The Accidental Curse
Banya clenched his outstretched hand in the empty air. Yeongso realized that what he truly wanted to snap was not the air, but her neck.
"Um, excuse me, but..."
"Apologizing won't do you any good. Undo this curse, or sorcery, or whatever it is, right now. Resolve it. End it. Otherwise, for the rest of the day, I will brutally slaughter every single human being I can lay my hands on, right before your eyes."
"May I ask just one question?"
Glaring at her with smoldering eyes, he gave a curt nod.
"Could you... explain what you meant by what you just said?"
Banya's face went blank. Flustered, Yeongso's words tumbled out in a rush.
"You keep saying I cursed you, but I did no such thing. I know absolutely nothing about that sort of magic. It is true that I killed you, but that is the only truth here. Everything else is completely new to me."
"Baekri Yeongso..."
"It's true! If anything, I find it hard to believe that a person could die and come back to life twenty times."
Banya swept his arm, and a six-panel folding screen in the distance shattered into splinters.
"Keep talking. Let's see what else you have to say."
"...Even if what you say is true, isn't it a bit of a stretch to claim your regression stopped just because you humored me? Perhaps someone else cast the curse, and they fulfilled their own conditions without you realizing it."
Following the folding screen, three celadon vases shattered to pieces one after another.
"I just... wonder if you're pinning it all on me simply because you find me resentful..."
This time, the remaining white porcelain vase was pulverized.
"Countless people hold grudges against me, Hwa Banya, but you are the only one who actually succeeded in killing me. Yet you claim someone else cast the curse? Who else could it possibly be but you?"
"If... if it wasn't a human..."
Banya leaned in, his face inches from hers.
"Is the word you cannot bring yourself to utter perhaps 'divine punishment,' my lady?"
Unaccustomed to lying, Yeongso could not bring herself to deny it. The best she could do was avert her gaze and attempt to shake her head. She didn't even manage to shake it—she merely attempted to.
A trembling smirk curled the corner of Banya's lips.
"I thought you said you didn't hate me, my lady."
"I don't hate you."
"How strange. You answered that right away. So, you don't hate me, but you still think I'm a man who deserves divine punishment? Is that your assessment of me, my lady?"
Yeongso spoke in a barely audible whisper.
"I never said you deserved it..."
Banya stared at his wife in silence. His murderous aura felt like a red-hot blade slicing across her skin. Yeongso held her breath, enduring the suffocating tension until his hostility finally began to recede. At last, Banya picked up his teacup. Gulping down the still-scalding tea as if it were cold water, he slammed the empty cup back down onto the table.
"I don't believe you."
Just as Yeongso was about to ask what she could possibly do to prove she hadn't cursed him, he spoke again.
"No matter how much I think about it, it has to be you. Even if you didn't mean to, you must have cursed me unconsciously."
"I told you, I didn't..."
"Did you ever make a passing wish regarding me to the heavens, the earth, or anywhere else? Don't just blindly deny it. Squeeze your brain and remember. Right now."
This was the height of absurdity. Yeongso let out a long sigh. Her husband was the first person she had ever killed in her life. Even up to the final moment of carrying out the assassination, she had not wanted to kill him. But there had been no other way, and so she had burned incense in atonement throughout the entire three-year mourning period. Was it because cleaning the ancestral shrine and burning incense every day wasn't enough that heaven was punishing her? Was that why her husband had returned to life to torment her with these unreasonable demands? If so, it made sense. The divine punishment was hers to bear.
"Even if you press me like this, it happened three years ago, so my memory is..."
But surprisingly, a sudden memory flashed through her mind.
"Ah."
At her meaningful gasp, Banya stopped tapping his fingers on the table.
The next day. As soon as dawn broke, the Alliance Leader and his wife headed to the shrine of Seowangmo on the outskirts of the city. This was the result of Yeongso persuading Banya, who had insisted on going immediately the previous night, by arguing that she might lose her way since she had never been there after dark. As she had already told him several times, she had only visited the place once and had never set foot there again.
