A Nightmare Worth Inflicting
"Oh dear, Principal. Are you all right?"
The security guard came running over and stamped his feet in a panic, completely at a loss for what to do.
One look was enough to tell that Kim Chang-soo must have been bullying this man on a daily basis.
I spoke to the guard in a calm, level voice.
"You should call 119 first. If you don't, he'll probably claim you were neglecting your duties and come after you for it."
"W-well, what exactly is your relationship with the principal, sir?"
The guard's eyes darted between me and Kim Chang-soo.
He had watched me cross the crosswalk the moment the accident happened and march straight up to him — that much was obvious.
"Ah, if you're asking about me... Kim Chang-soo here abandoned his own elderly mother in Gyeongju and hasn't cared for her since. I came to discuss that matter with—"
"Ahem! Security guard, what are you doing? Call an ambulance, now!"
Kim Chang-soo glared at the guard for no reason, desperate to shut me up.
"Yes, right away. I'll make the call."
While the guard pulled out his phone and dialed, Kim Chang-soo remained trapped in his crumpled car, gasping for breath.
He had slammed head-on into the school wall, shattering the entire front windshield and deploying the airbags.
His hair was a tangled mess and the door was mashed shut, leaving him unable to climb out — but beyond that, nothing serious. He'd live.
Good. He's going to experience his perfectly healthy body falling apart in real time.
Frankly, ever since I left the countryside, I'd planned to socially bury Kim Chang-soo the moment I arrived in Seoul.
Post everything he'd done on the education office's website, file formal complaints, tip off the media — all of it. It was high time someone asked whether a man like him had any business being an educator.
Needless to say, the whole world would answer no.
The school's phone lines would be flooded with angry calls, and the teachers would come to despise their own principal. I'd even wanted his own friends to point at him and say, You are not a human being.
But somehow, that alone didn't feel satisfying enough. And I doubted Kim Chang-soo would genuinely reflect on any of it.
So what I finally settled on was this:
Direct fear. Direct pain. Direct suffering.
Let him taste hell while still alive.
'From today onward, you'll be tormented by nightmares every single night. In them, your own children will dump you, old and helpless, in Gyeongju.'
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
I wanted him to suffer exactly what he had inflicted on someone else.
Even if it was only a dream, I wanted him to truly understand — with his own flesh and bones — how wretched and agonizing it is to be thrown away by your own child.
'Your head will be crawling with lice and your body will reek so badly that people will avoid you, nobody lifting a finger to help.'
I glanced sideways at the cat and conveyed my intentions telepathically: give him nightmares like these.
[Honestly? That's tame compared to what I went through on the Manchurian plains.]
What?
Is he really doing the 'back in my day' routine on me?
I had no idea what the cat had experienced on the plains of Manchuria, but I wasn't about to lose this contest. I kept whispering my curse like an incantation in my head.
'You'll be freezing and starving, an insect crawling into your ear to burrow into your eardrum. Your belly will be writhing with parasites until it hurts too much to stand, your broken fingernails bleeding in streams — and still, no one will come to help you.'
[Ugh, your imagination, seriously. Fine, I'll just handle it myself. Fear is my specialty.]
Well, if he was that confident, what could I say?
By all means, have at it.
'Fine. Latch onto that man and make his body hurt a little too.'
[How intensely? As bad as Lee Ho-young of Miho Gallery? Or worse?]
'You can even adjust the intensity?'
[I could wither him down to skin and bones until he drops dead.]
He could actually kill a man?
He looked so adorable, though.
Had the cute act only ever worked on my eyes?
A faint chill ran through me, and I furrowed my brow.
'For now, keep it at a level that won't kill him. He needs to be alive to sign away his inheritance.'
[Got it. When are you coming to pick me up? I need to go home.]
The cat evil spirit had said that the longsword was his home.
He hadn't explained the details, but I guessed that if he stayed away from the blade too long, his power would weaken or something to that effect.
'I'll look into it in due time.'
There was no way that cat was the only evil spirit out there. Which meant I'd be dealing with them again sooner or later — and learning how to handle them now would only make things easier.
I relayed my decision to the cat.
'I'll come for you in two days. Actually, no — torment him so thoroughly that Kim Chang-soo calls me first.'
[Understood.]
'Stick close to Kim Chang-soo, sightsee around, and eat plenty of good food while you're at it.'
Having finished my conversation with the cat, I turned my words on Kim Chang-soo himself.
"From this very moment on, your body is going to hurt so badly you'll wish you were dead."
"What the hell are you... uuurgh! Aaagh, my stomach!"
The cat suddenly swelled in size and raked its claws across Kim Chang-soo's belly, sinking its sharp canines into the flesh.
"Aaagh! AAAAAH!"
"This is only the beginning. When you sleep, you'll have nightmares. When you wake, you'll be in pain bad enough to make you beg for death..."
I waved my phone at him.
"Call me. I'm the only person who can save you now."
By the time I stepped back from the car, the cat had grown even larger and was gnawing away at Kim Chang-soo's head, mouth working with steady, mechanical bites.
You're not going to kill him, right?
I shuddered from head to toe and left the scene.
Of the wild ginseng roots I had dug up, I kept the finest one for myself and set the other two aside for my parents.
It felt wrong to ship something that precious through the mail, so I had stored them carefully and handed them over the moment I walked through the door.
"Good heavens, son! What is all this?"
Mother gave the wild ginseng a single glance — then snatched up the designer bag I'd bought her and hugged it to her chest.
Apparently the luxury bag beat out the ginseng.
"All your friends carry one of these, so I kept thinking about buying it for you, but it felt like such a waste, so I never could. And I still have to marry you off someday, you know."
"There's no one to marry off to, though."
"Even so, don't keep your heart shut so tight. Oh my! Hold still a second."
