The Name That Could Save Him
“You...”
Chairman Cho’s voice trembled from the very start.
“Do you remember me?”
“You...”
Chairman Cho grabbed Kang-to by the hand. Then, in a shaking voice, he asked, “What are you?”
It sounded less like an accusation than a plea.
Please. Save me.
That was how it looked to Kang-to.
“I’m the novice shaman of Chilui Island.”
“No, no. You’re not just a shaman.”
“Baek Jung-geun.”
“Ghk.”
At Kang-to’s single word, the muscles in Chairman Cho’s face locked up as if struck by lightning.
“You used my secret remedy, didn’t you?”
“......”
“Didn’t you?”
“I did...”
As he answered, Chairman Cho’s shoulders began to spasm. He had been seized not only by terror at the crash, but by Kang-to’s uncanny authority.
“If only you had listened to me sooner, innocent people wouldn’t have died.”
“That...”
“......”
“I couldn’t bring myself...”
Chairman Cho looked utterly dazed.
For the briefest instant, the moment of the crash flashed through his mind.
“How about Chilui Island? It’s all right, isn’t it?”
He had asked the feng shui master, Jeon Seon-wook, seated beside him in the helicopter. Chairman Cho was not a believer in shamanism. In religious terms, he belonged to Catholicism. But for business, he transcended religion. He approached Christians in a way that suited them, and the Buddhist side in a way that suited them as well.
Chameleon business.
That was Chairman Cho’s philosophy of management.
The world ran that way. If there was money to be made, he would have turned even the sectarian strife of the Middle East into a business opportunity. For that very reason, he never shied away from feng shui. In fact, when it came to new resorts, golf courses, or leisure complexes, he preferred to lead with feng shui. It was the easiest way to make a site look prestigious without spending a fortune.
Even the older generation wasn’t predisposed to reject feng shui. For the very rich, business with a layer of feng shui on top worked especially well. In the sale of golf club memberships last time, Chairman Cho had ridden feng shui all the way to a spectacular windfall. So whenever he came up with a new business plan, he always sought out the advice of feng shui masters.
“A prime leisure location. Seen from the sky, isn’t this the place where the energy of all the nearby islands gathers into one? On land, you could call it a dragon vein where vital force concentrates most powerfully.”
“A dragon vein, huh... Then I’d appreciate a feng shui slogan that sounds convincing. Like last time—elegant, but simple.”
“Understood.”
He was looking out at Chilui Island while listening to the feng shui master’s reply when, just as he thought the lighthouse was flickering in the distance, the helicopter suddenly began to plunge.
“What the hell? Why is this happening?”
Chairman Cho asked, but got no answer. Something had happened beyond even the pilot’s control.
“Aaaah—”
Before he could react, the water’s surface was rushing up toward them.
Crash.
People always said things like, Why didn’t you do this or that in that moment? But when disaster actually comes down on you, all those words are empty. It is real life. Not a game. Not a drill.
“Ah—?”
All anyone can do is scream.
Chairman Cho was no exception, and all that remained was a kiss with death.
[Shaman]
Then the oracle Kang-to had delivered on the island flashed through his mind.
- If you go now, you’ll die.
- But if you insist on going, then when the moment of death comes, remember Baek Jung-geun. Call out his name, beg forgiveness, and your life at least...
The calm, ordinary-looking sea suddenly seemed like the gates of hell. Beyond it, the world of wandering spirits spread out before him. In that yellowed haze, scenes drifted and rippled, distant and blurred... yet each one was saturated with an ancient, unbearable grievance. For an instant, the image of his grandfather as a Japanese military police aide seemed to stand before him, vivid and real—then blood and flesh flew through the air as torture began, teeth and fingernails ripped free.
One chilling, horrific instant after another.
With each one, Chairman Cho’s terror multiplied. Bones snapping, raw flesh burning—scenes too vile to bear with open eyes. And then, beyond that, a face full of the bitterness of centuries appeared.
Baek Jung-geun
A name tag sewn onto an old miner’s uniform. Blood of vengeance sprayed from the man’s eyes. Behind that spray, the mine tunnel was collapsing. What surged into the shaft was seawater. The mine, dug deep beneath the sea, was being swallowed alive.
The man stood rigid. Even as support timbers crashed down and rocks rolled toward him, he did not flinch. Right to the very end, he never took his eyes off the doll clutched in his hand. A wooden doll, hand-carved from timber. That doll’s face scraped across Chairman Cho’s vision like a thorn.
Grandfather?
