’s late to go far, let’s just go home for today.”
“Yeah. That’s what I wanted to say.”
At the same time, Jieon started the engine and smoothly pulled out the car. Fortunately, Jieon didn’t realize that he looked exactly like a driver confidently serving his master. Truly fortunately.
***
Question: Can grim reapers also possess people?
Answer: The concept of a grim reaper possessing a human body is based on imagination within the realm of creative fiction and is unrelated to scientific fact or actual doctrine.
“Of course it’s unrelated to scientific fact, what kind of answer is that?”
Jieon, who had been reading through the search results, grumbled irritably and closed the window. As he quietly mulled over the answer, he slowly got heated. It was hard to believe he had searched for such nonsense with his own hands.
Was I really such a ridiculous and childish person? The deeper his worries grew, the deeper his self-loathing became.
And that wasn’t all. Over there on his desk were books he’d received by delivery. They were all books related to the Afterlife and grim reapers. It was truly secret shopping that he was too embarrassed to even tell Suchan about.
The problem was that even after braving the embarrassment to buy books and search online, the results were completely unsatisfactory. Nowhere could he find a passage about a grim reaper possessing a human body.
Even research on the Afterlife wasn’t written by people who had actually been there and back. In other words, it was only close to oral folktales, legends, or cultural research—yet it was something that couldn’t be found even in records that were close to imagination.
If that was the case, wouldn’t all of Shin Mua’s words be close to lies?
“Ha… seriously, what am I doing? Of course it’s a lie, how could it be real?”
Unable to deal with his deepening self-loathing, Jieon mocked himself.
It was ridiculous. The reason he’d initially accepted Shin Mua’s proposal—that is, accepting Mua’s request to help solve his problem since they couldn’t divorce right away—was purely to find his flaws.
Because it was clearly a lie, because it was obvious he was acting, he had tried to end this ridiculous game by finding decisive evidence that couldn’t be refuted and shoving it in his face.
But look at him now.
Asking on the internet if grim reapers could possess people, buying and examining books. What Jieon had been searching for wasn’t evidence of lies but evidence of truth.
Jieon was quite earnest in searching for something that could support Shin Mua’s claims even a little bit, something that could add credibility to his nonsense.
Even rumors floating around or a mention in some historical document from long ago would have been good. That was right. Cheon Jieon wanted to believe Shin Mua’s words. This fact was undeniably clear.
“……”
Jieon’s pupils darkened. Even though they were his own, it was difficult to understand his own feelings.
It was true that Shin Mua had been terrible. He had wanted to get away from him by any means necessary. He had wanted to live his life freely, free from the anxiety that he might ruin his life or choose death because of him.
He had always scoffed at Suchan’s words that he was too soft-hearted, but now it had become an undeniable fact. Jieon was afraid that one person’s life, who would have lived well if they hadn’t met him, would be ruined because of him. He hoped that wouldn’t happen.
Although he had been tormented in various ways each time, Jieon had sincerely hoped until the end that Shin Mua would change. He had wanted to treat his clearly diseased mind, so that eventually he could live happily even without him.
That’s why Jieon was even more confused by the emotions he was feeling now. What was he acting so earnestly for right now, and for whom? Why did he want to find evidence, even the faintest fragment, that Shin Mua’s words might be true?
“Going around looking for shamans, being desperate to find grim reapers. How did my life end up like this?”
Jieon deliberately mocked himself in a light tone. Only by doing this did it seem like he could somehow digest the emotions he was feeling now.
If he really found a skilled shaman and they told Shin Mua not to talk nonsense, scolding him for daring to say such absurd things when he was just a human—what would happen? What kind of reaction would Shin Mua show? And how should he himself act?
Still pondering the unanswerable question, Jieon let out a sigh deep enough to cave in the ground. In any case, nothing good came from meeting Shin Mua.
***
“It should be worth coming all this way…”
Standing at the foot of a small mountain, Mua said. Honestly, his tone suggested he didn’t have much hope.
“If we come up empty here, we have to drive two more hours.”
At Jieon’s addition, Mua frowned slightly with a pale complexion. He had already been suffering from motion sickness the entire way here, and now he had to ride in the car for two more hours. He’d rather walk for two days.
“Phew…”
To calm his churning stomach, Mua took a deep breath and exhaled. Perhaps because it was a mountain, the air was different from the city. After suffering from the crowds of people everywhere in the urban center, coming to the mountain was somewhat satisfying.
“I said we made a reservation, so we can just go right in.”
At Jieon’s words, Mua immediately started walking without answering. What was her name—Seoran-mu, was it? The lack of titles like Bosal or Seonnyeo made it even more suspicious. After all, the most frightening scammers are the ones who don’t look flashy.
Following the narrow mountain path upward, they soon saw a shrine set up simply in the distance.
The two, who had lowered their expectations, stepped inside.
The shaman didn’t say anything even after seeing the two people enter. She just sat upright, eyes wide open, staring at them. Perhaps because of her upturned eyes, she almost looked like she was glaring at them.
Usually when customers entered, they would at least greet them, but this shaman didn’t even do that. Jieon turned his head awkwardly to look at Shin Mua. He too was silently looking back at the shaman, but no emotion could be felt from his indifferent expression.
“Excuse me?”
Unable to bear the awkwardness, Jieon was the first to speak. It was at that very moment that the shaman sprang up from her seat and scurried to a corner.
“Get away!! Why did you come here? No, why, why did you come! You’re not someone who should be here!”
“Why, why is she acting like that? Hey.”
Jieon, equally startled, stepped back with a bewildered expression. However, Mua still sat in that spot, quietly staring at the shaman who had scurried to the corner.
“I’ve been dead for over a hundred years, so why! Why did you come! I’m not going, I’m absolutely not going! I won’t go, please don’t come.”
The shaman now prostrated herself completely on the floor, bowing her head with both hands raised above her head, begging desperately. The scene was so absurd that Jieon was about to lose his mind, but what was more surprising was that Shin Mua sat calmly as if he had expected this scene.
“Please, I feel like I’m going to die. Ah, I’m already dead. Ah, excuse me, Reaper-nim. Please, why are you doing this? I don’t even scam people and I’m just being quiet, really only saying what’s necessary.”
At that moment, Jieon’s pupils filled with shock. But that wasn’t the end of it.
