The Cold Recedes
“How does it look…? Can you see anything?”
Park Su-hwan lifted his eyes and regarded the woman sitting across from him.
“Wait.”
“Ah… All right.”
“Tsk.”
He clicked his tongue once and dropped his gaze to the scattered grains of rice.
See anything? My ass.
To a man without a shred of spiritual power, this was nothing more than spilled rice.
“This won’t be easy.”
Feigning insight, he arranged his features into a carefully grave expression.
“Pardon…?”
“Yeah. It won’t be easy. His heart’s already moved on.”
Otherwise he wouldn’t have come to a dump like this after getting back together. He came because he couldn’t.
The woman shook her head, flatly refusing the reading—no, the result of the con.
“That can’t be. He really loved me. Look again—please, just look one more time!”
“A bond that’s already broken—you think forcing it will make it hold? Just go find somebody else!”
Park Su-hwan snapped his fan open with a sharp flick and fired the words back at her.
Fine. Let’s hear it. Why’s she this desperate.
Come on this hard and clients start spilling their whole story just out of sheer indignation.
The so-called softener.
The foundation of any good con was getting the other person to volunteer the information themselves.
“I can’t do that!”
Park Su-hwan kept staring at her as if he already knew everything. She hesitated, then opened her mouth.
“He was just… too good a man to lose.”
“If he was really that good, you wouldn’t have broken up. Right? If things had been fine, why split? Tsk tsk.”
She bit her lip hard and spoke.
“Actually… I was the one who asked to break up first. Because of our family situations.”
Ah. Now I get why she’s like this.
Park Su-hwan swallowed a sigh and struck first, sharp as a whip.
“What? Turned out his family was loaded?”
“Yes!! How did you know!”
Hit dead center, she cried out with her eyes wide.
I’ve made a living with this mouth for years, and how many clients like her have I seen?
This was nothing to Park Su-hwan.
“You should have said so from the start. Why hide it!”
She protested as if the whole world had wronged her, but in Park Su-hwan’s eyes it was only laughable.
Haa…
His body was already a wreck, and listening to this nonsense made him feel like dying.
The chill that had started out of nowhere before dawn yesterday was only getting worse.
If it had been ordinary cold, fine—but this felt like a midwinter blade of wind cutting all the way into his bones.
And his head was a mess from yesterday on top of it.
Did the delivery driver actually listen and live? Will the Grim Reapers come looking for the ledger? How am I supposed to walk properly again from here on…
His skull throbbed.
If I’d known it would be like this, I never would have taken the appointment.
“Other places do saju readings or spirit readings. Don’t you do any of that?”
Her refusal to give up earned her a sour look from Park Su-hwan.
But she only took it for the typical shaman act and refused to be cowed.
Gotta hand it to the shaman gig. You don’t even have to manage your face.
“Please? I’ll pay whatever you want! Just once—please!”
Yeah. No. Can’t, actually.
But still…
— Snap!
Park Su-hwan picked up the five-colored ritual banner beside the divination table.
I can at least pretend.
“Fine.”
Professional shaman—no, con man Park Su-hwan. Once he’d caught the scent of money, he couldn’t just sit there being irritated.
“It’s usually a hundred thousand won, but I’ll do it for seventy specially. That work for you?”
At his smooth proposal she nodded hard.
…
“Thank you!!”
As the woman left the shrine with a bright smile, Park Su-hwan immediately face-planted onto the divination table.
“Haa…”
He had told her only the things she wanted to hear. Thanks to that, two fifty-thousand-won bills sat in his hand.
Whether she reconnects with the guy or not—not my problem.
One look had told him she’d already shopped around a fair bit. She didn’t seem the type to come back and make a scene if the reading turned out wrong.
“Ugh…”
I’m freezing to death for real.
The room was at twenty-five degrees.
Considering it was high summer, that was hardly a low temperature.
Maybe I’ve caught a cold.
This is no good.
There were no more appointments left anyway. Better close up shop, take some cold medicine, and sleep.
It was a dream again.
“Great. Just five more households and I’m done! Early quit today too!”
A dream in which he had become a man muttering to himself in an excited voice.
“Chicken, chicken~ delicious chicken~ My wife is gonna love this.”
A familiar little song.