Mother set down the bag she'd been clutching and grabbed my face with both hands.
"Why does your face look so much better? Your skin is positively glowing."
"The headaches and the ringing in my ears vanished completely."
At my words, the corners of her eyes reddened.
"Really? It doesn't hurt at all anymore?"
Even after quitting the bank, the headaches and tinnitus hadn't gone away, and I'd been shuttling between university hospitals because of it.
Since nothing had worked, Mother seemed to have been quietly blaming herself the whole time.
"Then why didn't you tell me? Even a phone call, at least — do you know how much I worried?"
"It disappeared so gradually I never even noticed when it went. It never crossed my mind."
"That's wonderful. You've suffered so much, for so long."
"My goodness, thanks to my son, here I am eating wild ginseng and living in the lap of luxury!"
As for Father, the wild ginseng pleased him far more than the designer wallet and hiking outfit I'd bought him.
"Have a light dinner, then chew a root slowly the next morning on an empty stomach. I had one too, and I could feel the vitality spreading through my whole body."
"Is that so? My son's got his old dad bursting with energy again!"
"You need exercise for energy. I don't know what to do with your father and his hatred of working out."
Mother rolled her eyes, then shot Father a pointed look.
"Hurry up and give it to him. You promised you would when Yunho came."
"Ah, that?"
Father disappeared into the bedroom and came back out, holding out a thick stack of bankbooks toward me.
"This one was opened when you were born, and this one your mother made when you started elementary school."
Both books were crammed, line after line, with deposits my parents had made over the years — every spare coin they'd scraped together raising me.
"Wh-when on earth did you manage to save all this?"
"We meant to give it to you at your wedding, but you're independent now, so it seemed like the right time."
"This is a lot of money."
When I waved my hands and refused to take the bankbooks, Father's expression hardened.
"Do you have any idea how happy saving this money for you made your mother and me? No arguments. Take it."
"Th-thank you."
My throat closed up tight, and my voice trembled without my meaning it to.
The weight of what my parents were — something I'd never truly felt while living under the same roof — crashed over me along with the realization that I had, at last, genuinely become independent. My chest ached with it.
"I'll keep them safe and use the money somewhere that truly matters."
That was what I said, but I suspected I would never bring myself to spend a single won of it.
How could I? It's too precious.
I clutched the stack of bankbooks tightly, then lifted my head and looked back and forth between my parents.
"I'll be an even better son from now on."
"You being healthy and happy is being a good son."
"Well said, well said."
Mother took my hand and met my eyes.
"You'll eat dinner with us, won't you? I made galbi-jjim — your favorite."
Eating dinner with my parents for the first time in so long, the warmth spread all the way down into my chest.
The next day, I bought some additional camping gear and stopped by a bookstore to pick up books on hanok renovation.
Carpenter Jang was finally starting construction next week — and what kind of homeowner would I be if I didn't know a thing about my own house?
Armed with my new books, I settled into a café and buried myself in them.
"Yunho! Been waiting long?"
Ko Min-seok, who worked at an architecture firm, came jogging over, gasping for breath, and dropped into the seat across from me.
I'd already asked him to draw up the renovation blueprints for the old house's interior, but phone calls and emails only went so far.
I needed to explain the layout I wanted in person, so I'd set up the meeting.
"What, you didn't like my design? You want the living room separated out?"
"Catch your breath first. Have you eaten?"
"Eat when I have time. If I'm busy, I grab something at home. Same old."
"What kind of talk is that? Let's go — hyung's buying!"
We left the café and headed for a Korean beef restaurant nearby.
"Hey, why are you burning through money like this? You handed me two million won just for the design work, and now you're buying hanwoo too?"
"Because I want to. This place!"
I ordered a generous spread of meat, then looked Min-seok in the eye.
"I have money. Lots of it. So stop worrying and just eat."
"Did you blow your severance on crypto? Listen, until you cash it out and hold it in your own two hands, it's not your money."
"Since when did you get so preachy?"
"Fine, fine. I'm eating, then?"
"Yes! Eat up. I'll order more."
Min-seok was the breadwinner of a family with a mother recovering from cancer, a wife, and a son.
Even when he bought a whole fried chicken on his way home from work, he probably never got so much as a glimpse of a drumstick.
The good pieces went to his son, then his wife and mother — while Min-seok picked at the chicken neck, most likely.
Which was probably why the expression that crossed his face when he put the hanwoo in his mouth was pure, unfiltered bliss.
And watching him, my own heart swelled with satisfaction.
"Min-seok, how's your mother doing?"
"She finished chemo and she's recovering. Actually, she's talking about taking up hiking."
"The cancer cells — they're all gone, right?"
"That's what they say. But they told her it could come back, so I can't stop worrying."
I pulled an aluminum cold-pack out of my shopping bag and handed it across the table to him.
"This is for your mother."
"What is it?"
"Wild ginseng."
The intended recipient of my last, secretly stashed wild ginseng root had been none other than Min-seok's mother — fresh off her chemotherapy.
"W-wild ginseng?"
"Yeah. I dug it up myself. I ate some, my parents ate the rest, and I even sold the ones good enough for market. This one's not much to look at, but the medicinal potency should be strong."
"...Yah. Kim Yunho."
Min-seok's face crumpled with emotion.
I gave a careless little shrug.
"Your mother used to slip me allowance money all the time, remember?"
My parents had both worked, so whenever school let out, I'd come home to an empty house.
Hating the loneliness, I'd head straight to Min-seok's place, where his mother would welcome me so warmly and always set out snacks for me.
"I just want her to stop suffering from cancer and get healthy again. I mean it."
Just then, my phone buzzed.
The caller was Kim Chang-soo.
'The evil spirit must have worked him over pretty badly. Calling already, after just one day.'