Chapter 41

A few days later, Mu-yeong headed with Choi Yook toward the home of Hong Soon-ja, one of Kang Shim-soo’s former apprentices. Her personal details had been the first to be identified.

Sixty-nine years old, no family, living alone. Those were the few pieces of information defining her.

The neighborhood was an aged cluster of low-rise villas. Utility pole wires crisscrossed like spiderwebs, hacking the sky into jagged fragments. Along the roadside, bulging trash bags and lettuce seedlings planted in styrofoam boxes stood side by side in crowded rows.

The winding road narrowed as it climbed higher, eventually becoming impassable for cars. Seo Mu-yeong pulled over in a suitable spot, and he and Choi Yook got out to walk the rest of the way.

When they reached the villa, the glass outer door stood open. Following the hallway inside, they spotted a chipped wooden sign hung on a peeling door, announcing a fortune-teller’s shrine. Seo Mu-yeong rang the doorbell with an affable smile.

“Hello there,” Seo Mu-yeong said warmly. “We came to have our fortunes read.”

Before long, the door opened. A stooped elderly woman, Hong Soon-ja, was dressed in baggy work pants and a quilted vest. Her thinning hair had been swept back and pinned into a neat chignon with a wooden hairpin.

She peered outside through eyes cloudy with cataracts. The instant she spotted Choi Yook looming behind Seo Mu-yeong, however, she immediately tried to slam the door shut.

“Ow.” Seo Mu-yeong let out a muffled yelp.

The cry had slipped out because the foot he had already wedged into the opening was caught in the doorframe. Startled, Hong Soon-ja looked at him, at a complete loss for what to do.

“What in the world is this…?” she stammered in bewilderment.

Choi Yook shouldered past Seo Mu-yeong. “Excuse us.”

Shoving Seo Mu-yeong ahead of him, Choi Yook stepped straight inside. Overwhelmed by his imposing momentum, Hong Soon-ja was forced to stumble backward.

Seo Mu-yeong hurriedly slipped off his shoes in the cramped entryway barely two handspans wide. Inside the dim residence, which looked smaller than two hundred square feet, the drone of a refrigerator motor buzzed loudly. The musty stench unique to stagnant, unventilated air hung heavy in the room.

There were no vibrant Buddhist paintings on the walls, nor any imposing statues of deities. Only an old folding screen stood set against yellow floral wallpaper, with a solitary bowl of clean water resting atop a small low table.

A rusted clothes rack hung with a few shamanic robes served as the boundary between her bedding and the altar. Along the way to the kitchen, a traditional earthen soju still sat beside layered stacks of glass jars filled with infused liquor.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?!” Hong Soon-ja shouted in outrage.

Choi Yook settled himself comfortably before the water bowl, calmly looking up at her.

“You know Kang Shim-soo, don’t you?” Choi Yook asked, his tone measured. “Your spiritual mother—also known as Baek Woon-dang.”

Hong Soon-ja remained tight-lipped. “……”

Choi Yook continued without a pause. “There are questionable circumstances surrounding her death, so we came to ask you a few things.”

“Why come digging into something that happened over ten years ago?” she snapped in outrage. “Besides, the police already resolved everything!”

Choi Yook tapped his fingers against the low table. “Because testimony has surfaced proving that finding wrong.”

His tone was utterly detached as his knuckles rapped rhythmically against the wooden surface.

“It seems Kang Shim-soo has never once appeared in your dreams, though,” he remarked dryly. “To be burned to death by someone else’s hand is quite a bitter injustice to carry. Has she already attained nirvana, or is your spiritual vessel simply too small to reach her?”

Seo Mu-yeong glanced back at Hong Soon-ja. Her rigid body trembled with fury.

“Don’t… don’t speak such nonsense,” she stammered, shuddering.

A tremor shook her frail frame as she glared at him.

“It’s true that Mother committed a terrible deed,” she cried fiercely. “Those flames were her karmic retribution! How many years do you think I prayed to wash away her sins?!”

Choi Yook let out a dry scoff, watching her with cold amusement. “Such remarkable conviction.”

“Because I saw the police report with my own two eyes!” Gritting her teeth, Hong Soon-ja glared daggers at Choi Yook. “It stated plainly that Mother set the fire herself! It wasn’t an accident, but arson. Not an electrical short, not a careless mistake—she doused the whole place in fuel and set it ablaze. There were no traces of an intruder, and not a single mark on her body showing she’d been bound or beaten!”

Seo Mu-yeong went rigid. He already knew from Choi Yook that the police had officially announced the case as an attempted murder-suicide.

Yet there must have been rope marks left on Grandmother’s wrists.

Even after untying the ropes binding Seo Mu-yeong, she had commanded him to leave her own bindings untouched. It was as though she sought to tether her own urge to flee alongside him—or perhaps intended for her very body to remain behind as proof of a crime, waiting to be discovered after death.

The police should have found that evidence. If it was difficult to discern with the naked eye, they should have conducted forensic tests. And even if the corpse had been damaged beyond recognition, they never should have arrived at such absolute certainty.

He had assumed the police were merely incompetent, but this was a matter of deliberate negligence. Who on earth could have written a report asserting such blatant falsehoods? Had they simply rushed through their duties, or did an ulterior motive lie behind it?

Aimlessly digging with a hand hoe had caught another sweet potato on the vine. Its ultimate size would likely depend on the root’s hidden design. While Seo Mu-yeong mentally pictured slicing that sweet potato into even chunks, Choi Yook tilted his head to the side with an indolent expression.

“And so you swallowed their words without question,” Choi Yook remarked lazily.

“……”

“I suppose Kang Shim-soo was the sort of woman who’d do such a thing, then,” he added with a shrug.