Chairman Cho’s fear fixed itself on that scene. The man never let go of his grudge, even in the instant of death. And then, in one fleeting moment, he slipped from his body as a blue spirit. Those eyes met Chairman Cho’s reality.
- Only in death could I come for you.
- Now I will take it back.
- This grudge of a thousand autumns.
The instant that inaudible voice cracked like thunder through his skull, Chairman Cho had already soiled himself.
Only then did he understand that Kang-to’s oracle had not been empty boasting.
“Aaaah!”
With the other passengers screaming, the helicopter plunged into the sea. Chairman Cho saw hell. The hallucination he had just witnessed unfolded as a real-life inferno. The man’s spirit had become a water ghost and was coming for him. That terror was worse than death itself. Just before the water ghost’s hands clamped around his throat, he cried out in desperate anguish:
- Baek Jung-geun.
- Save me.
- I was wrong. Please, save me.
Even now, just remembering it made Chairman Cho tremble like a leaf. His hands and shoulders would not obey him. Only when Kang-to touched him did the shuddering finally subside.
“Ah...”
Chairman Cho saw it then. A radiance rose from Kang-to’s body like an aura, a sacred and uncanny light pushing back the fear.
“You...”
Chairman Cho’s mouth opened again.
“You saw it, didn’t you?”
“......?”
“Your grandfather’s crimes?”
“My grandfather...”
“The true face of the grandfather you believed was an independence activist.”
“That...”
“What you saw was not an illusion. Your grandfather’s sins rose so high they touched the heavens, and that karma has come back to you.”
“Karma?”
“Baek Jung-geun.”
“......”
“He’s not a fabricated figure. He was only one of the countless wronged spirits your grandfather inflicted.”
“So that was... real?”
“Shall I show you properly?”
“Is... that possible?”
“If you open your heart and look, it is.”
“How?”
“I need something that belonged to your grandfather. A watch, a keepsake—anything will do. If you don’t have one, a photograph is fine.”
“I do have a photo.”
Chairman Cho unlocked his phone. His hand still twitched with the aftershock.
“Here.”
He showed Kang-to the image file. It was from the days when his father had served as the president of Taebaek Heungup, the predecessor of Taebaek Construction. He was holding a child in his arms—that child was the very father who would later develop Taebaek Heungup into Taebaek Construction.
The dead and the living.
Could they be connected?
It was difficult.
Of course it was difficult.
The one who could make that connection was a shaman. The answer was hidden in the very character mu of mudang.
The horizontal strokes above and below the character for mu are heaven and earth. The vertical stroke in the middle is the boundary between spirit and flesh, the line that divides the living from the dead. The left-hand side, the person radical, is the living; the right-hand side is the dead, the departed. To connect the living and the dead within heaven, earth, and humanity—that was a shaman’s actual work.
But even shamans had levels.
Those levels were determined by talent and by the body spirit that served them. Ordinary ghosts belonged to the 3,000-level, so to speak. These low-grade spirits were collectively called petty ghosts. To rise above petty gods and petty ghosts, one had to reach at least the 4,000-level. But once you reached 5,000, the quality changed. That was the true starting point of the divine class, the kind humans would actually call gods. At 6,000 or 7,000 and above, one gained the ability of mu itself—to connect the living and the dead. That was Kang-to.
“Are you prepared?”
Chairman Cho swallowed hard.
When Kang-to asked, he nodded. Instead of answering, he swallowed dryly, which was proof enough that he had steeled himself.
“Take a handful of this.”
Kang-to held out some rice, and Chairman Cho obeyed without a word.
“Scatter it beside the photo.”
Again, he swallowed dryly, then carried out Kang-to’s instruction.
“......?”
His gaze came to rest on the rice as it formed into letters.
Cho Chun-bae
The name written in rice was his grandfather’s.
“Is this your grandfather’s name?”
Nod.
“Place your hand on top of it and close your eyes. Then your grandfather’s spirit will respond.”
Swallowing a third dry lump in his throat, Chairman Cho placed both hands over the name drawn in rice.
In the chaos at the end of the Joseon era, his grandfather had served as a Japanese military police aide.
But that had only been a means of survival. Later, he discovered the rice milling business and amassed vast capital.
With that money, he supported independence funds and was recognized as a patriot, honored as a man of independence merit.
Cho Chun-bae began to resonate with his grandson, Chairman Cho.
The response between spirit and living man.
Kang-to, the medium making it possible, looked into that resonance as well.
“Kome.”
Those were Cho Chun-bae’s first words. With that single word, Chairman Cho’s mind nearly flew out of his body.
