The Price of Avoidance
“You can come out now!”
Yoon Ji-ho’s voice came through, ragged from hard breathing. The short, dull impacts and the chaos had quieted in only a few minutes.
Haa...
But Park Su-hwan’s heart refused to settle. He had never once imagined something like this would land on him.
- Kang-kang!
Baekya bounced and thrashed at his feet.
“...You want a snack?”
This little bastard had nearly watched his master get killed, and all he could think about was the treat still clutched in Su-hwan’s hand.
- Kang, kang-kang!!
Fine. Here.
Su-hwan let out a long sigh and flicked a strip of dried duck meat into the air. Baekya leapt and snagged it mid-flight.
Tasty, is it?
The way the puppy wolfed it down looked almost funny. At least the little guy had taken the edge off his nerves; Su-hwan’s mood wasn’t all that bad because of it.
“One moment.”
- Click.
Su-hwan carefully undid the lock and opened the door.
A man lay pinned on the floor in handcuffs, and the pot-bellied senior officer was kneeling on top of him. Beside them stood the familiar face of Yoon Ji-ho, expression cold.
“Let me go!”
“Stay down!”
The man thrashed hard, trying to twist free. The pot-bellied senior didn’t budge an inch. Instead he snorted and ground his weight harder into the man’s back.
“Kkuh—kuh!”
“Are you all right?”
Su-hwan answered without taking his eyes off the knife that had fallen near Yoon Ji-ho’s feet. It had clearly been meant for him.
If Yoon Ji-ho hadn’t arrived ahead of schedule, Park Su-hwan would already be a dead man.
This old iron door would never have held against a man who was truly furious.
“Su-hwan!”
“Auntie!”
The landlady was peering down from above, worry written all over her face. The sudden racket must have drawn her outside.
“What on earth is going on down there?!”
“It’s nothing serious. I’m fine.”
Not wanting to frighten her further, Su-hwan forced himself to sound casual.
“Really? And these gentlemen?”
“They’re police.”
“Yes, ma’am. We are.”
Yoon Ji-ho gave the landlady a small wave and reassured her that a squad car would be there shortly—no need to call it in herself.
“More importantly, Teacher. Do you know this man?”
He turned the question on Su-hwan.
“...”
Su-hwan’s eyes met those of the man whose face was flushed dark with rage. The bloodshot stare was pure killing intent.
“Yes.”
The man already seemed to understand the situation. Honestly, only an idiot wouldn’t have.
From the day he and his girlfriend had come for a reading, her attitude had clearly shifted in some way.
“He visited the shrine recently with his girlfriend.”
“Is that so?”
The woman would have done her best to act normal, just as Su-hwan had advised. But it could never have been perfect—that was only natural.
How could anyone look at a lover who had hidden a camera inside a doll with the same affection as before?
And she would have felt guilty too. She had done something wrong.
He had half expected trouble, but he never thought it would twist this far.
“So what brought him here?”
“What did you say to Ha-young?!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Su-hwan tilted his head and denied it with perfect calm. Admitting the truth here would be the same as tightening the noose around his own neck.
“Did something happen to her?”
“Her replies got slower! She keeps dodging me with studying excuses! Even when we finally meet she just goes home! Tell me—what did the two of you talk about?!”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t play dumb. Who do you think you’re fooling? She was fine until she talked to you. After that she changed. So whose fault is that supposed to be?!”
He was claiming his girlfriend’s change was all Su-hwan’s doing. The grounds for it were pitifully thin.
Looks like she’s handling it well, at least.
The woman had clearly kept every word of their conversation locked behind her teeth. That was why this man had come charging in with a knife, no thought for consequences.
“You seem to have forgotten my reading.”
“...What?”
“I told the young lady quite clearly. Her acceptance was right around the corner, so if she wanted to get into university she should stop thinking about anything else and focus only on her studies.”
Su-hwan dismissed the woman’s change as the usual hypersensitivity of an exam candidate. That way both she and he would stay safe from this maniac.
It was a smooth, perfect lie that flowed like water. Flipping an entire situation with a single sentence was nothing to him.
“And yet, instead of helping her...”
Su-hwan didn’t stop there. A better way to reverse the whole scene had just occurred to him.
“...you come here and pull this outrage?!”
He roared, veins standing out on his neck. The sudden fury made everyone flinch.
“The spirits are angry! How dare you interrupt a prayer with a reason this absurd?!”
Su-hwan’s eyes flashed with a faint spiritual light as he glared the man down.
