The God Who Left
Before Lee-seol could manage any kind of reply, Tae-shin beat her to it, introducing himself with crisp formality. The moment his name left his mouth, the shop owner gave a small gasp of recognition.
"Ah — Executive Director Woo of Haeun Construction, isn't it? I've heard plenty about you from the villagers, one thing or another."
"I'll do my best not to give you any cause for concern."
He flashed her a friendly smile. It was easy to imagine just how many hearts that single smiling face must have won over, without the slightest effort.
"Thank you for the meal."
With his steel chopsticks he gave the noodles one grand swirl, then lifted them in a way that looked thoroughly appetizing. Slurp, slurp. He took a bite with evident relish, even tossing in a light remark that it was quite delicious.
Frankly, judging by his looks alone, she'd assumed he wouldn't touch anything that didn't come out of some upscale restaurant. Yet here he was, eating heartily without a word of complaint about the shabby little place — she found it a bit surprising, she had to admit.
"The elder must not think very highly of me, I take it."
He brought up Granny Yoon-hwa with practiced ease.
Mm. Figured as much. No wonder he'd been so keen to come outside with her. Sehwawon simply had too many watchful eyes for the two of them to talk privately — and there was no telling how, or when, word might find its way back to Granny Yoon-hwa.
Since things had come to this, it wouldn't hurt to play along up to a reasonable point. If only to get him to give up on the whole idea sooner.
Slurp. After tasting a mouthful, Lee-seol answered flatly.
"People dislike anyone who asks too much of them. That's simply human nature."
"Fair enough, I suppose."
The clash was unmistakable: one party desperate to dig something up, the other unwilling to spare him a single word.
Tae-shin took a sip of cool barley tea and merely smiled. Then as now, his voice was as unyielding as a thick plank of wood — a man with no intention whatsoever of backing down.
Lee-seol stole a glance at his face as he focused on his meal, then picked up her chopsticks again.
"What do you think, Miss Shin Lee-seol?"
"About what?"
"Whether I'll win, or the elder will."
"……"
"Well? Which one do you think it'll be?"
Tae-shin carried on eating as though nothing were out of the ordinary. The question carried no particular weight, yet the answer felt anything but trivial. Lee-seol let out a small sigh.
"……I believe I already answered that question, on the very first day."
She had given Tae-shin her honest advice once before. That this would come to nothing. That going home was the only way not to waste his time.
Granted, she'd said it hoping he wouldn't linger long at Sehwawon……
"You seem to think I'll lose."
"Yes."
Lee-seol declared it, short and unwavering. You will never win this wager.
She couldn't very well spell out the reasons here at this table, but on that fact alone, she could speak with more certainty than anyone.
Granny cannot move for Woo Tae-shin's sake.
Granny Yoon-hwa's present condition was the most closely guarded taboo in all of Sehwawon.
Not even the servants who had worked there for over twenty years knew a whisper of it. A clandestine secret known only to two people in the world: Granny Yoon-hwa, and Lee-seol.
It was the very year Lee-seol turned fifteen when Granny Yoon-hwa had chosen to tell her.
'Listen carefully, Lee-seol. My patron spirit left my body a long, long time ago.'
Her momjushin — her bodily patron spirit — had departed. Lee-seol had never held any great interest in or curiosity about shamanism, but having spent nearly her whole life under Granny Yoon-hwa's roof, she understood exactly what those words meant.
The illustrious mansin who had once been courted so desperately by the most powerful figures in politics and industry — tycoons clinging to her very trouser legs, begging for a single divination — was now no different from an ordinary woman.
No, truth be told, she was worse off than an ordinary person. Once her patron spirit had gone, the place it left behind was occasionally invaded by stray, restless spirits that peeked in with lewd and wicked things to show her — so the old woman had added, matter-of-factly.
'……Why did she leave?'
'Because my eyes were blinded by empty vanity, and I accepted rites that ran against her will.'
The secret the aged voice confessed was simple enough. Blinded by greed, she had committed a transgression — and her patron spirit, enraged, had abandoned her.
However deeply she repented, however many times she performed the jinjeok-gut* in atonement, the goddess never once turned back to look at her.
*A ritual of thanksgiving a mansin performs on the day of spirit possession, honoring her own patron spirit and the other deities in attendance.
Granny Yoon-hwa said she had taken Lee-seol in to atone for the rest of her life.
