The Broken Vessel Bears the Blame

"Over here?"

Yu-yeong beamed brightly, locking eyes with the reporters as she turned her body to the right and shaped a heart with her hands. Amid the relentless barrage of camera flashes, she did her best to protect the reputation of the actress Yu-yeong — on behalf of the someone who dwelled inside her.

She considered it the barest courtesy owed to the presence that had made her own life grueling, yet had also made it possible for her to care for her grandmother Jeong-in in comfort.

"Hey!"

Just then, a great shout erupted from somewhere in the crowd. Yu-yeong didn't register that it was aimed at her. A murmur rippled out in every direction, and then — with heavy thudding footsteps — something came hurtling straight at her.

By the time she noticed the figure barreling furiously toward her, it was already too late.

A high schooler? A college student? A woman with a strangely youthful face was running straight at Yu-yeong. Seul-a shot out, pale as a corpse, but no one could stop it. The bodyguards' steps tangled with one another, and the woman who slipped through that gap screamed as she shoved Yu-yeong hard.

"Die!!!"

The word die came through with perfect clarity.

That was exactly what she had said. Die. There was no time to recoil at the savagery of it — Yu-yeong's body was knocked backward, and she collapsed onto the plywood photowall that had been standing behind her. Her slight frame rolled straight off the edge of the stage.

Crash!

Yu-yeong tangled with her attacker and plummeted to the floor together. The chairs beneath them toppled over, and Yu-yeong's body was flung about uselessly, like a paper doll.

"Just die! I said die!"

The voice screaming for her death grew distant, fading like a mirage. All Yu-yeong could do under the crushing wave of pain flooding her entire body was stare up at the spinning sky.

The department store's searing white fluorescent lights seemed sharp enough to blind her.

"Yu-yeong!"

"An ambulance! Call 119!"

Shouts rang out from every direction. Seul-a's voice was there too. I'm fine, unnie, I'm okay. She wanted to say it — but she couldn't.

Because before she could say a word, someone's heavy fist came flying down at her face.

Ah, so this is what a punch is like. This is what it feels like to be hit. She had acted out getting slapped across the cheek plenty of times, but she had never actually taken a blow and felt the pain of it before.

The one who had attacked Yu-yeong hurled curses at her, swinging her fists like a madwoman.

Only a few of the blows landed cleanly, but even that was a terrible shock to Yu-yeong's delicate body and skull.

Inside the pain that shook her all the way to her brain, Yu-yeong lost consciousness completely.

The one who had reduced Yu-yeong to that state was a fan of Yu-won.

A fan of the man who had received the black cap as a fan gift. A fan of the person who had come to own that black cap.

It was said that even as she was being dragged away by the security guards, the woman kept spewing curses and vile abuse at Yu-yeong — words too foul to repeat. She screamed die so many times that even the people present at the scene clicked their tongues in disbelief.

"Good grief."

In the VIP hospital room, Seul-a, who was keeping watch at Yu-yeong's side, heaved a long sigh as she looked at her phone.

Every kind of sensational post filled the forums to bursting.

The footage of her being shoved and toppling off the stage had been edited for maximum shock value and spread across every corner of the internet, while her attacker — apparently driven to it, people argued — had somehow been recast not as the perpetrator but as a pitiable victim.

The public consensus was that none of this would have happened if Yu-yeong hadn't spent her days stringing men along and rolling her body around in such a disgraceful manner.

Reading those reactions, Seul-a shook her head.

The clear, unambiguous victim lay in a hospital bed right here, and yet the people had chosen not to take her side.

"God, insane."

Seul-a had seen the slow-motion clip of the moment Yu-yeong collapsed onto the photowall — edited so that her short dress rode up and bared her thigh in full — and she pressed a hand to her temple against the throbbing migraine.

The agency's legal team would push out a strong statement and a notice of intent to sue before dawn, but today's netizens weren't the type to be frightened off by such announcements.

They would simply say the agency was shielding Yu-yeong from her own wrongdoing, obvious as it was.

How on earth had things come to this...

Seul-a thought that as she gazed at Yu-yeong, lying there spent and motionless. Bruises everywhere was a given, and because of that final punch to the face, a deep blue welt had bloomed across her cheek. Just looking at it drew sighs out of her and filled her with heartache.

As Seul-a had witnessed at her side all these years, Yu-yeong was a pitiful child, a good child. Twenty-eight years old, and still as pure and clear-hearted as she had been the season of her very first debut.