Hong Soon-ja’s face, pale only moments ago, flushed a furious crimson. Fearing she might collapse from a stroke if left unchecked, Seo Mu-yeong hurriedly intervened.

“You couldn’t bring yourself to believe it precisely because she wasn’t that kind of person, right?” Seo Mu-yeong asked gently.

Startled, Hong Soon-ja looked toward Seo Mu-yeong. The fact that she couldn’t meet his eyes directly brought him a sense of calm reassurance. He softened his gaze with practiced empathy. “You respected your spiritual mother so deeply that you desperately wanted to believe in her, but the evidence seemed so definitive that you felt forced to give up. Yet because your heart couldn’t accept it, you’ve suffered in anguish all these years.”

“Who are you to act like you know what’s in my heart?” Hong Soon-ja barked. “Are you some uneducated novice shaman?!”

Her sharp rebuke rang through the room, but Seo Mu-yeong felt not the slightest hint of fear.

“That police report was fabricated,” Seo Mu-yeong stated evenly.

“…What did you say?” She gasped in disbelief.

“The police took a payoff from the real culprit and falsified the report to bury the truth,” Seo Mu-yeong urged earnestly. “It’s the truth. Please believe me. I may be a nobody, but you’re a shaman, ma’am. You must be able to feel my sincerity, can’t you?”

Seo Mu-yeong fabricated a narrative on the fly, pleading with fervent desperation. Though he had spat out the first words that came to mind, there was every possibility this was the actual truth.

I’ll get the full confirmation from Choi Yook later. Seo Mu-yeong feigned ignorance as Choi Yook looked at him with an expression that said he was pulling all sorts of nonsense. When Hong Soon-ja swayed on her feet, letting out an astonished sigh, Seo Mu-yeong quickly moved to support her.

Seo Mu-yeong steadied her trembling arm with firm support. “Are you all right?”

Hong Soon-ja jerked away from his grip. “Enough. Get off me. Let go of my hand.”

She waved her arm and braced one hand against the wall. Choi Yook, however, was not about to grant her time to catch her breath.

Choi Yook stepped closer, his voice dropping low. “There was a little girl living in that house.”

He pinned Hong Soon-ja with an unyielding stare.

“You must have caught sight of her coming and going,” he said smoothly. “If you know anything about the kid, you’d better start talking.”

“Why ask about that child?” she questioned warily.

“Shouldn’t she know who killed the woman who raised her, and how, and why?” Choi Yook countered. “Yet we have no way of knowing where on earth she disappeared to.”

For a long while, Hong Soon-ja glared piercingly at Choi Yook. Despite the fierce intensity in her gaze as if seeking to tear open his very insides, Choi Yook merely watched her with supreme indifference. His face looked more bored to death than ever.

Before long, Hong Soon-ja’s expression settled into an eerie calm. Turning toward the kitchen area, she pulled open the refrigerator door. A carton of milk, hardened rice cakes, and withered fruit were briefly visible inside.

What she retrieved was a glass bottle filled with clear liquid and a single wrinkled apple. The bottle was modest in size, standing barely a handspan high.

“Mother rarely ever traveled beyond Mangcheon,” she murmured to herself.

Setting the bottle onto a broad wooden tray, she reached up to rummage through the overhead cupboard.

Hong Soon-ja’s voice drifted over her shoulder. “So when she brought that child all the way from Seoul, I was truly astonished.”

“How did you know the kid was from Seoul?” Choi Yook asked.

Hong Soon-ja set two small cups onto the tray. “Because the cab pulling away from the shrine was a Seoul taxi.”

Her recollection was absolute. Seo Mu-yeong recalled his grandmother’s hands as she changed him into a girl’s one-piece dress and shoved him into the taxi. The touch of the grandmother he had met for the very first time had felt rough and frantic rather than affectionate. Hong Soon-ja rattled through the cupboard, setting down two small liquor cups.

“It looked as though the child had lost both parents early on. My mother happened to be dressed in black western mourning clothes, and the poor little thing was utterly disheartened. She never offered any explanation one way or the other, but whoever’s child she was, my heart ached for her. What cruel fate pushed a pitiful creature into a shaman’s house…?”

Letting out a heavy sigh, Hong Soon-ja began peeling the apple. The crisp scraping sound filled the quiet home. She continued as the blade pared away the peel. “Since she had injured herself on the straw cutter blades around that time, I figured she wanted a companion to spend her twilight years with in peace. Mother had lived her entire life shackling and tormenting herself, after all.”

“I heard that injuring oneself on the straw cutter blades usually means the shaman committed a grave wrong,” Seo Mu-yeong murmured.

Seo Mu-yeong recalled what he had learned at the shamanism institute.

“You must have placed immense trust in Kang Shim-soo, then,” he observed. “Even after an accident like that.”

“…A momentary mistake was one thing, but I never believed she was the sort of woman to commit a heinous act out of foolish greed,” she replied softly.

Putting down the paring knife, Hong Soon-ja raised her tone in fierce conviction.

“Her deities would never have condoned such a thing! Mount Yeongno isn’t just any famous mountain. It is distinct from Mount Inwang, which serves as the very womb of shamans, distinct from Mount Gyeryong with its pure, unadulterated energy, and distinct from Daegwallyeong watching over the people. Though explaining it to outsiders is a pointless endeavor.”

She went back to peeling the apple. Because her hands trembled, each stroke of the blade carved away thick chunks of flesh alongside the skin. While Seo Mu-yeong silently mourned the wasted fruit, Hong Soon-ja broke the silence.

“Mother possessed a fiercely sharp temperament, yet that child was remarkably attached to her,” Hong Soon-ja whispered fondly. “In truth, she was like that with everyone. Smiling easily, starving for affection. You could see her eyes light up with the desire to approach anyone who came near. She was pure-natured and overflowing with warmth.”