Just Call It Luck
— Unknown —
[Yes…….]
Leaving behind Ansi's anxious reply, I opened my eyes and looked down at the assembled maids.
"Court Lady Kim."
"Yes, Your Highness."
"From this moment on, every maid I call out is dismissed. Send them out of the Crown Princess's palace at once."
"I beg your pardon……?"
"Just write down the names as I go."
When viewed through the Heavenly Mandate Eye, the maids who carried more faults than merits—the ones who leaned closer to wicked than good—were all winnowed away.
That left roughly twenty maids in the palace. It was a thin number, admittedly. But this beat scrubbing out the divinely punished and hunting down replacements every single day.
"Draw up a roster of the ones who remain and bring it to me. We'll operate with this staff for the time being, and if we need to hire anyone new, you'll clear it with me first."
"Yes, Your Highness……."
Court Lady Kim, who had hurriedly scribbled down the names, ventured a careful question.
"F-forgive me, Your Highness, but may I ask by what standard you chose them?"
Oh, I have an excuse prepared for exactly this.
"The standard of the Seol Tribe."
"Pardon?"
"Court Lady Kim, you do know why Pyeong subjugated the Seol Tribe, don't you?"
"That……"
An earthquake rippled through Court Lady Kim's pupils.
It was common knowledge that the Pyeong Empire had conquered the Seol Tribe by slaughtering them and enslaving the survivors—all on account of a certain special power. Pyeong had dressed it up with talk of the Seol lands being their ancestral territory, but everyone knew what the conquest had really been.
Court Lady Kim surely knew it too, yet how could she dare say such a thing out loud to me—a woman of Seol blood and, at the same time, a princess of the Pyeong imperial house?
"It's all right, Court Lady Kim. Before I am a princess of Pyeong, I am a daughter of the Seol."
"……!"
"That's precisely why Pyeong sent me here. I trust a woman of your sense understands what that means?"
Which of my two clashing identities took precedence? From the way she darted her eyes anxiously about, Court Lady Kim seemed to grasp my meaning at once.
With Ansi standing guard, I hardly had to worry about anyone eavesdropping, anyway.
I went on with perfect composure.
"So understand this—I have no homeland. Pyeong is not my home."
I'm going to be living here for the foreseeable future, and I refuse to be treated as some foreigner. Better to draw the line clearly now, while I'm at it.
"This place will become my home from now on. And I intend to be a cloud that drifts free, clinging to no plain."
"Y-your Highness, do you mean……!"
Court Lady Kim stammered, her face flushed with something like awe.
Smiling secretly, I raised an index finger to my lips.
"That stays between us. Understood?"
It was several days later that Court Lady Kim brought me the books I had requested, along with the roster of palace staff.
There were quite a lot of books, so she hadn't managed them alone—several maids had trailed along behind her. And among them, I spotted a familiar face.
Choi Ja-myeong.
The first maid I had ever peered into with the Heavenly Mandate Eye.
Now that I think of it, I'd nearly forgotten about her.
Setting down my book, I singled Choi Ja-myeong out from the maids who were bowing and withdrawing.
"You. Stay a moment."
"……!"
Choi Ja-myeong froze dead white where she stood. The remaining maids and Court Lady Kim shot her furtive glances as they filed out.
Seated at my writing desk, I set pen to paper in quick, sure strokes.
"Choi Ja-myeong, isn't it?"
Her eyes went round—she had never imagined I would remember her name.
"Th-that's right."
"Come here and take this."
Choi Ja-myeong approached hesitantly, looked down at the paper, and asked carefully, "What is this, Your Highness?"
"A prescription. Take it to the palace dispensary and have the medicine made up exactly as written. If you're curious what it treats, you're welcome to ask the physicians there."
"……Medicine?"
"Mm. Give it to your brother, and he'll start turning a corner before long."
"……!"
Choi Ja-myeong's mouth fell open in a blank stupor.
When I had looked into her through the Heavenly Mandate Eye, I had seen nearly all of it—the whole shape of her life, the sins she had committed and the virtues she had piled up along the way.
Remarkably, she was a person with more virtue than sin.
An ordinary human accumulates merits and faults in roughly equal measure over a lifetime. The line is never perfectly clean—too many faults makes a person wicked, too many merits makes them good—but by that reckoning, Choi Ja-myeong was unmistakably on the side of the good.
Her family was poor, so she'd entered palace service young. And while she was away working at the palace, a landslide buried her home village.
It had been a catastrophe. Most of the villagers died in it.
The only survivors were a handful of children—including Choi Ja-myeong's own younger brother.
She had taken in every one of them and was raising them alone. The monthly stipend from the palace was generous enough that they scraped by, but recently one of the children had fallen ill with a mysterious sickness no one could name.
And though the boy wasn't even her blood kin, Choi Ja-myeong refused to give up on him. She was scrimping on her own food and clothing, scraping together his treatment fees however she could.
So the faults Choi Ja-myeong had racked up were all sins committed in her desperate scramble for money or medicine. Currying favor with a wealthy, foul-tempered maid, fawning and flattering, trading smiles for crumbs of soybean flour—petty things like that.
The way she was rude to me that day was for the same reason.
Compared to truly wicked people, they were trifling sins—and yet she had been living crushed under a mountain of guilt for them, far heavier than they deserved.
Even that time—when I told her all to leave and she insisted that preparing the wedding ceremony alone was impossible—that was her genuinely trying to help me.