Ten years into a debut, anyone grows haughty and demanding — but at least the Yu-yeong Seul-a knew was not that kind of person.

There was an old industry saying: don't trust the paint on someone's face. But in Seul-a's judgment, Yu-yeong was one of the few celebrities who could genuinely be trusted.

"Hello, yes, yes... Yu-yeong still hasn't woken up. Right, and her face was injured too... The doctor says this will take at least two weeks."

Slipping cautiously out of the hospital room, Seul-a called each of the film staff and the photoshoot team in turn, relaying that Yu-yeong would need no less than two weeks of rest.

It might actually be for the best.

Since her debut, Yu-yeong had never once taken a proper break. The longest she'd ever rested was two days. This was as good a time as any to rest for a few weeks and tend to her wounded body and heart.

Seul-a kept talking on the phone, glancing again and again at the door of Yu-yeong's room.

Postponing every scheduled engagement going forward... This incident could even derail her CF renewals. Advertisers didn't take kindly to celebrities tangled up in this kind of scandal.

Even amid those worries, Seul-a dialed another number.

So that when Yu-yeong woke, she might sleep a little longer, a little more peacefully — the reality she'd have to face was going to be horrific enough.

Cha-mu's gaze on the laptop screen was beyond cold — it radiated outright killing intent.

On his screen, footage played in raw, unblurred detail: Yu-yeong toppling backward along with the photowall, and her attacker driving her fists into Yu-yeong's face.

Human beings loved sensational things.

And footage of the nation's most beautiful, most arrogant, scandal-manufacturing actress being beaten was, for certain humans, nothing short of the most stimulating entertainment imaginable.

Beneath the video, filth upon filth of comments had accumulated. People who savored another person's misfortune like pornography.

The longer Cha-mu looked, the colder his expression sank. A deep loathing for humanity itself had settled into his face.

He had learned of it through a single phone call from the contact who arranged his jobs at the broadcasting station filming sites.

Yu-yeong got attacked, so there's no filming for the next few days. Want me to hook you up somewhere else? Oh wait, she got attacked — you don't use the internet, right? It's an absolute circus right now.

That endless chatter had come pouring through. An absolute circus. Those words had grated on Cha-mu's nerves.

It was a laptop he opened perhaps a few times a year. He'd dug it out, fully drained, plugged it in, and searched the two syllables of Yu-yeong's name.

The flood of articles and videos that poured in the instant he hit Enter was enough to startle even Cha-mu, whose eyes rarely blinked at anything.

So much of it that the words what in the world is all this rose to his lips unbidden.

And the more he looked, the deeper his mood sank toward the bottom.

He'd given her the bell because the ghost clinging to her tugged at his sympathy — and she'd seemed to live well enough for a few days with it, and now she was getting terrorized like this.

"..."

The entire world was dragging Yu-yeong out as the perpetrator, and crowning the one who had attacked her as the victim.

Cha-mu's gaze turned toward the shrine room.

The black cap still sat on the altar. The grim, shadowy energy clinging to that black cap had finally gone and caused a disaster.

At the end of that whole sequence — a gift given, passed on to another, and finally discarded — the malice of the one who had given the cap had turned toward the one who threw it away.

Whether it was fair to call Yu-yeong the one who had discarded it, however, was another matter entirely.

He would stake everything on this: the one who threw the cap away was not Yu-yeong. Not Yu-yeong — but the thing dwelling inside Yu-yeong.

And yet every ounce of the damage was falling on Yu-yeong alone.

That brutal truth dragged a heavy sigh up from the deep recesses of Cha-mu's chest.

A cracked vessel was condemned to shoulder, all by itself, the sins of the things that slipped in and out through its broken seams.

What Cha-mu had to do now was find the one who had reduced Yu-yeong to that state, and send it off before it committed any greater sin.

Almost certainly not a living person.

No — to put it precisely, it would be the sin of a yeong-ga that had seized a living person's body.

Find it, burn the black cap, and send the possessing yeong-ga on to ascension — that was all it would take. It wasn't a difficult matter. If he set his mind to the search, it would take less than half a day to catch the thing by the scruff of its neck.

What was fixed to be done, what needed to be done — Cha-mu knew it perfectly well.

"...Sweetheart."

What Cha-mu actually did was not go searching for the yeong-ga brimming with malice. Instead, he called out to the little girl in the yellow dress playing in the courtyard.

"Want to go see the pretty unnie?"