Park Su-hwan realized he had entered the body of the delivery driver he’d met yesterday.
And at the moment of the murder, no less.
Why is this happening now…
Panicked, he tried to move the body, but it was hopeless.
So he—no, the man—walked past the alleyway, swinging the bag, heading home.
“Hey! What the hell?”
At the front gate he ran into his drunk younger cousin holding a kitchen knife. Seeing the blade in the kid’s hand, the man shouted.
“Do you know where you are right now!”
“I asked you to help me just once.”
This guy’s completely… lost it.
The man swallowed dryly.
“Trying to gamble again? G-get out of here right—”
“If I win this time I’ll pay it all back!”
“It’s not the first or second—”
No way…
— Shunk!
“Aaaaaargh!!!”
The chill of the blade punched through the skin of his belly. The man and Park Su-hwan inside him screamed at the horrific pain.
“Argh! Aaaargh!!”
It felt exactly as if he himself were being murdered.
— Shunk! Shunk!
“Die! Die!!”
“I-I’m sorry… Even now, if I—”
In the fading consciousness, the man managed to open his mouth. And through his mind flashed his wife at home and the child about to be born.
“I’ll give you anything—”
— Shunk!
…
“Aaaaaargh!!!”
The instant the man fully closed his eyes, Park Su-hwan jerked awake with a ragged gasp.
He immediately checked his body all over. Thankfully, nothing was hurt.
“Hah, hah, hah…”
It had been far too vivid. That terrible sensation of the blade piercing flesh.
And that wasn’t all. The sorrow, the agony, the despair, the longing the dying man had felt…
Every one of those emotions crashed over him like a wave, until it felt as though Park Su-hwan himself had become the man and died.
“Shit.”
It was so awful he never wanted to go through it again.
“Why the hell would this… Haa…”
Even after sleeping, he didn’t feel rested. Far from improving, his condition only grew worse with time.
“Ugh…”
Maybe I should go to the hospital.
Through the translucent door he could see sunlight coming in. After that living hell in the dream, it seemed only a few hours had passed.
Outside, the landlady was chatting animatedly with someone.
Somehow, the sound felt warmly welcome. It finally felt like he had returned to reality.
“Really? Is that true?”
“I’m telling you! He suddenly rolled his eyes back like a madman, started saying stuff nobody could understand—it was chaos.”
“You should’ve gotten his number!”
“Who had the presence of mind for that? I just thought he was some crazy guy.”
First… I need some air. I need to get some air.
I have to get out of this gloomy place.
Park Su-hwan roughly wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and forced himself outside with difficulty.
“Hey!”
Seeing a familiar face, Park Su-hwan sucked in a breath. The man pointed at him and shouted.
“That guy! It was that guy!”
“What?”
Beside him, the landlady startled.
“That guy’s the one who saved my life!”
Park Su-hwan was too shocked to speak. He never imagined he’d see the man from his dream the moment he opened his eyes to reality.
“I-is that true? That young man saved you?”
The landlady cried out in shock.
“Yes, it’s true!”
Delivery driver Kang Dong-hyun strode over and seized both of Park Su-hwan’s hands.
“Ugh!”
Park Su-hwan yanked his hands back as if he’d been electrocuted.
The moment a stranger’s body heat touched him, the chill of the blade from the dream flared back to life.
There wasn’t a mark on him, yet his belly still throbbed as if the skin were tearing open.
“H-hey, kid?”
Kang Dong-hyun looked at him with worry as cold sweat ran down his face. Park Su-hwan forced his expression under control and spoke with difficulty.
“Just a little dizzy for a second…”
“You’re not hurt, are you?”
“Haha… No. I just didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Sleep is the best medicine. You’ve got to rest properly. I’ll send you something good. Seriously, thank you. If it weren’t for you, I’d be— I’d be a dead man for real.”
“I didn’t think you’d actually listen.”
Honestly, he’d expected it to go in one ear and out the other. At the end the man had cursed him out and left, after all.
Kang Dong-hyun scrubbed his face with both hands.
“Yeah. You’re right. I was half in doubt. Thought it was crazy talk.”
Some guy who’d just collided with him out of nowhere screaming that he was about to die and to be careful—easy enough to ignore.
But as the time he’d warned about drew closer, a strange anxiety had grown.
