The Goddess's Mistake
I was a child no one wanted.
A married wife. A husband with a wife of his own.
I was born the illegitimate child of two people who had crawled into bed together while both were already spoken for.
And from then on—from the very first day my memory begins—
When I grew up abused by the parents who had divorced over me and started a new life together, when I turned nine and my drunk of a father smashed a soju bottle across my face, leaving a scar that would never fade, when I barely clawed my way through survival, reported them both, and walked into Hanbit Orphanage on my own, and even when I went out to my first construction job—the kind the orphan labor office handed out—on my seventeenth birthday and a collapsed H-beam left me paralyzed from the waist down, there was one thought that filled my head the entire time.
Why am I this unlucky?
I must have committed some terrible sin in a past life, I figured. This was probably my life of atonement.
But even as I scrambled to rationalize it, something kept surging up from deep inside me, threatening to burst out.
Why is it only me…? Why does my luck have to be this bad…?
And the moment I was living right now could only be described as the absolute peak of my miserable, unlucky life.
After the paralysis, I'd scraped by on the accident settlement and disability pension, and finally managed—through sheer struggle—to get myself a tiny basement studio apartment. I was lying on a blanket spread across the middle of the room—the edges let in the cold, so they were even worse—dying in real time.
It was early January. A historic cold snap had struck, the boiler had broken down on top of it, and my ancient A-something phone refused to turn on in the freezing temperatures, so calling 119 wasn't even an option.
Then a brutal case of body aches and fever set in, and I couldn't even crawl as far as the front door.
As I put every piece of the situation together and realized this was the worst stroke of misfortune of my entire life, one certainty hit me.
"Oh. I'm going to die."
Right now. Right here. Without being able to do a single thing. Fully conscious. I'm going to die.
"Well… fine. Whatever, I guess…."
How hollow can you get…. I worked so hard. I lived as decently as I could…. Today, of all days, the bitterness just kept piling up.
As I felt something blurry and warm come creeping in from the edges of my vision, I surrendered to it and slowly closed my eyes.
…Or at least, I was about to.
GAAAAASP!
"Pwah! Hah! Gaaah! Puhah! Haaah…! Hah…."
What… what is going on here?
My consciousness, which I'd assumed had sunk down forever never to resurface, rocketed back to the surface, and as I looked around, all I could see was an endless expanse of pure white space.
"Hoh hoh, how undignified you look. Well then—how was the worst luck in existence, Kim Dasom?"
Kneeling and prostrate on the floor, I found a… woman? sitting before me in an ornate chair, legs crossed, looking down at me.
Thanks to the common sense hammered into me by countless web novels, I knew instantly that this magnificently dressed woman before my eyes was a goddess.
"…?"
Wait, what did she just say?
"It was a specially crafted destiny, made by gathering up all the misfortune of the poor children you tormented in your past life! Every last shred of it, not one piece spared! Fuhuhu… So? Feeling repentant yet?"
So every ounce of misery in my life had all been… this goddess's deliberate design?
Hold on—I don't even remember my past life.
And if you can't remember it, aren't you functionally a completely different person?
I was deeply, profoundly aggrieved.
"…"
She must have read the expression on my face—mouth flapping open and shut, unable to get a single word out—because the goddess frowned slightly in puzzlement.
"Hmm…? You feel wronged…? How can you have gone through that hell and feel not a shred of remorse…. Wait a moment. Did I ever actually unseal his memories?"
She stared into empty air and swished her hand back and forth a few times as if tapping some invisible screen, then leaned forward with her hands braced on the armrests and asked me,
"There we go, there we go. All set now. Think it over once more, hmm? Surely you're ready to repent—tears and snot streaming down your face?"
But despite what this smirking redheaded goddess in front of me was saying, nothing about me had changed in the slightest.
I still felt very, very, very wronged.
Now that my head was clearing, if anything, I felt even more aggrieved than before.
"…Um, no? Did I… did I do something wrong…? I honestly don't remember a single thing…."
The moment I answered, fidgeting a little, the goddess seemed to finally sense that something was off, and she started firing questions at me in a fluster.
"…Hey, you're Kim Dasom, right?"
"…? Yes, that's right…."
"From Hanbit Orphanage."
"Yes, that's right too."
"Born June 4th, 2007."
"Yes…. Yes? N-no, I'm not…?"
In that instant, a premonition struck me.
My twenty years of experience as a misfortune radar were shrieking at full volume, warning me that something had gone horribly wrong.
The being in front of me… no, the goddess had made a mistake.
"Ugh, come on, you're obviously the—what did you say?"
I enunciated as clearly and carefully as I could, one syllable at a time, so there could be no mistaking it.
"I was born on June 3rd…. I think you may have the wrong person…."
"…Seriously?"
The goddess's stunned, slack-jawed expression was turning my suspicion into certainty.
The moment it clicked, I cursed her out.
"You, you useless hack of a goddess…!!"
"I'M SO SORRYYYYY!!!!"
The goddess dropped to her knees before me.