Kome.
It meant rice in Japanese.
It was his father’s nickname. He had seen it in the diary after his father died. His grandfather had owned a rice mill, which was why his only son had been nicknamed Kome. Because it was Japanese, he had never said it to his wife or younger brother. So unless you had stolen a glance at his father’s diary, even God would never have known the nickname. The only one who could have used it was, of course, the grandfather.
Cho Chun-bae had been a generous and admirable father to his son. A mask. A lie. When he served as a military police aide, he had been a faithful dog of the Japanese Empire, and to independence activists or landlords alike, he had been the devil incarnate. He mostly preyed on Korean businessmen who were independently wealthy. Those who were not, he often dealt with through Japanese high-ranking officials.
His record for forced labor conscription and student soldiers was insane. Poor tenant farmers and wealthy men who did not mingle with Japanese elites were all his meat. He did not merely send them off to labor or to war. If they did not comply willingly, he would frame their families, torture them, and throw them behind bars. There was no better word for him than a living demon.
He had extracted wealth from four rice mills that way. But this sly bastard had taken the money from just one of them and funneled it into independence funds. In truth, it had been bait to catch the tail of major independence leaders, but the plan flipped on him. Just as they were closing in on the top domestic contact and the lineages of his crew, liberation arrived.
The cunning man destroyed the evidence of his crimes and moved quickly to reinvent himself. He emphasized the fact that he had donated rice-mill profits to the movement. In fact, there were testimonies from independence activists’ families who had received that money, and because he had also released a portion of the wealth he had stolen into the local community around the time of liberation, his military police atrocities were gradually buried and forgotten.
Having successfully laundered his sins, Cho Chun-bae reinvented himself as a businessman. Because he knew the route for exporting rice to Japan, he bought up Japanese-owned rice mills in the Honam and Yeongnam regions at bargain prices. It had been possible only because the Japanese themselves were being forced out of the country.
And all the blame for his crimes was shifted onto Baek Jung-geun.
In one swift stroke, Baek Jung-geun lost his father, his younger sister, and everything he owned, then was loaded onto a transport ship for forced labor. In a Japanese undersea mine, he ground his teeth and waited for the day of revenge. But even heaven was not on his side.
Three years.
The first contract term was three years of forced labor, with human rights stripped away and degradation pushed to the limit. In a place where more people left dead or crippled than alive, he clenched his fists and endured with everything he had, but the day of the nightmare came first. Profit was valued above the risk of flooding, and in the end, the undersea mine collapsed.
“Cho Chun-bae.”
As the tunnel caved in beyond all control, seawater surged in like an asura, along with the bodies of his comrades. To the very end, Baek Jung-geun looked toward the Korean Peninsula, his savage eyes chewing over a grudge that would last a thousand autumns. When Chairman Cho met that gaze, it felt as if a hole had been punched straight through his heart.
“Aghh...”
With a scream, Chairman Cho returned from the world of spirits. Kang-to, too, finished his role as medium with a long, steady breath. Both men were drenched in sweat. But Kang-to was by far the more soaked of the two.
“Brother, what’s going on?”
Hearing the scream, Jo Su-hyuk knocked on the door. It had been locked from the inside. But if someone wanted to open it, they could. The key was in Chairman Cho’s hands now—his decision alone.
“......”
“......?”
Kang-to and Chairman Cho. The two men’s hearts clashed against each other.
Chairman Cho Cheol-ung.
What decision would he make?
“It’s nothing.”
Chairman Cho shouted toward the door. His heart had already tilted toward Kang-to.
“What should I do next?”
By now, even his speech had turned formal. It was proof enough that he believed in Kang-to’s oracle.
“Do you believe my oracle?”
“Kome.”
“......”
“That was my father’s nickname—my grandfather called him that. My wife didn’t know it, and neither did my brother. Just that alone proves your divination was right.”
“You saw the vengeful spirit, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Your grandfather was targeted, but by then he had already become a dead man. Your father was the next best target, and he was the same. So they came for you.”
“They already came for me.”
“The second remedy I give you is harder than the first.”
“Will it cost a lot of money?”
“It will require effort as well.”
“I’ll do it. Better than dying, anyway.”
Chairman Cho’s resolve was grim.
Kang-to looked at him and, in a low voice, delivered an oracle of reconciliation so chilling it raised gooseflesh.
In truth, Kang-to himself did not yet know that this oracle of resolution would become the first thread leading to the method behind the brutal serial killings that had recently plunged the entire country into an uproar of terror.
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