The Ending of That Drama
My mother was a fanatic for makjang dramas.
And what, exactly, is a makjang drama? Birth secrets, amnesia, a mother-in-law hurling envelopes of cash, and—let’s not forget—the kimchi slap!
The kind of K-makjang that ran so hard on pure stimulation that plausibility had been dead and buried long ago.
Among them, there was one show my mother followed especially faithfully.
Tears of the Imperial Palace.
It was a so-called alternate-history romance set in a constitutional monarchy where the imperial family still existed in twenty-first-century South Korea. The premise was as obvious as they came.
A gritty heroine from humble origins somehow enters the imperial palace, then becomes hopelessly entangled with a prince who’s cold to everyone else but warm only to the woman he loves.
I used to click my tongue at that mess of palace intrigue and chaebol-drama clichés—an absurd blend that seemed to beg history to go screw itself.
My taste ran to solid, straight-faced period dramas like The Country at Dawn. Of course, the remote control in our house belonged to my mother, so all I could do was swallow my preferences and show her the appropriate respect.
Still, there was no stopping the questions that bubbled up.
“Mom, if the prince can just move the military around like that, isn’t that unconstitutional? I thought this was a constitutional monarchy.”
Or:
“A crime for harming royal relatives? They can just drag people off and lock them up without a warrant in the twenty-first century?”
Or:
“For an imperial palace in the twenty-first century, their security is on the level of a neighborhood convenience store. How did that villainess even plant a wiretap in the Emperor’s bedchamber?”
Every time, my mother would smack my back and defend the show. “You’re not supposed to watch these things by obsessing over plausibility! Our prince’s handsome face is the plausibility!”
Apparently, the actor who’d kept the living room drama kingdom alive mattered more than the son who’d returned from halfway across the world. Tch. What a disgraceful son I was.
“If there’s an imperial family, why is the country still called the Republic of Korea?”
“Oh, quit talking and just watch! That’s the fun of dramas. Oh my God, look at that rotten bitch! She’s splashing water on the heroine again!”
And yet she still watched every episode live, cursing all the while.
But then—
“Aaaagh, what the hell?! Has the writer lost their mind?! Are you kidding me right now?!”
On the day she watched the final episode, the one and only ending, the person who usually laughed through every ridiculous twist with “The writer must be insane!”—there was no other way to describe the joy of cursing while watching—let out a scream from the living room.
Startled, I dashed out of my room and found her face flushed bright red, huffing and puffing as she looked ready to hurl the remote at the television.
What kind of ending could possibly destroy the composure of a woman who’d spent fifteen years hardening herself on makjang drama? I was curious, so I cautiously approached and asked,
“Mom, what’s wrong? Do they not get married? Are they half-siblings?”
“Don’t ask.”
“No, seriously, what happened in the ending? Tell me. Was it worth watching?”
“Absolutely do not watch it!! It’s the shame of my life, a disgrace! I want to gouge out the eyes that spent two whole months following that garbage!”
My mother stormed off into her room, still fuming, and all that remained in the living room was the darkened TV screen.
I smacked my lips as I stared at the dead screen.
What kind of ending had shattered the mental fortitude of our usually indulgent madam like that?
I was curious, but I didn’t have the courage to turn on the replay in front of my snarling mother. My last memory of that life was me muttering to myself, Oh, Mom. You should at least let me see how it ends. If you’re going to turn it off, do it when you leave, not now.
Yeah. I never imagined that would become the final memory of my previous life.
And I certainly never imagined I’d transmigrate into that goddamn makjang drama.
Goddamn it.
* * *
“Damn it, it’s cold. So damn cold.”
In Ganghwado in January, the wind cut like a blade.
I was sniffling at the mucus gathered on the tip of my nose as I repaired a torn vinyl greenhouse. My fingers had already gone numb, and every breath I exhaled bloomed white in the air.
It had already been three years since I’d experienced that absurd thing called transmigration.
When I opened my eyes, I had fallen into the world of Tears of the Imperial Palace.
Not as the male lead prince, not as the second male lead who pined after the heroine, but as an extra named Lee Jin.
Lee Jin.
One of the imperial collateral relatives so far down the family line that he barely qualified as a footnote, the 47th in line to the throne in the Republic of Korea’s royal registry.
Forty-seventh, sure—but that was just a number. He was so distantly related to the imperial direct line that even counting the degree of kinship was pointless. Strip away the surname, and he was practically a commoner.
My grand total of royal privileges amounted to one calendar with the imperial crest and a spam set delivered to my house every year at the end of December.
As for the imperial family’s power struggles or wealth, I had absolutely no connection to them. So here I was, on lonely Ganghwado, farming a little patch of land my grandfather had left me, living out this life like an ordinary country bumpkin.
