The Detector's Scream
The blood-curdling alarm from the gas detector ripped through the entire house. At the same instant, a nauseating stench like rotten eggs stabbed at their nostrils.
"Hup!"
Lee Han-gyeol reflexively clamped a hand over his nose.
"Shit...!"
The inspector's mild expression from moments earlier twisted into something lethal. He shot to his feet and snapped an order at Han-gyeol.
"I'm going to shut the main valve. You stay right where you are. Understood?"
"Y-yes!"
Still reeling from the sudden crisis, Han-gyeol nodded so hard his neck cracked.
"Oppa! What's going on out there?"
Lee Ha-eun's voice floated from her room. Right after it came the hoarse croak of their grandmother, jolted awake by the racket.
"Why's it so loud?"
"...!"
The doorknob to Ha-eun's room rattled and began to turn.
"No!"
The inspector kicked off his shoes. In one desperate lunge he seized the handle of the door that held Ha-eun's voice.
— Clack, rattle!
"Huh? Oppa, the door won't open! What's wrong?"
— Rattle!
"You can't come out!"
"Ha-eun! Don't come out! Grandma, you either!"
"...What?"
"You must not come out!"
Han-gyeol shouted toward his grandmother's door. The inspector, breathing hard, piled on.
"Gas inspection in progress! We've got a small problem and we're handling it—please wait inside your rooms for a moment! Under no circumstances are you to come out!"
"You hear that? Grandma! Ha-eun too!"
The inspector looked at the trembling boy with a face of forced calm.
"We can't let gas get in there, so keep them locked in. Stay put right here. Got it?"
"Y-yes, sir."
"And don't touch a single thing. Not one switch, not one metal surface. One little static spark and we're all dead."
At that grim warning Han-gyeol sucked in a shaky breath and nodded.
"Hold the door, then."
Han-gyeol took over the doorknob. The inspector didn't even glance back as he bolted outside.
"Oppa...?"
— Rattle.
"It's okay, Ha-eun. Listen to Oppa and stay still. It'll be over soon. Grandma, please don't come out either!"
— Thud-thud-thud.
Moments later came the frantic sound of the man racing back up the stairs. Even in the chaos the inspector had left the front door flung wide open to vent the gas.
"Hah—hah. You didn't open it, right?"
He burst back inside, gulping air. Han-gyeol asked in a quavering voice,
"No. So what do we do now...?"
"Stay exactly like that. Don't move."
This was why professionals existed. The man strode straight to every window in the living room and kitchen and threw them all open.
"Borrowing this."
He snatched up the Hangul workbook Han-gyeol had been studying with his sister only minutes earlier.
— Whoosh! Swish!
"Uh, you could use a cushion or turn on the fan—"
"Hah—no. Too dangerous. Sparks."
Gritting his teeth, the inspector flailed the book through the air hard enough to nearly dislocate his shoulder, driving the thick gas out as fast as humanly possible.
— Whoosh! Swish! Swish!
With every swing the stomach-turning odor thinned.
"Hoo..."
At last he set the book down, wiped sweat from his brow with a sleeve, and sniffed the air.
"Looks like... hoo... it's mostly gone. But just in case, give me a second."
He retrieved the gas detector from the kitchen and began sweeping it slowly through the air, checking every corner with obsessive care, as if a single molecule of gas were an insult.
"We're good."
Only after a long, thorough scan of floor and ceiling did he finally smile.
"...Really?"
"Yeah. Hear that? Quiet now. Light's green too."
Just as he said, the detector had fallen silent—as if it had never shrieked at all.
"Ah. The smell might linger a bit longer, but that's just the odorant they add. Don't worry about it; it'll fade on its own."
Han-gyeol exhaled in pure relief and collapsed onto the floor as if his strings had been cut.
"Scared you pretty bad, huh?"
"Yeah... So it's all over?"
"More precisely, once we replace the parts. But the emergency's handled, so you can relax."
"I never imagined gas was leaking..."
"Tell me about it. I was shocked too. A little later and we'd have had a real disaster. You had no idea it was happening."
"Yeah..."
He truly hadn't imagined it—gas quietly seeping out in places no one could see.
"We can only call it luck. Of all times, you get anxious and decide to re-check the gas..."
Luck... Yes, you could call it luck. But someone had known this nightmare was coming and had warned him—had even pressed money into his hand.
Han-gyeol thought of the strange male shaman he had bumped into so suddenly the day before.
He'd thought a corroded valve was the cause, but...
Goosebumps raced across his whole body. Instinct told him the truth.
The gas explosion the shaman had spoken of—this was it. Right now.
"You saved your family, kid. The neighbors too."
Han-gyeol heard none of it. The inspector's voice sounded as if it were coming from far underwater.
"..."
"You okay?"
"Y-yeah... Just a little shook."
What if he had ignored the shaman who appeared out of nowhere? What if he had sent the gas inspector away, saying he still had the electric bill to pay?
Just imagining it sent a cold weight dropping into his chest.
"Really..."
Then, exactly as the shaman had warned, tomorrow night a gas explosion would have taken every person he loved.
"No way..."
"Oppa? Can I come out now? It's stuffy."
Ha-eun's bright voice through the door finally cracked the dam. Han-gyeol broke into the tears he had been holding back.
Park Su-hwan blew gently on the match and snuffed the flame clinging to its tip. Acrid smoke began to drift through the little shrine.
"Good. Done."
He checked the candles one by one on the altar.
This was no small chore.
