Divorce (5)
Love Area player Shin.
Shin Eun-jo's grandmother had been one of Korea's most renowned great shamans.
Politicians of staggering power, stars famous across the entire world—anyone who came seeking her grandmother's help treated even Eun-jo, the granddaughter, with scrupulous respect.
Shin Eun-jo did not mind people bowing to her.
At ten years old, when she began to waste away under a mysterious illness no one could explain, she believed without a shadow of doubt that she would become the next great shaman. She wanted it.
But on the night before the spirit-descent ceremony, the sickness vanished as if it had never been.
It wasn't spirit sickness after all…
Her grandmother had already summoned every spirit-daughter under her wing for Eun-jo's ceremony, so Eun-jo fully expected a thrashing. Instead, the old woman only looked at her and said:
"…So it has come to this after all."
It almost sounded as if she had always known the illness was never spirit sickness. But Eun-jo, drowning in guilt toward her grandmother, never pressed for the meaning behind those words.
A disease that had tortured her for a full year, then disappeared overnight. Stranger still was what followed: from that very day, her grandmother began teaching her everything a woman needed to know to live as a mudang.
Eun-jo did not understand why, but she respected her grandmother, so she learned with everything she had. The old woman taught her a great deal, and left her a great deal more. Those lessons would later prove invaluable when Eun-jo began impersonating a shaman herself.
By the time she turned twenty, after an ordinary school life, no faith in shamanism remained in her. Her spirit sickness had only been some rare pediatric disease of unknown cause; her grandmother had known it, too; and the whole spirit-descent rite was nothing but a noisy fraud.
So the great shaman people revered was simply a human being with extraordinary insight.
Thinking that way was easier on the heart—especially after, while Eun-jo was away at school in Seoul, the great shaman was murdered by some lunatic who claimed he did not believe in "superstition."
If she'd been a real great shaman, she would have known she was going to die.
And if she had known—even if the death was unavoidable—she should have left her granddaughter at least a single word.
"…So it has come to this after all."
On the days that phrase rose unbidden in her mind, the words her grandmother had spoken when the sickness left her, the pain was almost unbearable. It felt as if the old woman had greeted her own final moment the same way.
After days and nights of torment, Shin Eun-jo made a decision. That son of a bitch who had murdered a grandmother who had left more advice for strangers than she ever had for her own granddaughter—who had been, in the end, nothing more than an ordinary woman skilled at counsel—would not be left in peace.
But by then the man was already behind bars, and the sentence was long enough that even early release for good behavior was nowhere in sight. So Eun-jo began using everything her grandmother had left her to play the false shaman—because if she could not lay hands on him herself, she would use other people, power, connections, to make that bastard suffer for the rest of his life.
That was the plan, at least…
Even imitating a mudang was harder than it looked. Everything that had seemed effortless when her grandmother did it refused to work when Eun-jo tried. She was sharp on face-reading and geomancy, knowledge her grandmother had drilled into her, but truly seeing through a person was another matter entirely. Sometimes she almost wondered whether a god really had descended upon the old woman after all.
"If only I could have received the spirit descent back then."
Sitting alone in an empty shrine with not a single client in sight, Shin Eun-jo muttered the words, hollow. If it had truly been spirit sickness, maybe she would have known her grandmother was going to die before it happened.
An impulsively opened shrine, a revenge that had not even begun, and a despair so deep she felt she would never reach even the tips of her grandmother's toes—one tear slipped unbidden from the corner of her eye.
That was when the man arrived.
Hair black as absolute night. Hair so unnaturally dark even for a Korean that it stole the breath and held the gaze. He parted those even lips and asked:
"Why are you crying?"
And before she knew what she was doing, Shin Eun-jo told him everything. Her revenge, her grandmother's death, the girl who had wanted to become a shaman, the spirit descent she never received.
He listened to the end with a face that gave nothing away. Yet she remembered, with perfect clarity, that he never once looked bored.
When the last of it was out, she wiped her tear-streaked face and said, "I—I don't serve any god or anything. So you should just go home, mister. I'm sorry I tried to trick you."
"You need not concern yourself with that. The reason no other god was permitted to claim you is because of my father."
"…What?"
At the sudden mention of a father, Eun-jo blinked in confusion. The man offered a handsome smile and added:
"My father has taken a liking to you. One day you, too, will hear the call of the Father who dwells in heaven."
"Ah… that father…"
Is a Christian even allowed to come for a fortune-telling…?
He was a strange man, but the comfort was real.
"More importantly, I came because I have something to ask you."
"Y-you want to ask me something even knowing I'm a fraud?"
"Regrettably, there is no one else whose opinion I can solicit."
From his suit bag he produced, after a bit of rummaging—
"A game cartridge…?"
"At my father's will I have created a game. I wished to know whether it would appeal to young people."
"Ah…"
Wondering if he had developed some Christian game, Eun-jo took the cartridge he held out and read the title printed on it without thinking.
