Zeus Instead of a Spirit Descent
"You listen here, boy. If you keep going like this, your fate says you won't survive the year. You must receive a spirit descent!"
The fortune-teller's hut sat in a cramped back alley of the neighborhood.
The old woman beneath the grandiose nameplate reading [Ilwol Bodhisattva of Mt. Yongdu] rapped the ashes out of her long pipe and, out of nowhere, delivered my death sentence.
"We're booking your initiation rite for today. Right now! Since I can see the spirits themselves, I'll give you a special deal — just twenty million won."
Tak, tap, tatatat— beep!
Astoundingly, the hag hammered away at a calculator sitting beside her, then drove the knife in deeper.
"Pay in cash and I'll knock ten percent off the VAT. So do yourself a favor and bring cash."
...Twenty million won? A cash discount of ten percent off the VAT?
For words coming out of the mouth of a shaman who supposedly housed divine spirits, this was unbearably secular. Casting a sly glance, I caught the designer handbag half-hidden under the table, and the 24K pure gold rings on every single finger, glinting relentlessly.
This old woman is a con artist. Ballpark, no question.
Leaning back insolently in my chair, I let out a snort of a laugh.
"Grandma, does the initiation rite come with thirty-six-month interest-free installments? Is there anything like a secondhand initiation rite listed on Carrot?"
"W-what...? What nonsense is this brat spouting in front of the divine spirits?!"
"Come on, twenty million?! That's a hundred times more than I've got! My entire life savings is fifty thousand won!"
Screw it, I thought, and flung myself flat on the floor of the shrine, spread-eagled.
I had nothing left to lose in this life anyway. So sue me.
"This is straight-up fraud! Neighbors! There's a fake shaman in here trying to bleed a poor young man dry!!"
WHACK—!
"AAAGH!"
My glorious scene-causing performance came to a pathetic end, courtesy of a pipe strike straight to the crown of my head.
"You dare call me a fraud?! Get the hell out, you little bastard, and don't you ever show your face here again!"
Chaaaaa—!
The hag flung a bowlful of coarse salt straight at me, and when that apparently wasn't enough, doused me with water for good measure.
"Pfft! Kck, kck!"
Along with the terrifying twenty-million-won quote, I took the salty baptism of brine head-on and got tossed bodily out of the fortune-teller's hut.
Ptui, ptui! Ugh, dammit, salt got in my eyes.
Shaking the water dripping from my hair, I glared at the firmly shut door — then let out a sigh so deep it felt like it would swallow the earth.
Spirit Sickness.
That, apparently, was the cause of the mysterious headaches, nightmares, and phantom voices that had been tormenting me relentlessly for the past few years.
Frankly, the words of that money-grubbing old crone rang more plausible than the quacks who'd only ever muttered vague things about "stress" after charging me an arm and a leg for an MRI...
But I can't actually become a shaman! I don't have twenty million won, to begin with!
I'd just barely turned twenty. The ink on my ID wasn't even dry yet.
In the golden years when I should've been burning my youth at hunting bars, they wanted me to dress in some tacky shaman's garb and dance on a fodder chopper in front of a pig's head?
Biting off my tongue and dying would've been preferable.
"Ugh, damn it. There's gotta be another way. There has to be..."
I scratched irritably at my head, achieving nothing.
The whole soggy-rat trudge home, only one thought ran through my mind on loop.
Fuck. Somehow, some way, I have to find a way to survive.
The moment I got home, before I'd even shrugged off my jacket, I planted myself in front of the computer.
When I hit the power button on the tower and the monitor lit up, it laid bare the sorry wreckage of my room in all its glory.
Plastic bottles rolling everywhere with no floor space to step on.
Takeout containers stacked in overlapping layers of occupation across the desk.
And on top of that, a musty bachelor's stench and the sour reek of rotting food waste mingled in a fantastically vile union, synthesizing a one-of-a-kind biochemical weapon that had never before existed on Earth.
Ahem. Misconceptions aside — I was never this kind of pig before.
I used to be a clean, city-dwelling man who actually took pride in tidiness. It was just that my entire daily life had spectacularly imploded over the last few months, and this was the result. The culprit: headaches that felt like someone tap-dancing inside my skull every single day, and a 100%-realism horror ASMR that never stopped whispering at the edge of my ears.
Honestly, when I might drop dead tomorrow, who gives a damn that my room looks like a landfill.
"Whatever. First thing's first — survive."
Kicking the empty takeout containers cluttering my feet vaguely toward the corner, I hurriedly set my hands on the keyboard.
Tatatat— tap!
Desperate keywords filled the portal site's search bar in rapid succession.
Shaman. Korean shamanism. How to avoid spirit sickness. Refusing spirit descent. What happens if you don't receive a spirit descent.
I was tearing through every community and Q&A board I could find, scrolling furiously, when it happened.
From the abyssal pit of the internet — the Occult Gallery of a certain site — a post with a suspiciously promising title jumped straight into my field of vision.
Below the post raged an all-out war of clashing arguments.
Ordinarily I'd have dismissed it as another shitpost. But to desperate me, this post was practically divine revelation.
A different religion...?
So, Buddhism? Or Christianity?