He had to light each candle individually and scrape away the messy drips of hardened wax afterward.
Yet he couldn't simply leave them unlit.
Candlelight was the pathway by which spirits descended, an antenna that signaled the deities.
That, of course, applied only to real shamans. For Park Su-hwan—a fraud wearing a shaman's skin—these fancy candles were pure interior decoration, nothing more.
Actually, he hadn't even bothered with proper decoration. Complaining that candles cost money, he had left both sides of the shrine completely bare.
As long as the front looked decent when a client sat down, that was enough.
"Aigoo. This damned shaman's lot."
Even after pestering Choi Young-gam into selling him consumables and ritual tools cheap, the costs still added up. No small change.
No wonder people said a shaman needed money to serve the gods properly.
"Miserable. Truly miserable."
Why didn't those heavy-assed deities upstairs understand that? Su-hwan thought the gods themselves ought to come down to the mortal world and get properly worked over for a change.
Preferably by some vicious, sadistic logistics-center supervisor.
"Then they'd learn how precious money is."
After that, maybe they'd finally hand their disciple a lottery number or two... no, six solid numbers.
"Wait. Then I'd be the only one who loses out."
A forgotten fact suddenly hit him: he had no god who would ever whisper lottery numbers to him.
Scratch that last thought. A true shaman was supposed to be poor. How could someone who served the divine cling to worldly greed?
"Gods, huh..."
He recalled the recent session with the female client—how words had poured from his mouth against his will.
Once could be chance. But twice? That was destiny. The same thing had happened again.
The problem was, no matter how hard he thought, he still had no idea why.
Right. Su-hwan still couldn't figure out why his own mouth had moved on its own. He had thrown every scrap of shamanic knowledge he had half-learned at the problem and come up empty.
It really didn't feel like a god, yet...
Still, he ran through every deity who might have even the faintest connection to him.
An ancestral spirit? No. If it were, his mouth would have opened ages ago. Why stay silent all this time and choose now?
Or Bari Gongju...? He had saved Choi Young-gam and her disciple Choi Hana. A favor in return wasn't impossible.
But Bari Gongju was the goddess who guided the dead to the afterlife. She would never look kindly on Su-hwan, who was busy scrambling the order of Myeong-gye.
And Yeomra? Obviously not.
That left only one candidate.
Su-hwan's gaze drifted, almost of its own accord, to the statue of Okhwang Sangje standing at the center of the shrine.
Nah. No way... That was even more ridiculous. He swallowed a dry laugh and shook his head.
It was far more realistic to blame the ledger itself.
Every bizarre, supernatural event he had experienced had begun only after the ledger came into his hands.
Yet that theory had one fatal flaw.
Foretelling and revealing the future was the domain of mighty gods—or of particularly vicious low-grade spirits.
"Aaaargh!"
Su-hwan clutched his head and groaned. Nothing resolved cleanly. His chest felt tight with frustration.
Choi Young-gam might know something about this anomaly. But then he would have to reveal the ledger's existence to the old man. That was absolutely, positively not an option.
"Aigoo..."
Forget it. I don't know.
Whatever the cause, having his mouth open on its own was clearly a good thing. At least in those moments he became a real shaman.
He was just about to settle for that sunny interpretation when—
— Brrring-brrring!
"Ack!"
The sharp alarm shredded the silence. Su-hwan nearly jumped out of his skin and scrambled for the phone he had more or less tossed onto the floor.
— Brrring-brrring!
20:46
Already this late, huh.
He silenced the alarm and pulled out the ledger he kept hidden deep under the divination table. It looked exactly as it had the day he first seized it—an old, battered tome.
No one else could see it, yet he still hid it just in case.
He stared at it for a moment, then slowly began to turn the pages.
After Cha Hyun-seok—who had nearly died of rage when his superior stole his achievement—came only blank white paper.
If he had changed the future of Kim Jin-woo, the boy who casually tortured animals, that name would have appeared here as well. But the ledger held no such entry.
Right. This place recorded only the people whose fates Park Su-hwan had personally twisted.
"Hmm..."
He fixed his eyes on the empty page.
If he listened to me, it should show up right about now...
"...!"
Across the blank paper, as though an invisible brush were moving, black ink began to bloom.
Complex strokes formed, curves took shape, and at last Su-hwan could read the words.
Kim Jeom-rye
The future of Lee Han-gyeol's grandmother—who should have died at this very hour—had changed, and so her name had appeared in the ledger.
"I was worried..."
His eyes dropped to the bottom of the entry. Both the time of death and the cause of death remained blank. He let out a long breath of relief.
"So he listened after all."
Su-hwan smiled as he murmured to himself.
I can give him what I prepared.
Lee Han-gyeol, grinding through a hard life. Su-hwan had seen his own younger self in the boy.
That was why, if the kid came back after heeding the warning, Su-hwan intended to tell him everything—every place that had helped him when he was struggling.
There, Han-gyeol would find the daily necessities he needed right now, plus real, practical support.
On top of that, Su-hwan had already researched and organized every government program available to a grandparent-grandchild household like Han-gyeol's.
"What kind of shaman does this? I'm way too soft."
The kid probably felt the world was cold. Su-hwan wanted to tell him to lift his head and look around once.
The world is not as cold or as cruel as you think.
Park Su-hwan himself was living proof—a man who had somehow survived only because of the hands of people with warm hearts.
He sincerely hoped the boy would endure the way he had, without collapsing.
If he just kept hanging on, the day would come when he could look back on all that pain and laugh.