What if. Really, what if…
That ominous possibility had risen.
“I felt bad for my wife, but I told her we’d sleep out just for today.”
She was heavily pregnant—the kind of woman who had to watch even falling leaves. But he couldn’t shake the dread, so he had no choice.
“Ah… She didn’t ask why?”
“Of course she asked. But I didn’t tell her. No point making her worry for nothing.”
And the next day, when he went to work, a huge problem hit.
“That crazy gambling-addict bastard… I never thought he’d show up at the company.”
Kang Dong-hyun ground his teeth, muttering in rage.
“What? All the way to your company?”
“Yeah. Lucky they caught him right at the front gate. No—honestly, the real stroke of luck was listening to you in the first place.”
Kang Dong-hyun’s voice thickened, and at last the tears he’d been holding back spilled over. What he’d heard through the police investigation was truly shocking.
“That bastard… that son of a bitch really waited for me in front of the house.”
If he’d ignored Park Su-hwan’s warning, Kang Dong-hyun would never have seen his wife again. Or the face of the child about to be born.
“I’m really sorry I got angry at you then. Truly.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m just glad it worked out. I was worried, you know.”
Hadn’t I just dreamed of becoming the man and dying?
“More importantly—you two know each other?”
He didn’t want to keep talking about depressing things. So he quietly changed the subject.
The landlady nodded and planted a hand on Kang Dong-hyun’s shoulder.
“Yep. This one’s my little brother.”
“Pardon…?”
This guy is the landlady’s younger brother?
“Well? Don’t we look alike?”
He looked back and forth between the landlady and Kang Dong-hyun. Seeing them like this, they did somehow resemble each other.
“Wow. Blood siblings? The world really is small.”
“Tell me about it. I never thought my benefactor would be living this close either. I’ve been wanting to find him, actually.”
In that moment, something she’d forgotten came back to her.
“Wait a second.”
“What?”
“If I’d kicked the young man out last month…”
Her face went paper white.
Then her brother, who would never have heard Park Su-hwan’s warning, would have become a cold corpse.
“What? What are you talking about?”
Truth was, she had meant to put Park Su-hwan out last month. The rent had been overdue so long the deposit was already gone.
She hadn’t done it out of pity.
A young man scraping by with a bad leg was hard enough—and he was playing shaman on top of that. How rough must that life be?
She never imagined a kindness she’d offered on a whim would come back this big.
“F-for real? How much is the rent? I’ll pay all of it—there’s no way you’re kicking him out!”
Kang Dong-hyun jumped up shouting. He could never drive his life-saver out onto the street.
“A man about to have a baby, where would you get the money—enough of that!”
The landlady clasped Park Su-hwan’s hand tightly and spoke with eyes full of gratitude.
“From now on, don’t worry about the rent. Got it?”
“What do you mean…”
Looking at the startled Park Su-hwan, she offered a warm smile.
“Exactly what I said. What else would it mean? At the very least, you don’t have to worry about rent anymore. I was eating and living just fine without that money anyway. That’s why I let it slide for months.”
She’d always been kind, but after he’d saved her little brother her manner grew even warmer.
Park Su-hwan might be a money-loving con-shaman, but he wasn’t thick-skinned enough to just gulp down hundreds of thousands of won free.
It wasn’t a few tens of thousands either…
“It’s fine. I’m grateful enough that you’ve let it slide.”
“Oh, come on!”
At his repeated refusals the landlady cried out. Then she rolled her eyes a moment and they lit up.
“Right. Bokchae! How about thinking of it as bokchae? When you get a reading done, you’re supposed to pay the shaman’s fee, aren’t you? Right?”
“Oh. That’s true!”
Kang Dong-hyun chimed in beside her.
“If it feels awkward, just think of it as bokchae. You know—some shamans take tens of millions without batting an eye.”
“Or you can pay all the back rent right now. How about it? Choose.”
“…”
If she put it like that…
“Thank you.”
Park Su-hwan bowed his head and accepted the bokchae she offered. Along with a little dark greed of his own, of course.
Who would have thought the rent problem would resolve like this.
That was when it happened.
— Whoosh.
“Huh…?”
Park Su-hwan’s eyes flew wide with surprise. The chill that had been tormenting him so viciously was ebbing away as if it had never been.