Her hands had been rough about it, since she was minding the gossiping maids around her, but deep down she had pitied me, all while quietly despairing of herself. When she witnessed me surviving the wedding night alive, the relief on her face had been real—that was her true heart.
That was why I had brought her into my palace.
Once you peer into a human being that deeply and understand them this well…… you can't help growing fond of them.
Frail humans who nonetheless lived with all their might. People who did their very best within the circumstances that trapped them, who sometimes sinned simply in order to survive. Pitiful, deserving souls.
Wandering through the Karma Mirror for amusement, watching the dead drift across the River of Three Crossings, peering down at the mortal world through my far-seeing lens—I had often wanted to help humans like these.
But I was a goddess living in Heaven, and meddling in the mortal realm at will, uninvited and receiving no prayers or rites for it, was a violation of cosmic order. So I had never been able to lift a finger.
But now I'm a human living in the mortal world myself.
This wasn't some miracle possible only through divine power. A small kindness like this? I could manage a thousand of them.
After two hundred years of idling before the Karma Mirror, writing a prescription like this is nothing.
The illness I had glimpsed through Choi Ja-myeong's memories—the one her brother had caught—was the work of a resentful wraith. It was not a sickness to be treated but a corruption to be purified. Among immortals it would barely rank as a common cold. For humans, though, it was another matter entirely.
I was double-checking the prescription when something occurred to me, and I opened the chest I had stowed beneath the writing desk.
It was where I'd stashed the gold ingots I'd grabbed from the treasury of Sangra Palace using the Eight-Jewel Command Seal—whatever my hands could carry, at least. The pieces were too heavy to haul out anything large, so I had only taken bars the size of a palm.
I picked one out and held it toward her.
"Some of the ingredients are rare, but this should more than cover it. If it runs short, or you can't get hold of something, just tell me."
Choi Ja-myeong did not take the gold. She looked back and forth between the ingot and the prescription, then murmured in a daze, "How…… how did you……?"
"I saw you that day at the wedding. You remember?"
Choi Ja-myeong's shoulders flinched. She stared at me with disbelieving eyes.
"Then…… then what I felt that day…… it wasn't my imagination?"
"What did you feel?"
Seen through the Heavenly Mandate Eye, I knew exactly what such a thing felt like—but that was an immortal's standard. For a human, I thought it might be different, so I asked.
Choi Ja-myeong gazed up at the empty air for a moment, then answered as if murmuring to herself.
"……It was like my whole life flashing before my eyes."
"A life replay?"
"In the grip of that terror of dying, I looked back on how I had lived…… and there was so much I regretted."
The terror of dying? Wait. So being caught in the Mandate Eye's gaze feels so much like death that your whole life plays out before you? That's far stronger than I ever intended!
No wonder some of them were swaying on their feet even with the pressure split thirty ways.
While I was reeling, Choi Ja-myeong looked at me with the face of someone who had made up her mind about something.
"And then, when the fear lifted, all I could think was—thank you. I resolved that whatever life remained to me, I would live it more rightly, more earnestly…… that rather than slipping down the easy path, I would work harder and find the right one."
There was a new steel in her eyes. The woman was simply—not the same person anymore.
What on earth was this?
The Heavenly Mandate Eye held no power to reform sinners. I was certain of it—look at the Crown Prince's eunuch, who vomited up everything and still tried to deny his own crimes to the end.
Is it because she was good to begin with?
Humans really were astonishing creatures. Endlessly fragile, yet now and then flashing with a strength that took your breath away—and then, without warning, a goodness you never expected would come spilling out of them.
No wonder affection crept up on you. I was beginning to understand why so many gods watched over humanity—why some of them even went so far as to love it.
Choi Ja-myeong swallowed dryly and went on.
"It was all so unbelievable that afterward I wondered if I'd simply dreamed for a moment while standing there. Whether the feeling that I had shown someone—shown Your Highness—the whole of my life was just a delusion, too…… But it wasn't a delusion at all, was it?"
"……Mm. Well. No, it wasn't."
At my nod, Choi Ja-myeong drew in a sharp breath.
"Then Your Highness, you are……"
She parted her lips—then caught sight of my silver hair, finely braided and falling loose down my back, and closed her mouth again.
Among humans, who nearly all bore hair of black, an unusual color almost always hinted at a special power. Divine blood, perhaps—or the mark of one of the Gwoeryeoknansin.
And my silver hair is the mark of the Seol, whose divine blood runs in their veins.
How convenient. I didn't have to invent a single excuse—she reasoned it out and accepted it all on her own. Honestly, being a daughter of the Seol was a useful identity in more ways than one.
I held out the gold ingot and the prescription once more.
"Here. Take them."
"……But I was rude to you, Your Highness."
"I know."
"And yet you offer me a reward instead of a punishment?"
"It isn't a reward."
I tilted my head and added, "Just think of it as luck."
"……"
"Like a misfortune that struck you out of nowhere—only this time, a blessing rolled in unbidden. That's all it is."
"I don't understand what you……"
"Maybe it's your ancestors lending a hand. Maybe it's the virtue you've stored up over a lifetime of good deeds. One way or another, this is your fortune and your blessing. So just take it."
A stroke of luck great enough to catch the eye of a major deity like me might well be the harvested merit of generations of ancestors who strove before her.
And it was true that I myself had been moved by seeing she had piled up more virtue than sin in her life.
So this wasn't a reward from me at all. It was Choi Ja-myeong's own fortune—plain and simple.