Yunchae's House
When we reached the fine arts building, Yunchae took the bags from my hands and said,
"I'll call you later. I might run a little late."
She started to turn away.
"Uh—um… do you even have my number?"
Yunchae glanced back at me and smiled a smile so beautiful it nearly stopped my heart.
"I do."
Even after she disappeared inside, I stood there staring blankly at the building. It felt like a place where angels lived. And what did it matter if she was a shaman, or a monster? If a devil that beautiful existed, I would have handed over my entire soul without regret. I must have stood there for nearly half an hour wearing an idiot's grin before I noticed the people passing by giving me strange looks and finally tore myself away. My class time had already come and gone; the thought that walking in midway would be impossible settled over me all at once.
By the time I checked the clock, it was past nine. I rolled around on the floor of my one-room place, eyes glued to my phone. Tonight was supposed to be my convenience-store shift, but I had swapped dates with another employee. I had cleared the entire evening and waited—yet no message from Yunchae ever came. Had she only claimed she knew my number, and then never looked it up…? No, that couldn't be it. Should I just call her first? Then again, I didn't have her number either. Would Senior Yongjin know it? Should I ask him? Knowing his personality, he was not the sort to simply hand it over. He would grill me for details, and then what—would I have to tell him everything? Not that there was much to tell in the first place.
My miserable evening dragged on. Exhausted from waiting, I pressed my face to the floor and began to drift off. They say sleeping face-down will twist your mouth… that half-thought followed me as I slipped under. I was only dozing lightly, tormented by things that may or may not have been dreams, when a familiar ringtone and vibration jolted me awake.
I wiped the drool from my mouth and pushed myself upright. My phone was buzzing right where my face had been, lying in a small wet patch of my own spit. I slapped my cheek a few times, trying to clear my head, then looked at the screen. Unknown number. I was certain it was her.
"Hello?"
"Were you asleep?"
It was Yunchae, of course. I wiped the last of the drool from the corner of my mouth with my wrist and answered,
"No. I was studying."
Her soft laugh came through the line.
"Anyway, it's ten-thirty. Get to the address I'm sending you before midnight."
She hung up before I could ask a single question. I sat there a moment gathering my wits, then bolted straight out the door.
I punched the address Yunchae had sent into the map app and set off. The bus dropped me in a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. I wound through narrow, tangled streets, eyes on my phone, hunting for the house. The area looked like it had been redeveloped long ago; old multi-family houses crowded every corner. I threaded alley after alley, searching. Twenty minutes left. My pulse was climbing.
The neighborhood had been built on a hill, and the farther I followed the map, the steeper the slope became. At the crest, a trail like a mountain path led up into a small wooded rise, and the tightly packed houses began to thin. Multi-family units vanished entirely; only worn single-family homes remained.
At last I reached the address. The house before me was so old and archaic it hardly seemed possible it still stood in 2025. I double-checked the number and stopped in front of the gate. The rusted iron door was blotched with corrosion and hung with several talismans. Without really thinking, I searched for a doorbell, then simply pushed. The gate swung open.
I stepped into a tiny yard. Beyond it stood the entrance of a small single-story house.
"Senior… Senior…"
I called for Yunchae. No answer. I walked right up to the front door and raised my voice.
"Senior. It's Donghyun. I'm here."
From behind the old door came her voice.
"It's open. Come in."
I pressed a hand to my hammering chest and opened the door. A thick wave of incense poured out, and the interior was almost completely dark. I frowned and peered inside. A small living room came into view; a few candles burned along the walls. What was this, a vampire's castle? Why so many candles…
Along with the bewilderment, something I could only call fear and awe pricked at my senses of smell and sight. Why I was feeling those things at all was a question that rose unbidden. The moment I shut the front door and stepped fully inside, a room door in the corner opened.
"Come up."
It was unmistakably Yunchae's voice, yet something about it raised the hair on my arms. I hesitated for only a second, then slipped off my shoes and entered the living room. Eyes fixed on the open doorway, I walked slowly toward the center of the room—then stopped. Something was under my feet. A carpet marked with strange patterns.
"I refused the spirit-descent for a long time. I didn't believe in destiny. I believed I could carve my own path."
I looked toward the room the voice came from, but Yunchae still did not appear.
"They call it spirit-sickness—the illness that comes when you refuse the descent. In my case, the sickness never came to me. My entire family fell to mysterious diseases and died. After that, an old shaman woman found me and said everything was the result of my refusal."
What the hell was she talking about? And why wouldn't she show herself? Why had she decorated the house like a haunted set? My mind was racing, but I could neither move nor speak.
"In the end I accepted the descent. But my Jusin never asked anything of me, never answered when I needed it. In other words, I was a shaman who couldn't function as one."
Soft footsteps. Then Yunchae stepped out of the open doorway. She was dressed in white from head to toe—something like a hanbok, yet the design was markedly different. On her head she wore a tall conical hat like those worn by Buddhist nuns in ritual dance; her upper garment was white and formal, almost funereal. Ordinary hanbok skirts hang from beneath the chest all the way to the ankles; the skirt she wore now began at the waist like a modern one, leaving a band of bare skin exposed at her midriff.
It was too dark to see clearly, yet the mere knowledge that her waist was bare set my heart pounding. Having left the room, Yunchae stood still and continued speaking.
"After I met you in the club room, for the first time in ages I received a revelation from my Jusin. The god who never answered no matter how I called. It said you were my destiny."
She took one step forward.
"What are you talking about? Destiny?"
In any other situation, hearing a woman—especially a woman I liked—say "you are my destiny" would have left me glowing. But the scene before me was far too grotesque and terrifying to feel like a confession.
"I refused at first. I hated receiving orders from a god, hated the idea that I couldn't live this world by my own will. So I avoided you instead."
She took another step closer.
"My Jusin told me: if I offer everything I am to you, it will count as offering everything to the god itself, and it will never appear before me again until the day I die. In other words, as long as I stay with you I won't suffer spirit-sickness, won't be possessed, and the people around me won't be harmed."
I nearly snorted. I didn't believe in an afterlife. I didn't believe in ghosts. I didn't even have a religion. Catholicism, Christianity, Buddhism—the major faiths—I believed in none of them. To someone like me, her story was not even gossip.
"And it told me to help you. To help you become a savior who heals the pain of the world and leads people to deliverance. You would guide them, it said. You would free them from suffering."
She took one more step. In the faint candlelight and the dim night-light of the living room, her whole body began to take shape. The fabric of her white garments was so thin it was nearly transparent. Through the sheer upper layer the soft outline of her breasts showed faintly, and because of the short cut of the garment her underbust was visible as well. The skirt draped at her waist was equally sheer; the exact curve of her hips stood out with perfect clarity.
What startled me was not so much the sight itself as the fact that even in this eerie atmosphere her beauty still reached straight into my chest. Her body was a work of art, a gift from the gods in its own right—perfect lines, perfect proportions. Because of that body, every word she had spoken until then simply vanished from my mind.