Yes. A shaman had to get angry the way a shaman got angry, and Park Su-hwan was not the type to go down quietly.
There was a reason he had screwed over the reapers and run in the first place.
“W-what are you...”
“You want to know what I said about you? Fine. If you’re that curious I’ll tell you. The water’s already spilled, right?”
The killing intent had vanished from the man’s eyes, replaced by a vague terror of some truth he didn’t know.
“I told her that within two months you’d cause a major incident and end up in prison. We were praying to try and stop it!”
“What...?”
“You fool! If I’d told you the truth, would you have sat still? You’re the kind of idiot who loses all sense of heaven and earth, flips out, and shows up with a knife!”
Su-hwan turned the man’s own rampage into proof of the prophecy and spun an even tighter, more elaborate lie.
Besides, men like this were always the same. Their short tempers meant someone around them—parents, friends—must have told them off a hundred times already.
“Hasn’t everyone told you to fix that temper of yours? Your parents, anybody?!”
“...!”
He didn’t need an answer. The man’s blank, stunned face already said everything.
- Weeeeeooooooo!!
“Haa...”
Sirens wailed in the distance. Su-hwan listened to them and spoke in a tone of pure regret.
“So it ends like this after all. My prayers must have fallen short. I promised I’d stop it somehow...”
The man realized who that promise had been made for. His eyes went wide.
“They’re here.”
At last the officers who had answered the call arrived. The man rose from under the pot-bellied senior’s hands without the slightest resistance.
“I-is it true?”
“If you borrow the gods’ names to tell careless lies, the price is never light. I’d die for it.”
The man squeezed his eyes shut and hung his head. As he was led away, Su-hwan added one last thing to his retreating back.
“A better connection will find you.”
With those words he completely cut off any chance the man might harm his girlfriend further. He had driven the nail home: the man himself had ruined the relationship with his own hands.
“But for that to happen, you have to accept the punishment for the sins you’ve already committed. That’s how fortune arrives.”
The words that left Su-hwan’s mouth were the principle of extinguishing karmic obstacles. If accumulated karma blocks the road, blessing can never come.
Then a single thought flashed through his mind.
- You, who were the lady of a great house in a past life, beat that girl—who was a slave—to death.
Those were the words he had spoken to the woman.
Ah...
Park Su-hwan realized he had committed an irreversible mistake. A massive one.
At the time he had thought it was just something to say...
Only now did he understand why the god’s final words had been about retribution.
The advice he had given the woman had clearly been the best choice. In the end he had saved her from a dangerous man.
From a purely human point of view, that is. As a shaman, it had been the worst possible choice.
The man had been nothing less than a creditor come to collect a debt from a previous life. A real shaman’s duty would have been to untie that vicious grudge and find a path where both of them could live together.
What Su-hwan had done was not resolution of the grievance. It was avoidance.
“...”
Watching the man disappear beyond the gate, he thought:
I was a real idiot.
Unresolved karma only knots tighter with time, like a rope left tangled for years. That swollen debt would demand an even crueler price from the woman in her next life.
“...Are you all right?”
Yoon Ji-ho asked carefully.
“He’ll receive proper punishment. Please don’t worry too much.”
Even that sincere comfort couldn’t make Su-hwan open his mouth easily. Still, there was one thing he had to make clear, at least to himself.
He felt regret over how the matter had been handled—but he did not regret the choice itself.
He still believed it had been the best action available in that moment.
In the end, hadn’t he saved a person from a dangerous man? At least if you looked only at the result.
Yeah. Even if I went back, I’d make the same choice. There was no other way.
That was right. Even if he returned to the past, he still would not have been able to solve the problem the gods themselves seemed to have set. He hadn’t known the answer.
“Thank you for your help.”
Su-hwan led the two men into the shrine and bowed his head briefly once they were seated.
“Not at all. Honestly, it’s a huge relief. A little later and things could have gone very badly.”
Yoon Ji-ho pressed a hand to his chest as he spoke.
“Truly.”
Cause and effect really do come full circle.
Su-hwan felt the good karma he had built returning to him. If he hadn’t saved Yoon Ji-ho, he would almost certainly have died today.
“May I ask how you managed to arrive so early?”
They had shown up a full thirty minutes ahead of the agreed time. The pot-bellied senior seated next to Yoon Ji-ho—Go Sang-seok—opened his mouth.
“I figured arriving a little early was simple courtesy. Today just proved again that it’s better to leave yourself plenty of margin for appointments. Haha!”
