God's Vessel, Episode 3

Cha-mu bent down to pick up the sword that had fallen to the ground. And at the edge of his vision, he caught sight of a hat abandoned in the corner of the alley.

Clung to that hat was an eerie, sinister energy.

"Cha-mu?"

Just then, a young voice called out from inside. He turned his head toward the sound.

A boy who looked to be in middle school—or even younger—was staring at him, his eyes still heavy with sleep, soft and bleary in a rather endearing way.

"Go inside. It's nothing."

Before the boy could even ask what was going on, Cha-mu cut the conversation short. He had no desire to waste his breath on pointless chatter.

"What is it? What is it?"

"......"

"Who came here? Someone was here, wasn't they?"

The boy kept sneaking glances at the closing gate as he asked, but Cha-mu didn't answer. Instead, he turned his back on the gate entirely—like a man fending off an intruder—and glared at the child.

"I said, go inside."

"Fiiine......"

At that cold voice, the boy's face crumpled into a sulk. But as if he understood that pouting would accomplish nothing, he didn't open his mouth again.

Cha-mu swept a sharp glance around the grounds, then lowered his head to look at his own ankle.

The dark, malevolent energy from beyond the gate was gripping his ankle. There was no doubt it had latched onto him from that hat lying on the ground.

It didn't seem to belong to a wrongfully deceased spirit. No—if anything, it felt like the possession of a living person.

In the end, unable to bear it, Cha-mu opened the gate and stepped out to pick up the hat from the ground.

It was an object saturated with someone's fervent longing.

Affection, perhaps—or hatred, or perhaps both at once.

Emotions too tangled to name were caked all over it. An object like this was bound to invite calamity. When a living spirit attached itself to a living person's possession, this was the kind of power it acquired.

Without a word, Cha-mu carried it back inside.

Now that it had crossed the threshold of Wolryeongsa, the hat was his to keep—and his burden to resolve.

"Whose hat is that?"

"Hard to say."

"It's a dancer's thing, isn't it? Some entertainer's?"

A strangely old-fashioned word slipped out of such a young face. Dancer. At that, Cha-mu gave the boy an odd, sidelong look.

An entertainer.

He wasn't wrong. The energy radiating from the hat did not belong to an ordinary person.

No—to be more precise, the owner of this hat was no ordinary person either, but neither was the one who had passed it along.

"The one who gave it. The owner. The one who threw it away."

All three were different people. And a strong premonition flashed through him: the arrow of resentment lodged in the hat would not fly toward its original owner, but toward whoever had discarded it.

The time it had spent in the discarder's hands was hardly long at all—but that made no difference. The energy dwelling in the hat despised the one who had thrown it away.

"Dumping this kind of thing in front of someone else's house."

Cha-mu muttered it in a voice dark as a raincloud. What he meant was that some careless fool had abandoned this thing at Wolryeongsa's gate, and now the trouble had landed on him.

It wasn't an unfair complaint.

If it had never caught his eye, he would never have picked it up, and never have carried it inside the gate.

"......"

Cha-mu gazed quietly at the hat in his hand, then stepped up onto the main hall. The black hat was placed upon the altar of his shrine.

Within those walls, no corrupt thing dared exert its power.

Soon, the sound of Cha-mu's prayers filled the shrine.

His morning devotions were always the same. A God's Vessel who could not receive the gods, a man committing the great sin of severing his own family line with his own hands—the only content his prayers ever held was a plea for the well-being of everyone but himself. He prayed to help as many human beings as his strength allowed, as many as he possibly could.

And at the end of that prayer, he begged that his beloved ancestors—who would watch his own soul tumble into hellfire and love him still—might rest in peace, along with the grandfather and father whom the gods had unjustly claimed, all in their ruthless hunger to use the great vessel he had inherited.

When his morning prayers were done, Cha-mu stepped outside and sat for a while on the main hall, gazing up at the sky.

The owner of the black hat was a celebrity. So was the one who had thrown it away.

He wanted to ignore it. He couldn't.

"Not going to work today?"

"I am."

With that reply to the boy's question, Cha-mu reached for his phone.

Cha-mu didn't earn his living by reading fortunes, writing talismans, or performing rites.