I mulled it over seriously — and quickly shook my head.
No, wait a second.
Jesus and Buddha come with love and compassion as their default passive abilities.
What I wanted was not peaceful coexistence with those bastard ghosts.
What if they went "love thine enemies, even the spiteful little spirits~" and tried to stage a reconciliation handshake with the ghosts haunting me?
What I needed wasn't a peace treaty. It was a one-sided massacre.
Which meant the saintly types were out of the question.
No diplomacy? No compromise? None of that — a hothead who throws the first punch before anything else.
The kind of anger-management-failure god who, before those bastard spirits even opened their mouths, would smash their skulls without question or warning!
On top of that, I needed a thug of a god with overwhelming physical force to boot.
And then — like a lightning bolt — a brilliant idea flashed across my mind.
A filthy, gutter-grade temperament. A compulsive lecher's streak. Overwhelming physicality and raw power.
Plus world-class name recognition rivaling Buddha or Jesus himself.
The womanizing did give me slight pause, but there was no Tier-1 god better suited to physically obliterating the ghosts squatting in my skull.
"...Zeus."
Yes. The chief god of Greco-Roman mythology.
King of the gods. Lord of Lightning. The absolute mob boss of Mount Olympus.
One bolt from the King of the Gods, and those pedigree-less puny spirits of the Korean peninsula would be blasted straight to the Well of the Souls. Guaranteed.
I immediately typed Zeus and muscular Zeus into Google's image search.
Of the countless pictures, one illustration seized my gaze the moment I scrolled past it.
A razor-sharp square jaw. Shoulders wide as the Pacific and a neck like a tree trunk, plus showy musculature that would make bodybuilders weep with envy.
It was Zeus himself in the form of that ostentatious, muscle-bound colossus from the GigaChad meme that had once set the internet ablaze.
Perfect. With a physique like that, cracking ghosts' skulls will be like popping popcorn.
Wearing a satisfied smile, I printed that virile, testosterone-drenched illustration in full color.
I lovingly taped GigaChad Zeus to the center of the wall, then fished a dented can of beer from the corner of the fridge and placed it atop my rickety little folding table.
Psshh— tap!
With the cheerful hiss of the cracking can, my very own altar was complete.
Kneeling before it, rubbing my hands together like a fly grooming its forelegs, I began to shout with every fiber of my being.
"Lord Zeus! Can you see me?!"
I didn't know a single word of Greek, but he was the King of the Gods, after all — I trusted he'd understand even my mumbling gibberish like it was poetry.
"I'm dying of a vicious case of spirit sickness these days, my lord! They say I have to accept the spirit descent and live as a shaman, but I absolutely refuse!"
"I only just turned twenty! Before the army, I'm supposed to try picking up girls at hunting bars, take artsy café photos for Instagram, do it all, aren't I?!"
"So please! Burn those pedigree-less Korean peninsula lesser spirits to a crisp with your lightning right now — the ones trying to stamp a slave contract on me against my will!"
"Spare me and I'll show you anything! How about a tearful ass-kissing performance the likes of which Greece has never seen?!"
"And honestly, my lord? However hard those backwater peninsula spirits struggle, they couldn't so much as match a single toenail clipping of Zeus, the strongest of Olympus!"
With utter sincerity scraped up from the very bottom of my soul, I pounded my forehead against the floor and finished my desperate prayer.
"Aaaah, amen...! Oh wait, that's Lord Jesus's thing."
I hastily brushed it off and corrected myself.
"Eh, I trust our magnanimous Lord Zeus wouldn't be petty enough to hold a grudge over me borrowing a greeting from another religion! For the honor of Olympus, protect me from behind!"
Prayer complete with full grandiosity, I lay prostrate on the floor and narrowed my eyes, sneaking a glance at the folding table.
Alright. Lord Zeus has surely heard enough by now, right?
Stealthily, watchfully, I slid the freshly cracked can of beer I had so devotedly offered to Lord Zeus moments ago back into my own hands.
In this treacherous capitalist society, throwing away a three-thousand-won imported beer was tantamount to blasphemy — Lord Zeus would surely understand.
A little while later, the crispy fried chicken I'd ordered through the delivery app arrived, and I efficiently filled my belly with the chicken-and-beer combo.
As the blessed union of chicken and beer settled warmly into my stomach, something suddenly occurred to me. Frantically, with greasy fingers, I turned on my smartphone and opened my banking app.
Account Balance: ₩32,500
...Ah. Right. My total fortune had been fifty-eight thousand won, and I'd just burned nearly twenty thousand of it on chicken.
I stared blankly at the screen for a moment, then switched it off without the slightest regret.
"Who cares. The hag said I wouldn't make it through the year anyway — if I'm going to die, better to die gnawing on chicken and feel less cheated about it."
Tomorrow would demand my worry soon enough, but tomorrow's me could figure that out somehow.
Patting my full belly with a satisfying thump thump, I surrendered myself to the wave of drowsiness washing over me.
Then I flopped onto the bed, and plunged into a deep sleep like I'd been knocked unconscious.
Of course, right up until that moment, I couldn't have imagined — not even in my wildest dreams — the Greek-style miracle about to unfold before my eyes.