Chapter 55
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Translator: 8uhl
Chapter: 55
Chapter Title: Monster Tale Specialist Office: Mangnyang Cat (4)
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“I see.”
That was when Sia finally understood why Siwoo hadn’t been able to tell his father exactly what he’d seen.
“That makes sense, then.”
The man hadn’t heard the full story from Siwoo. Siwoo’s demeanor had been far more grave in front of his father, but he’d seemed relatively fine in front of the two of them.
Those few odd points suddenly clicked into place with just one word from Siwoo.
“There’s no way I could tell my dad something like that.”
“…You’re right.”
Siwoo said, hanging his head toward the floor. It looked like a kind of guilt—like he’d seen something he shouldn’t have.
“I just couldn’t bring myself to say it.”
Even if he’d been bracing for his father’s passing, no son’s heart would be at ease during the funeral. And on top of that, telling him about a cat with his dead grandfather’s face on it? That would be downright disrespectful. A kind of insult.
Besides, the man didn’t truly believe in a cat with a human face to begin with. He’d only come to the office because his son had said it himself, and he couldn’t find any other explanation.
Knowing what kind of person his father was, Siwoo couldn’t go into detail. He could only tremble. To his father, it must have looked like endless fear.
“So, it makes sense that you could tell us.”
In cases like this, it was often easier to confess the truth to strangers. But that required one guarantee.
“We can’t withhold anything from your father.”
“W-Wait…”
Siwoo visibly panicked at Taeju’s words.
“But we can filter it appropriately before passing it on.”
“Ah…!”
That was when Siwoo caught on to what Taeju meant.
“We can’t lie. It’s a matter of principle. But we don’t want to relay unnecessary details either. If the information would only make the client more anxious without helping the resolution, there’s no need to share it. To decide what qualifies, though, we need to hear a certain level of truth from you.”
To filter, there had to be enough content to sift through. Siwoo seemed to grasp the nuance, his expression brightening a little.
“Could you answer our questions as thoroughly as possible?”
“…Yeah. I will.”
Siwoo nodded with a resolved look on his face. Taeju gave a faint smile in return. Sia took a sip of her tea and spoke.
“Before we really get into it, one question.”
Sia posed a question before diving into the cat itself.
“What exactly did you feel when you saw it?”
Sia asked quietly, her face nearly expressionless. Feeling an inexplicable chill from her look, Siwoo replied.
“It was just… scary.”
Sia shook her head at his answer. That wasn’t what she was asking.
“Be precise. I’m not asking for just the most prominent emotion.”
Siwoo couldn’t respond. He was momentarily at a loss for words.
“Fear is fine. Disgust is fine. Tell us every emotion you felt at that moment, without holding back. Even if it’s something ridiculous like joy or ecstasy.”
“Is that really that important?”
Sia nodded at Siwoo’s question. He couldn’t comprehend it. Not knowing why it mattered, he hesitated to answer. Sia fixed him with eyes like icicles.
“There’s nothing more important. That wouldn’t be an exaggeration.”
Sia slowly set down her teacup, removed the teabag, and placed it on the small saucer she’d brought out with it.
“When enjoying tea, you don’t need to extract every last flavor. Over-extraction ruins the taste. But that’s for savoring. When analyzing the components, it’s a different story.”
If they were just going to wrap this up as some eerie tale, they could interpret Siwoo’s feelings as mere fear. If it was just a crappy summer ghost story, they could gloss over the mood like that.
“But if you don’t want your experience to end as just a monster tale—if you want to make sure it never happens again—then you can’t hide anything from us. Even if it’s deeply uncomfortable.”
That was why Sia wanted to hear everything. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounded.
“You’re scaring the kid.”
“But it’s true.”
Taeju couldn’t deny it either. Still, the boy was only in middle school. Pushing too hard didn’t feel right.
“Even if it’s true, he hasn’t had the rigorous training to recognize his own emotions. He’s not at an age where he can confront them with that kind of finesse. Pressuring him won’t magically produce the right answer.”
Taeju was right. Siwoo pondered bit by bit but struggled to articulate a clear answer.
“Honestly, even if you ask me to list every feeling, I don’t know. It definitely wasn’t joy. Fear was the biggest.”
Siwoo slowly mulled over the memory.
“Then surprise, I think. And after that, disgust.”
But he couldn’t name anything beyond that. Flustered and fumbling, Siwoo racked his brain, but he truly didn’t know.
“Hmm. I pushed too hard. Sorry.”
In the end, the approach hadn’t been ideal. Sia let out a soft groan and gave a small nod of apology. Siwoo jumped in surprise.
“No, it’s fine. You needed to, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
Sia nodded, feeling a twinge of guilt. He was a considerate kid.
“My turn for questions now.”
“Okay.”
Taeju began with the question he’d originally planned.
“You said no one else saw that cat, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So, were multiple people looking at the same spot, but only you saw it? Or was it somewhere only you were looking?”
“I was probably the only one looking there to begin with. Everyone else was busy.”
That checked out. Taeju pressed on with the next question.
“Did the cat do anything to you?”
“No. It just appeared. And I haven’t seen it since then.”
That was why, Siwoo explained, it had been terrifying at first, but now it wasn’t quite so scary.
“It looked a bit gruesome, but we just made eye contact. It didn’t do anything more than that. At least, not directly.”
Sia nodded at Siwoo’s words. She was running through possibilities in her head.
“No threatening behavior…”
“Right. None at all.”
“Then it’s not something that directly harms people.”
Staring silently without any threat was practically the same as nothing. In a way, it was like heat haze.
“Yeah, exactly.”