"It was probably around here."
At Yeongso's words, the coachman brought the carriage to a halt. It was a secluded spot, even for a village on the outskirts. Walking over to a drooping weeping willow, Yeongso looked around.
"How strange. It was definitely here..."
Having followed his wife out of the carriage, Banya crossed his arms and stared intently at her.
"I'm serious. There was a shrine to Seowangmo here. It was so dilapidated and crumbling in places that I didn't even realize it was a shrine at first, but it was definitely a place dedicated to the Queen Mother of the West."
"Right. You said you were passing by the day before you killed me and went inside to seek shelter from the rain."
"Yes, exactly."
Just then, an elderly local wandering nearby caught her eye. Making eye contact with Yeongso, the old man, seemingly glad for a distraction from his boredom, shuffled over to them.
"Are you folks here to look at land too?"
"No, not land. Elder, do you happen to know what happened to the Seowangmo shrine that used to be here?"
"The Seowangmo shrine... Ah, that crumbling old place? It was torn down long ago. Must have been demolished around the year before last. Some wealthy merchant from Jiangnan is moving to this village with his entire extended family, so he's been buying up all the orchards, rice paddies, and fields. I hear he's building a mansion and opening a teahouse in the town center. They probably tore down the shrine to build something here too."
Yeongso's eyes widened.
"Is it really alright to just tear down a shrine like that?"
"Well, normally no... but did you see what it looked like before they tore it down, young lady? It was an absolute eyesore. The neighborhood kids were too scared to even come near this place on rainy days. There were rumors of ghosts wailing inside."
Listening from the side, Banya let out a dry laugh. So she offered a prayer concerning her husband to a hideous ruin like that? His expression made it clear he was thoroughly unimpressed.
Yeongso, on the other hand, looked on the verge of tears. She had stayed up half the night racking her brain, and this prayer at the shrine was the only thing of note she could recall. But to hear it had already been demolished two years ago—what was she supposed to do now? While there were many shrines to Seowangmo in the world, this was the only one where she had prayed. Going to any other shrine just because it housed the same deity would likely be useless.
"But now that you mention it, young lady, I think I heard they moved the statue of the Queen Mother somewhere else..."
Yeongso's face lit up with hope.
"Where did they move it, Elder?"
"I'm not entirely sure, but I think I heard it was being kept temporarily in a shrine next to the Apricot Blossom Inn. You'll find the Apricot Blossom Inn if you head toward the town center."
"Thank you so much!"
This piece of information felt like a lifeline dropped from the heavens, and Yeongso's face beamed. In her sheer joy, she even urged Banya, who was still standing with his arms crossed, saying, "Let's go, quickly!" Banya rolled his eyes in disbelief at her sudden enthusiasm but followed her back into the carriage.
However, finding the statue of the Queen Mother at the shrine next to the Apricot Blossom Inn was not the end of it. The hideous statue had passed through several hands since then. The journey that had begun at dawn finally came to an end late in the afternoon.
The Alliance Leader and his wife stood in the desolate backyard of a long-abandoned house, staring at the statue in question.
"Well, at least we found it..."
Yeongso stole a glance at her husband. The soot-blackened statue of Seowangmo was so badly damaged that without someone explaining its origin, one wouldn't be able to tell if it was a goddess or an evil spirit. She could guess well enough what Banya was thinking as he stared silently at the statue.
"If we repaint it and build a small shrine near the Thousand Death Alliance to house it..."
"So you can go there morning and night to curse me?"
"I told you, it wasn't a curse."
Yeongso protested in a small voice.
Banya snorted.
"Well, it sounds like a curse to me. Take responsibility for the words you spat out and take them back."
Banya gestured toward the statue with his chin. He was ordering her to pray under the exact same conditions as three years ago, as closely as possible, even if the location had changed.