At first I’d been flustered, but compared with my previous life getting chewed apart by office work, this wasn’t so bad. I adjusted quickly enough.
Even so, the life of a novice farmer was a hard one.
From the first days of the New Year, the greenhouse heater broke, the vinyl tore, the water tank pipes froze and burst, and the village head kept calling before dawn, asking me to look into what had happened to the eco-friendly fertilizer subsidy.
“Hyung-nim! Hyung-nim Jin!”
While I was wrestling with the greenhouse and swallowing a string of curses, I heard a familiar, booming voice behind me.
When I turned around, there was a man in a sharply pressed coat, his hair cropped into a short assault cut, grinning from ear to ear. It was Captain Gwak Ji-hun of the Republic of Korea Marine Corps Second Division.
“Oh, Captain Gwak. What brings you here? Isn’t today your day off?”
“It is, which is why I came to see your face, Hyung-nim. What, the greenhouse got torn up? Want me to help?”
“No need. I’m almost done. Soldiers should rest on weekends; if you keep hanging around farms every weekend, your men will start cursing you. They’ll think you’re out here doing civil support again.”
Captain Gwak had become like a younger brother to me after he’d come with Marine civil-support troops to our field in the summer of two years ago, when a typhoon turned the whole village into a disaster zone.
He looked like a bandit, but he had a soft heart, and more importantly, he was easy to get along with. As a young man farming alone on Ganghwado, I got along with him remarkably well, and before long we’d become the kind of people who called each other hyung and dongsaeng.
“Come on, who else looks after the guys as well as you do, Hyung-nim? You even fed the whole work crew a full-course dinner after a job like that, and with your own money too.”
“Enough with the nonsense. Why’re you really here?”
“It’s cold and gloomy, isn’t it? You need a drink. I brought something incredible today.”
What Captain Gwak casually pulled from inside his coat was a bottle of premium liquor sold duty-free at the PX.
“Hey, isn’t that stolen government booze?”
“Come on, I—uh, I mean, I bought it properly so you could drink it, Hyung-nim. Let’s go to the pork-belly place in town. I’ll talk my way through the corkage fee.”
If he was saying it that far, I couldn’t exactly refuse.
The sight of that bottle, shimmering with its luminous elegance, melted my frozen irritation like spring snow.
“Oh, Gwak Ji-hun. Truly the pride of the Marines. Fine, let’s finish the plumbing and go. Today’s on me.”
So we moved to a shabby pork-belly restaurant in town, to a corner seat.
Thick cuts of meat sizzled and crackled over the grill, while the soju glasses were filled instead with amber liquor that looked entirely out of place.
The faint fragrance of fruit and smoky oak drifted up. Sure enough, after only drinking makgeolli before, the moment that fine liquor hit my tongue, it felt as if my frozen body melted from the inside out.
“Aaah! This is exactly why military liquor is the best.”
“Right? Hyung-nim, happy New Year, and may your harvest go through the roof this year!”
“Yeah, yeah. You’d better get promoted this year too.”
“Ha, you don’t know how bad things are in the military right now. If you saw how it’s running, you’d want to quit on the spot.”
“Tch. Can a soldier whose job is to defend the country say things like that?”
As I chewed on the meat and absently lifted my head, my gaze landed on the old flat-screen TV mounted on the restaurant wall.
[Breaking News] A romance for the ages finally bears fruit! Live coverage of Prince Yi Geon and Crown Princess-to-be Im Chae-yeon’s royal wedding ceremony.
On the TV screen, Deoksugung was packed with glittering gold ornamentation, brilliantly colored traditional wedding attire, and a crowd of foreign reporters and guests.
And through the middle of it all walked the male and female leads of Tears of the Imperial Palace.
Yi Geon, the cold imperial heir, and Im Chae-yeon, the candy-sweet heroine from ordinary civilian life who had been chosen overnight to become the Crown Princess.
Honestly, I didn’t feel much surprise.
More like: while I’d been killing myself digging in the dirt just to survive, the two of them had spent the entire sixteen-episode run tangled up in affairs, betrayals, and palace intrigue, and now they’d finally reached the ending.
The wedding was the very definition of opulence. A world completely unlike the dusty, shabby rural life I lived here.
“Wow, the Crown Prince really is handsome. And that lady’s gorgeous too. Shouldn’t you be there too, Hyung-nim? You’re from the same Yi clan, after all.”
Captain Gwak flipped the meat and asked jokingly.
“Bullshit. Why would I go there? I’d just be turned away at the door. If you gathered only the direct line and the higher-ranking collateral relatives inside that hall, there’d be over forty people. I’m not even qualified to sit in the guest seats.”
“Come on, but you’re still family. They won’t even send you an invitation? The imperial family is harsh.”
“Kid, at my degree of kinship, I’m basically just an ordinary person with the surname Yi. Do you really think those snooty bastards would even feed me properly?”