His grandfather had left him no small inheritance, but he had always earned his money by moving his own body. The places he frequented most were film sets crawling with powerful presences, and the sites where celebrities gathered in droves.

Places thick with sinister energy.

Where the living and the dead alike churned out their venomous auras, he prowled the very ground that seethed with it, wishing—hoping—that his vessel would crack and break.

"Tch."

Cha-mu glanced at the shrine door, picturing the black hat beyond it.

Things and people alike, in the end, always arrived at the place they were meant to be. Before he could complain about why it had come to him, he needed to ask himself why it had been bound to find its way here at all.

Everything carried its own karma, cause and effect wound together.

Cha-mu picked up his phone, found a familiar name, and dialed.

"Yes, it's me. If there's anywhere you need a hand today, send me there."

Once again, Cha-mu made himself ready to walk wherever his fate would lead.

"Director!"

Arriving on set, Yu-yeong sought out the director with the most radiant smile the world had ever seen.

She was the very author of the scandal that had set every online community ablaze overnight—the one rumored to have taken a famous idol back to her hotel—yet she shone so brightly it was impossible to believe.

The director looked at her, let out a helpless laugh as though his energy drained right out of him, and finally spoke in a voice that wasn't entirely unkind.

"You know, I do like that about you. That sunny disposition of yours, Yu-yeong."

"Right?"

"The ones who carry on about dying and killing themselves over a single scandal? They just annoy me, every time."

It wasn't a compliment. If anything, it bordered on mockery.

In the half year since filming began, the scandals that had erupted in Yu-yeong's name were already too many to count on both hands.

Scandals like that, attached to a film's lead actress, had never once done a production any good.

The first few times, he'd actually been pleased, thinking the movie might ride the gossip to viral fame but......

"Yu-yeong."

"Yes, Director."

"You do remember our contract says no marriages or pregnancies mid-production?"

At the director's pointed remark, Yu-yeong didn't look the least bit offended. If anything, her smile grew even wider.

"Of course. I'm careful, Director. Don't you worry."

Was he supposed to call that a good personality—or a flower garden where her brain should have been?

The director found himself momentarily struck speechless, just staring at her. Any other actor would have made their displeasure plain, indignant at being spoken to that way. But Yu-yeong had answered as if she truly hadn't a care in the world.

Behind her back, everyone was pointing fingers—and the woman herself remained perfectly serene. She wasn't performing unconcern; her face genuinely registered no problem at all.

It was the face of someone hearing about someone else's business. That was the expression Yu-yeong wore.

If her acting had been even slightly lacking, or clumsy, he would have convinced the investors on the spot and cut her loose. But the one holding the most absolute power on this set was not the director. It was Yu-yeong.

Every project she touched exploded into a hit—the albums, dramas, films, and commercials bearing her name. Having never once flopped at anything, she reigned over this set as its unquestioned sovereign.

"Then I'll go get ready for the shoot."

Watching Yu-yeong vanish away with a smile, more than a few people found themselves swallowing their words.

A character no one could ever hope to figure out—that was the Yu-yeong people saw.

Inside her dressing room, Yu-yeong settled into the chair for makeup and quietly studied the mirror in front of her.

The face reflected in it was Yu-yeong's—and yet, it was not hers.

On set, sometimes—no, for the vast majority of the time—Yu-yeong was not Yu-yeong. That presence, the one that had made her "the girl with heaven-sent talent," was occupying her body.

Today was no different.

"Unfair, isn't it?"

Even as that voice slipped out of her mouth, the real Yu-yeong trapped within could do nothing but lie there, helpless.

She had heard that question—does it feel unfair?—dozens of times, hundreds, thousands. She was a being whose voice had been stolen from her; no matter how loudly she screamed that it was unjust, nothing ever changed.

You're terrified of this set in particular—you always are, it's crawling with ghosts. So I'll handle everything. You just rest.

Just rest.

The whisper slithered cold against her ear, circling—but this time, too, it was the same.

The real one had no power to act. And the fake who had seized her body gazed at the mirror with a wide, brilliant smile, pressing a palm to her own cheek and beginning to examine the face from every angle.

As if admiring the masterpiece of a lifetime she herself had created.