The Goddess's Mistake
I was a child nobody wanted.
A wife with a husband. A husband with a wife. Two of a kind who crept together, and I was born the illegitimate child of that affair.
From the very first day my memory begins and ever after—whether I was growing up abused by the parents who had divorced over me and settled into a new house to vent their misery on me; or on the day I turned nine, when my drunken father cracked a soju bottle across my face and left me with a scar that would never heal; or when I somehow clawed my way through it all, reported my own parents, and walked into an orphanage under my own power; and even up to my seventeenth birthday, when the labor office for orphans sent me out to my first manual job and a toppled H-beam paralyzed me from the waist down—one thought, always, filled my head.
Why am I this unhappy?
I must have committed some monstrous sin in a past life. I must be living this life to atone for it.
Even as I forced the rationalization down, something kept surging up from deep inside me, threatening to burst free.
Why me...? Why is my luck this bad...?
And this very moment was, by any measure, the pinnacle of my life's misfortune.
After my paralysis, an accident settlement and a disability pension had become just barely enough to scrape by on, and this semi-basement studio—half-buried below street level—was the room I'd had to fight tooth and nail just to find. I lay on a blanket spread across the very center of it, since the edges let the chill seep in, and I was dying in real time.
It was early January. A once-in-a-generation cold snap had stacked itself on top of a broken boiler, and my ancient iPh*ne refused to power on in the cold, which meant even dialing emergency services was out of the question. On top of it all, a vicious fever had come calling, leaving me too weak to crawl so much as a step toward the front door.
The moment I tallied up every factor and understood that this was the worst luck of my entire life, a realization struck me.
"Ah. I'm going to die."
Right now. In this place. Unable to do a thing. Perfectly, vividly conscious. I'm going to die.
"No... come on, just... a little..."
Talk about anticlimactic.
After everything I'd endured—after how hard I'd tried, how decently I'd lived—the grief cut deeper today than it ever had.
As whatever had claimed the edges of my vision began oozing its way inward, thick and sluggish, I surrendered to it and slowly closed my eyes.
...Or at least, I was supposed to.
"Huuuaaagh!"
"Pwhaahk! Hah! Huaahk! Puhah! Haah... hah..."
What... what is even happening right now?
My consciousness—which I had been certain would sink forever, never to resurface—came rocketing back up, and when I looked around, there was nothing but a boundless, blinding-white space on every side.
"Hmhm. What a thoroughly pathetic sight you make. So—how was the worst misfortune imaginable, Kim Dasom?"
There, before me as I knelt prostrate on the floor, was—of all things—a woman. She lounged on an ornate chair with her legs crossed, gazing down at me.
Thanks to the common sense tempered by countless web novels, I knew instantly: this magnificently attired woman before me was a goddess.
...?
Hold on. What did she just say?
"The destiny I brewed for you was a special blend of the misfortune of every last pitiful child you tormented in your past life—all of it! Not one drop left out! Hohoho... Well? Do you feel like repenting now?"
So every measure of the misfortune in my life had unfolded exactly as this goddess intended.
Except—I don't remember a past life at all.
And if there are no memories, then for all practical purposes, that person is someone else entirely, isn't he?
I felt profoundly, violently wronged.
...
Perhaps she finally read the expression on my face—my mouth flapping open and shut without producing a single word—because the goddess before me put on a faintly puzzled look.
"Hmm...? You feel wronged...? How does one live through that hell and emerge without a shred of remorse...? No—hold on. Did I ever actually unseal his memories?"
With that, she stared into the empty air and swished her hand back and forth a few times, as though tapping at some invisible screen. Then she braced her hands on the armrests, leaned toward me, and asked:
"There we go, there we go. All set now. Think it over one more time. Surely the remorse will come pouring out of you, tears and snot streaming down your face?"
But contrary to whatever this red-haired goddess smirking down at me had in mind, nothing about me had changed one bit.
I was still very, very, very wronged. Now that I'd come back to my senses, if anything, I felt even more aggrieved than before.
"...No? I—did I even do anything wrong...? I honestly can't remember a single thing..."
When I answered, fidgeting a little, the goddess at last seemed to sense that something was amiss, and she began firing urgent questions at me.
"...Hey. Your name is Kim Dasom, right?"
"...? Yes, that's me..."
"And you're from Hanbit Orphanage."
"Yes. That's right too."
"Born June 4th, 2007."
"Yes... wait—what? N-no, that's not right...?"
In that instant, instinct arrived. My misfortune radar, honed over twenty years of hard service, blared at full force, warning me that something had gone wrong.
The person before my eyes... no, the goddess... had made a mistake.
"Argh, it IS you, so—wait. What did you say?"
I answered as clearly as I could, enunciating every single syllable so that no misunderstanding would be possible.
"I was born on June 3rd. I think you may be... mistaking me for someone else."
"...You're serious?"
The goddess's blank, dumbfounded expression was turning my guess into certainty.
The instant the realization landed, I fired.
"You—you trash-grade bitch...!!"
"I'm soooooo sorry!!!!"
The goddess dropped to her knees before me.