I snorted and knocked back the liquor.
Truthfully, I didn’t feel slighted.
In fact, it was a relief. That palace was, on the surface, all glitter and splendor, but inside it was nothing but a battlefield of power.
Even someone like me, who had only half-watched the drama, knew that much.
Poisonings, assassination attempts, kidnappings, and more. You could see how much blood the lead couple had shed across sixteen episodes just to make it to that wedding hall.
But this really is weird.
I rested my chin on my hand and stared at the TV.
The officiant had finished speaking, and the prince in full dress uniform and the heroine in her wedding gown now stood facing each other. The splendid chandelier-filled interior of the Seokjojeon Hall, the thunderous applause—it looked like the perfect happy ending from any angle.
Yeah, that’s the ending the drama was supposed to have.
The handsome man and beautiful woman exchanging rings through tears. A happy ending blessed by the entire nation. Suddenly I remembered my mother in my previous life, hurling the remote control in fury.
What on earth was the problem here that made her lose her mind like that?
It was just a standard Cinderella ending.
No matter how I looked at it, it was a perfectly peaceful conclusion.
The ending is so beautifully happy, so why the hell did my mother go ballistic and smash the remote to pieces?
A sudden pregnancy ending? Or maybe someone abruptly confessed they had an incurable disease?
With my meager imagination, the only thing I could picture was someone storming in and shouting, “Annulment! This marriage is annulled!”
The male and female leads finished their vows and slowly leaned in to kiss. The camera closed in on their beautiful silhouettes.
“Ugh, they’re shoving their couple crap in our faces. Hyung-nim, let’s have one more drink—”
Captain Gwak grumbled as he held out his glass, and I was just about to clink mine against it once more when—
······Biiiiiiip—!!
Behind the screen, the massive stone wall of Deoksugung warped grotesquely, and then—
—KWA-AAAAAANG!!!!
A thunderous blast that sounded as if it would shatter the TV speakers shook the restaurant.
On screen, the grand stone hall of Deoksugung was consumed by red-hot flames and collapsed in full view of the camera.
“······Huh?”
I froze. So did Captain Gwak. So did the restaurant owner, who had been slicing meat in the kitchen just moments before. All of us could only stare blankly at the TV screen.
It was pandemonium, pure and simple.
Screams. Guests collapsing in blood. The raised platform where the prince and princess had been smiling just seconds ago was gone without a trace, and half the screen was swallowed by black smoke.
“Aaagh!”
“Help us! Your Highness! Your Highness!”
The Crown Prince lay sprawled in blood, and beside him were fragments of a dress so mutilated they were impossible to recognize.
The camera angle spun wildly across the scene of chaos, and then, with a crackling hiss, the screen went completely black.
[Broadcasting service interruption has forced the regular program to stop.]
That eerie color bar filled the screen, and only a thin, shrill tone remained to crawl across the restaurant.
Silence. A stifling silence hung in the air for only a moment.
Wheeeeeeee—!! Wheeeeeeee—!! Beep! Beep! Beep!
My phone, Captain Gwak’s phone, and even the restaurant owner’s phone all started screaming at once with disaster alerts.
[Ministry of Public Safety] Emergency disaster alert
National emergency declared. All citizens should remain where they are and await government instructions. Large-scale explosive terror attack inside the imperial palace. (Details currently under investigation)
“······Jesus.”
I muttered dazedly.
Captain Gwak’s expression hardened. The smartwatch on his wrist was blaring wildly.
After checking it, Captain Gwak said,
“Hyung-nim.”
Then he shot to his feet and spoke in a panic.
“I have to get back to my unit right now. This is no ordinary incident. The entire military has just been put on highest alert.”
“W-what? Right, go. Be careful.”
“Hyung-nim, don’t go wandering anywhere. Head straight home! If anything happens, call me immediately!”
Captain Gwak bolted out of the restaurant like a shot. The ajumma running the place was trembling as she prepared to lock the doors.
I sat there dumbly at the table and turned on my phone. I tried to access a portal site, but because traffic had apparently surged too hard, all I got was a window saying, “Cannot connect to the server.”
So I opened social media instead, and with every refresh, horrifying information poured in.
- Bomb terror attack at Deoksugung! Is the imperial family wiped out?!
- Breaking news just came in. During the royal wedding, His Majesty the Emperor, Prince Yi Geon, and the direct imperial line are all presumed dead...
- There’s been a second explosion. Seoul’s in total chaos right now! Is this the start of a war?
My breath caught in my throat.
Only one word managed to squeeze out of my mouth.
“I’m fucked.”
The ending of the makjang drama I’d learned about after three years was this: with five minutes left, they blew the place up and killed off every character.
Fuck, what a mad bastard of a writer.
* * *