"Middle-Aged Man Romance Simula…tion…?"
"Well? Is the title itself seductive?"
"…"
Not Christian. A cult, then?
The title was bizarre, but the man had already given her no small amount of comfort, so Shin Eun-jo promised to play it herself and send him her thoughts.
"I'm not a real mudang, but… I am young. If I play it, I should be able to tell you whether it works for young people."
"I would be grateful. In return, I shall grant you one wish."
"My wish…?"
Is he doing this because he's afraid I'll demand a consultation fee…?
She had no intention of taking money from him anyway, so she nodded.
"Ah, my wish is…"
"There is no need to speak it."
"What?"
"It has already been granted."
"…"
Yeah, he definitely said that because he thought I'd ask for money…
Anyone who would walk into a fake shaman's shrine and ask her to check whether his game was fun probably did not have money to spare.
"You don't… have to pay a fee."
At that, the man laughed softly.
"You do not believe me. But soon enough, you will."
Then, in that gentle voice, he added:
"You will believe in the miracle of God."
Cultist…
Those were his last words before he left the shrine.
Shin Eun-jo spent the entire night playing Middle-Aged Man Romance Simulation, managed to reach one ending, and wrote her impressions to the email address on the business card he had left behind.
Hello, mister. This is the shrine owner you visited for a reading today… (omitted) In my opinion, even for a middle-aged-man conquest game, Hayden's age feels a bit too high, and limiting the playable perspective to soldiers is also a little disappointing. Also—is the Commander's face modeled after you? You're handsome, sure, but the players of this game might find that a little off-putting… And…
No reply ever came to the brutally honest email. After waiting all day with neither an answer nor even a read receipt, she decided the address on the card must have contained a typo, or else the man had simply blurted whatever came to mind after panicking at the revelation that she was a fraud.
The next day, the detective in charge of her grandmother's case informed her that the lunatic who had killed the old woman had been found dead inside the prison—slaughtered.
"The guard said it looked like he'd been mauled by a beast. One with a ridiculous number of teeth."
Why the man's voice, promising she would soon believe in the miracle of God, rose in her mind at that exact moment, she never knew. Shin Eun-jo was seized by a terror she could not name; by the time she came back to herself, every trace of her playthrough and the review email had been wiped clean. The object that had almost certainly been the game cartridge he gave her lay in the sink, burned down to ash.
And from that day forward, other people's thoughts began to open before her eyes as if written in plain text.
Shin Eun-jo chose to believe this was the "granted wish" the man had spoken of. The business card had vanished somewhere, and no matter how hard she tried, the email address would not return to her memory. For a long while she lived without thinking of him at all—until the day she learned of Apocalypse: Safe Zone, an homage to Middle-Aged Man Romance Simulation.
"Huh? This is…"
In that game, Hayden appeared as a young man around thirty, and alongside Luna Moon—presumably the original otome player perspective—a female NPC named Daphne had been added. Hayden's face, however, still resembled that man.
"…So you did read my email."
She had completely forgotten the whole affair after Middle-Aged Man Romance Simulation never released—yet here was unexpected proof that her encounter with the man had been neither dream nor hallucination. Fear rose in her, and alongside it, a fierce desire to see this game through to its end.
So Shin Eun-jo began Safe Zone. And there she learned of Dopamine Addict.
At first she thought Dopamine Addict was the man himself. The air around the Cola Area avatar felt somehow similar.
He just customized it to look like Commander Hayden. That guy founded the illegitimate-child route, after all.
Then something strange happened again. The veteran players who followed the convenience-store address Dopamine Addict had posted began to go missing.
Shin Eun-jo had already tasted the impossible once—the sudden, inexplicable death of her revenge target. She knew at once that this was no ordinary disappearance.
I have to go, too.
Ever since her revenge had ended in empty anticlimax, she had lived without goal or purpose. Even hearing that people were vanishing, what she felt was not fear so much as a fierce hunger to see it with her own two eyes. Whatever waited at that convenience store, Shin Eun-jo decided to go.
On her first visit she chose nothing and simply walked back out. The symbols inside, unmistakable to anyone looking, pointed to the nine Safe Zones.
This, perhaps, was a chance. A final chance to escape a life of permanent fraud—to stop being a false shaman forever.
She gathered other players and had them select the same zone symbol as her own. That was how she possessed a body inside the game. And that was how she came to stand here now, staring at the unbelievable landscape Dopamine Addict had created.
"This can't be real…"
The black storm clouds whirling and vanishing at Dopamine Addict's gesture were a sight no ordinary human mind could process. Just looking at it drained the spirit. Terror so absolute it felt as if the tongue might glue itself to the roof of the mouth.
Worse still was this: the one wielding that power seemed neither to grasp how impossible it was, nor to care enough to find out.
Dopamine Addict—no.
The boy who looked like chaos itself turned to her and spoke in a gentle voice.
"The miracle of God. Do you believe it now?"
Just like that man, on that day.