Because Princess Bari of Bulla-guk — the ancestral goddess of all shamans, her own momjushin — might, just might, look down once more with favor upon her, caring for another abandoned girl exactly as the princess herself had once been.
*The shamanic deity regarded as the progenitor of all mudang.
Lee-seol, deep in the throes of adolescence at the time, found the confession less painful than she'd expected.
Granny Yoon-hwa and the people of Sehwawon had truly, genuinely cherished her all these years. One uncomfortable truth she couldn't fully comprehend didn't change a thing — not the years she'd grown up here, drenched in love.
She truly, sincerely believed that.
'This is a secret between you and me alone.'
With those closing words, Granny Yoon-hwa had pressed both of Lee-seol's hands tight between her own, her palms creased and weathered, and enjoined her solemnly: that the departure of her patron spirit was an eternal secret, known to the two of them and no one else in the world.
All this time, Granny Yoon-hwa had played the part of a woman living quietly in the mountains, serving the gods amid poetic scenery — and refused every single request that came her way. She had never once ventured outside, not even carelessly.
It wasn't hard to guess why she hid her condition.
If word ever spread that her divine gifts had run dry, the power brokers who loved the sound of their calculators clicking would turn their backs on her, every last one of them. To be treated like a forgotten relic in the back room, swiftly discarded and forgotten — that would wound the old woman's pride more than she could bear.
Worse — what if the Chairman of Haeun Group, no longer having any reason to fear Granny Yoon-hwa, came forward and demanded Sehwawon back?
Lee-seol cherished and loved the family who had taken her in. If there was anything that might harm Granny Yoon-hwa, she wanted no part in it — not even by accident.
And so, even if the heavens split in two, she could not reveal Granny Yoon-hwa's secret to Tae-shin here and now.
Especially not now — not since she'd learned that the man who had so generously granted this estate to Granny in the first place was none other than his own grandfather, Chairman Woo……
'Why on earth did she leave?'
Lee-seol was halfway certain. There must have been some decisive incident — something that left Granny Yoon-hwa's patron spirit with no choice but to abandon her body.
The seven-day ritual. The last great gut the old woman had ever performed.
She had no doubt the two were connected.
If it was Chairman Woo of Haeun Group who had commissioned that seven-day ritual — and gifted Sehwawon in its aftermath……
She found herself wanting to dig a little deeper. Through Woo Tae-shin, if she had to.
What exactly had happened to Granny Yoon-hwa back then?
And what, precisely, had that ritual been?
Out in the kitchen, the owner of the kalguksu shop was still clattering away at the dishes, humming an old trot tune past its prime. Unless they raised their voices considerably, she was unlikely to overhear any of this — but just in case, Lee-seol lowered her voice.
"……I heard that it was the Chairman of Haeun Group who gave Sehwawon to my grandmother."
"Ah, right — that's correct."
His sculpted face, so leisurely at work on his meal, crumpled slightly.
"My grandfather has quite the taste for that sort of thing. He says he's seen everything there is to see with his own two eyes and grown sick of it all — that now he wants to feel what he can't see, and believe in it."
He answered readily enough, surprisingly so — though the tone was acidic to the point of venom.
It was the kind of remark that would make Granny see red if she ever heard it, but Lee-seol had always thought of shamanism as a refuge for the lonely. Chaebol tycoons, after all, were men condemned to isolation, surrounded by endless flatterers tapping away at their calculators. Perhaps Chairman Woo was something of the same. She gave a noncommittal nod.
"And you, Executive Director…… do you believe in it? In shamanism?"
"Not at all."
The reply was virtually instantaneous. Tae-shin's expression turned dry in an instant, as though a gust might kick up dust from it. He looked, for a heartbeat, like a man profoundly disillusioned by something.
"That's rather emphatic……"
"I don't believe in it. But there are times, I think, when the living need it, all the same."
For a moment, Tae-shin sank into a very old line of thought. Terrible things he'd been forced to witness and endure, whole and unfiltered, at far too young an age — they flickered briefly across his mind.
They had never been his to hold in the first place, and it was all long since past. Looking back on it now, the whole thing was nothing but laughable. A short, sharp laugh escaped him.
Lee-seol stared straight at his face, her own meal forgotten. Something about his smile was strange. Nothing could easily be read from that composed, unclouded face — but she could tell he was thinking about something. Something different from before.
Then, with perfect calm, he picked up a dumpling with his chopsticks and smiled again, lightly.
"Besides — didn't the elder do something that deserved exactly what she got?"