Having heard Siwoo out, Sia asked,
“You said you couldn’t look away.”
“Yeah.”
“Was it that you couldn’t turn your gaze away, or that you chose not to?”
“…I think it was me who didn’t.”
No one had forced him to look. But at the time, it hadn’t even occurred to him that he could look away.
“So I’m not sure.”
Sia nodded. Things were starting to take shape.
“One more question.”
“What?”
“What kind of person was your grandfather?”
Siwoo blinked at Sia’s question. The sudden shift from the cat to his grandfather threw him off.
“Uh… he was a good person.”
“Good… ‘Good’ can mean a lot of things. He could have been a person of great character, or someone with firm values. Maybe he did a lot of good deeds. In what way was he good?”
“…I don’t really know.”
After a brief hesitation, Siwoo confessed.
“I don’t really know.”
Sia repeated it softly.
“I’ve never really had a proper conversation with Grandpa. So all I know is what Dad’s told me. But from the stories, he seemed wise and kind.”
Siwoo said, averting his eyes. Sia let out a small sigh.
“I see. So there’s nothing more you can tell us about your grandfather?”
“Uh… yeah.”
Hearing that, Sia closed her eyes. It was her habit when deep in thought. A moment later, she opened them and spoke.
“I think I know what you saw.”
“Really?”
Siwoo said in surprise.
“What was it?”
“What you saw was probably a mangnyang.”
“…What’s that?”
Siwoo asked in a tone that said he’d truly never heard of it.
“I’ve never heard of mangnyang.”
“I figured. But you might have heard the term somewhere.”
It was a name anyone interested in this sort of thing had likely encountered once.
“You’ve probably heard of ‘immae mangnyang.’”
“Ah! Yeah, kinda.”
Sia nodded, satisfied with Siwoo’s reaction.
“The term ‘immae mangnyang’ is sometimes used for all sorts of ghosts. It’s akin to ‘night parade of a hundred demons’ or ‘supernatural beings and freaks.’ But if you separate it into immae and mangnyang, they’re two specific kinds of monsters. It’s pinning down the indefinable into something concrete.”
“Immae and mangnyang…”
It was all new to Siwoo. Sia continued her explanation.
“At first, I thought what you saw was an immae. An immae is a classic type of dokkaebi with a human head and the body of a four-legged beast.”
It matched Siwoo’s initial description perfectly, so immae seemed closer.
“Then it’s not immae? It’s mangnyang instead?”
Siwoo raised the natural question.
“Yes. There’s a reason I specified mangnyang.”
“So what’s a mangnyang?”
“What is a mangnyang? The answer varies by text. It’s the child of the Northern Emperor in some, a common water ghost in others.”
But if it were truly a water ghost, Sia wouldn’t have called it mangnyang.
“However, one tale says that if you look closely between light and shadow, that something which is neither—that’s mangnyang.”
The ambiguous border around a shadow that you can only see if you look closely, unsure if it’s shadow or light.
That border itself, or the monster hiding in that gap—that’s mangnyang, Sia explained.
“And most often, it lurks crouched in people’s shadows.”
That’s why studying mangnyang yields no certainties. Its form and nature differ across accounts.
“So mangnyang is nothing. But at the same time, understand it as something that can be anything.”
Sia paused, took a sip of tea, and continued.
“And that’s why mangnyang is usually just… that. Nothing special.”
“Nothing special?”
“It doesn’t threaten people.”
The various descriptions of mangnyang are too vague to count as threats. The water ghost variety might be dangerous near water, but otherwise not.
“But there’s one thing we can definitively say mangnyang does. And that’s why I said mangnyang over immae. Though maybe there was no need to distinguish them…”
“What’s that?”
Sia didn’t answer the question directly. She just continued.
“Immae mangnyang is a bizarre term where all four hanja mean ‘dokkaebi.’ And hanja come from China, of course. So how would it be pronounced in Chinese?”
Siwoo had no idea, naturally. Neither did Taeju.
“Chimae wangnyang, or chimi bangnyang… I’m no expert in Chinese, so I can’t give the exact pronunciation, but that’s roughly how it sounds.”
Siwoo stiffened as he heard it. He could guess where Sia was going.
“There are countless interpretations of mangnyang, but they share one thing: it bewitches people. Ever heard ‘the old man’s addled’? That’s wrong, though. Mangnyang is for the living. ‘Addled by mangnyang’ is precise, but ‘addled’ has become standard now.”
No one knows exactly what mangnyang is. The only sure thing is that it bewitches people.
That’s why the ancients thought those with clouded minds had been bewitched by mangnyang. It was inexplicable otherwise.
Sia looked at Siwoo as she spoke. He stared back, flustered and shocked.
“The reason you couldn’t answer well when I asked about your grandfather…”
Taeju finally understood why Siwoo’s father had seemed so composed, and why safety cushions were everywhere in the house.
Siwoo nodded before Sia could finish.
“…Yeah. That’s right.”
Sia made a bitter face. This wasn’t something to boast about nailing.
“I see. Then it confirms what you saw was indeed mangnyang. An immae mangnyang in form, borrowing your grandfather’s appearance no less. We’ll need to be careful.”
“Of what?”
“Mangnyang bewitchers. It lives for the thrill of beguiling, deceiving, and toying with people. Weird to say a non-living thing ‘lives,’ but still.”
“Bewitching…”
“Yes. You’ve already experienced it once.”
The moment their eyes met, Siwoo couldn’t look away. It was nothing major, so he should have been able to. Fear should have made it easier; disgust even more so.
But Siwoo hadn’t been able to. He might think it was his choice, but it wasn’t.
“Mangnyang will try to bewitch you again this time.”