Go Sang-seok’s belly shook as he laughed loudly. Su-hwan answered with a faint smile of his own.
“Ah. Do people sometimes say they’ll come and then never show?”
“Plenty.”
Clients who made appointments and never appeared were not rare. No-shows were usually the headache of ordinary small-business owners, but Su-hwan’s situation was not much different.
“They’re going to regret that. I’ve heard finding a genuine shaman is hard.”
“Please. Don’t flatter me so much. It’s embarrassing.”
Go Sang-seok’s praise was sincere. Today he had been truly shaken.
The shaman hadn’t so much as blinked at the man who came to kill him. Instead he had thundered and scolded with a terrifying presence.
It was something Go Sang-seok had never seen in his life, and not a level of guts an ordinary person could possess.
He had come here half in doubt. In this moment, though, he felt a fierce certainty that he had done the right thing by seeking the man out.
Somehow he had the feeling that things were going to work out.
“I heard you warned Ji-ho and saved his life. Thank you. He’s a kid I’m fond of.”
“It was nothing. All I did was give a warning. Ji-ho is the one who actually moved on it.”
“Still, without that warning...”
“No. Fate only changes when a person moves under their own power.”
“Ah... I see.”
Go Sang-seok was struck deep by those words. Fate only changes when you move yourself. It felt like a single sentence that summed up every year he had spent as a police officer.
“Here. I couldn’t come empty-handed, so I brought this.”
Go Sang-seok slid a shopping bag toward Su-hwan. Su-hwan quickly checked the contents.
Premium ham? And that’s cooking oil?
Oh. A fairly expensive gift set. He far preferred practical things like this over weird ornamental junk that served no purpose.
“And...”
Go Sang-seok rummaged inside his jacket and produced a white envelope.
No. That is—!
“This is the bokchae. Honestly, I don’t believe this kid paid you properly the first time.”
He clapped Yoon Ji-ho on the back with a hearty laugh.
“It’s far too much.”
Su-hwan refused first. Snatching it up too eagerly would look greedy.
He had only shown cool, impressive sides of himself so far.
“I’ve already received more than enough. If I get greedier than this, the spirits will be angry.”
“Couldn’t you accept it just this once? Please.”
Su-hwan shook his head firmly.
“When a man covets wealth too much, misfortune always follows. That is the law of heaven.”
Then Go Sang-seok licked his dry lips and began to hesitate.
What? Something feels off...
Su-hwan instinctively felt a nameless unease. Go Sang-seok’s face looked exactly like a man about to make an extremely awkward request.
“Then if it becomes a fair price, would that be all right?”
“...”
He felt he shouldn’t answer, yet there was no way to dodge. In the end Su-hwan nodded with difficulty.
“That’s correct. As a rule, what goes out must come back in.”
“I see.”
Go Sang-seok glanced past Su-hwan at the spirit altar and spoke.
“Honestly, I didn’t believe in this sort of thing.”
Today that conviction had been completely shattered. He now understood that people sought out shamans for good reason.
“Yes. That’s natural enough. Only those who truly need help end up walking through this door of their own will.”
“...Ah!”
Go Sang-seok’s eyes went wide and he let out a short sound of realization. The reason he himself had come looking for a shaman today was contained in that very sentence.
He had arrived with the attitude of “nothing to lose, might as well try even a cat’s paw.” He had been wrong.
Cat’s paw, nothing. Right now he was reaching for the hand of someone truly formidable and spiritually powerful. He was glad he had taken Yoon Ji-ho’s crazy-sounding story seriously.
Ah.
And when Su-hwan saw the sharp light in Go Sang-seok’s eyes, he knew. He had just made a serious slip of the tongue.
“There is one thing I would like to ask of you.”
“...A request?”
Go Sang-seok reached into his jacket again. This time it was a photograph of a young child. The tips of his fingers trembled faintly as he set it down.
His gratitude had been genuine, but this was the real reason he had sought out the shrine.
No way. It can’t be. Really?
Su-hwan already knew what the man was about to say.
No. No! I’m a fraud!
“This is my friend’s child. The boy disappeared suddenly not long ago. Could you help us? I’m begging you.”
I’m finished. I should have just taken the gifts and the money when they were offered. I had to put on airs and play the lofty shaman, and now I’ve tripped over my own cleverness.
Park Su-hwan froze solid, like a stone guardian statue. The warm atmosphere that had filled the shrine only moments earlier cooled as if winter had suddenly arrived.